Print Issue of January 11, 2018 (Volume 47, Number 14) by Chicago Reader

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY | K I C K I N G A S S S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | J A N U A R Y 1 1 , 2 0 1 8

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

After powerful Chicago comedy-scene ﬁgure Brian Posen’s departure from Stage 773 amid harassment allegations, the theater behind SketchFest begins a new era without him. By AIMEE LEVITT 13

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR VINCE CERASANI DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JAMIE RAMSAY CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS STEVE HEISLER, JAMIE LUDWIG, KATE SCHMIDT SENIOR WRITER MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI FILM LISTINGS COORDINATOR PATRICK FRIEL CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, ANDREA GRONVALL, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, IRENE HSIAO, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, MICHAEL MINER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, BEN SACHS, DMITRY SAMAROV, OLIVER SAVA, KEVIN WARWICK, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS ---------------------------------------------------------------ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER BEST SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 30 N. RACINE, SUITE 300 CHICAGO, IL 60607 312-222-6920 CHICAGOREADER.COM

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

HOUSING & POLITICS

Arrested development

How’s Chicago supposed to desegregate when building proposals that include aﬀordable housing can be blocked by aldermen on a whim? BY MAYA DUKMASOVA 9

26 In Rotation Current musical obsessions include the Weekend EP Project, the complete harpsichord works of Jean-Philippe Rameau, and more. 4 Agenda Stand-up from Julia Sweeney and Brian Posehn, the documentary Tokyo Idols, and more goings-on about town

27 Shows of note Gus Dapperton, Jhené Aiko, Pokey LaFarge, and more of the week’s best

COMEDY

The show must go on

After powerful Chicago comedy-scene ﬁgure Brian Posen’s departure from Stage 773 amid harassment allegations, the theater behind SketchFest begins a new era without him. BY AIMEE LEVITT 13

CITY LIFE

7 Joravsky | Politics Chris Kennedy got it right: people of color are being pushed out of Chicago intentionally. 8 Transportation Divvy’s top rider of 2017 is an African-American food courier with some thoughts on increasing ridership in communities of color.

SketchFest vs. Ex Fest What to see at the rival funny festivals 17

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CORRECTION: THE PHOTOS FOR “LAST NIGHT AT MAN’S COUNTRY,” A FEATURE IN THE JANUARY 4 ISSUE, RAN UNCREDITED. THEY WERE TAKEN BY BRITTANY SOWACKE. ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GARRISON. FOR MORE OF HIS WORK, GO TO JOHNGARRISONART.COM.

31 Restaurant review: The Family House The city’s only restaurant serving the food of Myanmar has great Malaysian and Indonesian food too. 33 Cocktail Challenge: Bonito flakes A BellyQ bartender uses the dancing fish flakes in an oldfashioned.

CLASSIFIEDS

FOOD & DRINK

ARTS & CULTURE

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

The top 20 albums of 2017 Our veteran critic counts down his favorites, including Damn by Kendrick Lamar and Reaching for Indigo from Chicago’s own Circuit des Yeux. BY PETER MARGASAK 22

18 Theater The 29th annual Rhinoceros Theater Festival presents a full slate of plays that are “new, local, and good” (or not). 19 Theater Steppenwolf ensemble member Molly Regan’s solo show The Accidental Curator tells her family’s story going back 130 years. 19 Lit In her book The Selﬁe Generation, Alicia Eler explores the social impact of a cultural phenomenon. 20 Movies Chris Smith’s documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond looks at Jim Carrey’s immersive screen performance as Andy Kaufman.

34 Jobs 34 Apartments & Spaces 35 Marketplace 36 Straight Dope Is a recent change in acceptable blood pressures a drug-company ploy to get even more people on medications? 37 Savage Love Dan advises a potential beneficiary of the “sexy Daddy” thing, a potential beneficiary of the “hot wife” thing, and more. 38 Early Warnings The Breeders, Panda Bear, Steely Dan, Justin Timberlake, Jeff Tweedy, and more upcoming shows 38 Gossip Wolf Wicker Park’s Bourbon on Division hosts a stacked rap show, and other music news.

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F cousin who succumbed to TB, fought a literary war with the nasty Rufus Griswold, and died under mysterious circumstances at 40. Christenson recounts all this while giving surprisingly short shrift to the reason why any of it matters: Poe’s great poetry and ﬁction. The show consequently lacks heft—which may be why director Ed Rutherford is so willing to push lurid atmospherics at the cost of clarity. Still, Christenson’s score is far better than his book, and, under Nick Sula’s strong music direction, the band and cast of this Black Button Eyes production make the most of it. —TONY ADLER Through 1/28: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, the Edge Theater, 5451 N. Broadway, 773769-9112, blackbuttoneyes.com, $30.

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Forts! Build Your Own Adventure ò PAUL AUDIA

THEATER Blue Over You Francis can’t find his wife, Mitzi. She was gone when he came home from work yesterday, didn’t sleep at home last night, and hasn’t called in. So now he’s rooting around in her stuff, searching for clues. Maybe she lit out for Phoenix. Maybe she ran off with Joey, the macho maintenance engineer at the school where she teaches first grade. After a few minutes with Michael Joseph Mitchell’s Francis, though, you might suspect that she just couldn’t take his loopy, manic style anymore—his best-gay-friend asides (“Don’t you just love Angela Lansbury?”), his tendency to break into a Broadway show tune at the least provocation. You’d think that Francis’s many affectations would have some bearing on the ultimate trajectory of Dan Noonan’s play, getting its world premiere here as the debut production of Spot On Company. But they don’t. They’re apparently just there to give us something to focus on until an unremarkable surprise ending arrives. —TONY ADLER Through 1/28: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Northminster Presbyterian Church, Logan Hall, 2515 Central Park, Evanston, 866-468-3401, northminpres.org, $20-$25. Forts! Build Your Own AdvenR ture Filament Theatre’s latest kids’ feature is a “world of play and cre-

ation” with theatrical elements. Think of it as a charmingly designed play space inhabited by roving actor guides giving kids tools to fuel their imaginations. My ﬁve-year-old nephew was uncharacteristically speechless upon entering the theater, which was packed to the ceiling with cardboard boxes, not to mention couches, pillows, and twinkling lights. With only two rules—be safe and be kind—it was up to us to begin creating

our own experience from the materials at hand. My nephew settled on a massive washer-dryer box as the base of his fort. Full disclosure: I spent most of my time inside that box, but he thoroughly enjoyed holding me hostage and making shadow puppets with the distributed flashlights. —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 2/11: Sat 10 AM and noon, Sun 1 and 3 PM, Filament Theatre, 4041 N. Milwaukee, filamenttheatre.org, $6. It’s My Penis and I’ll Cry If I Want To Trans performer Jamie Black has been suffocated by gender norms for his entire life. Before transitioning, he felt the pressure women are under to be docile in a society that expects them to silently do what they are told. After his transition, he felt the pressure men are under to confine their emotions and appear stronger than the other sex. Black’s solo show explores three different relationships where gender norms have been negated, revealing men who openly express their vulnerability and women who aren’t afraid to be lustful, angry, or withdrawn. The performance has passion, but lacks polish; It’s My Penis . . . feels underrehearsed, which shouldn’t be an issue for a remounted solo production. —OLIVER SAVA Through 2/4: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 5 PM, The Buena at Pride Arts Center, 4147 N. Broadway, 800-737-0984, pridefilmsandplays.com, $10-$25. Nevermore—The Imaginary Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe Though the subtitle promises an “imaginary life,” Jonathan Christenson’s 2009 musical sticks pretty faithfully to the facts about Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, he was the son of actors, abandoned by his father and then orphaned when his mother died. Yes, he was taken in by the Allans, Frances and John, only to lose Frances and fight with John. And yes, yes, yes, he married a 13-year-old

David Rabe’s Winter or Fall features Mary Ann Thebus and Mike Nussbaum reminiscing about dating in college 60-plus years ago and realizing that maybe the good old days are better left forgotten. In Carly Olson’s Slate two aspiring actresses—one white, the other Latina—debate how much they’d bend their morals to land a part. Carolyn Braver’s The Cellphone Play attempts to engage the audience by making them do the opposite and turn on their devices. Rammel Chan’s Northern Michigan Trust is a Fargo-esque riﬀ on small-town desperation. The three standouts are K. Frithjof Peterson’s sad bartender-relationship story Soft Things, J. Nicole Brooks’s hilarious Nigerian Astronaut Wants to Come Home, about an e-mail scam one would almost want to fall for, and Tracy Letts’s The Night Safari , featuring a world-weary tour guide whose anthropomorphizing of the exotic animals he’s tasked to describe seems uncomfortably personal. The night concludes with Will Eno’s Cancellation, an extended one-liner about a couple scoring a coveted reservation only to receive everything but a meal, or service for that matter. Even the pieces that don’t come together have kernels of good ideas and at ten minutes can

hardly be accused of wearing out their welcome. —DMITRY SAMAROV Through 1/14: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3:30 PM, Gift Theatre Company, 4802 N. Milwaukee, 773-283-7071, thegifttheatre.org, $10, sold out. Young Playwrights Festival The concept of overthinking comes up an awful lot in this year’s edition of Pegasus Theatre’s annual festival of plays by Chicago-area high school students. Which seems surprising given the stereotype of teenagers as thoughtless and impulsive. But much drama comes from overthinking; just ask Hamlet. Or check out the four well-crafted plays that have been chosen here, all of which entertain and enlighten without preaching or resorting to straw-man arguments. This is best shown by Mairi Glynn’s morality tale Monster, about a hijab-wearing high-schooler falsely accused of terrorism; by the end of this subtly written and performed drama we come to understand the how and why of Islamophobia, yet it never demonizes the student’s misguided accusers. —JACK HELBIG Through 1/27: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM; also Sun 1/21, 3 PM, Pegasus in Residence at Chicago Dramatists, 773 N. Aberdeen, pegasustheatrechicago. org, $30, $25 seniors, $18 students.

DANCE Listen . . . Emma Draves’s new R work explores the “physical fracturing caused by a slipping sense of

place and changing identity.” Sun 1/14, 4 PM, High Concept Laboratories, 2233 S. Throop, info@highconceptlaboratories. org, highconceptlaboratories.org, $10.

COMEDY Brian Posehn The accomplished R stand-up comic pokes fun at his chubby appearance and mixed feelings

about becoming a father. Sat 1/13, 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, 773281-4444, beatkitchen.com, $23.

Listen . . . ò TINGYU HUANG

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of January 11

VISUAL ART

The Light of Prayer by Hunter Cole, on display as part of “Living Light” Shark Tank: The Musical In case R you’re unfamiliar, Shark Tank is a reality show in which entrepreneurs and

small-business owners pitch their concepts to a panel of potential investors, most notably Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Greg Ott and Jennifer Estlin—owner of the Annoyance Theatre—have transformed this engaging series into an improvised musical in which panelists give the contestants the third degree over their products, services, or businesses, made up on the spot. Through 3/30: Fri 8 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $20, $15 students.

Living Light Evanston-based artist and scientist Hunter Cole exhibits photographs of human ﬁgures illuminated by the blue glow created by bioluminescent bacteria. Through 1/27. Thu-Sat noon-6 PM, Sun noon-4 PM. Arc Gallery, 2156 N. Damen, 773-252-2232, arcgallery.org. Pseudo- and Hetero- Films by Tao Hui and Barry Doupé, who live in Beijing and Vancouver respectively, highlight the diﬀerence between a pseudonym (a fake name) and Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s notion of a heteronym (a fake persona). Multimedia artist Maryam Taghavi speaks at the opening reception Fri 1/12 at 6 PM. Through 1/26. Sat 1-5 PM, Lithium, 1124 W. Belmont, 773-477-6513.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool The sad last days of Oscar-winning actress Gloria Grahame, who died of cancer in 1981 at age 57, are the subject of this middling British drama, told from the perspective of Grahame’s much-younger English lover. Annette Bening—a star whose late career Grahame would have

Faith Soloway At this fund-raiser R for Equality Illinois, Annoyance alum Faith Soloway, a current writer on

the Amazon series Transparent, screens a live performance of Jesus Has Two Mommies—her humorous opera in which God allays Soloway’s fears about gay marriage and motherhood. Following the video, Soloway and improv queen bee Susan Messing improvise. Sun 1/14, 3:30 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $10. Julia Sweeney Though best R known for her sketch work on Saturday Night Live, Sweeney performs

stand-up touching on religion, her bout with cancer, and her androgynous character Pat from SNL. Through 3/18: Fri 9 PM and Sun 6 PM till 2/2, thereafter Sun 6 PM, Judy’s Beat Lounge, Second City Training Center, 230 W. North, second ﬂoor, 312-337-3992, $10-$13, students $8-$11.

LIT & LECTURES Devin Murphy The Book Cellar presents a discussion with Murphy, a Chicagoan whose family is part Dutch. His debut novel, The Boat Runner, is about a Dutch boy who comes of age in Europe during World War II. Sun 1/14, 10:15 AM, Emanuel Congregation, 5959 N. Sheridan, 773-561-5173, emanuelcong.org. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo Last year’s Dulce, a poetry chapbook by the Mexican-born Castillo, was awarded Northwestern’s Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. Celebrate Castillo, the ﬁrst person of color to win the award, with readings plus a musical performance by Trio Alma Jarocha de Chicago. Thu 1/11, 6 PM, Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior, 312787-7070, poetryfoundation.org.

The Challenge This short documentary by Italian filmmaker Yuri Ancarani recalls some of Werner Herzog’s nonfiction work (La Soufrière, Lessons of Darkness) in that its subject matter feels almost secondary to its painterly imagery and philosophical mood. Ancarani, observing a group of Qatari sheikhs as they enjoy their pastime of amateur falconry, employs long takes and wide shots that encourage you to bask in the men’s lavish lifestyle. They zoom around the desert in expensive sports cars and private planes, gambling large sums of money and showing off their dangerous pets (not only falcons but also leopards). This milieu might seem exotic in any case, but here it seems like something from a different planet; that Ancarai shows greater sympathy for animals than people only heightens the antihumanist vibe. Francesco Fantini and Lorenzo Senni wrote the wondrous score. In Arabic with subtitles. —BEN SACHS 70 min. Sat 1/13, 5:15 PM, and Mon 1/15, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

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family shows her more kindness than she gets from her sniping relatives back in LA. With Julie Walters and Vanessa Redgrave. —J.R. JONES 105 min. Landmark’s Century Centre. Insidious: The Last Key This fourth entry in the Blumhouse Productions horror franchise is so superior to the previous ones that it feels like something from a diﬀerent series. Director Adam Robitel creates a tone unlike anything his predecessors generated; mournful yet warm, the movie engenders sympathy for the characters even as the action turns somber or gruesome. Lin Shaye returns as the series’ paranormal expert, revisiting the New Mexico home of her youth to conquer a demon that ﬁrst appeared to her in childhood. Flashbacks reveal that she was abused by her father; as in Oculus (2013), another above-average Blumhouse release, supernatural horror serves to spotlight the real-life horror of domestic violence. With Leigh Whannell (who also scripted) and Bruce Davison. —BEN SACHS PG-13, 103 min. For listings visit chicagoreader. com/movies.

Tao Hui’s short ﬁlm The Dusk of Teheran, on view as part of “Pseudo- and Hetero-”

MOVIES More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS Birdboy: The Forgotten Children Written and directed by Pedro Rivero and Alberto Vázquez, this 2015 Spanish animation takes place on a once-idyllic island now leveled by nuclear war and divided between adorable woodland creatures and haggard rats that sift through the garbage. The title character—with his giant head, obsidian eyes, tiny beak, and little Reservoir Dogs suit and tie—steers clear of the canine cops, who still remember his drug-dealing father, Birdman. The 2-D art is often gorgeous, not least in Birdboy’s nightmares, where black birds of prey swoop down on him from a blood-red sky. The drawing style bears no resemblance to Japanese anime, yet the narrative tone is remarkably similar, with cute and sinister elements held in suspension by a deadpan cool. In Spanish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 76 min. Fri 1/12, 7:45 PM; Sat 1/13, 3:45 and 6:45 PM; Sun 1/14, 4:45 PM; Mon 1/15, 7:45 PM; Tue 1/16, 6 PM; Wed 1/17, 6 PM; and Thu 1/18, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

Never miss a show again. Phantom Thread envied—bears a strong resemblance to the pixieish actress and nicely captures her pouty, ﬂirty persona, though director Paul McGuigan, worried perhaps that no one will remember his protagonist, uses photos and clips of the real Grahame to reference her Hollywood heyday (in The Bad and the Beautiful, In a Lonely Place, and other classics). Jamie Bell costars as the London actor who falls hard for the aging bad girl and whose working-class

Phantom Thread An icy romance in the Kubrick vein, this drama from Paul Thomas Anderson stars Daniel Day-Lewis as a tyrannical dress designer in 1950s London and Vicky Krieps as the poor waitress he adopts as his muse. Though they eventually marry, their relationship is no love match but a muted power struggle, as deadly as the clash between the oil tycoon (also played by Day-Lewis) and the Christian µ

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B evangelist in Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007). Anderson has trouble coaxing this struggle to any sort of emotional climax; its fanciful, symbolic ending is the sort critics will praise for its careful ambiguity even as they overlook its narrative desperation. This is being heralded as Day-Lewis’s farewell to the screen, though the most ﬁnely etched portrayal comes from Lesley Manville as the designer’s hard-bitten production manager. —J.R. JONES R, 130 min. Screens in 70-millimeter at Music Box. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Music Box, River East 21.

seek out girls instead of women, and reject real relationships to worship ﬁgures who will never challenge, hurt, or reject them. Some of the men are lecherous and vaguely pedophilic (the allure of a ten-yearold idol, one explains, is that she’s “still developing”), but others are attracted to the brotherhood of idol culture. These men identify as outsiders, and in scrutinizing rather than reviling them, Miyake humanizes them as well as the women they fetishize. In Japanese with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 89 min. Fri 1/12 and Thu 1/18, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

Porto Two brooding expats (Anton Yelchin, Lucie Lucas) meet by chance in Porto, Portugal, and share an intimate night they relive for years afterward. Cinematographer Wyatt Garfield favors a bluish, overcast palette by day and sumptuous golden tones by night; director Gabe Klinger, making his narrative feature debut, conveys the lovers’ fragmented memories by switching between Super 8, 16-millimeter, and 35-millimeter film. Unfortunately the thin narrative reveals little about the characters aside from their brief encounter, and the actors lack chemistry; their romantic connection feels like lust amplified by loneliness. In English and subtitled French and Portuguese. —LEAH PICKETT 76 min. 35mm. Music Box.

Wait for Your Laugh Timing is everything in comedy, and according to this nostalgic documentary portrait of Rose Marie—best known for her TV work onThe Dick Van Dyke Show and The Hollywood Squares—she always knew when to jump to the next big thing. In 1928 she became a five-year-old singing star on NBC Radio, and a year later she segued into talking pictures; by 1946, when gangster Bugsy Siegel booked her to open the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, she’d matured into a witty nightclub performer, and in the 60s she played one of television’s first working women as part of the comedy-writing team on Dick Van Dyke. Director Jason Wise clearly admires his sweet-natured subject, who died in 2017 at age 94, though her Hollywood Squares colleague Peter Marshall offers the caveat “You didn’t want to cross her, because she could cut your head off.” —ANDREA GRONVALL 85 min. Fri 1/11-Thu 1/18. Facets Cinematheque.

Tokyo Idols With this fasciR nating and troubling documentary, Kyoko Miyake investigates

the Japanese phenomenon of very young female pop singers, known as idols, who cater to a passionate fan base of grown men. Following singer Rio from age 19 to 21, and interviewing several fans, Miyake exposes a cultural paradigm in which men so value purity that they

REVIVALS The Crime of Monsieur R Lange Political filmmakers everywhere could learn a lot from

Jean Renoir’s 1936 classic, made as his contribution to France’s Popular Front. Monsieur Lange (Rene Lefevre), a meek employee of a Paris publishing house, passes his spare time writing the adventures of “Arizona Jim,” a rugged American cowboy hero. His boss, Batala (a masterpiece of ham acting by Jules Berry), steals the rights to Lange’s stories and prints them. Providence steps in when Lange learns that Batala has been killed in a train wreck, which allows Lange and his coworkers to form a cooperative and publish the stories themselves. But Batala returns, dressed as a priest and demanding his cut. Jacques Prevert’s screenplay has wit and economy, but the multiplicity of perspectives implied in Renoir’s fluid direction is what lifts the film from propaganda to art. In French with subtitles. —DAVE KEHR 81 min. Fri 1/12, 2 and 6 PM; Sat 1/13, 2 and 8:15 PM; Sun 1/14, 3 PM; Mon 1/15-Wed 1/17, 6 PM; and Thu 1/18, 7:45 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center. SPECIAL EVENTS Seriously Swingin’ Women Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss directed these three short documentaries about female musicians. Tiny & Ruby: Hell Divin’ Women proﬁles jazz trumpeter Tiny Davis and drummer-pianist Ruby Lucas, International Sweethearts of Rhythm looks at the multiracial jazz band of the title, and Maxine Sullivan: Love to Be in Love tells the story of the pioneering black singer, a role model for Ella Fitzgerald. 106 min. Screening at Chicago Filmmakers’ new location, 5720 N. Ridge, as part of the “Dyke Delicious” series, with a social hour at 7 PM. Sat 1/13, 8 PM. Chicago Filmmakers. v

Read Ben Joravsky’s columns throughout the week at chicagoreader.com.

CITY LIFE A student in class at North Lawndale College Prep ò PAUL BEATY/AP

POLITICS

Chris Kennedy got it right

The whole point of Mayors Daley and Emanuel’s economic development programs has been to push poor people out of Chicago. By BEN JORAVSKY

hen I moved to Chicago in 1981, the community around the intersection of Clybourn and Division on the north side was overwhelmingly poor and African-American. Now, of course, it’s one of the richest and whitest corners of town. I offer this slice of relatively recent history to underscore my puzzlement at the reaction greeting gubernatorial candidate Chris Kennedy’s recent comments about Mayor Emanuel and the changing face of Chicago. “I believe that black people are being pushed out of Chicago intentionally by a strategy that involves disinvestment in communities being implemented by the city administration,” Kennedy said at a press conference last Wednesday in North Lawndale. “I think that’s part of a strategic gentrification plan being implemented by the city of Chicago to push people of color out of the city. The city is becoming smaller, and as it becomes smaller, it becomes whiter.” Since then, Kennedy’s been slammed by everyone from the Tribune to Mayor Rahm, who in fact quoted the Trib’s editorial to make his case against Kennedy’s claim: “The Chicago Tribune referred to it today as imaginary, hallucinatory,” Emanuel said. Well, if anyone’s hallucinating, it’s the mayor and his pals at the Tribune. ’Cause, let’s face it, folks, we all know the exodus of tens of thousands of black residents over the last seven years is no figment of Kennedy’s imagination. And it’s not happenstance—as Kennedy said, it’s fostered to a great extent by

economic development policies promulgated by the city for decades. OK, yes, there are obviously other factors in these demographic trends, like crime. And I’m not saying these planning policies are directed solely at black residents, as opposed to poor and working-class people in general. Or that Rahm invented these strategies, which began under Mayor Daley. And, yes, Kennedy—a prominent local businessman— was largely quiet about these things until he began his campaign. But by and large Kennedy got it right. Whether the mayor admits it or not, the point of his planning policy is to generate gentriﬁcation—that is, to move poor people out and wealthier ones in. Want to get specific? Let’s go back to the area around North and Clybourn. In 1981, it was dominated by Cabrini-Green, a public housing project with roughly 30,000 lowincome residents, most of them black. I watched and wrote about the systematic dismantling of Cabrini down through the last three decades, much of it through benign neglect. For a long time in the 80s and 90s the CHA allowed the population to dwindle through attrition—as old residents moved out, no new residents were moved in. Then, in the late 1990s, Mayor Daley teamed up with the Clinton administration to tear down Cabrini, promising to build new housing for the residents in a few years. But the housing was never built. And the city doesn’t really know or seem to care where the old residents from Cabrini went once the

buildings came down—they’re just out of the neighborhood. As the population fell, the city closed four of the local schools—Schiller, Byrd, Truth, and Near North High School. Closing the schools gave the old residents one less reason to come back to the neighborhood.

