Chicago Reader: print issue of January 28, 2016 (Volume 45, 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 8 , 2 0 1 6

Politics There’s always money in Mayor Rahm’s “banana stand.” 8 Visual Art What’s a photo museum’s role in the age of Instagram? 12 Food & Drink Serai fills Chicago’s Malaysian food void. 29

How

TY MONEY

made one of the best rap records of the past year

By LEOR GALIL 18

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2 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

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C H I C AG O R E A D E R | JA N UA RY 2 8 , 2 01 6 | VO LU M E 4 5, N U M B E R 1 6

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN SENIOR WRITERS STEVE BOGIRA, MICHAEL MINER, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI SOCIAL MEDIA COORDINATOR RYAN SMITH CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, JENA CUTIE, MATT DE LA PEÑA, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, DMITRY SAMAROV, ZAC THOMPSON, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS MANUEL RAMOS

IN THIS ISSUE 4 Agenda The play Le Switch, the exhibit “Straight Into the Camera: David Gremp’s Chicago, 1978-79,” Zlumber Party at Quimby’s, and more recommendations

CITY LIFE

7 Street View A couple make the case for all-black winter ensembles.

7 The Contrarian Outdoor ice skating is hell frozen over.

9 Transportation The controversial Belmont flyover has federal approval—but still faces other hurdles.

ARTS & CULTURE

10 Theater How the rules have changed at Rhinofest 10 Lit In Disaster Drawn, Hillary Chute argues for recognizing comics as a substantial documentarian form.

15 Small Screen Where’s Chicago in Dick Wolf’s Chicago P.D.?

16 Movies In Son of Saul, a Jew in Auschwitz readies his fellow prisoners for the gas chamber.

36 Straight Dope What is the best way to wipe your butt?

37 Savage Love Dan offers a beginner’s guide to sounding.

MUSIC

18 Feature How Ty Money made one of the best rap records of the past year 21 Shows of note Hieroglyphic Being, Minsk, Spektral Quartet, Black Breath, and DJ Paypal

FOOD & DRINK

29 Review: Serai The Logan Square restaurant serves up the city’s first proper Malay cuisine in eight years.

31 Food media A requiem for the Midwestern Diner’s long-form coverage

CLASSIFIEDS 8 Joravsky | Politics There’s always money in Mayor Rahm’s “banana stand.”

12 Visual Art What’s the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s role in the age of Instagram?

33 Jobs 33 Apartments & Spaces 35 Marketplace

38 Early Warnings At the Drive-In, Yung Lean, the Joy Formidable, Jeff Tweedy, Black Lips, and more shows you should know about in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf Caribbean dance night Feel the Rhythm makes its overdue return, and more music news

---------------------------------------------------------------SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES AARON DEETS, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY BUSINESS MANAGER STEFANIE WRIGHT ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654 312-222-6920, CHICAGOREADER.COM ---------------------------------------------------------------THE READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY SUN-TIMES MEDIA, LLC, 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654. © 2016 SUN-TIMES MEDIA, LLC. PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL. POSTMASTER: SEND CHANGE OF ADDRESS TO CHICAGO READER, 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654.

CORRECTION: DUE TO AN EDITING ERROR IN THE JANUARY 21 PRINT EDITION, A REVIEW OF COLLABORACTION’S FINAL SKETCHBOOK FESTIVAL INCORRECTLY REFERRED TO IT AS SKETCHFEST, I.E., THE CHICAGO SKETCH COMEDY FESTIVAL, AND PLACED IT IN THE WRONG VENUE. SKETCHBOOK RAN THROUGH JANUARY 24 AT THE CHOPIN THEATRE, NOT STAGE 773.

FEATURE

ONLINE

How Ty Money made one of the best rap records of the past year By holing up in his home studio, this Harvey hip-hop hero found a distinctive voice that speaks to injustice with rare insight.

BY LEOR GALIL 18

PHOTOS OF TY MONEY BY RYAN LOWRY. FOR MORE OF LOWRY’S WORK GO TO RYANLOWRY.ORG.

MEDIA/SPORTS “THE SPORTS WORLD’S longest winning streak shows no sign of ending anytime soon. For the 30th straight year the 1985 Chicago Bears have won Super Bowl XX, and our town has gone a little bit crazy,” Michael Miner writes. “The relentless giddiness over the ’85 victory has no parallel in American sports.”

