Print Issue of January 25, 2018 (Volume 47, Number 16)

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY | K I C K I N G A S S S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | J A N U A R Y 2 5 , 2 0 1 8

Plus: Vinyl archaeologist Mark Grusane has forgotten more about dance music than you’ll ever know.

BY LEOR GALIL 30

THE TRIALS OF C H I CAG O ’ S F L A S H I E ST DEFENSE AT TO R N EY He wears $5,000 suits and is chauffeured to court in a Rolls-Royce. He’s made a fortune off the war on drugs. He claims Oprah once wanted to have his baby. He is Stuart V. Goldberg, the most interesting lawyer in Chicago. But who’s the man behind the megawatt smile?

BY MAYA DUKMASOVA 12

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C H I C A G O R E A D E R | J A N U A R Y 2 5 , 2 0 1 8 | V O L U M E 4 7, N U M B E R 1 6

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR VINCE CERASANI DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JAMIE RAMSAY INTERIM CULTURE EDITOR AIMEE LEVITT FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS STEVE HEISLER, JAMIE LUDWIG, KATE SCHMIDT SENIOR WRITER MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI FILM LISTINGS COORDINATOR PATRICK FRIEL CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, ANDREA GRONVALL, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, IRENE HSIAO, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, MICHAEL MINER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, BEN SACHS, DMITRY SAMAROV, OLIVER SAVA, KEVIN WARWICK, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS MADELINE HAPPOLD, ASHLEY MIZUO, MELISSA PARKER, RACHEL YANG ---------------------------------------------------------------ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER BEST SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE 4 Agenda Second City’s She the People, the Annoyance’s Shark Tank: The Musical, the film Shadowman, and more goings-on about town

CITY LIFE

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Better call Stu He wears $5,000 suits and is chauffeured to court in a Rolls-Royce. He’s made a fortune off the war on drugs.

He claims Oprah once wanted to have his baby. He is Stuart V. Goldberg, the most interesting criminal defense attorney in Chicago. But who’s the man behind the megawatt smile?

BY MAYA DUKMASOVA 12

9 Transportation A Chicago alderman wants to bring point-to-point car share to town.

Opponents worry that it will create a parking crunch.

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CORRECTION: “SURE THINGS” IN THE 1/18 ISSUE INCORRECTLY LISTED WHAM CITY COMEDY X HELLTRAP NIGHTMARE UNDER THE HEADER “FRIDAY 19.” THE SHOW OCCURRED ON THU 1/18, AS STATED LATER IN THE LISTING. ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY KEVIN PENCZAK. FOR MORE OF PENCZAK’S WORK, GO TO KEVINPENCZAK.COM. SCALES PROVIDED BY ZAP PROPS.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Mark Grusane has forgotten more about dance music than you’ll ever know The cofounder of defunct south-side shop Mr. Peabody Records talks about the insanely rare and sought-after tracks he’s sharing on The Real Sound of Mark Grusane.

BY LEOR GALIL 30

FOOD & DRINK

25 Theater All My Sons joins the pantheon of Court Theatre’s great tragedies.

26 Visual Art At the Block Museum of Art, Egyptian death-mask portraits bring their subjects back to life after 2,000 years.

27 Visual Art For the People Artists Collective looks back on 100 years of police violence in “Do Not Resist?”

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34 In Rotation Current musical obsessions include Dolores O’Riordan, Santana, Jaden Smith, music from Coco, and more 35 Shows of note Partner, Samantha Fish, Brent Faiyaz, and more of the week’s best

ARTS & CULTURE

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MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

7 Joravsky | Politics A few of the civic traits that should convince Jeff Bezos to bring Amazon’s second headquarters to Chicago

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28 Movies Tom Palazzolo’s experimental classic Love It/Leave It lampoons the binary choice presented to 70s antiwar protesters.

28 Movies Fatih Akin’s thriller In the Fade proves there’s nothing more dangerous than a person who’s lost everything.

40 Restaurant review: S.K.Y. Former Intro chef Stephen Gillanders’s pan-Asian vision alights on a gentrifying 18th Street.

41 Food on film In the new documentary 42 Grams, filmmaker Jack C. Newell captures the life cycle of chef Jake Bickelhaupt’s dearly departed Uptown restaurant.

CLASSIFIEDS

42 Jobs 43 Apartments & Spaces 43 Marketplace 44 Straight Dope Are we facing a fatberg apocalypse?

45 Savage Love Can a marriage withstand an oedipal revelation?

46 Early Warnings Brian Jonestown Massacre, Minus the Bear, Jon Batiste, and more shows to look for in the weeks to come 46 Gossip Wolf The Growing Concerns Poetry Collective celebrate their vinyl debut, and more music news.

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The Antelope Party CHARLES OSGOOD

THEATER

Thorndale, jackalopetheatre.org, $30, $20 students and seniors.

More at chicagoreader.com/theater

The Good Fight Chronicling the efforts of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter, Christabel, Anne Bertram’s 2011 play, now at Babes With Blades, presents a series of vignettes from their struggle to gain the vote in the years before World War I. Through public demonstrations, bombings of property, propaganda, and, eventually, training in martial arts as a means of self-defense against police aggression, these brave and pioneering women sacrificed life and limb for the greater good. Unfortunately, a just cause is no recipe for compelling drama. There’s not a single moment in this nearly two-hour production in which sympathies might waver or anyone could have any doubt about the fight’s outcome. The piece comes off as a lecture with unnecessary emoting added.

Elizabeth Lovelady directed. —DMITRY SAMAROV Through 2/17: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-904-0391, babeswithblades. org, $20, $15 students and seniors.

The Antelope Party With a photoshopped image of a My Little Pony figurine decorating the promo materials, you’d think Eric John Meyer’s play would be a goof on the kids’ toy turned cult object. And you’d be right, for maybe 20 minutes. The show starts with a comically underattended gathering of the Rust Belt Ponies Meetup Group, complete with homemade costumes and wistful misfits. But from there Meyer takes an odd, fascinating turn: the neighborhood where the misfits meet has become an outpost for a watch group that evolves into a militant political organization with an arcane, quasi-Wagnerian mythology.

Meyer is brilliant at showing how fantasy play may produce a brony or a neo-Nazi.

If only other elements of his narrative were as strong: engaging as it is, Jeremy Wechsler’s staging for Theater Wit can’t hide the sketchiness of some of the characters. —TONY ADLER Through 2/24: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, theaterwit.org, $20-$70.

Franklinland Director Chika Ike gives New York playwright Lloyd Suh’s 75-minute historical romp a tasty world premiere at Jackalope.

Suh reimagines Benjamin Franklin as a self-aggrandizing gasbag perpetually stage-managing his illegitimate son William’s life in hopes of forcing a hint of greatness from his manifestly unimaginative progeny—only to have him end up royal colonial governor of New Jersey, a position no better than dog catcher in Franklin’s eyes. The father-son rivalry is at once idiosyncratic and iconic, giving much of the gleefully anachronistic play a quirky resonance, and Ike’s quick-witted, poker-faced cast add an unlikely layer of emotional poignancy. While Suh ultimately takes on too much (the birth of America, for starters), requiring him to churn out a disappointingly conventional climax, the lead-up is captivating. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 2/24: Thu-Sat 8 PM, the Frontier, 1106 W.

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Harbur Gate Kathleen Cahill’s searing 2017 triptych shows us, in three interconnected one-acts, five lives ripped apart, two literally and three figuratively, by a roadside IED explosion near Mosul, Iraq, in 2004. In each play, Cahill displays considerable skill, telling compelling stories filled with rich, believable, sympathetic multidimensional characters. She has a strong ally in director Ann Filmer, who fills the production with strong actors, all of whom gracefully reveal the nuances in Cahill’s work.

Stephanie Shum and Felipe Carrasco are especially strong as a mismatched, but still functional team: he’s a traditional jarhead who doesn’t believe women have a place in the marines; she’s a marine who does. And Arti Ishak displays remarkable range as a guilty survivor haunted by the ghost of a fallen comrade/perhaps lover. —JACK HELBIG Through 2/17: ThuFri 7:30 PM, Sat 4 PM and 8 PM, 16th Street Theater, Berwyn Cultural Center, 6420 16th St., Berwyn, 708-795-6704, 16thstreettheater.org, $22, $18 military.

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company’s new West Loop home, with this hour-long musical about acceptance, and the new digs—cozier and more welcoming than its old Ruth Page Center for the Arts proscenium—feel like a warm hug. That sensation carries over to the Pritzker Family Studio Theatre’s interior with whimsical, otherworldly scenic design by Will Bishop (who also does costumes) and lighting by Michael Joseph, who together create a playhouse complete with a glowing, sentient tree. Though the production isn’t particularly memorable for its tunes or voices, director-playwright Gloria Bond Clunie’s kid-friendly parable refreshingly dispels the “I don’t see race” myth and encourages young children to embrace skin color, not merely “tolerate” it. —DAN JAKES Through 2/18: Sat 9:30 and 11:30 AM and 3 PM, Sun 9:30 and 11:30 AM, Chicago Children’s Theatre, the Station, 100 S. Racine, 872-222-95555, chicagochildrenstheatre.org, $35.

Rose When it comes to Kennedy family retrospectives, it’s downright shocking that, at this point, every square inch of Camelot hasn’t already been gone over with a fine-tooth comb. Alas, Laurence Leamer’s docudrama solo play relies on hours of unearthed interviews between Times to Remember memoir ghostwriter and biographer Robert Coughlan and the matriarch Kennedy, much of it centered on the family’s fall from grace.

There’s no doubt Linda Reiter’s performance as Rose—especially when relaying the cruel, devastating saga of her daughter Rosemary’s lobotomy—is studied and exacting. Whether audiences respond to it, though, rests entirely on their tolerance for groggy, chronological, biographical one-person play conventions. And, perhaps, whether they’re properly caffeinated. —DAN JAKES Through 3/11: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, greenhousetheater.org, $30-$51, $18 students.

Yank! A WWII Love Story The title lures its target audience with the promise of military hand jobs, but this is a mostly sexless production. David

and Joseph Zellnik’s script follows a young army recruit (Matthew Huston) as he enters a forbidden romance with his squad’s resident hunk (William Dwyer, voice smooth as gun oil). As a tribute to socially conscious musicals of the past like South Pacific, the lack of sexual content makes sense, but sexual interactions are essential to the central tension: intimate relationships develop between men develop during wartime, but they become dangerous once they become physical. The lead’s gay awakening manifests as a tap-dancing number with a colleague at Yank magazine (John Marshall Jr.), and the sweaty, stirring scene is the closest this musical comes to true passion. —OLIVER SAVA Through 2/18: Wed-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3:30 PM, Pride Films and Plays, 4139 N. Broadway, 773-250-3112, $30-$40.

DANCE If Left Unchecked Through modern dance and ballet, Paige Caldarella and Jess King address the topic of “female anger.” Thu 1/25-Sat 1/27: 7 PM, Links Hall at Constellation, 3111 N. Western, 773-2810824, linkshall.org, $10, $5 students.

A New Light The lineup at this dance showcase includes 13 choreographers and dance troupes, all of whom stick around after the show for a chat with the audience. Thu 1/25, 7 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252, stage773. com, $10.

COMEDY Freakfest This variety showcase features burlesque, drag, experimental comedy, and “planned disasters.” Fri 1/26, 10 PM, Under the Gun Theater, 956 W. Newport, 773-270-3440, undertheguntheater.com, $8.

Hyde Ya Kids, Hyde Ya Park! The sketches in this once-a-week revue, directed by Jonald Jude Reyes, flip some choice scenes from Hyde Park life on their heads to middling comedic effect. The venue is next to the Wood-

Freakfest SARAH LARSON

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Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of January 25

A New Light lawn Tap (Jimmy’s), which explains the pandering to a nearby audience of PhD candidates that was the evening’s first bit, a musical rendition of a graduate student union rally. The fact that there is an audience of disgruntled graduate students big enough to pander to in this neighborhood is a deeper and sadder commentary on the times than anything in the show itself. Devin Middleton, the show’s emcee, gets decent mileage out of prepresidential “Barry-O” material, levels a few benign little jabs at the south side’s brutal legacy of redlining, and takes the opportunity of a captive audience to plug several local nonprofits.

—MAX MALLER Through 2/24, Sat 7:30 PM, the Revival, 1160 E. 55th, 866-811-4111, the-revival.com, $20, $10 students.

Robert Kelly The foul-mouthed Kelly has appeared on Inside Amy Schumer, Louie, and Maron. Expect sex talk. Fri 1/26, 8 PM, Laugh Factory, 3175 N. Broadway, 773-327-3175, laughfactory.com, $25.

sat sipping cocktails. More than a typical “girls’ night” experience, this is 90 minutes of eviscerating the patriarchy and a laugh-out-loud wake-up call that’s necessary viewing for women and men alike.

Skewering everything from the portrayal of women in commercials to the fact that, collectively, we know more about the Kardashians than current events, the hilarious six-woman cast is capable, critical, and compelling. Carisa Barreca is powerful and delightful in the style of Kate McKinnon, Maria Randazzo is spoton spoofing the “manic pixie dream girl,” and Kimberly Michelle Vaughn’s rap about brains makes smart sexy.

—MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 4/1: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Up Comedy Club, 230 W. North, 312-337-3992, secondcity.com, $26-$36.

VISUAL ART Light Times Club Chicago street artist Don’t Fret has constructed this bar within a bar populated by cardboard cutouts of cartoonlike characters (think Bob’s Burgers). Through 2/10. Sun-Mon, Wed-Thu 6 PM-2 AM, Fri 5 PM-2 AM, Sat 3 PM-3 AM. Emporium Arcade Bar, 2363 N. Milwaukee, 773-360-8774, emporiumchicago.com/logan-square.

For more of the best things to do every day of the week, go to chicagoreader. com/agenda.

Mike Cloud: The Myth of Education The Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based artist combines collage and paint mediums in his first Chicago solo exhibition.

Opening reception Fri 1/26, 6-8 PM. 1/263/11. Tue-Sat 9 AM-9 PM, Sun 11 AM-9 PM. Univ. of Chicago Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th, 773-702-2787, arts. uchicago.edu.

younger daughter, already a freethinker at age 11, solves their problem by disguising herself as a boy; she revels in the freedom of her new identity, though exposure will mean certain death. A story within the story, centered on an elephant king and rendered in mock cutout style, harks back to the traditionalism of Kells, but the modern narrative is more engaging, using a child’s simple perspective to examine the cruelty of sharia law. 94 min. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 93 min. Fri 1/26, 2 PM; Sat 1/27, 3 PM; Sun 1/28, 3 PM; Mon 1/29, 7:45 PM; Tue 1/30, 6 PM; Wed 1/31, 8 PM; and Thu 2/1, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

The Tip of My Tongue This exhibition highlights communication as a form of connection, discovery, and growth through works by six Chicago artists.

Organized in partnership with the Chicago Literacy Alliance. Through 3/17: Mon-Sat 10 AM-5 PM. Tue-Sat 10 AM-5:30 PM. Weinberg/Newton Gallery, 300 W. Superior, #203, 312-529-5090, d-weinberg.com.

42 Grams Things were tense when I dined at 42 Grams in spring 2015, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. The answer seems clear now that I’ve seen this 2017 documentary about chef Jake Bickelhaupt; his wife, Alexa Walsh; and their short-lived but widely celebrated fine-dining restaurant, located below their Uptown apartment in a space that formerly housed a fried chicken joint. Director

Don’t Fret’s Light Times Club at Emporium Arcade Bar COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Shark Tank: The Musical One LIT & LECTURES R evening at the Annoyance, an American Writers Trivia The American audience member fiercely advocated for his own groundbreaking invention, a sex robot, and was rewarded drink tickets and hearty applause. No idea is a bad idea at this jovial, good-natured parody of ABC’s Shark Tank. On TV, entrepreneurs pitch products and services to five “sharks”—potential investors such as Dallas Mavericks owner and sentient Lego Mark Cuban. Annoyance founder Jennifer Estlin and her writing partner Greg Ott adapt the show’s conceit into a playful form of improvisation around some scripted bits, notably each judge’s solo song. None of the cast members is a particularly great singer, but everybody leans into it. Mick Napier plays Kevin O’Leary, aka “Mr. Wonderful,” and tap-dances like he’s never tap-danced before, which seems true. —STEVE HEISLER Through 3/30: Fri 8 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $20, $15 students.

She the People: Girlfriends’ R Guide to Sisters Doing It for Themselves The excitement and energy on the eve of the Women’s March were palpable at this all-woman Second City revue, from the bustling photo booth where attendees posed with cutouts of Hillary, Beyoncé, and Michelle to the theater, where a largely female audience

Writers Museum rewards the winner of this trivia night with a free one-year museum membership. Drinks are included in the cost of admission. Thu 1/25, 6:30-8:30 PM, American Writers Museum, 180 N. Michigan, second floor, 312-3748790, americanwritersmuseum.org, $20.

Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes Author, journalist, and essayist Anne Elizabeth Moore discusses body politics, women’s rights, and American health care. Fri 1/26, 6-7:15 PM, Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State, 312-747-4300, chipublib.org.

Funny Ha-Ha The live-lit series returns with readings and performances by Jeremy Owens, Kirsten Toomey, and Fuzzy Gerdes. Hosted by author Claire Zulkey.

Fri 1/26, 6:30-8 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433, hideoutchicago. com, $10.

Poems for the People Chicago-based poetry collective the Growing Concerns release their first collection of poetry, First Fifths by McKenzie Chinn and Mykele Deville. For more see Gossip Wolf, page 46. Fri 1/26-Sat 1/27, 8-10 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $15.

God’s Own Country

MOVIES More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS The Breadwinner Irish animators R Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey won critical acclaim for their magical

feature The Secret of Kells (2009), which was inspired by Celtic folklore. Moore followed it with another Irish-themed feature, Song of the Sea (2014), but Twomey strikes out into new territory with her solo feature debut, a children’s adventure about life in Afghanistan under the Taliban. After a kindly street merchant in Kabul is thrown into prison, his wife and two daughters face privation because no one in the local market dares to do business with a woman. The

Jack C. Newell tracks the stressed, irritable, and driven chef from the restaurant’s opening through the fleeting glory bestowed by Michelin stars and ultimately to divorce and closure. Give it your all and you can lose it all—that’s the lesson, accompanied by the frenetic Philip Glass-like string arrangements that have become de rigueur in the now ubiquitous genre of tortured-chef portrait. —MIKE SULA 82 min. Newell attends all screenings. For more on the documentary, see page 40. Sat 1/27, 8 PM; Sun 1/28, 5 PM; Wed 1/31, 8 PM; and Thu 2/1, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

God’s Own Country Johnny R Saxby is going nowhere in life: his days are full of hard labor, as he

struggles to maintain his father’s Yorkshire sheep farm following the old man’s stroke, and his nights are full of hard drinking, as he broods over his lot

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AGENDA �B and tamps down his attraction to other men. Fortunately for Johnny (Josh O’Connor), help on both fronts arrives in the form of Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a swarthy Romanian migrant worker who’s tough enough to win his respect as well as his desire. This tale of cautious gay romance in a seriously macho environment naturally calls to mind Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), though writer-director Francis Lee creates a more credible rural milieu, anchored in the grubby details of raising livestock and the furious emotional repression of his male characters.

By the end of the movie Johnny has found some measure of happiness, but don’t ask him to describe it. —J.R. JONES 104 min. Fri 1/26, 8 PM; Sat 1/27, 3 PM; Sun 1/28, 5 PM; Mon 1/29, 7:45 PM; Tue 1/30, 8 PM; Wed 1/31, 6 PM; and Thu 2/1, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

Maze Runner: The Death Cure If you haven’t seen the first two installments of the Maze Runner sci-fi series, this third episode won’t make a lick of sense. It begins in medias res, its young-adult heroes and their grown-up allies carrying out a dangerous rescue operation in the desert; after that, the characters journey to places whose significance will be apparent only to the initiated. The story has something to do with evil scientists experimenting on imprisoned children in hope of finding a cure for a devastating plague.

Director Wes Ball fails to generate any emotional resonance with this premise, though some of the action sequences are exciting. With Dylan O’Brien, Rosa Salazar, Aidan Gillen, and Patricia Clarkson. —BEN SACHS PG-13, 142 min. ArcLight, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, 600 N. Michigan.

Shadowman In the grungy R downtown art scene of early 1980s New York, street artist

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Richard Hambleton stood out, his soigne appearance and playful manner at odds with his murals of menacing, shadowy men. By mid-decade he’d turned to painting canvases inspired by cowboy icons, and the unsought financial success that followed fed his appetite for drugs. This documentary portrait of Hambleton, who died in 2017, is remarkable for its sweep and its refreshing lack of cant and sentimentality, as art insiders and Hambleton’s benefactors weigh his prodigious talent against his lies and instability. Director Oren Jacoby (Constantine’s Sword) observes like a fly on the wall as two dealers frantically hold the stubborn painter to his deadline for a 2009 Giorgio Armani show; the event provided a stunning comeback for Hambleton after nearly 20 years of obscurity, but he soon returned to

Shadowman

Wild Beasts After someone drops PCP in the water supply of a city zoo, large animals break loose and terrorize the human population.

Franco E. Prosperi, a director of the infamous “shockumentary” Mondo Cane (1962), wrote and directed this 1984 horror item, which is silly, gory, and occasionally enjoyable in its go-for-broke showmanship; the highlights include a cheetah chasing a Volkswagen Beetle down an urban thoroughfare and a ravenous polar bear menacing a children’s ballet school.

The makeup effects are creative and disgusting in the fashion of many Italian grindhouse films of the 1970s and ’80s; if you ever wanted to watch rats eat a person’s face off, this is the movie for you. —BEN SACHS 92 min. 35mm. Fri 1/26-Sat 1/27, midnight. Music Box.

Good Time Josh and Benny Safdie’s ferocious, darkly comic crime drama (2017) takes place mostly over one long night, as a bank robber (Robert Pattinson in a galvanizing performance) does anything he can to raise bail for his intellectually disabled brother.

Like the directors’ previous feature, Heaven Knows What (2014), this presents New York’s lower depths with lots of energy and imagination; the athletic camerawork, jumpy editing, and eerie electronic score (by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never) combine in a heightened, queasy atmosphere that’s never less than commanding. At the same time, the film encourages delight at the adventures of an amoral dirtbag content to exploit people who are poor, black, or disabled. Not since Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) have I been so mesmerized by a film I found morally repugnant. —BEN SACHS 35mm. R, 100 min. Music Box.

REVIVALS

SPECIAL EVENTS

All the Rage Michael Galinsky abandoned this documentary about Dr. John Sarno in 2004 but revived it years later after debilitating back pain prompted him to reconnect with the acclaimed but controversial physician. As head of outpatient rehabilitation for New York University’s Rusk Institute, Sarno practiced inside the mainstream for almost five decades, though his ideas were anything but conventional: he pioneered the diagnosis of TMS (tension myoneural syndrome), attributing some chronic muscle pain to repressed anger.

The film serves as an introduction to Sarno’s mind-body approach to wellness but underplays the importance of cognitive behavioral therapy and meditation. Galinsky, Suki Hawley, and David Beilinson directed; with testimonials from Howard Stern, Larry David, Jonathan Ames, and John Stossel, all of whom know something about rage. —ANDREA GRONVALL 94 min.

Fri 1/26, 8 PM, and Sat 1/27, 5 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

Films by Chase Joynt Trans filmmaker, media artist, and author Chase Joynt screens three short films and participates in a discussion with University of Chicago associate professor Jennifer Wild.

Thu 2/1, 7 PM. Logan Center for the Arts. F

penury, where he could work on his own terms. —ANDREA GRONVALL 81 min. Fri 1/26, 6 PM, and Mon 1/29, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

Religion in the Frame Facets Cinematheque and the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion (part of the University of Chicago Divinity School) present six films, each to be followed by a discussion between a religious scholar and host Gretchen Helfrich. Screening are Richard Brooks’s Elmer Gantry (Sun 1/28, 6 PM), Vikram Gandhi’s Kumaré (Mon 1/29, 6:30 PM), Peter Weir’s Witness (Tue 1/30, 6:30 PM), Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man (Wed 1/31, 6:30 PM), Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day (Thu 2/1, 6:30 PM), and Kamal Tabrizi’s The Lizard (Fri 2/2, 6:30 PM). Facets Cinematheque. v

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CITY LIFE POLITICS

Bezos bait Just a few of Chicago’s civic traits that should convince Jeff Bezos to build Amazon’s second headquarters here

BY BEN JORAVSKY

W

ithin moments of Amazon’s announcement that Chicago was one of 20 finalists in its let’s-get-the-dumbass-publicto-pay-for-our-headquarters scam, Mayor Rahm and his allies were touting reasons our fair city should win the prize, dubious as it may be.

