FREE AND FREAKY SINCE 1971 | JANUARY 11, 2024
THIS WEEK
C H I C AG O R E A D E R | JA N UA RY 1 1 , 2 024 | VO LU M E 5 3 , N U M B E R 7
IN THIS ISSUE
LETTERS
04 Readers Respond You talk, we listen.
cleared a West Loop homeless encampment for cleaning. Residents question the true motivation.
16 Book review The first full biography of the late economist Milton Friedman 17 Exhibitions of Note Exploring “Water” at 6018North and the human eye at the International Museum of Surgical Science
12 Brown | Ceasefire Palestinian Americans with loved ones in Gaza demand a ceasefire.
24 Galil | Angry Blackmen The Chicago hip-hop duo blow off their own roof with the new The Legend of ABM. 26 Chicagoans of Note Nix Campbell, dance party lighting designer 28 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Drama, Reginald Mobley, Haptic, and L’Rain 32 Early Warnings Upcoming shows to have on your radar 32 Gossip Wolf Ausar helps map Chicago rap’s future, footwork heirs DJ Corey and DJ Chad drop intense new records, and more.
COMMENTARY
CLASSIFIEDS
CITY LIFE
THEATER
18 Festival preview The Fillet of Solo Festival offers a diverse menu of stories at two Rogers Park venues.
06 On Prisons James Soto was released from prison after a wrongful conviction.
FOOD & DRINK
14 Isaacs | On Culture Claudine Gay, AI, and weaponizing plagiarism
ARTS & CULTURE
20 Tribute For Mike Nussbaum, life in the theater was all about “the hang.”
FILM
08 Sula | Cannabis OURS enters the Illinois cannabis market.
NEWS & POLITICS 10 Prout | Housing The city
MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE
15 Exhibition review Marina Ross’s paintings were inspired by The Wizard of Oz.
22 Feature A film installation titled “we love” at the Cicero Green Line station .23 Movies of Note Last Things is a kaleidoscopic experimental film, The Zone of Interest is perfectly monotonous, and more.
34 Jobs 34 Professionals & Services 34 Housing 34 Auditions 34 Matches 34 Adult Services
OPINION
35 Savage Love Dan Savage gives advice to a reader who is turned off by their boyfriend’s lack of self-care.
ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY LILLI CARRÉ. FOR MORE OF CARRÉ’S WORK, GO TO LILLICARRE.COM.
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Reader Letters Re: “Midwest media workers battle for the future of their union,” by Jason Flynn (posted December 20, 2023 at chicagoreader. com) My 2024 resolution: demand transparency, in reporting and union politics. A December 20 Chicago Reader article attempting to tackle the dynamic of union politics in my opinion failed. Aside from corrections having to be made, it leaned heavily on narratives of two members who lost in their elections. Unions are important, and covering them accurately is of great importance, especially in a labor town like Chicago. The Chicago Reader missed a larger story, why so many members supported Siddiqui and his vision for reform. While the original article stated 56 people signed a petition to enact a trusteeship (the act of removing elected leaders and replacing them with an appointee) it ignored the greater question, how 56 people can overthrow the will of a majority of members in a Local of more than 500, removing close to over 20 officers, by a petition. Nor did it mention the many members asking in frustration why they would do this again. Despite challenges, Siddiqui and other e-board members successfully obtained four local and two national contracts for workers at Chicago-area television stations. This has increased wages and quality of life benefits for the workers. Many people equate television to anchors and reporters, it is our job to think about those who do the heavy lifting and receive the least credit. Our members truly make television happen.
m The Siddiqui administration also achieved a major victory for all local unions by dissolving the NABET-CWA 2022 trusteeship in federal court. The case Siddiqui v. NABET-CWA will be cited in future cases when local union members are fighting for their democracy. Seven members successfully fought for ALL members of Local 41. The efforts of these members resulted in: • NABET-CWA sector, having to pay $26,620.80 to NABET Local 41. • Union democracy being restored for all Local 41 members • Continued use of television and the internet to hold informative training. I pioneered this to help guide freelance sports members in securing health insurance and unemployment benefits when all sports were shutting down during the pandemic. We also held numerous virtual worker safety training during the riots that year, many are still available for viewing on the Facebook group “media essential workers.” The Chicago Reader has allowed me the opportunity to refute claims and add context. Below is a point by point. • In a union town like Chicago reporters should understand that union actions can be rooted in internal politics. A statement by a Trustee, Parent Union, or secretive petition should not constitute a fact but should be treated only as a party in a dispute. Such claims should be subject to journalistic skepticism. Siddiqui v. NABETCWA where every assertion was struck down by a judge in the TRO has proven that, (see deadline.com article, “Temporary Restraining Order Lifts ‘Invalid’ Trusteeship Of NABET-CWA Local 41 In Chicago”) but so have other Chicago cases like Blevins v. Int’l Bhd. Of Teamsters. • While speaking with television station managers about worker safety, CAN-TV editors saw the value of getting the word out and invited me on their program on 09/21/2023. The program can be seen at Chicago Newsroom 2.0 on cantv.org.
4 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2024
A mural unveiling celebration at CAN-TV headquarters in October 2022. SALEM COLLO-JULIN
Working with management is never a conflict of interest when it serves our members and when our goals are aligned such as with worker safety. • Despite criticisms by a member I represented, he received no discipline, my goal is not to be liked by members only to make sure they are well represented. • Office landlines were not cut off because of disarray, but because we use cell phones. We are frequently in the field responding to members. I half expected to read the opponents complaining that I had disconnected a fax machine as well. Our administration faced challenges from the moment we were elected including bank accounts not being turned over, a former president not returning his union issued property until months later, and then claiming $56,000 was owed to him for “unused” vacation time. While those interviewed in the original article claimed our investigation led to “a dire financial situation,” I contend investigating a financial claim of over 50 thousand dollars is due diligence, this is what reform means. In his memo opinion and order it appears the federal judge agreed.
The original article stated the former president reached a deal with Local 41 this is untrue, he reached one with the trusteeship in a confidential settlement. Members deserve to know how their dues are being spent, and we will be fighting for answers including the amount he was paid, and why the decision was made not to share that with the members. This information belongs to our membership. The article ended with one member saying Siddiqui may become President again; the truth is we fought for local union democracy, so whoever becomes president will do so in my shadows. We have already won. —Raza Siddiqui, NABET 41 Duly Elected President, via email Find us on socials: facebook.com/chicagoreader twitter.com/Chicago_Reader instagram.com/chicago_reader linkedin.com search chicago-reader The Chicago Reader accepts comments and letters to the editor of less than 400 words for publication consideration.
m letters@chicagoreader.com
JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 5
CITY LIFE ON PRISONS
Exonerated, graduated, and ready for law school James Soto was released from prison in December after a 42-year fight to prove his innocence. By ANTHONY EHLERS
O
n December 14, James Soto and his cousin David Ayala were released from Stateville Correctional Center after a 42-year-long fight to prove their innocence. At the time of his release, Soto was the longest-serving wrongfully convicted prisoner in Illinois history. Earlier that week, a Cook County judge vacated Soto’s sentence, stating that neither he nor Ayala received adequate counsel during the initial trial. Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx declined to retry Soto for lack of evidence. Soto was convicted in 1981 after prosecutors said he committed a double murder of a young couple on Ayala’s orders. Soto was convicted despite there being no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence tying him to the crime. I know Jimmy Soto personally. We were both students in the first cohort of Northwestern University’s Northwestern Prison Education Program at Stateville (NPEP). In November, we both graduated with bachelor’s degrees from the program. Jimmy is kind and generous, highly educated, and truly cares about other people. He is humble and a man of integrity and principle. Those qualities would be difficult to find in one man, let alone someone who spent the last 42 years behind bars after being wrongfully convicted. I interviewed him shortly before his release. “I had never been to trial for anything before,” Soto said. “I was young, only 19 years old. I had no idea what was going on. A lawyer has to have a college degree, he has to go through years of training and studying. Then he has to pass the bar exam in order to be a
6 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2024
Soto spoke at the November graduation ceremony before receiving his degree. JIM DALEY
lawyer, yet the courts expect you to know just as much if not more than your lawyer. You have to hold him accountable. You are responsible, legally, for what your lawyer does. The courts don’t hold your lawyer responsible for errors and inadequacies, they hold you responsible. How is any kid off the streets supposed to know more than their lawyer? The system is set up for you to fail.” The problem lies in procedure. Understanding procedure is the door to the corridors of power, where the people with the capacity to determine a criminal defendant’s fate reside. If you cannot gain entry, you have no chance of justice. “I was telling everyone I could that I was innocent,” Soto said. “No one would listen.” Procedural barriers all too often stop innocent inmates from getting out of prison. “The system values finality over accuracy,” Soto said. “People like to say that the system is broken. But the truth of the matter is, the system runs just like it’s supposed to. It’s the way that those at the top keep those at the bottom from moving up, ways that are all dressed up in the stiff and sterile legal language.”
Illinois has one of the highest rates of wrongful convictions in the nation. According to the National Registry of Exonerations (NRE), at least 3,454 people nationally have been exonerated after a wrongful conviction since 1989. The NRE’s 2022 annual report showed that for the fifth year in a row, Illinois had the most exonerations (accounting for more than half of the total exonerations in that calendar year). A disproportionate number of the wrongfully convicted are Black or Brown people. While these facts should be shocking and abhorrent to every person, the sad fact is, in Illinois, it’s all too common. The danger of this being commonplace is that miscarriages of justice that destroy so many lives are effectively an accepted part of the criminal justice system. “This cannot become the norm,” Soto lamented. “It cannot become an acceptable part of the process for innocent men and women to languish in prison for crimes they didn’t commit, only to be set free decades later, after their life has passed them by, their children have grown up without a mother or a father, and loved ones die. It’s unacceptable
“Even those who aren’t innocent need help.”
that Illinois is the worst in the nation when it comes to police misconduct and wrongful convictions.” I asked Soto why he thought that this problem continues to plague the people of Illinois specifically. “Honestly, it comes down to a lack of political will; that’s the major impediment,” he said. “We hear a lot about criminal justice reform, but nothing ever gets done. These politicians play three-card monte with their words. They offer lip service to the idea of change because they know it’s what most people want, but then they make political calculations and all too often those calculations don’t add up to change. They won’t change the procedures to help because they have a fear of guilty defendants convicted of violent offenses exploiting procedural loopholes to get out of prison. It all comes back to how this may affect them in their bid for reelection. It’s political gutlessness.” Soto told me when he came to prison he was young and angry, but he saw something right away that changed his trajectory. “On my third day in prison, we went to the movie hall to watch a film. I saw a guy get stabbed up. He laid in the aisle and bled to death. The CO didn’t notice until the movie was over. I saw right away what a highly aggressive and
CITY LIFE “How is any kid off the streets supposed to know more than their lawyer?” violent place prison can be, and I had to learn how to navigate that.” Soto decided right away that he wanted to get an education. He took a vocational class in small engine repair and was certified through Joliet Junior College. Using Pell grants, he earned 42 credit hours from Lewis University and became a certified paralegal. “I’ve always held education in high esteem,” he said. “It was instilled in me as a child that in order to have a level playing field I needed a good education because as a Mexican, American people would look down on you if you were stupid. Education was something that no one could take away from me.” He also decided that even though he was wrongfully convicted, he wanted to help people. He was accepted into the Jaycees, a leadership training service organization, in
1988, then became a chapter vice president. He taught business, accounting, and entrepreneurial classes. He volunteered to tutor Spanish-speaking prisoners. He began working at the prison law library and helping others with their cases. As a legal advocate, Soto helped get 14 new trials for other prisoners. Soto’s tireless legal work has led to 20 exonerations and more than 100 resentencings. He has worked on almost 1,000 cases and helped hundreds of fellow prisoners. He got results that their own legal counsels couldn’t get them. Here is a man who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life in prison, yet was still trying to help other people. “I feel like I was in a unique situation to help,” Soto said. “I know what it’s like to be wrongfully convicted and stuck in this hellhole with no help, and no one listening to
you. I didn’t want anyone else to feel that way. It also helped me grow and learn as a legal advocate; here I was in prison winning cases, helping to get guys home. I knew I had what it took to get myself home. It was a good feeling. These things helped me grow in ways that are hard to define. I’ve become less critical. I learned that power wasn’t always equated with money. There is power in knowledge and words. I learned that and have tried to teach it to others.” When he heard about NPEP’s program, Soto knew he had to get in, and recalled his junior year as a teenager at Quigley Preparatory Seminary South. “We had a college recruitment day,” he said. “There was this senior from Notre Dame with an orange jacket and these gold pamphlets. I really wanted to go to college.” He was accepted into NPEP’s first cohort, becoming one of 20 men selected out of hundreds. “Professor Jennifer Lackey’s vision of higher education for men and women in prison was amazing,” Soto said, referring to the Northwestern law professor who is the founding director of NPEP. “I was being taught the same courses that are taught on campus. In prison,
they take away so much. This program gives you back a sense of being a person. I have forged lasting relationships with individuals I never would have otherwise met. This is the vision of community that Jennifer Lackey tried to build for us.” Soto recently took the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), becoming the first incarcerated person in Illinois history to do so. I asked him how he did. “I don’t like to brag, but it was good. You know I was nervous, but I did well,” he said. “I want to go to law school. You don’t need a law license to help somebody; I’ve done it my whole time in prison, but I want to pass the bar. There are other innocent men and women in prison; we know some of them. Even those who aren’t innocent need help, [such as] people who have death-by-incarceration sentences who no longer need to be in prison. When you keep somebody in prison for years and years who is changed and is rehabilitated, and not a danger to society any longer, you’re just wasting taxpayer money and robbing society of someone who will be a productive, strong addition to society. How can we expect other people to do better if we as a society won’t do better?” What, I asked, can be done to fix the criminal legal system? “You have to tweak some things a little bit, like the appellate procedures so guys are allowed to put forth innocence claims, and even the post-conviction process,” he said. “You have to make things easier for prisoners’ pleas of innocence to be heard. But, it goes farther than that. You have to encourage the election of progressive prosecutors like Kim Foxx, and more conviction integrity units. You have to establish innocence commissions to get into wrongful convictions. In a state like Illinois with the corruption and manufacturing of evidence, more leeway should be given to a prisoner claiming innocence, not less. I’d also like to point out that clemency and parole are only as good as the officials in charge. We need to make sure we have the right people in those positions.” I asked Jimmy Soto what was next for him. “Spending time with my family and friends, getting my certificate of innocence, and going to law school,” he said. v Anthony Ehlers is a writer incarcerated at Stateville Correctional Center. Find out more about incarcerated journalists from the Prison Journalism Project (prisonjournalismproject.org).
m letters@chicagoreader.com JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 7
FOOD & DRINK
Find more one-of-a-kind Chicago food and drink content at chicagoreader.com/food.
CANNABIS
OURS enters the Illinois cannabis market as one of few Black-owned companies to make it that far Organic Urban Revitalization Solutions is collaborating with Nature’s Grace to create mushroom and cannabinoid–infused chocolate bars. By MIKE SULA
T
wo new chocolate bars hit the market just a few silent partners. OURS applied for four state cannabis business facility to do the actual manufacturing of before Halloween last year, though they “We were aligning to answer what social licenses: dispensary, craft grower, infuser, and cannabis-infused products, which requires an weren’t targeted at trick-or-treaters. equity needed, but also choosing to form part- transporter. “Initially, we were going after the injection of capital on the order of millions Packaged in subdued beige, green, brown, and nerships with the best people,” says Tanya dispensary space,” says Ward. “That was the of dollars. The principals behind OURS spent the first orange tones, both are infused with 50 mg of Ward, who handles the group’s marketing. cherry of the industry.” But they were only two years of legalization networking, doing THC and other cannabinoids and are only for “We looked at this as an opportunity to create awarded the latter two. generational wealth, because for people with This presented a new set of hurdles before outreach, and trying to help newer social eqsale in Illinois cannabis dispensaries. The timing was as coincidental as it was our skin growing up in this country, that’s not the business could stand up on its own. A uity applicants get their own start through a long overdue. Community brand chocolate guaranteed. My family was decimated by the transporter’s license is only worth anything if collaboration with the Chicago Urban League. bars—the first chocolate edibles in the state drugs that were brought into our community existing established cannabis companies con- “Before we got set to selling products, we had to incorporate adaptogenic mushrooms like and the subsequent war on drugs. It was an tract with transporters to do the work (there’s to think about, ‘OK, what about the people that are incarcerated still? How can reishi and lion’s mane—were we open up opportunities for launched by one of the few oppeople to work in the industry, erational Black license holders but not necessarily have to in the state. They landed in distouch the plant?’ Working in pensaries more than four years equity and justice turned out after corporate multistate to be a great branding thing operators hijacked the “most for us—we became a trusted equity-centric” cannabis laws source. We put in the sweat in the country, as Governor J.B. equity doing the right things.” Pritzker described when he But a lot of what they ensigned off on it in the summer countered from the established of 2019. industry was discouraging. One of the companies behind “There’s a faction that had no Community, OURS—which intention of doing right and stands for Organic Urban Revimaking people whole,” says talization Solutions—has been Ward. “A lot of people just needaround about just as long. It’s a ed a social equity applicant, Black-owned, women-led group someone that checked all the of some nine friends that was boxes to move forward. Going founded that spring by Grow to these conferences outside of Greater Englewood executive Illinois, I started to notice the director Anton Seals Jr. The farmers were missing because goal was to create a vertically they were scheduling these integrated, wellness-focused events during harvest seasons. cannabis company, driven by So no farmers were ever going the need to address the dis“We looked at this as an opportunity to create generational wealth, because for people with our skin growing up in this country, that’s not guaranteed,” says Tanya Ward. SARAH CROWLEY FOR CHICAGO READER to be here. And the farmers are proportionate impact the war our industry. Before it becomes on drugs has had on Black and Brown communities by fostering ownership effort to do for ourselves, but also to honor not enough traffic for that) or if direct-to- about money, it’s about a quality product and loving the earth. But at the end of the day, it’s and employment in the emerging industry. the people that came before us. In the case of consumer delivery is permitted (it isn’t). The group included Seals’s co-CEO, Harvard J.T.’s family, they were pioneers in the medical An infuser without a grower’s license is capital. It’s gray suits and bankers.” With Community, OURS became one of the Law grad and entrepreneur J.T. Stinnette, cannabis space.” beholden to purchase cannabis from existing the group’s wellness officer Jamaal Kendrick, During the immediate green rush that growers, with limited availability. What’s first Black-owned cannabis brands to deliver a restaurant owner Chris “Dough” Fryison, and followed the passing of the new state law, more, an infuser needs a brick-and-mortar product to market, but they didn’t do it alone.