Rahm’s mad at Chris Kennedy for shining a spotlight on policies the mayor would rather keep hidden.

All the while, the city seeded new development in the area with property taxes taken from one of several local TIF districts. As I’ve written many times, the TIF program is intended to eradicate blight in lowincome neighborhoods. But in this case, as with so many others in and around the Loop, it was used to help make a gentrifying neighborhood too expensive for the poor people who once lived there. Instead of eradicating poverty, the city was simply moving it somewhere—anywhere—else. Like I said, most of these policies began under Mayor Daley. But in 2014, Emanuel

tried to add a little icing to the cake when he proposed to build Barack Obama College Prep high school in the area. Think about it—the city closed four schools as the black people left. Once white people moved in, the mayor proposed opening a new school. Perhaps he figured by naming it for Obama he’d head off opposition in south- and west-side wards where he was still closing schools. It didn’t work, and eventually Rahm pulled back the proposal after a citywide parental uprising. But wait, there’s more. To the west of Halsted and Division is an old industrial area that’s one of the hottest real estate markets in the city, thanks in part to Cabrini’s demolition. Developers are scrambling to buy up the old factories, warehouses, and junkyards and replace them with upscale offices, retail, residential—you name it. It may even be the site of Amazon’s headquarters, should that corporate behemoth choose to take Rahm’s offer of more than $2 billion in handouts to come to Chicago. To abet this development the mayor is creating—you guessed it—another TIF: the Cortland/Chicago River TIF district, to be exact. With that TIF, the city will divert property taxes from the schools and parks and county and other taxing bodies to seed development in the old industrial corridor by buying land for development, building sidewalks, installing street lights, etc. In short, we’ll be spending millions of public dollars to make the area even more prosperous, while the Roselands, Austins, and North Lawndales of the city, choking for development, continue to empty out. To compensate for the tax dollars the schools won’t be getting from property in the Cortland TIF district, the mayor will have to raise taxes on everyone else, including poor people on the south and west sides. Thus, Rahm really will be taking from the poor to give to the rich—just as Kennedy said. And life will get that much more expensive, giving poor people one more reason to leave. And so the cycle continues. It’s great that some areas of the city are thriving. But let’s not pretend that good times on the north side aren’t coming at some other community’s expense. v

v @joravben JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE TRANSPORTATION

Road warrior

Divvy’s top rider of 2017 is an African-American food courier with some thoughts on increasing ridership in communities of color. By JOHN GREENFIELD

n January 2 my mind was blown by a tweet from the Divvy bikeshare account congratulating a guy named Kerdia Roland for being the program’s number one rider of 2017, with a staggering 2,462 trips for the year. “That’s 6,275 miles of riding—enough to get you to Alaska!” Farther than that, actually. Google Maps provides a 3,574-mile bike route from Chicago to Anchorage, but Roland pedaled far enough to cover the 6,234 miles from Madrid, Spain, to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. As I gazed at the accompanying photo of the smiling young man flashing a peace sign by the Union Station Divvy docks, it dawned on me that the large black pack he was holding was an insulated delivery bag. Apparently this guy had racked up all these miles while making runs as a food courier using these relatively slow, 49-pound bikes, kind of like racing the Kentucky Derby on a Clydesdale. What the hell? Roland, a 25-year-old South Loop resident who takes delivery orders via the Postmates, Caviar, and Uber Eats smartphone apps, says his strategy isn’t as crazy as it sounds. He argues that not having to worry about bike theft and maintenance is well worth the few miles per hour he sacrifices by using bike share instead of the featherweight ﬁxed-gear bikes often preferred by couriers. A lifelong Chicagoan who grew up in Streeterville, Roland transports everything from Big Macs to pricey French-Vietnamese cuisine from Le Colonial in the Gold Coast. While he mostly works in the Loop and River North, deliveries have taken him as far aﬁeld as Lincoln Park, Pilsen, and Hyde Park. Roland says he started using Divvy for deliveries after thieves nabbed three of his personal bikes, one of which he’d spent hundreds of dollars customizing. “Losing that one was like an arrow to the heart.” “For me Divvy is really convenient and cost-effective,” he says. “The initial cost of a good bike can be pretty steep, $500 to $800,

8 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

but my Divvy membership is only about $10 a month.” Moreover, Roland points out, ﬁxing ﬂats is a hassle, or expensive if you pay a shop to do it, but when you’re a bike-share member the staff maintains the cycles for you. Still, isn’t it a pain in the neck to ride to a Divvy station near a restaurant, dock the bike, walk to pick up the food, return to the station, and do the same thing at the delivery point? “No, I keep a little U-lock on me and lock up the wheel of my bike outside the restaurant or the residence,” Roland says. (While you’re technically not allowed to use your own lock while riding bike-share, Roland says Divvy staffers seem unbothered, and Divvy spokeswoman Kelly Goldthorpe confirmed

Kerdia Roland

that “we’re delighted Divvy has been able to enable his work across the city. His story shows how Divvy has become integral to the Chicago transportation network.”) While Roland has had a few run-ins with drivers, he’s so far been uninjured. “I’ve fallen, but I’ve never broken and bones or bled or anything, thankfully,” he says. He’s also had excellent luck finding valuable stuff that’s been left in the street, including a pair of expensive Apple AirPods earbuds and a total of $287 in dropped cash last year. “I really love this job,” Roland says. “It’s a source of joy and satisfaction, and it’s an adventure for me every day.” Those who are familiar with Divvy’s demographic challenges might be surprised to hear that the system’s most proliﬁc rider of 2017 is African-American. A 2015 survey found that 79 percent of annual members are non-Hispanic whites, a group that currently makes up only about 33 percent of the Chicago’s population, and membership also heavily skews male, young, affluent, and well educated. A publicly subsidized transportation system that mostly serves relatively wealthy Caucasians isn’t equitable. To its credit, since the survey was conducted, the city has focused on expanding the bike-share system into more communities of color in an effort to address this imbalance. In addition, the Divvy for Everyone (D4E) initiative, which offers onetime $5 annual memberships to low-income Chicagoans and waives the usual credit card requirement, is helping to level the playing ﬁeld. The city has been promoting the program on the south and west sides via Divvy outreach staff and the Chicago Department of

Transportation’s Bicycling Ambassadors, and there are currently 1,730 active D4E members. Use of Divvy stations in Chicago’s black and brown neighborhoods remains low, however, and recently this has emerged as a ﬁnancial issue for the city. Last month the Chicago Tribune’s Mary Wisniewski reported that Divvy’s net revenue plummeted from $2.84 million in 2015 to $1.97 million in 2016, largely due to poor ridership numbers for recently installed stations in lower-income communities. For example, while the 36 stations in Lincoln Park saw a total of 452,727 trips between July 1, 2016, and June 30, 2017, the 14 stations in Austin saw a mere 1,339 trips during the same period. Roland, for one, says he appreciates the west-side stations. His six-year-old daughter, Kenya Meadows, lives with her mother in North Lawndale. The docks by the Kedzie Pink Line stop come in handy when he travels to her house, and there’s another station a few blocks from her school that he uses when he picks her up. A recent Portland State University study of barriers to bike share that surveyed residents of underserved neighborhoods, including Chicago’s Bronzeville, found that concerns about traffic safety, crime, police harassment, user fees, and liability for the bikes are factors in low ridership. The report also revealed that many residents in these neighborhoods are unclear about how the systems work, and argued there’s a need for more one-on-one outreach regarding the advantages of using bike share. Roland reports that when he rides through African-A merican neighborhoods some residents do seem “kind of confused.” And he agrees with the PSU study that more promotion will be required if Chicago wants to increase bike-share ridership in communities of color. “The city needs to do a better job of communicating the beneﬁts,” he says. “Having a car in Chicago isn’t as good as most people think it is—you still have to deal with traffic jams, and it’s stressful.” He adds that Divvy is also more reliable than the el. “There are no delays. I try to ride lawfully, but how fast I get someplace is largely within my control.” City officials would be wise to heed Roland’s advice and shift their Divvy-vangelism into an even higher gear. v

JAMIE RAMSAY

John Greenfield edits the transportation news website Streetsblog Chicago. v @greenfieldjohn

CITY LIFE

Arrested development How’s Chicago supposed to desegregate when developments with aﬀordable housing can be blocked by aldermen on a whim? By MAYA DUKMASOVA

Rendering of the proposed apartment building at 8535 W. Higgins Road. It would’ve been mostly luxury “micro units,” but also include 30 aﬀordable apartments. ò COURTESY OF GLENSTAR

uxury apartment buildings in Chicago are typically built in neighborhoods with no shortage of well-to-do renters or in working-class parts of town where they serve as a vehicle for gentriﬁcation. Though the city’s Affordable Requirements Ordinance is meant to stem the drain of reasonably priced rental housing, developers have all too often elected to pay a fee in place of setting aside 10 percent of their units as affordable for people making 60 percent or less of the area median income. Most aldermen hardly put up a ﬁght when developers do this, eager to see any kind of economic stimulus in their wards, especially if it promises to bring in higher-income constituents. This only goes to reinforce segregation in the city, as formerly affordable neighborhoods fall out of reach for working-class people and high-opportunity

areas remain hopelessly closed off to lower-income households. Which is why the story of a planned 297-unit apartment building at 8535 W. Higgins near O’Hare is a curious one. The ten-acre site sits in the mostly white 41st Ward, across the highway from the Cumberland Blue Line stop. Plans have been in motion since 2015 to develop some commercial and residential buildings there. Located in one of Chicago’s major job centers—adjacent to the airport, as well as malls, hotels, and office parks—the area nevertheless lacks rental housing, both for young professionals and for minimum-wage workers. To GlenStar, a developer specializing in upscale commercial and residential properties, building mostly studio and one-bedroom units alongside two new office buildings on the site seemed like a good idea. Over the course of the last year, with a blessing from the 41st Ward Zoning

Advisory Committee and Alderman Anthony Napolitano (currently Chicago’s only Republican alderman), GlenStar worked to ﬁne-tune its proposal to Department of Planning and Development speciﬁcations. They even committed to making 30 units on-site affordable, in full compliance with the letter and spirit of the ARO. However, last spring, the alderman suddenly abandoned his support of the development shortly after controversy erupted over a planned affordable-housing building in nearby Jefferson Park. GlenStar hasn’t gotten a satisfactory explanation from Napolitano about his change of heart. It also hasn’t received a zoning hearing in City Council that’s required to move forward with construction. The saga of this planned development, which has played out in e-mail exchanges obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, as well as at public meetings and in the press,

is yet another lesson in how Chicago-style democracy continues to reinforce segregation and class divides across the city. In January 2016, Napolitano sent a letter to Department of Planning and Development commissioner David Reifman expressing support for the development of an apartment and office buildings on a parcel next to a Marriott hotel on Higgins Road. At that time the development was controlled by a different developer. Once GlenStar took over the property later that year, it proceeded with the same vision of the site, adding 77 more apartment units to the previously proposed 220. The parcel was zoned only for commercial development, however, and so GlenStar began the process of getting a zoning amendment to allow for a residential structure. The developer commissioned a traffic- and school-impact study and presented the J

JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE continued from 9 results to the 41st ward Zoning Advisory Committee. Given that the building would be mostly studios and one-bedroom units, with a smattering of two-bedroom units, and given its extreme proximity to the Blue Line, the potential impact on traffic was predicted to be minimal. The study also found that the nearly $90 million development was likely to bring in fewer than 20 school-aged children, thereby posing little threat to the overcrowded local public schools. DNAinfo reported that at the December 2016 Zoning Advisory Committee meeting, GlenStar’s managing principal Larry Debb said that with the cheapest non-ARO units starting at $1,200 per month, “we ﬁnd that a lot of people who are paying this kind of money would send their kids to parochial or private schools.” (Rent caps for the affordable units would be set at $800 for studios, $850 for one-bedrooms, and $1,020 for two-bedroom units.) With no one speaking against that proposal at the meeting or voicing opposition in the ensuing month, the 11-member Zoning Advisory Committee approved GlenStar’s proposal in January 2017 by unanimous vote

with one abstention. In the months that followed, GlenStar prepared to seek approval from the Chicago Plan Commission—the next step toward breaking ground on the apartment building. Though the developer wouldn’t become aware of it until months later, GlenStar’s rift with Napolitano began in February, and its roots had nothing to do with the apartment building on Higgins Road. Rather, a proposed 100-unit affordable housing development at 5150 N. Northwest Highway backed by 45th Ward alderman John Arena became a flashpoint between local homeowners, progressive housing groups, and Arena’s political opponents. That building was intended primarily for families, veterans, and people with disabilities. At a February 9 community meeting hosted by Arena, local residents expressed nakedly bigoted opposition to an anticipated inﬂux of poor people of color into the northwest side. An angry crowd that gathered outside the meeting chanted “No Section 8!” and waved signs reading “Jefferson Park is not Rogers Park” and “Cabrini started as vet housing too.” Napolitano was among them. The alderman told Nadig Newspapers, which

covers the northwest side, that his office had been inundated with calls regarding Arena’s proposal. Napolitano tried to distance himself from the racist flavor of the protest while defending his constituents’ concerns. “I don’t believe it has anything to do with the racial tone that is being painted,” he told Nadig. “It has to do with the density issue. Our schools are bursting at the seams.” Over the next month, as the rhetoric of the opposition metamorphosed from open to veiled racism, Napolitano continued to stand by groups such as Northwest Side Unite and the Jefferson Park Neighborhood Association, which waged a public relations battle with supporters of the project such as Neighbors for Affordable Housing and the Chicago Housing Initiative. In an e-mail exchange the groups supporting the project obtained via FOIA request and shared with the Reader, Arena accused Napolitano of being hypocritical in his opposition of the affordable development in the 45th Ward while supporting a building with three times as many units on Higgins Road in his own ward. Napolitano wrote back that the two buildings shouldn’t be compared. “This is Income limits are for the ChicagoNaperville-Joliet, IL HUD Metro Area.

Area Median Income Limits 2017 (Effective April 14, 2017)

Household Size

Source: City of Chicago

50%

60%

80%

100%

120%

140%

$27,650

$33,180

$44,250

$55,300

$66,360

$77,420

$31,600

$37,920

$50,600

$63,200

$75,840

$88,480

$35,550

$42,680

$56,900

$71,100

$85,320

$99,540

$39,500

$47,400

$63,200

$79,000

$94,800

$110,600

$42,700

$51,240

$68,300

$85,400

$102,480

$119,560

$45,850

$55,020

$73,350

$91,700

$110,040

$128,380

$49,000

$58,800

$78,400

$98,000

$117,600

$137,200

$52,150

$62,580

$83,450

$104,300

$125,160

$146,020

The Affordable Requirements Ordinance is meant to create rental units affordable to households making 60 percent of the area median income or less. Affordability is defined as rental costs that amount to less than 30 percent of a household’s monthly income j VINCE CERASANI

10 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

high-end micro apartments geared towards young professionals, completely different than what’s being forced into Jefferson Park,” Napolitano wrote. “[The Higgins parcel] is exactly where you’d expect to see density.” But Napolitano’s outlook began to change. In the late spring of 2017, as GlenStar worked toward a hearing and vote on its proposal at the June meeting of the Chicago Plan Commission, Napolitano began sending e-mails to the Department of Planning and Development and his ward’s Zoning Advisory Committee declaring his opposition to the apartment building and citing an outpouring of disapproval from “thousands” of local residents to GlenStar’s project. E-mail exchanges reveal surprise from those who received Napolitano’s letters. When ZAC chair Mike Emerson asked the alderman to explain his reversal to “help us better understand where and how this ground swell of dissent is being delivered, processed, and acted upon,” Napolitano responded with a link to a Nadig story about the opposition to the building in Arena’s ward. (Emerson didn’t return requests for comment. It remains unclear whether he received any further explanation from the alderman.) In his correspondence with the Department of Planning and Development, Napolitano also claimed that because GlenStar had recently added two additional units to the building, bringing the planned total to 299 apartments, “the changes made to the proposal completely nullify the school impact study and traffic study.” Ahead of the Chicago Plan Commission’s June meeting, Napolitano’s chief of staff Chris Vittorio wrote Department of Planning and Development assistant commissioner Patrick Murphy regarding 8535 W. Higgins, saying that “Alderman Napolitano would like to defer this matter indeﬁnitely.” Napolitano and his staff also began opposing the Higgins development in the media. In mid-June Vittorio indicated to DNAinfo that the uproar about the Jefferson Park building animated Napolitano’s change in attitude toward the GlenStar proposal. Ultimately the June hearing was deferred because GlenStar and not the alderman asked for the extension. In the weeks before the following Plan Commission hearing in July, GlenStar’s Larry Debb wrote to Napolitano in an effort to understand his changed position and reiterate that the apartment building wouldn’t significantly disrupt local density, traffic, or schools.

CITY LIFE

Anthony Napolitano, Chicago’s only Republican alderman ò BRIAN JACKSON/FOR THE SUN-TIMES

“Given your prior support, the public’s support, and the unanimous support from the [Zoning Advisory Committee] earlier this year, we are surprised and troubled by this situation,” Debb wrote. He added that without the understanding that Napolitano had been in full support of the project, GlenStar would never have expended money and time on the proposal during the prior six months. Given the size of the planned apartments and the “price point of approximately $2,300 a month, there would be no more than six (6) children living in the entire residential portion of the development,” he stressed, adding that the building’s property tax contributions to Chicago Public Schools “could be over $500,000 per year, far in excess of any possible new costs for schools associated with school-aged children living in the new apartment building.” Debb was not available for comment, but according to Rand Diamond, another managing principal at GlenStar, the company did not receive a response from Napolitano to the letter. Instead, the alderman appeared before a Plan Commission hearing on July 20 and pleaded with the members to vote no on the proposal. It passed despite his objections, with just one nay vote from 44th Ward alderman Tom Tunney, who said he respected Napolitano’s wishes and that the building didn’t have as many affordable housing units on-site as he would like to have seen in a development of that size. The next step in getting approval for the building would be a vote in the zoning committee in September. Furious that the Plan Commission OK’d the development, Napolitano wrote e-mails to Department of Planning and Development commissioners, demanding to know why a vote had been held

on the Higgins building after he’d asked for it to be indeﬁnitely deferred. In one response, he was reminded by the department’s managing deputy commissioner, Patti Scudiero that, per Chicago’s zoning ordinance, only the developer had the right to ask for a deferral in Plan Commission hearings. Over the next month Napolitano concentrated his efforts on preventing the Higgins building from being considered by the zoning committee, chaired by 25th Ward alderman Danny Solis. E-mails reveal Vittorio coaching Dirksen Elementary principal Daniel Lucas in writing a letter to the zoning committee to express opposition to the Higgins proposal as well as a 397-unit residential building proposed for 8601 W. Bryn Mawr. “Please share specifics regarding Dirksen’s capacity and actual enrollment as well as the growth rate during your time at Dirksen,” Vittorio wrote to Lucas. “Please also explain the result of any potential increase in enrollment.” The school, as Napolitano had been pointing out for weeks, was already over capacity, with more than 900 students in a space designed for some 600. Napolitano also personally sent e-mails to Solis and the other zoning committee members declaring his opposition to GlenStar’s proposal. The developer, meanwhile, decided to increase the number of on-site affordable housing units from seven to 30, in response to Tunney’s criticism and the requests of affordable housing advocates on the northwest side. The next time GlenStar and Napolitano met face to face was that September 11 zoning committee meeting, where the alderman kept testifying about the density and the schools. He also claimed that it was the first time he’d heard that there was affordable housing

planned for the site. “In the end, I have to speak on behalf of my community. I have to speak on behalf of the schools. And I have to speak that there was no affordable housing in this until today,” Napolitano said. GlenStar’s attorney, Jack George, reiterated the developer’s dismay with Napolitano’s position. The alderman, it seemed to George, “is concerned lately about this educational issue. But when he changed his mind and told me he wasn’t going to support it, I said, ‘Can I go back to your community and make another presentation?’ And he said no. He said, ‘I have talked to them and you can’t go back.’” George added, “This is the ﬁrst time in my 45 years of practicing zoning that I have ever had to disagree with an alderman before this body.” Solis than called a recess, inviting Napolitano and the committee to speak off the record. The public meeting resumed 14 minutes later with Solis announcing that 15th Ward alderman Raymond Lopez had a motion on this item. Lopez moved to defer it. A chorus of ayes voiced their approval, with not a single alderman voting against. After the meeting, Napolitano expressed surprise that the developer now wanted to put 30 affordable units on the Higgins site. DNAinfo reported that he called the change “dirty,” something intended “to tug on the heartstrings of the [zoning] committee on behalf of affordable housing.” The Higgins development hasn’t come before the zoning committee since. Since it wasn’t voted on in the January 9 meeting, it’s not likely to get a full City Council vote by January 20. Which means the Plan Commission approval will become null and void, effectively sending GlenStar back to square one. Diamond says he doesn’t know what the company will do if this happens. “We’ve never had this situation come up before,” he said, adding that while he can’t be sure, it seems like politics are at play in both Napolitano’s and Solis’s treatment of their proposal. It’s possible GlenStar will simply use the parcel meant for the apartments to build another office building, for which they wouldn’t need to seek any more approvals or zoning changes. If that happens, however, Diamond points out that it will only increase density on the parcel and bring more traffic to the area given the parking requirements for commercial development. While Diamond is perplexed by the situation, it seems that whatever happens,

“The City should not use its zoning committee to block, delay, or obstruct projects including affordable housing up for consideration, including when those projects are opposed by the ward’s alderman.” —attorney Kate Walz of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in a December letter to zoning committee chairman and 25th Ward Alderman Danny Solis

GlenStar’s business won’t be irreparably hurt by the maelstrom around the apartment building. The real losers in this situation appear to be the Chicagoans—including those in the 41st ward—who need rental housing, and particularly affordable housing, near jobs and transit stops. According to data compiled by UIC’s Nathalie P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement, some half of the O’Hare community area’s renters are paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent. According to 2015 Census data, about half of the neighborhood households made less than 60 percent of the area median income for families of three. In the months since the September 11 zoning committee deferral, affordable housing advocates have tried to no avail to get answers from Solis on the status of the proposal. To Sara Gronkiewicz-Doran of Neighbors for Affordable Housing (many of whose members live in the 41st Ward) it seems that Na- J

JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 11

CITY LIFE continued from 11

politano, a former cop and firefighter almost half of whose constituents voted for Trump, decided to shift his position on the apartment building to pander to his base—the same people who turned out to decry a proposed affordable housing development in Jefferson Park as an attempt to bring “the projects” to the northwest side. “We requested a meeting with Alderman Napolitano and we know he got that request,” Gronkiewicz-Doran says. “He didn’t ever respond.” She thinks that Solis’s honoring of Napolitano’s wishes to indefinitely defer a zoning hearing contravenes due process and “sends a message from Alderman Solis to developers in the city that you can be penalized for including affordable housing. That completely goes against the mission of the ARO and the stated goals of the aldermen on the zoning committee.” Compliance with federal fair housing law is also at issue. Because Chicago accepts funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, it’s bound to “affirmatively further” desegregation. The letter of the law remains unchanged even as the Trump administration announced Friday that it has rolled back Obama-era rules that required cities to show the specific ways they’re affirmatively furthering fair housing. In a December letter, attorney Kate Walz of the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law reminded Solis of these fair housing obligations. “The City should not use its zoning committee to block, delay, or obstruct projects including affordable housing up for consideration, including when those projects are opposed by the ward’s alderman,” Walz wrote. In an interview she emphasized that such actions “could be considered in violation of the federal Fair Housing Act if the city is either taking up the request of neighbors to block affordable housing that would benefit protected classes or if one alderman is taking up the cause of another alderman [to do so].” The city could also possibly be sued for blocking the construction of affordable housing based on opposition animated by racial animus. Napolitano has carefully presented his opposition to GlenStar’s building as a density and school-crowding issue. But Walz says that the alderman’s justification doesn’t hold water if the effect of his and the city’s actions were proved to be discriminatory. In cases across the country, “references to density or school

12 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

Rendering of the proposed apartment development in Napolitano’s ward ò COURTESY OF GLENSTAR

overcrowding or increase in crime have been considered thinly veiled racial claims,” she says. “There is ample case law exposing that for what it is.” Confronted with these perspectives, Thomas Bowen, a spokesman for Solis, only alluded to the tenets of aldermanic prerogative. “Alderman Solis greatly respects his colleagues and the fact that they have been chosen by the voters to represent them,” he said in an e-mailed statement. “On matters of zoning changes, the Chicago City Council has always given great deference to the alderman of the ward where a change is requested.” Meanwhile Alderman Tunney, who sits on both the Plan Commission and zoning committee, and whose stated opposition to GlenStar’s development centered on the dearth of affordable housing, did not return repeated requests for comment on why he hasn’t stood up for the building once the developer committed to putting all the required ARO units on-site.