They bragged about things like great transportation and lots of universities and tons of supersmart techies and plenty of relatively affordable housing and yada, yada, yada.

Well, let me ask you this, people. If Chicago’s so great, how come we have to pay Amazon to move here?

Of course, the same question could be asked of New York, D.C., Boston, Indianapolis, and all the other suckers on Amazon’s short list. But I’ll just concentrate on the Chi. As we all know, the real issue in this deal is which city is best positioned to bamboozle and bully its citizenry into forking over untold billions to one of the world’s richest companies.

And at the risk of sounding like a Chicago booster, I think we can all agree that Chicago has some civic virtues that make it second to none on this front. Let’s take it point by point.

Chicago is . . .

RICH

Or at least we have tons of money—$550 million or so a year—flowing into the tax increment financing honey pot, which the mayor’s pretty much free to spend as he wants, thanks to a rubber-stamp City Council.

GULLIBLE

We believe just about anything the mayor tells us, which is largely how he gets away with the aforementioned TIF program. He tells us TIFs don’t raise taxes or divert money from the schools, even though they do.

In the case of Amazon, the mayor’s already convinced all the major papers and most of our elected officials that it’s a good idea to deprive our schools of billions and give it to Amazon.

This is the city that let Mayor Daley talk it into believing the Olympics was a good idea. Hell,

if Mayor Rahm told us there really is an Easter Bunny, half of Chicago would probably start hunting for eggs.

DOCILE

We like to think we’re so big and bad, but push comes to shove and Chicago rolls over like a little puppy dog when the mayor barks his command.

The City Council is virtually the mayor’s court, and since he appoints all the members of the so-called oversight committees, they’re worthless at keeping him from wasting money on frivolous schemes.

Why, just last year the Better Government Association and Crain’s Chicago Business teamed up to report that $55 million earmarked for a Marriott Hotel and DePaul basketball arena in the South Loop actually wound up being spent on Navy Pier.

Man, once Amazon finds out that Rahm’s appointed school board looks the other way as the mayor starves CPS coffers in favor of TIFs, the second headquarters will be as good as ours.

TRIBALISTIC

We live in segregated corners of our universe, so it’s easy for any mayor to play one against the other and conquer and divide.

In the recent debate over giving $5.5 million in TIF funds to Presence Health, for example, the mayor got many of his black City Council allies to guilt-trip their white liberal counterparts who opposed the deal. Somehow they managed to turn a $5.5

million handout for an office in an upscale downtown office building into a crusade against white hypocrisy.

Well, yes, it’s true that a few years back the City Council approved a TIF deal for Swedish Covenant hospital without debate. But Swedish Covenant isn’t as restrictive when it comes to women’s health as Presence, which withholds certain forms of treatment along with abortion. More to the point, the Presence subsidy isn’t going to its neighborhood clinics—it’s going to the downtown headquarters.

And while I’m at it, TIF funds shouldn’t go to health-care providers to begin with. Hospitals, clinics, and the like are generally exempt from property taxes, and the whole point of the TIF program is to increase an existing tax base.

But—wait. Where was I? Trying to cut through the thicket of the mayor’s counterarguments, I got lost in the weeds. And in fact you might say Chicago is also . . .

EASILY DISTRACTED

Which ought to come in real handy for the mayor as the Amazon debate unfolds.

Anyway, in the case of Presence, you had black aldermen playing the race card to help perpetuate a reverse-Robin Hood TIF program that robs from the poor and gives to the rich.

The mayor also tried to play the race card in the fight over the Lucas Museum. Just as Mayor Daley played it in the fight over moving the Children’s Museum to Grant Park . You know, it’s a wonder there’s any poverty at all in Chicago, what with all the wonderful things our mayors are doing to fight it.

You watch, before the Amazon debate is over, we’ll see the mayor and his west- and south-side allies saying it’s all about helping kids in our most impoverished communities.

Even as he closes their schools and all but ushers them out of town.

By the way, can we just take a moment to appreciate the irony of Rahm shamelessly playing the race card on behalf of a TIF program that’s so unfair to so many low-income black communities? I mean, this is the same mayor who closed mental health clinics in high-crime, low-income neighborhoods—so much for wanting to offer heath care to poor people—and who concealed the Laquan McDonald tape for about a year. And closed all those schools. And so forth.

Being docile, gullible, tribalistic, and easily distracted is no way to go through life. But it’s a helluva way for Rahm to get away with forking over billions to Amazon. v

@joravben

READER ILLUSTRATION; PHOTO BY RICH HEIN/SUN-TIMES

JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

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CITY LIFE TRANSPORTATION

Free-floating anxiety A Chicago alderman wants to bring point-to-point car share to town.

Opponents worry that it will create a parking crunch.

BOBBY SIMS

By JOHN GREENFIELD

T

he downsides of ride-hailing services like Lyft and Uber are well-documented. Studies show that in addition to decimating the taxi industry, they’ve increased traffic congestion and cannibalized transit use. The City Council was wise when it voted last November to pass a new fee on ride-hailing trips, with the additional money going to fund CTA infrastructure.

Now near-northwest-side alderman Joe Moreno (First Ward) wants to bring another form of car sharing to town, called “pointto-point” or “free-floating” car share, which allows members to check out vehicles parked on the street and leave them at their own destinations. Last month Moreno introduced an ordinance to pilot the technology across a broad swath of Chicago, from Foster to 63rd Street.

Research shows that, in contrast to Uber and Lyft, the new network could result in less

driving and fewer total cars on the road. But Moreno’s proposal is proving controversial with some of his City Hall colleagues, who fear the shared cars would gobble up precious parking spots in their wards.

Traditional car share—which involves vehicles parked in reserved spaces on private lots to which they must be returned when the trip is over—has been around for years in Chicago. Zipcar has 500-plus vehicles stationed all over the city and near suburbs, while Maven has a few dozen cars downtown and on the near north side.

Old-school car share can be handy for stocking up on groceries or picking up furniture from Craigslist, or as a convenient way to rent a vehicle for a day trip. But it’s not practical for, say, hauling music gear to a gig, since you’d be charged for the hours you’re hanging out at the club. Nor does it work as a fi rst- or last-mile solution to or from a train station during the wee hours or in nasty

weather, when the bus, Divvy bike share, or walking may not be practical or appealing.

Uber and Lyft work well in these situations, but free-floating car share is another option that’s been around for years. The leading point-to-point company, Car2go, was founded in Germany in 2008 and now operates in 11 U.S. and Canadian cities. Users locate the vehicles via a smartphone app (Car2go is known for its pint-size, two-seater Smart cars but recently began offering Mercedes sedans and SUVs as well) and park them for free at any legal metered or unmetered curbside spot at the end of the trip. In some cities, Car2go pays the city government a flat fee for parking privileges; in Washington, D.C., that recently came out to $2,340 per vehicle for a year of parking.

Point-to-point is cheaper for customers than ride hailing: the District’s Car2go rates start at $15 per hour, including gas. And then there are the environmental and congestion advantages. A 2016 UC Berkeley study of some 10,000 Car2go members found that each shared car took up to 11 private vehicles off the road, adding up to a whopping 28,000 fewer cars. The researchers also estimated that Car2go was eliminating at least six to 12 million—and possibly as many as 21 to 37 million—miles that would otherwise be driven in private vehicles.

So why doesn’t Chicago have point-topoint yet? Blame our much-despised parking meter contract , which requires the city to compensate the concessionaire for any lost meter revenue, complicating any deal that might be made with a free-floating car-share provider. That said, Moreno thinks it’s time to give point-to-point a spin: “We’re moving towards a society that relies less and less on our own personal vehicles,” he says, noting the popularity of Lyft, Uber, and Divvy.

Moreno’s ordinance would establish a nine-month test of free-floating car share, starting this spring. The vendor would be allowed to establish a fleet of 500 vehicles within a service area roughly bounded by Lake Michigan, Foster Avenue, and 63rd Street, with a western border of Central Park Avenue, Western Avenue, or Halsted Street, depending on the neighborhood. The service area would exclude the 43rd Ward (largely made up of Lincoln Park) and the 44th Ward (mostly comprising Lakeview)—more on that in a bit.

Chicago Department of Transportation spokesman Mike Claffey says it’s worth exploring whether point-to-point can take

personal cars off the road here, and the new ordinance would require the vendor to share trip data with the City Council to help gauge its impact on congestion, air quality, and parking. Claffey says that in addition to paying the city a yet-to-be-determined fee for the use of curbside space, the point-to-point vendor would be required to hash out a system for paying standard meter rates to parking concessionaire Chicago Parking Meters.

Since Car2go is the largest free-floating car share in the U.S., it’s the most obvious contender for the pilot. “Chicago has a good transit system, dense development, relatively low rates of vehicle ownership, and the Divvy system,” says eastern regional director Josh Moskowitz. “Those are all the boxes we want to check when evaluating new cities we want to operate in.”

However, Moreno says he’s gotten pushback from a few aldermen who are concerned that the free-floating cars will create a parking crunch in their wards. That’s why Lincoln Park’s Michele Smith (43rd) and Lakeview’s Tom Tunney (44th) have nixed the trial in their wards. Near-south-side alderman Pat Dowell (Third) is also a skeptic.

Smith, who says she plans to vote against the ordinance, characterized the use of public parking by a private company as an unfair subsidy, and questioned whether the city would get fair compensation. “These guys are just trying to get a leg up,” she says. But her biggest concern is the potential impact on street parking in her dense district. She sent me links to several articles from other cities with residents opining that Car2go has made parking scarcer. “To my mind this will increase commuting pressure, not alleviate it,” she says.

But wouldn’t a new travel option benefit Lincoln Park’s many car-free residents? “People who don’t own cars in my community are very well served by public transportation,” Smith responds.

Moreno says there will be in-depth briefi ng sessions for aldermen in the next few weeks, and the council will vote on the ordinance in March or April. He doesn’t blame his colleagues for being apprehensive about pointto-point. “It’s kind of like how ride hailing seemed weird to people at first—‘You’re going to jump in a stranger’s car?’—but now everybody’s doing it.” v

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

JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

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apparel label, Sir & Madame. The Merritt’s Hyde Park store brings in both customers and fashion stylists alike, with themed collections snapped up as soon as they’re launched.

It doesn’t get much more “meet cute” than this – Brian and Autumn Merritt met in middle school at Hyde Park’s Ray Elementary, and later attended Kenwood Academy together. After college, Autumn knew her future included becoming a part of the Chicago creative community and building a life with Brian – starting a fashion business together made that possible on both counts.

Two months after getting married in 2007, they opened Solemates in Wicker Park, a consignment sneaker store. The Merritts later rebranded the store as Sir & Madame, adding their own private label designs – and opened the first dedicated Sir & Madame store in Ukrainian Village in 2010. They saw a void in the boutique market for men’s and women’s casual wear with unexpected details, and together they produce eclectic collections of casual and elegant pieces. With Autumn handling the retail and marketing operations and Brian in charge of product line management, they’ve formed a partnership that plays on their strengths and continues to evolve.

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Their store at 5225 S. Harper Court opened in August 2015, and at the time Autumn commented, “When we were teenagers, it (Hyde Park) was the place to be—where all the cool people were. All of that was sort of lost until now, and we want to be a part of bringing that back.” Since then, Sir & Madame has become one of the neighborhood’s don’t-miss shopping destinations, attracting customers from all over the city, reinforcing Chicago’s place as a center for fashion – and bringing more awareness to the neighborhood’s charms.

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Side, when they come (here) they’re like, oh well, it’s not what the news makes it out to be, and they realize we have good stuff here on the South Side. Good food, entertainment, and shopping, and you’ve got a thriving neighborhood in Chicago.”

Autumn added, “It means a ton to us just to have a presence here and to be able to touch people and talk to people and inspire people, and be inspired by people.”

The couple has starred in a day-in-the life Honda Civic commercial that aired after the Cubs won the World Series, has been featured in Marie Claire magazine, and when interviewed for a January 2017 Chi City Fashion blog post, Autumn said, “Over the past 10 years we have witnessed so much growth within the art, fashion and music communities…it truly is amazing. Chicago is a city that for so long was overlooked with limited resources in the fashion and retail industries, so to be instrumental in that shift is important to us.”

5225 S. Harper Court 773.241.5225 sirandmadame.com

JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 11

ò KEVIN PENCZAK/ ASSISTANT: SNAKEBITE

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u t S

He wears $5,000 suits and is chauffeured to court in a Rolls-Royce. He’s made a fortune off the war on drugs. He claims Oprah once wanted to have his baby. He is Stuart V.

Goldberg, the most interesting criminal defense attorney in Chicago. But who’s the man behind the megawatt smile?

By MAYA DUKMASOVA

I

n a half hour Stuart V. Goldberg needs to be in three different Chicago courtrooms dozens of miles apart. It’s 8:30 AM on a Tuesday in October 2016. He takes off the jacket of his gray, three-piece Tom Ford suit before sliding behind the wheel of his white Rolls-Royce.

He is a man of many mantras and rituals. “If you don’t take your coat off while you drive you’re like the hundred other lawyers in court with a wrinkled suit,” he says.

Goldberg is widely known in local legal circles as one of the city’s busiest criminal defense attorneys. He swings by to pick up his nephew Matthew Kaplan, then a student at Goldberg’s alma mater, John Marshall Law School. The 27-year-old will drive his uncle from court to court, semireclined behind the wheel, assisting him in preparing arguments and drafting motions throughout the day.

Goldberg gets on speakerphone.

“Linda, you’re doing a great job!” he announces earnestly to the courtroom clerk who picks up. “Running a little late.” He asks her to push his case to a later slot on the morning’s docket. “R.J., what’s up, it’s Goldberg,” he says to the next clerk on his speed dial. “Just pass it for me.” Whichever judge he knows to be the strictest about starting hearings on time, it’s his or her courtroom he heads to first.

No sooner does Goldberg walk through the doors of a courthouse than people begin approaching to J

JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 13

continued from 13

ask for his card. (“They’re hand engraved,” he likes to point out. He estimates that he’s handed out a quarter million of them over the years.) Guards, other lawyers, and judges greet him as he floats by, back straight, leading with his chest. No matter how short he is on time, he never looks rushed. “The way I dress, the way I act, the way I walk into a courtroom is all part of the brand,” Goldberg later tells me.

Entering a courtroom in Pullman on the city’s far south side, Goldberg—a dead ringer for Michael Douglas in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, with his silver mane and angular features—struts past rows of pews filled with mostly black men, women, and children, and then two filled with mostly white cops. He shakes hands with one of the officers, then goes to talk with his client’s girlfriend. Her boyfriend, Llewain Hardin, was out on bail on a different drug case when he was arrested with 41 small bags of crack cocaine and 13 baggies of heroin—enough to land him a few years in prison if he were convicted.

Llewain was supposed to lay low while Goldberg worked to resolve his other case, but “he didn’t listen to me,” Goldberg says. “The drugs were found on him.” At the preliminary hearing today the judge would decide whether there was probable cause to suspect that Llewain had committed the felony and if so, send the case on to be prosecuted before the same judge who was hearing the first case. This would make defending Llewain on both sets of charges harder. “The officer was an honest officer. He wrote a good report,” Goldberg notes, scanning the arrest report for red flags and inconsistencies. In the margins he’d scribbled some notes in purple ink.

When Llewain, a tall black man with dreadlocks, is brought into the courtroom from lockup in a beige jumpsuit, the same police officer who’d shaken Goldberg’s hand approaches the judge’s bench. The prosecutor, a young white woman, questions him about the arrest. He testifies that a call had come in about a drug dealer, and when he arrived on the scene he saw Llewain sitting on a stoop. As he approached he says he saw “a bulge” in Llewain’s waistband and proceeded to frisk him, thinking it could be a gun. The bulge turned out to be a package of drugs wrapped in individual doses seemingly ready for sale.

On cross-examination of the officer, Goldberg focuses on the details. Despite his flashy appearance there’s no bombast; in and out of court Goldberg is soft-spoken, patient, and methodical. He questions the cop about what the 911 caller had reported—drug sales in progress—and what the officer saw when he arrived on the scene—a man loosely matching the caller’s description sitting on a stoop. Goldberg asks about the bulge that looked like a gun. The officer says that during the pat down he felt it was “soft.” Goldberg zeroes in.

During a preliminary hearing, attorneys are not supposed to argue about the evidence for charges, only about the grounds for arrest, and so the prosecutor quickly objects when Goldberg turns to the judge and cites Minnesota v.

Dickerson. But the judge looks interested and lets Goldberg keep talking. This was a 1993 Supreme Court decision stating that if a police officer is frisking a suspect for weapons and feels an object that he knows isn’t a weapon but can’t tell what that object is, then continuing the search and seizing the object is unconstitutional, even if it turns out to be contraband.

The moment the cop felt that the bulge in Llewain’s waistband was soft, he knew it wasn’t a gun and had to stop the search, Goldberg argues. “We’re hoping for judicial economy,”

14 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 25, 2018

Goldberg with his son, Maximilian, and his Lamborghini in 2016

he concludes—a signal to the judge that the case would fall apart later since the evidence couldn’t be used against Llewain anyway and that it would be pointless to let the arrest stand and tie up the next judge’s docket. The judge agrees. “There is a finding of no probable cause,” he says and calls the next case.

Spinning around toward her colleagues, the Cook County assistant state’s attorney mouths “I can’t believe it!” with eyes bulging. Llewain grins as a sheriff’s deputy leads him out of the courtroom. He’ll be released later that afternoon.

“That was near impossible,” Goldberg tells Llewain’s girlfriend as he makes his way out of the courtroom. Before he reaches the door two more people ask for his card.

As he entered his 70s, Goldberg’s career was on fire: up to a dozen courtroom appearances for different clients every day, three bench trials every week, a jury trial once a month. After every win in court—whether a not-guilty verdict, a successful motion to suppress illegally obtained evidence that gets his client’s case dismissed, or a finding of no probable cause for arrest—Goldberg posted a celebratory picture of himself with his happy clients on Instagram and Facebook. Below, dozens of followers and friends left notes of gratitude, words of congratulations, and pleas to represent them. Like Saul Goodman, the fictional lawyer who helped Walter White get out of many a legal pickle in Breaking Bad, Goldberg has a knack

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for making cases disappear, and it’s has earned him a loyal clientele among Chicagoans living at the intersection of crime and police overreach. Caught with two pounds of marijuana?

Better call Stu. Cops seized three assault rifles from your home? Better call Stu. Pulled over by police and charged with a DUI for that cough syrup in your cup holder? Better call Stu. (But when you call, you better not call him Stu—it’s Stuart.)

Regardless of what crimes his clients—most of them young, black men—may or may not have committed on the streets, in Chicago, and across the country, they’re usually treated by cops, prosecutors, and judges as guilty until proven innocent. They’re usually poor and represented by overburdened public defenders. If they have the money to get a lawyer they’re more likely to wind up with a shark. Their constitutional protections against unreasonable arrest and unwarranted search and seizure as well as their right to a speedy trial are rarely affirmed. According to a report from the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, 57 percent of black defendants in the county found guilty of a felony in 2016 were sentenced to prison time, compared to 36 percent of white and 39 percent of Latino defendants, who were more likely to get probation. Of the 11,000 people sent to Illinois prisons from Cook County in 2016, 74 percent were black. In this moment, Goldberg—with his virtuosity in oral arguments, encyclopedic knowledge of the law, and categorical refusal to consider plea bargains in all but the most extreme circumstances—is exactly the kind of champion they need in court. But the man who’s been reversing their odds case by case isn’t on a social justice crusade to undo the policies that produce his client base. He sees himself as a foot soldier in the battle between good and evil—humanity’s noble intentions and our tendency to make bad decisions, ordinary people’s attempts to keep their heads above water and the government’s incessant drive to limit their options for doing so. It’s a battle that’s cost him friends, family, money, and even for a time, his career. Surviving a lifetime of snatching people from the jaws of the justice system has required a knack for reinvention and a thick, protective armor.

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oldberg exits the courthouse just as Matthew pulls around in the Rolls. He drops his white Hermès briefcase in the trunk and snaps the lid shut. The license plate reads snkchmr—snake charmer. It’s how he’s come to think of himself, as a tamer of the “evil forces at 26th and California that will push you into trouble.”

He’s come a long way from his working-class upbringing in West Rogers Park. Neither of his parents, children of Jewish eastern-European immigrants, went to college. His father didn’t finish high school. Goldberg was the eldest child and only son; his three younger sisters, he says, set him up to be a “woman’s man, not a man’s man.” He never watched or participated in sports; his favorite pastime has always been “a one-on-one conversation.”

He describes himself as a short kid, “definitely a late bloomer,” who allied with the biggest, toughest kids in grammar school to protect himself from bullies. He got in trouble a lot.

Teachers regularly sent notes home: “Does not play well with others.” “Doesn’t come organized.” “Talks unnecessarily.”

Though he wasn’t a particularly good student, Goldberg had a fierce competitive streak and sought out leadership roles, like being hall monitor “lieutenant,” which entitled him to a badge with three stars and authority over others. “When I was in a group, I wanted to be the top of the group,” he says.

By the time he got to college at the University of WisconsinMadison in the late 60s, he was already thinking about a career in law. Goldberg recalls Madison resembling a war zone: mass protests against the Vietnam war, activists bombing buildings, police in riot gear hurtling tear gas. But he was utterly uninterested in politics and resented the protesters disrupting the functioning of the university. “I just wanted to get to law school,” he says “I did originally lean a little bit toward law and order.”

Drug use was also rampant. “They thought I was some kind of undercover narc in Wisconsin because I was so straight,” Goldberg says. He didn’t use, smoke, or drink—still doesn’t— having grown up in a home where alcohol was only around on Passover, when drinking the sugary wine “was like tasting piss.” (There’s a nonalcoholic cocktail called the SVG at one of his favorite stops, Le Colonial, the upscale Vietnamese restaurant in the Gold Coast. A bartender created it to match the lawyer’s orange Lamborghini: lychee puree, mango juice, sour mix. Patrons can choose to add vodka.)

In his last year of college Goldberg was drafted. Months before his deployment to Vietnam, a congenital defect spared him: he was born with two kidneys on one side of his body, a condition known as fused renal ectopia. Because he thought he’d be deployed, Goldberg didn’t apply to law school during his senior year at Madison. After graduation he returned to Chicago and began looking for work. He was hired as a Chicago Public Schools substitute teacher. At first he was sent all over the district, until one day he landed at Walter Scott, a grammar school on Blackstone Avenue in Woodlawn, where a teacher had left abruptly. The largely black school was understaffed and overcrowded. Many students had special needs, Goldberg recalls, but no special attention. He was assigned to a class of students who were behind on their reading skills.

“They were ten, 11, 12, and they were my size,” Goldberg says. “They beat up the last teacher and stole his car.” He told me he felt for them but was also overwhelmed by their behavioral problems. Almost immediately he had to send kids to the principal for fighting or refusing to work. But when they returned to class he was horrified to learn they’d been beaten; back then staff at CPS schools got away with corporal punishment. “The principals in the elementary schools in the inner city would have rulers taped together, or pointers, and they would whip the kids.” Goldberg decided he wouldn’t send the kids away anymore, instead inventing new rules for his classroom: he let them chew gum, created a point system to incentivize good behavior, and handed out prizes. By the week’s end, he says, the students were begging him to stay on.