Read the rest of Miner’s column at thebleader.com.

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 3

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F exuberance, and feverish rage. The only trouble is Cole’s intrusive production design, which is so loaded with atmospheric effects (echoing voices, clanking pipes, eerie lighting) that it’s easy to miss the text. —ZAC THOMPSON Through 3/12: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Mon 8 PM, Oracle Theatre, 3809 N. Broadway, 773244-2980, oracletheatre.org. F

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4 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

R

Bye Bye Birdie " BRETT BEINER

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater Bye Bye Birdie In the wrong hands, this 1960 homage to/ R parody of Elvis Presley and that awful

“music” all the kids are listening to can seem very dated indeed. It was, after all, written to entertain old farts (my parents among them) who considered 50s rock ’n’ roll a mere fad. Thankfully, director-choreographer Tammy Mader is a clever woman who respects the material enough to find the comedy in the show’s gentle send-up of middle America while also moving us with the glorious, albeit prerock, score. Of course, you need a high-caliber cast to do this, and for this Drury Lane production Mader has brought out lots of big guns, among them Michelle Aravena (dynamite as a sad-sack songwriter’s girlfriend/secretary) and Leryn Turlington (who sizzles as the young teen who wins the right to kiss the Elvis stand-in, Conrad Birdie, before he goes into the army). —JACK HELBIG Through 3/13: Wed 1:30 PM, Thu 1:30 and 8 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 5 and 8:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Drury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace, drurylaneoakbrook.com, $55.

The Consultant Heidi Schreck’s R bittersweet recession one-act is a fitting closer for Signal Ensemble

Theatre, now dimming the lights for good after 13 seasons. An advertising firm in the throes of downsizing hires a woefully underqualified NYU student to bolster a hopeless designer’s presentation skills before a sink-or-swim pitch meeting. The Pygmalion-like story line never makes any real sense, nor does the fatalistic, perpetually late, pants-pissing designer ever feel worthy of saving. It’s the rest of the recession-era setting that redeems: as the office glue, Courtney Jones conveys the strange, dependent, contentious relationship employees have with their work environment, hated or not. Ronan Marra’s production finds value and beau-

ty in getting shitcanned, no matter how unceremoniously. Good-byes don’t get more noble or touching than that. —DAN JAKES Through 2/20: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Signal Ensemble Theatre, 1802 W. Berenice, 773-347-1350, signalensemble. com, $23, $15 seniors.

Epopeya The first production of Aguijón Theater’s 26th season “begins where the battle ends.” So sayeth the program notes for Epopeya (“Epic Poem”), a contemporary retelling of Euripides’s Hecuba, whose characters are as desperate for harmony as they are thirsty for revenge. The main players in writer Abel González Melo’s tragedy are no different. The fall of Troy brings unrest to an island of inhabitants who have suffered brutality at the hands of warring elites.

At the center of the drama is the former queen Hécuba, a woman accustomed to the finer things in life. Confined to an otherwise deserted island and destitute in the aftermath of the battle, Hécuba is forced to reconcile a once-fruitful future with the little she has left. Contemporary references often fall flat, but a stellar cast compensates with enough gusto to make the show worthwhile. Be prepared to shift your gaze early and often, as the play is performed in Spanish with English supertitles. —MATT DE LA PEÑA Through 2/28: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 6 PM, Aguijón Theater, 2707 N. Laramie, 773-637-5899, aguijontheater.org, $25, $15 students and seniors.

The Hairy Ape Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 expressionist drama gains contemporary resonance in this production cast entirely with black men. Director Monty Cole obviously means to make a connection between the travails of the play’s working-class hero, Yank—regarded by the upper crust as a fearsome brute when he’s not being exploited, ignored, beaten, or thrown in jail by their lackeys—and the issues of racial inequality and violence brought to light by the Black Lives Matter movement. The enterprise is helped considerably by a gripping performance from Julian Parker, whose Yank is equal parts pathos, youthful

The Mutilated You’ve probably never heard of this 1966 Tennessee Williams one-act, but you’re sure to recognize it all the same. Set in late-1940s New Orleans, just a streetcar ride from Stella and Stanley’s tenement, it’s sown with familiar Williams types: lowlifes, sailors, and damaged, desperate women of a certain age. Trinket and Celeste both come from money, and both have fallen very far—Celeste because of her alcoholism, Trinket due to a disfiguring surgery. They were friends until Celeste made a characteristically clumsy attempt to leverage the secret of Trinket’s “mutilation.” Now each has arrived at her dark Christmas Eve of the soul. Williams treats the pair with a brutal grace. Dado’s staging couches them in a kind of Brechtian surrealism full of strange, comic sights.