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ORGANIC URBAN REVITALIZATION R SOLUTIONS ourssolutions.org
“Before investors invest in you, they want to see what you can do, they want to see a proof of return on their investment,” says Ward. “We hadn’t done anything in terms of retail or creating an amazing product. We had to get to market with something that was wonderful and accessible and delicious and worked in all the ways that we said it would.” In 2021, OURS began eyeballing a space on the south side that could house their brick-and-mortar infusion operation. But in the midst of the pandemic, investors were running scared, and negotiations with the landlord fell through. That’s when they joined forces with Nature’s Grace and Wellness, a downstate cannabis cultivator run by fifth-generation farmers the O’Herns, to bring the Community bars to market. Together, OURS and Nature’s Grace developed a dark chocolate bar infused with lion’s
FOOD & DRINK
resulted in a series of particularly deep and peaceful slumbers. Both bars are in more than 90 dispensaries statewide right now, including Mission, nuEra, and Grasshopper Club. “There’s a lot of work to do to get dispensaries interested, keep our name on the buyers’ minds, and make sure that we engage the budtenders,” says Ward. A portion of the sales from Community bars goes to organizations that support Black, Brown, and rural Illinois farmers, like Grow Greater Englewood, HEAL Food Alliance, the Chicago Food Policy Action Council, and Farm Aid. While OURS continues to raise capital for a south-side brick-andmortar, more products and collaborations are on the way. Earlier this year, Mike Bancroft and Anne Kostroski of Edgewater’s Sauce and Bread Kitchen came on board. In 2020, after their OURS prioritizes equity; a portion of the sales from Community attempts to obtain cannabis chocolate bars goes to organizations that support Black, Brown, and licensing to bring their own rural Illinois farmers. SARAH CROWLEY FOR CHICAGO READER edible Nutty Buddy Munchy mane mushroom, vanilla, and THC along with Bar to market fell through, they handed over the cannabinoids cannabinol (CBN) and can- intellectual property and equipment to OURS. nabigerol (CBG), each with their own set of They officially signed on early last year and purported health benefits. When I tried a 10 continue to conduct R&D for future products. “We’ve been noodling on a bunch of things,” mg square before a viewing of the otherwise nerve-racking film Iron Claw, an easy physical says Ward. “I don’t know that I want to say body high set in with a cerebral focus that what, but there’s a lot of great stuff coming evened out much of the tension coming from in the future.” v the screen. Individual squares of the milk chocolate-lemon reishi bar, with CBD and CBG, m msula@chicagoreader.com
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NEWS & POLITICS HOUSING
‘They’re cleaning to get rid of us’ Seven days before Christmas and in below-freezing weather, 30 unhoused Chicagoans were forced to leave their tents. By KATIE PROUT
I
t was 31 degrees out and seven days They laughed again. “This is our Christmas while Adam sat on one of before Christmas the morning the city, present,” S.G. said. Ritchie nodded. “A lot of his bags and ate peanut at Alderperson Bill Conway’s request, outsiders came over here and messed it up, butter and chocolate chip temporarily dismantled the West Loop pretty much,” he said. cookies. They also hoped encampment that 30 or so Chicagoans An outreach worker popped by to ask if they to return. “I guess somecalled home. Before this, outreach workers needed help packing and to remind S.G. he still body got killed here not from Haymarket Center, the Department of had a spot at the shelter he’d visited the day too long ago,” Ben replied Family and Support Services (DFSS), and before. Good-natured ribbing and swearing when I asked him what was others visited every day for a week in an effort ensued: it was clear the worker and the men happening. “They think to prepare residents by offering garbage bags, had an established rapport. The worker moved it’s our fault. So they’re suitcases, and optional transportation to a on. “I’m going to move around the corner and cleaning to get rid of us, then move back,” S.G. said. I asked him why he get rid of the bad things. shelter. The dismantling of the camp was necessary chose to stay. S.G. looked surprised. “Why do We symbolize bad things.” All encampments in the to clean it, the city announced. The Depart- we stay here?” he repeated back to me. “It’s city are regularly cleaned ment of Streets and Sanitation (DSS) would where we live!” Before I left, I asked the men if there was via a coordinated effort be by the morning of December 18 to power wash the viaducts of Lake, Milwaukee, and anything they wanted Mayor Brandon John- between DFSS, DSS, and Fulton—tents, personal belongings, and peo- son to know. “Take care of us instead of Ven- the Chicago Police Deple needed to be temporarily removed. Any- ezuelans,” Ritchie said. “And tell the mayor to partment. According to a spokesperson from the thing remaining in the public way would be kiss my ass.” Two men I’ll call Ben and Adam watched mayor’s office, the camp discarded. This included what was undeniably garbage—food containers, broken umbrellas, the removal from across the street, huddled in the West Loop, like othripped paper—as well as personal belongings, between shopping carts and plastic bags of ers of its size, is cleaned like roller skates and boots, or winterized their belongings. Ben shuffled to stay warm, weekly, but the deep power cleaning tents too sturdy or heavy for their witnessed Monday is based on need “if owners to pack up. there is an excessive trash buildup,” the Fifteen minutes before cleanup spokesperson explained, “or unsanitary was to begin, garbage trucks, bullconditions. Public health: that’s what it dozers, and police cars already lined boils down to.” the streets. Outreach workers hurWith the exception of the mayor’s ried down Clinton, Lake, and Fulton, office, no one I interviewed mentioned rapping on tents and calling out to sanitation or public health as the reason residents and each other, their voicbehind the cleaning, including Conway, es amplified by the viaduct walls: whom I spoke with while a bulldozer “Have you seen so-and-so? Are you slowly demolished a tent a dozen feet packed? Do you need garbage bags? away. (At another point, we were interDo you need a ride to the shelter? rupted by the sound of yelling as DFSS What’s your plan?” and outreach workers ran towards the On Milwaukee, I met two men still tractor, waving their arms to halt the in their tent and asked if they’d mind driver, who was about to destroy a tent telling me in their own words what that was erroneously tagged for disposwas going on. They cackled. “Man, al.) When I asked why the cleaning was I’m just chilling,” said the younger necessary, Conway said commuters into man, who gave his name as Guy the ward needed to be able to access the Ritchie and his age as 5,900 years City Streets and Sanitation workers clean a West Loop homeless encampment in freezing weather days before Christmas. viaduct sidewalks, as did disabled ward old. “Being evicted,” said the elder, residents. But for the majority of our who went by S.G., “off the streets!” KATIE PROUT
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conversation, Conway, who has publicly said he wants the encampments (and the people in them) gone, conflated, largely without proof, the presence of unhoused people living in his ward with violence and danger. “I’ve seen with my own eyes that the large orange tents have really been the locus of that criminal activity,” he told me, referring to fishing tents donated in an effort to protect unhoused Chicagoans from the cold that inevitably kills some of them every winter. “In the tent that you just saw get put in that dumpster, I have seen drugs dealt out of that tent hundreds and hundreds of times.” (Witnessing people doing or selling drugs does not mean that those people committed armed robbery or murder.) That’s why his office has been working with DFSS and outreach teams to offer viaduct residents other immediate shelter, he said. “It’s not safe for the people around here, and it’s not safe for a lot of the folks who live under
NEWS & POLITICS
here.” Looking up at the high-rises behind us, I wondered how many of those residents like cocaine or take MDMA on the weekends; except their drug use—and drug deals—take place behind security guards and elevators, 11 stories up. But the nature of that shelter has been unclear, until now. After the December cleaning, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Block Club Chicago reported residents of the camp were offered “rapid rehousing.” In a press release emailed that afternoon, Conway wrote that “five people accepted rapid rehousing so far today,” while ten other residents declined. “We hope they will reconsider.” Rapid rehousing was, in fact, not offered to the viaduct residents the morning of the cleaning. Rapid rehousing is not housing itself. Rather, it’s a DFSS-run, 12- to 24-month housing intervention for unhoused people who are able to live independently, intended
to connect them quickly with options that may include permanent housing, depending on their eligibility. What was offered to the folks in this camp, according to the spokesperson, was placement in a Pilsen shelter, as well as access to an “Accelerated Moving Event,” the intake for rapid rehousing, which won’t occur until early 2024. The shelter is low-barrier, the spokesperson said, meaning “it does not
ing options, but it is not a home, and it is not permanent. In the week before the cleaning, seven people accepted transportation to the shelter, according to the city spokesperson; three more joined them on December 18. The remaining 20 or so either relocated on their own (to a friend’s apartment, a motel, or another camp), never returned to their tents, or opted to stay right where they were, taking the chance that, once DSS finished power washing and workers had thrown salt down to keep the wet sidewalk from freezing, they’d be able to adequately set up their homes again before nightfall. Some were already on a housing list, like Johnny Figueroa. When I met him, Figueroa, 52, was inside his tent, balancing managing his emotions with trying to pack before his home was destroyed. His tent, tall enough to stand upright in, was a mass of
“They think it’s our fault. So they’re cleaning to get rid of us, get rid of the bad things. We symbolize bad things.” enforce a curfew, does not require sobriety, and allows residents to leave the shelter for up to 48 hours and still maintain their placement.” This type of shelter can serve a real need and can connect folks to long-term hous-
clothing, furniture, heaters, and reinforcement: crutches helped hold up the ceiling. Because of its sturdiness and size, it was the exact type of tent that would not survive the cleaning. “Right now, I’m about to relocate, because we’re pretty much evicted from our dwellings here on Fulton and Milwaukee,” Figueroa said. Four days before this, he’d looked at an apartment, and he was hopeful he’d be able to move in by Christmas. Figueroa was so close to leaving this tent, which provided him safety and shelter, on his own accord. But now that the garbage trucks were here, he was forced to leave behind most of his possessions and find shelter again. Figueroa was chronically homeless, he told me. A veteran, he suffers from PTSD, anxiety, and depression, and in that, he’s not alone: many of the camp residents are disabled, veterans, or over the age of 60. He’d read in the city pamphlet announcing that the power washing was for sanitation purposes. “If that’s the real reason, I’m all for it,” he said. “We can’t keep it as clean as the city can—we can try and maintain it, the ones that wish to, but not everyone can,” he explained, because of mental illness and physical disability. But he doubted that was the real motivation. “To be honest, I think that’s an excuse to get us out of here, because of the recent events that’s been in the news that happened in this area. But everybody that’s out here complaining and writing petitions and stuff like that aren’t all law-abiding citizens,” Figueroa said. He said some condo residents have thrown rocks out their windows at encampment residents. “They call police just to come out here and harass us. Not everyone down here is a drug dealer. But everyone down here is trying to survive.” “It’s kind of like fuck the city right now,” said Kay, 35. When I met her, she was pacing in a hoodie, no coat. Kay had been staying with a friend for a couple days and missed the city’s posted warnings that the cleanup was coming. When she returned, it had already begun. “Fuck the city,” she repeated. “They make us look to be so bad. This is fucked up.” What are you going to do? I asked. At that point, outreach workers had spotted Kay and approached her with options. “I have no clue,” she said, still pacing. “I have no clue. I have no clue.” v
m kprout@chicagoreader.com JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 11
NEWS & POLITICS CEASEFIRE
Palestinian Americans in Chicago speak out against atrocities in Gaza
Flanked by photos of dead, injured, or at-risk loved ones, several speakers demanded action from Congressman Sean Casten, Governor J.B. Pritzker, and other elected officials. By DMB (DEBBIE-MARIE BROWN)
S
even Palestinian Chicagoans from all walks of life staggered into a semicircle behind a lectern, hastily-made posters in hand. Microphones jutted out from behind the lectern, and large broadcast media companies’ probing cameras stood opposite the group. Each of these individuals, who were now shuffling in anticipation, had been invited to the January 4 press conference by the Council on American-Islamic Relations–Chicago (CAIR-Chicago) two days earlier. The speakers had each thrown together poster boards with faces of dead, injured, or at-risk loved ones, and gathered to speak about how their families in Gaza were faring three months into Israel’s bombardment of Palestine—one of many that has occurred under Israel’s decades-long military occupation. The assembled speakers pleaded for Congressman Sean Casten and Governor J.B. Pritzker to call for a ceasefire and to support
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Israel has targeted Asfour’s family. Relatives were killed or wounded during four previous assaults in 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021. “I have a message for my congressman: you represent the largest community of Palestinians in the U.S. . . . We want you to demand Israel gets held accountable, and to save our families,” Asfour said. He reminded the governor that Illinois has the largest population of American Muslims in the U.S. “Please step in to help my family.” Dr. Thaer Ahmad is an emergency medicine physician from the south side. He was set to travel to Gaza the following day with MedGlobal, a humanitarian NGO. On the eve of his trip, he asked for the different levels of government to allow unrestricted humanitarian aid like food, water, and medicine into the region. Only 13 of the 36 Gazan hospitals are partially functioning, each three times over capacity, the physician said. “Palestinians are in every Palestinians still alive in Gaza, who are exerting all efforts to survive Israel’s U.S.-funded rampage. The solemn group spoke one by one. Yasmeen Elagha, a Chicago law student, stared into a camera lens. She said Israel has killed 120 members of her family in the last three months. An 81-year-old relative, for example, recently froze to death in a displacement camp. She has American family members still stuck in Gaza, too. When they seek food and water, she said, Israeli tanks shoot at them. “I’m asking every Illinois resident, every American with a conscience, to please peacefully protest,” Elagha said. “Shut down our highways, continue shutting down our train stations until Congressman Sean Casten votes for a ceasefire.” William Asfour, a 26-year-old Cook County auditor, shared that Israel has killed 209 members of his family. This isn’t the first time
nook and cranny of the [remaining] hospitals,” Ahmad said. “There are no antibiotics. There is no anesthesia. There are no supplies. So, they sit and wait and die.” Nabil Alshurafa, a medical researcher in the Chicagoland area, said a local rabbi has been helping him try to get his family out of Gaza, and it’s been logistically difficult. Alshurafa told the Reader his family has been escaping terror in Gaza their whole lives. Every day, the medical researcher said, he thinks the atrocities in Gaza can’t get any worse. But they do. For example, he never thought taking a shower or getting bread would be an issue. At the start of the most recent bombardment in October, people in Gaza would take water, bottle it, set it in the sun to warm it up, and then wipe themselves down. But now, there’s no water for showers. Food has also been increasingly hard to come by. His wife’s grandmother had been eating half a piece of bread for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—but now she skips her dinner portion to ensure there’s enough for children. Nearly two and a half million people are crammed in the south of Gaza, pushed toward Rafah, a city along the strip’s southern border with Egypt, to escape Israel’s growing target zone, and there’s just no space. Israel has imposed an air, land, and sea blockade of Gaza since 2007, maintaining tight control over who and what enters and leaves the occupied zone. Because of that, many had been forced to use underground tunnels to get their furniture into Gaza or, now, use it to seek shelter.