In an e-mail to the Reader, Napolitano reiterated that his opposition to the apartment building at 8535 W. Higgins began after the kerfuffle over the Jefferson Park proposal, as his office was “inundated with phone calls and walk-ins in opposition of the high-density developments.” He added that it was the Dirksen Elementary Local School Council who “reached out to me and scheduled a meeting regarding their concerns with adding even 1 student to their enrollment,” and not the other way around, as the e-mails suggest. He concluded that, “Ultimately my job is to advocate for the residents of the 41st Ward, especially those that live close to this proposal. It is very clear to me that they are strongly opposed to this development.” Asked whether he’d conducted surveys to see whether the opposition he’d been hearing was representative of the ward, Napolitano didn’t respond. Since the passage of the Affordable Requirements Ordinance in 2007, the 41st

Ward hasn’t added a single unit of affordable housing, according to a March report from the Chicago Office of Inspector General. The proposed apartment building on Higgins Road would be a small step in the direction of compliance with local and federal housing policy. Napolitano, however, seems to be unwilling to be a leader on this matter. He’s opted instead to position himself as a champion of the will of a vocal group of constituents, however damaging that will might be to other people in the city. His colleagues in the City Council, meanwhile, are choosing to maintain the tradition of aldermanic prerogative rather than uphold the city’s own policies and procedures. It’s the same code of conduct that has allowed discriminatory NIMBYism to dictate housing policy and has reinforced segregation in Chicago for decades. v

v @mdoukmas

THE SHOW MUST GO ON After powerful Chicago comedyscene ﬁgure Brian Posen’s departure from Stage 773 amid harassment allegations, the theater behind SketchFest begins a new era without him. By Aimee Levitt

rian Posen’s exit this past November from Stage 773, the theater he founded and ran for many years, was one of the least dramatic departures of a powerful man during the fall of Harvey Weinstein. Yes, it’s true Posen had a history. Plenty of improv performers around Chicago, particularly women, had stories about him; seven of those women shared theirs with the Reader. There was the time he slapped his assistant’s ass. The time he bragged about surreptitiously snapping pictures of his students’ butts and cleavage and then compared the photos with a friend. The time he told a performer that if a stranger rubbed his dick against her on a bus, she would probably bend over and take it. The many times he commented in classes and rehearsals about the women’s bodies and the effect he imagined they had on men and boys. The certiﬁcate that showed he’d completed a sexual harassment training program (he actually sent his personal assistant on his behalf, according to multiple sources who worked at Stage 773), which he proudly hung on his office wall as a joke. And, like other women who’ve been harassed at work, they wondered if his behavior had other consequences that they couldn’t empirically prove, like that he’d give them smaller roles in his longrunning Cupid Has a Heart On revue if they didn’t play along with his jokes and that he’d deliberately undermined their attempts to get work outside Stage 773. But they were afraid of speaking up and risking his wrath. Posen, 53, was a powerful force in the comedy world. In addition to running Stage 773 and producing and directing shows there, he also taught improv at Second City and Columbia College. He was independently wealthy—his family owned the Beltone hearing aid company—and well-connected. He liked reminding his performers how much they owed their success to him; several of them recalled him pulling epic guilt trips when they left Stage 773. The only public allegations against him were a series of social media posts hashtagged #boycottstage773 that were easy to miss if you weren’t part of the local improv comedy scene. By the time he stepped down at Stage 773, though, Posen had already begun to relinquish some of the tremendous power he’d once held in the Chicago comedy world. In 2015, after more than 20 years, he left his adjunct teaching job at Columbia. (The college declined to comment beyond disclosing the dates of Posen’s employment.) Last March, Second City removed him from his position as the head of its beginner improv program after a group of women contacted Kerry Sheehan, the company’s chief people officer and president of training centers and education programs, with stories of how Posen had touched or spoken to them inappropriately or made them feel uncomfortable. And in August, Stage 773 announced that Jill Valentine, the theater’s director of operations, would be taking over as execu- J

JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 13

Â&#x2122; JOHN GARRISON

14 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

continued from 13 tive producer of the annual Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival (aka SketchFest), a role Posen had held since the festival’s inception in 2002. When he stepped down as executive director of Stage 773 on November 17, announcing Valentine as his successor, Posen didn’t admit that he’d done anything wrong. Instead he transferred the blame to the social media campaign: “I feel that due to the comments online about me being shared at this time, I am more of a distraction right now from the great and important work that is put forth by the many talented individuals that are a part of Stage 773,” he wrote in a statement he posted on Facebook. He apologized if he’d “ever unintentionally offended anyone by saying anything improper, which in turn hurt or offended anyone,” but he didn’t apologize for any speciﬁc actions. Stage 773 has been largely silent on the subject of Posen as well. Valentine hasn’t made any public statements about the allegations against Posen, and she declined, in an e-mail interview with the Reader conducted via the theater’s public relations representative, to explain why he’d stepped away from SketchFest and then Stage 773, writing only, “I can’t comment on behalf of Brian.” (The week he resigned Posen agreed to an interview with the Reader to discuss the allegations, but he didn’t respond to further inquiries after the Chicago Tribune published a story describing those allegations in detail. The Reader interviewed the accusers prior to the Tribune story and heard identical stories.) The theater, Valentine added, is moving on. In 2018, she and her colleagues are planning several initiatives to reach out to more “diverse voices,” and they’ve already established an anti-harassment policy and begun working with a human resources representative (previously, HR duties had been performed by employees with other jobs in the organization) and the non-Equity theater advocacy group Not in Our House. This week is the beginning of the two-weekend-long SketchFest 2018, the first without Posen. It will feature an all-woman panel on the second Saturday called “The Future Is Female: A Discussion With Women About the Climate of Chicago Comedy.” Speakers include Susan Messing, a founding member of the Annoyance Theatre, and Jen Ellison, a director at Second City. For some members of the community, this isn’t enough to restore their trust in Stage 773. Although Valentine, as the founder of the theater’s Chicago Women’s Funny Fest, established herself as a strong advocate for women in comedy in Chicago, she also worked very closely with Posen for many years. They wonder how much she knew about the abuse and harassment and why she hasn’t made any kind of public statement. “She’s been busting her ass for so long,” says Matthew Payne, a former Stage 773 performer. “She’s the one that tells people not to piss outside the theater. People support her. I’m willing to support her if she does one thing, which is to say that what Brian did is not OK and that it will never happen again in that house.” Payne is the organizer of Chicago Ex Fest, an alternative festival that will run concurrently with this year’s SketchFest. Plans for Ex Fest were already under way when Posen resigned. The new festival, Payne wrote on its GoFundMe page, is “all about breaking up with bad habits.” Ex Fest is intended to be the antithesis of everything Payne had observed about Stage 773 under Posen: inclusive and respectful. It would also

pay its performers instead of charging them a $50 submission fee. But it would still be funny. “One thing Brian said in his statement that I agree with,” Payne says, “is that sexual conduct in comedy is a blurry line that is constantly moving. Everyone is trying to decide what the rules are now, now that we know what’s going on. How are we going to clean it up and move on? I’m suspicious of anyone not wanting to participate in that conversation.”

“I think it’s important [that women stand together]. There are so many dudes in the improv community that don’t know what goes on. And it’s important for us, as women, to be bringing these things to light, just because it happens far too much.” —comedian Becca Brown

x Fest and the #boycottstage773 social media campaign began approximately the same time last August, right when SketchFest announced it was accepting submissions for the January festival. “I was online and SketchFest had just announced that they were going to be accepting submissions, and a lot of people had frustrations about it,” Payne recalls. “They were voicing them online. Because Brian Posen had very recently been fired from Second City for all these allegations, a lot of his students, his friends, people who had worked with him, even people who had his name on their resumé were suddenly very concerned about using that name. I made this comment online, like, ‘Oh, you guys, we could all put on a better festival ourselves.’ And I can’t tell you how many people commented on that. I just put it out there, and then people started commenting, ‘Hey, I would throw money at that.’” Payne, who’s 29, had recently moved to Texas and was about to start his first semester teaching theater at Amarillo College. Nonetheless, inspired by the social media love, he set up a GoFundMe page and raised $600 in the first four days. He relied on a network of friends to do the on-the-ground work in Chicago, including scouting venues, meeting with potential performers, and checking out new acts. Most of these friends are women. He decided it was necessary when planning the festival to prioritize female voices since women had been most harmed by Posen’s alleged behavior at Stage 773. He had performed at the theater himself, but his largest grievances, and the reason he left, were because Posen didn’t pay him money he believed he was owed. (Payne shared a series of text messages with the Reader in which he asks Posen for payment and Posen appears to be putting him off with various excuses and guilt trips.) Katie Johnston-Smith was one of the women who’d been affected by Posen’s alleged harassment at Stage 773. She was his office assistant for two years, from 2012 to 2014. Once, she says, while she was hanging something on the wall, Posen slapped her ass. She says he told her she had “blow job lips” and once asked if he could smell her armpits on a day she forgot to wear deodorant because, he told her, women’s natural body odor was “hot.” At the time, she assumed that he was just a flirt and this was how people behaved in the theater scene. She especially didn’t feel like she could complain. It was Posen’s theater, his playhouse. “I was like, this is how it is, and I have to put up with this to get ahead,” she remembers now. “If you speak out about it, you’re not cool and you get shut out of shit.” Johnston-Smith left Stage 773 in 2014 after an affair with a married coworker ruined both her own marriage and his and made the office atmosphere uncomfortable. (“I kind of exploded out of there,” she says now.) She got a day job J

JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 15

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with a company that has an HR department and began working with the Nerdologues, another comedy collective. But she kept thinking about her experiences at Stage 773, and the more she thought about it, the angrier she got. “It’s been an interesting time to reﬂect on my experiences coming up in the comedy scene. Like, fuck, why did I let someone talk to me like that?” she says. “It was around the time that applications opened for SketchFest, and I was like, ‘Fuck this, I’m going to say something and tell people to not apply.’” She began posting her Posen stories on Facebook under the hashtags #boycottstage773 and #boycottchicagosketchfest. At ﬁrst she kept her account private so only her friends could see, but when another friend referenced one of her posts and people began complaining that they couldn’t see it, she decided to go public and post on Twitter too. She began hearing from other women who had had similar experiences, some of whom were only beginning to realize that what they’d gone through was harassment. “There’s power in numbers,” says Becca Brown, a singer and comedian. She should know: Brown was the one who, after seeing comments by Posen’s former Second City students on a secret Facebook page last March, encouraged them to call the theater and share their stories. Brown says that Posen made inappropriate comments to her about her sexuality when she was part of the Cupid Has a Heart On ensemble; after she left, she advised other women not to work there. “I think it’s important [that women stand together],” she continues. “There are so many dudes in the improv community that don’t know what goes on. And it’s important for us, as women, to be bringing these things to light, just because it happens far too much.” (A member of Second City’s management team told Brown she’d been completely unaware of Posen’s behavior until the women spoke up. Before that, the manager knew him only as a popular teacher with high approval ratings.) Brown will be performing at Ex Fest. But other former Stage 773 players remain loyal to Posen and to Valentine, his successor. “The things I’ve posted about my experience with Brian, people are like, ‘I had no idea he was like that,’” Johnston-Smith says. “Most people feel strongly one way or the other,” Payne acknowledges. “Some performers that are friends with both parties felt like they couldn’t do anything this year.” As the submission period for both festivals wore on, Payne also received inquiries from out-of-town performers who’d

Brian Posen

16 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

heard about the harassment allegations and wanted to know what, exactly, was going on at Stage 773 and whether Posen was still involved in SketchFest. Payne says he directed his correspondents to Valentine. They likely received a response similar to what she told the Reader in the e-mail interview: “Brian is no longer employed at Stage 773 nor serves on the board. He has resigned from all responsibilities, services and compensation. We are a not for proﬁt which means we answer to a board of directors. So, any proﬁt we make goes back into the theatre.” In her e-mail, Valentine emphasized that Stage 773 had always been more than a showcase for Brian Posen. “Stage 773’s mission has always been to support Chicago arts companies and we are continuing with that mission,” she wrote. “We believe our role is more important than ever supporting artists and our community. The new leadership and staff are working diligently to move forward with our mission.” Posen’s sister, Laura Michaud, remains the chair of the board; Lukaba Productions, the company that runs Stage 773, is funded, in part, by the Posen Family Foundation; and Posen himself still has a 35 percent share in the building.

Katie Johnston-Smith ò CHRIS POPIO

Becca Brown

s the Ex Fest lineup developed, it turned out to be less a direct competitor to SketchFest than an alternative. (See “SketchFest vs. Ex Fest,” page 17.) It will be much smaller, for one thing, in the tiny Crowd Theater in Uptown. For another, instead of focusing exclusively on comedy it will have more of a variety-show feel: a mix of singers, stand-ups, sketch troupes, burlesque dancers (speciﬁcally a new troupe composed of performers who walked out of the now-defunct Gorilla Tango Theatre last summer after several weeks without pay), and even a laser show. All performers will be paid a token $20 which, Payne says, is better than nothing. The security staff will be all female, per a recommendation of Payne’s panel of woman advisers. They also advised him to keep the festival BYOB; with a bar, there was the potential for bartenders and servers to be harassed. Payne has learned that running an arts organization isn’t as simple as he thought when he ﬁrst told his Facebook friends “We could do a better festival ourselves.” There have been issues with staying under budget (a very modest $1,500), arranging performance schedules, and worrying about ticket sales. Just a few months in, in early November, Ex Fest experienced its own crisis concerning allegations of misconduct. Immediately after Payne posted the name of one of the performers on Facebook, he received messages from two women who told him that the performer had been accused of sexual assault. “These were women I trusted,” Payne says. “I had to create a process” to investigate the claims. He contacted the performer immediately to ask about the allegations. The performer denied that he’d ever assaulted anyone. Payne asked him for a list of character references. “The gist of what I got,” he says, “was that this is a person who is very, very unliked. He’s a grouch, especially toward women. But he’s never done anything weird, and he has no [criminal record].” Payne told the performer he would stand by him for the performance and see what happened. The two women who alerted him remain involved with the festival.

Jill Valentine

Matthew Payne ò ADAM GALLEGOS

As the opening of the festival draws closer, Payne says, he’s been in a constant state of stress. He’s beginning to appreciate Jill Valentine’s labor on behalf of Stage 773 and SketchFest much more. “It’s hard to give everyone what they want,” he says. “It’s hard to please everyone.” He daydreams about meeting Valentine for lunch after the two festivals are over to compare notes. “If Jill can’t win community back, I think they should close down,” he says. “If 773 does survive, it will be because of Jill Valentine.” v

v @aimeelevitt

Reilly Willson and Shelby Quinn are comedy duo Jim and Melissa

SKETCHFEST VS. EX FEST The rival funny festivals do battle this week. By STEVE HEISLER

or 17 years, the two-week-long Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival has served as a brass ring for rising talent—the opportunity to perform for a much larger audience and to network with like-minded comedians from across the globe. This year’s SketchFest, taking place at Stage 773 from January 11 through 14 and picking up again January 18 through 21, includes reunion shows, groups from other countries, and an array of styles. Now Ex Fest, conceived as an alternative to SketchFest, has packed 25 acts over three days, January 12 through 14, an impressive feat for the ﬁrst-time event, which is happening at the Crowd Theater. Here’s some of what we recommend for both festivals:

Rachel Joravsky Yep, New York-based comedian Rachel is the daughter of Reader staff writer Ben Joravsky. Rachel wrote and will be performing her one-woman show Rachel Joravsky Is a Thirsty White Ally, deriding selfproclaimed “white allies” who are vapid and naive to what white privilege really means. Rachel Pegram joins in a supporting role. Fri 1/19-Sat 1/20, 8 PM

SKET CHFEST

The Cool Table This high-energy ensem-

All shows at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, stage773.com/sketchfest, $15-$250. Laser Improv Show

Salsation The all-Latinx members of Salsation have plenty to say about Donald Trump’s new immigration policies and not-so-subtle racism. This sketch show focuses on Trump’s policies, speciﬁcally those about discrimination against folks of Latin American descent. Fri 1/12, 8 PM

Hot Thespian Action From Canada come Winnipeg sketch darlings Hot Thespian Action, a troupe specializing in physical comedy. In one bit, a member curls up in the fetal position, the

rest of the group wrapping their bodies around her to form a womb. Their accolades include recognition from the Canadian Comedy Awards, where they’ve received three nominations for best sketch troupe. Fri 1/12-Sat 1/13, 8 PM

Fratwurst

This all-male group excels at cleverness and wordplay. One online video features two people playing the board game

Scrabble at a bar after work, blowing off steam by speaking in sentences whose letters phonetically double as words. Example: “I N V U.” Fri 1/12-Sat 1/13, 9 PM

Fuct Revel in raunch with this late-night sketch group, known in their native New York for four-letter words, ribald content, and occasional full-body nudity. Fri 1/12-Sat 1/13, 10 PM

ble returns to Chicago for a 12th appearance at SketchFest. The group has remained intact out in Los Angeles, and currently produces videos for Funny or Die. Fri 1/19-Sat 1/20, 9 PM

GayMe Show!

Dave Mizzoni and Matt Rogers (full disclosure, Rogers was once a colleague) lampoon gay stereotypes by hosting a trivia game show as exaggerated, ﬂamboyant versions of themselves. The winner is awarded the moniker “Gay as fuck,” and hints can be requested from such characters as Woman Who Gets It and Wise Queer. Fri 1/19-Sat 1/20, 9 PM J

JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 17

ARTS & CULTURE Julia Williams’s The Near Future is one of more than 40 works playing as part of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival. ò JEFFREY BIVENS

Hot Thespian Action

THEATER

continued from 17

Return of the Rhino

EX F EST

By JUSTIN HAYFORD

All shows at the Crowd Theater, 3935 N. Broadway, facebook.com/chicagoexfest, $15-$100.