“The kids signed a petition, and the parents, to have me come back. And sent it to the Board of Education.” Goldberg ended up spending a year at Walter Scott. He says his students’ behavior continued to improve as he positively reinforced them, and though he’d had no formal training as an educator, he was able to teach them reading basics. He played music on Fridays, letting boys and girls dance with each other. He took them riding in his car and out to eat lunch. “It was so rewarding. It was unbelievable,” he says. “I got these kids to see that there was some other life. Every day I broke up a fight. I sewed their shirts together. Because if they went home with a ripped shirt, they would get beaten.” He says students eventually started calling him Daddy Goldberg.

As the law school application cycle approached, Goldberg considered staying in teaching, but given “the difference I

could make just as a teacher—my God, what difference could I make as their lawyer?” he recalls thinking. “I would be in charge of their lives. I could save them. When they stepped off that rock, I could save them.”

Goldberg finally walked into John Marshall Law School in the fall of 1970. He met a real lawyer for the first time that day at orientation. The next year Richard Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one,” and as Goldberg immersed himself in his studies and drove a cab at night to pay his way, he began to see drugs as the base of a fledgling specialization. “It was my feeling that, in criminal law, drugs were the catalyst— the common denominator in most criminal cases,” he says. He also had some personal experience with the criminal element around drugs: one night in Evanston a couple of dazed hippies held him at gunpoint, and he found himself having to negotiate the surrender of his day’s cab fare earnings.

Illinois appellate court justice Aurelia Pucinski remembers meeting Goldberg at John Marshall in 1973, as he was preparing to graduate. He sat next to her on her first day of class, and “I thought, OK, he’s a really hot guy.” But then Pucinski recalls Goldberg turning to her and asking, “Do you have a game plan?” “I said, ‘Well . . . what’s yours?’” He announced that he planned to “get a job at the DEA,” where he’d learn how they investigated and built cases against drug dealers. And then, he concluded to the young future judge, “I’m gonna go out and represent the biggest drug kingpin in America and I’m gonna be a millionaire.”

Pucinski was impressed. She saw Goldberg a few more times before he graduated and then again periodically over the years. “Stuart Goldberg is living proof that having a game plan works,” she says every time she tells this story, which is often, mostly to young people. “That was 1973 and I’m still talking about it all these years later. He’s a guy who knew what he had to do to get to where he wanted to be. So God bless.”

Goldberg didn’t end up at the DEA. Instead his first job was with the Illinois Drug Abuse Program; he was an attorney for a network of state-funded rehab centers where people charged with drug possession could be sentenced as an alternative to incarceration. Less than a year after he entered that line of work, he saw that there was a huge client base among the participants and left to start his own private practice. Besides, he didn’t like having a boss.

But being your own boss didn’t mean being in charge of your professional life. What he quickly learned was that in the mid-70s, Cook County criminal courtrooms were a cesspool of corruption.

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s the Rolls glides north on the Dan Ryan Expressway, past some of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the city, Goldberg is still reveling in the improbable victory he orchestrated for Llewain. I ask him whether he thinks Llewain will heed his advice now and stop selling drugs while his other case is pending. “No,” Goldberg says without hesitation. “He’s got a girlfriend that works hard, a hardworking girl that loves him. He’s got children. I think it’s weakness, stupidity, and ignorance, and an easy way to make a living, and that’s probably all he knows.”

Goldberg doesn’t bring up the fact that Llewain’s previous felony conviction would prevent him from getting most any legitimate job, though when the point is raised he agrees that it’s true. Unlike criminal justice reform crusaders, J

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Goldberg isn’t prone to holding forth about bias and racism in the system, or the way that people’s entrapment in it is determined by race and socioeconomic status. He says he’s always identified with black clients because he understands what it’s like to be an outsider—he’s been the only Jew in many a room. But asked whether he thinks there’s racial discrimination in the courts he seems to contemplate the notion as if he’d never before given it a thought. “Somewhat,” he concedes finally.

Goldberg says he loves cops and respects prosecutors even though his job puts him in direct opposition to them in the courtroom. A self-identified Republican, he’s pro-Second Amendment and disdains big government, and also thinks marijuana should be legalized. When he talks about his clients he’s neither particularly sympathetic nor especially judgmental. “I’m not saying he’s an honorable, perfect representation of a citizen of Chicago,” Goldberg says of Llewain, “but if we are to operate under our law, I’m like a surgeon. They roll them in on a stretcher, I don’t ask was it the cop, the bank robber, or the teller that got shot, I just take the bullet out. I do my job as a crucial part of the way the justice system works.”

Ultimately Goldberg’s outlook is that life isn’t deterministic. He believes in the importance of personal choices, and in everyone’s propensity to make bad ones. “We’re in the business of man’s inhumanity to man,” he likes to say of his work.

“We’re in the mistake business.”

As long as they can afford it, Goldberg’s clients—the majority of whom are facing drug and weapons-related charges and come from neighborhoods besieged by aggressive policing and gun violence—can count on the second chances to keep coming. Some of his clients are ordinary people who might get pulled over driving someone else’s car in which the cops discover a gun. Many face low-level pot possession charges. But some of his clients appear, based on the charges against them, to be deeply connected with criminal enterprises.

Goldberg considers the day’s schedule and listens to some voice mails. The only way to reach him is by phone. He doesn’t use e-mail because, he says, “e-mail is for pornographers.”

Though his business card lists an address on the 14th floor of a swanky Magnificent Mile building, Goldberg only occasionally shows up there to make use of a conference room.

“Offices,” he says, “are for guys sitting around waiting for the phone to ring.”

His cars serve as both office and billboard—the ultimate marker of success and professionalism. The Rolls is always showroom clean. When excited young men run up to ask how much it costs, he likes to answer “a lot of not-guiltys.” Inside there’s not a single personal object in sight. In the trunk he keeps only purple manila folders that hold his clients’ files and an Alexander McQueen umbrella with a skull handle. There are also a couple of small trays for the times he and Matthew get Portillo’s on the go; with around 50 cases each week scattered across the county, that’s not unusual.

“One of my most important client’s son is up today,” Goldberg says. Kolby Craig, known to everyone as Big Mo, “has referred innumerable people to me. Hundreds.” Goldberg explains that in addition to beating Mo’s charges on many occasions, he also “saved [Mo’s] best friend’s life. He had a kilo of cocaine in his lap.” Mo has generously repaid Goldberg’s services not only in tens of thousands of dollars in fees but in more personal ways as well. “When my son was born he went to a jeweler and had a tiny Jewish star made, all with diamonds.”

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Mo’s son’s case appears to be a formidable challenge. In March 2016, 18-year-old Stephon Mack was indicted on one count of possession of a controlled substance, four counts of armed violence, and 24 counts of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon. Goldberg managed to get Stephon out on house arrest, but he still has to prove the guns and drugs can’t be used as evidence against the teen. As he scans the police reports again, Goldberg is unequivocal. “A clear case of the cops lying,” he says.

T

he moment in Stuart Goldberg’s personal narrative in which it becomes hard to parse what’s real and what’s embellished is the mid-1970s. At that time judges in almost every division of the circuit court of Cook County were taking bribes to fix cases. Traffic tickets, divorces, drug charges—all could go away at the right price.

When he talks about this part of his life, Goldberg begins by saying, “Now I’m getting into The Snake Charmer.” This is the title of the autobiographical novel he’s been working on for more than 20 years. It’s his dream to see it made into a movie. Sitting at the Greek Islands on Halsted Street— another restaurant where everyone knows his name—he frequently distinguishes between events happening “in real life” or “in The Snake Charmer.”

Goldberg with nephew Matthew Kaplan and longtime client Kolby “Big Mo” Craig

Goldberg says that when he began his private practice he saw the scales of justice being tipped, and it outraged him. What’s more, the heavily Irish Catholic judiciary’s antiSemitic hostility toward him was palpable, he says.

“The whole system was ridiculously corrupt. You had to give money to the clerk to get your cases called. If you weren’t in the club of people paying off the sheriffs, the cops, the judges, it was very difficult to break in.” Even in his custom-made black three-piece suit and leather cowboy boots he says he felt invisible, waiting all day in narcotics courtrooms for his turn in front of the judge.

“The way it worked was, you walked up to the clerk and you had $10 in your hand. The clerk would open the drawer or the clerk would push the wastebasket out, and you dropped it in the basket or the drawer, and your case was called.” The sheriff’s deputies would also make a cut by directing confused defendants to attorneys who played ball.

Was he ever tempted to participate? “No, that’s not my style,” Goldberg says. “I’m too much of a rebel.” During one of our conversations about The Snake Charmer, he quotes a favorite passage from the book inspired by his experience with courtroom corruption: “Is it bribery when you pay a judge, to give money for the person you’re representing to get off? Or is it extortion when you can’t represent them unless you pay money?”

By the late 70s the circuit court was the target of a massive undercover FBI investigation code-named Operation Greylord—the largest judicial corruption sting in American history, which involved the wiretapping of judges’ chambers and undercover operatives paying to fix cases. Sources close to the operation say that Goldberg wasn’t involved with the federal efforts to bring down the judges, and no one I spoke with had heard of Goldberg being one of the corrupt lawyers who was targeted by the investigation. Still, in his recollection he was close to the action in the Greylord years.

Goldberg says that as his struggle to get his clients’ cases called continued, he began to take notes in his agenda book.

“The bottom of every page, I started keeping a diary: this attorney fixed this case, this judge did this.” Later, when everyone learned that prosecutor Terry Hake was an undercover FBI operative wearing a wire and collecting evidence on dirty lawyers and judges, Goldberg felt honored that Hake had never approached him with an offer to fix a case. Goldberg says his notekeeping, though, created an “unknown symbiotic relationship” between him and Hake: “He was fixing cases, I was documenting what he was doing.” (Hake, whose book Operation Greylord: The True Story of an Untrained Undercover Agent and America’s Biggest Corruption Bust was published in 2015, declined to comment for this story.)

Despite the difficulties he faced being a clean lawyer in a dirty system, Goldberg’s practice eventually flourished. He bought a Gold Coast condo and a Ferrari, and in 1980 married a beautiful blond woman ten years his junior after just three months of dating. His daughter was born the next year, but he says it was an unhappy marriage. “During the night I fought her and during the days I fought the court.” Goldberg says that at one point his wife and her attorney copied his lawyer’s diary and turned over all the information to the IRS. The goal, he believes, was to use his financial information for leverage in the divorce, which she filed for in 1983.

Six weeks later, as he lay sleeping in his empty condo, Goldberg says he got a knock on the door. “She had taken the J

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JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 17

Goldberg says there are five things to look for in a man— shoes, haircut, pen, tie, and watch. KEVIN PENCZAK

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baby. She had taken her fur coat. She had taken everything.

My mattress is on the floor,” he recalls. “I look out the peephole and I see every gold badge in the United States government—FBI, DEA, IRS, Secret Service—and an assistant United States attorney.” (Robert Breisblatt, who was an assistant U.S. attorney at the time, recalls showing up to the door with only two FBI agents.) Goldberg says they were all there to pressure him to testify against crooked judges after the IRS saw his notes on who was taking bribes. “They said, ‘Yeah, you’re the perfect witness—an honest attorney.’ ” But he refused.

“They said, ‘We want your impressions.’ I said, ‘My impressions will get me killed.’ I didn’t help them.” He claims that in retaliation the IRS audited his taxes for six years and he was threatened with arrest multiple times.

Through the late 80s and early 90s, even without Goldberg’s testimony, more than 100 judges, lawyers, and court staff were indicted and convicted on federal corruption charges resulting from Operation Greylord. By that time he’d gotten close to fulfilling his law school game plan by becoming the go-to attorney for the middle managers in the organization of Mario Lloyd, one of the most notorious Chicago cocaine kingpins of the era, who’d gone from selling $1 joints to running a $30-million-a-year drug ring.

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mong people familiar with Chicago’s criminal circles, Goldberg now enjoys a legendary reputation, not least because he’s a self-made man. Big Mo first met Goldberg in 2012 but had heard about him for many years before. “Growing up in the hood, in the city, when you see them nice cars it’s what you want for yourself,” Mo says of what makes Goldberg an attractive lawyer as he waits for his son’s case to be called at 26th and California. “But then to meet the man behind the car or meet the man behind the myth and the legend—he was everything they said.”

Goldberg had prepared to argue a motion to suppress all the evidence in Stephon’s case. It was clear to him, after reading

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what he refers to as the “mystical code” of the police reports, that the warrantless search and seizure was done illegally and the drugs and guns—a couple of Glocks and a small, ultralightweight rifle—couldn’t be pinned on Stephon.

Mo says there are plenty of lawyers who take your money but don’t fight. There are also plenty who just don’t have the necessary skill. Compared to them, “Goldberg’s just in another league.”

Over the years, Goldberg and Big Mo became friends. Mo says he believes that even if he were dead broke Goldberg would take his cases. He’s been arrested for everything from weed possession to disorderly conduct to aggravated assault.

Most of the time his charges were dropped or he’d plead guilty for a reduced sentence. But in 2015 Goldberg help him beat drug charges that could’ve landed him a 50-year prison sentence. Should he ever face federal charges, Mo is certain Goldberg would come out of retirement for him. “He’s just been good to me and my family, that’s all,” Mo says. To him, Goldberg represents a chance “to beat the system for once.

On a small scale.”

Though courtroom dramas would have us believe that every criminal trial is heard by a jury, the vast majority are actually resolved by a judge in a bench trial—if they get that far. Goldberg usually prefers to take a bench trial in which he prevails against prosecutors by arguing the law. (The assistant state’s attorneys used to have a “win board” in their office onto which they pinned the names and ties of prosecutors after their first jury trial victory. There was also a photo of Goldberg there, with a notice scrawled in red marker—“warning avoid at all cost!”) He prefers a jury trial when the facts of the client’s case are relatable and he can make an emotional appeal. If he loses the motion and Stephon’s case goes to trial, Goldberg would opt for a jury because he thinks the only way he can lose is if judge Thomas V. Gainer is sympathetic to the officers whom he believes lied about where and how they found the guns.

Even if he’s running late and doesn’t have a long history with a defendant, Goldberg goes out of his way to make the

people who retain his services feel as if they’re his only clients. He makes emphatic eye contact, holds the client’s hand, explains his strategy in a way that’s clear and comprehensible.

He never looks worried or unsure. That’s because, as Mo puts it, Goldberg’s already got “the blueprint” for how everything will go figured out as soon as he reads a police report. As Goldberg puts it, “I try to imagine something I want in my mind and then create the circumstances.”

It’s how he says he approaches life outside the courtroom too. His own biggest second chance came three and a half years ago when he met 19-year-old Miranda Carranza, an aspiring model with dark, flowing hair who was wandering around River North looking for a Jimmy John’s. Goldberg was on his way to a steak dinner with clients. He had just selfpublished his first novel, The One and Only, about an antiques collector going after an impossible dream. “I beckoned the universe. I was the loneliest person in the world. I had everything I always wanted—but it wasn’t enough.”

Goldberg stopped her as she was about to pass by and they began to talk. He asked about some words in Spanish on her shirt and then asked if she knew about the five things to look for in a man—shoes, haircut, pen, tie, and watch. “I wasn’t really listening, I was just watching him talk,” Carranza told me in early November 2016. She’s from McHenry County and was on the verge of enlisting in the navy before moving to Chicago to pursue modeling instead. She says she was inexplicably drawn to Goldberg’s energy. “It was the most magnetic feeling,” she says, like she already knew him. He invited her to dinner. They spent the entire evening engrossed in conversation, ignoring the clients. She ate steak even though she was a vegan.

In a few months’ time they were married and had a son, Maximilian Pierceson Goldberg. Carranza says at first her parents were aghast at the May-December romance. But slowly she brought them around. “I said there’s nothing really you can do about it. By legal definition I’m an adult, and I’m in love with him and you’re just gonna have to deal with that.”

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At that time—late 2016—Goldberg didn’t have much of a life outside court and family. His wife, their baby son, his nephew, and his nonagenarian mother were his social world.

He spent any leftover time working out at the East Bank Club (where he still entered 48 as his age on the elliptical). He read voraciously, and peppered conversation with references to Proust, Maimonides, Einstein, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Carl Jung, W.C. Fields. He never talked about his daughter. Once, however, when discussing his own father he quoted from the Odyssey: “ ‘I am that father whom your boyhood lacked and suffered pain for lack of,’” then added, pensively: “I get to be a great father to Maximilian.”

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n the mid-80s Goldberg was divorced and out for a good time. Business was booming, with plenty of work coming from Mario Lloyd’s organization and other referrals.

With a sizable disposable income, he wasn’t about to get hammered and hook up with strangers at Rush Street bars like a mere mortal. Instead, he frequently hosted enormous themed parties in the nightclubs and hotel ballrooms of Lincoln Park. “That’s when Oprah told me she wanted to marry me and have my baby,” Goldberg recalls. A 1985 article about three eligible local bachelors in the Chicago Tribune captured the atmosphere at one of these events at the Park West, which attracted some 900 guests who paid admission: “For this party, Goldberg had arranged for a choreographed ultra-chic fashion show, a sensuous body building routine and a karate act. Amid a cloud of smoke and a faded white light, a string of elegantly clad models struck poses with their backs to the audience. An Elvis look-alike modeled a rhinestone jacket just barely reaching his swiveling hips. In this fashion show, dance imitated life in the fast lane. An agile, blond male dressed like a penguin twirled, spun, jumped and did splits on roller skates to rock music. For the finale, Goldberg himself, keeping perfect step to the music, gyrated in a glittery silver sequined hand-sewn top.”

But being the lawyer for Lloyd’s street-level dealers and others implicated in drug and gun crimes wasn’t all parties and high fashion. Goldberg was losing clients and clients who’d become friends to street violence on a regular basis—his “record,” he says, was 12 clients dead in as many months in the mid-80s. “I would just hug people on Friday and they would be dead on Saturday or Sunday,” he recalls. By far the most painful loss was that of his law clerk Michael Nevels. He was a young black man Goldberg once defended on armed robbery charges.

After winning the man’s case, Goldberg found him waxing his car. “He would show up and go to court with me,” Goldberg says. Though Nevels didn’t have any formal training in law, he offered insights from a lot of experiences as a defendant that Goldberg found useful. “He was just a sweet guy who’d never hurt anybody,” Goldberg says. “But he had cases.” After they’d worked together for four years, becoming close friends, Nevels died of AIDS. “Use of needles,” Goldberg says. He saw Nevels the way he sees many of his clients, a perspective he would later summarize in The Snake Charmer: “No man is black or white. In the heart of the worst criminal, there’s a secret garden that is within the grasp of the fresh start of a not guilty.”

The years of working among so many corrupt officials and suddenly losing people he’d formed bonds with, and the painful saga of his brief marriage and protracted divorce reinforced his natural tendency to keep to himself. “It was lonely,”

“TO MEET THE MAN BEHIND THE CAR OR MEET THE MAN BEHIND THE MYTH AND THE LEGEND—HE WAS EVERYTHING THEY SAID.”

—Kolby “Big Mo” Craig, Goldberg’s longtime client

Goldberg admits. But he never lost faith in the idea that he was doing good and necessary work. He says he’s not conflicted about defending his clients, that the rush of giving someone a second chance combined with the righteous feeling of protecting citizens from government overreach keeps him going. “If I can win using the legal means that I should, I’ve given [clients] their fight,” he says. “I didn’t make this world, I only want to live in it, and I want to give them their best fight in court.”

In 1990, Goldberg found himself in the defendant’s seat when the feds mounted a civil asset forfeiture case in which they tried to seize his Mag Mile condo and his Porsche. The Department of Justice at the time was aggressively pursuing such cases against many drug dealers’ attorneys; the government viewed their work as aiding and abetting crime and it repurposed their assets to fund the war on drugs. One of Lloyd’s personal lawyers, the famed F. Lee Bailey, whose clients have included “Boston Strangler” Albert DeSalvo, Patty Hearst, and O.J. Simpson, had to forfeit $90,000 in fees from Lloyd around that same time, and many millions from other clients in the ensuing decade.

Goldberg says the forfeiture attempt was just another one of the feds’ tactics to get him to testify in Greylord cases, which were still being tried well into the 90s. Or perhaps to punish him for his resistance. In the course of the forfeiture case the prosecutors also tried to introduce evidence that Goldberg had bribed court clerks in the early 80s, but the judge denied the motion, saying these claims had nothing to do with the forfeiture case. The feds never tried to bring these charges again in a separate case, as the judge advised. During the jury trial, Lloyd testified that Goldberg carried $168,000 of his money in the Porsche. Convicted con artist and jailhouse snitch Tommy Dye also alleged that Goldberg had purchased cocaine from him and transported it in that car. But their stories were full of inconsistencies, and Goldberg’s lawyer Dennis Berkson eviscerated them during cross-examinations. The jury acquitted Goldberg in 1991. As he was leaving the Dirksen federal courthouse, Goldberg recalls telling assistant U.S. attorney Mark Flessner: “Friedrich Nietzsche said, ‘Whoever seeks to protect society from monsters should see to it they don’t become the monster.’ You and the federal government are the monster.”

After that case Chicago began to feel unbearable to Goldberg. “I got so turned off with the corruption,” he says. “The feds were worse than the corrupt people in the state government.” He decided it was time for a change and moved to California in 1992.

His intention at first was to pass the California bar and continue practicing law. But he decided to live at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, where he soon met plenty of people connected to the movie business who told him he should write screenplays instead.

Though he had no previous experience or interest in creative writing, over the next six years Goldberg poured himself into screenplays, mostly on the theme of criminal law in Chicago. “I loved it so much, I never wanted to go back to law,” he says. “Law is singing and writing is flying.”

He says a major studio optioned several of his screenplays.

He met Sylvester Stallone, Steven Seagal, and George Clooney, and says at one point or another each of them expressed interest in making a movie with him. He says that he was called in to read the script of The Fugitive based on his expertise as a Chicago lawyer. He says he pitched Oliver Stone. But none of his projects ever got the green light, and he started to J

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On Instagram and Facebook, Goldberg often posts celebratory pictures of himself with his happy clients.

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Goldberg circa mid-70s with a 1974 De Tomaso Pantera. Illinois Appellate Court justice Aurelia Pucinski remembers meeting Goldberg at John Marshall Law School in 1973, as he was preparing to graduate. He sat next to her on her first day of class, and “I thought, OK, he’s a really hot guy,” she says.

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suspect people were just using him for his money. “ ’Cause everyone was saying ‘You’re the greatest, I love you. Could you pay for the bill?’ ” When he’d ask about one of his screenplays getting made into a movie, the studio rep or actor he’d taken out for a drink or a meal would say “ ‘Maybe next year’ or ‘I’ve got another movie I’m doing now, but you’re still a great writer.’ Everyone bullshitted me so much—and I have pictures with Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, Cuba Gooding but could never, never get a movie made.”

Eventually Goldberg ran out of money and had to move out of the Four Seasons, then out of a rental apartment. He sold his car and gave up altogether, returning to Chicago. “I was in a sarcophagus. A mummy. I wasn’t broke—I owed money.” He moved into his sister’s basement. After 18 years of practicing law and building up a formidable fortune, he’d thrown it all away on a dream.

Emerging from the stupor of this failure, he put on his last suit, borrowed $25 from his girlfriend for cab fare, and headed to the gloomy neoclassical edifice of the Cook County Criminal Court, which was still devouring casualties of the war on drugs by the thousands. People immediately recognized him in the hallways. He says he got $900 worth of business in his first ten minutes back in the building. “And I’m thinking, Schmuck, do you want to be a broke-dick writer the rest of your life? Or do you want to be a rich lawyer?”

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oldberg had always avoided taking cases involving violence. No murders, rapes, child abuse, or assaults.

But for the first few years of his comeback he felt that he didn’t have the luxury to be choosy. In the early 2000s

he represented a suburban mom who killed her adopted son and got a 12-year sentence; a drug dealer who was accused of lies that put innocent people in prison but was acquitted; and a woman who killed an infant while driving high on PCP and ultimately was sentenced to six years in prison. He is relieved he doesn’t need to take such cases anymore. “I have a very powerful skill and I don’t want to use it for that.” He’s regretted defending people who later went on to commit violent crimes. In order to be an effective advocate he needs to believe in the possibility that his clients are good people caught in a government trap; that gets harder when the alleged crimes are gruesome. “I love having my innocence,” he explains. Even after all these years he says, “I still believe the clients.”