Jennifer Engstrom’s brassy Celeste and Mierka Girten’s defensively demure Trinket make them heartbreaking. —TONY ADLER Through 2/28: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells, 312-943-8722, aredorchidtheatre. org, $30-$35.

Posh Steep’s Theatre’s U.S. R premiere of a 2010 drama by British playwright Laura Wade is intense and disturbing. Purportedly about class warfare, Posh is in fact about rich people and the persistence and fragility of wealth, perhaps especially in this onetime empire. I wasn’t fully convinced by the script—you may wonder, as I did, what’s at stake, exactly, or whether the play isn’t itself reifying existing inequities (much like Bruce Norris’s Domesticated, currently at Steppenwolf). But what a pleasure to watch this feat of ensemble theater as Jonathan Berry’s direction reveals the fragility of the bonds between the members of an exclusive Oxbridge dining club. Steep’s small space heightens the harrowing

Le Switch " MICHAEL BROSILOW

tone: we audience members at first seem to be in a room we likely wouldn’t be invited into, eavesdropping; eventually, we feel captive to certain horror.

—SUZANNE SCANLON Through 2/28: ThuSat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Steep Theatre, 1115 W. Berwyn, 312-458-0722, steeptheatre. com, $25-$35.

Sunset Baby In one of many suffocatingly somber moments in Dominique Morisseau’s hit 2013 play, former black revolutionary Kenyatta intones, “The man in the mirror is the scariest revolution there is.” Tell that to Fred Hampton.

Morisseau’s inability to distinguish psychobabble from radical politics—or to paint the legacy of the black liberation movement in anything but the broadest of strokes—might be forgivable if it resulted in compelling drama. But her story of Kenyatta’s efforts to reconnect with his long-abandoned daughter Nina, now selling small-time drugs with her big-dreaming thug boyfriend Damon, is implausibly contrived to the point of melodrama (the stilted, explain-everything-as-we-go dialogue doesn’t help).

Director Ron OJ Parson gets searing performances from his cast, then compromises their efforts with unaccountably sluggish pacing. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 4/10: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM (except Wed 2/10 and 3/24, 8:30 PM), Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Sun 3/20, 6 PM, TimeLine Theatre Company, Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, Baird Hall Theatre, 615 W. Wellington, 773-281-8463, timelinetheatre. com, $38-$51.

Le Switch As shown in his previR ous plays The Homosexuals and Charm (the latter staged by Northlight

Theatre at Steppenwolf Garage last fall), Philip Dawkins has a knack for depicting contemporary LGBT life with warmth and wisecracks. His new comedy is set shortly before and after the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision legalizing marriage equality—a development met with ambivalence by the play’s protagonist, David, a gay thirtysomething librarian.

He remains squeamish about state-sanctioned lifelong commitment even after falling for Benoit, a sweet and sexy flower vendor he first encounters during a trip to Montreal. Though it’s a fizzy

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of January 28 For more of the best things to do every day of the week, go to chicagoreader. com/agenda.

Saint Charles, 630-584-6342, $25 plus two-drink minimum.

Will Durst Wed 1/27, 7:30 PM; Thu 1/28, 7:30 PM; Fri 1/29, 8:30 and 10:30 PM; Sat 1/30, 7, 9, and 11:15 PM; and Sun 1/31, 8:30 PM, Zanies, 1548 N. Wells, 312-337-4027, chicago.zanies.com, $25 plus two-drink minimum.

Forever Alone: Based on the Novel Single AF by Satire Dating advice from improv troupe the Hopeless Romantics, plus guest performers. Through 2/11: Thu 8 PM, Cornservatory, 4210 N. Lincoln, 773-650-1331, cornservatory.org, $12.