Jim and Melissa The duo’s horror spoof Bloodlust includes a song titled “Everyone Wants to Fuck a Vampire.” Reilly Willson and Shelby Quinn populate their show with kooky, campy, Halloween-themed ghouls in addition to the aforementioned fang bangers. Fri 1/12, 7 PM Becca Brown Remember the bassist from

the movie School of Rock? That’s Becca Brown, a musician and humorous songwriter. “Remember that time I clogged your toilet / It wasn’t poop, it was a tampon,” she sings, wondering if her beau will still be interested in her after learning this sordid detail. Fri 1/12, 8:30 PM

Flanders

Josh and Sheri Flanders are a mixed-race couple, and in their show they laugh at the kinds of reactions they receive from strangers. Fun fact: They met through a personal ad in the Reader. Another fun fact: the pro-life website lifenews.com gave the Flanders’s abortion-themed Choice—the Musical a scathing review sight unseen. Fri 1/12, 8:30 PM

Laser Improv Show Chris Best remains backstage during his one-man improv show, doodling scenery and characters with a laser

18 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

Rachel Joravsky and Rachel Pegram

pointer onto a white curtain. The audience only sees these drawings and hears Best’s voice. He’s a crude illustrator, but all facets of improvisation are meant to be messy. Fri 1/12 and Sat 1/13, 10 PM

Abby Vatterott Vatterott is game to play

around with the mundane. In one video sketch she purports to demonstrate how to open a bottle of wine, but she’s already drunk and makes the corkscrew do “jumping jacks.” Sat 1/13, 8:30 PM v

v @steveheisler

wenty-nine years ago, when Curious Theatre Branch cofounders Jenny Magnus and Beau O’Reilly hunkered down with a handful of struggling fringe artists to create the inaugural Rhinoceros Theater Festival, they insisted that submissions would be accepted only if they met at least two of three criteria: new, local, and good. Which meant new, local, bad work could get in. “And yes indeed, it did,” says Magnus. Those selection criteria remain in place all these years later. So you may well catch a stink bomb or two anytime you go to the Rhino. But like much of the Chicago fringe theater scene, the Rhino welcomes the unconventional, the untried, the unmarketable. “Where else can you put up your eccentric, 35-minute whatever-it-is?,” says Magnus. “We love those. And if it fails, well, we’ll probably invite you back if you gave it your best shot.” True to form, this year’s Rhino overﬂows with eccentricity. Triangle Collective, recently transplanted from downstate, offers A Well, a wordless piece about three people trapped at the bottom of a well just before a rainstorm. In Ripple, choreographer Shalaka Kulkarni uses classical Indian dance to examine issues of identity. The Official Theater Company of. ThyssenKrupp AG’s Direct My Woyzeck gives audience members a chance

to helm Georg Büchner’s seminal modernist play. And for The Unbelievable Beauty of Being Human, InterPlay Chicago plans to assemble a multigenerational group of performers—including members of Wheeling High School’s Orchesis dance group—in the morning to invent a show for performance that afternoon. The festival offers a good number of “legit” plays as well. Marking her third year in the Rhino, playwright Karen Fort presents Accidents, a story of political and personal clashes in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade. In Lon West’s Heartbleed, an odd young man without discernible motive takes over an old folks’ home. And Lee Peters’s The Institution reimagines Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with one gay and one straight couple. And as always, the Rhino presents a handful of musical offerings. Your two best bets: Curious Theatre Branch’s concert version of The Threepenny Opera, in a decidedly brash translation by the Nonsense Company’s Rick Burkhardt, and experimental duo Jack the Dog’s pair of concerts featuring Carrie Biolo on her self-made icelophone—a xylophone made of ice. v RHINOCEROS THEATER FESTIVAL 1/13-2/24: Wed-Sat, times vary; see website, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-539-7838, curioustheatrebranch.com, $12 in advance, $15 at the door, or pay what you can.

R READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

ARTS & CULTURE

THEATER

Keeper of the relics ANDY WARHOL ONCE OBSERVED that “dying is the most embarrassing thing that could ever happen to you because someone has got to take care of all your details. . . . You’d like to do them all yourself, but you’re dead, so you can’t.” That goes double for the emotionally taxing process of sorting the physical possessions loved ones leave behind, a process that inspired Steppenwolf ensemble member Molly Regan’s new solo play, The Accidental Curator. For the past two years, over berries and cheese, Robinson has held living-room rehearsals with friend and longtime collaborator Mary B. Robinson, who directs, to shape and prepare for the stage essays she began writing for events like Steppenwolf’s Writer Jams. Telling her own story and those of her family is a relatively new venture for the veteran performer, one met with encouragement from Robinson, Victory Gardens managing director Erica Daniels (formerly president of Second City Theatricals and associate artistic director at Steppenwolf),

and the late Martha Lavey, Steppenwolf’s artistic director from 1995 to 2015. “Even though I was not writing plays,” says Regan, “I was writing essays. [Martha] just said, ‘Send me everything you write.’ And she came to see it and she said, ‘Please do this here. Cut ten minutes, but do it.” After tinkering with the piece in workshops in Chicago, New York, and Weston, Vermont, Regan says she’s ready to get her family’s story, going back 130 years, in front of real people, her relatives included. “The best thing is when people would say to me ‘Thank you for making me feel I’m not alone,” says Regan. “Or someone would come up to me and say, ‘I’m the last in my family. What am I going to do?’ Or, ‘OK, you gave me the courage to do what I need to do here.” —DAN JAKES THE ACCIDENTAL CURATOR 1/12-1/14: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1700 Theatre, 1700 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $40.

v @DanEJakes

Molly Regan in Steppenwolf’s The Herd ò MICHAEL BROSILOW

LIT

Express your selﬁe By ALICIA SWIZ

f you’re an Instagram user, you’ve probably noticed a hashtag called #2017bestnine circulating in your feed during the past few weeks. It’s from the Top Nine app, first launched in 2015, on which users enter their Instagram handle into a field and an algorithm forms a collage of the nine most popular photos from their accounts in that calendar year; people then post the montage on their Instagram pages. In 2017 my top nine included five selfies, four more than in 2016; no selfies were in my top nine in 2015. This change is indicative of why Chicago native Alicia Eler’s debut book, The Selfie Generation: How Our Self-Images Are Changing Our Notions of Privacy, Sex, Consent, and Culture, is a timely addition to growing research on selfie culture. Weaving first-person narrative and conversations with tech and social media experts, the Minnesota Star Tribune journalist offers a wide-ranging exploration of the effects of the selfie on our cultural relationship to technology, privacy, and gender. In the opening chapter Eler points to Kim Kardashian as the first person to capitalize on the selfie by using it as a commodity. Kardashian built a brand off her identity and life-

style through selfies that, as Eler puts it, “offer fans a voyeuristic look into her life, curated by her.” As social media has become more popular, so has Kardashian’s celebrity, which has led to brand endorsements, product lines, personal appearances, and even a best-selling book. Still, Kardashian remains a target of criticism, a lot of which is directed at her body. Eler uses this example to lay the framework for the book’s most compelling topic: How America’s deeply rooted misogyny and the boundaries of consent are embedded in selfie culture. “The selfie is a way to be seen,” Eler states early on, identifying how the selfie is shifting what was once private into public spheres. The desire to be seen and connect results in what Eler refers to as an “attention economy” where personal value is based on “likes.” Is it any wonder that selfies would be embraced by women, who’ve been systemically invisible for most of history? Though Eler never explicitly addresses how gender norms are enacted via selfies, she dedicates a significant portion of the book to examining how girls participate in selfie culture and the consequences they face when they do. J

JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 19

ARTS & CULTURE Jim Carrey in Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond ò NETFLIX

continued from 19

In a gratifyingly sex-positive voice, Eler delves into the subjects of shame and the stigma women may encounter when they reveal their erotic selves through sexting and selfies. The third chapter opens with the author’s memory of her first experience taking a “clit pic” to send to her girlfriend. “I recall one time I was deep into some heavy texting and it quickly turned to sexting,” Eler writes. “Then she asked for a pic of my pussy. It seemed like a normal par for the course sexting request but it was something I had never done.” Eler describes what she calls “a mix of fear and lust” that also turned her on. But this anecdote also signals vulnerability, as Eler wonders “Who’s to say it would only be for her eyes?” That question pervades conversations around privacy and consent. Selfies can skew gendered power dynamics by allowing women to commodify what they’ve been taught is their only value—their appearance. Perhaps more significant is how selfies present a way for women to claim space, to prove they exist. Selfies enable a feeling of control over an image that has historically been defined by men. The male gaze is inescapable, however, which leads Eler to ruminate on the inevitable sexualization of women and what this means for culture in general. “[The selfie] is empowering as a way to capture attention and to connect quickly, but it comes with the reality of literally releasing one’s selfie as data to the network,” Eler writes. “This becomes even more complicated within the realm of selfie culture, because while the image is of her and for her, it becomes something that is also consumed by others who see her as a sexualized object. It’s impossible to escape the gaze or the commodification of bodies under patriarchy.” So maybe selfies aren’t going to dismantle the patriarchy, but giving women more power and autonomy to make choices about their bodies will. You’ve got to start somewhere. Why not on Instagram? v R THE SELFIE GENERATION: HOW OUR SELF-IMAGES ARE CHANGING OUR NOTIONS OF PRIVACY, SEX, CONSENT, AND CULTURE By Alicia Eler (Skyhorse) Author reading Thu 1/18, 7:30 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, 773-769-9299, womenandchildrenfirst. com. F

20 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

MOVIES

A madness to his method By TAL ROSENBERG

his week’s most prominent new release is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, featuring what actor Daniel Day-Lewis claims will be his ﬁnal performance. Day-Lewis is famous for an approach to role-playing so immersive that it blurs the line between art and athletics: he might prepare for a part by experiencing his subject’s living conditions (he “learned to live off the land” to play a Native American tribesman in The Last of the Mohicans) or stay in character between takes (during production of My Left Foot, for which he won an Oscar, he insisted on remaining in his character’s wheelchair and being spoonfed by the crew). For Phantom Thread, in

which he plays a fashion designer in 1950s Britain, Day-Lewis sewed a Balenciaga dress from scratch. Some might think Day-Lewis’s fanaticism elevates acting to previously unimaginable heights, but I think it’s preposterous. An actor who refuses to break character at the expense of his colleagues crosses the line from artistry to abusiveness. Chris Smith’s direct-to-Netﬂix documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond reinforces my conviction. Smith considers many things (identity, celebrity, selffulﬁllment), yet Jim & Andy mainly explores the limitations and pitfalls of method acting. Twenty years ago Jim Carrey was one of the biggest movie stars on the planet. From Ace

Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) through Liar, Liar (1997), his films grossed nearly $2 billion worldwide. The Truman Show (1998), in which he plays the unsuspecting subject of a 24-7 reality TV program, won him critical acclaim as well, and with Miloš Forman’s Man on the Moon (1999) Carrey landed his dream role: Andy Kaufman, the provocative comedian who became a TV star on Taxi and Saturday Night Live before dying of cancer in 1984. At this point Carrey wielded so much power that he convinced Universal Pictures, the studio financing Man on the Moon, to let Kaufman’s girlfriend, Lynne Margulies, and writing partner, Bob Zmuda, produce the film’s electronic press kit. Their footage reflected so poorly on

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE Carrey that Universal never used it, but now Smith has combined it with a new interview in which Carrey remembers the experience of playing Kaufman. Before shooting began, Carrey tried to communicate with people telepathically; eventually, he recalls, “Andy Kaufman showed up, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, ‘Sit down, I’ll be doing my movie.’ ” From that point forward Carrey refused to break character. The role itself called for excess—Kaufman, more of a performance artist than a comedian, was utterly committed to his elaborate comic schemes (such as wrestling women onstage, despite intense vitriol from audiences). When Carrey first shows up on set, his fellow cast members are delighted by his method approach. (“It’s really weird! It’s totally surreal!” exclaims Paul Giamatti, a truly great actor, who played Zmuda.) But their amusement curdles into annoyance and then outright unpleasantness once the script calls for Carrey to become Tony Clifton, the louche lounge-singer character that Kaufman (or, as a gag, Zmuda) would spring on unsuspecting audiences. Carrey says that becoming Clifton was liberating—he could tap into his antagonistic side without fear of consequence—and at one point the actor, disguised as Clifton, barges into Steven Spielberg’s production office and demands a meeting. Forman, his patience worn thin, begs Carrey to stop, but Carrey, as Kaufman, replies, “We could fire [Kaufman and Clifton] and I could do a pretty good impression of both of them.” The exhausted director pleads, “I don’t want to stop it, I just want to talk to Jim.” Playing Kaufman as Tony Clifton turns out to be a strenuous, psychologically taxing endeavor that visibly damages Carrey’s well-being. He takes up smoking, looks haggard, and berates himself constantly. When Zmuda asks Carrey if he dreams as himself, Kaufman, or Clifton, Carrey admits that he sometimes sees all three wrestling each other. The actor’s selfabuse is most conspicuous when, playing Clifton, he levels uncomfortably intimate insults at himself. “All that smiling all the time, you can tell it’s not real,” Clifton observes of Carrey in what feels more like a therapy session than a comedy routine. Because of the overlap between Carrey’s various personas, Jim & Andy is filled with lines that have two or three ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

meanings; the documentary is an unlikely exercise in metaphorical speaking. As Carrey explains, his unresolved issues only compounded his confusion. His stratospheric success distracted him from dealing with the trauma of his father’s death in 1994. Carrey confesses that, when Kaufman’s illegitimate daughter visited the set of Man on the Moon, he spoke with her in character for more than an hour. Was Carrey helping her deal with her loss or addressing his own? In these scenes and others Jim & Andy becomes a candid dissection of a celebrity’s insecurities and anxieties, filtered through an interrogation of the acting process. Chris Smith has made a number of features, but most people remember him for his 1999 documentary American Movie, about the quest of Wisconsin indie filmmaker Mark Borchardt to complete a direct-to-video horror movie despite his own incompetence. Jim & Andy deals with a famous actor instead of an unknown director, but it makes a similar point: people can succeed professionally despite their personal problems, but success doesn’t make those problems go away. Carrey admits to Smith that after production wrapped on Man on the Moon, he didn’t know who he was. “It felt so good being Andy because you were free from yourself,” he recalls thinking. “You were on vacation from Jim Carrey.” One of the most powerful metaphors of Jim & Andy is that life itself is a kind of performance. When Carrey embarks on becoming Kaufman, he seems to believe that his intense process will win him the respect he deserves. But when Smith asks Carrey what finally cured him of trying to gain people’s approval, Carrey responds, “Standing there with everything anybody else had ever dreamed about having, and being unhappy.” In the archival footage Carrey is young, fresh-faced, confident, and high on his own success. But the actor interviewed for Jim & Andy looks more like a combat veteran, with sunken eyes and a bushy gray beard. The Jim Carrey of 2017 seems mellower, at peace with his own doubts and conflicts. It’s more impressive than any performance I’ve ever seen. v JIM & ANDY: THE GREAT BEYOND ssss Directed by Chris Smith. 93 min. Streaming on Netflix

v @talrosenberg

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ALL THE QUEEN’S HORSES

TOM OF FINLAND January 12 - 18

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Fri., 1/12 at 2 pm; Sat., 1/13 at 5:15 pm; Sun., 1/14 at 3 pm; Tue., 1/16 at 7:45 pm; Wed., 1/17 at 7:45 pm Inside the Rita Crundwell scandal — where did $50 million go? Jean Renoir’s long-unavailable 1936 classic

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PETER MARGASAK’S

20 FAVORITE ALBUMS OF 2017

s 2017 came to a close, I put together a list of my 40 favorite albums of the year. Not everything I wrote would fit in print this week, but it’s all online at chicagoreader.com—accompanied by streaming tracks from almost every release. The usual caveat applies: I love all this music, but you should take my rankings with a grain of salt. And please bear in mind that I’m not trying to be definitive. As big a pain as it is to compile this list—and as skeptical as I am of the practice of ranking albums—I do love this time of year. By reading other peoples’ lists over the past couple weeks, I’ve already discovered a slew of records. Of course, that only underlines how arbitrary this practice is—a month from now, after reading a few more, my own list would probably be different. —PETER MARGASAK

KAJA DRAKSLER OCTET Gledalec (Clean Feed) Slovenian pianist Kaja Draksler has blossomed as an improviser since moving to Amsterdam in 2013, developing a stunning solo practice and playing in bracing duos with the likes of Portuguese trumpeter Susana Santos Silva, Dutch drummer Onno Govaert, and French pianist Eve Risser. Her beguiling 2017 double album Gledalec represents a huge artistic leap, and not just because it’s an octet recording—her sophisticated harmonic sense and structural elegance have always suggested a deep understanding of European classical music, but here she makes it much more explicit. Her compositions blur together free jazz and chamber music, and she’s enlisted two vocalists—Björk Níelsdóttir and Laura Polence—to alternate between spoken word and sung delivery of texts by Pablo Neruda and contemporary poets Andriana Minou and Gregor Strniša. Breaking up these art songs are improvisations by different groupings

22 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

of ensemble members: Govaert, reedists Ab Baars and Ada Rave, violinist and violist George Dumitriu, and double bassist Lennart Heyndels. As ambitious as Gledalec is, I’m at least as excited about what Draksler has yet to do, both with this group and with a growing number of other projects.

PAN DAIJING Lack (PAN) No electronic album thrilled me or creeped me out more in 2017 than this jarring, richly imagined salvo from Berlin-based Chinese artist Pan Daijing. She weaves a sumptuous fabric from seething feedback, ﬂoor-rumbling bass, harrowing industrial noise, internal piano scrapes, operatic singing (from soprano Yanwen Xiong), her own processed screams and guttural vocal fry, and a kaleidoscopic range of ethereal, harrowing electronic textures. An underground electronic record of unusual depth and grit, Lack throbs, ﬂoats, and corkscrews in taut, surprising ways.

OUMOU SANGARÉ Mogoya (No Format) Malian singer Oumou Sangaré has generally embraced a traditional sound, even when her lyrics challenge antique patriarchal mores, but she takes a thrilling turn on Mogoya. She made the album in Stockholm with French production crew A.L.B.E.R.T., whose members have worked with pop artists such as Beck, Air, and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Normally I’d get nervous reading a sentence like that, but Mogoya is one of the best things Sangaré has ever done. Her rich, authoritative voice has always required very little support to convey its power, and the producers seem to understand that—they’ve simply added subtle electronic textures and enhanced some of the rhythms. Sangaré grew up in Bamako, Mali’s urban capital, but her music has consistently drawn on the hunter songs of the Wassoulou region, in which women sing call-and-response melodies over a rustic blend of kora, n’goni, and hand percussion. Over the years Sangaré has added electric bass and electric guitar, but traditional instruments have remained the core of her sound—and they dominate on Mogoya as well. In her subject matter,

though, she’s been bolder: she’s increasingly challenged traditional practices such as polygamy, genital mutilation, and the suppression of female sensuality.

DANISH STRING QUARTET Last Leaf (ECM) The Danish String Quartet has earned its sterling reputation largely by interpreting the modern classical music of its homeland. The group’s first recordings tackled work by the great Carl Nielsen, while subsequent efforts have focused on younger composers—its terrific self-titled 2016 album, for instance, included material by fellow Danes Per Nørgård and Hans Abrahamsen. I was bit skeptical when I heard about Last Leaf, which adapts rustic traditional Nordic folk music for string quartet—the example of the Kronos Quartet has convinced many similar groups that they too can widen their audiences by adapting material from outside the classical sphere, but often the results sound bloodless and generic. Thankfully the Danish String Quartet delivers performances that suggest not only familiarity with Nordic traditional music—including Christmas tunes, dance numbers, and funeral hymns—but also

a commitment to arrangements that preserve the source material’s rhythmic vitality and bittersweet sonorities without dumbing down the group’s virtuosity. Last Leaf is as beautiful as anything I’ve heard all year.

KENDRICK LAMAR Damn (Top Dawg/Interscope) On his latest album, Kendrick Lamar strips down the layers of samples and beats that usually support his complex rhymes, leaving behind something simpler and more direct, with more overtly head-nodding grooves— but otherwise his music remains as dense, confrontational, and lyrical as ever. I’m not proud to admit that I haven’t kept up with hip-hop’s rapidly changing landscape—in part because I’ve been so repelled by the part of it that draws inspiration from shitty pop and/ or emo—but among the records I’ve managed to hear, none comes close to matching the nuance, richness, and creativity of Damn. In this job I often listen to a record in a concentrated burst, but I never did that with Damn—instead I kept coming back to it, and each time I was surprised anew, discovering new details and ideas. It feels like an album that will keep rewarding me far into the future.

TOM RAINEY OBBLIGATO Float Upstream (Intakt) Drummer Tom Rainey belongs to a dying breed—he’s a hard-core improviser who still has a foot planted in jazz tradition. He appears on the terriﬁc recent album Lucille! (Delmark) by bass clarinetist Jason Stein, and at Stein’s release party at Constellation in September, I sat closest to Rainey’s spot on the ﬂoor—and it was revelatory to hear how he maintained an imperturbable, swinging pulse while regularly upsetting the apple cart. Rainey reminds me of Han Bennink, but not because they sound anything alike or because Rainey shares the Dutchman’s absurdist sensibilities—it’s how they’ve both inextricably entwined the tasks of playing it straight and making surprising shit happen. Rainey leads several bands these days, but the quintet Obbligato—with trumpeter Ralph Alessi, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, pianist Kris Davis, and bassist Drew Gress—thrills me most because it heightens that duality by setting a bunch of free improvisers loose on a repertoire rooted in mainstream jazz tradition. Obbligato’s fantastic second album, Float Upstream, consists almost entirely of time-tested standards such as “Stella by Starlight,” “What Is This Thing Called Love,” and “There Is No Greater Love”—Rainey tosses in only one original

(the collectively composed title track) and a brisk, astringent take on the overlooked Sam Rivers classic “Beatrice.” The band’s cool assertiveness, biting edge, and devotion to swing suggest a classic Blue Note session from the 60s, when much of the label’s roster was cutting inside-out postbop on the regular. But that’s not to say their performances sound the slightest bit nostalgic—instead Rainey and company demonstrate the seemingly bottomless reinvention that characterizes the best jazz musicians.

NADAH EL SHAZLY Ahwar (Nawa) I’ve long been a fan of Arabic music, whether traditional folk or urban pop, and this year I discovered a new thread of experimentation that combines those disparate sounds. Many musicians from the Arabic world, among them Lebanese improvisers Mazen Kerbaj and Sharif Sehnaoui, have made unabashedly experimental work that barely refers to their homelands, but Cairo’s Nadah El Shazly uses a mixture of shaabi (a form of working-class street pop) and the classic songs of legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kalthoum as the foundation for her explorations—she heaps her elegant melodies and loping grooves with bits of noise and dissonant harmonies, digitally dicing and refracting her voice and adding electronic textures. El Shazly collaborated with a fellow Egyptian, composer Maurice Louca, and with Libyan guitarist Sam Shalabi (who spent many years living and working in Montreal and led the postrock group Shalabi Ef-

fect) to build dazzling, layered arrangements around songs she wrote and constructed at home on her computer. But what differentiates Ahwar from other recordings that experiment with traditional music from the Middle East is her stunning voice. Louca also appears on the excellent recent trio record Lekhfa (Mostakell) with singer Maryam Saleh and vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, which further suggests that an exciting new aesthetic is emerging.

ERLEND APNESETH Nattsongar (Heilo) I don’t think I’ve ever compiled a year-end list that included albums by two different Norwegian Hardanger fiddle players. Neither Nils Økland (whose Lysning I ranked at number 29) nor Erlend Apneseth plays the instrument in the pure folk fashion for which it’s best known, but each taps into its lush harmonic possibilities, applying its rich, grainy timbre and natural overtones to wide-ranging original compositions. Like Økland, Apneseth adapts approaches and techniques from jazz and improvised music, but Nattsongar has a distinctive spectral depth thanks to his band— specifically the kaleidoscopic guitar and electronics of Stein Urheim. The pieces on the album were commissioned for a Norwegian folk festival, and they often incorporate traditions from other parts of the world as well (“Oasia” has a Chinese flavor, for instance), but the borrowings don’t feel glib, artiﬁcial, or insincere. Apneseth has wide-open ears, and his excellent bandmates—Urheim, Atomic

drummer Hans Hulbækmo, double bassist Ole Morten Vågan, and nyckelharpa player Erik Rydvall—help him draft sumptuous, shape-shifting grooves, soaring melodies, and dense atmospheres. This year Apneseth also released the wonderful trio album Åra (with guitarist Stephan Meidell and percussionist Øyvind Hegg-Lunde), but Nattsongar edges it out for a place on my list with its breadth and tuneful splendor.