Palestinian Americans join CAIR-Chicago for a January 4 press conference. DMB (DEBBIE-MARIE BROWN)
NEWS & POLITICS “I was born here in the U.S. But my cousins, they weren’t lucky,” Alshurafa said. “I could have been in their place. And now, my tax dollars are going to kill my family.” Despite how one-sided media coverage has been in the United States, Alshurafa believes that if mainstream media showed the same harrowing images that people see on social media, if Americans truly understood the long history of Israeli attacks on civilians in that region, they would support Gaza. “We don’t get equal airtime in mainstream media. This is why you have the young generation on social media sympathizing a lot more with the Palestinians. . . . They see what’s actually happening on the ground.” Yasser Said is a pediatrician and internal medicine doctor in Chicago who would visit Gaza every year, sometimes for medical trips. Israel began refusing him entry in 2019 without explanation. Said’s family lives in a village called Burin, which sits in a valley in the north of the West Bank near Nablus, one of the territory’s main urban centers. Israelis settled in the three mountains surrounding the village and, even before Israel’s latest assault, took over, Said said. Israeli settlements are civilian communities built, often through force, by Israeli Jews in the territories obtained after the Six-Day War. Few settlements are recognized by the Israeli government, as those in occupied Palestinian territories violate international law. Things have gotten worse in Burin with the upheaval in Gaza. Schools in the West Bank are remote—people are terrified of going outside and won’t leave their homes—and children who don’t have iPads for virtual school are out of luck. “The settlers come down on a daily basis. They break windows. They’ve got, like, literally American guns that they just got from Biden,” Said said. “They burn cars. They salted the olive tree groves just so that they wouldn’t grow. They poison the well. They literally just do everything they can to just make it unlivable.” Said wants Chicagoans to know that what’s happening in Palestine is not different from what Indigenous Americans, Black Americans, or South Africans went through. “It’s not a 1,000-year conflict. It’s not purely a religious conflict. It is a land grab, and it’s oppression. If you understand that, it’s very simple to see what’s going on.” v
A Normal Thing For a Person To Do
By Sam Herschel Wein
knuckle-shuffling across my kitchen floor to fix a leak in the cabinet under my sink, the 70-something building manager begins every queer’s favorite conversation, “Can I ask you a personal question
I had learned to hide, so young, I had been trained to be very serious, not flimsy, not whimsical, not gay or alive how I am now. There were also worldly demons, like at my Orthodox Jewish Day School
without you getting offended?” which is normally how straight men ask me if I’m a faggot but this man knows I’m a faggot, he’s seen the buttnaked painting all over my apartment walls—
where I learned religious seriousness was fighting for a homeland I had a right to, and at Jewish Summer Camp where for fives years I sang the Israeli national anthem every morning, where half the camp
no, he surprises me, he asks, “Is there any part of you that’s a serious person?” to which I respond immediately, defensively, “Of course there is,” arguing in my brain that I just
counselors were Israeli and insanely hot but intense, serious, harsher than my Midwestern niceness. I want to call them monstrous. I want to say I was scared but it was summer camp, I was 9 and running outside,
got a master’s degree, worked several jobs I’d told him about, just handed him a copy of Butt Stuff Flower Bush, my poetry chapbook, and I’m spinning, is it my titles, is it
ziplining to joyous grasses, dancing and singing with other Jews, but then the counselors shocked and screamed and woke us in the middle of the night for Army Night, drilled us like soldiers, told us we fight, fight, fight
my giggling, incessantly, when he’s around and trying to talk about society’s collapse, but I’d already thought about that all day, now it’s evening and I’m just trying to hang out
for what’s ours, our land, our olive trees, and look, over there, in the dark in the woods, one of our fellow soldiers was captured by a suicide bomber! Can we rescue our own? Can we take out the enemy? With our pretend
but now I’m deeper in my head, I’m going back to my beginning, to my earliest, seriousest self, when I would sit weeklong in my basement, wage wars between my Beanie Babies Best Friends and their neighboring
guns? “If you all move there, to Israel, you can hold the real thing. Real guns.” And they’d smile, doing their job. I was trained to be serious in that I should join the Israeli army and murder Palestinians
cities, play at surviving in wartime, mimic living through battle, it was always a violence, how I flitted around my childhood home before anyone else was awake with my magic wand battling demons
like that’s a normal thing for a person to do, even to kill children, and Israel was this mythic mystical land I was propaganda’d to obsess over since birth, when I skipped around my house
and night ninjas that broke in while we slept, how I had to remove them all before my family discovered them, discovered me, prancing, gayly dancing to routines, the wand casting spells
as a child ready for combat, like I had to know how to kill someone, and honestly, you really want me to be serious? How could I be serious about anything ever again?
Sam Herschel Wein (he/they) is a lollygagging plum of a poet who specializes in perpetual frolicking. They have an MFA from the University of Tennessee and were the recipient of a 2022 Pushcart Prize. They have published three chapbooks, most recently Butt Stuff Flower Bush from Porkbelly Press, and are the co-founder and editor of Underblong Journal. They have recent work in American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, and Gulf Coast, among others. Poem curated by Faisal Mohyuddin. Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of Elsewhere: An Elegy (forthcoming March 2024 from Next Page Press), The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, and The Riddle of Longing. He teaches high school English in suburban Chicago and creative writing at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies; he also serves as a Master Practitioner with the global not-for-profit Narrative 4 and is a visual artist. A biweekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.
Hours
Wednesday & Friday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM Thursday: 11:00 AM–7:00 PM Saturday: 10:00 AM–5:00 PM
Harriet Monroe & The Open Door
Visit our latest exhibition to learn about Chicago icon and Poetry magazine founder, Harriet Monroe.
Open through January 13, 2024. Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org
m dmbrown@chicagoreader.com JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 13
COMMENTARY ON CULTURE
Claudine Gay, AI, and weaponizing plagiarism “It’s about attacking the first Black female president of this elite institution.” By DEANNA ISAACS
This software has algorithms that look for similar language. It’s useful to a point, but then you need someone with critical thinking skills to evaluate what it came up with.
T
he Congressional hearing that turned Republican representative Elise Stefanik loose on Harvard University president Claudine Gay made me wonder—not for the first time—why anyone voluntarily participates in these dog and pony exercises in political theater; you might as well offer yourself up to a firing squad. Stefanik was in bristling attack mode and Gay, no doubt scripted by lawyers, was encased in an armor of jargon. Like the two other university presidents in the firing line, she was unable to give a straight answer to a question about whether a call for genocide would violate the university’s code of conduct. It was so bad that University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill resigned four days later. That, however, wasn’t what toppled Gay, Harvard’s first Black and first woman president. The Harvard board, headed by Chicagoan Penny Pritzker, initially stood by her. The decisive blow came in the form of dissertation plagiarism charges by a tech-enabled rightwing posse. Which might have some other academic leaders worried. Accounting for the work of previous scholars is the meat and potatoes of a dissertation. It paves the way for the researcher’s own groundbreaking dollop of insight or innovation. But could any of it make its way improperly into the hundreds of pages of their own tome? A verbatim throwaway sentence, perhaps? A nuts-and-bolts paragraph describing how minor point A plus minor point B equals obvious point C that slipped in without its quotation marks? Because any such patch of matching words is what the technology identifies. In a tweet posted the same day Gay resigned, conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who led the campaign to unseat her, announced the establishment of a “plagiarism hunting” fund that will “expose the rot in the Ivy League and restore truth, rather than racialist ideology, as
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Can computer programs be trusted to identify it?
What about letting donors and politicians have a say?
Claudine Gay FRAME FROM 12/5/23 C-SPAN BROADCAST
the highest principle in academic life.” In a Politico interview published the next day, Rufo said his “primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America.” He also explained his three-pronged strategy of narrative, financial, and political “leverage.” The financial leverage used against Gay, he said, was “led by [hedge fund manager, Harvard donor, and plagiarism decrier] Bill Ackman.” Two days later, Business Insider published the results of its own dissertation investigation, alleging that it had found “multiple instances of plagiarism.” The offending author? Former MIT professor Neri Oxman, Ackman’s wife. That tinkling noise is the glass house shattering. But is any of this significant? Should donors be calling the shots? Politicians? Software? I dialed up someone who should know: Irene Mulvey, president of Washington, D.C.–based American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Here’s an edited version of our conversation.
Deanna Isaacs: What is plagiarism, anyway? Irene Mulvey: Real plagiarism means intel-
lectual theft with the intention to mislead people that somebody else’s work is your work. It’s a complicated and serious matter.
Who should judge it? Allegations of plagiarism in the academy should be investigated by the institution, using established procedure, full information, and, because there are disciplinary differences, faculty with the relevant expertise. For example, I’m a mathematician; we reproduce definitions from other papers all the time. [In Gay’s case,] the accusations came from an anonymous source, published in a rightwing publication, amplified in right-wing social media. So all of a sudden they’re in the public sphere. I would not presume to make any kind of a judgment on them because I am not in the discipline and I don’t have [the] full information.
There’s always been interference in higher education. That’s part of the AAUP’s origin story. In 1915, our founders were seeing cases where faculty were fired because their teaching or research displeased some wealthy donor. Our declaration of principles points out that to be a public good in a democracy, higher education needs to be free of inappropriate interference. In the last few years, interference has escalated to the state level. In Florida, for example, the state is passing educational gag laws that dictate what can be taught in a college classroom. This is a new level of interference. And the December 5 hearing showed that it is not limited to public institutions—all of higher ed is under attack.
Why is this happening? Over the last 40 years, scholarship has expanded and the academy has expanded to include more students and faculty from underrepresented groups. I think the attack on higher ed is a backlash from people with money and power and influence who are not happy with that expansion and would like to revive the prejudices of the past.
So should we expect an onslaught of retrospective dissertation plagiarism hunts? A glass-half-full idea might be that what will come out of this could be a better understanding of what plagiarism is and what it isn’t. And that this was a lot of nothing. I don’t think it’s really about plagiarism. It’s about attacking the first Black female president of this elite institution. It’s pushback against the progress we’ve made in many areas of social justice. v
m disaacs@chicagoreader.com
CITY” R “EMERALD Through 1/28: open by appointment, info@artruss.com, Artruss, 4553 W. Diversey, artruss.com
ARTS & CULTURE
EXHIBITIONS
In ‘Emerald City,’ Dorothy is queen Painter Marina Ross uses The Wizard of Oz to explore the post-pandemic desire to return “home.” By MEL COOK
I
n Marina Ross’s exhibition “Emerald City,” she conjures a sense of longing, dreaming, and the desire to transcend the gritty limitations of reality. Touching upon themes from her last solo exhibition, 2022’s “Everything Was Forever” at Baby Blue Gallery, the Chicago painter dives deeper into the world of Oz, revisiting the beloved and tragic icon of Dorothy, playfully poking at utopian views of a civilization lost, and perhaps, most artfully, exploring the notions of the post-pandemic desire to return “home.” But this Emerald City is anything but a utopian home, and Ross has no plans of easing our anxiety. At first glance Ross seems to bring us into a room filled with visionary depictions from The Wizard of Oz; however, upon closer observation, each painting reveals itself to be an uncanny translation of something that could be from the film rather than is. The result is unsettling. A smattering of decadently colorful paintings fill the brightly lit gallery, creating a bizarre sense of rhythm, flitting between contradicting pairs. Dorothy is still queen here though, her small and intimate grade schoollike portraits countered by grandiose images reminiscent of staged rococo decadence. Architectural blueprints and studies of Dorothy’s farmhouse are positioned next to a field of painted poppy fabric. Meanwhile, the Emerald City is gloriously painted, floating in space like an antique cake topper or a snow globe on auction. We have landed in a cinematic world of props without a script. To counter this dizzying cacophony, we turn to Dorothy, seeking her familiar jovial presence, hopefulness, and beauty. Surely one can return to a state of innocence when panning over her four small portraits. She is the epitome of saintly girlhood—braided pigtails, rosy cheeks, and a doe-eyed gaze fit for any star milkmaid. Each portrait becomes a signpost of hope with titles directly quoting the film like Where There Isn’t Any Trouble or Why, Of Course You Can, giving us permission to dream with her. This sweet cream quickly sours with the ambivalence of You Can Always Go Both Ways, where Dorothy transgresses
her cheery nature as she scorns us. Slowly she begins to fade chromatically, losing density and warmth in People Come and Go So Quickly. Echoing the markers of loss and grief, she becomes a ghost. Searching for an alternative to this somber note, we turn to the larger portraits of Dorothy where she literally becomes larger than life. In Fallen Star (ironically the star of the show), Dorothy becomes transmuted into something between cinematic opulence and horror. Poised on stage, mid-dance, Dorothy is longingly glazed over and blurry (perhaps anesthetized by poppies, or daydreams, or both) as someone or something beyond our gaze pulls at her from stage right. She appears wild, her mouth set in some trancelike beauty queen smile, while her cherry popsicle lips bleed onto the page, terrifyingly reminiscent of the kind of red that oozes from children who eat too many sweets. She’s intoxicating to look at. This, paired with the intensity of oxidized teal and seafoam green, give her an almost manic perverseness, one that Ross intentionally references as a nod to the precariousness of mental health and trauma. If only it were just a temporary sugar high one could shake off. This childlike desire to escape through the glamour of narrative and play is further explored in In a Field of Stars. It is a hybrid world between fiction and reality where Dorothy is again poised on stage, this time with three arms. The jarring third arm appears like an AI-generated digital glitch, the first obvious clue that the original narrative has been warped. One could spend lots of time wandering through the gallery, attempting to recall which painting is indeed a cinematic reference and which is new, but then we would lose the point. This is not a scavenger hunt. With so many breadcrumbs to follow, Ross’s interest in constructing and reconstructing narratives becomes a didactic form of play. She is improvising and is asking us to join her in the complications that ensue. We quickly desire to return home when confronted with the surprise of loss, and now Ross guides us back home with a jolting aes-
Marina Ross, Fallen Star, 2023 TOM VAN EYDE
thetic shift. When looking at the installation of farmhouse paintings, we are presented with two paintings, Blueprint and Farmhouse. The latter depicts a toylike rendering of Dorothy’s home from the film, while the former functions more like an editorial layout, depicting two small greenish paintings of different farmhouses suspended within a field of white paper and drafted graphite outlines waiting to be cut. In Blueprint, the top painting appears as an almost identical copy of Farmhouse, while the bottom painting functions like a snapshot of someone’s home with a looming tornado in the distance. Home floats somewhere between the facade of memory and the shallowness of the construction of home. Thankfully, this impending tornado is only metaphorical. If only this longing to return home could be eased by the beauty of nature. In Poppies, we are presented with a lavish field of red and cornflower blue flowers. The soft, powdery brushwork and dappled light are almost enough to lure us into a sense of relief. Slowly we realize that the field is not a field, but a synthetic structure, albeit a turf-green field decorated with the image of poppies, slowly being sucked into or folded onto itself like the all-consuming folds of a 1960s ball gown—a casual nod to Judy Garland’s Ray Aghayan-designed poppy dress. It can barely bear the weight of its own beauty. The fabric of delusion is real here, and Ross
wants us to take note. And so we place our hopes in the return to utopia, or at least in the desire to create one— and perhaps this is Ross’s goal. Her painting Emerald City gives us the last dose of sweetness that we need before returning home to Chicago, the city where The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was written. Here we view the decadent cityscape of a utopia once lost. Suspended in time and space, we behold the beauty of the green city with all of its lights. It is specific in its architecture, yet lacks the clarity of a fully realized place, an idealized view of urbanization as the key to future prosperity, the American dream of hope sold to every generation. Above, high in the ceiling, we are able to see the trusses of the building, an ode to industrialization, mirroring the very same structures along railroad lines that bridged the distance between rural and urban spaces, carrying every dreamer to a city filled with light. “Emerald City” is a nod to the legacy of dreaming and building “home.” Ross reminds us that longing for safety in a “post-pandemic” world doesn’t need to feel so dire. She asks us to dream with her, to hope, and to hold onto our notions of building a utopia because the script can always be edited, adapted, and rewritten. v
m letters@chicagoreader.com JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 15
ARTS & CULTURE
Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative by Jennifer Burns Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, hardcover, 592 pp., $35.00, us.macmillan. R com/books/9780374601140/miltonfriedman
DISMAL SCIENCE
The making of Milton Friedman The economist’s first full biography delves into how the complexity of his ideas has been lost. By MAX BLAISDELL
M
ere mention of the name Milton basic income, something Cook County began Friedman tends to conjure up not the piloting in December 2022, or introducing actual image of the man—diminutive, “automatic stabilizers” so that during any bespectacled, slightly disheveled, enormously economic downturn increased unemployment energetic—but the intellectual boogey- benefits would automatically kick in for those man-cum-punching bag for the left as the who need them. And so too does his legacy godfather of neoliberalism. In 2017, In These include well-established policies that no polTimes republished Vermont senator Bernie itician—left, right, or center—would dream Sanders’s 2009 speech critiquing the ideas of overturning, such as automatic income Friedman trumpeted from his perch at the tax withholding and the Earned Income Tax University of Chicago—which is also Sanders’s Credit. The product of almost ten years of carefully alma mater—with the provocative title, “The combing through the archives—some of which Failed Prophet.” Joe Biden later echoed the same sentiment as Sanders’s Democratic primary opponent in 2020, castigating the neoliberal order by declaring, “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore!” And in a 2022 interview with the Reader, Hadas Thier, a Brooklyn-based writer, lambasted Friedman’s role in shaping the current government’s response to curbing rising prices through interest rate hikes, despite his being dead for more than 15 years. What gets lost in these appraisals, as Jennifer Burns’s new book, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, carefully demonstrates, is that the man’s ideas underlay more than the establishment conservatism of, say, a Ronald Reagan or a Mitt Romney; they also underlay current progressive economic proposals, like providing people with a universal COURTESY FARRAR, STRAUS, AND GIROUX
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are held in the Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections at U. of C.—Burns’s book is the first full-length intellectual biography of Friedman. Rather than being a trained economist, she is an associate professor of history at Stanford University and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where Friedman worked after leaving U. of C., from 1977 until his death 30 years later. Her previous book dealt with the life of Ayn Rand, another major 20th-century conservative figure. (Perhaps F. A. Hayek or William F. Buckley Jr. will be her next subject.) Across the more than 480 pages of text (there are an additional 50 pages of notes), Friedman’s life never d ra gs. A l t h o u g h large sections of the book deal with abstract economic theory and complicated technical matters that were the subject of immense debate between Friedman and various academic and professional economists, Burns manages to make them compelling to a lay reader because she puts them in human terms. Here is how she introduces Paul Volcker, the Federal Reserve chair appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1979 who became famous for ending years of stagflation—a period of high inflation and high unemployment—by precipitating a steep but short recession, with a Chekhovian attention to contrast:
Frank Knight; and engage in intense intellectual debates with members of the Cowles Commission for Economics Research and fellow future Nobel laureates Franco Modigliani and George Stigler. Part of the reason why Friedman’s name is held in such contempt by progressives was Friedman’s own fault, as Burns explains. By aligning himself so closely with the Republican Party during his lifetime—he advised Presidents Richard Nixon and Reagan, as well as longtime Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan—much of what made him an unconventional thinker has gotten lost. “As he increasingly came to symbolize a political movement,” namely the modern conservative movement, “the nuance and complexity of his ideas was lost,” she writes. One of those core ideas, that capitalism reduces inequality rather than widening the gap between the rich and the poor, was actually far from outside the mainstream in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, as Burns points out. At that time, in fact, there was ample data to support this conclusion, as illustrated by the famous Kuznets curve. (The timing is important, however: inequality has risen dramatically in the U.S. since 1979, which was also the time period when Friedman’s ideas gained the greatest currency in policymaking circles.) Indeed, he would never become an advocate for reducing inequality via taxation and robust social welfare programs (although he did recognize poverty as a key issue for government policy to address). Because he saw high taxes as coercive and bureaucracy as inefficient and paternalistic, he instead championed educational opportunity as the best remedy for inequality. His prescription of introducing market-type incentives into education through school choice vouchers has been taken up by present-day conservatives like Trump’s former Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, and adopted by many states like Indiana and South Carolina. (Recent studies show that choice did not lead to improved test scores for low-income youth, contrary to what advocates say.) In his quest for influence, Friedman also failed to identify how his willingness to serve as an adviser to politicians, not just in the U.S.