Eventually, he says, he made back all his money and then some. He bought a $2 million condo on the 29th floor of a Mag Mile high-rise. In 2010 gossip columns buzzed as he was in the running to represent Lindsay Lohan; a Gawker headline read “Extremely Tan Lawyer Vows to Keep Lindsay Lohan Out of Jail With Sewing Metaphors.” (He told TMZ he planned to go on the offensive: “Instead of making her reactive, like a pin cushion, [we’re going] to be proactive. We’re gonna go after them.”) Goldberg bought Bentleys and Lamborghinis, though he began to favor the Rolls-Royce after the birth of Maximilian. (Going fast in a sports car no longer seemed worth it with a baby in the back seat.) In 2013 he was photographed for a Tribune story on local lawyers using social media to promote themselves. The next year he helped former Bears receiver David Terrell beat drug and battery charges. As he approached his 70th birthday, he was working harder than ever and had settled into a fast-paced but comfortable rhythm both in court and at home.

When talking to Goldberg one often has the impression that he’s exaggerating, mythologizing, writing his own legend. It’s easy to become engrossed in his stories and then to be left questioning your own credulity. When he finds a phrase that works he tends to repeat it often: “Taught school during the day, drove a cab at night.” “It’s a roman a clef, a novel with a key.” “Nietzsche said . . . ” I was astonished by how many of the phrases he uses in conversation are also in the galley of The Snake Charmer, which arrived in my mailbox last August.

I’d lost touch with Goldberg for a few months. One day he texted to say that he was planning a launch party for the novel at the Tom Ford store on Oak Street. Then he disappeared from social media, the steady stream of victorious photos with his clients halting abruptly. He no longer responded to phone calls and messages. Meanwhile, Carranza’s Instagram account, on which she once proclaimed herself “Wifey to my SVG, Momma to my Maximilian,” appeared with only the latter descriptor, and her feed began to fill with photos and videos of the self-described homebody partying with friends.

The book is nearly 500 pages long. It’s dedicated to Goldberg’s nephew and son, as well as to his mother, whom he describes as a “fireball pushing me to my zenith” and who would pass away at the age of 95 in mid-January. At the center is a Chicago criminal defense attorney, Victor Raymer, who struggles to build a law practice and find love while fighting the temptation of fast money and beautiful women, the corruption of Cook County courts, and the rapacious law enforcement tactics of the federal government. Much of it closely follows the narrative of his life that Goldberg shared in interviews.

While the writing is at times over-the-top, veering into J

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“I’M LIKE A SURGEON. THEY ROLL THEM IN ON A STRETCHER. I DON’T ASK WAS IT THE COP, THE BANK ROBBER, OR THE TELLER THAT GOT SHOT, I JUST TAKE THE BULLET OUT. I DO MY JOB AS A CRUCIAL PART OF THE WAY THE JUSTICE SYSTEM WORKS.”

—Stuart V. Goldberg

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melodrama and cliche, the narrative, a noirish fusion of court procedural and romance novel broken up into 90 chapters, is engaging and full of action. There are periodic interludes in which Goldberg seems to reflect not just on his characters’ predicaments but on his own choices and beliefs. When describing the civil asset forfeiture case against Raymer, he writes: “All I could think about was the unbridled ability of the government to take. Not just my car. Not just my home. Something bigger and more terrible. Their ability to take whatever they wanted— to make nothing you ever achieved secure. To take your family.

Your dreams. To steal your future.”

When Goldberg and I finally reconnect last November, it’s a little over a year since we first talked. It turned out life had thrown him several unexpected challenges in the meantime.

He said his relationship with Carranza had encountered “complexities” but was reluctant to say any more.

“I would kid around—the older I got, the more Miranda appreciated me. She loved a mature man,” he says. “But there is a complexity in the dynamism of having a child and having a wife that is younger.” As he confronted his marital difficulties in the spring and early summer, some serious health issues (about which he didn’t want to elaborate) forced Goldberg to temporarily step away from the frantic pace of his practice.

Then, in August, Big Mo was killed. He was leaving a dance party in West Pullman when a gunman driving by in an SUV shot at the crowd he was in. He was only 33. The news was deeply upsetting to Goldberg.

“On a day-to-day basis I still can’t believe he’s dead,” Goldberg says. “I just was not ready for it, and I miss him dearly.”

He says he’d warned Mo to be careful many times, not to go out at night or go clubbing given his criminal past. “But his lack of permanency was almost part of his character. He embraced it,” Goldberg laments. “You live that life and your lack of eternity is apparent. For a while when I represented him he was a very large client. He couldn’t walk down the aisles of criminal court without people saying hi to him or moving out of the way. Mostly everybody loved him.”

All these abrupt and distressing changes forced Goldberg to slow down and “learn to appreciate patience and the rewards of small steps,” as well as the human limitations he refers to as “primary facts.” But the time away from court has also allowed him to focus on The Snake Charmer, which he hopes to finally self-publish in the near future. He still plans to have a big, glitzy release party. He’s been working with an editor but hardly allowing her to change a thing. “I really liked using the phrases that I used,” he says. “I told her she can’t change anything. She just can look at the punctuation.”

On a dark mid-December afternoon, Goldberg is sitting in his living room, a sparsely furnished white space accented by black and gold Chinese antiques that leave the sweeping views of Lake Michigan as the focal point. He’s in a reflective mood. Grappling with personal challenges, he says, has allowed him to think deeply about his work in a way he hadn’t in a long time. “My life was so fast-paced that I had excitement every day,” he says. “Now I have to appreciate every small facet of criminal law.” As he goes over clients’ cases with Matthew, he’s more focused than ever on the details of the police reports, imagining what he might say to the prosecutors and judges if he were in the courtroom.

While he’s talking about the legal matters, the nitty-gritty elements of a case, Goldberg’s scripted self seems to dissolve.

Criminal law is an addiction. It’s the all-body high of a not-

On a bulletin board assistant state’s attorneys once alerted colleagues about Goldberg’s prowess: “WARNING AVOID AT ALL COST!”

guilty jury verdict, it’s walking into a lockup of desperate people “like you’re Jesus walking on water.” He rejoices in people telling him “I owe you my life.” He loves to see them scrawling his number on their forearms in marker. He’s proud that they consider being his client a bragging right. To him, the work isn’t about sticking it to the machine of mass incarceration but about snatching one person out of its jaws—saving a life, not saving the world. And his ability to do that—and to earn his lavish lifestyle in the process—has relied on his storytelling power. In front of a jury it doesn’t matter what’s real, it matters what you can make people believe.

Though he hasn’t exactly been bored during this six-month hiatus, he says he misses “the day-to-day of being in the operating room. I want to be myself—full flare, full flavor, full steam.” And he’s sure he’ll be back. Phone calls and getwell-soon cards from other lawyers, clerks, judges, and clients remind him of his purpose in life. Whenever Matthew—who’s handling his uncle’s cases in the meantime—has clients on speakerphone and they hear Goldberg in the background, Goldberg can hear relief in their voices. “I’ve had a few obstacles, I’m dealing with them, and clients are so happy to hear that I’m looking over their situation,” he says. “They’re, like, immediately comfortable and feel like I’m watching over them. They send me messages: ‘We know you’re a soldier, you’ll be back shortly.’”

When he comes to the criminal courthouse at 26th and California, Goldberg could park for free in the garage like all the other lawyers. But for years he’s preferred to rent two adjacent spots in a small lot next to the Popeye’s on the northwest corner of the intersection. His luxury car is thus within easy view of the constant stream of pedestrians and traffic.

If the key to being a successful trial attorney is the ability to give a compelling performance, the country’s busiest criminal courthouse is Goldberg’s theater. He can’t wait for the day he’s back onstage in front of his most loyal audience. v

v @mdoukmas

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Why Haven’t Senior Homeowners Been Told These Facts?

Keep reading if you own a home in the U.S. and were born before 1955.

It’s a well-known fact that for many senior citizens in the U.S. their home is their single biggest asset, often accounting for more than 50% of their total net worth.

Yet, according to new statistics from the mortgage industry, senior homeowners in the U.S. are now sitting on more than 6.1 trillion dollars of unused home equity.1 With people now living longer than ever before and home prices back up again, ignoring this “hidden wealth” may prove to be short sighted.

All things considered, it’s not surprising that more than a million homeowners have already used a governmentinsured Home Equity Conversion Mortgage or “HECM” loan to turn their home equity into extra cash for retirement.

However, today, there are still millions of eligible homeowners who could benefit from this FHA-insured loan but may simply not be aware of this “retirement secret.”

Some homeowners think HECM loans sound “too good to be true.” After all, you get the cash you need out of your home but you have no more monthly mortgage payments.

NO MONTHLY MORTGAGE PAYMENTS?2 EXTRA CASH? It’s a fact: no monthly mortgage payments are required with a government-insured HECM loan;2 however the homeowners are still responsible for paying for the maintenance of their home, property taxes, homeowner’s insurance and, if required, their HOA fees.

Another fact many are not aware of is that HECM reverse mortgages first took hold when President Reagan

signed the FHA Reverse Mortgage Bill into law 29 years ago in order to help senior citizens remain in their homes.

Today, HECM loans are simply an effective way for homeowners 62 and older to get the extra cash they need to enjoy retirement.

Although today’s HECM loans have been improved to provide even greater financial protection for homeowners, there are still many misconceptions.

For example, a lot of people mistakenly believe the home must be paid off in full in order to qualify for a HECM loan, which is not the case. In fact, one key advantage of a HECM is that the proceeds will first be used to pay off any existing liens on the property, which frees up cash flow, a huge blessing for seniors living on a fixed income. Unfortunately, many senior homeowners who might be better off with HECM loan don’t even bother to get more information because of rumors they’ve heard.

That’s a shame because HECM loans are helping many senior homeowners live a better life.

In fact, a recent survey by American Advisors Group (AAG), the nation’s number one HECM lender, found that over 90% of their clients are satisfied with their loans.

While these special loans are not for everyone, they can be a real lifesaver for senior homeowners.

The cash from a HECM loan can be used for any purpose. Many people use the money to save on interest charges by paying off credit cards or other high-interest loans. Other common uses include making home

FACT: In 1988, President Reagan signed an FHA bill that put HECM loans into law.

improvements, paying off medical bills or helping other family members. Some people simply need the extra cash for everyday expenses while others are now using it as a “safety net” for financial emergencies.

If you’re a homeowner age 62 or older, you owe it to yourself to learn more so that you can make an informed decision. Homeowners who are interested in learning more can request a free 2018 HECM loan Information Kit and free Educational DVD by calling American Advisors Group toll-free at 1-(800) 840-3558.

At no cost or obligation, the professionals at AAG can help you find out if you qualify and also answer common questions such as: 1. What’s the government’s role?

2. How much money might I get?

3. Who owns the home after I take out a HECM loan?

You may be pleasantly surprised by what you discover when you call AAG for more information today.

Source: http://reversemortgagedaily.com/2016/06/21/seniors-home-equity-grows-to-6-trillion-reverse-mortgage-opportunity. 2If you qualify and your loan is approved, a Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) must pay off any existing mortgage(s). With a HECM loan, no monthly mortgage payment is required. A HECM increases the principal mortgage loan amount and decreases home equity (it is a negative amortization loan).

AAG works with other lenders and anancial institutions that offer HECMs. To process your request for a loan, AAG may forward your contact information to such lenders for your consideration of HECM programs that they offer. When the loan is due and payable, some or all of the equity in the property no longer belongs to borrowers, who may need to sell the home or otherwise repay the loan with interest from other proceeds.

AAG charges an origination fee, mortgage insurance premium, closing costs and servicing fees (added to the balance of the loan). The balance of the loan grows over time and AAG charges interest on the balance.

Interest is not tax-deductible until the loan is partially or fully repaid. Borrowers are responsible for paying property taxes and homeowner s insurance (which may be substantial). We do not establish an escrow account for disbursements of these payments. A set-aside account can be set up to pay taxes and insurance and may be required in some cases. Borrowers must occupy home as their primary residence and pay for ongoing maintenance; otherwise the loan becomes due and payable. The loan also becomes due and payable when the last borrower, or eligible non-borrowing surviving spouse, dies, sells the home, permanently moves out, defaults on taxes or insurance payments, or does not otherwise comply with the loan terms. American Advisors Group (AAG) is headquartered at 3800 W. Chapman Ave., 3rd & 7th Floors, Orange CA, 92868.

(MB_0911141), (Illinois Residential Mortgage Licensee; Illinois Commissioner of Banks can be reached at 100 West Randolph, 9th Floor, Chicago, Illinois 60601, (312) 814-4500). V2017.08.23_OR

1

These materials are not from HUD or FHA and were not approved by HUD or a government agency.

JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 23

Doug Varone and Dancers in ReComposed. © Erin Baiano

“If this work and these dancers can’t move you, I don’t know what would.”

Dance Magazine

Doug Varone and Dancers Nocturne(s), Boats Leaving, Folded (a duet from in the shelter in the fold) and Lux

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Wild sexual fantasies. A mysterious cowboy.

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ARTS & CULTURE

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John Judd, Timothy Edward Kane, Heidi Kettenring, Kate Collins MICHAEL BROSILOW

THEATER

One for the pantheon All My Sons is another of Court Theatre’s great tragedies

By TONY ADLER

“We might be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” —Jimmy Gator, in Magnolia

O

ver three seasons, from 2014 to 2016, Court Theatre assembled a trilogy of tragedies from separate works by each of three Greek tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—collectively recounting the fall of the house of Atreus. Iphigenia in Aulis got the ugly ball rolling with the tale of how King Agamemnon found himself sacrificing his daughter to placate the goddess Artemis and get the Trojan War on track. The following season’s entry, Agamemnon, saw him assassinated for his trouble. And then Electra gave us his surviving daughter’s revenge on the previous play’s revengers. Sins of the father, illustrated.

Now Court is presenting an unofficial fourth entry in the series, Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, and it’s arguably the best of the bunch.

Miller wrote a handful of plays before and during World War II, but he didn’t receive wide attention until the late 1940s, for his postwar tragedies of common men tangled up in the contradictions of American capitalism.

All My Sons was the first of those, premiering in 1947. Death of a Salesman followed two years later.

There are several tangled common men in All My Sons—none of them really happy on their best days, and at least one suffering from what we’d now call trauma. The most

tangled of all, though, is Joe Keller, a 60-ish factory owner who went to prison briefly during the war for allowing 120 cracked engine heads to be shipped from his factory and installed in Curtiss P-40s, those single-engine planes that became iconic for the shark eyes and teeth often painted on their noses.

Because of the defective parts, 21 fighter pilots died. Joe eventually came home with an official document attesting to his exoneration, but his partner, friend, and next-door neighbor, Steve Deever, remained behind in the penitentiary.

Joe seems to have put all that behind him as the play begins. He even appears to have made peace with the loss of his son Larry, also a fighter pilot, who went MIA in the Pacific three and a half years earlier. The play opens on Joe sitting in his backyard on a late-summer day, reading the paper (not the news—the want ads, which are funnier), making small talk with his neighbor Jim, who bought the old Deever place, and gently messing with the mind of Bert, an eight-year-old from the block who thinks Joe is some kind of sheriff with a jail in his basement. (In a gorgeous touch, Joe explains that his imprisonment underwent an inversion in Bert’s imagination, turning Joe into a retired cop.) In John Judd’s quietly masterful performance, Joe chuckles a lot: the wise old philosopher in retirement.

But in fact he’s King Agamemnon, and his suburban dwelling is the House of Atreus, and his downfall begins as so many of the Greek

tragedies do, with the return of someone who’s been away a long time.

What a great play this is! Not a slavish recapitulation of classical tropes, but a recasting of them into a work that’s somehow weighty and lithe, inexorable and unexpected, eternal and American, all at once. Even if you know All My Sons, you don’t know it. You may see it coming—Miller being a staunch constructionist—and still have no idea what hit you.

(Which puts you, by the way, in precisely the same situation as Joe Keller.) And, in any case, you can’t escape the relevance of this particular drama to a culture and economy that fetishize the marketplace. Last week the Reader’s Albert Williams, writing about August Wilson’s Jitney, said that Wilson belongs “at the forefront of American drama alongside Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams.” Well, based on this Court offering and an astonishing revival of A View From the Bridge hosted by the Goodman Theatre last fall, I’d say it’s past time to stop thinking of Miller as O’Neill

and Williams’s earnest, slightly flatfooted cousin and put him in the forefront too.

Charles Newell’s staging, in which Joe’s neighbors constitute a silent chorus, makes an excellent case for it. Timothy Edward Kane is, well, earnest and slightly flatfooted—but in an appropriate way—as Joe’s surviving son, Chris, who’s taken it into his head to marry Steve Deever’s daughter, Ann. Heidi Kettenring’s Ann makes both Chris’s devotion and her own believable. Playing Ann’s brother, George, Dan Waller feels as uncanny as the stranger in “The Masque of the Red Death.” And if Kate Collins seems heavyhanded at first in the role of Joe’s wife, Kate, she more than justifies that behavior when she comes clean at the end. The woman is but mad north-north-west. v R All My Sons Through 2/11: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-753-4472, courttheatre. org, $44-$74.

@taadler

February 6–11, 2018 go.iu.edu/1PGx

THE MEDIA SCHOOL INDIANA UNIVERSITY

JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 25

ARTS & CULTURE VISUAL ART

The mummy resurrected In “Paint the Eyes Softer” at the Block Museum, Egyptian death-mask portraits bring their subjects back to life after 2,000 years.

By DMITRY SAMAROV

T

he impulse to render human likenesses of one kind or another has been with us for 40,000 years, since Paleolithic people first scratched figures onto the walls of their caves. But the idea of portraying individuals was thought to be a relatively modern phenomenon until the beginning of the 20th century, when the mummy portraits of Roman Egypt were excavated in the Faiyum region just south of Cairo.

“Paint the Eyes Softer,” on view at the Block Museum through April 22, attempts to ex-

amine a few of these revelatory paintings not only through art-historical means but also by employing the latest imaging technology with the aim of uncovering these portraitists’ working methods. Were the paintings of particular people? Were they done before or after their subjects passed? Were they meant to be seen only by close family or by a wider audience?

These and other unanswerable questions are broached in this sparse yet diverting show.

The half-dozen portraits that form the core of the exhibit come from the Phoebe A. Hearst

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Comparison of a mummy portrait using imaging technology COURTESY OF THE PHOEBE A. HEARST MUSEUM OF ANTHROPOLOGY

Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. They were all made sometime between the First and Third centuries CE on wood panels with pigments suspended in beeswax. All were once attached to the linen-wrapped faces of mummies but have been most commonly displayed as stand-alone art since their discovery. This change of presentation has contributed to the ease with which the modern viewer identifies with these ancient visages. But their direct gazes and their unidealized countenances appeal to us on a more elemental level too, because they look so familiar. One wouldn’t be surprised to see similar faces on the bus en route to work.

The name of the show, “Paint the Eyes Softer,” comes from a written instruction discovered on the back of one of the portrait panels.

Using sophisticated imaging technologies, scientists discovered several notes made by the artist, each a small clue to the wishes of whoever commissioned this portrait. There’s no way to know much more definitively, but these notes prove that, at the very least, the portraits were meant to represent a specific likeness.

The same can’t be said of the death masks attached to similarly consecrated bodies from just a couple hundred years earlier, discovered in the same region. The pharaohs preferred their faces to be rendered in much more idealized form. A couple of these masks are on display in the first room of the exhibit for contrast, and they effectively demonstrate the dramatically different intent of their creators. Their simplified, regular facial features may represent anyone or no one, whereas the portraits from Roman Egypt are unmistakably themselves and no one else.

Painted in careful layers on wood, these portraits lay the groundwork for the Christian icon painting that would dominate Western art for centuries. But their attention to indi-

vidual physical specificity anticipates a kind of portraiture that would not be allowed again until the prohibition on nonreligious figures loosened its stranglehold on painting during the Renaissance more than a millennium later.

The last gallery presents an intact mummy of a five-year-old girl. The painted portrait is still attached to where her face used to be. This display of wrapped remains has a very different psychological and emotional effect from anything else on show. Wall labels include X-ray scans of her skeleton and other scientific analysis of both her body and the material that covers it, but none of this information can obscure the fact that one is in the presence of what’s left of a person who was once alive.

Looking down at her painted face is nothing like looking at the very similarly rendered faces in the previous room. The presence of the remains of her body calls into question the propriety of presenting disinterred remains as art in ways the disembodied portraits don’t. Perhaps objective-minded scientists would disagree, but I would have preferred that this dead five-year-old had been left in her resting place.

No matter how sophisticated our technology becomes, it’s doubtful that a device will ever be invented to explain the impulse to render the human image for posterity. The desire to make a picture in which we recognize our own faces is as basic to the human condition as the need for food or shelter. The 2,000-yearold ancestors looking out from the walls of the Block Museum are a reminder of that. Even if they were originally meant as death masks, these portraits look as alive as you or me. v R “PAINT THE EYES SOFTER: MUMMY PORTRAITS FROM ROMAN EGYPT” Through 4/22, Tue and Sat-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Wed-Fri 10 AM-8 PM, Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Dr., 847-4914000, blockmuseum.northwestern.edu. F

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ARTS & CULTURE Aisha Oxley’s For Rekia—on display at the Hairpin Arts Center as part of “Do Not Resist”—is a tribute to Rekia Boyd, the 22-yearold woman who was fatally shot

by Chicago police officer Dante Servin in March 2012.

KERRY CARDOZA

VISUAL ART

For the People Artists Collective looks back on 100 years of police violence “These aren’t just these random accidents or incidents. These are all connected,” says Monica Trinidad, an organizer of “Do Not Resist?”

By KERRY CARDOZA

F

ive television screens sit around a living room among houseplants, table lamps, and easy chairs. Each screen shows a family member of Rekia Boyd, the 22-year-old woman who was killed by Chicago police officer Dante Servin in March 2012. As Boyd’s brother talks about his sister—the way she laughed, how she would brighten a room—the others listen and then respond. The installation, called Present Absence, evokes a “listening circle,” a virtual dialogue about the deceased, that gives the viewer a more personal look at the life lost.

Created by filmmakers Salome Chasnoff and Meredith Zielke, it’s one of 120 pieces featured in “Do Not Resist? 100 Years of Police Violence in Chicago,” a citywide art exhibition organized by For the People Artists Collective.

“We wanted to dig a little bit deeper into this long, long legacy of police violence, and how violence is inherent in policing as a whole system,” says Monica Trinidad, a collective member and one of the show’s curators.

“These aren’t just these random accidents or incidents. These are all connected.”

The exhibition opened on January 12 at the Hairpin Arts Center in Avondale. It showcases work by more than two dozen artists and features an in-depth time line of policing in the city going back to 1917. It also serves as the main hub for three satellite shows at other galleries around the city. Each space shows work based on a different theme: at Roman Susan, there’s a focus on remembrance and paying tribute to CPD victims, while at Uri-Eichen, local artist Larry Redmond will show his photographs of activism over the years. Art In These Times will feature a more factual look at police violence with an exhibit by the Invisible Institute. “[The collective is] trying to emphasize the importance of art and how integral it is to organizing,” Trinidad explains. “Because it’s a way that people have always resisted, through arts and culture.”

The work of artist and graphic designer

Emory Douglas embodies that combination of art and activism. Douglas, who served as minister of culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until the party disbanded in 1980, has two prints on display at Hairpin, both from 1970. One shows a black revolutionary wearing buttons bearing the names of Chicago Panthers killed by police. The other is a rear-view drawing of a black person in handcuffs getting hit in the back by an oversize bullet printed with the words “POLICE TERROR, USA.” Ricardo Levins Morales, another longtime political artist, submitted a never-before-seen print for the exhibit that honors the life of Manuel Ramos, a member of the Puerto Rican civil rights group the Young Lords Organization who was was killed by CPD in May 1969.

The scratchboard-and-ink work shows Ramos standing amid a cityscape; behind him is the Young Lords logo, “Tengo Puerto Rico en mi corazon” (“I have Puerto Rico in my heart”).