SAICOBAB Sab Se Purani Bab (Thrill Jockey) Yamataka Eye is famous as the restless driving force behind the Boredoms, but for more than three decades the band’s drummer YoshimiO (aka Yoshimi P-We) has proved herself a visionary as well, with a seemingly unquenchable wealth of ideas. I was a bit surprised to learn that she had a “new” band called Saicobab, which has existed in one form or another for several years—you wouldn’t think she’d need another outlet, given that her long-running group OOIOO can change so radically from album to album. (OOIOO’s brilliant 2013 album, Gamel, puts a unique spin on Indonesian gamelan while retaining the combo’s terse rhythmic drive.) On Saicobab’s first album, Sab Se Purani Bab, YoshimiO is joined by double bassist Akita Goldman, sitar player Daikiti (aka Yoshida Daikichi), and percussionist Motoyuki “Hama” Hamamoto (who specializes in an Arabic tambourine called a riq), but the most arresting thing about this nimble ensemble is YoshimiO’s idiosyncratic singing—a bizarre style halfway between ecstatic chanting and manic screaming. Her vocals provide the songs with melodic structure, but the sound of Saicobab is nonetheless alienated from any tradition or era—not least because of the studio production, which subtly but effectively accents the wriggling, scuttling sitar with stereo-field effects and unexpected vocal harmonies. Few musicians can create new idioms while maintaining an instantly recognizable identity, but YoshimiO seems to pull it off every time—I’d say she can do it in her sleep, except that might sound like an insult to this rigorous and exciting music.

LINDA CATLIN SMITH Drifter (Another Timbre) Few things turned my head around last year like the launch of the Canadian Composers Series by peerless British label Another Timbre. The ﬁve titles that came out in 2017 were consistently fantastic, forcing me to reckon with an emergent depth in the Canadian contemporary-music community—I’d J

JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 23

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known only a few pieces by some prominent composers. This series has helped me make connections among folks such as Martin Arnold, Marc Sabat, Chiyoko Szlavnics, and Linda Catlin Smith, all of whom were featured in the initial batch of releases (along with much younger composer and percussionist Isaiah Ceccarelli). The double CD Drifter collects pieces Smith wrote between 1995 and 2015, and the sometimes serene, sometimes unsettling beauty of her pensive music is underlined by performances by members of England’s adventurous Apartment House (in various solo, duo, and trio configurations) and by Montreal’s ravishing Quatuor Bozzini. Like much of the music in the series, Smith’s work is contemplative, its sorrowful melodies unfurling slowly and never arriving at clear resolutions. In its lack of tidy endpoints, it feels like an act of exploration.

MARIEL ROBERTS Cartography (New Focus) New York cellist Mariel Roberts is best known as a founding member of the daring Mivos Quartet, but she’s achieved her greatest feat thus far with the bracing solo recital Cartography, which consists of four works written specifically for her. The album opens with “Gretchen am Spinnrade” by Wet Ink Ensemble pianist Eric Wubbels, named after a lied by Franz Schubert that’s arguably the first art song; Wubbels’s piece bears little surface resemblance to Schubert’s, instead colliding and snapping apart its charged lines in an intense, electric dialogue. The record never quite recovers—if that’s the correct word— from the furious brilliance of “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” but the works that follow (by Cenk Ergün, George Lewis, and David Brynjar Franzson) are almost as rewarding and less draining. Roberts plays with a serrated tone and diamond-sharp precision when that’s called for, but she’s just as effective with ominous overtones and icy, ringing upper-register flurries (on Franzson’s “The Cartography of Time”) or percussive pizzicato passages that ping and pop (on Ergün’s electronicssaturated “Aman”). Her performances are dazzling technically, but the cellist isn’t just a virtuoso—she’s also a fearless explorer with a keen curatorial mind-set.

mastery of hyperminimalism and durational music, and he tackles both on his recording of this three-and-a-half-hour opus by New York composer Randy Gibson. Like Ellen Arkbro (see number six), Gibson is a disciple of minimalist icon La Monte Young, and he particularly shares the master’s interest in just intonation. That tuning system requires a piano to be thoroughly retuned, though, and because Lee wanted to be able to take Gibson’s piece on the road, the composer developed a technique whereby subtle amplification and electronics could achieve a similar effect without mucking endlessly with the strings. The Four Pillars uses only one note of the scale (albeit in all seven octaves of the keyboard), but its variety of rhythmic attacks—single tones separated by chasms of silence, for instance, or rapid tones that pile up overtones like billowing smoke—prevent it from growing tedious. The music stays in constant motion, exploring decay and harmony, and the closing movement, “Roaring,” digs into the piano’s bass register in a thrilling, thunderous climax.

DÁLAVA The Book of Transﬁgurations (Songlines) Vancouver singer Julia Ulehla and her husband, adventurous jazz guitarist Aram Bajakian, collaborate with cellist Peggy Lee and drummer Dylan van der Schyff to present sorrowful 19th- and 20th-century Moravian folk songs in a variety of styles: art-rock, folk, even archival recordings by the singer’s grandfather Jiri. (Her great-grandfather Vladimir, a biologist by trade, was also a passionate ethnographer who wrote a key book on the folk music of his region, which is the source of the songs on this remarkable album.) The arrangements are sometimes delicate, sometimes punishing, but the beauty of the songs always comes through powerfully. Ulehla careens, sails, and shimmers through the varied interpretations with penetrating strength—her singing is sometimes heavenly and ethereal, sometimes gruff and earthy, as though she were channeling the spirit of a hardscrabble village woman who’s known these songs her whole life.

R. ANDREW LEE Randy Gibson: The Four Pillars Appearing From the Equal D Under Resonating Apparitions of the Eternal Process in the Midwinter Starﬁeld 16 VIII 10 (Kansas City) (Irritable Hedgehog) Denver pianist R. Andrew Lee has proved his

24 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

IKUE MORI Obelisk (Tzadik) Few computer musicians have developed an aesthetic as instantly recognizable as that of Ikue Mori, a Japanese expat who got her start in the late 70s playing crude but inimitably original drum parts in the great no-wave trio DNA. For most of the past few decades, however, she’s focused on electronics, developing a wonderfully liquid sound suggestive of chiming bells, chirping insects, and dripping water—a constant stream of shifting, globular tones. She’s used that approach in many improvisation-oriented contexts, including the proliﬁc duo Phantom Orchard with harpist Zeena Parkins, but until recently she’s tended to stay inside her comfort zone in these collaborations. In 2017 Mori released two albums that pushed her out of that space: a duo with pianist Craig Taborn called Highsmith (Tzadik) and a tune-oriented quartet recording with cellist Okkyung Lee, pianist Sylvie Courvoisier, and drummer Jim Black called Obelisk. Both are excellent, but the latter really blew my mind. Mori’s laptop manipulations alternate between sinister and whimsical within arrangements that combine rhythmic ferocity, melodic playfulness, timbral surprise, and atmospheric ambiguity. The pieces include plenty of improvisation, but their relatively strong compositional frameworks bring out new dimensions of Mori’s creativity.

ELLEN ARKBRO For Organ and Brass (Subtext) Young Swedish composer Ellen Arkbro, known previously for her work in underground rock circles, claims as mentors Canadian composer Marc Sabat, minimalist pioneer La Monte Young, and Young’s wife, Marian Zazeela—and she’s surely made them proud with this beautiful, meditative album. On the album’s three pieces, she guides organist Johan Graden and Berlin-based brass ensemble Zinc & Copper through harrowing microtonal alleyways—because she wrote in meantone temperament, for the recording she found a 17th-century church organ in Tangermünde, Germany, that used that tuning system. The musicians move among a handful of sustained pitches, generating clouds of overtones that shimmer outward from tight note clusters. On “Three” the brass players operate on their own, foregrounding the interaction of French horn, tuba, and trombone—every subtle change in pitch creates thrilling collisions of sound, as if new instruments were produced by each combination. The writing is simple and mesmerizing,

relying on a continuously cycling tone progression, but the way it’s orchestrated makes it feel timeless and profound.

not a time of structure—it’s a time for all of us to use our wits and ﬁgure out how to cope and then to build new structures.” Radio Flyer illustrates Allen’s investment in tradition and devotion to exploration more clearly than anything he’s done yet. Ellman is the perfect foil, sometimes stating the melodies in loose unison with Allen, sometimes playing against him, but never reverting to predictable chordal comping. On the title piece, Ellman initially uses effects to give his tone a washedout feel, so that it seems to puddle around August and Royston’s probing rhythms; then he switches to another pedal for a jarring harmonized sound, creating an ambiguity that Allen’s Coleman-esque phrases have to power through. While Allen’s earlier trio records give you the sense that every element is precisely where it should be, this one seems to ask why anything should be as it is—the results aren’t vague or tentative, but instead push against your attention, demanding engagement.

CHRIS SPEED TRIO Platinum on Tap (Intakt) Reedist Chris Speed’s trio with drummer Dave King and bassist Chris Tordini places his velvety tenor saxophone front and center, and the group’s second album, Platinum on Tap, feels like a major statement. The volatile rhythm section maintains an energetic swing even when it fractures time, forcing Speed to weave through the shards—and even at those moments, the reedist’s tone never loses its cool. His sound has never been more glorious—a kind of hazy pastel marbled with a serious grain, it’s both airy and substantive. Sometimes he almost seems to be playing from under a blanket, but instead of muffling him it creates extra intimacy. Speed wrote most of the music on the new album, but the two tunes by other people say just as much about him. When he dances through the Hoagy Carmichael ballad “Stardust,” it’s as if he’s reinvented its melody, shrouding it in darkness. The other cover is a killer version of Albert Ayler’s “Spirits,” which Speed sprints through as though it were a bebop number—he departs from the composer’s gospel-steeped vibe in order to break the melody apart and reassemble it into a mosaiclike abstraction. Album opener “Red Hook Nights” is a tender ballad where Speed uses his elliptical, beautiful style to elaborate on the tune with luxurious patience. Even when the group turns up the heat, as on “Buffalo 15,” he hangs on to his chill approach, applying his horn to the roiling rhythms almost like a balm.

PANCRACE Pancrace (Penultimate Press) This French improvising quintet are responsible for one of the loveliest, most mysterious, and most peculiar releases of the year: a double album whose four side-length pieces employ a highly unusual set of instruments and develop with organic, unstudied ease. They recorded it in the Saint Pancrace Church in the tiny Alsatian village of Dangolsheim, and the church’s organ dominates all four pieces. The ensemble engage in a deliberate but obscure subversion of liturgical music, sprinkling their shape-shifting improvisations with Baroque violin, tin whistle, and uilleann pipes, often played in unconventional ways—and complemented by an arsenal of homemade and toy instruments. Despite a few traces of Baroque pastoralism, the group most often build richly

textured, constantly evolving drones. During a lull in the second piece, the sound of children playing seems to seep into the church—and into the improvisation—but generally the musicians create such serendipity themselves, adding new colors, harmonies, and rhythmic eddies as though they’re just as spellbound by the possibilities of their many instruments as we might be. They seem totally, precisely in control of their choices and simultaneously unbound and spontaneous. I hesitate to guess whether this group can bottle this lightning again—Pancrace could be an ephemeral, in situ musical miracle. In either case, it’s the kind of thing most ensembles spend their entire careers trying to achieve.

CIRCUIT DES YEUX Reaching for Indigo (Drag City) Chicago vocalist Haley Fohr has matured in leaps and bounds since the release of her breakthrough album, 2015’s In Plain Speech (Thrill Jockey), but nothing could have prepared me for 2017’s Reaching for Indigo (Drag City). Early on, Fohr convinced me that she had lots of ideas, but she also seemed to struggle to choose a destination or a path to get there. Now she’s in full command of her talents as a songwriter, singer, and arranger, having forged an approach that reconciles several of her abiding loves: art-song experimentation, expansive folk, and psychedelia. Produced by Fohr and Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas, Reaching for Indigo frames her arresting voice brilliantly—her authoritative lower register becomes a howling operatic force on “Black Fly,” and on “Paper Bag” she uses the top end of her range to shape minimalist patterns

that evoke classic Philip Glass. Fohr clearly takes inspiration from the likes of Yoko Ono, Diamanda Galas, and Nico (whose Chelsea Girl she covered at a concert in October), but her new album isn’t derivative. Album opener “Brainshift” is a delicate, hymnlike meditation that aims to convey the feeling of a sudden, all-encompassing transformation with the help of a swell of massive brass by trombonist Nick Broste. On the galloping “A Story of This World Part II,” Fohr ﬂings herself into some of her most daring vocal experiments so far, mixing wordless howls and melismatic whoops with a focus and precision missing from her earlier work. As exciting as I ﬁnd what she’s done on Reaching for Indigo, I’m looking forward to the next album even more.

JD ALLEN Radio Flyer (Savant) Tenor saxophonist JD Allen threw a couple of wrenches into his process when he made Radio Flyer. Not only did he enlist inventive guitarist Liberty Ellman (also of Henry Threadgill’s Zooid) to augment his longrunning trio with bassist Gregg August and drummer Rudy Royston, he also wrote the album’s seven originals as loose-limbed modal vehicles free of chord changes (a la Ornette Coleman), presenting them to the musicians in the studio with little time for rehearsal. After so many years working together, Allen, August, and Royston have practically wired their minds together, and they hit their stride in every tune; Ellman follows suit, providing extra tang and harmonic fog. In the album’s liner notes, Allen explains his artistic choices as a reaction to the political moment: “This is

RICHARD DAWSON Peasant (Weird World) British singer-songwriter and guitarist Richard Dawson is a brilliant improviser, capable of playing jagged, astringent lines worthy of Derek Bailey. But he’s also fascinated by British folk traditions, drawing on them for his epic original songs—which he belts out in a soulful, spellbinding voice that’s as earnest as it is imperfect. On Dawson’s previous records, as good as they are, those two seemingly incompatible approaches have collided only occasionally, but on Peasant he goes all-in, fusing them with a cohesion he’d only hinted at before. He packs his ebullient, unkempt folk-rock tunes with fanciful phrases and bizarre imagery, helped along by colorful harmonies from harpist Rhodri Davies, violinist Angharad Davies, horn player John Davies, and a raucous chorus. Dawson draws on folkloric language but adds a biting sense of humor: he opens “Weaver” with the lines “I steep the wool in a cauldron / Of pummeled gall-nuts afloat in urine / And river water thrice-boiled with a bloodstone.” No matter how absurd his language gets, though, Dawson sells it with his voice—he’s never been more precise and emotive, keeping a tight rein on his outsize howl but leaving in the wrinkles that make him sound so richly human. His music already stood apart from almost everything else I’ve heard, and on this masterpiece he matches the vivid originality of his imagination with the expertise of his arrangements and performances. v

v @pmarg JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 25

MUSIC IN ROTATION

A Reader staﬀer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn.

The cover of Mariam the Believer’s Love Everything

Katelyn King performing Christopher Adler’s “S-K-L”

A still from Guan Xiao’s video David ò DARREN & BRAD

PETER MARGASAK Reader music critic

Ensemble dal Niente pianist

MABEL KWAN

KELLEY SHEEHAN Coartistic director

Pandit Pran Nath, Sings Ragas Bheempalasi & Puriya Dhanaashree This is the second volume of recordings made in Paris in 1972 by brilliant classical Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath when he was touring and performing with American disciples Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela. The afternoon concert captured here—the ﬁrst time anyone had performed these two ragas in Paris at the appropriate time of day—makes an effective showcase for his microtonal precision, ingenious phrasing, and penetrating timbre.

Jonathan Piper and Michelle Lou’s duo Go by Land In the winter months you need a warm, furry jacket. The music of improvising duo Go by Land (tubaist-electronicist Jonathan Piper and bassist-electronicist Michelle Lou) makes a fine sonic equivalent. It’s currently my go-to for cooking, working, listening, everything. Jonathan has several other tuba projects, including a jug band that will put sunshine in your day. Michelle is a visiting lecturer in composition at Dartmouth, and her sound world is worth many listens.

Mariam the Believer, Love Everything Swedish singer Mariam Wallentin (best known as half of Wildbirds & Peacedrums) has always moved comfortably between pop and experimental modes, and on her latest solo album she sets her sumptuous melodies in fascinating arrangements loaded with surprising details, many of them provided by daring avant-garde figures such as guitarist Oren Ambarchi and singer Soﬁa Jernberg.

Guan Xiao, David This 2013 video piece is a perfect synthesis of so many things: visuals, sound, text, humor, commentary, entertainment. Beijing-based artist Guan Xiao looks at the way we look at things through our phones and other technology, and at how we try to interface with something old and classic, such as Michelangelo’s sculpture David. It’s a topic that performers and artists revisit often. The hilarious soundtrack she wrote for David (on which she also sings) is an integral part of the whole experience.

Christopher Adler’s “S-K-L” as performed by Katelyn King This piece belongs to a suite of ten short Adler compositions collectively titled Zaum Box. On his website he describes it as “scored for solo percussionist who orates Russian Futurist poetry while performing on a variety of instruments and devices.” I choose to highlight a 2016 rendition of “S-K-L,” which delights us with text by Aleksei Kruchenykh and a skillful performance by Katelyn Rose King-Utzinger. Her setup includes a gong, a small fan, an inverted snare drum, a glass bottle, and a tumbler with a straw—it’s special, and I’ll watch her again and again.

Die Enttäuschung, Lavaman On their first new album in ﬁve years, Berlin’s Die Enttäuschung not only withstand the loss of founding drummer Uli Jennesen (seamlessly replaced by Michael Griener) but grow into a quintet with the addition of trombonist Christof Thewes. They remain one of the most agile, imaginative, and satisfying improvising bands on the planet, especially with Thewes joining the highly interactive front line of bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall and trumpeter Axel Dörner.

26 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

Scott Ross playing the complete harpsichord works of Jean-Philippe Rameau I’ve been obsessed with a 1727 piece by Rameau called Gavotte and Six Doubles. My favorite interpretation is by Scott Ross (1951-1989), who is one of my favorite harpsichordists anyway. He mostly followed performance conventions, but at the same time his interpretations still sound contemporary. He played the way he wanted to, always with clarity, directness, and beauty.

of Cacophony, performer, composer

Alexa Meade, Jon Boogz, and Lil Buck, Color of Reality It’s hard to choose just one piece by movement artists Jon Boogz and Lil Buck, but in this case the bold brushwork and startling colors of installation artist Alexa Meade helped me decide. I ﬁrst watched this piece just before bed, and I woke up the next morning still thinking about it. The care and attention that drips from every aspect of this video is beyond my ability to articulate. Once you watch it, I know you’ll want to see more, so I’ll point you toward of Am I a Man? The Weekend EP Project You can easily get the idea from the name: the Weekend EP Project gives an artist 72 hours to complete an EP, and releases a new one every month. In particular, I’m fond of Noisée le Seque’s piece “Instant Success” and composer Sivan Cohen Elias’s EP Eve & Adinn, but each contribution is equally good and worth your time.

Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of January 11

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F

THURSDAY11 Gus Dapperton See Pick of the Week. 7 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $18, $15 in advance. b

PICK OF THE WEEK

Rising music wiz Gus Dapperton scours soft rock for his pop future

JhenÉ Aiko Lana Del Rey headlines. 8 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison, $25-$125. b

In July 2012, Miyagi Chilombo, older brother of LA singer-songwriter Jhené Aiko, died of a brain tumor at the age of 26, following a two-year struggle with cancer. Aiko’s recent trio of creative projects, which she’s bundled under the title MAP (for "movie," "album," and "poetry"), chart her path through her grief. In September she dropped the first two, a short ﬁlm called Trip and a 22-track album bearing the same title, through Def Jam, and in December she followed these with a book of poetry, 2Fish, through Ulysses Press. On the album Aiko maintains an austere composure amid the fog of tragedy that pervades many of the glum instrumentals that fill it; her yearnsome vocals leave the impression that no matter what she’s encountered she’ll be able to persevere by ﬁnding strength within herself. Many of the tracks bleed together through the album’s gossamer atmosphere, but Aiko condenses so much feeling into each song it’s easy to get stuck in a single moment as it comes—such as when her quasi-rapped verses skip atop skeletal, pitter-patter percussion on “Overstimulated.” —LEOR GALIL

Dan Phillips Trio Josh Berman & Keefe Jackson open. 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10 suggested donation. b

While electric guitarist Dan Phillips spends most of his time in Bangkok, Thailand, where he teaches music at Silpakorn University, he heads back to Chicago every year to visit family and recon- J

ò COURTESY THE ARTIST

GUS DAPPERTON

Thu 1/11, 7 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $18, $15 in advance. b

ALTHOUGH HE’S ONLY a hair’s breadth into his 20s, Gus Dapperton makes effervescent music that feels like it emerged from an early 80s time capsule that was discovered buried deep within a picturesque California mountainside. The songs on his self-released EP Yellow and Such, which came out last August, are so mellow that even its faint tambourines vibrate like thunder, and they contain the kind of luminescent keys and gently reverberating guitars that evoke the atmosphere of beachfront vacations (which most of us who are stuck in single-digit weather yearn for right about now). Dapperton’s easygoing vocals sugar-

coat any subtle inﬂections of glumness, misery, or tension. The lackadaisical, psych-twinged single “I’m Just Snacking” exudes a comfort beyond its breezy feel; it bears a familiarity and an intimate friendliness that suggest you’ve sought out this very song in times of joy and loneliness long before even you knew it existed. Dapperton—who also moonlights as a hip-hop producer—exhibits an understanding of how to make songs that stick to your brain like gum on the underside of your shoe, and if you enjoy throwback rock with a soft pop touch, it’s easy to feel like he’s made his them just for you. —LEOR GALIL

Jhené Aiko ò CASSIDY SPARROW

JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

bottom lounge ON SALE NOW 4544 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG • 773.728.6000

MUSIC

JUST ADDED • ON SALE THIS FRIDAY! 2/2 2/24 UPCOMING SHOWS REACT PRESENTS

01.13 SAYMYNAME

RCKT PWR / JSQUARED / AUDAZ

01.17 ANTI-FLAG & STRAY FROM THE PATH THE WHITE NOISE / SHARPTOOTH / ERABELLA

3/15 3/16 3/16 3/23 4/13

A New Canon of Classical Music: Composer Kevin Puts and Librettist Mark Campbell Bela Fleck & Abigail Washburn (5PM show just added!) Omar Sosa & Seckou Keita Todd Snider Laurie Lewis Altan Bettye Lavette