By aligning himself so closely with the Republican Party . . . much of what made him an unconventional thinker has gotten lost.
“Paul Volcker knew Friedman from his time at Treasury, and he was not a fan. The two men were opposites in temperament, approach, and even physical appearance, with Volcker as strikingly tall as Friedman was short. While Volcker appeared every inch the Republican banker, he was actually a Democrat. Where Friedman prized ‘straight talk,’ Volcker cultivated mystique, shielding his face in clouds of cigar smoke while testifying before Congress.” While this hefty tome is a testament to the power of ideas, it ably charts the details of Friedman’s journey from the town of Rahway, New Jersey, where he was editor of his high school’s newspaper, to U. of C.’s quad in Hyde Park, where he would meet his wife, Rose, and her brother, Aaron Director; learn price theory from one of his most important mentors,
ARTS & CULTURE but also worldwide, might cause his reputation to suffer. In some ways fairly and in other ways not, his name has been tarnished by guilt by association. For instance, Friedman, a Jew whose parents had left Eastern Europe in the years after the worst pogroms, stuck on till the end of Barry Goldwater’s quixotic 1964 presidential bid as his economic adviser, even after Goldwater curried favor with anti-Semitic, nativist elements of the far right, which were represented in those days by John Birch Society members. And despite his trumpeting of individual freedoms, Friedman stood by Goldwater in not supporting civil rights for Black Americans. Defending Goldwater’s vote against the Civil Rights Act in an interview with the Tribune, Friedman made the senator’s case as if it was his own: “He believes that laws by the federal government cannot effectively improve the Negro’s position, but can only undermine the basic right of individuals to be free from government interference.” Burns doesn’t offer a fullblown apologia for Friedman’s woeful racial ignorance, noting that he refused to recognize how “the legacy of forced African diaspora, marked by systemic violence, dispossession and slavery,” wrought an antiBlack racism that had not and has not gone away; but Burns offers a sympathetic gloss. “The postwar dip in anti-Semitism that Friedman lived through suggested prejudice need not be a permanent feature of American life,” she writes. Also, she notes, his personal successes, and those of fellow Jewish economists like Paul Samuelson and Arthur Burns, who also rose to positions of eminence, “convinced him that ethnic prejudice was no true barrier to accomplishment.” His six-day trip to Chile in 1976, shortly after the bloody military coup that toppled the socialist president Salvador Allende and installed Augusto Pinochet, whose rule was marked by the widespread use of torture against and the forced disappearance of regime opponents, was similarly reflective of his myopia. “Literal-minded to a fault, Friedman failed to appreciate the optics of meeting with Pino-
chet, who was widely viewed as a U.S. stooge,” she writes. “To Chilean exiles in particular, it appeared that the U.S. government had installed a vicious dictator, and then sent over its most famous economist to consolidate his hold on power.” But, as Burns makes clear, Friedman’s actual influence on the broad-based market reforms Chile underwent in the 1970s was minimal. In his sole meeting with the dictator, Friedman gave the same simple recommendations as those that could be easily grasped by reading his Newsweek columns. Rather, according to Burns, the real figures behind the country’s financial transformation, which involved privatizing the pension system and introducing school vouchers, among other changes, were the Chilean acolytes of U. of C.’s Arnold Harberger, who were thus dubbed the Chicago Boys by the press. What Friedman’s visit did provide, she argues, was reassurance to the country’s cautious military leaders that these shock treatments for curbing inflation would in fact lead to a more stable and prosperous Chile. His penchant for sloganeering in the press and his outsized public persona also came to overshadow what were his major contributions in academia, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976. As Burns points out, his accelerationist hypothesis in which inflation tends to increase exponentially rather than in a linear fashion has been born out empirically, and his monetarist explanation for the Great Depression, which he laid out in a coauthored book with the pioneering female economist Anna Schwartz, garnered him widespread praise even from his most ardently Keynesian adversaries. Indeed, for Burns, “Friedman is too fundamental a figure to set aside,” which, perhaps, is especially so for those who revile him. As the saying goes, know thy enemy. And because, as she points out, “Whatever social and political order emerges next, it will not be, cannot be, a clean break from the past,” we would do well to know which pieces should be retained. v
In his quest for influence, Friedman failed to identify how his willingness to serve as an adviser to politicians . . . might cause his reputation to suffer.
m letters@chicagoreader.com
First floor installation view, “Water,” 6018North NATHAN KEAY
OPENING
R Small wonders
Artist Jenny Åkerlund’s “Vitreous bodies” is a multimedia exploration of the human eye. Artists often use their eyes to absorb the surrounding world before recreating it. Doctors use their eyes to identify symptoms, provide diagnoses, or perform surgeries. With approximately 125 million photoreceptors in each human eye, these small organs hold magnificent power—no wonder we call our eyes the “windows to our soul.” On view at the International Museum of Surgical Science, “Vitreous bodies” is artist Jenny Åkerlund’s intersectional exploration of the human eye, weaving together 2D drawings, printouts and stills from archived documents, and 3D objects modeling the eye’s anatomy to create a dialogue between surgical science and visual art. The exhibition continues the artist’s exploration of entoptic phenomena, the ability to perceive substances endogenous to the eye, including the vitreous body, which refers to the clear gel between the lens of the eye and the retina. With her glass models, Åkerlund pulls something we could only see as an illusion or chance reflection into the physical realm. A second layer of the exhibition is Åkerlund’s interrogation of the impermanence of all things visible. By changing solidity, vitreous bodies create visual distortions in shadowy forms, often known as floaters, visual traces captured by aging eyes. In that sense, the eye—our instrument of seeing—becomes unreliable in capturing the world. What does it say about our vision and, ultimately, our perception and awareness of the world? —XIAO DACUNHA “VITREOUS BODIES”
Through 2/25: Mon-Fri 9:30 AM-5 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 N. Lake Shore, imss.org, admission $11-$20, free for members
R Bodies of water
A group exhibition at 6018North looks at the anthropogenic effects on Chicago’s water. Julie Carpenter and Jane Norling’s Plastics S.O.S. (Save Our Shores) beckons to visitors before they’ve even reached 6018North. Installed on the iron fence sur-
rounding the house, the sculpture spells out “SOS” in bright plastic children’s beach toys, mostly collected from litter left behind at neighborhood beaches. The piece is a fitting introduction to the gallery’s exhibition “Water”—on view as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Art Design Chicago—which looks at the relationship between water and people, particularly in Chicago. Work is spread throughout the house’s four floors, by theme. The basement presents historic and archival information about Chicago’s water, including images from the reversing of the Chicago River and a map of the Indigenous trails and villages in the city in 1804. (Warning: between the copious amounts of printed matter in the show and the inclusion of several longform videos, one could easily spend hours taking everything in.) The ground floor takes stock of the current conditions of the Chicago and Mississippi Rivers through two videos by Jennifer Buyck; Jin Lee’s mesmerizing photographs of Lake Michigan are interspersed throughout. The second floor, which looks at how humans have impacted Chicago’s waterways, contains some of the exhibition’s strongest work. Central to that is Ines Sommer’s absorbing 40-minute video The Hills, from 2023. The documentary delves into the southeast side of the city, which is reeling from the environmental devastation of the steel industry—and dealing with health risks from new industrial development. A chalk drawing on a bathroom wall by Eugenia Cheng visualizes what waterways our sewage ends up in. A room overlooking the front staircase is devoted to local artist JeeYeun Lee’s ongoing investigation into Chicago’s water and shoreline, from the government’s seizure of Potawatomi land to the creation of some of the city’s most iconic lakefront attractions. The works on the top floor are more speculative and abstract, including David Fried’s video about a New Zealand lawsuit that seeks to grant personhood to a local river. Not to be missed are the bathroom wall labels by Candace Hunter, installed throughout the house, that contain information related to the lack of clean water for women and children and a flier on the top floor that offers crowdsourced tips for helping the environment, from composting to decolonizing our minds and organizations. —KERRY CARDOZA “WATER” Through 3/2:
Sat 1-5 PM or by appointment, 6018north@gmail. com, 6018North, 6018 N. Kenmore, 6018north.org
JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 17
THEATER STORYTELLING EXTRAVAGANZA
Choice cuts
The Fillet of Solo Festival offers a diverse menu of stories at two Rogers Park venues. By JACK HELBIG
T
here is something about the coldest months that invites storytelling—people gathering together, exchanging tales, and keeping warm. Hence, Fillet of Solo, Lifeline Theatre’s annual festival of solo performers and storytellers. Every January, the folks at Lifeline kick off the new year with a two-weeklong gathering of the community—solo artists, live lit folks, storytelling collectives, and assorted others—to celebrate yarn spinning and the gift of the gab. As in years past, this year’s festival features a panoply of performers: alums of past Fillets (Nestor Gomez, Tekki Lomnicki, the Sweat Girls) and new or newish voices (Archy Jamjun, Shelby Marie Edwards, and Jonathan Pitts). Actually, scrolling through the schedule of Fillet performers on the website is mind-boggling. Who knew there were so many storytellers and solo performers in Chicago? When I ask Fillet of Solo curator and former Lifeline artistic director Dorothy Milne how many performers they had in the fest this year, she pauses, laughs, pauses again, and then admits, “Oh my gosh, you know, we have more solo shows this year. I haven’t gone through and counted this year, because some of the groups still haven’t told me how many they are bringing. But we have about 100, 120 artists.” Sharon Evans is recognized as the creator of Fillet of Solo. In those days, before live lit became a thing and Moth competitions spread across the country, solo performers were few and mostly performed in galleries and clubs. Evans, who was herself a solo performer, wanted to encourage solo performers and performing. The Fillet of Solo was a way, in Evans’s words, “for us to mingle the more established solo artists with much younger solo artists who are just performing for the first time and create a kind of community.” “And so, this was in 1995, and we thought, well, summer’s supposed to be kind of an offseason for theater. Let’s do a big two-month festival over the summer. It really lends itself to summer. The shows are no longer than an hour long. We’ll charge $10. And so people can come to a show and then go to an outdoor
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cafe on Southport or whatever, and make an evening of it.” The festival took place for its first 13 years at Evans’s late, lamented Live Bait Theater on the edge of Wrigleyville. In 2008, Evans and her husband, John Ragir, decided to stop producing on a regular basis at their space (which they still rent to other companies—it’s now occupied by Otherworld Theatre Company). But she did not want to shut down Fillet of Solo. So she contacted Milne at Lifeline. “I wanted to create a home for all the solo artists that we had been working with,” Evans remembers, “because I didn’t want to pull the
rug out from under them. So I went to Dorothy and I said, ‘Would you be willing to take on Fillet of Solo as a festival and continue producing it?’” “Sharon came to me and said, ‘You’re a new-work theater, you participated as an artist in Fillet of Solo, would Lifeline take this over for us?’ And we said yes,” says Milne. She and Evans put their minds together and, after a year hiatus, Live Bait and Lifeline Theatre coproduced the 2010 festival. Fourteen years later the festival is going strong, never missing a year, even during the years Chicago theaters were closed for COVID-19. “We did two years of Fillet of Solo on Zoom,” Milne tells me. “It wasn’t live, it was all recorded.” The lack of an immediate live audience response “really smacked everybody in the face,” Milne notes. “But we had a lot of feedback from people saying, ‘Thank you for getting me through the pandemic.’” Last year’s edition of Fillet of Solo was the first in-person presentation since 2020. Evans continues to work on Fillet of Solo,
offering Milne “anything she needs from me,” Evans explains. “Sometimes I bring artists and then direct them. Other times she will call me up and say, ‘I’m going to send you a script—see if you’re interested in directing.’” But in Milne’s words, the festival is really her “baby” now. Evans concurs: “I don’t want to be a buttinsky. I kind of put it in her ballpark.”
27th Annual Fillet of Solo Festival
1/12-1/21: Fri-Sun, various times; all performances at Lifeline Theatre, 6912 N. Glenwood, and South of the Border, 1416 W. Morse, 773-761-4477, complete schedule at lifelinetheatre.com, $12 single entry, $60 festival pass.
And what a ballpark Milne has turned the festival into. Actually, two ballparks, since the festival is being staged in two locations: Lifeline Theatre (6912 N. Glenwood) and down the street at South of the Border (1416 W. Morse). The sheer size of the event has Milne psyched. “I’m excited. The Fillet of Solo is
Clockwise from top left : Nestor Gomez, Tekki Lomnicki, Earliana McLaurin, Jill Howe COURTESY LIFELINE THEATRE
THEATER P N C F A M I LY S E R I E S 2023-24 SEASON
JAZZMEIA HORN
February 3, 2024 / 2:00 PM
BLACK GRACE
March 2, 2024 / 2:00 PM Archy Jamjun; Sharon Evans (left) and Dorothy Milne COURTESY LIFELINE THEATRE
corporate life. I was an advertising copywriter for many years.” On the bill are also several solo performers with longer pieces. Jamjun, curator of OUTSpoken!, tells me, “I’m doing a story about my mom surprising me with eyelid surgery when I got to Thailand one year because I’d been talking to her about wanting to have it done and then I got to Thailand and she was like, ‘I have scheduled your surgery.’ The story is all the adventure that follows that.” Improv teacher and Chicago theater stalwart Pitts will be doing a show with the intriguing title My Dad, His Chimp, and a Serial Killer. Pitts tells the story of his father, Dave, who performed in the Ice Capades with a trained chimpanzee, Spanky—and what happened when he and Spanky were abducted on the road to an Ice Capades show by a serial killer in the midst of a killing spree. (The story is also the subject of the recently released movie, He Went That Way, starring Zachary Quinto and narrated by Pitts.) “My pitch to Fillet of Solo was this show is Silence of the Lambs meets Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia,” says Pitts. If it all sounds stranger than fiction, that’s just one of the startling joys of this festival, which packs so many lively true-life tales into the bleak reality of Chicago midwinter. v
Tickets start at $10. Plus, these performances are sensory-friendly!