Gone But Not Forgotten, a quilting project made by Rachel Wallis in collaboration with We Charge Genocide, is one of the most prominent pieces on display; it takes up much of the gallery at Hairpin. Six quilt panels display the names of 144 people who were killed by Chicago police or died while in police custody between 2006 and 2015. Each name is placed in a star, along with the person’s age and the date of his or her death. More than 200 community members gathered together to work on the quilt and listen to stories about the individual lives of the deceased. Binders accompany the panels featuring news stories or short biographies of as many of the people as the participants could find information on. As Wallis notes in a video on the project, there is no public record of these names (the Chicago Police Department doesn’t include fatal shootings by police officers in the city’s annual homicide

count); she and her collaborators compiled their list by searching through newspaper clippings and interviewing victims’ families.

“Gone But Not Forgotten,” she writes on her website, “appears to be the most comprehensive public collection of information about who has been killed by the police in Chicago.”

Viewing the piece is a truly staggering experience. The sheer number of names gives an overwhelming sensation of just how many lives have been lost to police violence in our city.

It was this work that gave Salome Chasnoff the idea for the Present Absence video project.

She had been documenting the quilting process and helping to facilitate a conversation among the quilters about restorative justice.

Chasnoff has worked with people affected by the criminal justice system for many years, and she took issue with the way people killed by police are often portrayed. “There’s a gross misrepresentation of the way they were killed and why they were killed,” she says. “They’re characterized as people who had it coming.”

With her project, which tells the story of five individuals killed by CPD, she wanted to create a space for those to become visible “not as cases or statistics.”

Nowhere is that more evident than in the video featuring the family of Dakota Bright, a 15-year-old boy shot and killed in November 2012. His younger sister, Makayla Edwards, talks about how her brother used to defend her against bullies and cheer her up when she was sad. While most of her family members can’t get through their interviews without tearing up, Edwards retains her composure.

But her last words illustrate how her brother’s killing has affected her. “I wanted to be a police officer since I was seven,” she says. “But that made me change my mind-set.”

Trinidad hopes that the works on display, along with the programming scheduled throughout the show, can help viewers imagine a future without policing. “I think that art is a really good sort of gateway for these conversations,” she says. “There was a world that once existed without police. There was a world that existed without prisons. We can get there again. It’s not going to happen overnight, but we can start exploring alternatives now.” v R “DO NOT RESIST? 100 YEARS OF POLICE VIOLENCE IN CHICAGO” Through 2/9, various times and locations, 773-661-6361, forthepeoplecollective.org. F

@booksnotboys JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE Diane Kruger in In the Fade ò NICOLA DOVE

MOVIES

About to explode

In the Fade proves there’s nothing more dangerous than a person who’s lost everything.

By J.R. JONES

F

atih Akin’s harrowing thriller In the Fade represented Germany in this year’s Oscar competiton for best foreign-language film. Yet the 44-year-old director, born in Hamburg to Turkish parents, spends much of the film wondering whether Germany really represents him. In the Fade opens with camcorder footage of a prison wedding that unites Nuri (Numan Acar), a handsome Turkish immigrant to Germany doing time on a drug charge, and Katja (Diane Kruger), his blond, statuesque German girlfriend. Several years later, Nuri has gone straight, running a little storefront business in the Turkish sector of Hamburg as a translator and tax preparer, and he and Katja have an adorable little boy, Rocco, whom they cherish. Then, in a flash, it’s all gone—after leaving Rocco with his father at work one afternoon, Katja returns to discover that a nail bomb, planted by neo-Nazis, has exploded on the street outside Nuri’s office, blowing him and the boy to bits.

The rest of the film centers on Katja (and on Kruger’s grueling, heart-rending performance) as she tries to bring the perpetrators

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to justice, her crusade continually hampered by prejudice against her late husband. Akin generally limits the story to Katja’s point of view (in the manner of French director Robert Bresson, he explained to AwardsCircuit.com), and for the first of his three acts, viewers are obliged to accompany her to the absolute depths of despair. Overwhelmed by grief, Katja grows suicidal; only the news that the perpetrators have been caught pulls her back from the brink. This isn’t the first time Akin has dealt with suicide in his films, though in this case it becomes the baseline for everything to follow. Katja’s heavy descent pushes In the Fade toward existential drama even as it ratchets up the suspense, because no character is more volatile than one who doesn’t care about living anymore.

Akin first came to international attention with Head On (2004), a romantic black comedy that won the Golden Bear for best film at the Berlin film festival. Like In the Fade, it deals with a widowed spouse: Cahit (Birol Ünel), a shaggy rocker who works at a concert hall, is so bereft after his wife’s death that, in the first ten minutes of the movie, he drives

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his car into a wall at top speed. (Akin captures this in an overhead shot, for a good view of the crumpling hood.) Confined to a mental clinic, Cahit meets another inpatient, Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), who immediately demands, “Are you Turkish? Would you marry me?” Sibel has cut her wrists to escape from her strict Muslim family, and she begs Cahit to enter into a marriage of convenience with her so that she can maintain a pretense of piety but sleep with whomever she pleases. “I want to live, Cahit,” she explains as they drink together in a bar, having escaped from the clinic. “To live and to dance and to fuck.” When Cahit refuses her proposal, Sibel smashes her beer bottle and slices her wrist open again.

In the Fade delves deeper into the protagonist’s grief than Head On ever dares. Akin shows only the aftermath of the blast, sticking with Katja as she rolls up to the police cordon in her car, makes a mad dash for the crime scene, and gets tackled by police. Later, when she learns that a man and a boy have been killed and the police ask her for a DNA sample, Katja howls and collapses, writhing on the floor. Visions of the last moments torture her for days. “Imagine Rocco lying on the ground, seeing his own limbs around him,” she says to a friend. “Imagine how scared he was.” Summoning up her courage, Katja ventures past the plastic sheeting that covers the bombedout office; inside she spies a spray of blood dried against one wall and silently leans her forehead against it. In the most excruciating scene of all, Katja curls up in Rocco’s bunk bed, sobbing uncontrollably; the room is flooded with light, and the bed has a cute little play slide leading from the bunk to the floor.

Katja’s grief is only compounded by the tension between the German and Turkish in-laws as they keep vigil over her in the days between the blast and the funeral. The initial mystery surrounding the bomb attack brings out the worst in Katja’s mother (Siir Eloglu), who—like the police—insists that Nuri must have been involved in some criminal activity.

Nuri’s parents implore Katja to let them take their son’s and grandson’s remains back to Turkey for burial; when she refuses, they stalk out, leaving Katja’s mother to dispense a haughty “Well done!” At the funeral, Nuri’s mother (Aysel Iscan, also Sibel’s mother in Head On) gets her revenge: “If you’d taken bet-

ter care,” she notes, “my grandson would still be alive.” The ultimate test of loyalty comes when the police arrive at Katja’s home with a search warrant and find a packet of opium she’s been using over the past few days. Katja’s mother tells the police that the stash belonged to Nuri, but Katja, glaring at her, defends her husband’s memory and claims the dope as her own.

Akin based his film on the true story of the Zwickau terror cell, three neo-Nazis allied with the National Socialist Underground who murdered ten people in Germany, most of them Turkish immigrants, between 2000 and 2007; as Der Spiegel later reported, police investigation of the killings tended to focus on the victims’ families or associates, leaving the killers free to continue their campaign.

In the movie, Katja provides the authorities with a detailed description of the young white woman she saw leaving a bicycle with a top case outside Nuri’s office, but the detective leading the investigation (Henning Peker) keeps returning to Nuri’s criminal record and Turkish background. Could it have been the Turkish mafia, the Kurdish mafia, the Albanian mafia? Unfortunately, Katja’s drug possession only reinforces the faulty police narrative surrounding the case.

By the end of the first act, no one should be surprised that Katja has decided to check out.

After her piteous breakdown in Rocco’s bunk bed, Akin follows a trail of discarded clothes along the bathroom floor and reveals Katja lying in a warm bath in her underwear. As in Head On, an overhead shot records the moment of bitter truth, blood creeping out from Katja’s wrists and flanking her white torso as she stares into the camera. Just as she begins to sink below the water line, an answering machine message from her attorney brings word that the bombers have been apprehended and pulls her back into the world of the living. “If you want to end your life, end it,” a therapist tells Cahit in the earlier movie. “But you don’t have to die to do that. End your life here and go somewhere else. Do something useful.” In the comic world of Head On, Cahit makes himself useful by agreeing to a sham marriage; in the tragic one of In the Fade, Katja finds a reason to keep going too, even if it’s as simple as punishment. v IN THE FADE sss Directed by Fatih Akin. R, 106 min. Arclight, 1500 N. Clybourn, 323-615-2550, arclightcinemas.com, $15.

v @JR_Jones

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Love It/Leave It

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his winter the University of Chicago Film Studies Center presents a series of programs celebrating the 50th anniversary of Canyon Cinema, the experimental-film distributor founded by filmmaker Bruce Baillie and still going strong in San Francisco.

This Friday’s installment, “Decodings,” offers plenty of exciting stuff: Jodie Mack’s Point de Gaze (2012), a dazzling high-speed montage of the patterns in fine Belgian lacework; Naomi Uman’s Removed (1999), in which the figure of a woman has been scraped away from 16-millimeter footage of an old 1970s soft-core feature, just as her perspective has been overlooked in the original; and JoAnn Elam’s Lie Back and Enjoy It (1982), whose soundtrack consists of a woman interrogating a male filmmaker about the power relationship he creates when he trains his lens on her.

My favorite blast from the past, however, is Love It/Leave It (1973), Tom Palazzolo’s 15-minute satire of knee-jerk patriotism and a choice example of good old Chicago lefty troublemaking. Palazzolo, who graduated from the School of the Art Institute, opens with footage from a nudists’ parade at the annual Naked City festival in Roseland, Indiana: as martial music plays on the soundtrack, women wearing only heels and carrying helium balloons strut around a fairground and clothed male photographers angle for position. A nude old woman rocks gently in a tree swing, and Palazzolo cuts to a close-up of an alarmed squirrel darting out of frame. (You have to admire an

experimental artist who isn’t ashamed of an animal-reaction shot.) The men get their nude parade too, complete with an insert of a corkscrew drill spinning into the ground Palazzolo takes his title from the slogan “America—love it or leave it,” which was popularized by red-baiting columnist Walter Winchell in the 1950s and revived in May 1970 by construction workers who attacked student antiwar protesters in Manhattan. The final movement of the film is accompanied by a deranged audio loop of voices chanting “Love it!” and “Leave it!” while Merle Haggard’s country hit “Okie From Muskogee” drifts in and out (“We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee . . . We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street”). Meanwhile Palazzolo cuts together familiar Chicago locales, wacky footage of clowns at the Saint Patrick’s Day parade, and a shot of the White House through its spike-tipped iron fence. In a joking edit, a shot of black teenagers horsing around near the lakefront is countered by footage of riot police marching in close-step formation. They plow forward, thrusting their batons ahead of them like phalluses.

Clearly they’ve made their choice: Love it. v LOVE IT/LEAVE IT sss Directed by Tom Palazzolo. 15 min. Screens as part of “Canyon City 50: Decodings.” Fri 1/26, 7 PM, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th, 773-702-2787, filmstudiescenter. uchicago. F

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Mark Grusane ò TOM MICHAS, WITH ASSISTANT BEN LEGUE AND GROOMING BY SOPHIA PORTER

Mark Grusane has forgotten more about dance music than you’ll ever know The cofounder of defunct south-side shop Mr. Peabody Records talks about the insanely rare and sought-after tracks he’s sharing on The Real Sound of Mark Grusane.

By LEOR GALIL

C

hicago has produced plenty of influential electronic producers and DJs who’ve become legends in their communities but remain obscure outside them. Late-80s ghetto-house producer Steve Poindexter, for instance, perfected a raunchy sound on “Work That Mutha Fucker” that other producers would make famous, but he’s hardly a household name himself. And before footwork originator RP Boo released Legacy via Planet Mu in 2013, the people carrying his torch were mostly battle dancers on the south and west sides.

30 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 25, 2018

Even within the city’s ranks of underappreciated geniuses, though, producer and collector Mark Grusane is a special case. The 42-yearold Washington Heights native has been plugged into electronic music since the early 80s, amassing an astounding breadth of knowledge; he learned about house music before the genre had a name, and at the time he wasn’t even out of grade school. But as a DJ—the principal way he might share that knowledge with the public—he’s spent more time spinning in his record store or in his bedroom than he has playing high-profile gigs. For decades he’s

been a behind-the-scenes connector, satisfying the curiosity of DJs hungry for obscure disco, house, funk, and boogie, and in 2004 he and fellow collector Mike Cole opened Mr. Peabody Records, creating a brick-and-mortar outlet for their skill at finding and selling vinyl. The Morgan Park shop, which closed in 2012, developed a fervent cult following, even shipping records to DJs living overseas who’d never set foot inside it—and some of them prized Mr. Peabody so highly they tried to keep it to themselves.

“We’d been shipping records overseas for a lot of these guys that do compilations—a lot of

times the records end up on the compilations, but we wouldn’t get any credit,” Grusane says.

“They’d be thanking people, but they wouldn’t thank us. They would say, like, ‘My guys in the States, you know who you are.’ We were always a secret for a long time.”

Since Mr. Peabody shut down, Grusane himself has become less of a secret. For the past few years he’s toured internationally, and last year alone he played dates in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Australia. Next weekend he’ll return to London for an in-store set at a popup shop run by the label Barely Breaking Even

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in a multimedia arts space called the Institute of Light. It’s a celebration for The Real Sound of Mark Grusane, a compilation of deep disco, elastic funk, and sensuous boogie that he’s rescued from record shops, warehouses, thrift stores, and the like over the decades. BBE has previously released disco compilations that Grusane assembled with Cole—2010’s The Real Sound of Chicago and 2011’s The Real Sound of Chicago & Beyond—and it’ll drop his solo collection on Friday, January 26.

Grusane was a precocious learner. In the early 80s, when he was just eight years old, his older brother, Durward, brought him to Importes Etc.—the defunct Printer’s Row record store, favored by Frankie Knuckles, that famously gave house music its name. Its staff christened the burgeoning genre by shortening the label “Warehouse Music” (used to denote records Frankie would play at that club) to just “House Music.” Grusane caught the bug and followed in his brother’s footsteps.

“He was just a neighborhood DJ. It was just a hobby,” Grusane says. “He didn’t even have a pair of [Technics] 1200s—he had regular turntables with no pitchers on ’em. He would speed it up by dragging the platter with his finger, and he would blend that way too.”

Grusane was able to buy himself a pair of Technics turntables because of two other pursuits he’d gotten into young: acting and modeling. He began his career at age seven, appearing in Spiegel catalogs and in TV and print ads for the likes of Sears, McDonald’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. By the time he started high school in the late 80s, though, that part of his life was over. “When I was modeling, if you were black, you had to have a really clean-cut look—you pretty much had to look like a Cosby kid,” he says. “I mean, all that was fun, but I wanted to be a normal kid.”

For Grusane, “normal” included DJing. He practiced blending and mixing in his bedroom, and as a high school student at Lindblom he played records at neighborhood parties with a couple crews of friends—Frantic Party Productions and Men of Action. The more Grusane spun, the more records he’d collect, and the more he’d collect, the more he wanted.

He’d developed a fascination with what he calls “higher order disco,” and even though he was only DJing at small parties, he wanted to play material obscure enough to make him stand out. At age 16, he began contacting record stores across the country trying to track down unfamiliar music. “What I would do is go downtown to the main library and get phone books for different cities, and just call the stores at random until I could find somebody and gain a relationship with them,” he says.

He’d order piles of records, keep his favorites, and sell the rest to other DJs.

Mark Grusane in Mr. Peabody Records in 2004, the shop’s first year in business ò ALL PHOTOS THIS PAGE COURTESY OF MARK GRUSANE

After high school, Grusane earned an associate’s degree in engineering from OliveHarvey College in 1996, the same year he first teamed up with Cole to sell records. He went on to study electrical engineering at Purdue, but left in 1999 to become a traffic engineer for the Illinois Department of Transportation. He’d briefly worked at Kennedy-King College’s WKKC in the late 80s, and he continued to DJ the occasional party with Cole, but for the most part he showed off his taste and his turntable technique out of the public eye, by sharing cassette recordings of his vinyl mixes.

Opening Mr. Peabody helped Grusane build his reputation. Though the shop occupied a strip-mall storefront, he and Cole designed it to be a hangout. “It was a record store, but it was very personal,” Grusane says. “We didn’t close at any particular time—if you were in there, we never kicked you out.” By working at Mr. Peabody, Grusane met international touring artists such as London DJ Frankie Valentine, who introduced the shop’s owners to BBE. It’s also where Grusane became close with Chicago house veteran Sadar Bahar, who introduced him to his manager, Ornella Cicchetti—and after Mr. Peabody closed, she took him on as a client.

I have a rule Grusane behind the counter at Mr. Peabody Records, probably in 2006 when I find records—I play everything.

Grusane tours more internationally these Literally, I’ll play days, but he still spins locally—right now he’s working to set up a regular gig at Punch House every record in Pilsen. And his renown around town continI find. If I’m ues to grow, particularly in the thriving boogie scene: this fall, when I spoke with Tim Zawada digging, I’ll drop of Star Creature Universal Vibrations, he said a needle on that Grusane had done as much to build an auevery possible dience for that postdisco funk sound in Chicago as Dam-Funk had done in Los Angeles. And for thing I put in my years, Grusane says, he felt like he was keeping hands. I’ll try to the flame lit all by himself: “I remember when people in Chicago didn’t even like boogie.” play every single The Real Sound of Mark Grusane contains 11 record, because treasures this vinyl archaeologist holds dear.

I called up the DJ with the golden ears to talk I don’t want to about the tracks he’d decided the rest of the miss anything. world needs to hear. We ended up discussing —Mark Grusane

five of the cuts that appear on the compilation, some of which he’s edited or remixed and some of which he included in their original form.

Below are edited versions of his replies.

J

JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 31

Grusane’s record collection when he was 15 years old ò COURTESY OF MARK GRUSANE

This Sears ad features a young Mark Grusane and future actor Chris O’Donnell, who played Robin in two 1990s Batman movies.

continued from 31

AFRICANO

“OPEN YOUR HEARTS” (1974) “Open Your Hearts” was an edit I did when I was 21. It was a 45—it was a part one and part two, one on each side. It had a really short intro, and it’s a really nice beat and disco record—really soulful, up-tempo, energetic disco. It needed to be longer, so I extended it, edited it together.

Back then I had a friend I met in Canada, and he was a customer: Jason Lev. Our dream was to have our own edit record. Basically Jay was like, “I want to press a couple of your edits to vinyl.” He said, “I want to make it super limited, something like 100 copies.” This was before the store opened. I remember I gave him the edit, and we pressed it to record, with “Mucho Macho” on the flip side—that’s on the compilation also. And we did 100 copies. The store had opened by the time we got them, and I think I put, like, 25, 30 copies in the store.

They just sat there for about six months. But we just sat it there as an experiment, just to see who would grab it.

One day my friend Sadar came through the store. I said, “Hey man, check this out.” I gave him a test pressing of the release, and he championed that record. Back then he started touring a little bit, and he was overseas playing it, blasting the shit out of that record, giving love back. That’s what got it really sought after. You look on Discogs right now, you’ve got 400 people looking for it. [Editor’s note: At publication, that number had grown to 1,056.]

He got it to that point where people were really looking for it, and we couldn’t even get rid of copies of it. Slowly, the copies went through the store—people figured it out.

You’ve got so many people, globally, looking for it, it’s pretty much extinct. Most of the copies, people play off CD-Rs. So I figured that

32 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 25, 2018

would be a good driving force for the comp, to put that on.

BRIEF ENCOUNTER

“WHAT ABOUT LOVE” (1976) That’s an obscure Capitol 45. Brief Encounter, before they hit Capitol or around that time, they had a couple other private releases. This 45 was pretty hot on the market. They also had a funk track too, on the Capitol label. The 45 was only three minutes and two, maybe three minutes and five seconds; I basically tastefully extended certain parts. I didn’t want to make it too boring or whatever, but I got it to about five minutes.

If you listen to it, you really can’t tell it’s an edit. That’s how I like to do my edits. Like, it sounds like a longer version. Sometimes people edit records that don’t need editing. I think it’s like they just edited it just to say they edited it. But my purpose is to make it tastefully longer, where you have a longer experience with the song. Putting records out like that, especially when you’re messing with other peoples’ music—I try to still respect it.

YAN TREGGER

“RIFF ON” (1978) He did a lot of library music—like, soundtrack library music. It’s really big on the collectors’ thing now, because people are going to all extents for music today. He’s a guy that did music that’s designed for soundtracks, commercials, stuff like that. Basically, it’s a nice downtempo track. I designed it to be a skating-style record; I chopped it a little bit. You wouldn’t know it unless you had the original. I just did a little overdub with some sexy voice, to try and make it sound a little sexier—I put a lady’s voice over it.

I was in a warehouse, and I found that when I was digging. I have a rule when I find

records—I play everything. Literally, I’ll play every record I find. If I’m digging, I’ll drop a needle on every possible thing I put in my hands. I’ll try to play every single record, because I don’t want to miss anything. That’s just one of those records—it looked interesting. I just played it, and I said, “Oh shit, I like this one.”

record. That’s an American cover. I used to know what it was, but it’s a disco cover of an American jazz artist. It’s a really good, wellput-together record of disco-funk. What’s so odd about it is it has a steel-drum element in it that goes well. That one I didn’t even edit—I just put it on there as it was.

THE ISLAND MUSIC MAKERS

“DO IT” (1976) Shabadoo was the break-dancer—I don’t know if it was Beat Street, Breakin’, or all of them, but he was the break-dancer back then.

[Editor’s note: He appeared in Breakin’ and in Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo.] I think this record is his only work that he did, and there’s a part one and part two. I don’t know the whole production with it, but it’s on the Doré label.

That’s a record I found two years ago, when I was in London and I was shopping in my friend’s record store. I’m always finding stuff.

Some of these records I’ve had since the age of—like, before 21.

There’s a part one and part two, and basically the record’s so good, but no one’s ever did a 12-inch. When a record is playing, if part two’s on the other side, it’s like, “Who the hell wants to take it out and flip it over? Let it keep going!” v

“CALYPSO MEDLEY” (1980) That record is a Carnival Cruise ship record. I remember when I was younger, my mom took me on a cruise—on a cruise ship, you’ve got the steel bands or the calypso bands. They’re playing the live music on the ship. This was one of those groups that was on the cruise ship; back then, their records were their business cards. So what they would do is they would either give a record away, or sell a record if you wanted to support them while you’re on a cruise ship. That record I found in a collection of somebody that went on a Carnival Cruise.

Usually with those cruise-ship records, they have a lot of traditional island stuff—like where they’re from or whatever, ’cause they give you that island experience while you’re cruising. It never fails: on every record, there’s a cover that’s their style—like, Caribbean style or steel band—of an American

SHABADOO

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JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 33

MUSIC IN ROTATION

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

Brockhampton onstage in 2017, with front man Kevin Abstract in the Wu-Tang shirt ò KEVIN WINTER/GETTY

Jaden Smith in his video for “Batman”

Amr Diab in 2011 ò AMRO MARAGHI/GETTY

LEOR GALIL

CIERA MCKISSICK Founder and

VIA ROSA

Awesome L, Awesome L & His Posse I recently found a sealed copy of this 1989 Chicago rap LP. Local rap didn’t tend to get released on vinyl in those days, and the records that did were often one-offs produced by musicians who knew house music better than hiphop. But Awesome L & His Posse doesn’t come off like it was made by hip-hop outsiders, and that’s thanks to MC Awesome L. His ease and ferocity on the mike showed real promise— even though he was foolhardy enough to rip on rap king Rakim on two different tracks.

Santana’s Amigos on vinyl Nowadays most younger people know Santana from Rihanna’s “Wild Thoughts,” which samples his 1999 hit “Maria Maria.” I picked up his 1976 album Amigos at a thrift store, and it’s become an integral part of my mornings. The album art is vibrant and psychedelic, with elephants, lions, and trees in Technicolor. Amigos is Santana’s seventh studio LP, and produced the minor U.S. hit “Let It Shine,” its only song to highlight bassist David Brown (the album was also Brown’s last with the group). “Let It Shine” is actually my least favorite song on Amigos—it’s a bit too disco and gospel for me—but I could listen to “Dance Sister Dance (Baila Mi Hermana)” on repeat, because it makes me do just that.