FOR TICKETS, VISIT OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG

01.19 STORY OF THE YEAR

DAVLIN / MAKE ROOM / FACE THE FIRE

01.20 V IS FOR VILLAINS

COL GUNN’S WILD WEST MUSIC SHOW / BLOODMAN

01.21 LELAND CLARK BAND

GOLDEN SOL / EAST AVENUE / THE SHADY CACTUSES

SUNDAY, JANUARY 14 10:30AM

Justin Roberts and the Not Ready for Naptime Players • Kids Concert

REACT PRESENTS

01.25 4B 01.26 ZOMBIE SCHOOLBOY

ACTION/ADVENTURE / CLIFFHANGER / BAD JOKES

REACT PRESENTS

01.27 MAKO

NIGHT LIGHTS

01.28 REANIMATE THE FALLEN

OVER THE SUN / NEW HOUSE OBSERVING WITH ANNIE / MALLORY ANN BOTTOM LOUNGE & KICKSTAND PRESENT

02.01 DIET CIG

GREAT GRANDPA / THE SPOOK SCHOOL SILVER WRAPPER PRESENTS

02.03 TOO MANY ZOOZ 02.09 MICKEY AVALON & DIRT NASTY REACT PRESENTS

02.10 TWO FRIENDS REACT PRESENTS

02.13 JOYNER LUCAS & DIZZY WRIGHT MARLON CRAFT

02.24 MISSIO

WELSHLY ARMS RIOT FEST PRESENTS

02.25 AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

NO WARNING / SPIRITUAL CRAMP

SUNDAY, JANUARY 14 7PM

Kaumakaiwa Kanaka'ole with Shawn Pimental In Szold Hall

SATURDAY, JANUARY 27 8PM

Carrie Newcomer FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2 7:30PM

The Bad Plus Never Stop II

featuring Reid Anderson, Orrin Evans, and David King

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 3 8PM

02.28 J BOOG

James Hill

03.01 GABRIELLE APLIN

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8 8PM

JESSE ROYAL / ETANA

JOHN SPLITHOFF

REACT PRESENTS PRESENTS

03.02 AUTOGRAF RAMZOID

REACT PRESENTS PRESENTS

03.03 NIGHTMARES ON WAX 03.07 THE EXPENDABLES

THROUGH THE ROOTS / PACIFIC DUB

03.08 FUTURISTIC

ISHDARR / MARK BATTLES

03.09 JUSTIN NOZUKA & GOOD OLD WAR

In Szold Hall

John Oates and The Good Road Band FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 9 8PM

Tom Paxton

with special guest The DonJuans

RIVER MATTHEWS

RIOT FEST PRESENTS

03.11 SORORITY NOIS E NOISE

REMO DRIVE / FOXX BODIES

ACROSS THE STREET IN SZOLD HALL 4545 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL

03.19 THE HUNNA

1/12

03.24 KNOCKED LOOSE

1/19

03.28 FOZZY

1/26

COASTS

TERROR / JESUS PIECE / STONE / KHARMA THROUGH FIRE / SANTA CRUZ / DARK SKY CHOIR

THE NOISE PRESENTS

03.29 ICED EARTH

Global Dance Party: Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orchestra Global Dance Party: Big Mean Sound Machine Global Dance Party: Ethnic Dance Chicago Celebrates the EU featuring Mazurka Wojciechowska and Paul Collins

SANCTUARY / KILL RITUAL

04.21 FORTUNATE YOUTH TATANKA

RIOT FEST PRESENTS

05.19 FU MANCHU

www.bottomlounge.com 1375 w lake st 312.666.6775

28 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE

1/17 1/24

Jaerv Marimba Oxib K'ajau

OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG

Pokey LaFarge ò NATE BURRELL

continued from 27

nect with a music scene that shaped his aesthetic sense. Most of his local gigs this time have been with shifting four-piece lineups that pit his liquid tone and fluent phrasing against a series of extroverted horn or keyboard players. But for this concert, his last before heading back to Asia, he'll play in a trio to celebrate his musical partnerships with its players and their two new CDs: the recent Divergent Flow and last fall’s Converging Tributaries, which also features former Chicagoan Jeb Bishop on trombone. Bassist Krzysztof Pabian’s command of swinging rhythms, precise unisons, and contrapuntal bowing have made him Phillips’s go-to on the instrument since 1997, and he’s been the guitarist’s constant accompanist during all the gigs on his current visit. Drummer Tim Daisy is a more recent associate, but his ﬂuid shifts between meterless coloration, asymmetrical structures, and light-stepping grooves help to push the guitarist into the more adventurous territory he explores on both releases. —BILL MEYER

FRIDAY12 Pokey Lafarge See also Saturday. Nicole Atkins opens. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $20, $18 in advance. 18+ With his recent Manic Revelations (Rounder), Saint Louis roots maven Pokey LaFarge hasn’t surrendered his love of a simpler musical era, but he seems to have decided that polishing up his sound might net him a broader listenership. I enjoyed his 2015 album Something in the Water, which was made by a crew of skilled Chicago time travelers including members of the Fat Babies and Flat Five— artists who routinely balance their romance for American’s roots music past with a sly postmodern sensibility. The new album, however, was cut

with a band that plays well yet adds little personality. LaFarge’s music has regularly juggled bits of rockabilly, ragtime, trad jazz, early R&B, and honkytonk balladry, but the songs on the new record are glossed with a generic horn section and an overlay toothless 60s soul that tends to push them all into a single corner. While the album’s opening tracks express empathy for ﬂashpoints of racial unrest in his home region— “Riot in the Streets” references Ferguson’s West Florrisant Avenue, which was the scene of much of the clashes between protesters and police officers following the shooting of unarmed teenager Michael Brown in 2014—his song “Silent Movie” delivers a depressingly apathetic statement. Reacting to the world’s hostility and insensitivity, he sings, “Cover your ears and watch the world go by / That’s how you survive.” The music complements that sort of disengagement; it’s pleasant, catchy, and well made, but it doesn’t seem to matter very much. —PETER MARGASAK

Keefe Jackson & Steve Hunt, Gerrit Hatcher & Julian Kirshner 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10. 18+ These two sax-percussion duos represent several generations in Chicago improvised music —saxophonist Gerrit Hatcher is 26, while drummer Steve Hunt is 63—but all the musicians share an exploratory curiosity, and both pairs engage in fascinating modes of communication. Reedist Keefe Jackson and Hunt—a perpetually overlooked titan in the city’s jazz scene who’s played in NRG Ensemble, Caffeine, and Extraordinary Popular Delusions, among others—are celebrating the release of The Long Song (1980), a succinct cassette featuring three feverish pieces of bob-and-weave interplay, aerated friction, and surprisingly bruising onslaughts that reveal less common sides of each musician’s personality. Jackson deploys a deeply striated tone marbled with upper-register squawks

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

in serving up visceral, gnarled flurries. There are also passages of marked restraint, where Hunt produces nicely curdled bowed cymbals, irregularly unspooling scrabbles, and nuanced scraping sounds across the surface of his drums. On the new self-released Five Percent Tint, Hatcher and drummer Julian Kirshner—part of an exciting new crop of players who've brought an electric energy to the local community in the last few years—engage in a driving, forward-motion attack, Kirshner issuing gruff, paint-peeling riffs and cycling licks with improvisational patterns that frequently veer into keening high-end cries. There are also moments of repose when he spreads objects across his kit—dragging, abrading, and dropping things to generate an intimate little mini-performance of texture—allowing the saxophonist to embrace a conversational flow, albeit one that eventually becomes extroverted and explosive. —PETER MARGASAK

Snaketime: The Music of Moondog 8:30 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10. 21+ Plenty of ensembles in jazz and new-music circles have put their spin on the idiosyncratic compositions of the blind New York composer Louis Hardin, aka Moondog, who died in Germany in 1999. Self-taught and usually homeless, he was derisively known as the Viking of Sixth Avenue for the eccentric headdress and spear he sported. Moondog was a sui generis presence among the city’s jazz and classical communities during the 50s and 60s, hanging out with musicians at the New York Philharmonic by day and jamming with beboppers in clubs by night. His music reflected the same disregard for stylistic borders. Although he eventually attained a level of notoriety and respect—Janis Joplin recorded his “All Is Loneliness” for her 1967 debut with Big Brother & the Holding Company, and he later signed to Columbia Records—he wasn’t taken seriously for

MUSIC

most of his career. A new Chicago octet organized by reedist Dustin Laurenzi is the latest outﬁt to tackle Moondog’s repertoire. Judging from a live recording Laurenzi shared with me, this superb group does something compelling with his music. The group focuses on pieces from the New Yorker's two Columbia albums, 1969’s Moondog and 1971’s Moondog 2. Most of its selections are sweetly tuneful, concise little gems with springy rhythms and, often, sing-song vocal chanting, but the octet deftly sands away some of the naive treacle. Percussionists Quin Kirchner and Ryan Packard add propulsion, and the band—which also includes saxophonist Nick Mazzarella, bass clarinetist Jason Stein, trumpeter Quentin Coaxum, guitarist Dave Miller, and bassist Matt Ulery—reshapes the writing with sharp arrangements bristling with puzzle-piece constructions. —PETER MARGASAK

FIND HUNDREDS OF

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anthems, spirituals, hymns, international, and acappella. Saturday rehearsals,

Upon my first listen to St. Vincent’s newest album, October’s Masseducation, I experienced disappointment. Produced largely by hit machine Jack Antonoff, it’s a massive step away from the knotty, topsy-turvy prog-funk of Annie Clark’s brilliant 2014 self-titled LP, instead jumping into straightforward electro-pop. But a few spins later, it became clear that Masseducation is another step in evolution for Clark’s genius. Sure, the beats snap rather than throb, and there’s significantly less of her insane guitar shredding, but the comparative simplicity of the music sets a perfect backdrop for her beautiful voice and oﬀ-kilter melodies. Though a couple moments of Masseducation dip into schlocky radio-ready piano-pop (like on the single “New York”), it’s easy to look past that when the record serves up next-level cuts like the sketchy buzzing “Pills” and the heartbreakingly honest “Happy Birthday, Johnny.”—LUCA CIMARUSTI J

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JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 29

1800 W. DIVISION

Est.1954 Celebrating over 61 years of service to Chicago!

(773) 486-9862 Come enjoy one of Chicago’s ﬁnest beer gardens! JANUARY 11.................. FLABBY HOFFMAN SHOW 8PM JANUARY 12.................. AMERICAN DRAFT JANUARY 13.................. DJ SKID LICIOUS JANUARY 14.................. TONY DO ROSARIO GROUP JANUARY 17.................. JAMIE WAGNER & FRIENDS JANUARY 18.................. MIKE FELTON JANUARY 19.................. SITUATION DAVID MAXLIELLIAM ANNA JANUARY 20.................. FIRST WARD PROBLEMS JANUARY 21.................. TONY DO ROSARIO GROUP JANUARY 22.................. RC BIG BAND 7PM JANUARY 24.................. PETER CASONOVA QUARTET JANUARY 25.................. THE WICK JANUARY 26.................. THE HEPKATS SKIPPIN’ ROCK JANUARY 27.................. THE STRAY BOLTS JANUARY 28.................. WHOLESOMERADIO DJ NIGHT

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Deep Dark Woods ò GEMMA WARREN

Hassles 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10 suggested donation. 21+

EVERY TUESDAY (EXCEPT 2ND) AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMIJON AMERICA

“A Musical Gem” - NY Times

continued from 29

SATURDAY13 6615 W. ROOSEVELT RD., BERWYN FRI

Americana Night w/ COYOTE RIOT In The SideBar - IAN LEITH

Pokey Lafarge See Friday. Nicole Atkins opens. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $20, $18 in advance. 21+

SAT

ERIC LINDELL & The Grand Nationals

Deep Dark Woods Cass Cwik opens. 9 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $18, $15 in advance. 21+

WDCB Big Band Sundays - Open Mic Every Tuesday SUNDAY AT NOON - Opportunity Knocks Chili Cookoff

On Yarrow (Six Shooter), the first studio album in four years by veteran Canadian folk-rock band Deep Dark Woods, the group continues to pursue singer Ryan Boldt’s harrowing end-time visions, putting a modern spin on murder ballads, apocalyptic natural disasters, and frayed love affairs. At times Boldt's prosaic touch makes the music fall flat, no matter how crisply his bandmates shape the guitar-driven arrangements or how beautifully guest harmony singers Kacy Anderson and Clayton Linthicum (aka Kacy & Clayton) bring richness and variety to his introspective mumbling; his uninspired imagery and tentative delivery on “Deep Flooding Waters” conjure the destructive force of a sun shower. He fares better on the opening track, “Fallen Leaves,” grappling with the death of his lover in a much more convincing, heartfelt manner, imagining his “lovely Annie” buried in the ground, which is covered by leaves as they cascade to the earth from the trees above her grave. “The Birds Will Stop Their Singing” is equally effective. The delicately rendered waltz epically spells out a series of deadly misunderstandings; it sounds like a Wild West saga squeezed into nine harrowing minutes. Deep Dark Woods brings the muscle and energy lacking in the studio to its live performances, but the absence of Kacy & Clayton’s harmony singing on this tour will be strongly felt. —PETER MARGASAK

WED

THU

Big Band Dance Party w/the APOL Orchestra 7pm Start - Free Swing Dance Lessons!

Tribute Night: The Bands’ Favorites, feat.

18 PHIL ANGOTTI / RACHEL DREW / N. BERWYN RHYTHM & SOUL FRI

19 SAT

THU 20

BELVEDERES / JAY O’ROURKE Deadhead Alert! TERRAPIN FLYER

1/25 - Country Night In Berwyn 1/26 - Rico Birthday Bash 1/27 - Funding Futures Chicago Fundraiser 2/2 - Acoustic Fridays with Jenny Bienemann 2/3 -Washington Island Fish Boil 2/6 -WDCB BluesdayTuesday w/ Dave Specter Band 2/10 - Bono Bros 5th AnnualValentine’s Show 2/13 - Mardi Gras Party with Nelson St. Revival 2/15 - 17 - Harmonica Dunn Presents Dunn Dunn Fest: Charley Crockett, Blackfoot Gypsies,The Heavy Sounds,Wild Earp, COMPLETE INFORMATION THEHannah WEBSITE Fox Crossing Stringband, AlannaON Royale, Wicklund & the Steppin' Stones, Moonrise Nation, Matthew Ryan,The High Divers, Carson McHone, Ryan Joseph Anderson, PineTravelers and more 30 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

Saymyname Rckt Pwr, Jqsuared, and Audaz open. 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 1375 W. Lake, $15. 17+ LA electronic producer Dayvid Lundie-Sherman, aka Saymyname, is the self-proclaimed pioneer of hardtrap, a combination of hardstyle and electronic

trap. Lundie-Sherman blends the boisterous parts of those genres so effectively that distinguishing between them can feel like trying to figure out the diﬀerence between being pummeled by a tenpound sack of quarters or being pummeled by a ten-pound sack of dimes—even to those familiar with the differences between electronic trap and electronic hardcore it may sound like every other over-the-top, frenetic “EDM” track at first listen. But with Lundie-Sherman, the end result is always overpowering. Once you get past the shocking intensity of each song, his electronic trap clusters of hi-hats noticeably gel well with hardstyle bass (it sounds like a trampoline getting electrocuted), and his aﬀection for shrieking, squiggly synths emphasizes his desire to make every sound leave a mark. Lundie-Sherman is most effective as a producer when he’s working with a vocalist. He earns the volume-pushing hook on his 2017 single with Crichy Crich, “Swerve”—the atmospheric passages he provides are so good the EDM rapper sounds way cooler than he ever could on his own. —LEOR GALIL

It’s never been a secret that Chicago free-jazz reedist Ken Vandermark is inspired by punk rock; it’s obvious in the the raw directness of his performance and the pile-driver energy of his playing. For years he’s worked with inventive self-taught guitarists Terrie Hessels and Andy Moor of Amsterdam postpunk juggernaut the Ex—a group that came to embrace improvisational music out of its DIY roots—in a quartet with Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love called Lean Left. The group plays without guidelines, and the members’ collective interest in noise, punk spirit, and unbridled exploration has produced consistently thrilling, abstract, and hard-hitting music where a howling din and ﬂinty riffs are plowed together in serrated, scalding heaps of sound. On last year’s I Forgot to Breathe (Trost) the quartet revealed an ongoing restlessness: as the guitarists rudely stab, probe, and shout in terse, metallic shards, Vandermark skirts both the six-string wreckage and Nilssen-Love’s spastic beats and scraping metal. Tonight a new quartet called Hassles will make its Chicago debut on the end of a short U.S. tour; the band also includes Hessels and Nilssen-Love, but the impetus behind the project augurs a much diﬀerent aesthetic than Lean Left’s confrontational attack. When Vandermark, Nilssen-Love, and New York trombonist Steve Swell played some gigs with superb Norwegian bassist Jon Rune Strøm (Friends & Neighbors, Universal Indians) in Europe, they conjured the notion of a high-end free-jazz combo smashing into the autodidact provocations of Hessels—who serves as the wrench in the works. Although Swell isn’t part of this group, I’m excited for what’s sure to be an exhilarating collision. —PETER MARGASAK v

SUNDAY14 Peter J Woods Mykel Boyd, Jason Soliday, and Christopher Elmore open. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, $5. 21+ Milwaukee’s loudest Renaissance man, Peter J Woods has spent the last decade and a half keeping his energy flowing through a variety of media— he’s an absurdist, avant-garde playwright, a performance artist, a visual artist, and is probably best known as a harsh-noise wizard. Some might say that musical genre has a limited emotional palette and has its best years behind it, but Woods is having none of that, and his natural theatricality and inventiveness keep his work fresh and challenging. As influenced by John Cage as, say, Merzbow, he’s unafraid of silence, chance, and allowing thoughts to unfold in the spaces between blasts; last year’s cassette release I’ve Told Lies Before pummels, shivers, and crackles with his methodic madness. For this performance, he’ll be debuting a brandnew piece on the theme of white privilege and the construction of whiteness, called “The Privilege of Breath,” which will feature his first use of live video. —MONICA KENDRICK

SayMyName ò COURTESY THE ARTIST

FOOD & DRINK

THE FAMILY HOUSE | $ R 2305 W. Devon 773-856-0192

facebook.com/The-FamilyHouse-126214931421882

Mohinga, a briny brew full of tilapia bits, banana stems, and rice vermicelli; tea leaf salad, a Burmese specialty ò ERICA KOHAGIZAWA

RESTAURANT REVIEW

The Family House brings Burmese cuisine to Chicago

And the city’s only restaurant serving the food of Myanmar has great Malaysian and Indonesian food too. By MIKE SULA

here’s nothing quite as disconcerting as the sound of a microwave pinging in the middle of a quiet restaurant. On a polar December night on Devon Avenue, that very sound gave me concern for the condition of my mohinga, a hot, fish-based noodle soup from Burma, or Myanmar, as its military dictatorship renamed it in 1989. That notoriously cruel government is largely the reason there’s a sizable Burmese population that’s resettled in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and why that midsize city has a small but rich collection of Burmese restaurants and groceries. Brutal government oppression is also the reason that Chicago in recent years has welcomed a growing number of Rohingya refugees originally from Burma’s western

Rakhine state and now, to our great fortune, Chicago’s only Burmese restaurant, the Family House. Mohinga is a dish very often eaten for breakfast, so it might just have served me right to get rewarmed soup in the evening. But on the night in question I was very much looking forward to that mohinga, something I hadn’t eaten since my last visit to Fort Wayne nearly ﬁve years ago. I desperately wanted it to be good. And it was—a piping-hot briny brew full of tilapia bits and banana stems, with a small island of deep-fried soybeans that contributed a crunchy textural enhancement to the long, slippery rice vermicelli. If you, as a Chicagoan, have pined for Burmese food as I have, there are other dishes J

JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 31

Search the Reader’s online database of thousands of Chicago-area restaurants—and add your own review—at chicagoreader.com/food.

FOOD & DRINK

Clockwise from top left: nasi goreng kampung, villagestyle fried rice; ohn no khao swe, curried noodle soup with wickedly moist slices of chicken breast; dining at the Family House ò ERICA KOHAGIZAWA

continued from 31 on the menu at the Family House that will immediately grab your attention. Of course there’s laphet thoke, or Burma’s famous tea leaf salad—sour, deeply funky fermented green leaves tossed with shredded cabbage, roasted peanuts, toasted sesame seeds, and fried split soybeans that together perform a veritable symphony of crunchiness. There’s also ohn no khao swe (there are multiple anglicized spellings), a richly creamy curried noodle soup served with roughly hacked and wickedly moist slices of chicken breast. It’s a

32 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

relative of the coconut-based type of northern Thai khao soi most commonly found in Chiang Mai and at Thai restaurants across U.S. The Family House is in fact owned and operated by a family, according to co-owner Mohammad Alif, who was born in Malaysia, where his parents ﬂed from Burma in the late 70s along with his uncle Ismail Kalamiah. The family resettled here in stages three to four years ago. Everybody’s gotten in the act. Kalamiah as well as Alif’s mother and aunt cook in the kitchen, while four other relatives work the front of the house, a small, sparsely deco-

rated storefront whose windows frosted over during the last cold snap. It was the perfect place to warm your suffering soul and bones with one of those soups, or snap out of your seasonal stupor with one of the bracing salads—green mango, pickled ginger, or papaya, each sharp with chile and lime and deeply umamic with ﬁsh sauce. And that, sadly, is where the choices stop. Alif tells me that they had to scale back ambitions for a more rounded Burmese menu due to the difficulty of sourcing key ingredients. Luckily, the Family House is also serving Malaysian and Indonesian dishes every bit as good as the Burmese stuff. There’s a fat tangle of sweet-and-spicy mee goreng, stir-fried wheat noodles mined with snappy shrimp and crispy fried garlic. There’s a handful of fried rice variants including nasi goreng pattaya, rice enveloped in a thin omelet drizzled with sweet chile sauce, or nasi goreng kampung, “village style fry rice,” studded with tiny anchovies. Other rice dishes include the iconic nasi lemak: rice cooked in

coconut milk and fragrant pandan leaf, surrounded by pieces of chicken, fried anchovies, roasted peanuts, sliced cucumbers, and the chile paste sambal, all meant to be combined in customized bites. A bracing, clear oxtail soup, sup ekor, recalls the hot-and-sour proﬁle of Thai tom yam. I’ve been told that the best time to eat at the Family House is during the day, when the most skilled chefs in the family are on duty, though I’ve had great homey food in the evenings too. The restaurant opened in early November, and due to supply and occasional service snafus, it’s still very much a work in progress, so much so that I almost hesitated to write about it now. But Alif promises that more Burmese food will gradually be added to the menu, and because the Family House has been championed by the travelers at LTHForum—who put it on the food-writer radar—it’s picking up momentum. Let’s hope it thrives. v

v @MikeSula

○ Watch a video of Autumn Eytalis making this cocktail with bonito flakes at chicagoreader.com/food.