312.334.7777 harristheaterchicago.org 205 East Randolph Street
Jazzmeia Horn. Photo by Drew Bordeaux.
a way for the community of storytelling in Chicago to get to see each other’s work, effortlessly. Everybody’s within a block of each other. And so, you know, all the people that are performing in the fest get to see the other shows for free, so they can just go hog wild with ingesting each other’s performances that they normally have to run all around town for.” This year’s festival schedule includes the work of numerous storytelling groups and workshops, including Lifeline’s in-house Storytelling Project, featuring Lifeline-affiliated artists; Nestor Gomez’s 80 Minutes Around the World: Immigration Stories, featuring the work of “immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, their descendants and allies”; the Goodman Theatre’s storytelling program, GeNarrations, focusing on storytellers who are over 55; the long-running (30 years and counting) all-women collective, the Sweat Girls (of which Milne is a founding member); and OUTspoken!, stories by tellers who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer. Another noteworthy group is Lomnicki’s Tellin’ Tales Theatre. Lomnicki has been a participant in all 26 of the past festivals. This year, Lominicki explains, “The theme for my group show with Tellin’ Tales is ‘Middle of the Road.’ Are you at a crossroads? Have you learned something that’s going to reveal where you go next in your life? And for me, mine is, ‘What’s my second act?’ I retired from
Irving Harris Foundation, Joan W. Harris Harris Theater Presents Sponsor
20th Anniversary Season Sponsor
Series Presenting Sponsor
m letters@chicagoreader.com JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 19
THEATER MEMORIAL
Be like Mike
For Mike Nussbaum, life in the theater was all about “the hang.” By BJ JONES Mike Nussbaum died just a few days short of 100 on December 23, 2023. BJ Jones, artistic director of Northlight Theatre and longtime friend and colleague of the legendary Chicago actor and director, remembers what made Nussbaum one of a kind. A version of this piece also appears online at americantheatre.org.
M
ike Nussbaum was my artistic father. I looked to him for support, guidance, and a deep and loyal friendship. I know he felt the same about me. In a film assembled for my anniversary at Northlight, he said, “I think of BJ as my best friend in the theater.” In the past few weeks, I have received so many phone calls, texts, and emails offering condolences on his passing. But I’ve told friends that I was happy for him, because every time I stopped by to spend time with him in the past year, he’d tell me he was ready to go. He told Barbara Gaines, founder and former artistic director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and also his closest of friends, the same thing. When we were with him after his first heart attack at Northwestern Hospital last winter, the doctor came into the room to ask if he wanted her to relieve the pain. He said, “No, I’m ready to go.” The doctor looked at Barbara and me, and Mike said, “Don’t look at them—they know what I want.” A synchronized comic shoulder shrug from the two of us acknowledged our support. We knew enough to know where his boundaries were drawn. And Karen and Jack, his children, knew it as well. He directed me, I directed him, we acted together. Over a dozen plays at Northlight were graced with his gifts, beginning with Jumpers, directed by Frank Galati in 1975, our first production. He was then the artistic director and a founder along with Galati and Greg Kandel, an MFA graduate at Northwestern. Fifty years later, I celebrate my 25th season as artistic director. When I asked Mike 25 years ago if I should apply for the job, his immediate response was, “Better you than me.” Because Mike was an actor and that is what he wanted to do. That is why he jogged when he still could and famously did his daily 50 push-ups.
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cause of his chemistry that Mamet knew so well. Mamet had included a story in the plot about a leather bomber jacket Mike owned from WWII. [Nussbaum had worked as a teletype operator for General Dwight Eisenhower and had sent the cable announcing the Nazi surrender in Paris.] Drawn from Mike’s life, the story was that Annette had the jacket cleaned. In Mike’s view, the cleaning ruined it. Mamet wove that story into the play. It was a story Mike told David 40 years before in rehearsal, and David remembered it! Mike was so touched. In the last few years, I picked Mike up and drove him to a number of gatherings where we read it, people asked for his autograph,
More importantly, it was his loyalty to the Chicago theater community that inspired me. In 1983, while he was appearing on Broadway in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, I called him to ask if he would appear in my production of Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms at Northlight. He asked Annette, his wife, what she thought and Annette said, “Yes! I’m tired of New York.” Coming back on the phone, he told me he’d do it. Imagine leaving Broadway to appear at a regional theater in a converted grade school, where, as Mike Maggio, one of my predecessors as artistic director, said, “The rent was high and the urinals were low.” Because it was never about Broadway or Hollywood for Mike. It was about the work and, frankly, Chicago’s actors and audiences. For Tracy Letts (left) and Mike Nussbaum in Tuesdays With Morrie at Northlight Theatre (2003) MICHAEL BROSILOW Mike, it was about “the hang.” Sitting in the green room and laughing, dishing, being adrenalized by the next generation of actors, racing to beat John Mahoney at finishing the New York Times crossword on Sundays. And always, always—telling the truth onstage. About a dozen years ago, I realized I might not get to act with Mike again. So, I reached out to David Mamet, whose plays made Mike nationally recognized. I asked if he’d write a curtain-raiser for Mike and me to read at events. He replied that he would put on his velvet thinking cap and, in two weeks, I had a 15-minute skit called Pilot’s Lounge. In the script, Mike’s character did all the talking, and I set him up. I called him and asked him what he thought. He said, “I don’t get it.” But when we finally read it, Mike got all the laughs! As usual, Mike killed, and it was be-
and he’d pose for a picture, and it buoyed his spirits. Fitting that his last performances were in a Mamet work. Even though Mike didn’t agree with David’s politics, he appreciated his craftsmanship and generosity. He told me he sent David a note thanking him for what David did for his career and how grateful he was for David’s loyalty. And, of course, Mike just had to let David know how he felt politically. Mike needed to tell his truth, especially to the people he loved, without malice. At Northlight, we have door codes to let everyone into the offices and the rehearsal hall. One day, when we were rehearsing a play called Hearts by Willy Holtzman (with Mike in the lead), he was a bit late. Annette was not well, and he had to hand off his responsibilities to her caregiver. He was not great with
technology and couldn’t negotiate the door code. Apparently, he lost his temper a bit at the woman who let him in the door. It took him a minute to settle down, but shortly after, the box office staffer came down to apologize for not recognizing him. He immediately apologized to her for his short-tempered outburst, explaining his behavior, and his anxiety over being late. He was never late, the work was sacred to him, and he was a consummate professional. Making an immediate amend was so like Mike. In the same production, we had a little disagreement over a moment in the play, but because I was the director, he accepted my suggestion. As I recall, in one of the reviews, the moment was lauded by the reviewer, and the next morning he called to thank me for insisting on playing it that way. I had forgotten about it. But in his pure sense of fairness and justice, he wanted to set the record straight. That’s Mike. He and Annette raised their children that way. Progressive, with an unerring sense of social justice and with the dedication to improve our world. [He was preceded in death by Annette, and his daughter, playwright and disability rights activist Susan Nussbaum. In addition to children Jack and Karen, he is survived by his second wife, Julie, and seven grandchildren.] At 100, Mike had come to his end. I brought him corned beef sandwiches from Kaufman’s in Skokie and we would watch his beloved Cubs, but the last visit he told me not to bring anything. Regardless—I brought a script with a great role in it for him, just to keep him engaged in the work. He wanted to go. He said he was bored. If he couldn’t act, what was the point? Karen, Jack, Barbara, his poker playing buddies, all understood his feelings. Rick Peeples, who was his ad hoc IT technician, would come over and fix the TV or his iPad. Kate Buddeke would play poker with him along with Bill Bannon and Jim Leaming. We all knew his wishes, and selfishly we all wanted him to stay, but if he couldn’t act . . . . At the end, he offered another lesson: to leave with dignity, with blunt honesty, and on his own terms. For Mike, it was about the work and his fellow artists. Lacking that, it was time to go. He never missed an entrance, and he knew how to make an exit. But his ghost light will always burn brightly for me. v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
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JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 21
FILM
“WE LOVE” R CTA’s Cicero Green Line station, 4800 W. Lake, free, all hours through March 2024 chicagofilmarchives.org/calendar/event/we-love
The “we love” projection, as seen from outside the Cicero el stop on the west side NANCY STONE
INSTALLATION
The Chicago Film Archives loves home movies The free, public film installation “we love” is on display through March at the Cicero Green Line station. By KAT SACHS
“A
s long as we have had cameras, we have made home movies about the people and things we love.” So reads the text superimposed over footage of people doing the kinds of things people do when captured for the sake of an intimate memento, here smiling at the camera while parading around babies. Such footage comprises the bulk of “we love,” an art installation running through March, wherein moving images are projected onto a wall in the mezzanine of the Cicero Green Line station. Created by the Chicago Film Archives (CFA) in partnership with the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), the 48-minute-long program begins with an approximately six-minute-long work created by School at the Art Institute professor Romi Crawford and filmmaker John O’Hagan, then proceeds to footage from various collections in the archives.
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Though it launched in March 2023, the installation started with a much earlier memory for CFA founder and executive director Nancy Watrous. “Way back, when I was . . . walking home after the sun was down . . . I loved the feeling of being in the dark and seeing lights coming from the houses . . . and this feeling of warmth and love and safety, all that stuff,” she says. “Skip forward many decades, I saw the [Crown Fountain] piece at [Millennium Park], where the kids are spitting out water . . . and so I’m thinking at that time, at some point I’d really like to get home movies, people from Chicago and the region, displayed throughout the city. And I think that earlier feeling of warmth that I had when I was a kid was also accompanying this somewhat.” It’s unlikely that anyone who made these home movies knew that one day their personal memories would make for public art. Young people who see the installation may not even
remember when the only way to record what one wanted to remember in perpetuity was with a camera, initially 8- and 16-millimeter cameras and later tape-based camcorders. CFA has as its mission, “identifying, collecting, preserving and providing access to films that represent the Midwest,” per their website, keeping secure this material that at one time was inherently precious because of its relative uncommonness (the equipment then being prohibitively expensive for many families) and now inherently precious for its rarity altogether. “Back then, it was a very special thing to pull out a camera and start filming something,” O’Hagan says about the experience of working with this material. “We realized that everyone was filming things that they loved, people that they loved, moments that they loved, and that they wanted to preserve and have for the rest of their lives.” Initially, Watrous had imagined the idea taking on a different form, perhaps on billboards throughout the city. Eventually, the CTA was chosen, “because so many people ride the CTA to work and back from work that it ended up there as a place that was so public and available,” she says. “We often tout that the public artwork featured in our stations is a glimpse into the windows of the community surrounding the station, but in this rare instance, this public art is offering a glimpse into the homes and lives of Chicagoans over the last several decades,” said CTA president Dorval R. Carter Jr. in a press release upon the installation’s opening. Finding the right spot was a journey in itself, with Watrous and collaborators riding every line on the CTA in late 2020 to scout potential locations. The Cicero Green Line station was the first or second place they visited, and the CTA ended up being especially keen on it because “it could use a little perking up,” says Watrous. In terms of how one mounts a movingimage installation in public, the process is not as simple as the end result may have it seem. “It’s an interesting technical challenge to identify sites for a project like this,” says Rebecca Hall, CFA’s director of communications and operations. “You can’t just project light onto any surface and have it be coherent. You need a white, flat wall, not a wall with little brick lines in it. You need it to be shaded so that it’s visible in the daytime. You need a place where you can mount a projector.” The opening piece, which gives the in-
stallation its name, was born of Crawford and O’Hagan watching close to 100 hours of footage and finding something they hadn’t expected. “Something that kept showing up was a sort of thesis around commonality,” says Crawford. “It was overwhelming, the extent to which we could watch footage from [families in] different neighborhoods in pockets of the city, and to be able to recognize literally common gestures. Things like picking up a child, blowing out birthday candles . . . we started to categorize the gestures. “This is why the film we love shows up in the way that it does, really because of what we found in the research. It wasn’t that we started with a thesis or that we started with an agenda—instead, we followed the research findings and made something that was really as true as possible to that material.” The project was especially close to Crawford’s interests, as she focuses on the comparative aspects of people in America and how they live through their racial and ethnic circumstances, she says. She likes that the installation is being projected onto a public surface, another area of her expertise being the Wall of Respect, created in 1967 and generally considered the first large-scale, outdoor community mural. What comes thereafter is more freewheeling, all footage selected by staff from the CFA collection. “We started looking at home movies that were probably more reflective of west-side neighborhoods and kind of picking our favorite little chunks,” Watrous says, “and not really doing much editing on them.” Also included is footage from more amateur films in the CFA collection—the distinction between these and home movies being that the intent of the former is more to make a film as one traditionally understands it—such as footage of people walking about downtown and timelapse animations of flowers blooming. It’s an ingenious idea, this putting of the private into a public space, with both a deliberate thesis and a more free-flowing interpretation of it; the name “we love” comes to represent the affection on display in these films and that which CFA and its collaborators have for the form itself, all of which come through in the singular installation. “It really is a beautifully simple project,” says Hall. “Home movies can be hard to exhibit out of really specific contexts . . . it really is as simple as taking these images and finding a way to display them where everybody can see them.” v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
R READER RECOMMENDED
FILM
Get showtimes and see reviews of everything playing this week at chicagoreader.com/movies.
NOW PLAYING
R Last Things
Last Things takes the measure of humankind (or lack thereof), whether floating through space or situated in a laboratory, while also showing how the hard, rough, robust backbone of the planet will take the reins once again. The film begins with a segment of Clarice Lispector’s novella, The Hour of the Star, where “one molecule said ‘yes’ to another molecule,” which sets the stage for the remainder of the film, where a voiced narration carries the viewer through the story of time in 50 minutes. Chicago-based artist and filmmaker Deborah Stratman utilizes minerals to walk us through evolution and the elements that surround us in her new experimental film. And it’s not all butterflies and roses, either. With a sinister soundscape by Brian Eno and Okkyung Lee, as well as haunting dialogue, evolution feels terrifying. Mankind perishes, and there is little to no presence of our footprint in the film at all. “This story takes place in a state of emergency and public calamity,” says the narrator. What ensues is a hypnosis of mineral supremacy, a world where all things are rocks and humankind is easily replaced by crevices and cracks. The minerals “annihilated the people” and took back the planet, creating a vast and dense landscape with no insects and no cars, leaving only an elemental kingdom. Using images from outer space, crystals shining in the light, sketches, and microscopic objects, Stratman creates a new, chaotic history of what it means to kill a planet. Last Things takes us through a kaleidoscope of shapes, colors, and forms that represent who was here first and who will outlast us. Don’t watch it small—I suggest seeing the fall of humanity and the rise of the rock kingdom on the big screen. —S. NICOLE LANE 50
min. Gene Siskel Film Center
Occupied City Steve McQueen’s nearly four-and-a-half-hour documentary presents, one by one, various places in contemporary Amsterdam while resurfacing the history of these locations as they pertain to the city’s Nazi occupation during World War II. It’s the same thing over and over again, the story of each spot narrated in voiceover by British actress Melanie Hyams, who becomes our tour guide through the past and its connection to the present. Adapted from the book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945 by Dutch filmmaker Bianca Stigter (who’s also married to McQueen), this film revels in history big and small, from people (such as Anne Frank) and events that may already be known to viewers to lesser-known occasions and personages. The juxtaposition between stories from the past and scenes of the present—many of which reflect the time during which it was shot, the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—emphasizes what Hannah Arendt famously referred to as the
banality of evil, reminding us how terror, enforced in part by people who had previously lived peacefully as neighbors, became part of the citizens’ day-to-day lives. It’s an effective dichotomy to be sure, but it becomes played out well before it ends. McQueen also makes installation art, and this is of a piece with that practice; it’s a work that might be better appreciated in parts than all the way through. The filmmakers Wang Bing and Kevin Jerome Everson also work in both formats, but their films feel like films and their installations like installations. This lacks that differentiation, feeling too much like one and not enough of the other. I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from seeing it, but I imagine that one viewing will be enough. —KAT SACHS PG-13, 246 min.