Sunday Salon with artist and author Tony Fitzpatrick " COURTESY THE ARTIST tale, Dawkins displays a tender compassion for gays still carrying the scars of feeling unwelcome and inferior. The wit and likability of his script is matched by a talented cast in About Face Theatre’s staging. —ZAC THOMPSON Through 2/21: Wed-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, aboutfacetheatre.com, $35.

Transparent Early on in Kellye Howard’s energetic and brutally honest one-woman show, she gestures to the pile of her teenage journals onstage and urges audience members to run the other way if they encounter anyone with half as many physical manifestations of their “crazy.” Less a cohesive narrative than an ever-changing stand-up dramedy set, Howard’s show covers her search for “normal” in everything from race (is she more Cosby Show or The Wire?) to parenting to mental illness. Her marriage to an Asian man who’s shorter than her teenager—and her paranoid underwear sniff tests and other detective work following his infidelity—provides particularly moving and relatable fodder.

Although uneven at times, Howard’s exploration of her personal struggles with marriage, illness, and death exposes admirable vulnerability and strength.

—MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 2/29: Thu 9:30, the Comedy Bar, 500 N. LaSalle, 312-836-0499, comedybarchicago. com, $20-$30.

Vices & Virtues Eleven directors R and 20 actors put on one hell of a showcase at this double feature of

short plays, some premiering, by Neil LaBute. For every LaButism to grumble about—depravity, heavy-handed ambiguity, self-righteous speeches, women shrieking at slobs—there’s an empathetic and disarming counterbalance. Both programs feature some magnificent work, but of the two, “Virtues” contains the most pleasant surprises, particularly 10-K, a naturalistic flirtation with infidelity featuring Betsy Bowman and Tom McGregor, and Swallowing Bicycles, a pushback against unyielding artists.

With good reason, some of these shorts will no doubt be fast-tracked into work-

shops; see them here first. —DAN JAKES Through 3/16: “Vices”: Thu 8 PM, Sat 4 PM, Sun 7 PM; “Virtues”: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Profiles Theatre, Main Stage, 4139 N. Broadway, 773-549-1815, profilestheatre.org, $40.

Sean Patton Thu 1/28, 8 PM; Fri 1/29, 8 and 10:30 PM; and Sat 1/30, 8 and 10:30 PM, Up Comedy Club, 230 W. North, 312337-3992, upcomedyclub.com, $20.

R

Under the Gun Improv Classic Improv teams from across the city go head-to-head in this five-week tournament to win bragging rights (and a cash prize). Through 1/30: Sat 7:30 PM, Under the Gun Theater, 956 W. Newport, 773-270-3440, undertheguntheater.com, $10-$12.

in business. For more on MoCP and its anniversary, see page 12. Reception Thu 1/28, 5 PM. Through 4/10. Mon-Sat 10 AM-5 PM (Thu till 8 PM), Sun noon-5 PM. 600 S. Michigan, 312-663-5554, mocp.org.

LIT History Press Author Night The Book Cellar hosts History Press historians and authors John Hogan and Judy Brady and their latest book, The Great Chicago Beer Riot: How Lager Struck a Blow for Liberty, as well as Gayle Soucek and her latest work, Mr. Selfridge in Chicago: Marshall Field’s, the Windy City & the Making of a Merchant Prince. Fri 1/29, 7 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773293-2665, bookcellarinc.com.

WRITERS: What Will You

Finish In 2016?

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Taught by award-winning author author S.L. Wisenberg.

Wisenberg. $30. $30. $5 rebate rebate w/ w/donation donationofoftoiletry toiletry items to benefit the Night Ministry.

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Saturday February 6, 1- 4pm | Chicago Publishers Resource Center | 858 N. Ashland Ave. Thisprogram programis isbrought broughttotoyou youby: by: This

Under the Influence R Reading Featured guests at this outing

DANCE

Amid Festival A performance R festival, curated by Michelle Kranicke, that considers and celebrates

the aging body in relation to dance and performance art. The second weekend features Bebe Miller’s Duet With Piece of String, Pranita Jain’s What the Body Remembers, Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts, and a couple of performances

by Kranicke’s Zephyr Dance. Through 1/31: Thu-Mon 7 PM, Links Hall at Constellation, 3111 N. Western, 773-281-0824, linkshall.org, $10-$17 per performance, festival pass $25-$50.