FOOD & DRINK Drinks Per Glass House Wines Beers Well Drinks Mai Tai

COCKTAIL CHALLENGE

A newfangled old-fashioned

Appetizers

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By JULIA THIEL

Entrées Tempura Shrimp White Fish Salmon Blackened Catﬁsh Snow Crab Legs Stuffed Swai Chicken Kabob

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1816 N. Halsted St. Chicago 312-280-8990 www.kingcrabchicago.com

Don’t Be Koi cocktail by Autumn Eytalis of BellyQ ò CHRIS BUDDY

Eytalis describes the ﬂavor of the cocktail as “out-there,” but adds that she would deﬁnitely serve it at BellyQ. “With all of the components, the fruit, the smoke, it would be a good classic cocktail,” she says. DON’T BE KOI

UTUMN EYTALIS, a bartender at Asian barbecue restaurant BELLYQ, learned what BONITO FLAKES were a week before Adam Kamin of the Delta challenged her to create a cocktail with them, she says. Coincidentally, she’d ordered brussels sprouts that were served with bonito flakes on top. “They were dancing,” she says. “I was like, what is this weird thing?” Bonito flakes, made from smoked skipjack tuna that’s fermented and dried in the sun for several months, are sliced so thinly that the steam from hot dishes makes them curl and sway, appearing to dance of their own accord. For her cocktail, Eytalis first tried making a simple syrup infused with bonito flakes, but it turned out to have a flavor and aroma that was

3 DASHES CREOLE BITTERS 2 DASHES ORANGE BITTERS .25 OZ BONITO SIMPLE SYRUP* 1 OZ HAKUTSURU PLUM WINE 2 OZ NIKKA TAKETSURU PURE MALT WHISKEY too fishy, she says. “I didn’t want that to be the nose of the cocktail. I added soy [sauce] to it, which helped bring more of a barbecue aspect and less of a fishy smell.” She also added maple syrup and demerara sugar for a deeper flavor. The syrup joined Japanese whiskey in a slightly smoky take on an old-fashioned: because the bonito flakes are smoky and savory, Eytalis says, she wanted to complement that flavor without overwhelming it. She chose Nikka Taketsuru Pure Malt whiskey for its restrained smokiness and fruit-forward flavor, which she combined with plum wine for a “rich, fruity, and a little bit floral component.” She finished the drink with a combination of Creole bitters (with a flavor she describes as “anise and floral”) and orange bitters.

Add all ingredients to a mixing glass and stir with ice. Strain into a rocks glass with a large ice cube, then garnish with an orange peel. *Bonito simple syrup: Combine four parts water, two parts demerara sugar, one part maple syrup, one part soy sauce, and one-half part bonito ﬂakes in a saucepan and simmer for 30 minutes, then strain.

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WHO’S NEXT:

Eytalis has challenged SAM RUPPERT of DRYHOP BREWERS to create a cocktail with HOPS. v

v @juliathiel JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 33

Jim Beam Brands Company (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Beam Suntory Inc.) is seeking a Sr Solutions Architect in Chicago, IL w / the following reqs: BS deg in SALES & Econ, Fincl Mgmt or rel field or MARKETING foreign equiv degree. 7 yrs of rel exp. Reqd skills: design & impleGENERAL OFFICE: PART- ment full lifecycle models using TIME flexible hours 12-6 Mon-Thurs. SAP ERP Finance & Controlling telephone & marketing person want- modules, product costing, materied. Congenial & Pleasant. Evanston al ledger & planning (5 yrs); deoffice. Next to Purple Line Train. sign, develop & implement customized solution integrating ECC Nicole 847-875-6463 6.0, EDW/BI & Business Planning & Consolidation (BPC/EPM) tools for COGS calculation, stock valuGeneral ation, planning & reporting (6 mos); define, design & build KPIs SACIA ORCHARDS, INC, in & dashboards in Tableau tool Galesville, WI is hiring 1 temporary meeting business reqs (1 yr); prep & conduct workshops for Cook/Chef from 3/1/2018 to 5/14/2018: 40 hrs/ week. Cook/Chef GAP analysis & gathering busiwill plan and coordinate menu, pre- ness reqs for SAP ERP processpare breakfast, lunch and dinner, es definition or improvements in clean and organize kitchen, applian- Controlling, Planning & Finance ces and dishes. Cook/Chef will coor- areas (5 yrs). 30% travel reqd; must live w/in normal commuting dinate food supply request as well as distance of Chicago, IL & near a check in of food/supply orders. In ad- major airport. Apply to the cadition, Cook/Chef will ensure to keep reers section of www. a clean and organized kitchen, dining beamsuntory.com using referand delivery areas at all times. Will ence #15641.

JOBS

sanitize kitchen surfaces regularly throughout the day. Will maintain meal records. Must have knowledge of generally accepted well balanced nutrition guidelines. Must be able to lift 50 lbs. Worker must have 3 months verifiable experience. $13.06/ hr. (prevailing wage). Guarantee of 3/4 of the workdays. All work tools, supplies, and equipment furnished without cost to the worker. Free housing is provided to workers who cannot reasonably return to their permanent residence at the end of the workday. Transportation and subsistence expenses to the worksite will be provided or paid by the employer, with payment to be made no later than completion of 50% of the work contract. Send Resume or contact; Illinois Department of Employment Security, Migrant/Farm Workers Programs, 33 State Street, 8th Floor, Chicago, IL 60603, (312) 793-1284, (312) 793-1778 FAX, or your nearest State Workforce Agency and reference job order 2229755.

PART-TIME HOUSE CLEANERS: Daytime hours. Drivers license a plus. No experience necessary. We do background checks. Next to purple line Call our recruiter Nicolette 847-875-6463.

DEPAUL UNIVERSITY seeks Sr. Web Applications Developers for Chicago, IL location to develop Enterprise Web Applications, throughout the entire life cycle of the development process using sw best practices. Master’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. Eng./Comp. Interaction /related field + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. Eng./ Comp. Interaction/related field + 5yrs exp. req’d. Must have exp. in higher education environment w/ Windows Client/Server systems, A SP.NET (MVC, Web API), Azure, SQL, TFS, JavaScript/ JQuery/AngularJS/Knockout, CSS /Sass/Less, Xamarin iOS/Android, SQL Server/RDMS, Entity Framework, Object Oriented & Service Oriented architecture (SOAP, RESTful), Unit Testing, Automated Build Tools, Design Patterns, Agile /Scrum, UX design principles. Send resume to: Amaris Casiano, REF: YW, 243 S Wabash, Chicago, IL 60604

ACCOUNTING ADVISORY MANAGER, M&A (MULT. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Conduct pre-deal and confirmatory diligence in a wide range of functional areas incl. IT, Operations and Back-Office areas, focusing on issues impacting purchase price. Req. bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Acctng, Fin, Bus Admin or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s progressive rel. work exp.; OR Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Acctng, Fin, Bus Admin or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Must have at least 1 yr of exp. in at least 2 of the following functional areas: IT, Human Resources, Fin, Operations/Supply Chain, and/or Sales and Marketing. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1506, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607. TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY MANAGER, QUALITY ASSURANCE AND TESTING (MULT. POS.) , PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Provide end to end solution offerings including App. Development & Integration, App. Architecture, User Experience, Quality Mgmt. & Testing and help clients determine best apps for their business needs. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Apps, Engg, Bus Admin or rel. + 5 yrs post bach’s progressive rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Apps, Engg, Bus Admin or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1516, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607

TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS APPLICATION ANALYST, SAP, PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Help clients use SAP offerings and/or industry specific solutions to solve complex bus. problems in the areas of fin., operations, human capital, customer, and governance, risk and compliance. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Engg, Bus Admin or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Engg, Bus Admin or rel. + 1 yr rel. work exp. Travel up to 80% of the time is req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1532, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

ACCOUNTING ADVISORY SENIOR ASSOCIATE, CORPORATE AND BUSINESS STRATEGY (MULT. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Assist w/ providing strategy, technology & risk consulting services to help client anticipate & address complex bus. challenges. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Acctng, Fin, Bus Admin or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Acctng, Fin, Bus Admin or rel. + 1 yr rel. work exp. Travel req. up to 80%. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1537, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607

Find hundreds of Readerrecommended restaurants, exclusive video features, and sign up for weekly news chicagoreader.com/ food. 34 CHICAGO READER | JANUARY 11, 2018

I.T. COMPANY seeks SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS DEGREE in Computers/ Engineering/Science related.

rection incl MV switchgear, transformers & motors. Trvl to various unanticipated sites reqd. May reside anywhere in the US. Apply to HR, 2121 Norman Drive South, Waukegan, IL 60085 TECHNOLOGY ADVISORY MANAGER, ORACLE (MULT. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Identify & execute Oracle solns against client ERP needs in the areas of finance, ops, human capital, customer, governance, risk & compliance. Req. Bach’s deg. or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Engg, Info Systms or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s progress. rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg. or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Engg, Info Systms or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel req. up to 80%. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1542, Attn: HR SSC/ Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

ACCOUNTING ASSURANCE MANAGER, FSR (MULTIPLE POSITIONS) , PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chicago, IL. Advise clients to help them achieve success in the capital markets. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Acctng, Fin, Bus. Admin or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s prog. rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Acctng, Fin, Bus. Admin or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1547, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607

ENGINEERING: DATA ENGINEER (Chicago, IL) (Mult pos). Cllct data in dffrnt file frmts frm mltpl data srcs & prcss them thrgh big data tools to prfrm bsnss logic & data qlty chcks. Req Mstr deg or frgn equiv in Sftwr Engg, Elctrncs Engg, Info Tech, or rel & 2 yrs exp in job offrd or rel pos devl’g data wrhses & dgtl anlytcs; or in alt, Bchlr deg or frgn equiv in same & 5 yrs exp in same. Must’ve relvt wrk exp. Apply res/cvr let to Evolent Health LLC, Attn: M. Terceros, (Ref# ES2017), 800 N. Glebe Rd, Ste 500, Arlington, VA 22203. No calls.

Software Developer: dsgn, dvlp, code, test, debug, impl & maintn software apps using exp w/ Oracle, Java, J2EE, HTML5, Spring, Hibernate, Angular JS, Tomcat, WebLogic, Eclipse, GIT, Jenkins, Maven, Bootstrap, AWS & SQL; perf unit & end to end tstg. Reqs BS/MS in comp sci/apps, info sys or eng +5 yrs exp (3yrs w/ MS). Job in Evanston, IL & unanticipated locatns thru’ US. No Relocatn benefits offered. No telecommtg. Bckgrnd check reqd. Resumes to Katalyst Technologies, Inc- kataly sthr@katalysttech.com (WAUKEGAN, IL) YASKAWA America, Inc. seeks Senior SAP Functional Developer/Analyst (ECC/SAP APO) w/ Bach or for equiv deg in Comp Sci, Eng or Bus & 3 yrs exp in job offered or bus exp in related function (Planning, Forecasting), incl 3 years of config exp with SAP SCM; 1 yr exp w/ ECC modules & BW; & 1 yr exp bring diff areas of SCM tog through integration SAP’s (BW, CRM, SCM). Apply to HR, 2121 Norman Dr. South, Waukegan, IL 60085

GENERAL

VEOLIA NORTH AMERICA, INC. seeks a DIRECTOR OF STRUCTURING in Lombard, IL to work with business developer on transactions and coordinate due diligence, strategy and costing. Req. MS + 4 yrs exp or BS + 6 yrs exp. Mail resume to: Veolia North America, Inc., Attn: Lucille Delubac, 53 State Street, Boston, MA 02109. Must reference Job Title: Director of Structuring.

Prosthodontist (FT): Winterset Dental Care, Chicago/ Orland Park, IL. Work w/ PPO patients w/ complex restorative treatment plans, implant & cosmetic treatment. Must’ve DDS, be Board Eligible, have 1 yr of U. S Dental school teaching exp, successful completion of prosthodontics residency & state licensure as req’d. Resumes should be faxed to 708-590-0743 SOFTWARE ENGINEER in Champaign, IL: Design/build high-performance, web-based enterprise applications. May telecommute from home office in Central Time Zone up to 75% of time. Mail resume to: Amobee, Inc., 3250 Ocean Park Blvd., Ste. 200, Santa Monica, CA 90405. Ref job #ME122.

STUDIO $700-$899 LARGE STUDIO APARTMENT near the lake. 1341 W. Estes. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Laundry in building. $725/month. Heat included. Available 2/1. (773) 761-4318

STUDIO OTHER LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888 CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE, CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms. 24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air. Low rates daily/weekly/monthly. South Side. Call 773-376-5200

1 BR UNDER $700 2018 NEW YEAR SA VINGS! Newly Remod. Studio $550, 1BR $650 w/Heat. 2BR and up starting at $750. Qualified Applicants rcv. up to $200/month off rent for 1 year. No App Fee. (773)412-1153 Wesley Realty

BUSINESS MANAGER: Direct, coord activities of employees/ subcontr. marketing, sales to max profits. Prep work schedules, assign duties. Order material. Customer support. 1 yr exp. HS. Res: EM Power Contractors, Inc., 3323 N Kolmar Ave., Chicago IL 60641

ACCOUNT MANAGER: INTERVIEW clnts, provide quotes, promote & sell various ins policies in Shaumburg IL. HS dipl, license & 1y exp. req. Mail res: Argo Insurance Agency Inc. 10700 W Higgins #230 Rosemont IL 60018 FINANCE: IMC AMERICAS, Inc. (Chicago, IL), a proprietary trading company, seeks an experienced professional to fill an opening in its Chicago office for a Trader. To apply, submit resume and cover letter to talent@imc-chicago.com with position title in subject line. No calls. EOE.

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

Newly updated, clean furnished rooms in Joliet, near buses & Metra, elevator. Utilities included, $91/wk. $395/mo. 815-722-1212 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $133/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2 BR $735, Includes Free heat & appliances & cooking gas. (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt 6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

1 MONTH FREE South Shore Studios $600-$750 Free Heat, Fitness Ctr, Lndry rm. Niki 773.808. 2043 www.livenovo.com Chicago - Hyde PARK 5401 S. Ellis. 1BR. $625/mo. Call 773-955-5106 Newly Decorated 4 Rms, 2BR, $700; 3 Rms, 1BR $600, 5800 S Wabash, Lambert Realty 773-287-3380

bly Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park. Laundry & Security on Premises. Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030

MODERN 6RM HOUSE, 3BR Must See! 9300 Block S. Ada Lambert Realty 773-287-3380

MIDWAY AREA/63RD KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All

1BR, $750 LARGE STUDIO, $650 Newly decorated, carpeted, stove, refrigerator, dining room. FREE heat & cooking gas. Elevator & laundry facilities. FREE credit check, no application fee. 1-773-919-7102 or 312-8027301

modern oak floors, appliances, Security system, on site maint. clean & quiet, Nr. transp. From $445. 773582-1985 (espanol)

CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up. 773-637-5957 7520 S. COLES - 1 BR $520, 2 BR $645, Includes appliances & AC, Near transp., No utilities included (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt

1 BR $700-$799

62ND

MAPLEWOOD ,

4BR, 2BA ,$1200/mo, $850 move in fee, lrg LR/DR, utilities not included, No security deposit. Call 773406-0604

$800-$899

NEWLY REMOD 1BR & Studios BR starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/hot HUMBOLDT PARK. ONE water. 1155 W. 83rd St., bedroom apartment for rent. Newly 773-619-0204 remodeled. Next door to food store.

REAL ESTATE

CHICAGO Lovely 4 rm apt, 1BR, liv rm, din rm, kitchen/bath,

RENTALS

heated & carpet flrs. Close to trans. $685, avail now. 108th. 773-264-6711

STUDIO $500-$599 CHICAGO, BEVERLY/CAL Par k/Blue Island: Studio $625 & up; 1BR $700 & up; 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Parking. Call 708-3880170

STUDIO $600-$699

8200 S. DREXEL XL 1BR $665/ mo. Heat & appls incl. LR, DR, newly remodeled. No Sec Dep. Section 8 OK. Call 312-915-0100. CHICAGO - $299 Move In Special! 110th & Michigan, 1BR & 2BR Apts, $580-$725/mo. Avail. now Secure building. 1-800-770-0989

$880/mo plus security deposit. Includes gas. Near shopping area. Tim, 773-592-2989.

SECTION 8 WELCOME! South side, Recently renovated, 1, 2 & 3BR Apts. FREE HEAT! $800$1250/mo. Call Sean, 773-410-7084

1 BR $900-$1099 LARGE ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT near the Metra and

CHICAGO 70TH & King Dr, 1BR, clean, quiet, well maintained bldg, Lndry, Heat incl. Sec. 8 Ok Starting at $720/mo 773-510-9290

Warren Park. 1902 N. Wolcott. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $900/month. Heat included. Available 2/1. (773) 761-4318

232 E 121ST PL.: 1/2 Off 1st mo rent + security - Nice lrg 1BR $565; 2BR $650 & 1 3BR $800, balcony.

CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone /cable, switchboard, fridge, priv bath, lndry, $165/wk, $350/bi-wk or $650/mo. Call 773-493-3500

Sec 8 Welc. 773-995-6950

SOUTHSIDE Spacious, Newly rehabbed 1 & 2BR, hdwd flrs, appls, free heat. $900-$1100/mo. Near public trans. Call 773-716-7679

GENERAL

(1) MS w/2 years OR BS w/ 5 yrs exp. in mobile appl. Dev. Exp. in SDLC, OOP, Agile, MDM, Objective C, C++, Java, Android SDK & NDK, iOS, Android Studio, Xcode, PhoneGap, MS Visual, Oracle, SQlite & SQL Server. (2) BS w/ 3 yrs exp in mobile appl dev. Exp in SDLC, Agile, Objective , C++, OOPs, Sqlite3, SQL Server, SOAP/REST API Integration, JSON, XCode, CloudKit, Social, MapKit. Travel to local clients; Send Resumes to: H.R. Softweb Solutions Inc. 2531 Technology Drive, Suite 312, Elgin, IL 60124,

(Waukegan, IL) Yaskawa America, Inc. seeks MV Sales Engineer-Drives Division w/ Bach or for equiv deg in EE or ME & 2 yrs exp in job offered or sales exp. Also acceptable 4 yrs exp in job offered or sales exp. Must have 2 yrs field exp w/ sales of drives & automation prod; exp w/ US factory automation mrkt; support & mngng various sales channels & netwrks such as distrib, value added resellers, integrators, reps and other channel outlets & providing tech & applic di-

Cyril Court Apartments, a Section 8 Apartment Community located in the quiet South Shore Community, just minutes away from Lake Michigan. Enjoy living in our spacious studio and one-bedroom apartments designed for your comfort and convenience. You can enjoy an array of amenities including a clubhouse, elevators, laundry on site, and gated secure parking lot. We as well offer controlled access, and after hours emergency maintenance assistance. Residents enjoy monthly activities with their neighbors which creates a sense of community. Come in and ﬁll out an application and see why Cyril Court Apartments should be your new home.

FREE APPLICATION! JUST WALK IN, IT’S THAT EASY! *Must have valid state ID to apply

Applications accepted 10AM-3:30PM Tuesday-Thursday Only.

BUILDING HAS A SENIOR PREFERENCE!!

Preference as well given to disabled, homeless or displaced. Applicants subject to HUD income eligibility and other screening requirements. Rent based on 30% of adjusted monthly income.

7130 S. Cyril Court, Chicago, IL 60649 Half Block West of Jeffrey Ave.

(773) 588-7767 ext. 108 • TTY (711 National Relay)

www.CyrilCourtApts.com • Email: CyrilCourt@m2regroup.com

1 BR $1100 AND OVER

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. SUMMER IS HERE!! Most units Include.. HEAT & HOT WTR Studios From $475.00 1Bdr From $550.00 2Bdr From $745.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled. Rent is based on 30% of annual income. For details, call us at 847-546-1899 ∫

GORGEOUS ENGLISH TUDOR

courtyard building located only 2 blocks from Irving Park “EL”! Lovely hdwd flrs, built-in bookshelves, Kitchen has Granite countertops and Stainless appliances! Onsite Lndry/ Storage. 4237 1/2 North Hermitage: $1,225.00 heat incl. www.theschirmfirm.com (773) 3810150

CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/ C, laundry, near transportation, $680-$1020/mo. Call 773-2334939 MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENTS! 6748 Crandon, 2BR, off street pkng 7527 Essex, 2BR, $850/mo and up. 773-947-8572 / 312-613-4424 SUBURBS, RENT TO OWN! Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT NO MOVE IN FEE 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM APTS (773) 874-1122 ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

NEW KITCHEN WITH granite

counter tops and stainless appliances in this wonderful Ravenswood 1 bedroom! Lovely hdwd flrs, onsite Lndry/ storage. Near Winnemac Park, Damen “EL” and Lawrence Metra stop! 1946 . Argyle: avail 1/27. $1,245.00 heat incl. www.theschirmfirm.com (773) 381-0150

1 BR OTHER WAITING LIST OPEN Drexel Square Senior Apts. 810 E. 51st. Chicago, IL. 60615 for Qualified Seniors 62+ Beautiful park like setting, Hyde park area, rent based on 30% of monthly income (sec. 8), A/C, heat, lndry., rec. rooms, storage space in apt, cable ready, intercom entrance system, 24 hours front desk customer service. Applications will be accepted immediately between the hours of 11:00am-3:00pm at the above address. 773-268-2120 APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. Hot Summer Is Here Cool Off In The Pool OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG Plenty of parking 1Bdr From $795.00 2Bdr From $925.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**

2 BR UNDER $900 8324 S INGLESIDE 1BR $660/mo, newly remodeled, laundry, hrdwd flrs, cable, Sec 8 welc. 708-3081509 or 773-493-3500 SECTION 8 WELCOME Newly Decorated. 77th/ Ridgeland. 2BR. Heat Incl. $775. 773-874-9637 or 773-493-5359

EVANSTON DLX 2 & 3BR no De p.,1 MO FREE RENT, new kit, oak flrs, new BA, OS lndry, $1295$1550/incl ht. 773-743-4141 urban equities.com

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499

GARFIELD RIDGE: 4546 S. Lamon, Beaut rehab’d 3BR, 2BA house, fin bsmt, granite ctrs, SS appls, 2-car gar, $1625/mo 708-2884510

3 BR OR MORE $2500 AND OVER GARY NSA ACCEPTING applications for SECTION 8 STUDIO, 1 & 2BR UNITS ONLY. Apply Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am to 2pm ONLY at 1735 W 5th Ave. Applications are to be filled out on site. Adult applicants must provide a current picture ID and SS card.