Gene Siskel Film Center
R The Zone of Interest
The question that haunts Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is disarmingly direct: How do you sleep at night? It applies literally to the film’s subjects, the family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), who are encircled by the sounds of genocide after moving into their dream home built on the other side of the wall from the concentration camp. The film moves at an anesthetized lull as we watch Rudolf and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) go about their routine from a cold distance. They host family, chat about their Italian vacations, and go on picnics. At night, we watch through an otherworldly thermal lens as their Jewish maid hides apples around the camp for the prisoners to find. Faced with the challenge of depicting the Holocaust, most filmmakers sentimentalize it by zeroing in on a universally relatable story within the camps, something inspiring about love or family or hope transcending evil. As a Jew, I find it a little grotesque. Glazer’s film instead speaks a new cinematic language defined by omission. We never see the Holocaust, but it’s felt in everything we encounter: it’s the dense wall of screams buried under every line of dialogue, calibrated to a 600page research document Glazer’s crew assembled to determine the distance and volume of every occurrence on a typical day in Auschwitz; it’s the fistful of metal fillings that their son inspects with a flashlight under his blanket; it’s Hedwig showing her mother-in-law their garden while a pillar of black smoke rises from behind the barbwire wall beside them. That question is also directed at you, bored into submission by the banality of the Höss family’s lives. This is, by design, a monotonous film about being surrounded by unfathomable horrors so continuously—in our city, in cell phone videos of police brutality, in photos of Palestinian mothers cradling dying children in Gaza—that they cease to even register. It’s a claustrophobic and uncomfortable viewing experience because it doesn’t ask for our sympathy—it confronts us with our passivity. How do you sleep through this? When did you stop feeling shock? —JOEY SHAPIRO PG-13, 105 min. Alamo
Drafthouse Wrigleyville v
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MUSIC
Angry Blackmen blow off their own roof
The hip-hop duo’s new album for Deathbomb Arc, The Legend of ABM, raises the emotional stakes of their already noisy, turbulent sound. By LEOR GALIL
I
n June 2014, Chicago rapper Quentin Branch was scheduled for his first live show, opening for Michigan MC Prozak at Another Hole in the Wall in south suburban Steger. Prozak was signed to Strange Music, an indie label cofounded by long-grinding Kansas City rapper Tech N9ne. Debuting with such a high-profile show, Branch says, scared him a little. Then another rapper, Brian Warren, asked to join him for his set. Warren was hungry to get onstage—any stage—and the two MCs had recently become friends. Branch said yes, and Warren helped him with his nerves. “Everyone was like, ‘Y’all killed that,’” Branch says. “I’m like, ‘OK, there might be something going on here.’” He and Warren kept performing together and building their rapport, and in 2016, Warren proposed forming a duo. At first Branch declined. There weren’t many groups in the scene to show him how it could work—almost every MC wanted to be a solo star. “But I
thought about it for a couple minutes,” Branch says. “I was like, ‘What would you name it?’ He was like, ‘Mad Black Men.’ I was like, ‘That’s corny as shit. What if we call it “Angry Blackmen”? ’Cause it sounds more aggressive.’” In the ensuing years, Angry Blackmen have cultivated a sound that thrums with intensity. They rap over noisy productions with percussion that clangs at disorienting intervals, synths that squelch and shriek, and dirty bass blasts that threaten to rupture the songs. Warren and Branch maintain a playful authority on the mike that corrals these disordered, dissonant instrumentals, so that the elements seem to move together in an animated mass—they’re like the scattered bits of the Iron Giant, all rolling to the same place. Branch’s full-throated delivery and dry, husky voice make even his loudest, fiercest declarations sound like he’s barely warmed up. Warren has a richer voice and a wildcard streak—even when a verse feels like it’s speeding toward a brick wall, he can give it a tantalizing melodicism. Chicago has brought the world a hip-hop buffet over the past five years, and some of those acts also play with chaos and aggression—but few if any sound like Angry Blackmen, who combine huge volcanic force with arty sensibilities. Their new album, The Legend of ABM (due via experimental label Deathbomb Arc on January 26), supersizes everything that makes them distinctive. Within a few years of forming Angry Blackmen, Warren and Branch began to attract a
Angry Blackmen: Brian Warren and Quentin Branch PHOTOS ON THIS PAGE BY JOSEPH TORRES
24 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2024
cult following. Their fan base notably includes other artists who make noisy experimental hip-hop: Angry Blackmen were initially recommended to Deathbomb Arc founder Brian Miller by vocalistpercussionist Margot Padilla of True Neutral Crew, a performance group associated with Deathbomb, and Jonathan Snipes, producer for Deathbomb artist Clipping. “The more I looked into how much they were getting themselves out there into the world already, it seemed like a good match,” Miller says. “Being on Deathbomb would be something that they would be able to use and help themselves—which kind of is key for being on the label, since I’m just one guy here in a bedroom.” Angry Blackmen made their debut on Deathbomb Arc in 2020 with the EP Headshots! Miller has been running Deathbomb since 1998, and he’s released music by a bafflingly diverse roster of artists, among them singer-songwriter Julia Holter, postpunks Abe Vigoda, underground pop artist U.S. Girls, and noise-rock project Gang Wizard. He’s less interested in focusing on a genre or scene than in releasing music that moves him, but he acknowledges that Deathbomb’s noisy hip-hop releases—by the likes of Clipping, JPEGmafia, and Death Grips—have had an outsize effect on public perceptions of the label. Some of the heads who’ve flocked to Deathbomb because of those releases have surely been turned on to Angry Blackmen, and Miller is confident they’ll be thrilled with The Legend of ABM. “To me, it’s just another amazing album that I’m so fucking lucky to get to put out,” he says. “If it happens to reinforce this belief that a lot of people have that Deathbomb’s strong point is doing hip-hop releases—well, so be it. But I’ll still put out a country album a month from now if I want to.” For The Legend of ABM, Branch and Warren didn’t depart from their approach to music so
much as sharpen the skills that already made them stand out. “We was on some Dungeon Family–type writing,” Warren says. “We was really pouring our heart and soul into [it]. Some of the stuff that I wrote down, I was actually tearing up a little bit, just reminiscing.”
A
t age nine, in the early 2000s, Warren liked to spend time in his parents’ basement, surrounded by his father’s massive record collection. “My dad made these custom speakers,” he says, “these speakers that was super big—I mean, bigger than your body. He would play house music, and I would just be sitting there, jibber-jabbering lyrics.” His dad produced music too. “He almost got signed to Motown,” Warren says. “But they didn’t need any more producers—they just wanted writers.” His father’s musical ambitions rubbed off on Warren. Later in the 2000s, he’d visit his mom at her day job and print out lyrics to Lil Wayne songs. “I’d just be sitting there just practicing, going over and over,” Warren says. “I just found a love outta that. Then I started making my own.” Branch came of age during the same period as Warren, but it took him some time to find hip-hop that spoke to him—during his childhood, mainstream rap was in its bling era, and that rubbed him the wrong way. While in high school, though, he noticed a sea change in the
MUSIC culture. “We saw the emergence of people like Odd Future,” he says. “The blog era was coming up. J. Cole was doing his thing; Kendrick was doing his thing.” In the early 2010s, Branch’s friends played him “Freaks and Geeks” by Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino. “I remember being so blown away by it,” Branch says. “In retrospect, the shit is corny now. But at the time I was like, ‘He’s actually talking about shit that relates to me.’ I was feeling so seen.” Branch dug into the rest of Glover’s work, which he found nourishing. “I was like, ‘If this dude can do it, I can do it,’” he says. “I feel like we’re pretty similar in some of the stuff we like.” When Branch and Warren met in 2014, Warren already had some experience finding places to perform around town. He was used to calling venues looking for gigs, and he was used to getting rebuffed. “I was on the phone with House of Blues’s talent scouter—I forgot his name,” Warren says. “He would look at my Instagram and say, ‘Man, you ain’t got enough credentials to get in here. Get your credentials up and then visit me later.’” As Branch and Warren began building their solo careers, they worked out of the south suburbs. They were part of a loose collective that included MCs who attended Prairie State in Chicago Heights or Governors State in University Park. “When Angry Blackmen started,” Branch says, “we started getting more connected to the city. We would go to YCA [Young Chicago Authors] and all that and meet people there.” One of Angry Blackmen’s most important early Chicago connections was to rapper Ric Wilson. In early 2017 they dropped their debut single, “OK!,” which Wilson mixed. Its uplifting nu-funk instrumental hews closer to his sunny, disco-influenced aesthetic than to the turbulent sound the duo would soon develop. As Branch and Warren sought out their niche, they say, Wilson introduced them to other emerging Chicago hip-hop artists. “So, 2017 and 2018, we were really trying to find a sound,” Branch says. “We were experimenting.” In December 2017, Angry Blackmen dropped “Riot!,” a smoldering single that hinted at the caustic direction the duo would take with the self-released 2019 EP Talkshit! “At that point, it was just so many other artists showing us that we can make abrasive, weird shit,” Branch says. “I credit JPEGmafia for opening up that rabbit hole. I was like, ‘Oh, you can do stuff like this!’” This newly evolved sound also better fit the logo Warren and Branch had been using
since the launch of Angry Blackmen. Branch had drawn a simple cartoon face with big lips, an Afro, and a grimace full of teeth—he’d modeled it after the logo for MF Doom’s old group KMD, which also satirizes racist caricatures of Black people. Angry Blackmen had found a path, but it would still take them another year or so to figure out where they were going. So far they’d worked mainly with producers Gary G Beats and Wendigo, but they’d shortly meet another crucial collaborator. “The third one’s the charm,” Warren says. “Took about three producers.”
I
n February 2020, Angry Blackmen played at a punk house in Elmwood Park with Chicago rapper Blake Saint David and Minneapo-
really thin rugs laid down and a bunch of blankets everywhere. I had treated it with cheap foam, so it worked. It looked really grimy—it looks how that album sounds.” “That was a little trial run,” Branch says. When Angry Blackmen went on to make Reality! with Allen in 2021, everything clicked. During the long process of creating The Legend of ABM, which began even before Reality! came out, their partnership was firing on all cylinders. “We were like, ‘This is our guy! This is our Alchemist!’” To make the tracks on The Legend of ABM, Allen started with field recordings, drones, and other synth sounds, often warping them beyond recognition. He created so much material for Angry Blackmen that he can’t recall exactly how the selections on the album came
“This album kicked my butt a little bit,” says Brian Warren (at left). “I be coming in with some surfacelevel stuff, and Quentin be like, ‘Nah, that ain’t it!’” KEATON BEACH
lis crew KillUsOnline. In the crowd was Derek Allen, who makes dark electro as Formants and plays in a noisy punk trio called Lower Automation with the drummer who ran shows at that house. Angry Blackmen impressed him so much that he introduced himself to Warren and Branch on the spot. “He was like, ‘Man, that shit was fucking awesome,’” Branch says. “‘If y’all need anything, just let me know!’ I’m looking at this guy, like, ‘OK, yeah yeah.’” Allen remained in touch with the duo as the country shut down in the early months of the pandemic. Their friendship grew through text messages. In June, Angry Blackmen went to Allen’s parents’ house to record Headshots! “Their basement sort of looks like Silence of the Lambs,” Allen says. “Everything’s unfinished. It basically was this corner where I had
together, but he does remember processing the hell out of what was probably the noise of a wood-burning stove and a footfall. “One of my favorite things about working with them—beyond just being friends and having this shared love for dirty, grimy, in-your-face stuff—is that they chose the weirdest beats that I make,” Allen says. “Almost all of them, I’m like, ‘Uh, OK.’ It’s just strange.” As Angry Blackmen began working on The Legend of ABM in 2021, Branch was battling depression and alcoholism. “I was like, ‘Man, I don’t think I’m gonna make it past 27,’” he says. He hoped that getting out of Chicago could help him escape that bad place in his head, and he made plans to move to New Mexico at the end of the year. “I told him, ‘Man, go,’” Warren says. “‘We
are on a watery, rocky planet. Go out there and see something. Don’t stay tied down here.’ It was a lot going on that year.” In fall 2022, Branch was in a three-vehicle car crash in Santa Fe. He made it out with just a bruise from his seatbelt, but he was shaken up. He was 27 at the time, and he couldn’t help but think of his earlier premonition of doom. The crash motivated him to open himself up more in his music—and to push Warren to do the same. You can hear the results on The Legend of ABM. “I ain’t gonna lie, this album kicked my butt a little bit,” Warren says. “I be coming in with some surface-level stuff, and Quentin be like, ‘Nah, that ain’t it! Let me hear the argument about you and your momma last week! That’s what I need to hear!’” They completed the new album this past spring. “I probably never in my life will forget listening back to it, because none of us expected it to turn out the way it did,” Allen says. “We were all giggling, ’cause it ended up being a lot cooler than we imagined it would be. A lot of stuff came out from both of them that I didn’t expect going into it.” In the years between Reality! and The Legend of ABM, Angry Blackmen have done a lot to reach new fans in their niche. They opened a couple east-coast shows for veteran underground duo Dälek in 2022, and in July 2023 they played a Black & Brown punk festival in Houston alongside noise-rap phenom Blackie, who’s a fan of Angry Blackmen. That said, it’s probably fair to say that Warren and Branch make music for the sake of making music, not because they imagine they’ll be supporting themselves with it anytime soon. Their best streaming numbers are in the tens of thousands (with around 1,000 monthly listeners on Spotify), and they have just shy of 11,000 Instagram followers. While they’ve sold out the physical editions of their previous Deathbomb releases, that means just a few hundred copies. The Legend of ABM may not make Angry Blackmen stars, but it ought to push all those numbers up—and help the duo build the reputation they deserve. “I want a peace of mind that says we did all that we could, and I want prosperity,” Warren says. “I just want an understanding that people understand the art that we’re putting together.” “He’s giving you that answer,” Branch says. “Imma be real. I want people to throw some respect on our name, like Birdman.” v
m lgalil@chicagoreader.com JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 25
MUSIC CHICAGOANS OF NOTE
Nix Campbell, dance party lighting designer “All the artists here are so talented and cool and sexy. I was like, ‘I just want to light them up!’” As told to MICCO CAPORALE In the church of electronic music, Nix Campbell performs baptisms with light. The 33-year-old lighting designer grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he spent his childhood nights at amateur hockey games. During the week, his father worked as an educator, but on weekends he refereed on the ice, shepherding the elegance and brutality of the contest. Campbell recalls how flashes of color would sync with music to heighten the bonding experience and the drama. It was his earliest understanding of adults’ need for spaces to commune by getting a little wild—and his earliest memory of being captivated by the power of lighting. Campbell fell in love with dance music as a teenager, and he’s followed his passion to multiple cities and states to experience different electronic-music communities. In 2018, he landed in Detroit and began experimenting with lighting underground parties. Three years later, he moved to Chicago, and since then he’s made a name for himself as grooving’s most devoted lighting artist. He helped build the lighting setup for Podlasie Club during its 2022 remodel, and he’s a staff lighting designer at Smart Bar, where he runs a monthly party called Club Crush. He’s worked with other parties too, among them Eden, Strapped, and Hidden Ideas, and he draws as much inspiration from local musicians such as Miss Twink USA and Ariel Zetina as he does from Caravaggio paintings and cult-classic and art-house films.
longed. Dancing in crowds and dissolving into them is such a natural feeling for me. Tulsa was a very band-heavy place to grow up. I had a friend who lived in Berlin for a while and brought the idea of DJing to the city, but we never had a lot of that stuff. Growing up, I got a lot of dance music off the Internet. It wasn’t until I was a bit older that I even got to see big DJs. I got lucky and experienced Day for Night in Houston [in 2016] when that was, like, a thing. I got to see Aphex Twin, Sophie, and Mykki Blanco all play one festival. Once I started being around it, it just became my life, and I’d travel as often as I could to experience it. In 2018, I moved to Detroit—which, you know, has a huge history with dance music. Sometime before I moved, I remember getting a grant to make a sculpture that was, like, a big chandelier piece. It was my first time working with lighting. It had all these LEDs connected to Arduinos that I’d hand soldered, and then I created these paper pieces to go around the lights, which were motion activated. At the time, I didn’t know why I did it. I just wanted something that hung over people’s heads and lit up in these specific ways when people got close to it. It took me a while to connect all the dots between my interests. I knew I cared about art, but I always felt stuck doing purely visual, 2D work. I’ve always spent a lot of time developing my bedroom or my private areas. I’ve always been concerned with creating spaces for people to feel comfortable—like, where they can feel competent and safe. It brings out more emotion. When I was younger, everyone looked to me for a party. I remember throwing a party in junior high and just spending so much time crafting a make-out corner—I was
obsessed with getting the lighting right! Like, “What can I do to get these people kissing?” [Laughs.] The same year I moved to Detroit, I went to a conference in Montreal. The city of Montreal has always been really influential to me, but that was the first time I saw a lighting designer on a rave bill. These young kids were bringing in a high level of DIY production to underground parties that made them feel immersive. That’s when it clicked for me, like,
mates with Tammy Lakkis, who’s gone on to be hugely successful. She hired me to do a really big visual projection at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and I worked with a lighting artist to make sure the rest of the room worked with my visuals. After that, I started getting a ton of local bookings for projection mappings and live graphics. And then the pandemic happened. During lockdown I put a lot of time and energy into honing my craft. I was tired of doing only pro-
“I brought my laser into Podlasie before it was renovated, and people went crazy— they just loved it.”