Peep Show: Kristina Isabelle R Dance + Ben Law + Marcos Balter A behind-the-scenes look at the

creation of a new dance performance.

Wed 2/3, 7 PM, Links Hall at Constellation, 3111 N. Western, 773-281-0824, linkshall.org, $5.

COMEDY Blackout Diaries Comedians tell their most embarrassing drinking stories.

Open run: Sat 8 PM, High-Hat Club, 1920 W. Irving Park, 773-697-8660, highhat. club, $10.

R

Broad Squad The debut of a monthly show featuring games and comedy celebrating women. Ruthie Lichtenstein hosts and Rebecca O’Neal headlines. Sun 1/31, 8 PM, Skylark, 2149 S. Halsted, 312-948-5275, skylarkchicago. com. F John Caponera Thu 1/28, 8 PM; Fri 1/29, 8 PM; and Sat 1/30, 7:30 and 9:45 PM, Zanies (Pheasant Run), 4051 E. Main,

Dorthea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother is on view at “MoCP at 40.” " DOROTHEA LANGE/COURTESY MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY

VISUAL ARTS Harold Washington Library Center “Straight Into the Camera: David Gremp’s Chicago, 1978-79,” a collection of black-and-white photographs of Chicagoans looking “straight into the camera.” Gremp leads a gallery talk on Sat 1/30, 2 PM. Through 5/16. Mon-Thu 9 AM-7 PM, Fri-Sat 9 AM-5 PM, Sun 1-5 PM. 400 S. State, 312-747-4300, chipublib.org.

of the monthly reading and trivia (and drinking) series are Liz Baulder, Ed Blair, Christine Nolan, and Mason Johnson.

The theme is “Bitter.” Wed 2/3, 7 PM, Sheffield’s, 3258 N. Sheffield, 773-2814989, sheffieldschicago.com, $3.

Sunday Salon Chicago Tonight R the monthly reading series features local Curbside Splendor authors Halle Butler, Dasha Kelly, Dave Reidy, and Tony Fitzpatrick. Sun 1/31, 7 PM, Riverview Tavern, 1958 W. Roscoe, 773248-9523, riverviewtavern.com.

Museum of Contemporary Zlumber Party Quimby’s R Photography, Columbia College R recommends that zinesters, “MoCP at 40,” a chronological collection comic artists, and whoever else “bring of pictures from notable photographers—Diane Arbus, Carrie Mae Weems, Sally Mann—from the museum’s permanent collection, in honor of four decades

yer jammies and a sleeping bag”—but attendees don’t actually have to stay all night. There will be snacks and coffee and general merriment, plus the cre- !

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JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 5

AGENDA and Sun 1/31, 5:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Cemetery of Splendor Thai R filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee

Cemetery of Splendor

B ative buzz of working alongside fellow artists. RSVP required. Sat 1/30, 9:30 PM-6:30 AM, Quimby’s Bookstore, 1854 W. North, 773-3420910, quimbys.com.

and Glenn Close. —J.R. JONES R, 90 min. Fri 1/29, 8:15 PM; Sun 1/31, 3 PM; Mon 2/1, 8 PM; Tue 2/2, 6 PM; Wed 2/3, 7:30 PM; and Thu 2/4, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

MOVIES

The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young Every year hundreds of thrill seekers from around the world apply to run a 160-mile course through Tennessee’s treacherous Frozen Head State Park, though fewer than 40 people are granted the privilege.

This enlightening documentary (2015) chronicles the 2012 marathon from the perspective of its eccentric founders, affectionately referred to as “sadists,” and its participants, who are mostly well-educated achievers adrenalized by the possibility of failure. Codirectors Timothy Kane and Annika Iltis provide helpful graphics between scenes—in terms of elevation, the course is equivalent to climbing and descending Mount Everest twice—and provide plenty of context as to why one would choose to push one’s body and mind to their breaking points. “Most people would be better off with more pain in their lives,” remarks one participant. Cut to the remaining runners, their ashen faces breaking into grins at the finish line. —LEAH PICKETT 89 min. Sat 1/30, 7:45 PM,

More at chicagoreader.com/ movies

NEW REVIEWS Anesthesia Well-respected character actor Tim Blake Nelson wrote and directed this indie ensemble drama, and it bears all the earmarks of an actor’s film: he’s attracted a stellar cast of serious-minded players, but they fight a losing battle against the characters’ overwritten dialogue and unlikely behavior. Sam Waterston, playing a good-hearted philosophy professor, fares the best, primarily because his long tenure on Law & Order has so sharpened his skill at delivering pedantic, moralizing speeches.