PARK MANOR; 7528 S. St. Lawrence, Beautiful rehab, 6+3BRs, 2BA house, fin bsmt, granite ctrs, SS appls, $1600/mo 708-288-4510

OTHER

BRAND NEW REHABBED 3

ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for Subsidized 2 and 3 bedroom apt waiting list. Rent is based on 30% of annual income for qualified applicants. Contact us at 847-546-1899 for details 10734 S. AVENUE C. 2 . 5 B R , 1BA, remodeled, tile & hdwd flroos + more! $1400/mo., negotiable. Pictures also available. 312-824-1180 24 HOUR SECURITY Lg 2BR, beautiful hdwd flrs. Free Heat. SEC 8 WELCOME. 773-609-5720 or 773-602-1115

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 JOLIET W BELLARMINE. Beautiful townhome, 3BR, 1.5BA, remod., Close to I-80, tenant pays util. $980/mo 815-302-5729 or 708-422-8801 SECTION 8 WELCOME 7134 S. Normal, 4BR/2BA. $1150. 225 W. 108th Pl, 2BR/1BA. $950. 9116 S. So Chgo Ave, 2/1. $675. No Deposit. 312-683-5174

SOUTHSIDE 3BR, 1BA, near 107th/Wentworth. Call Donna for appointment. $750/mo. + utilities. 773-445-4779

ADULT SERVICES

FOR SALE: Montello, WI Supper Club Great business opportunity $1,500 monthly rental income Near lakes, main hwy, bars & restaurants $325,000 UC | Hamele Auction & Realty Terry Dixon 608697-0750 | UCHamele.com

HEALTH & WELLNESS AFFORDABLE CAREGIVER

SENIOR CARE - Looking For A Job To Live-in 24/7 or Come & Go Best price, All Loc.’s, No Fees. Eng. Spkng. Bonded/Insured. Has Car. 10 Yrs Experience. Excellent references Clear background check 708-6922580

non-residential

3 BR OR MORE

2 BR OTHER

FOR SALE

bdrm 1 ba MUST SEE! Quiet block in Englewood. $1200 Section 8 welcome. Call or text 773-491-4709

CHICAGO, PETERSON & Damon, Kedzie & Lawrence, Studio, 1, 2, 3 & 4BR Apts. $550 & Up. Section 8 Welcome. Call 847401-4574

GARY, 4468 CONNECTICUT, 3BR, 1.5BA, carpet, appls incl, fenced yard, 2 car garage, $1000/mo. Sect 8 Welc. No pets. 773-972-3230

NEAR BEVERLY - Sec 8 Ready! 6BR, 2BA, Brick Bungalow and 941 W 114th Pl, Morgan Park, Ranch, 3BR, 1 BA. 773-818-3962

CALUMET CITY, Spacious 3 bedroom, 2 bath, 2nd floor, A/C, modern kitchen, well kept, $1000/month. 312-451-7495

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 5900 W & 300 N. 1/2 block from G reenline & Oak Park. Renovated

3BR, sanded floors, heat incl. $1200/mo + sec deposit. Call 773626-8993 or 773-653-6538

WEST PULLMAN: SEC. 8 WEL. $500 Cash Back! $0 Security for Sec 8. 3BR, $1300/mo. Fine condition. ADT alarm. 708-7150034 65TH AND CARPENTER 3BR, 2BA, carpeted, heat & appls incl, 1 mo free rent (with Sec 8). No Sec Dep. $1250/mo. 773-684-1166 Avail Now! 11728 S. Harvard, Well maint 3BR, 1BA, bsmt, fenced in bkyd, 2 car garage avail w/ fee.

CHICAGO HEIGHTS, 4BR, 1BA, NEWLY REMODELED,

SELF-STORAGE CENTERS. T W O locations to serve you. All units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue. 773-685-6868. South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

Gorgeous 8 room, 3 bedroom, 2 bath renovated apartment in attractive 3 unit building. Apartment features two sunrooms, large living room, dining room, new appliances, and A/C. $2200 includes heat. Chad: 312-720-3136, cjohnson@hallmark-johnson.com LARGE 3 BEDROOM apartment near Wrigley Field. 3820 N. Fremont. Two bathrooms. Hardwood Floors. Cats OK. $2175/month. Special! Sign a lease starting by February 1, get March rent free! Available 2/1. 773-761-4318.

BRONZEVILLE, HYDE PARK, Kenwood area. Luxury rentals. SS appliances, in-unit washer/ dryer, parking, 2&3BR available. $1400-$2000. Call Carter 312-502-7205. CHICAGO SOUTH - You’ve tried the rest, we are the best. Apartments & Homes for rent, city & suburb. No credit checks. 773-253-2132 or 773-253-2137 VACATION PROPERTY!!! MULTIPLE LOCATIONS. Studios - 2BRs avail. Call for more info. 708-567-2401

OLYMPIA FIELDS Newly remodeled 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath house, full basement. Beautiful area. 708-935-7557.

special. Russian, Polish, Ukrainain girls. Northbrook and Schaumburg locations. 10% discount for new customers. Please call 773-407-7025

ADULT SERVICES roommates AUSTIN & MARQUETTE PARK AREAS, furnished rooms with use of hsehld. $115 per week, 1 week security. Bkgrnd check req’d. 773-378-7763

APPLS INCL , SECTION 8 OK. NO SEC. DEPOSIT. 708-822-4450

855 W. MARGATE Terrace –

FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

DANIELLE’S

LIP

SERVICE.

Adult Phone Sex and Web Cam Provider. Ebony Beauty. Must Be 21+. All Credit Cards Accepted. 773-935-4995

MUSIC & ARTS SOUTH SIDE, $375-$450 all utilities includes, no smoking, $50 security deposit. 312-589-8611

MARKETPLACE GOODS

JAZZ VOCAL CLASSES for scatting, improvisation and more Wednesday evenings, starts January 24 with Instructor Spider Saloff. Call Bloom School of Jazz 773-860-8300.

JAZZ

COMBO

COURSES:

Learn improvisation techniques of master musicians with David Bloom "Jazz Educator of the Year", call Bloom School of Jazz 773-860-8300.

CLASSICS WANTED ANY CLASSIC CARS IN ANY CONDITION. ’20S, ’30S, ’40S, ’50S, ’60S & ’70S. HOTRODS & EXOTICS! TOP DOLLAR PAID! COLLECTOR. CALL JAMES, 630-201-8122

JAZZ VOCAL CLASSES enhance skills and expression. Saturday afternoons, starting January 20 in the Loop. Call Bloom School of Jazz 773-860-8300.

ADULT SERVICES

$1225/mo. 630-240-1684

ADULT SERVICES

CHICAGO, 120TH & HALSTED, 5 rooms, 2BR, heat & appliances included. $675/month + security deposit. Call 773-707-3132 CHICAGO - 6336 S Rockwell. 2BR, Heat included. $800/mo + $400 Move in fee. Section 8 ok. Call 773-426-8723 or 708-261-8953

LARGE 2 BEDROOM APT $750/month, tenant pays gas and electric. Division / Springfield Area. Call 312-401-3799

2 BR $900-$1099 SOUTH SHORE - Lrg 2+ BR Apt,

COLLEGE GIRL BODY RUBS

1BA, 1st flr, carpet & hdwd flrs, new appls. Laundry avail. Heat incl. $925mo. Call 708-204-2182

2 BR $1100-$1299 NORTH PARK DLX 3BR, no Deposit, 1 MO FREE RENT, eat-in kit, oak flrs, new BA, on-site lndy, $139 5/incl ht. 773-743-4141 urbanequi ties.com

$40 w/AD 24/7

224-223-7787

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Check out the latest giveaways to win tickets to live theater, concerts, and much more. VISIT CHICAGOREADER.COM/WIN for your chance to win!

JANUARY 11, 2018 | CHICAGO READER 35

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365,000 of our readers have attended a rock or pop concert in the last 12 months.

THE HOTTEST GAY CHATLINE

1-312-924-2082 More Local Numbers: 800-777-8000

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Ahora en Español/18+

By Cecil Adams Q : Recently it was announced that

medical experts had lowered the numbers of what acceptable blood pressures are, so now nearly half of all adults are considered to have high blood pressure. Is this a drug-company ploy to get even more people on medications? —PRESSURED IN MICHIGAN

312-222-6920

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36 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

STRAIGHT DOPE

SLUG SIGNORINO

{ { YO U R AD HERE

A : Funny, isn’t it? What with the fast food,

the sedentary lifestyles, and the increasingly hair-raising national politics, we Americans shouldn’t really need help getting diagnosed with high blood pressure—doing just fine, thanks. Yet along come these goalpost-moving guidelines: where previously hypertension meant 140 over 90 and up, the new threshold is 130/80, meaning that, yep, quite literally overnight, a full 46 percent of Americans now have HBP. The change came via a report in November from the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, part of a regular, federally sanctioned process to guide medical practices across the country. But you’re certainly not wrong, Pressured, to cast a skeptical eye. The shady stuff we’ll get to in a minute; first the official line on the matter—why, in theory at least, the new guidelines aren’t simply a big drug-company ploy. According to defenders, the idea isn’t to get more folks on medication but to keep more folks off it, by motivating them into blood-pressure-lowering lifestyle changes before meds become necessary. Hypertension drugs work best on those with systolic blood pressures of 140 and above, so the newly designated HBP sufferers, the 130to-139 crowd, aren’t even the target market. So the half-the-country’s-got-HBP framing is maybe a little hyperbolic. One could reasonably argue the AHA et al just want to get you to quit smoking, while it’s the headline writers who are trying to give you a heart attack. But if the guidelines are broadly unobjectionable, you honestly can’t say the same about the medico-corporate milieu whence they emerged, which has taken deserved heat. The last time blood-pressure guidelines underwent major revision, back in 2003, the change prompted a Seattle Times investigation focusing on the links between the new rules and the pharmaceutical companies uncomfortably close to their creation. The 2003 report created a new condition called “prehypertension” (eliminated in the 2017 update), it recommended the wider use of hypertension drugs—and, conveniently enough, nine of the 11 authors of the report, the Times found, had ties to Big Pharma.

That’s a conflict of interest basically baked into this particular system. Groups like the American Heart Organization and the American Cancer Society are what’s called patient advocacy organizations, or PAOs, and over time have come to be heavy hitters on the American medical scene: authoring guidelines, influencing policy and regulatory decisions, sponsoring research, etc. Unfortunately, that kind of work ain’t cheap, and many PAOs receive substantial funding from for-profit companies, including pharma manufacturers and medical-device makers. A 2017 sample of PAOs found that 67 percent received at least some cash from for-profit companies, and 12 percent got more than half their budget that way. The problem was described a bit more heatedly in a 2009 article in the New York Review of Books by Marcia Angell—longtime editor of the New England Journal of Medicine—about the infiltration of industry money into things like “expert panels” on health issues. Angell cited as an example the National Cholesterol Education Panel, which in 2004 recommended lowering acceptable levels of “bad” cholesterol, and eight of whose nine members proved to have financial ties to cholesterol-drug makers. Angell’s conclusion? “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines.” So there you have it. The specific guidelines you’re asking about seem harmless enough (though we’ll note that one major organization, the American Academy of Family Physicians, decided not to endorse the new hypertension guidelines, citing, among other issues, potential conflicts of interest on the authors’ part). But going forward, you’d be wise to take this sort of medical pronouncement with a grain of salt— or, depending on your dietary restrictions, the low-sodium flavor enhancer of your choice. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 30 N. Racine, suite 300, Chicago 60607.

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Have a go, Daddy-o

After a refresher on the Campsite Rule. Plus: formicophilia and more Q : I’m a 67-year-old gay man

who believed the possibility of emotional and sexual intimacy with a partner was over for me. Then a couple of months ago, I started using apps for the ﬁrst time, and I felt like the proverbial kid in a candy store; it seemed strangely similar to when I ﬁrst came out in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in the early 1970s. Also, I was surprised— not unpleasantly—by the whole Daddy phenomenon, never imagining that this old face and body would interest younger men. You can probably guess what happened next: I was contacted by a 22-year-old man who revealed himself to be mature, intelligent, sweet, and, fatally, the physical type that arouses me most. I fell hard, and he seems to like me too. Am I a creep? A fool? Is my judgment impaired? —DUMB AND DADDY

A : The sexy “Daddy” thing—which has always been with us—seems to be undergoing a resurgence. And if, DAD, the affections of a consenting adult 40-plus years your junior is your particular perk of aging, go ahead and enjoy it. Just keep your expectations realistic (a successful STR is likelier than a successful LTR), don’t do anything stupid, and reacquaint yourself with my constantly updated and revised Campsite Rule: When there’s a significant age and/ or experience gap, the older and/or more experienced person has a responsibility to leave the younger and/or less experienced person in better shape than they found them. No unplanned or planned pregnancies, no sexually transmitted infections, no leading the younger partner to believe “forever” is likely. Do what you can to boost

their knowledge, skills, and self-confidence while you’re together, and do your best to stick the nearly inevitable dismount—the chances that you’ll be together forever are slim, but you can forever be a friend, mentor, and resource. While the age difference will creep some out, DAD, that doesn’t mean you’re a creep. Worried about infatuation-impaired judgment leading you to do something foolish? Ask a few trusted friends to smack you upside the head if you start paying his rent or lending him your credit cards. Just as you don’t want to take advantage of this young man, DAD, you don’t want to be taken advantage of either.

Q : Someone at work—not

my boss—asked me to fuck his wife. He’s a nice guy, his wife is hot, and I’m single. This is a ﬁrst for me. Besides STI status, what questions should I ask? —HELP INTERESTED STRAIGHT BOY UNDERSTAND LUST’S LIMITATIONS

A : (1) “Are you a cuckold or

is this a hot-wife thing?” (If he is a cuck, he may want dirty texts and pictures—or he’ll want to be in the room where it happens. Is that OK with you?) (2) “Have you done this before?” (The reality, as opposed to the fantasy, of another person sleeping with your spouse can dredge up intense emotions, e.g., jealousy, sadness, anger, rage. If they haven’t done this before, maybe start with a make-out session at a time or in a place where you can’t progress to sex.) (3) “Can I speak directly with your wife?” (You’ll want to make sure she isn’t doing this under duress and that she’s into you, and you’ll want to independently verify the things he’s told you about

their arrangement, health, experiences, etc.)

Q : I recently started seeing

a gorgeous 24-year-old woman who’s smart and sweet and also happens to have a few out-there fetishes. There’s not much I’ll say no to, Dan, but one of the things she’s into is formicophilia (a sexual interest in being crawled on or nibbled by insects). I oﬀered to get some ants and worms to crawl on her body while I fuck her, but she wants me to put earthworms in her vagina. Is there a safe way to do this? Female condom? I want to help, but putting worms in your vagina seems like it will end with an embarrassing trip to the ER. —WORRIES OVER REALLY MESSY SCENARIO

A : “I thought I’d heard

everything,” said Dr. Jen Gunter, an ob-gyn in San Francisco. “Apparently not. “Anything that lives in soil could easily inoculate the vagina with pathogenic bacteria. Also, I am not sure what earthworm innards could do to the vagina, but I am guessing the worms would get squished and meet an untimely demise during sex. I can think of a lot of ways this could go very wrong. I would advise against it.” I’m with Dr. Gunter (and, no doubt, PETA): Don’t stuff earthworms in your girlfriend’s vagina. Tucking a few earthworms into a female condom and carefully inserting it into your girlfriend’s vagina could work safely, I suppose, but even so, WORMS, don’t do it. Because blech. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. v @fakedansavage

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please recycle this paper JANUARY 11, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 37

Panda Bear ò TONJE THILESEN

NEW

Altan 3/23, 7:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 1/12, 8 AM b Glen David Andrews 2/2, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 1/12, 11 AM Animal Collective (DJ set) 2/3, 10 PM, the Mid As the Crow Flies 4/24, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 1/12, 10 AM, 17+ Berlin 4/12, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/11, noon b Boogie T, Squnto 3/15, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Born Ruﬃans 5/19, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Terry Bozzio 9/18, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Breeders 5/8, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 1/12, 10 AM, 18+ Buckethead 3/25, 7:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 1/12, 10 AM b Casket Lottery 3/10, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Audrey Chen Duo 1/31, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ George Clanton, Negative Gemini 3/21, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers 3/3, 8 PM, Subterranean Anderson East 5/18, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ 4B 1/25, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Frigs 4/4, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Fruit Bats, Vetiver 4/13, 7 and 10 PM, Schubas Gas 3/29, 8:30 PM, Art Institute of Chicago Hot Snakes 3/9, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Judah & the Lion, Colony House 3/23, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 1/12, 10 AM b

Bettye LaVette 4/13, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 1/12, 8 AM b David Luning 4/10, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 1/12, 10 AM Medasin 3/2, 10 PM, 1st Ward, on sale Fri 1/12, 10 AM, 18+ Moonrunners Music Festival with Harley Poe, Days N’ Daze, Hellbound Glory, Jayke Orvis, and more 5/4-5, 1 PM, Reggie’s Norma Jean, Gideon 3/21, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Pale Waves 4/7, 8:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 1/12, 10 AM b Panda Bear 4/30, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 1/12, 10 AM, 17+ Glen Phillips 5/13, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/11, noon b Power Trip, Sheer Mag 5/19, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 1/12, 10 AM Jordan Rakei 3/2, 8 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 1/12, 10 AM, 17+ Ed Schrader’s Music Beat 4/8, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Todd Snider 3/16, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 1/12, 8 AM b Omar Sosa & Seckou Keita 3/15, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 1/12, 8 AM b Steely Dan, Doobie Brothers 6/21, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 1/12, 10 AM Sweet Sensation, Soave 4/21, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall Justin Timberlake 3/27, 7:30 PM, United Center, on sale Tue 1/16, 10 AM Titus Andronicus 3/15, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+

38 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2018

Jeﬀ Tweedy 4/27-28, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 1/12, noon, 18+ Suzanne Vega 5/5-6, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/11, noon b Jimmy Webb 4/13, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/11, noon b Wild Pink, Adam Torres 2/21, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Xavier Wulf 1/28, 6:30 PM, Portage Theater b

UPDATED Melanie Fiona 2/7, 7 and 9:30 PM, City Winery, late show added b Bela Fleck & Abigail Washburn 2/24, 5 and 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, early show added b

UPCOMING Acid Mothers Temple, Melting Paraiso U.F.O. 4/14, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen Alice in Chains 5/15, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Alvvays 3/23, 7:30 PM, Metro b American Nightmare, No Warning 2/25, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Dan Auerbach & the Easy Eye Sound Revue, Shannon & the Clams 4/2, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Big K.R.I.T. 4/28, 7 PM, Metro b Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Night Beats 2/10, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Blackalicious 1/21, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Borgore 2/3, 11:45 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Jonatha Brooke 3/16, 8 PM, City Winery b

b Carpenter Brut 4/26, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Circuit Rider Trio 2/26, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Coin 2/7, 8 PM, House of Blues b Darkest Hour, Whores. 2/22, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ A Day to Remember, Papa Roach, Falling in Reverse 2/24, 6:30 PM, UIC Pavilion Dead Meadow 4/4, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen Eagles 3/14, 8 PM, United Center Earthless, Kikagaku Moyo 3/24-25, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Enslaved, Wolves in the Throne Room 2/23, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Fetty Wap 1/25, 7 PM, House of Blues b First Aid Kit, Van William 2/2, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Frightened Rabbit 2/16, 7 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds 2/24, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Godspeed You! Black Emperor 3/18-19, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Glen Hansard 3/18, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Helloween 9/10, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Peter Hook & the Light 5/4, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Iced Earth 3/29, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Igorrr 2/6, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Integrity 4/6, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Jeezy 2/21, 7 PM, House of Blues b Jimmy Eat World, Hotelier 5/8, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Mat Kearney 3/9, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Stephen Kellogg 3/15, 8 PM, City Winery b Kimbra, Arc Iris 2/3, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall b Kitty, Ricky Eat Acid 1/25, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Knocked Loose, Terror 3/24, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Less Than Jake, Four Year Strong 2/22, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Lorde 3/27, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Los Lonely Boys, Lisa Morales 3/17-18, 8 PM, City Winery b Jeﬀ Lynne’s ELO 8/15, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Machine Head 2/23, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall b Magic Giant 2/9, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Majid Jordan 2/21, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Mammoth Grinder 2/24, 9 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Marilyn Manson 2/6, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ National Parks 3/19, 8 PM, Schubas Dan Navarro 2/9, 7 PM, Schubas

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Nothing, Nowhere. 3/9, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Of Mice & Men 2/11, 5 PM, House of Blues b Partner 1/26, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Pharoahe Monch 1/20, 9 PM, Subterranean Propagandhi, Iron Chic 3/3, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Royal Thunder 4/5, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Joe Satriani, John Petrucci, and Phil Collen 2/23, 7 PM, Chicago Theatre Screaming Females 3/10, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Screeching Weasel 2/16-17, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Sleigh Bells, Sunﬂower Bean 1/31, 8 PM, Metro b Taylor Swift 6/2, 7 PM, Soldier Field They Might Be Giants 3/17, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 14+ Tune-Yards 3/3, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Shania Twain 5/19, 7:30 PM, United Center Wedding Present 3/26, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall Bob Weir & Phil Lesh 3/10, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Jonathan Wilson 3/2, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Andrew W.K. 5/12, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Yo La Tengo 3/29-30, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Zombies 3/19-20, 8 PM, City Winery b

SOLD OUT Avatar 2/2, 6:45 PM, Bottom Lounge b Borns 1/27, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre b Dangerous Summer 2/10, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge b Hippo Campus 2/16, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Kooks 5/30, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ LP 2/24, 7:30 PM, Metro b Milky Chance 1/26, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Our Last Night 3/16, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Robert Plant & the Sensational Space Shifters 2/20, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Protest the Hero 3/23, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Quinn XCII 3/9, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Joe Russo’s Almost Dead 2/17, 9 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Brett Young 2/2, 8:30 PM, Joe’s Bar v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene MONIKER RECORDS co-owner Jordan Reyes tells Gossip Wolf that he’s long planned to move back to Chicago from Minneapolis, and this month he became a local yokel again. Welcome back! As usual, Reyes has plenty on his plate, including a new tape label called American Damage with two releases on Friday, January 19. Autumn Casey of east-coast noise-rock duo Snakehole makes her solo debut with This Is No Dream, which Reyes describes as “a creepy piano/musique concréte type thing.” The other tape, Live Exorcism 2017, is from a September set by Reyes’s industrial solo project Reverence, which uses almost exclusively voices as sound sources. If you’ve ever wondered what Suicide’s Alan Vega would sound like singing doo-wop about cocaine psychosis, you’ll want to nab a copy. Reverence tours the southeast and east coast in February— and that same month, Moniker drops its next release, the full-length debut of Minneapolis queer-punk squad Royal Brat. On Friday, January 12, singer-songwriter Micha (aka Michelle J. Rodriguez) headlines the Hideout to celebrate the release of the ﬁrst single on her forthcoming EP, a tender, acoustic version of “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” a 1954 classic by Mexican composer Tomás Méndez. A portion of the show’s proceeds go to Puerto Rico Independent Musicians & Artists, a campaign to raise money for musicians on the island suﬀering from Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Last month ace local hip-hop producer Nasim Williams gave Gossip Wolf an early listen to “Highway,” a dreamy number featuring local rappers Sisi Dior, K’Valentine, and ShowYouSuck. The tune dropped Monday—give it a spin and tell ’em this wolf sent ya! If you haven’t been to newish hot spot Bourbon on Division (2050 W. Division), you might want to pop in Saturday, January 13. Pivot Gang rapper MFnMelo headlines a show with Sage, the 64th Wonder; Ajani Jones; Angry Blackmen; and DJ Skoli. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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