“Un Poco Loco” from the movie Coco This movie was breathtaking from beginning to end. The scene in particular that struck home for me was the first time we hear Miguel sing.

His character is forbidden from expressing his musical talents, so you really feel him break loose. I see a lot of myself in this scene, not because I was forbidden from singing by my family (it’s quite the opposite) but because for a long time I was in denial about how much music meant to me. So seeing him let go of his fear of singing—and of being heard and being on a stage—was very powerful.

Reader staff writer

Dolores O’Riordan If you were an American middle-school kid in the mid-90s whose only source of new music was corporate rock radio and you didn’t feel punched in the gut the first time you heard the Cranberries’ “Zombie,” did you even grow up in the 90s? Front woman Dolores O’Riordan died January 15 at age 46. I’ll be honest, I’m not familiar with too many of her songs—but the ones I do know burned themselves into my brain years ago, and I’m sure they’ll stay there for many more to come.

Brockhampton What’s not to love about a boy band whose 15 members include their webmaster? What’s not to love about group leader Kevin Abstract rapping about being gay, when so many other MCs can’t even handle other people being gay? What’s not to love about their immersive Saturation trilogy? I say all this because I’m still adding to a lengthy Twitter thread in which I make my case to join Brockhampton—come on, guys, put me in!

34 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 25, 2018

curator of AMFM gallery

Jaden Smith Will and Jada Pinkett Smith have beautifully eccentric children who’ve become celebrities in their own right. I knew Willow made music, but I’d never much heard Jaden’s, so I went down a rabbit hole with the videos from his November 2017 studio album Syre (which follows mixtapes in 2012 and 2014). The videos are simple and lovely, with backdrops of picturesque nature and city shots. “Batman” is my favorite, featuring Smith as Bruce Wayne and as a modern-day hipster Batman clad in all white instead of the traditional black.

Freddie Old Soul, “Lost” “Lost,” the sixth track on Freddie Old Soul’s latest EP, All Black Trill Shit, is hard-hitting yet ethereal, due to the local MC’s poetic verses and the ghostly production by Noahs Art. Her song haunts my speakers.

Singer in the duo Drama

Food and Fela My heart belongs to music and food, and if any artist can help me connect those loves, it’s Fela. My parents being musicians, I grew up in a house filled with all kinds of musicians, one of whom played for Fela. He went by ID, and he taught me about macrobiotic food and all the cool knife cuts I didn’t understand. When my mom was six months pregnant with me, they saw Fela at Liberty Lunch in Austin. I still cook to Afrobeat to honor them both. Dancing to Fela’s “Expensive Shit” goes great with making macrobiotic mushroom-barley soup.

Amr Diab, “Tamally Maak” I listen to music from all over the world with my best friend, producer Na’el Shehade, the other half of Drama. When he played me this Egyptian hit from 2000, I instantly fell in love. I don’t know exactly what it’s about, but it reminds me how powerful music can be. Its melodies are so beautiful and enchanting—it’s an undeniable track that I’ll never get tired of.

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Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of January 25

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F

THURSDAY25

PICK OF THE WEEK

Partner make massive power-pop celebrating queer Canadian life for all its humor and foibles

Kitty Ricky Eat Acid opens. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10. 21+

In 2012, a teenage Claire’s employee from Daytona Beach, Florida, going by the X-Men-inspired alias Kitty Pryde released “Okay Cupid,” a dreamy and dreary cloud-rap track that quickly went viral. Just months later Kitty (the Pryde was quickly dropped) started collaborating with fellow Internet hiphop sensation Riff Raff, and by 2013 she was touring with Danny Brown (at the peak of his XXXera hype) in support of her excellently quirky and catchy D.A.I.S.Y. Rage EP. But 2013 is like a century ago in Internet years—how does a bedroom rap star stay relevant over that length of time? The answer is revolution and reinvention. By 2015, Kitty had completely stepped away from the vapory cloud-rap genre she helped establish and begun putting out spacey electro-pop tracks through her Bandcamp page. That summer, she took to Kickstarter to fund her first proper full-length. While the campaign was a wild success, the following years were anything but. Album production was stalled due to the breakdown of a relationship with one of Kitty’s producers and the theft of a hard drive containing the bulk of its finished product. But last August, almost two years to the day of Kitty’s initial Kickstarter post, Miami Garden Club saw the light of day. The album is full of spacey, psychedelic, and experimental pop perfection, with a mix of certified bangers and introspective slow jams. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

FRIDAY26 Dover Quartet 7:30 PM, Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, Northwestern University, 50 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston, $30, $10 students. b

The impressive 2016 debut from this superb young string quartet suggested they might be paragons of orthodoxy: Tribute—Dover Quarter Plays Mozart (Cedille) focuses on the composer’s final two string quartets along with his String Quin- J ò COLIN MEDLEY

PARTNER, ANNA BURCH, DREAM VERSION

Kitty

Fri 1/26, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12, $10 in advance. 21+

ON THE BANDCAMP biography for Partner, a Canadian rock group led by guitarists and singers Josée Caron and Lucy Niles, the duo say they’re best friends. From the sound of their debut, September’s In Search of Lost Time (You’ve Changed), that’s easy to believe. The album’s arsenal of muscular guitars, effervescent vocal harmonies, and indestructible, catchy melodies screams “fun”—specifically, the kind of fun that comes from spending time with someone who knows you inside and out. Caron and Niles play their uproarious tunes with a lighthearted charm and swagger, and they sing about the minutiae of the lives of gay potheads with a sense of purpose that makes their songs about trashy television programs (“Daytime TV”) or finding

ò SAM RAY

a roommate’s sex toy (“Sex Object”) sound blissful. As Niles told Stereogum last year, their songwriting direction came out of their chemistry as friends: “We’re definitely always goofing around, but I think we got better at realizing that you could talk about serious stuff sometimes but without, like, being serious.” But being queer is itself political—conservative politicians continue to rail against homosexuality with an insane fervor—so there’s a significance baked into Partner’s music; Caron and Niles present themselves as they are—personalities and humor intact—reminding us that showing people the corners of your life can be as serious and vital as any overt social commentary. —LEOR GALIL

JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 35

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MUSIC

SATURDAY, JANUARY 27 8PM

Dover Quartet

Carrie Newcomer

ò CARLIN MA

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2 7:30PM

The Bad Plus Never Stop II

featuring Reid Anderson, Orrin Evans, and David King

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 3 8PM

James Hill

In Szold Hall

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 8 8PM

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

Tom Paxton

with special guest The DonJuans

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10 3PM

Alasdair Fraser & Natalie Haas In Szold Hall SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10 8PM

Sexteto Milonguero In Szold Hall

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 11 7PM

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

1/26

1/27 2/2

2/2 2/9

Global Dance Party: Ethnic Dance Chicago Celebrates the EU featuring Mazurka Wojciechowska and Paul Collins Old Town School Uncovered: Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves A New Canon of Classical Music: Composer Kevin Puts and Librettist Mark Campbell (at Armitage Hall) Global Dance Party: Salsa Congress Global Dance Party: Chicago Style Steppers Set with DJ Maurice "Ice" Culpepper and Ken Watkins of the National Steppers Society

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Paolo Angeli with Lucero Flamenco, Maya Tatiana and Mehran Jalili Derek Gripper

OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG 36 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 25, 2018

continued from 35

tet in C Minor and pays homage to the venerable yet forward-looking Guarneri String Quartet in the process. The group’s musicians had studied under three of Guarneri’s members at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, and timed their release exactly five decades after their mentors made their recording debut with interpretations of the same two Mozart quartets. Further connecting the ensembles, Guarneri founding violist Michael Tree joins the Dover Quartet on the quintet. The group made a much bolder, more modern, and conceptually charged recording with last year’s excellent Voices of Defiance (Cedille), performing works by three European composers written in response to the destruction of World War II. The centerpiece is Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 2, an epic masterpiece of violence, sorrow, resistance, and serenity. The two works that surround it are less familiar and deeply rewarding. Czech composer Viktor Ullmann, a student of Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander Zemlinsky, wrote the magnificent String Quartet no. 3 while imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camp in Theresienstadt, a year before he was transferred to and killed at Auschwitz. It conveys a sense of tenderness among explosive energy and bursts of violence. The collection ends with a surge of measured optimism courtesy of String Quartet no. 3 by Polish composer Szymon Laks, who survived two and a half years at Auschwitz while being forced by the Nazis to lead the concentration-camp orchestra; its postliberation ebullience is spiked with passages of folk-derived darkness, and it deserves a much wider hearing. The quartet is in residence at Northwestern University, and its latest recital stretches between the ensemble’s two albums, with performances of Mozart’s String Quartet in D Minor, Schoenberg’s String Quartet in D Minor, and Zemlinsky’s String Quartet no. 2, the latter two works

by Ullman’s two key influences. —PETER MARGASAK

Quin Kirchner 9:30 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $12. 21+ Drummer Quin Kirchner has quietly made himself an indispensable presence in Chicago’s music scene since Hurricane Katrina drove the Oak Park native to return from New Orleans in 2005. He’s now a consistent member of the pop band Wild Belle, but the lion’s share of his activity has been his work in a countless number of jazz and improvisedmusic groups, including bands led by saxophonists Nate Lepine and Dave McDonnell, pianist Paul Giallorenzo, and guitarist Tim Stine, among others.

This week Kirchner is finally dropping the debut album by his own band, which shows his years of working and collaborating have clearly paid off.

The Other Side of Time (Astral Spirits) is a sprawling double record that embraces the gritty sound of Chicago postbop while embracing the fiery energy of the present, with occasional digressions into postrock and experimental music, like the stuttering two-part “Drums & Tines,” where Kirchner dubs minimalist kalimba patterns over his seductively dragging polyrhythmic kit playing. His excellent quintet features some of Chicago’s best improvisers in saxophonists Lepine, bass clarinetist Jason Stein, trombonist Nick Broste, and bassist Matt Ulery. Together they bring deep soul, contrapuntal richness, and spontaneous heat to a strong program of original pieces and vintage postbop gems by Sun Ra (“Brainville”), Charles Mingus (“The Shoes of the Fisherman’s Wife Are Some Jive Ass Slippers”), Andrew Hill (“Limbo”), and Paul Motian (“Mumbo Jumbo,” which features the horn players improvising with profound three-way interplay), as well as Brazilian arranger Arthur Verocai’s propulsive “Karina.” The drummer’s own tunes stand up to the comparison: there’s a sensual warmth to the arrangement of “Wondrous Eyes,” a ballad enhanced by a lovely Stein solo that makes it feel as timeless and

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MUSIC

familiar as anything else on the album. The smoldering tone poem “Together We Can Explore the Furthest Beyond,” which features guest pianist Ben Boye, touches on the spirituality of early 70s jazz. It all makes for the first great jazz record of 2018. — PETER MARGASAK

amplify the tension and power of his bandmates’ feverish interactions. The musicians have worked together in numerous contexts over the years, and it seems that they’ve developed an ultrasharp, almost telepathic sensibility—this is improvised music at the highest level. —PETER MARGASAK

SATURDAY27

SUNDAY28

Tom Rainey Trio 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15, $10 in advance. 18+

Alexander Melnikov 2 PM, Mandel Hall, University of Chicago, 1131 E. 57th, $39, $21 under 35, $11 students, $1 under 18. b

I had listened to Hotel Grief (Intakt) several times before I noticed that leader and drummer Tom Rainey, guitarist Mary Halvorson, and saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock were credited for improvising all five pieces when the recording was made live at New York’s Cornelia Street Cafe in April 2014.

I’m still shaking my head in disbelief that it was all created on the spot. Although the performances ripple with an attractive looseness and sense of space, the musicians shape melodies with such empathy and cooperative grace that the music feels composed and rehearsed. Halvorson and Laubrock engage in a steady balancing act; Halvorson frequently lays down chordal patterns that alternately hang in the air or shift with rapid, hopscotch pointillism, which allows Laubrock to run biting lines up and down her partner’s movement. At other times the guitarist unspools wonderfully jagged lines that slalom amid the saxophone parts and swerve alongside them. That’s not to say the music doesn’t ever explode with frenzied, free-flowing intensity—the final moments of “Last Overture” splatter with a burst of harried rhythm, split notes, and noise—but more often than not the trio navigate their lyric terrain with uncanny anticipation and rapport. Behind the front line, Rainey is a marvel of control, toggling between gentle, fractured swing that treads lightly on balladlike passages and driving rhythms that

CAN YOU SING???

Recording choir needs volunteer

In 2016 the prolific Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov made his overdue Chicago debut with his frequent collaborator, the great German violinist Isabelle Faust. Now he’s back for a solo performance of one of the most remarkable 20th-century works for his instrument: Dmitri Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues. In 1950 Shostakovich attended a performance by fellow Russian Tatiana Nikolayeva of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier—two sets of preludes and fugues in all 24 minor and major keys—and was so moved by the experience he set about writing a response to the work. He feverishly churned out his two-and-a-half-hour opus in just over three months.

It was premiered by Nikolayeva in 1952, and she continued to perform it from memory until her death in 1993. Melnikov recorded his own staggering interpretation of the Preludes and Fugues for a dazzling 2010 release on Harmonia Mundi. In his linernote commentary he dismisses the criticism that the music is too academic and formal, and his performance further dispatches that notion. The electrifying polyphony of the writing demands much of the performer. But Melnikov deftly achieves a masterful blend of dancing, bright-toned melodies, somber harmonies, and breathless rhythms on the up-tempo passages, as well as the heightened sensitivity and feel for jagged lines suffused in darkness J

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singers for debut CD and YouTube video projects. ALL VOICES (especially SOPRANO and ALTO) for multi-cultural, non-denominational, adult community choir.Widely varied repertoire includes traditional and contemporary gospel, anthems, spirituals, hymns, international, and acappella. Saturday rehearsals, 9:30 am to 11:30 am, Chicago (SE Side) – close to the University of Chicago. Text or Call NOW – slots are filling quickly. ClaimYour Star Power!

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Alexand Melnikov ò COURTESY THE ARTIST

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JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 37

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38 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 25, 2018

MUSIC Jennifer Koh

continued from 37

ò JÜRGEN FRANK

necessary for the subdued sections. The pianist will perform the entire work, with two intermissions to break things up. —PETER MARGASAK

Jennifer Koh 3 PM, Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, Northwestern University, 50 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston, $27-$42, $10 students. b Violinist Jennifer Koh, who was born and raised in the Chicago area, is that rare rising classical music star with fluency in both standard repertoire and new music. Her most recent album, Tchaikovsky: Complete Works for Violin and Orchestra (Cedille), follows on the heels of her eclectically curated recordings with bracing readings of work by living composers such as Kaija Saariaho, Anna Clyne, and John Zorn. She’s an artist with an abiding sense of community and has worked diligently to break down the barriers that often separate composers from performers by designing programs and commissioning music with a heightened awareness of those roles. In her upcoming “Limited” duo performances in New York, she’ll tear down the walls completely, playing with composers including synth player Missy Mazzoli and percussionist Nina Young.

As much as Koh wants to push contemporary music forward, she also thinks about how to serve and expand audiences—not just by getting more bodies in seats but by engaging potential listeners without lecturing them. The two solo concerts she gives this weekend reflect her commitment to advocating new work: she’ll perform pieces from Shared Madness, which includes 34 new commissions from respected voices like Philip Glass, Augusta Read Thomas, and Frederic Rzewski; exciting younger voices like Andrew Norman, Daníel Bjarnason, and Zosha Di Castri; and composers working across genres like Vijay Iyer, Gabriel Kahane, and Bryce Dessner.

Usually Koh comes to town to perform programs of standard rep; it’s exciting that she’s visiting to introduce local listeners to a raft of music that’s never been performed in the area. —PETER MARGASAK

swooping electronic lines and curdling passages of contemplative serenity, the unsettling tones and warped overtones presenting a more sinister sound than the album’s opening tracks. “Collapse of Materialists 2” sticks with electronics but dispenses with beats to deliver a woozy deep-space excursion with gently pulsating drones occasionally prodded by low-end mist and dark, quavering stabs of drizzle. A slow-moving duet between Bennett and cofounder Mark Dwinell, the album’s closing track, “Improvisation for Flute and Piano,” offers the most radical shift. Bypassing new age simplicity for something unresolved and ambiguous, the song’s fragility and melodic beauty bob like buoys over ripples on the surface of a lake. —PETER MARGASAK

TUESDAY30

Forma Quicksails and Steve Hauschildt open; Beau Wanzer DJs. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $8. 21+

Brent Faiyaz Diana Gordon and Amber Olivier open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, sold out. 18+

New York trio Forma promised some changes with Physicalist, their 2016 debut for Kranky Records, but while it’s a retreat from the techno flirtations they served up on their 2014 EP Cool Haptics (The Bunker New York), the first half of the album offers a familiar approach. Sharpening up the basic MO of their 2011 self-titled debut and 2012 album Off/On (both on Spectrum Spools), they place a pop focus on late Kosmische tools and the pioneering synthesizer music of Laurie Spiegel, deploying an array of synthesized sounds—rubbery post-Kraftwerk synth arpeggios over rolling bass tones and driving, uncluttered dance beats—using tactics common in 70s and early 80s electronic music. For me things get much more interesting on the back half of the album, where Forma start to push into different terrain. On “As If Pianos Grew on Trees,” keyboardist John Also Bennett shifts his focus to an acoustic piano—albeit one drenched in reverb and milky effects— with layers of cascading runs colliding with

Goldlink’s runaway 2017 hit “Crew” would be nothing without the buttery-smooth vocal hook from Brent Faiyaz. Raised in Columbia, a Maryland suburb that rests on an axis between Baltimore and D.C., the 22-year-old tried his hand at being an MC before he received a Twitter DM from a stranger advising him to stop rapping and focus his on other aspects of his music. Faiyaz wisely followed suit, making the stranger his manager. These days Faiyaz lives in Los Angeles, where he fronts a neosoul trio called Sonder, and he recently released his first album as a solo artist, October’s Sonder Son (Lost Kids). The record is pitched as an autobiographical effort, and while it can take several dozen listens for the lyrics to seep in, his supple, luxurious voice is a wonder unto itself. I’ve frequently been spellbound listening to his vocals shape-shift throughout Sonder Son, which offers a cornucopia of sonic elements for Faiyaz to play off of, be it a finely plucked acoustic guitar (“First World Problemz/Nobody Carez,”

“Talk 2 U”), sluggish modern-funk percussion (“Gang Over Luv”), echo-treated guitars (“Needed”), or what sounds like a small army of hand drums (“So Far Gone/Fast Life Bluez”). —LEOR GALIL

WEDNESDAY31 Yung Lean & Sad Boys 6 PM, Concord Music Hall, 2047 N. Milwaukee, $22, $20 in advance. b In the early 2010s, Yung Lean arrived as an oddity: a white Swedish rapper who blurred together a clutch of hip-hop sounds made by black musicians from the U.S. As with any case of an artist taking inspiration from a foreign culture wholesale, it seemed like something was lost in Yung Lean’s translation—a fact that hasn’t been lost on Lean. The MC has since taken full ownership of his tumid flow, and though in the early days of his career his awkwardness was part of his charm, it’s hard now not to feel like the deeper resonance of referencing luxury fashion brands is missing from some of his older material. On his third album, November’s The Stranger (Year0001), he makes a strong case as an earnest contributor to global hip-hop, with a sound that doesn’t rely on its sources of inspiration to have an effect. On “Red Bottom Sky” Lean’s voice leisurely coasts along with a sullen, sedate instrumental like he’s tubing along a lazy river; his half-sung performance evokes a deep wistfulness while further expanding hip-hop’s boundaries. —LEOR GALIL

Samantha Fish Dan Tedesco opens. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $25, $20 in advance. 21+ In the past, eclectic roots exploration with a beat was the purview of rootsy rock acts like Rod Stewart or the Band. More recently, the torch has been picked up by blues acts. Valerie June’s last couple of albums—including last year’s excellent The Order

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Samantha Fish ò COURTESY THE ARTIST

of Time—mix roots traditions and swagger into a boiling stew worthy of the Rolling Stones or Dylan.

Samantha Fish’s second album from 2017, Belle of the West (Ruf), follows in those same eclectic footsteps. Produced by Luther Dickinson of North Mississippi All-Stars fame, the album includes stomping country blues—complete with flute—on “American Dream” and a flirtatious acoustic call-and-response with Lightnin’ Malcolm on “Poor Black Mattie.” But it also goes further afield with the echoey, folk-tinged “Daughters” and the fiddle and country harmonizing of “Nearing Home.” “Tell me where I’m goin’ / ’Cause I thought I was nearing home,” Fish sings on that last number, trading her familiar bluesy shout for a delicate quaver that sounds more like Iris Dement than B.B. King. The title track, “Belle of the West,” has a lazy, shoulder-shrugging sway that just about cries

out for an Emmylou Harris cover. A retro-roots potpourri isn’t the sure chart-topper it used to be, but Fish makes you wish it was no matter which genre she fits in, or doesn’t. —NOAH BERLATSKY

Sleigh Bells Sunflower Bean opens. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $26. b After building a reputation as the world’s first great shred-pop standard-bearers—bolstered by hardcore-breakdown guitar riffs that sonically resemble something close to a New Year’s Eve glitter bomb—the duo of vocalist Alexis Krauss and guitarist Derek Miller went outside their element for their fourth full-length record, 2016’s Jessica Rabbit.

The results were mixed. While Sleigh Bells’ early

MUSIC

party songs were fun, simple, and complemented a great deal by Krauss and Miller’s leather-jacketand-black-sunglasses cool, with Jessica Rabbit they struggled to find a middle ground between the allure of their first few albums and their desire to mature past their candy-coated sound; it often feels too stilted, and sometimes too meandering. But last year’s mini album Kid Kruschev (Torn Clean) is proof that they’re figuring it out. Featuring more seething dark-electro elements than before and smartly relying on Krauss’s charm and talent, Kid Kruschev is much (much) tighter than its predecessor. It’s a step forward for Sleigh Bells without being neglectful of where they came from—as evidenced by a solid, thrumming single like “Rainmaker.” What’s remained unchanged is that the band is still a commanding force onstage. —KEVIN WARWICK v

JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 39

FOOD & DRINK

S.K.Y. | $$$$ R 1239 W. 18th 312-846-1077

skyrestaurantchicago.com

Foie gras bibimbap ERICA KOHAGIZAWA

S.K.Y. opens on Pilsen

Former Intro chef Stephen Gillanders’s pan-Asian vision alights on a gentrifying 18th Street.

By MIKE SULA

O

ne of the most absurdly delicious things I’ve eaten this winter was a humongous lump of deep-fried chicken breast with a core of molten cheese from Hot Star Large Fried Chicken, a Tawainese chain with several outposts in and around Toronto and Los Angeles. It’s the kind of thing that blinds you to how truly bad for you it is until your greasy paws are empty, there’s cheese dripping down your chin, and you want to fall over and die.

I thought of that chicken at S.K.Y., a vaguely pan-Asian (vaguesian?) restaurant from Stephen Gillanders, who arrived in Chicago in 2011 with little fanfare to help reopen the Pump Room under Jean-Georges Vongerichten. Three years later he returned to great fanfare as the fourth chef at Intro, Lettuce Entertain You’s late pop-up experiment, staying on past his tenure to provide a baseline of consistency and approachability as newer chefs came and went. S.K.Y., which happens to be the initials of the chef’s wife, is his first solo outing, which he’d originally planned on opening in Los Angeles, his hometown.

The chef’s fried chicken is one of the entree-size plates on the menu. It’s two thickly battered, togarashi-dusted deep-fried thighs positioned between 11 and one o’clock on the plate over a circle of corn porridge with the consistency of risotto, in its center a fermented habanero hot sauce tamed

40 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 25, 2018

by butter. It’s far more sophisticated than Hot Star. It won’t make you hate yourself, for one thing—together the components look like a smiley face—but it’s every bit as irresistible.