This is one of those movies whose seemingly unrelated plotlines all merge at the end, though the character connections feel more like a parlor trick than any sort of thematic revelation. With Nelson, Kristen Stewart, Gretchen Mol, Michael K. Williams, Corey Stoll,

Who Can Recall His Past Lives) crafts another of his mysterious tales dissolving the boundaries between past and present, people and nature, the conscious and the unconscious. Calm and quiet, but nicely paced, the film centers on a kindly middle-aged woman volunteering at a small-town medical clinic for soldiers afflicted with a strange sleeping sickness. According to two Laotian goddesses (who appear to the heroine in modern casual wear), the clinic sits on the site of an ancient cemetery whose dead kings enlist the sleeping men as dream warriors. The film has been called an allegory for the current political tumult in Thailand; that part went right over my head, but a dazzling shot in which Weerasethakul superimposes the rows of occupied hospital beds with shoppers on a bank of mall escalators encapsulates the sense of a voyage taking place in complete stillness.

In English and subtitled Thai. —J.R. JONES 122 min. Weerasethakul attends the screening on Monday, February 1. Fri 1/29, 2 and 6 PM; Sat 1/30, 3 and 8:15 PM; Sun 1/31, 4:45 PM; Mon 2/1, 6:30 PM; Tue 2/2, 7:45 PM; Wed 2/3, 7:30 PM; and Thu 2/4, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center The 5th Wave Chloë Grace Moretz is a plucky teen outwitting extraterrestrials in this sci-fi thriller based on Rick Yancey’s eponymous novel. Unfortunately the premise holds more excitement than its execution, which amounts to a lazy patchwork of themes from various young-adult dystopian franchises.

Separated from her family during a series of coordinated alien attacks, Moretz’s character goes on the run to save her kid brother (Zackary Arthur) and eventually confront “the Others” with the help of a sensitive hunk (Alex Roe) and an army of child soldiers who look as if

they’ve been recruited from the set of Divergent. Director J. Blakeson injects some suspense into the edgier first half, but the potential for this adolescent Independence Day to transcend mediocrity is ultimately squashed by a silly and generic love triangle that makes The Hunger Games look like Casablanca. With Maria Bello and Liev Schrieber. —LEAH PICKETT PG-13, 114 min. For venues visit chicagoreader.com/movies.

The Finest Hours The U.S. Coast Guard rescue of commercial tanker the SS Pendleton, which broke in half during a wild storm off the Massachusetts coast in February 1952, is considered one of the bravest operations in the guard’s history. This Disney/Pixar production does the story justice, though the movie is a case study in the companies’ lopsided creative partnership: Pixar’s digital effects are awesome, but the script suffers from the narrow emotional parameters Disney imposes on its live-action dramas.

Chris Pine gives a quietly magnetic performance as Bernard Webber, the young lifeboat commander who led a frightened three-man crew straight into the deadly gale; this thrilling adventure is periodically interrupted by a feeble romantic subplot in which Webber’s fiancee wrings her hanky onshore. Craig Gillespie directed; with Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, and Eric Bana.

—J.R. JONES PG-13, 116 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, City North 14, Webster Place Mekong Hotel A relatively slight effort from Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives), this 2012 drama records a series of desultory conversations among guests at a posh waterfront hotel. In case you might be nodding off, periodic scenes show one of the guests, traveling with her grown daughter, to be a vampire who pigs out on bloody human viscera in her room and has the power to inhabit the bodies of others.

Weerasethakul’s films have been hailed for their hypnotic mix of natural splendor and supernatural mythology, though this one is a bit lumpy by his standards. He opens with a scene of himself interviewing a friend who plays Spanish guitar, and the pensive music serves as auditory wallpaper for the rest of the movie, in contrast to the spectral hush found in some of Weerasethakul’s other work. In Thai with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 58 min.