I
enjoy dancing and seeing people dance. When I was about 12, I remember my friend and her friend who was a bit wealthier rented a hotel suite and had a DJ. All these kids were dancing and going crazy. It felt so easy and natural and the kind of place where I be-
26 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2024
Pacer of Dasani Boys spins a DJ set amid a lighting installation by Nix Campbell at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art’s Art After Hours series in July 2023. ALX CARRION
“Oh, I really care about this!” And I was like, “I could be doing this in Detroit.” I’ve always been good with technology. I pick up software really quickly, so I started using this software called TouchDesigner to do projection mapping and live graphics rendering at parties. During that time, I was really fortunate because I ended up being room-
jections. It reminded me of a TV screen. I saw everyone’s attention getting sucked into it, like they would at a sports bar. It’s fine, people get mesmerized, but I wanted something that spread the experience across the room more. So I saved up money and got a laser made by Pangolin that’s really responsive. I could do vector graphics and play it with a computer or
MUSIC
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Nix Campbell practices at home with a sign plugging his Smart Bar party, Club Crush. SARAH HAMBURGER
MIDI controller. A month after getting vaccinated in 2021, I moved to Chicago. I didn’t have a reason to move; I just kind of woke up one day and had this gut feeling. I knew the DJ Lorelei, and she connected me with Craig Gronowski, who’s always been really supportive and connected me to Podlasie. I brought my laser into Podlasie before it was renovated, and people went crazy—they just loved it. That’s when I decided to officially transition out of projection mapping and focus on full immersive lighting. Now I use light fixtures and lasers and control them through software. At the end of 2021, Podlasie reached out to me about being a part of the renovation team, and then I got hired at a few other places. I started working at Smart Bar in February of 2022. From then until now I was doing lighting for an insane amount of shows. I would play almost every weekend. My output has been insane, and my friends have been begging me to slow down. They’re right! This work puts a lot of wear and tear on your body, so I’m starting to move back to a studio practice. When I started back in 2018, I probably would have been like, “I’m not creating art, I’m creating ambience.” I was very hesitant to talk about my work, but I was putting tons of time and energy into it and thinking very intensely about it. During the pandemic, I spent a lot of time alone in my studio, and it’s only been recently that I started to really understand myself as an artist. There’s a really technical side of lighting design, and people make whole careers as
lighting designers. There’s also light artists like Dan Flavin and James Turrell. I like to think I’m meeting somewhere in the middle, because I’m providing a behind-the-scenes service and this is very much my art practice. I was really fortunate to meet a lot of people really quickly after I moved. I felt so received here. I’ve been out in Oklahoma and Detroit, but I’ve felt another level of supported and seen here. I wanted to give back to the dance community, and lighting was the best way I knew to do it. All the artists here are so talented and cool and sexy. I was like, “I just want to light them up!” What makes good lighting is subjective, but to me, it’s finding that sweet spot where people feel cocooned—like where you feel vulnerable but also safe. On a technical level, how much darkness will there be? Will the light appear at specific times? What’s the cadence of the music? You want to work with the motion of the sound without getting repetitive. There have to be moments of excitement and surprise. And of course you have to think about color. What’s the emotion of the room? The DJ is a good focal point to ground the room, but the dancers are the real stars. You’re lighting them; you’re sculpting their forms through light. In some ways, the dance floor is, like, one cohesive body made up of all these different individuals. And they’re all so creative! I want everyone to feel like they have their moment. v
BOMBAY BICYLE CLUB
SONS OF THE SILENT AGE
FRI M AR 1 5 / 9PM / 1 8 +
ft. Michael Shannon playing the songs of Brian Eno FRI JAN 26 / 9PM / 18+ M E T RO, SMA RT BA R , F O RMAT & O B S C U R E PRE S E NT
999999999 BRENDA JOSH TONG
+ Cyanotic
S AT M AR 1 6 / 7: 30 PM / 1 8 + ST. PAT RI CK'S DAY CE LE BRAT I ON
THE TOSSERS
W ED M AR 20 / 9PM / 1 8 + 1833 W E LCOM E S
F R I F E B 02 / 9 P M / 1 8 +
FLIP PHONE XXL DANCE PARTY & DRAG SHOW
DANNY BROWN
with Kornbread / Hershii LiqCour-Jeté S A T M A R 09 / 8 P M / A L L A G E S
JAKE SCOTT
KMFDM
MAR 21 MAR 22 MAR 23 MAR 24
ANA TIJOUX CLAIRE ROSINKRANZ TOO MANY ZOOZ LEE FIELDS + Y LA BAMBA
SMARTBARCHICAGO.COM 3730 N CLARK ST | 21+
FRI JAN 19 Things That Go Bump In The Night
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HORSE MEAT DISCO HARRY CROSS SAT JAN 27
AVALON EMERSON SEVRON LEESH SAT FEB 10
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m mcaporale@chicagoreader.com JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 27
Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of January 11
MUSIC
b ALL AGES F
PICK OF THE WEEK
Chicago electronic duo Drama call for love, resistance, and freedom
Via Rosa and Na’el Shehade of Drama ZOE RAIN
DRAMA, RIC WILSON, DERRICK CARTER, TERRY HUNTER, EMMACULATE Sat 1/20, 7 PM, Salt Shed, 1357 N. Elston, $35-$70. 17+
DRAMA, THE ECLECTIC ELECTRONIC DUO of singer and lyricist Via Rosa and producer Na’el Shehade, put out their full-length debut, Dance Without Me (Ghostly International), in February 2020, and they easily could’ve dropped the ball when the pandemic shuttered the live music industry. Instead, they burst out of lockdown to play on stages as big as Lollapalooza in 2021 and Soldier Field in 2022 (where they opened for Coldplay), and they didn’t compromise their artistic integrity or agency on the road to commercial success. Last year, Drama continued their ascent into the limelight with a triumphant set at Coachella and a European tour in support of their latest release, Till We Die. Released in November, the seven-song digital EP is all killer, no filler: Shehade’s sleek production builds atmospheres, and the arrangements fuse smart electronic pop, chic R&B, and hypnotic house with bits of disco, soul, indie rock, and more. On the sultry self-titled opening track, Rosa moves among rapping, crooning, and spoken word set against pulse-raising beats, while the funky “Tighten It Up” recalls “Erotic City”–era Prince as she entices listeners to “meet me on the dance floor.” Though Till We Die was record-
28 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2024
ed before the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October, the timing of its release gave the songs new resonance for their creators—especially Shehade, who’s a second-generation Palestinian American. In a November 9 Instagram post, he wrote about the emotional turmoil he suffered as he tried to go about his daily life as the Israeli government ramped up its strikes on Gaza. In his call for an end to the violence and the occupation, he asked the world to uphold the “fundamental right” of freedom for all, and he cited Drama’s songs—and the very existence of the duo’s members—as acts of resistance. “By releasing this project tomorrow,” he said, “we do so in honor of the Palestinian people, and all people, regardless of culture, religion or the color of their skin.” Drama drove that point home the next day in a Facebook post dedicating their EP to “all the people fighting for LOVE.” The world is in for a tumultuous 2024, but it seems ripe to be a big year for Drama—not least because they’re starting it with a high-profile hometown headlining show. Their success might feel bittersweet, especially if nothing else gets better, but the joy, catharsis, and humanity they pack into their tunes will help us all deal with whatever comes. —JAMIE LUDWIG
THURSDAY11 Fetishist Snuffed headline; Fetishist and Heet Deth open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10. 21+ Chicago punk band Fetishist, who grew out of performance art group Maternity Ward, are visually oriented and playfully raw and heavy. Their first album, 2020’s Sin Etiquette, showed plenty of promise, but guitarist Brendan White tells me the band wasn’t too happy with it—they eventually deleted it from their Bandcamp page. In the intervening years, Fetishist have undergone some lineup shifts and expansions. The band originally consisted of White on bass, Erica Gressman on drums, and Majora Lee on guitar and vocals. White left town for a while, and Bill Williams took over on bass; when White returned, he rejoined as second guitarist and recruited vocalist and synth player Kyle Futrell to round out the group’s sound. As a five-piece, Fetishist reenvisioned Sin Etiquette as a new full-length with a new name: about a year ago, they went into Electrical Audio with Steve Albini and rerecorded its tracks live to tape, along with some new songs. The bandmates consider the resulting album, Austerity Messiah, their true debut. The record is a thrilling ride that showcases the band’s tight musicianship and chunky, layered sound. The new version of “Oathkeeper’’ slides and pulses with postpunk intensity; the gothic doom of “Conquistador” is sinister, slinky, and threatening; “St. Ethyl” builds from a chant-along invitation to headbang into a shifting, churning climax. The members build on one another’s performances and can turn on a dime as a unit. Fetishist are somewhat mysterious by design and keep a relatively low profile online, so if you’re lucky enough to stumble across them, you’re in for an unfiltered experience—a rare treat, now that underground bands often maintain active social media presences even before they’ve recorded a note. Fetishist celebrate the release of Austerity Messiah at this Empty Bottle show, where they share the bill with fierce local hardcore quartet Snuffed and noisy postgarage duo Heet Deth. It’s got all the makings of a high-energy evening of sweet, stylistically diverse sonic battery. —MONICA KENDRICK
Haptic Cleared and Maar open. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15. 18+ Adam Sonderberg, Joseph Clayton Mills, and Steven Hess formed Haptic in Chicago 19 years ago as a live performance unit, because the studiogenerated ambient sounds of their other joint endeavor, the Dropp Ensemble, afforded them little opportunity to share face time with audiences. But for much of its existence, the trio has rarely played out; it’s had to contend with one or another of its members living in other states. These days, Haptic’s essence isn’t located in any particular style, set of instruments, or performance method—it arises from the persistence and problem-solving strategies necessary to get everyone together in the same room in Chicago long enough to make some sounds. The immaculately recorded drums and keyboards on Haptic’s most recent album, 2022’s Ladder of Shadows (901 Editions), betray its origins at
MUSIC Experimental Sound Studio, where the trio created it in a single day of live performances. But its yet-tobe-released follow-up, Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, consists instead of lengthy, degraded field recordings of unidentifiable outdoor spaces, resonant rooms, and humming machinery, plus occasional instruments captured either from close up or far away—a set of aesthetic choices that concretizes the lengthy separations and brief reunions that characterize Haptic’s existence. The trio’s sporadic schedule leaves plenty of calendar time for its members to pursue other creative endeavors, and a couple of them have sustained long-term projects with guitarist, electronic musician, and visual artist Michael Vallera. In Cleared, Hess and Vallera have abstracted rock music by alternately magnifying and atomizing the sounds of electric guitars, drum kit, and electronics. Mills and Vallera have a project called Maar, whose output is more amorphous, building sprawling soundscapes from crunchy textures and rhythms in advanced states of entropy. While Maar and Cleared play live now and then, this is the first time they’ve shared the bill with Haptic and each other. —BILL MEYER
SUNDAY14 Sweet Bike Truth or Consequences, New Mexico headline; Disaster Kid and Sweet Bike open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport. 21+ F Chicago four-piece Sweet Bike play emo like 2013 never ended. That makes their sound feel different than it would if they were actually in 2013, refashioning the gritty melodies of 90s emo for a new generation. Sweet Bike don’t sound nostalgic for the halcyon days of the Fireside Bowl—they seem to be calling back to Strangelight, a short-lived early2010s Logan Square DIY space that hosted several shows by Philadelphia emo-revival poster boys
Sweet Bike ANTHONY CORBO
Algernon Cadwallader. This also makes Sweet Bike stand out from the current crowd of fifth-wave emo acts, who are rebuilding the genre from the ground up; Sweet Bike do their rebuilding with the galloping rhythms, whiplash-inducing riffs, cycling guitar patterns, and distressed hollering that have been part of emo for decades. Their debut album, last year’s self-released Ode to Coty, is as invigorating as getting splashed with a bucket of ice water in August. Sweet Bike burst out of the gate with instantaneous intensity and slalom through these songs with the jittery eagerness of a band convinced that this is their one shot. Thankfully they don’t exclusively play like they’re planning to burn out after a single record: on “Final Battle (With Bonus Rage),” where Sweet Bike crescendo into a wall of sound, they also ease up on the throttle a bit, revealing a talent for magnetic melodies that’s much more sustainable than frantic energy. —LEOR GALIL
WEDNESDAY17 Reginald Mobley Cheryl Cellon Lindquist accompanies Mobley on piano. 7:30 PM, Roosevelt University, Ganz Hall, 430 S. Michigan, $49, $43 seniors, $16 students. b Reginald Mobley is one of the finest countertenors working today. A few top-flight male trebles might match the luminosity of his voice, which is as bright as the sky on a cloudless day. Their high notes may pierce just as cleanly as his. But I’ve yet to hear another vocalist deploy such a rarefied instrument with the plummy, sophisticated quality of Mobley’s singing. Raised in Florida and based in Boston, he’s a soloist for John Eliot Gardiner’s esteemed Monteverdi Choir, with whom he performed at Charles’s coronation in 2023, and he acts as programming consultant for the Handel and Haydn Society, the oldest continuously run classical music organization
Fetishist COURTESY THE ARTIST
Reginald Mobley RICHARD DUMAS
JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 29
MUSIC continued from p. 29
in the U.S. His talent has captured the attention of more than just classical tastemakers: in 2022, Mobley and Chicago-based theorbist Brandon Acker posted a performance video of Henry Purcell’s “Music for a While” that’s racked up nearly 700,000 views on YouTube as of this writing, a rarity in the insular world of Baroque music and an impressive feat for any song published in 1702. Mobley’s vocal range may be exceeded by the broadness of his musical horizons. If Baroque arias are a countertenor’s daily bread, then Mobley’s repertoire builds a meal around them: his programs and recordings slot Bach next to 20th-century and contemporary art songs, Motown hits, tunes from the Great American Songbook, and arrangements of spirituals. His regular recital partner Baptiste Trotignon, a French pianist with whom he released the album Because (Alpha) last year, comes from the jazz world. In this Roosevelt University recital (produced by the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago, the city’s most consistently excellent independent art-song organization), Mobley trains his trademark versatility on the concept of codeswitching. Its selection of love songs gives nearly equal weight to Purcell and to Florence Beatrice Price (1887-1953), cited as the first Black woman to have her music performed by a major orchestra. In a section of the program about struggle, Handel makes way for 20th-century Black composer Moses Hogan. Whether you’re a classical music person or not (watch the “Music for a While” video if you haven’t), this promises to be one of the winter’s can’t-miss performances. —HANNAH EDGAR
THURSDAY18 Torres Part of the Tomorrow Never Knows festival, which runs from Wed 1/17 through Sun 1/21 at Lincoln Hall, Schubas, Gman Tavern, and Sleeping Village. My Brightest Diamond and Aisha Burns open. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $25, $20 in advance. 18+ Mackenzie Scott, who makes music as Torres, is 12 years and six albums into her musical career, and
Mackenzie Scott of Torres EBRU YILDIZ
30 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2024
Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews. while she isn’t exactly exploring new ground on her latest full-length, October’s What an Enormous Room (Merge), she hasn’t lost a step either. The record draws from indie rock past and present, including heart-on-sleeve pop punk a la Liz Phair, growling grunge guitar, a touch of angular new wave, and ruggedly sweet roots melodies that nod to her southern upbringing. Scott fuses everything together into a reliably hooky mix of roar and caress. The album’s standout track is the slow-boil revenge put-down “Collect,” which combines the soft-loud dynamics made famous by the likes of Nirvana and the Pixies with a lovely, incongruent bridge where Scott sings at the top of her range, evoking an echoey dream-pop sound that’s more Cocteau Twins than Kurt Cobain. Scott flexes another side of her artistry on the uplifting “Jerk Into Joy,” whose beautiful multitracked harmonies wouldn’t sound out of place on a Brandi Carlile album (if you stripped away much of the feedback). Enormous Room doesn’t have an anthem that packs the punch of “Don’t Go Putting Wishes in My Head” from 2021’s Thirstier or a ballad as haunting as “Three Futures” from the 2017 album of the same name, but that’s all the more reason to head to this show at Lincoln Hall. Whether Scott is playing new tunes or cuts from her back catalog, her in-person reworkings of her music are consistently excellent. —NOAH BERLATSKY
FRIDAY19 Corker Spread Joy and Body Shop open. 10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12. 21+ Few contemporary punk labels have impressed me as much as Feel It Records, which launched in 2010 in Richmond, Virginia. The label’s catalog is stuffed with midwestern acts, among them sugary Indiana garage-pop unit the Cowboys, nervy Kansas City solo outfit Silicone Prairie, scary Iowa misfits Why Bother?, and playful Chicago postpunks Spread Joy. Feel It founder Sam Richardson moved the label to the midwest in 2022, and it now operates out of Cincinnati—also home to brooding postpunk band
Corker ALEXZANDRA ROY Corker, who released Falser Truths on the label in September. Corker create a cavernous sound, as though they’d started with richly layered arrangements and then stripped them to the bone; the chill that pervades these songs is the kind caused by blood loss. As gaunt and hollow as Corker can feel on Falser Truths, they play with such a focused drive that their music has a thrilling swing and energy. They deploy icicle-sharp guitar stabs and sheets of twisting, atonal noise with surgical precision—they’ll leave you on edge with excitement, and they can summon the sort of dread that tantalizes as well as terrifies. —LEOR GALIL
L’Rain Part of the Tomorrow Never Knows festival, which runs from Wed 1/17 through Sun 1/21 at Lincoln Hall, Schubas, Gman Tavern, and Sleeping Village. Trinity Star Ultra open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $25. 21+ The expansive work of L’Rain—aka multi-instrumentalist Taja Cheek—has always had the energy of a live wire, relentlessly jolting through disparate genres and inspirations. On her third full-length, October’s disconcertingly titled I Killed Your Dog, she pulls from a motley palette to stamp the archetypical breakup record with her sonic imprint: vintage synth patches, ripped voice memos, and a sound bite of choreographer Bill T. Jones recalling a dream spar with balmy field recordings and baroque electrified arrangements. Cheek’s compositions often sound like transmissions from a faraway universe, but she’s adamant that they’re intended to be human. “I don’t have an interest in my work being separate from the world,” she wrote in an Instagram post introducing I Killed Your Dog. “Experimental music gets a bad rap that way.” Even as she defends her chosen genre, she challenges its self-aggrandizing tropes, often leveraging the power of humor: “Pet Rock” indicts the erasure of Black voices in rock with lyrical barbs and
guitar riffs inspired by the Strokes (also referenced in the song’s lyrics), while “What’s That Song?” dunks on condescending scene snobs. Between the laughs, Cheek draws her listeners through sensual twists and hairpin turns; the tender bedroom pop of “5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwaG)” tangles with dense dreamscapes, and the sparse exposition of “New Year’s UnResolution” is abruptly overrun by feverish neosoul. While Cheek is the prime mover of L’Rain, she’s quick to reject the “lone genius” cliche, especially in her live shows, where she’s often flanked by a coterie of friends and peers. For the IKYD tour, Cheek will take on an audacious creative challenge: re- creating the album backed by just two musicians, a drummer and a sax player who doubles on synths. What they lack in numbers, they make up for with zeal. Under Cheek’s guidance, every song contains a world and every heartbreak has a body count—a reality you don’t hear so much as feel. —SHANNON NICO SHREIBAK
Squirrel Flower Part of the Tomorrow Never Knows festival, which runs from Wed 1/17 through Sun 1/21 at Lincoln Hall, Schubas, Gman Tavern, and Sleeping Village. Greg Freeman and Tenci open. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln Ave, $25. 18+ In 1964, Jay Williams published Tomorrow’s Fire, a historical novel that the New York Times praised for its insightful depiction of Richard Coeur de Lion during the Third Crusade. The book’s epigraph consists of eight translated lines by 13th-century French composer and poet Rutebeuf, which end with the couplet that gives the book its title: “Tomorrow’s hopes provide my dinner / Tomorrow’s fire must warm tonight.” Squirrel Flower bandleader Ella Williams is Jay’s great-granddaughter, and in October, Polyvinyl released the group’s third album, titled Tomorrow’s Fire.