I ate this knockout dish along with another, a foie gras bibimbap cooked in a dolsot, a stone bowl heated so that that bottom layer of the rice forms nurungji, a crispy scorched crust that when mixed in adds an irresistible texture to softer mushrooms steeped in bulgogi marinade. The duck liver, subbing for an egg, blends seamlessly into the mix of grain and greens, lending a understated rich, meaty sumptuousness to the bowl, a great gateway dish for foie gras first-timers.

Gillanders frequently pushes the right buttons, as with a quartet of black truffle croquettes encasing a matrix of gooey aged white cheddar and jalapeño and releasing a fungal ambrosia that rises to your nostrils. Lobster dumplings, sweet and snappy, bathe in a pool of “jade butter” colored with fermented jalapeño paste. Seared diver scallops mingle with maitake mushrooms in a dashi mounted with brown butter. Corn-bread madeleines slathered with olive-oil-whipped butter are so moist they barely make it to your mouth.

Crunchy fried potatoes are countered with slightly bitter fried rosemary, oregano, thy me, and parsley, and blistered Sichuan-style green beans are tossed with crushed peanuts and fermented black-bean vinaigrette. Long stretches of roasted carrots and parsnips wallow in a pureed sultanaraisin vinaigrette along with grapes, blue cheese, and candied walnuts.

Gi l la nders’s si g nat u re prepa rat ion , a dish he developed at Intro, is a pretty, kaleidoscopic plate of thick hamachi sashimi adorned with ponzu, creamy avocado, puffed rice, and hydrated black sesame seeds that pop like caviar. Even an amuse of pureed edamame on puffed rice chips—a brightly acidic Japanese variant on guacamole—is an encouraging harbinger of things to come.

Not all of the chef’s dishes hit these high notes. Some come across as pro forma renditions of common things, Asian and otherwise. Chile-dusted Japanese cucumbers bathe in a dressing of garlic, soy, and sesame oil that almost presents as miso. A Thai chicken-and-coconut-milk soup (aka tom kha gai) is a workmanlike rendition, warm and comforting but unmemorable. Same goes for a Thai steak salad, familiar flavors muted for

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42 GRAMS

Directed by Jack C. Newell. 82 min. Sat 1/27, 8 PM; Sun 1/28, 5 PM; Wed 1/31, 8 PM; Thu 2/1, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11. Newell will discuss the film at all screenings.

Chef Jake Bickelhaupt in 42 Grams

FOOD ON FILM

42 Grams and the weight of culinary greatness

JACK C. NEWELL

In a new documentary, filmmaker Jack C. Newell captures the life cycle of chef Jake Bickelhaupt’s dearly departed Uptown restaurant.

By JULIA THIEL

T Fried chicken, corn porridge, habanero hot sauce ERICA KOHAGIZAWA

the safety of all. A nicely rendered, perfectly formed braised beef short rib is dull in flavor relative to the brighter dishes on the menu, its brilliant green but ultimately bland chive dumplings failing to rise to the level of their own arresting appearance.

Things come a bit more alive at dessert with a light cheesecake roofed with burnt sugar and served alongside last summer’s preserved blueberries. Even more texturally busy is a banana budino, the pudding resting on a bourbon caramel and covered in granola, heavy on the banana chips.

It’s the only taste of booze they’ll serve you at S.K.Y until the liquor license kicks in (estimated January 26), delayed due to the restaurant’s proximity to a church. That’s just one of the struggles Gillanders and company have had to contend with since opening. The restaurant has been targeted by an aggressive anti-gentrification campaign familiar to both old and new residents of Pilsen. In spite of it, Gillanders is working well and making his way on this small stretch of 18th Street, along with three other prominent new Asian restaurants (HaiSous, Cà Phê Dá, and Furious Spoon). In a perfect world creative people wouldn’t have to compete with each other in order to express themselves—it would just be the kind of internal struggle that produces good work. Change happens, for better and for worse. v

@MikeSula

he story of 42 Grams is a somewhat unlikely one. Chef Jake Bickelhaupt had experience in top-notch kitchens (Alinea, Charlie Trotter’s, Schwa) but had never run his own before, aside from the underground dinners he and his wife, Alexa Welsh, had been hosting in their apartment. The elaborate 15-course meals Bickelhaupt was producing at that “guestaurant,” which he called Sous Rising, intrigued filmmaker Jack C. Newell. After attending one, he started filming Bickelhaupt’s food prep and presentation, not entirely sure at the time if anything would come of it. Over the course of two years, Newell continued filming the couple as they developed a plan for and then opened 42 Grams, a tiny fine-dining BYOB restaurant, in a former fried-chicken joint in Uptown in January 2014. The result is a feature-length documentary, 42 Grams, which will be playing at the Gene Siskel Film Center from January 27 to February 1.

“Logically, the whole restaurant wasn’t realistic,” Bickelhaupt says now. “I was an unknown chef. Even though I worked at good restaurants, I never ran a kitchen at that level before.” And yet, somehow, it worked. Bickelhaupt doesn’t lack for confidence; as he explains in the documentary, he wants 42 Grams to get two Michelin stars right away. Welsh, who’s more pragmatic, doesn’t think it’ll happen immediately, but Bickelhaupt is determined. He’s also tightly wound; as he works on developing new dishes for the menu, several scenes show him snapping at his sous chefs or at Welsh. The film doesn’t shy away from the hard realities of running a restaurant: in one scene Welsh uses a ruler to make sure the placemats are positioned just right while she explains that she and Bickelhaupt don’t have time to travel, eat out, or see friends. Meanwhile, her mother has terminal cancer and will be moving in with the couple for hospice care. But we also get to see the couple’s

elation when Bickelhaupt gets the call that after being open for just ten months, 42 Grams has been awarded two Michelin stars.

That moment is the apex of the film, but not the end of the restaurant’s story. Closing titles inform us that 42 Grams was awarded two stars again in 2016 and 2017; Welsh and Bickelhaupt divorced in January 2017 and closed the restaurant in June. “A documentary is a living thing,” Welsh says. “The story line keeps on. There’s a certain point where you just have to stop updating, and we all decided we don’t need to continue.”

As for closing the restaurant, Bickelhaupt says, it was a result of the divorce, not because business was bad. “We were trying to work together, and it’s very difficult to do that, so the best decision was to close the restaurant and go our separate ways.” He’s convinced, though, that 42 Grams would’ve gotten three Michelin stars in 2018 if they’d kept the restaurant open. (Alinea is currently the only restaurant in Chicago with three stars; there are four restaurants in the city that have two stars.) In the last few months that 42 Grams was open, Bickelhaupt was doing all the cooking himself. “It was literally just me, Alexa, and the dishwasher,” he says. “I created a restaurant that’s very hard for anyone else to work in. It was very unique, very specific to me, and no one else can be me. So I decided I might as well do it all myself. It was a weird decision but we were doing some awesome food.”

Last September, Bickelhaupt launched a “wandering” supper club called Konro. The food is in the same vein as what he was doing before, but he’s now focusing on collaborating with other chefs. “At 42 Grams I was pretty much in my own bubble . . . I didn’t work well with others,” he says. “This time I wanted to work with other people, to be more open and collaborative.”

Welsh, meanwhile, is getting into commercial real estate. She doesn’t regret the time she put into Sous Rising and 42 Grams—she’d do it again, she says. But when she watches the documentary, “I see the stress on my face, I think of all the shit we were going through when that was filmed. For so long I put my job before myself. I put the restaurant before myself. I put Jake before myself. In the absence of all that, I finally am putting myself first. It’s been fantastic.”

Eventually, Bickelhaupt hopes to open another restaurant, but he says he doesn’t want to work alone anymore. “42 Grams was 100 percent built around what I’m going to do. So ultimately I ended up working by myself,” he says. “Moving forward, I need to make a restaurant that I know other chefs are able to work in.

I want them to thrive, feel comfortable, express their own creativity on the menu.” v

@juliathiel

king crab house 1816 N. Halsted St., Chicago

Valentine’s Day Specials V Regular Menu Available February 14th

Four Course Dinner $51.95 6 oz Lobster Tail • 6 oz. Filet

Appetizers Choose from Popcorn Shrimp, Fried Calamari or Mussels

Desserts

Key Lime Pie, Chocolate Cake, Tiramisu, Limoncello Cake or Cheese Cake

Entrees

1/2 lb. Snow Crab Legs & 1/2 Slab Ribs $35.95 1 /2 lb. Large King Crab Legs + Skewer or Filet Kabob $48.95 (Includes a choice of soup or house salad & vegetable, glass of house wine or champagne, well drink or beer)

Lenten Specials $19.95 February 14th thru March 31st All You Can Eat Fried Perch

Call For Reservation 312-280-8990

JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 41

JOBS SALES & MARKETING Telephone Sales Experienced/aggressive telephone closers needed now to sell ad space for Chicago’s oldest and largest newspaper rep firm.

Immediate openings in Loop office. Salary + commission.

312-368-4884.

DO YOU NEED EXTRA CASH? I NEED EXTRA WORKERS. Tele-Fundraising Veterans.. Part-time, Full-time, Set your own schedule.

START TODAY! 847-863-2275

General

Find hundreds of Readerrecommended restaurants, exclusive video features, and sign up for weekly news chicagoreader.com/ food.

42 CHICAGO READER | JANUARY 25, 2018

Lead Medical Technologist Northwestern University Chicago, IL Performs final review and signoff of assigned clinical data per lab policy. Coordinates and oversees multiple complex projects including interfacing with vendors, writing procedures and submitting validation packets for accreditation agency review. Analyzes and interprets more complex clinical histocompatibility tests and orders resolutionary testing as necessary. Reviews and signs off on release of documentation ensuring quality of laboratory instrumentation and reagents as per lab policy. Generates special reports to aid in tracking and trending instrument and reagent performance. Trains other senior lab staff including troubleshooting of complex procedures. Serves as an expert resource for all staff in regard to specialized equipment handling and maintenance.

Communicates with the transplant programs, lab staff and governmental agency (UNOS) to clarify and confirm testing orders in support of clinical workflow.

Maintains detailed records of results which may include collecting, extracting and entering data.

Interprets and presents results.

Presents charts and graphs for scientific presentations and publications. Reviews testing results and revises protocols as necessary to ensure that testing objectives are attained. Orders and/or maintains inventory of reagent, a nd/or lab supplies. Obtains sales quotes for lab equipment and supplies.

Must have a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Biology, Biotechnology or a related field and five (5) years of experience as a Laboratory Technologist, Research Technologist, Medical Technologist, or Research Personnel.

Must also have five (5) years of experience with molecular biology or histocompatibility testing.

Please email your resume to us at n-herrera@northwestern.edu and reference LMT0118.

CHICAGO TRANSIT AUTHORITY is seeking Financial Systems Business Analysts in Chicago, IL w/ the following requirements: BS degree in Business Administration, Engineering, Management Information Systems (MIS) or related field or foreign equivalent degree. 5 yrs of related experience.

Required Skills: Design, develop, implement, upgrade and support Oracle Financial and Distributions modules (5 yrs); Create documents for Business Requirement Analysis, Mapping, Technical & Functional design, configuration, testing, conversion, and deployment using Oracle AIM Methodology (5 yrs); Build SQL queries against Oracle eBusiness Suite tables to troubleshoot issues and create ad-hoc reporting as needed using Quest Software (TOAD) and Oracle Sequel Developer (5 yrs); Create new Web ADI Templates to load Journal Entries and Assets, and design Data Migration process from Legacy systems and Open Interfaces using Oracle Technology (5 yrs).

Applicants, if hired, must comply w/ CTA’s residency ordinance. All nonunion employees must reside w /in the CTA service area (or agree to relocate w/in 6 months of hire). Please see the following link for the CTA service area: http://www. transitchicago.com / a s s e t s / 1/miscellaneous_document s /

C T A _S tatu to ry _S erv ice s_A re a_ and_Map.pdf Apply at tra nsitchicago.com/careers using reference # IRC 11901 TRIBUNE MEDIA COMPANY is seeking an APPLICATION ENGINEER - Workday in Chicago, IL with the following requirements: Bachelor’s degree in Comp. Sci, Info.

Tech/Engineering or related field or foreign equiv. degree. 4 years related experience. Required skills: design, configure and develop Workday business processes, Workday integrations using Workday Studio, EIB’s, Core Connectors, custom reports and calculated fields (3 yrs); configure and develop Workday API’s and related REST API’s processes to send and receive data between source and target systems (3 yrs); design and develop Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) scripts used

by ETL processing to transform data layouts to align with system requirements (3 yrs); plan and execute regression testing for Workday Finance, Workday HCM upgrades and SQL server upgrades (3 yrs).

Please submit resume to Jobs@tribunemedia.com and reference “Tribune Media Company – Application Engineer” in the subject line.

DEPAUL UNIVERSITY SEEKS Enterprise Application Administrators for Chicago, IL location to support enterprise sw application environments & assoc. custom web sw applications. Master’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. Eng./any Eng. field + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. Eng./any Eng. field + 5yrs exp. req’d. Skills req’d: Enterprise sw applications problem solving, life cycle phases (incl. plan, design, build, test, deploy, support), design & development for client server/distributed & internet/intranet applications, high level data definition techniques, PUM (PeopleSoft Update Manager), Tax updates, Applicati on/PeopleTools Upgrade, PeopleSoft App Designer, Data Mover, Change Assistant, WebLogic, HTML, SQL, Reporting tools (Crystal Reports, SQR, nVision), PSADMIN, Splunk, Elasticsearch, Log Analytics, Nagios, Toad, PL/SQL Developer, Oracle DB, SQL Server, OS (Windows, UNIX, Red Hat Linux).

Send resume to: Todd Hover, Assoc. Director, REF: LD, 1 E Jackson Blvd, Chicago, IL 60604 QUALITY EXCAVATION, INC. seeks Project Manager Estimators for Chicago, IL loc to quantify info from blueprints to prepare estimates & secure job. Bachelor’s in Civil Eng/ Construction Mgmt +2yrs exp req’d.

Skills req’d: client-facing role reviewing construction contracts (material costs, contractor work estimates, invoices, inspections) & communicating daily construction proj progress for proj, incl. civil/public works/ streets/storm sewers; reviewing proposals, cost control & reporting, creating schedules for proj valued at $5Mil; reviewing subcontractor costs for demolition, excavation & shoring, disposal of construction materials (post excavation/pre-building); providing field coordination. Travel to project sites as needed. Send resume to gkeane@qualityexcavation.com Ref: GBD

IMPORT OPERATIONS CUSTOMER SERVICE REPR E S E N T A T I V E (S c a rb ro u g h International, LTD., Bensenville, IL): Maintain relationship & communicate w/ customers, colleagues & vendors. Facilitate incoming & outgoing shipments & transit for airline, train & trucking terminals.

Have general knowledge of import compliance & operations.

Demonstrate acctng skills incl client invoicing, vendor payables & AP/AR resolution.

Req’s HS diploma or frgn equiv. Mail resumes to 10841 NW Ambassador Dr., Kansas City, MO 64153.

MARVELOUS TECHNOLOGIES, INC. in Gurnee, IL is seeking Sr. Quality Assurance Analysts to dvlp & execute sftwr test plans in order to identify & resolve sftwr issues & causes. No trvl; no telecomm. Postn is projbased @ unanticipated sites w/in US. Relo may be req’d at proj. end. Mail resumes to: Marvelous Technologies, Inc., ATTN: HR, 5445 Grand Ave, Ste 206, Gurnee, IL 60031.

TRANSUNION,

LLC

SEEKS

Consultants for Chicago, IL location, responsible for technical needs for designing & executing sw tests. Master’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. Eng./Info.

Systems/Info. Tech. + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. Eng./ Info. Systems/Info. Tech. + 5yrs exp. req’d. Skills req’d: designing/ executing manual & automated sw tests (blackbox, whitebox, functional) in healthcare domain, .NET, Java, AbInitio, databases, Agile, Linux, QTP, webservices using SOAP UI, exp. w/Data Analytics & ETL Testing in Hadoop environment, Tableau for Visualization, Python. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: SA, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

Sr. Software QA Analyst: dsgn & impl test strtgies; create/exe autmatd scripts; discvr & reprt defcts; perf intgrtn, sys, manual & out of the box testng. Reqs exp w / HP QC, QTP, HP ALM, Soap UI, ActiveVOS, DBVisualizer, Win Runner, Load Runner, JMeter, Cramer OSS & IBM TDP. Reqs B S/MS in comp sci, info sys/ technlgy or eng +5 yrs exp (3yrs w/ MS). Job in Evanston, IL & unanticipated locatns thru’ US. No Relocatn benefits offered. No telecommtg. Bckgrnd check reqd.

Resumes to Katalyst Technologies, Inc- katalysthr@katalysttech .com FINANCE EXPEDIA, INC. has openings for COMMERCIAL FINANCE MANAGERS (Job ID#: 728.2113) in Chicago, IL: Support financial decision making of Expedia Global Partner Solutions. Collaborate with heads of strategic partnerships on a day-to-day basis. Guide team members to make decisions regarding business modeling.

To apply, send resume to: Expedia Recruiting, 333 108th Avenue NE, Bellevue, WA 98004.

Must reference Job ID#.

TRANSUNION,

LLC

SEEKS

Consultants – Info. Tech., Batch Credit Services for Chicago, IL location, to analyze, develop, & implement business requirements. Master’s in Comp Sci/ Comp Eng/any Eng field +2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp Sci/ Comp Eng/any Eng field +5yrs exp. req’d. Req’d skills: exp. w/Ab Initio, Autosys &Informatica, Python, Unix, Shell Scripting, SQL, Oracle, PL/SQL, Netezza, DB2, Teradata. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: SKS, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

MESIROW FINANCIAL HOLDINGS, Inc. (Chicago, IL) seeks a fulltime Operations Data Analyst (Job #18A) to analyze, maintain & communicate investment/performance related data w/ Mesirow Advanced Strategies (MAS) team. Requires master’s in fin/bus/accounting/math or rltd technical/quant discipline + 12mo exp in data mining/mgmt. Apply to degan@mesirowfinancial.com and ref job #18A in subject line. No calls.

SENIOR DIRECTOR OF BEHAVIORAL HEALTH Seeking dynamic Director to manage a 52-bed adult psychiatric unit, 33-bed C/A psychiatric unit, and detox unit in Healthsource Hospital, Saginaw, MI. Req’s Master’s Degree in related field, and 3+ yrs. acute care psych mgmt. exper. in a hospital. Relocation pkg.

Send resume to: Terry Good, terry.good@horizonhealth.com; Fax: 1-804-684-5663. EOE TECHNOLOGY EXPEDIA, INC. has openings for CUSTOMER SERVICE MANAGERS (Job ID#: 728.1721) in Chicago, IL: Plan, direct, or coordinate quality assurance programs. Some travel to various unanticipated sites throughout the U.S. required. To apply, send resume to: Expedia Recruiting, 333 108th Avenue NE, Bellevue, WA 98004.

Must reference Job ID#.

(Palos Hills, IL) Kedziora Insurance Agency, Inc. seeks Insurance Customer Service Representative w/ Assoc or for deg equiv in any fld & 2 yrs exp in job offered or in commer office, incl 1 yr exp in office setting wrkng w/ Polish clients/custom & IL Casualty, Health, Life & Fire Insur licen reqd.

Apply to K. Kedziora, 17239 Oak Park Ave. Tinley Park, IL 60477 RELIABILITY ENGINEER Advanced Technology Services, Inc. seeks Reliability Engineer w 2/yrs of exp for position in Chicago, IL. Send C.V. to: Adam Smith, Advanced Technology Services, Inc., 8201 N. University, Peoria, IL 61615

l

l

REAL ESTATE RENTALS STUDIO $500-$599 CHICAGO, BEVERLY/CAL Par k/Blue Island: Studio $625 & up; 1BR $700 & up; 2BR $885 & up.

Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Parking. Call 708-3880170

UN SOLO DIA, el viernes, 2 de febrero de 2018, desde las 9:00 a.m.

- 3:00 p.m. NO SE ACEPTARÁ INFORMACIÓN EN PERSONA Los Apartamentos Palmer Square son un complejo familiar de Sección 8 con subsidio federal el cual es BASADO EN EL PROYECTO y por lo tanto no pueden aceptar bonos ó certificados.

LOS APARTMENTOS PALMER SQUARE MANEJADO POR: HISPANIC HOUSING DEVELOPMENT CORP., un “IL Licensed Re Broker Corporation”

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

STUDIO $600-$699 CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone /cable, switchboard, fridge, priv bath, lndry, $165/wk, $350/bi-wk or $650/mo. Call 773-493-3500

STUDIO OTHER LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE, CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188

bly Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park.

Laundry & Security on Premises.

Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030

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

MIDWAY AREA/63RD KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All modern oak floors, appliances, Security system, on site maint. clean & quiet, Nr. transp. From $445. 773582-1985 (espanol)

PRE-SPRING SPECIAL - Chicago South Side Beautiful Studios, 1,2,3 & 4 BR’s, Sec 8 ok. Also Homes for rent available. Call Nicole 312-4461753; W-side locations Tom 630-7765556

Chicago - Hyde PARK 5401 S. Ellis.

1BR. $625/mo.

Call 773-955-5106

CHICAGO 70TH & King Dr, 1BR, clean, quiet, well maintained bldg, Lndry, Heat incl. Sec. 8 Ok Starting at $720/mo 773-510-9290 Newly updated, clean furnished rooms in Joliet, near buses & Metra, elevator. Utilities included, $91/wk. $395/mo. 815-722-1212 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $133/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

Irving/Kimball 2BR new tile, laundry facilities, energy efficient windows, central heat/ac, $999/mo Call Luis 708-366-5602, lv msg N Riverside: 1BR new tile, engery efficent windows, lndry facilitities, a/c, incls heat- natural gas, $955/ mo Luis 708-366-5602 lv msg

1 BR $700-$799 CHATHAM 742 EAST 81ST (EVANS), 1 bedroom, 3rd floor, $700/ mo. Please call Mr. Joe at 708-870-4801 for more info

1 BR $800-$899 Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air.

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200

1 BR UNDER $700 RE-OPENING THE WAITING LIST Palmer Square Apartments is re-opening their Section 8 Subsidized Housing Waiting List for their Two (2) bedroom and Three (3) bedroom apartments ONE DAY ONLY on Friday, February 2, 2018, from 9:00am - 3:00pm. We will accept a total of forty (40) names of interested persons for the Two (2) bedroom apartments, and ten (10) names of interested persons for the Three (3) bedroom apartments. Persons interested in signing up to receive a preapplication card must call the Management Office at (773) 342-0055 ONE DAY ONLY on Friday, February 2, 2018, from 9:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m.

NO WALK-INS WILL BE ACCEPTED Palmer Square Apartments is a federally subsidized Section 8 Family Development which is PROJECT BASED and therefore cannot accept vouchers or certificates.

PALMER SQUARE APARTMENTS MANAGED BY: HISPANIC HOUSING DEVELOPMENT CORP., an IL Licensed Re Broker Corporation RE-APERTURA DE LA LISTA DE ESPERA Los Apartamentos Palmer Square re-abrirán su lista de espera de Sección 8 para apartamentos de dos (2) dormitorios y tres (3) dormitorios, UN SOLO DIA, el viernes, 2 de febrero de 2018, desde las 9:00am 3:00pm. Aceptaremos un total de cuarenta (40) nombres de personas interesadas para los apartamentos de dos (2) dormitorios y diez (10) nombres de personas interesadas para los apartamentos de tres (3) dormitorios. Personas interesadas en recibir una tarjeta de pre-solicitud tienen que llamar a la Oficina de Administración al (773) 342-0055,

7520 S. COLES - 1 BR $520, 2 BR $645, Includes appliances & AC, Near transp., No utilities included (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt CHICAGO, 6838 S. JEFFERY. Studio, $575 & 1BR, $650.

Hardwood floors, gas & heat incl. No security deposit! Call 773-412-5368 7601 S. SOUTH SHORE. 1BR, $650. Laundry room, in elevator bldg. Appls, gas & heat incl. Parking avail. No Deposit. 773-908-3076 CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up.

773-637-5957 76TH & PHILLIPS: 2BR, 1BA $825-$875; Remodeled, Appliances available. FREE Heat.