Sat 1/30, 7 PM; Wed 2/3, 6:15 PM; and Thu 2/4, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

REVIVALS Pistol Opera Japanese R director Seijun Suzuki has called this 2001 feature a sequel to

his 1967 stylistic exercise Branded to Kill. But that was a hit-man thriller in black and white; this is a sensual explosion in color, a surreal, deliriously balletic pop fantasy that defies most forms of narrative description. Shot for shot, it ranks as the most beautiful movie I’ve seen in years. The characters are four or five generations of women, most of them dressed to kill, with one, a determined hit woman named Stray Cat (Makiko Esumi), trying to shoot her way from third to first place in a hierarchy of assassins managed by an inscrutable and invisible “Guild.” The striking settings are industrial, urban, or rural locations, diverse theatrical stages, and otherworldly studio sets; the dialogue, in Japanese with subtitles, occasionally shifts to English (including recitations of Wordsworth and “Humpty Dumpty”); and the musical accompaniment periodically sounds like Miles Davis in an echo chamber. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 112 min. Sat 1/30, 3 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center 70 Acres in Chicago: Cabrini Green Every Chicagoan should see this documentary about the history of the Chicago Housing Authority and the controversial destruction of Cabrini-Green

Homes on the north side to make way for a 21st-century model based on mixed-income housing. Filming over 15 years, director Ronit Bezalel tracks three longtime Cabrini residents as the hellish high-rises come down and new town houses go up lodging an uneasy mix of lower-class blacks with government subsidies and middle-class whites paying market rates. As Bezalel reports, many more of the project’s original residents were screened out due to negative drug tests and criminal-record checks and shunted off to the south and west sides. “I stay in it, I play in it, I live in it, and it’s home to me,” declares young Raymond McDonald, one of the voices that animate this story of a community in transition. But for those at the bottom of the economic ladder, home is wherever the city says. —J.R. JONES 53 min. Fri 1/29, 2 and 8:15 PM; Sat 1/30, 5:30 PM; and Sun 1/31, 3 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Stevie While in rural southR ern Illinois in 1995, Chicago filmmaker Steve James (Hoop

Dreams) contacted the abused, rejected kid he’d been a Big Brother to ten years earlier, Stevie Fielding. This remarkable documentary (2002) charts the renewal of their friendship, explores Stevie’s past, and attempts to come to terms with him as an adult—a more difficult task after he’s charged with sexually molesting a little girl. Taking nothing and no one for granted, including himself, James looks at his subject with admirable honesty, and the tragic tale that emerges is full of powerful lessons and impenetrable mysteries. In the process, we get to know something about the people closest to Stevie—his relatives and fiancee and some of the people in his community—as well as the abused girl’s mother.

—JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 144 min. James attends the screening, part of a series marking the 50th anniversary of Kartemquin Films. Fri 1/29, 7 PM. Northwestern University Block Museum of Art v

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CITY LIFE Ù

OUR MOST READ ARTICLES LAST WEEK ON CHICAGOREADER.COM IN ASCENDING ORDER: “What the Van Dyke murder trial judge has in common with Laquan McDonald” —STEVE BOGIRA

ò ISA GIALLORENZO

“With CPStakeover proposal, Rauner tries to take Rahm down with him” —BEN JORAVSKY

“Mayor Rahm wants to spend $16 million on high-end apartments” —BEN JORAVSKY

“The 50 worst moments in the first 50 years of the Chicago Bulls” —JAKE MALOOLEY

Street View

None more black COLORFUL OUTERWEAR is always a great opportunity to brighten up the city’s bleak winter landscape. But you can hardly fault Yohtii Law and Tayhee Tung for wearing all black when they look so damn good. Art students visiting from New York City, they had just stopped by the Bucktown boutique RSVP Gallery—and despite their somber monochromatic looks, they managed to stand out. “All of my clothes are black because it is full of mystery and coolness,” Tung says. The couple gets inspiration from Japanese labels such as Yohji Yamamoto and Comme des Garçons, the brand of Tung’s puffer jacket. The pair show off more of their minimal goth style on Instagram at @yohtiii and @tung.16.

—ISA GIALLORENZO See more Chicago street style on Giallorenzo’s blog chicagolooks.blogspot.com.