UPCOMING CONCERTS AT
MUSIC Tomorrow’s Fire has helped ground me during these times, when I can’t articulate my own sorrow. On “Almost Pulled Away,” Williams’s rich voice glides alongside fuzzy guitars that rise like 50-foot waves, and even though she expresses a sense of loss, to hear her song is to feel comforted and cared for. The sensation that gives the track life and power is longing, and longing is fueled by a promise that tomorrow can be better. Tomorrow’s Fire owes much of its resonant depth to the band Williams brought to Drop of Sun Studios in Asheville, North Carolina, and as shoegaze continues its renaissance, more people will surely be drawn to this recording. As I write, two of the album’s songs (“Full Time Job” and “Stick”) are on Spotify’s Shoegaze Now playlist—another sign that this might be your last chance to see Squirrel Flower at a venue as intimate as Lincoln Hall. —LEOR GALIL
SATURDAY20 L’Rain, aka Taja Cheek ALICE PLATI I can’t speak to how Squirrel Flower’s new album might relate to the themes of the book Williams named it after. But her warm, full-throated indie rock definitely carries the spirit of Rutebeuf’s verse—it’s an argument for perseverance in the face of dire circumstances. Williams’s gutsy singing and her music’s dreamlike textures capture the poet’s determination to improve a bleak present with stubborn hope—a sentiment I’ve often returned
to Tomorrow’s Fire to find. The album came out just days after the Israeli military began its vicious assault on Gaza, and the ensuing months of violence and mass death have consumed my consciousness. I’m an American-Israeli who has long advocated for Palestinian freedom and equality, and I barely know how to grieve for everything being destroyed. I understand that it’s important to bear witness, but doing so has often left me feeling powerless.
Squirrel Flower bandleader Ella Williams ALEXA VISCIUS
Ground Control Touring Presents: Second Annual Abortion Access Benefit Series Divino Niño headline; Macie Stewart, Melkbelly, Resavoir (DJ set), Is This Whit (Whitney covers the Strokes), and Free Range open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, advance tickets sold out. 21+ The United States has a complicated history with the right to terminate a pregnancy. Some view access to safe, legal abortion procedures as a hot-button issue, but for millions of Americans it’s a self-evident human right. Someone might make such a decision for a multitude of reasons, and in my opinion, they should be able to do so without lawmakers getting involved in their private lives. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, women and allies around the world took to the streets and social media to protest such a monumental setback. The following January, Ground Control Touring launched the Abortion Access Benefit Series to boost awareness, support community activism, and raise funds for reproductive rights with simultaneous concerts in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. On January 20, they’re bringing the series back, expanding to five concerts that include new events in Nashville and Philadelphia. Once again, the series will benefit reproductive justice organization Noise for Now, which will allocate the proceeds to various independently run abortion clinics and funds in each region. The Chicago benefit, which takes place at the Empty Bottle, is headlined by American-Colombian indie-rock chameleons Divino Niño and features several other awe-inspiring acts, including beloved multi-instrumentalist Macie Stewart and dazzling noise rockers Melkbelly. If you’re lucky enough to snag late-release tickets, don’t miss out. This is a great night of music for a great cause and a chance to join these artists in the fight for reproductive justice. —CRISTALLE BOWEN
Drama See Pick of the Week on page 28. Ric Wilson, Derrick Carter, Terry Hunter, and Emmaculate open. 7 PM, Salt Shed, 1357 N. Elston, $35-$70. 17+ v
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EARLY WARNINGS
UPCOMING CONCERTS TO HAVE ON YOUR RADAR
b ALL AGES
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BEYOND SAT 3/2 Raffaella, Why Not 8 PM, Subterranean b
Killah Priest EDGAR GARCIA AKA ESL
JANUARY THU 1/25 Billy Joel Jr., Daarling, Sweet Hudson 8 PM, Schubas F Nano, Caleb Hyles, DJ James Landino 7 PM, Reggies Rock Club b FRI 1/26 Lovesliescrushing, Gs70, Kyle Bates & Lula Asplund Duo 10 PM, Empty Bottle Story of the Year, We the Kings, Youth Fountain 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b William Tyler & the Impossible Truth 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ SAT 1/27 Marisela 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino, Hammond Stay Smooth XXIX: Fwtr Wvvv featuring George Arthur Calendar (solo), Corn on My Dinner Plate, Stay Smooth DJs 8 PM, Gman Tavern MON 1/29 Joey Valence & Brae, Sloe Jack 7:30 PM, Subterranean b TUE 1/30 Ryan Alexander 8 PM, the Promontory WED 1/31 Julián Pujols Quall & Mamey 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music F b Young Gun Silver Fox 8 PM, Lincoln Hall
FEBRUARY THU 2/1 The Brunt (Dave Rempis, Gerrit Hatcher, Kent Kessler, Bill Harris), Mai Sugimoto & Katie Ernst 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Circle of Trust (Julian Davis Reid, Jeremiah Hunt, Ryan J. Lee) 9 PM, Hungry Brain FRI 2/2 Isoxo 10 PM, Cermak Hall at Radius, 18+
SAT 2/3 Spectral Distortions, James the Boneless, 13 Monsters, Stick Horse 8 PM, Burlington Trio WAZ (Edward Wilkerson Jr., Tatsu Aoki, and Michael Zerang) 8 PM, Elastic b WED 2/7 Messer Chups, Werewolf Detective, Aquaholics 8 PM, Reggies Music Joint THU 2/8 Reverie Road 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b WED 2/14 Yuma Abe, Lake J 9 PM, Empty Bottle FRI 2/16 Mathame 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ SAT 2/17 Blade Runner screening with live score performed by the Chicago Philharmonic 7:30 PM, Auditorium Theatre b Totally Cashed, Blind Equation, Edging, Scumbag Skippy 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ FRI 2/23 Max Barskih 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Jamila Woods 8 PM, the Vic b SAT 2/24 Jonathan Richman with Tommy Larkins 8 PM, Thalia Hall b SUN 2/25 October London, J. Brown, Shindellas 7 PM, the Vic, 18+ MON 2/26 Killah Priest 9 PM, the Promontory, 18+ TUE 2/27 Silversun Pickups, Hello Mary 7:30 PM, the Vic b THU 2/29 Osamason 7 PM, Avondale Music Hall b
32 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 11, 2024
SUN 3/3 Glitterer, Glixen 8 PM, Beat Kitchen b THU 3/14 Bombay Bicycle Club 8 PM, Metro, 18+ FRI 3/15 Paul Thorn & Steve Poltz 8 PM, City Winery b FRI 3/29 Daniel Villarreal 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ SAT 3/30 Armchair Boogie 9 PM, Martyrs’ WED 4/3 The Obsessed, Howling Giant, Gozu, Shadow of Jupiter 7:30 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+ FRI 4/5 Willis 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ THU 4/11 Young Fathers 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ SUN 4/14 Busta Rhymes 6 PM, Radius b THU 4/25 Mike 8 PM, Metro, 18+ FRI 5/3 Black Veil Brides, Creeper, Dark Divine, Ghostkid 5:30 PM, Concord Music Hall b TUE 5/28 Bloodbath, Primordial, Archgoat, Severe Torture, Cardiac Arrest 6:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ SUN 6/9 Jacob Collier, Emily King 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b SAT 6/15 Pvris, Pale Waves 6 PM, House of Blues b FRI 6/21 Billy Joel, Stevie Nicks 7 PM, Soldier Field b FRI 6/28 Third Eye Blind, Yellowcard, Arizona 6:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion b v
IF YOU WERE tapped in, you couldn’t help but see Chicago rap take a crucial breath of fresh air last year. The scene got an invigorating influx of long-awaited new projects, captivating visuals, and electrifying live performances from many of its most talented and respected lyricists and storytellers. The Reader most recently covered southside rapper Ausar when he put out a 2020 EP inspired by honeybees, but in July he dropped his debut LP, I Now Know., which belongs on any list of the city’s most exciting current releases. It’s certainly one of Gossip Wolf’s favorites from 2023, collecting intimate reflections on the life experiences that have shaped Ausar into the man and artist he is today. Fellow Chicagoan D2x, who released his sophomore album, Hotel 1105, last year, has picked Ausar to join him as one of the openers at the Blueprint Cncrt on Friday, January 12, at Reggies Rock Club—so named because the artists on the bill are among those creating blueprints that will shape the future landscape of Chicago rap. Also scheduled to perform are Sonny, Kiraly Payne, and Better Known As, with sounds by DJ Preme. Doors open at 7 PM, and tickets start at $20 bought in advance online (they’re $25 at the door). Early last year, DIY-youth scene organizer Eli Schmitt transformed his New Now streaming performance series into a monthly all-ages live showcase at Color Club . Schmitt knows better than almost anyone that a hallmark of Chicago’s teen scene is creativity that jumps fences from medium to medium. He plays music in indie-rock groups Post Office Winter and TV Buddha, and he’s a visual artist who makes a zine about art and music called Unresolved—he just published issue number eight, which includes an interview with North Carolina singer-songwriter and Wednesday guitarist MJ Lenderman. Schmitt has also curated a new art show called “Youth Now!” that opens at Color Club at 5 PM on Friday, January 12. “Youth Now!” celebrates young underground Chicago talent, and it’ll showcase a dozen artists (including Lifeguard bassist Asher Case) in a variety of mediums. The show’s opening night, which starts at 5 PM, includes a New Now concert at 8 PM with local shoegaze duo Twin Coast and Virginia experimental indie group Hypochon-
driac; tickets cost $10. Schmitt promises that the “Youth Now!” exhibit will host more musical performances, poetry readings, and other events before its closing night on Friday, January 26. You probably know James Wetzel for his hurricane drumming in one of Chicago’s best rock bands, Melkbelly . But Wetzel is also a heck of a talented solo artist. He makes disorienting and hyperactive electronic tracks under the name Mode Hexe, and since 2014 he’s been sporadically uploading those recordings to Bandcamp. Last week, Chicago label Love All Day issued Mode Hexe’s vinyl debut, an immersive album called Norphonic, whose driving, multilane percussive arrangements have a lot in common with footwork. Speaking of footwork! Chicago kicked off the new year with a terrific pair of intense new footwork full-lengths from its emerging royals. On January 2, DJ Corey, son of DJ Clent, dropped Heat Files 2K24, which also features DJ Chad, son of the late DJ Rashad. Corey shows up in turn on Chad’s monster album Raw Is War, which also dropped on January 2. The future of footwork sounds like it’s in good hands! Gossip Wolf has been a longtime fan of Chicago singer-songwriter Izzy Olive, better known as Half Gringa . She released an EP last January called Ancestral Home, and she’s been writing material for a Half Gringa full-length she plans to record with Chicago producer Brian Deck at Narwhal Studios. Olive recently launched a GoFundMe to cover the projected costs ; at publication time, she’d raised more than half of her $10,000 goal. New York indie label Fire Talk has a soft spot for Chicago. The label has released music by locals Fran , Bnny , Deeper , and Mia Joy, among others. So Gossip Wolf welcomes the news that Fire Talk has launched a Chicago- focused sublabel called Angel Tapes. On Monday, the imprint shipped its second release: a reissue of the tender 2021 EP Umarell by Blaine Teppema’s folk duo, Sleeper’s Bell, whose cassette edition includes four bonus tracks. —TYRA NICOLE TRICHE AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.
JANUARY 11, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 33
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SAVAGE LOVE SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS
UPCOMING SHOWS
He’s just not that into shampoo. Trying to make it work with someone who isn’t washing By DAN SAVAGE
some underlying mental health issue here that he’s struggling with. You can offer him your friendship and moral support—provided you can spare the emotional bandwidth—but don’t offer him a blow job. Sucking this guy’s dick would not only be unpleasant for you, ODORS, but it would send the wrong message to him, e.g., that he’s in good enough working order (proof: he’s getting his dick sucked) and doesn’t need to get help and make changes. WITH P.S. The sexless monogamous relationship— as a concept—has always broken my brain. If being in a monogamous relationship means you don’t have WITH DERRICK CARTER, RIC WILSON, sex with other people . . . TERRY HUNTER AND EMMACULATE wouldn’t being in a sexless monogamous relationship mean you only don’t have sex with other people? A FILM FESTIVAL It has always seemed to me that if monogamy means, “I’m not fucking anybody WITH JOE P but you,” sexless monogamy means, “I’m fucking everybody but you.” Perhaps someone who WITH EAZYBAKED, CHMURA X DAGGZ, doesn’t want to have sex with their partner but insists BLOOKAH AND LHASA PETIK on sexual exclusivity— someone who thinks celibacy is a reasonable price of WITH TIGERCUB admission—can jump into the comments thread and explain how this works or isSALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT THE supposed to work. v SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE
JAN 25–27
“He’s a bit of a hoarder.” MATTHEW HENRY/UNSPLASH
Q: Have you ever seen
a successful relationship where the sex was difficult from the start? Or where the sex stopped pretty early in the relationship? I have been with my boyfriend since August and I honestly lost my desire for him early on. He’s a bit of a hoarder and has some selfcare and cleanliness issues, which I only realized some time into the relationship. It killed the sexual vibe for me at a very early moment. But I do feel safe with him and very connected emotionally. Is there hope? Or should we call it friends?
—ONLY DOOMED OR REAL SHOT
a: I’ve definitely seen relationships succeed despite sex being difficult at the start. In some cases, the couple broke up, found new partners, and remained in each other’s lives as friends. But the couples that succeeded in the way you most likely meant—the sex was difficult at the start but they’re still happily together years later— had at some point rede-
fined their relationships as companionate. Some of these companionate relationships were ethically non-monogamous, e.g., one or both partners were allowed to seek sex outside the relationship, but some were strictly monogamous. What I haven’t seen much are two people who didn’t share a strong sexual connection at the start manage to create one. And when I have seen that happen, ODORS, there was always some shared interest or dynamic or kink—there was always at least one thing that worked or clicked—and the couple focusing on their overlapping interests/dynamics/kinks and on that rock built a good-togreat sex life together. But what I found myself wondering as I read your question, ODORS, was why you would wanna make things work with this guy. If he can’t be bothered to bathe and brush his teeth and use a little deodorant when he’s trying to win you, ODORS, he’s not going to make the effort once he’s won you. There may be
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