312-286-5678.

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

Sec 8 Welc. 773-995-6950

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

HUMBOLDT PARK. ONE bedroom apartment for rent. Newly remodeled. Next door to food store. $880/mo plus security deposit.

Includes gas. Near shopping area.

Tim, 773-592-2989.

R U O Y AD E R E H

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. SUMMER IS HERE!!

Most units Include..

HEAT & HOT WTR Studios From $475.00 1Bdr From $550.00 2Bdr From $745.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**

CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/ C, laundry, near transportation, $680-$1020/mo. Call 773-2334939

SUBURBS, RENT TO OWN! Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com

CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT NO MOVE IN FEE 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM APTS (773) 874-1122

LARGE ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT near the Metra and Warren Park. 1902 N. Wolcott. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $900/month.

Heat included. Available 3/1.

(773) 761-4318

5218 S. DREXEL 1BR. $1095.

2BR. $1295.

Newly decor, hdwd flrs, appls, free credit check, Sec 8 OK. no app fee 1-773-667-6477 or 1-312-802-7301

1 BR OTHER WAITING LIST OPEN Drexel Square Senior Apts. 810 E. 51st.

Chicago, IL. 60615 for Qualified Seniors 62+ Beautiful park like setting, Hyde park area, rent based on 30% of monthly income (sec.

8), A/C, heat, lndry., rec. rooms, storage space in apt, cable ready, intercom entrance system, 24 hours front desk customer service.

Applications will be accepted immediately between the hours of 11:00am-3:00pm at the above address. 773-268-2120 ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled.

Rent is based on 30% of annual income. For details, call us at 847-546-1899 ∫

2 BR $900-$1099 BLUE ISLAND 10 min S. of Chicago. Huge 3 level, newly renovated. 2 BR, 1.5 BA, central AC, appl. incl, near transp. w/ enclosed atrium. $1050/mo + dep.

Sec 8 welcome. Mike 773-988-2730 CHATHAM AREA, 2BR House, $900/mo.

1 mo rent + 1 mo sec required. Section 8 Welcome.

Call 872-2075184 7530 S. LANGLEY, 2 & 3BR Apts, hdwd flrs, updated kitchen & Bath, heat incl. Sec 8 Welc. $900-$1200.

773-383-4718 or 773-221-8550

2 BR $1100-$1299 BEAUTIFUL REMODELED 1, 2 & 3BR Apts, hdwd flrs, custom cabinets, avail now. $1000-$1200 /mo + sec. 773-905-8487. Section 8 Ok NORTH PARK DLX 3BR, no Deposit, 1 MO FREE RENT, eat-in kit, oak flrs, new BA, on-site lndy, $139 5/incl ht. 773-743-4141 urbanequi ties.com EVANSTON DLX 2 & 3BR no De p.,1 MO FREE RENT, new kit, oak flrs, new BA, OS lndry, $1295$1550/incl ht. 773-743-4141 urban equities.com SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 6717 S. Rhodes, 5BR, 2BA house, appls included. $140 0/mo. 708-288-4510

ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

2 BR UNDER $900 CHICAGO 7600 S Essex PRE-SPRING SPECIAL - 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sec 8 Ok! Also Homes for Rent avail. Call Nicole 312-446-1753; W-side locations Tom 630-776-5556

SECTION 8 WELCOME. Different Locations. 3-5BR & 3-4BR, Incl all appls.

944 W. 95th St. & 6714 S. Eberhart.

312-804-0209

APTS: 70th/Aberdeen. 2BR $695,Studio $475, 1 mo rent + 1 mo sec. laundry rm, heat incl, hdwd flrs. Section 8 Welcome 773651-8673 10734 S. AVENUE C. 2.5BR, 1BA, remodeled, tile & hdwd flroos + more! $1200/mo.

Pictures also

available. 312-824-1180

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 BRONZEVILLE, 4542 S King Dr. 2nd flr, 3BR, 2BA, hdwd flrs, kitchen, pantry, LR & DR, lots of closets, sun porch, ten pays gas & heat.$1100 +$1200 sec. 773965-1584 aftr 6pm CHICAGO, 68TH & STONY ISLAND, $935/MO. 3BR, 1BA, WASHER & DRYER IN UNIT. TENANT PAYS ALL UTILITIES. CALL 858-699-5096 SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo.

708-288-4510 7221 S. STEWART, 3BR, hrdwd flrs, ceiling fans, appl., laundry room, gated entrance. Tenant pays utilities. $925/mo. 312-314-6604

HARVEY - 167 W. 157th St., 3BR Home, 1BA, 2 car garage, $1100/mo +utilities.

Call 708-299-0055

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

CALUMET CITY, Spacious 3 bedroom, 2 bath,

2 BR OTHER

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

1 BR $900-$1099

{ { 1 MONTH FREE South Shore Studios $600-$750 Free Heat, Fitness Ctr, Lndry rm. Niki 773.808.

2043 www.livenovo.com

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. Hot Summer Is Here Cool Off In The Pool OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG Plenty of parking 1Bdr From $795.00 2Bdr From $925.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**

Villas is accepting applications for Subsidized 2 and 3 bedroom apt waiting list. Rent is based on 30% of annual income for qualified applicants. Contact us at 847-546-1899 for details

63RD/ARTESIAN, 2BR, 1st floor, finished basement w/ bonus BRs & 1/2 bath. Enclosed back porch. Move in fee reqd. $875/mo 773.704.

0239 NEAR BEVERLY Huge 2BR on 1st floor. Sect 8 welcome. Call 312.806.1080.

ADULT SERVICES

2nd floor, A/C, modern kitchen, well kept, $1000/month. 312-451-7495

6658 S UNIVERSITY Ave, 3

bed/2 bath, spacious third floor apartment. Granite countertops, stainless steel apliances, section 8 ok, $1290 please call Jerry 7736995774

121ST & PARNELL: SEC. 8 WEL. $500 Cash Back! $0 Security for Sec 8. 3BR, $1400/mo. Fine condition. ADT alarm. 708-715-0034 DOLTON/RIVERDALE - 4BR, 1.5BA, 2 car garage, unfinished basement, Section 8 OK. $1200/ mo + security. 847-909-1538

ADULT SERVICES

OAK PARK NE - $1400/mo. 2 flat, 2nd floor, spacious 3BR, 1BA, heated, laundry, parking available. Call 708-205-5526.

65TH AND CARPENTER 3BR, 2BA, carpeted, heat & appls incl, 1 mo free rent (with Sec 8). No Sec Dep. $1250/mo. 773-684-1166

WE BUY HOUSES AND BUILDINGS FOR CASH! Investors and Lenders Weclome.

Call 773-703-8400

WE BUY HOUSES ANY PRICE, ANY AREA! 630-452-0516

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499

non-residential

LARGE 3 BEDROOM apartment near Wrigley Field. 3820 N. Fremont.

Two bathrooms. Hardwood Floors.

Cats OK. $2175/month. Special!

Sign a lease starting by March 1, get April rent free! Available 3/1. 773-761-4318.

T W O locations to serve you. All units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue.

773-685-6868.

South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

ROGERSPK 3BR, 2BA+DEN, 1 ONTH FREE! No Dep. New kit w/ granite, SS appl, Close to lake! $18 75/incl ht 773-743-4141 urbanequ ities.com OLYMPIA FIELDS Newly remodeled 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath house, full basement. Beautiful area. 708-935-7557.

SELF-STORAGE

CENTERS.

roommates BRIDGEVIEW AREA- Lg furn Room in a single home. No drugs/ alcohol. Dep Req. Mature working person pref. 708-458-8610/ 708-436-4043

3 BR OR MORE

MARKETPLACE

OTHER

GOODS

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STRAIGHT DOPE SLUG SIGNORINO

THE LATEST ON WHAT’S HAPPENING AROUND TOWN READER RECOMMENDS

By Cecil Adams Q : There seems to be an alarming

increase in news stories about enormous fatbergs—blobs of fat and grease accumulating in the sewers of major cities in the U.S. and Europe. Is it the Western diet, more fast-food restaurants, what?

Are we facing a fatberg apocalypse? —FTG

A : As the Western diet continues to wreak havoc on the world’s health, you can certainly see some rich metaphorical possibilities here— hard, plaque-y, whitish deposits plugging not just our bodies’ arteries but also the ones underground that sustain our cities. The British press loves to wail about sewers stopped up by wads of grease the size of buses, football fields, the Tower Bridge, etc, but for once they’re not exaggerating the problem.

This past fall, London saw its largest yet: the Whitechapel fatberg, 140 tons heavy and 270 yards in length, a leviathan glob of solid fat, human waste, and trash.

A recent paper in the Journal of Oleo Science (what? You don’t subscribe?) reported that buildups of this kind account for 47 percent of sanitary sewer overflows in the U.S., and fully half in the UK. London attracts a good share of the attention because it’s a particularly extreme example of a common urban situation: antiquated infrastructures not designed to handle the loads they’re currently servicing. There’s the expected verboten items (diapers, condoms, tampons), but these solids are bobbing along in a much larger waste stream that’s the ultimate source of the fatberg problem: cooking grease.

We have the Brits to thank for the evocative term “fatberg,” which was added to the OED in 2015. The phenomenon is otherwise known in the sewage trade as a FOG deposit—fat, oil, and grease—and it’s the reason you don’t dump your turkey drippings down the sink after Thanksgiving dinner. That’s not just harmless effluent: it joins a river of other solidifying fats down there.

The chief driver here is restaurant waste. In research attempting to determine the source of the Whitechapel fatberg, London utility Thames Water found that not one restaurant on the street above (that’d be Whitechapel Road) used a functional grease trap. A sampling of 700-plus London restaurants revealed that nine out of ten weren’t doing anything to filter out the fat headed down their drains; homes within 50 meters of a fastfood restaurant were eight times likelier to flood with sewage.

“Fatberg apocalypse” may be overstating it, but this is a genuinely massive problem for big-city sanitation authorities, not to mention a major physical challenge. The BBC described fatbergs as “a form of artificial geology,” made up of “a pale, tough substance with the strength of rock.”

Or, somewhat more accurately, the strength of a mighty bar of soap. As you may recall from high school chem class, saponification is the process wherein a fatty acid, as found in animal fat or vegetable oil, encounters some high-pH substance and turns into soap—the classic pairing is tallow and lye. What we’re seeing in FOG situations is the fatty acids released during the deep-frying of food reacting with the calcium in the concrete sewer walls to form a monstrous, fetid soap cake that’s pure misery to dislodge.

As I say, there’s other stuff clogging up the works too. The notable culprit here, now widely used by adults as well as on babies, is wet wipes; they’re typically advertised as “flushable” by their manufacturers, but sewer operators beg to differ. A 2015 New York Times story sets out the debate: On one side you’ve got New York City, spending $18 million over five years on “wipe-related equipment problems.” On the other there’s the powerful nonwoven-fabric industry, which pins the problem, to quote a trade rep, on “nonflushable wipes inappropriately flushed”—in other words, don’t blame the wipe, blame the wiper.

Still, the wipes issue is just the tip of the fatberg. What to do about all the grease?

Getting people to give up their french fries would reduce clogging in both our vascular and sewage systems, but color me bearish on that prospect. An alternative is to use FOG as biofuel—to power city buses, for instance. On that front, the good news is that spent cooking oil can burn 80 percent cleaner than traditional fossil fuels. The bad news? Somebody still has to go down there and get it. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 30 N. Racine, suite 300, Chicago 60607.

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SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Can a marriage withstand an Oedipal revelation?

A game of truth or dare exposes a case of mother-son incest, and more.

Q: My father left my mother

abruptly when I was 14 years old. It was a crushing blow for her, and she retreated from the world. She lost the love of her life for no apparent reason and was left completely alone, except for me. We were extremely close for the next four years and actually slept in the same bed every night. Eventually, we began doing something that most people would consider evil but neither of us has ever regretted. It was just something that happened.

And it wasn’t something that just happened once—it went on for two years and ended only when I left to go to university. I haven’t thought about this for years, and it is something my mother and I have never discussed.

She has since remarried and seems perfectly fine. But even today, we sometimes send each other friendly messages that are vaguely suggestive. The problem is I mentioned it to my wife recently and she went ballistic. She called me and my mother sick and moved into another bedroom and refuses to have sex with me.

I wish I had never mentioned it, but it was part of a truthor-dare session we were having. This has been the situation for the last three months. I have finally lost my patience and I am thinking of leaving. I have mentioned going to a counselor, but she refuses and claims that she is married to a monster and that no woman would want me. We don’t have any children—so if I were to leave, I wouldn’t be disrupting an innocent’s life. Do you have any advice? —TRUTHFUL REVELATION UNMAKES TWO HAPPY SPOUSES

A : I’m not a professional counselor, TRUTHS, but I’m gonna climb out on a

limb and say that a game of truth or dare isn’t the right time to reveal an incestuous sexual relationship with a parent. Hani Miletski and Joe Kort, on the other hand, are professionals: Miletski is a psychotherapist and a sex therapist, and Kort is a sex and relationship therapist.

Miletski literally wrote the book on the subject: MotherSon Incest: The Unthinkable Broken Taboo Persists.

She told me it isn’t uncommon for a woman who has been abandoned by her husband to turn to an adolescent son for emotional comfort.

“These women are often very insecure and needy,” said Miletski. “Unbeknownst to the son—and sometimes to the mother—the son begins to feel responsible for his mother’s well-being and emotional support. Occasionally, this close relationship between a mother and her son evolves into a sexual relationship, and the substitute husband becomes her lover as well. The situation described in this letter sounds exactly like that.

And while I’m glad this man believes he has not been affected by this boundary violation, [the fact that he and his mother are] sending suggestive messages to each other may suggest otherwise.”

You say you have no regrets, TRUTHS, and you don’t mention feeling traumatized by the experience, but the absence of trauma doesn’t confer some sort of retroactive, after-the-fact immunity on your mother.

She is responsible for her actions—actions that were abusive and highly likely to leave you traumatized.

“To gain empathy and compassion from his wife, TRUTHS should be willing to listen to her concerns, fear, and anger,” said Kort.

“He also needs to invite her to have compassion and empathy for the vulnerable position he was in—but he cannot do that until he has some compassion for himself. Untreated, the abuse he suffered from his mother, as well as the loss and grief over his father, could be troubling to his wife and their relationship. Perhaps if he ever has children, the reality of the abuse will hit him. Parents don’t have children to turn them into lovers.”

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Q : A friend of mine is a

gifted artist who hasn’t truly dedicated himself to his art. He’s also a so-called “womanizer,” and every time he meets an interesting woman who’s into him, he inevitably fucks it up. For this reason as well as some others I won’t mention, I believe he’s a repressed homosexual. I believe that what makes him unable to face this aspect of his life is interfering with everything else too. I would like to be able to talk openly about it with him without hurting him. Do you have any tips? —ARTIST FAILING AT

RELATIONSHIPS

A : Sometimes a cigar

isn’t just a cigar—but an unsuccessful heterosexual is almost always just that.

Unless the details you didn’t share include, say, a massive collection of gay porn or messy closet-case classics like drunken lunges at male friends or running for Congress on a “family values” platform, your friend will have to remain in the hetero column for now. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com.v @fakedansavage

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EARLY WARNINGS

chicagoreader.com/early

JANUARY 25, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 45

b Tillers, Pert Near Sandstone 3/30, 9 PM, Hideout Timbiriche 6/3, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM Unknown Mortal Orchestra 5/3, 8 PM, The Vic, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 18+ Tyrone Wells 4/25, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/25, noon b Ben Wendel Seasons Band 3/17, 8 and 9:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Wet Ink Ensemble 2/23, 8:30 PM, Constellation, part of Frequency Festival, 18+ Wyclef Jean 4/15, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Yamantaka // Sonic Titan 4/19, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Yellow Days 4/9, 7 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 1/26, 11 AM, 17+

Fatai ò JEREMY YAP

NEW

Martin Arnold with Joshua Abrams and friends 2/20, 6 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, part of Frequency Festival Jon Batiste 5/4, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM b Marco Benevento 4/14, 9 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 18+ Big Dipper 2/15, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Brian Jonestown Massacre 5/11, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 18+ Brit Floyd 3/23, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM Kevin Burke 2/16, 7 PM, Irish American Heritage Center b Sam Bush 5/11, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/25, noon b Caitlin Canty 5/23, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Catharsis 4/27, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Clifton Chenier 3/10, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 1/26, 11 AM Ram Chiang 2/25, 9 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino, Hammond Come to Grief, Fistula 5/9, 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Davina & the Vagabonds 4/11, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM b Dizzy Wright 2/13, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Stella Donnelly 3/22, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Tashi Dorji & Tyler Damon 3/18, 9 PM, Hideout Hamid Drake 2/21, 8:30 PM, Constellation, part of Frequency Festival, 18+ Erasure 7/27, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM

UPDATED George Ezra 4/29, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM b Faith Healer 4/10, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Fall Out Boy, Rise Against 9/8, 7 PM, Wrigley Field, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM Fatai 4/28, 7 and 10 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 18+ Fever Ray 5/18, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 18+ Haim 5/11, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM b Hall & Oates, Train 5/18, 7 PM, United Center, on sale Mon 1/29, 10 AM Ben Harper & Charlie Musselwhite 7/30, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 17+ High Up 3/1, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Hinds 5/15, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 18+ Hop Along 6/10, 8 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 18+ International Contemporary Ensemble 2/24, 8:30 PM, Constellation, part of Frequency Festival F Billy Joel 9/7, 8 PM, Wrigley Field, on sale Mon 1/29, 10 AM Joey Purp 2/14, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM Darryl Jones Project 3/9, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 18+ Julius Eastman Portrait Concert 2/25, 2 PM, Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center, part of Frequency Festival Fb Kendrick Lamar, Sza, Schoolboy Q, Jay Rock, Ab Soul, Sir, Lance Skiiiwalker 6/15, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 1/26, noon

46 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 25, 2018

Storm Large 4/5, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/25, noon b Low Anthem 3/30, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Minus the Bear 5/4, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 17+ Meshell Ndegeocello 3/26, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM b Oneida 3/17, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Jean-Michel Pilc 2/25, 11 AM, PianoForte Studios b Power Trip, Sheer Mag 5/16, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Quatuor Bozzini 2/22, 6 PM, Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago, part of Frequency Festival Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats, the Head and the Heart 5/31, 6:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM Red Molly 4/29, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/25, noon b Mariel Roberts, Haley Fohr 2/25, 8:30 PM, Constellation, part of Frequency Festival, 18+ Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever 5/2, 9 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 18+ Shakey Graves 5/22, 7:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 18+ Slayer, Anthrax, Testament, Lamb of God 5/25, 5 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM Subramania 4/23, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM b Suuns 5/30, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM Tech N9ne 6/9, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM, 17+

David Byrne 6/2-3, 8 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 6/2 sold out, second show added, on sale Fri 1/26, 10 AM Keb’ Mo’ 4/26, 8 PM and 4/27, 8 and 10:30 PM, City Winery, 4/27 late show added, on sale Thu 1/25, noon b This Is the Kit 5/18, 8:30 and 10:30 PM, Constellation, early show sold out, late show added, 18+

UPCOMING Adult Mom, Chris Farren 2/7, 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Afghan Whigs, Built to Spill 4/12, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ American Nightmare, No Warning 2/25, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Trey Anastasio Band 4/20-21, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Barenaked Ladies, Better Than Ezra 7/13, 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Black Angels, Black Lips 3/26-27, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 18+ Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Night Beats 2/10, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Calexico 4/25, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Brandi Carlile 6/15, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Casket Lottery 3/10, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Dead Meadow 4/4, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen Decemberists 4/10, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Eagles 3/14, 8 PM, United Center Earthless, Kikagaku Moyo 3/24-25, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Enslaved, Wolves in the Throne Room 2/23, 7 PM, Metro, 18+

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Fortunate Youth, Tatanka 4/21, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Fossil Youth, Rarity 2/8, 7:30 PM, Cobra Lounge b Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds 2/24, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Haunted Summer 2/20, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Hot Snakes 3/9, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Iced Earth 3/29, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Jimmy Eat World, Hotelier 5/8, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b John 5 & the Creatures 2/18, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Mat Kearney 3/9, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Kimbra, Arc Iris 2/3, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall b King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard 6/10, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Legions of Metal Fest with TKO, Toxik, Heir Apparent, and more 5/18-19, 5 PM, Reggie’s, 17+ Lightning Bolt 3/28, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Majid Jordan 2/21, 7:30 PM, The Vic, 18+ Bruno Major 2/27, 9 PM, Schubas Mammoth Grinder 2/24, 9 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ MGMT 3/3, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre b Nightmares on Wax 3/3, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Oh Sees 2/18, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Pedro the Lion 8/24, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Preoccupations 4/27, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Radio Dept. 2/1, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Residents 4/17, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Screaming Females 3/10, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Ty Segall 4/8, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Soft Moon 3/31, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Steely Dan, Doobie Brothers 6/21, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park They Might Be Giants 3/17, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 14+ Ana Tijoux 2/19, 7 and 9:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Titus Andronicus 3/15, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Bob Weir & Phil Lesh 3/10, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene AS THE Growing Concerns Poetry Collective, poet McKenzie Chinn, rapper Mykele Deville, and producer Jeffrey Michael Austin blend “emphatic spoken word, conversational storytelling, and vivid rapping, all set to dreamy ambient beats” (as Lee V. Gaines put it in the Reader in September). The collective celebrated their debut album, We Here: Thank You for Noticing, with two shows at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theatre in August, and this Friday and Saturday they return to that venue to mark the vinyl release of We Here and the publication of Five Fifths, a poetry collection by Chinn and Deville.

The two perform separately and with the collective both nights; also on the bill are soul multi-instrumentalist Sam Trump (Friday) and R&B artist Tasha (Saturday).

In June, Chicago’s Art Leaders of Color Network and the Comfort Station launch the second annual P.O.W.E.R. Project, which transforms the Logan Square space for the month into what they call an “empowerment hub,” with lectures, discussions, happenings, self-care exercises, and more. (“P.O.W.E.R.” stands for “Preparation, Organization, Wonderment, Empowerment, and Resistance.”) Organizers want to find four curators who identify as ALAANA (African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Native American), each of whom will get a stipend and a budget to plan a week of events. Applications are due via the Comfort Station site by Sunday, February 11.

Chicago’s Gal Gun recently dropped the hook-a-minute cassette Special Music of Emotion via Dumpster Tapes, and Gossip Wolf digs its crunchy power-pop riffs. Fans of Material Issue and Smoking Popes, lend an ear! On Saturday, January 27, Gal Gun play a DIY show with Girl K, Jimmy Floortom, and jangle-pop crew Beach Bunny, whose new single “Sports” is up on Bandcamp. If you’re having issues with romance (or your tennis game), you should have a ball with this catchy jam!

E-mail cisaacburns@gmail.com for show details. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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SPECIAL GUESTS:

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JUNE SPECIAL GUESTS:

BIRDS OF CHICAGO

THURSDAY FEBRUARY 15

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THURSDAY MAY 3

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NICHOLAS TREMULIS

SUNDAY MAY 13

FRIDAY, MARCH 9 PARK WEST ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

FRIDAY, MAY 11 ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

MAY 22 ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 9AM!

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

LOTUS –Friday, Feb. 9 • HIPPO CAMPUS – Feb. 16-Sold Out! • MAJID JORDAN – Feb. 21 • CELEBRATING DAVID BOWIE –Friday, Feb. 23 • BIANCA DEL RIO – Feb. 24 RAILROAD EARTH – Friday, Mar. 9 • OMD – Mar. 16-Sold Out! • THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS –Saturday, Mar. 17 • PUDDLES PITY PARTY –Friday, Mar. 23 • DIXIE DREGS –Saturday, Mar. 24 BUCKETHEAD – Mar. 25 • ROB BELL –April 5 • “WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC – April 6 & 7 • CLEAN BANDIT – April 11 • THE WOOD BROTHERS – April 13 & 14 • JEFF TWEEDY – April 27 & 28 STEVEN WILSON – May 1 & 2 • THE BREEDERS –May 8 • ANDREW W.K. –May 12 • THE KOOKS –May 30

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