“When Chicago spent its pension money on the mayor’s pet projects” —BEN JORAVSKY

Diameters of circles are proportional to the number of page views received.

The contrarian

Outdoor ice skating is hell frozen over IT’S FIVE DEGREES on a Friday evening, even colder with the wind chill, and you’re shivering while in line to ice skate at Millennium Park.

After the hour-long wait, you cough up 12 bucks to rent a pair of bladed boots that smell like a clammy YMCA, spend another ten overheated minutes struggling to stuff your feet into them, and then cram your remaining possessions into a tiny rental locker.

You shuffle onto the rink’s surface only to find yourself in an arena of barely controlled chaos. It’s like a mosh pit in reverse: a mass of people desperately trying not to slam into each other. But danger looms as dozens of amateur skaters move at various speeds within the rink’s confines. You repress a feeling of panic as you dodge daredevil teens haphazardly zipping around like they’re being timed for Olympics trials and narrowly avoid a six-year-old who looks like he’s doing a Bambi impression—arms and legs splayed as he falls to the ice on his stomach.

And holy shit, is that someone texting while skating backwards?

There’s a beautiful skyline in the background, but you’re too busy keeping yourself balanced on two

Why in the name of Michelle Kwan does anyone participate in this tedious winter pastime? ò LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION

thin rails of steel to admire it, let alone keep track of your date, who’s suddenly missing from view. One tumble could send you crashing skull first into the ice, your knit hat providing only the flimsiest of protection. After 20 minutes of etching circles onto the ice with your shoes, your feet ache, your face is numb from the biting lake winds, and your “apres-skate” hot chocolate tastes like powdered mud.

Why in the name of Michelle Kwan would anyone waste time and money on outdoor ice skating?

Everywhere you turn these days, there’s a new slab of ice in Chicago you can pay to skate on. In addition to the ever-popular McCormick Tribune rink in Millennium Park, we’ve now got the winding, Mario Kart-like track in Maggie Daley Park, pop-up ice in Wicker Park and at the Lincoln Park Zoo, and a synthetic surface installed on the patio of Parson’s Chicken & Fish in Humboldt

Park. At this pace, we’re a winter or two away from becoming a Canadian province.

Did the polar vortex freeze our capacity for rational thinking, or is the powerful opiate of Rockwellian nostalgia that surrounds ice skating causing mass delusion? I’d bet the latter. Close your eyes and ponder “outdoor ice skating”—you probably picture an old black-andwhite movie with Cary Grant and an elegant woman holding hands while doing effortless figure eights in a snow globe. Or maybe you think of the grace and visual poetry of sequin-studded Olympic figure skaters.

In any case, it’s time to wipe the dewy romanticism from your eyes and face the truth, even if it stings like a late-January night along the lakefront: outdoor ice skating is a painfully tedious—and sometimes downright painful—winter pastime.

—RYAN SMITH

Ñ Keep up to date on the go at chicagoreader.com/agenda.

CITY AGENDA Things to do about town.

THURSDAY 28

FRIDAY 29

SATURDAY 30

SUNDAY 31

MONDAY 1

TUESDAY 2

WEDNESDAY 3

M Winter Mix-Off Top mixologists battle it out at the Reader’s Winter Mix-Off at Roof (201 N. State). Drink cocktails by Kristina Magro of Pub Royale, Dustin Drankewicz of Tack Room, Mea Leech of Pump Room, Julia Momose of GreenRiver, Brian Bolles of the Betty, and more.

6-9 PM, Roof, 201 N. State, chicagoreader.com, $40.

¡ I n cendium Chicago Slam Works presents a cabaret inspired by the afterlife.

1/29-3/4: Fri 8:15 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, chicagoslamworks.com, $20.

◎ Pie Fight 2016 Bakers can submit their pies in either the sweet or savory categories for a chance to win $100.

For those who are more into eating, whole pies and slices are available for purchase. All proceeds benefit 826Chi. 2:30 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar, 1366 N. Milwaukee, emporiumchicago.com.

E Groundhog Day The Boiler Room presents a screening of the Bill Murray comedy with a PBR-hosted bar for anyone who RSVPs. Pizza and other snacks available a la carte. 8 PM, Boiler Room, 2210 N. California, boilerroomlogansquare.com.

E Th e St ars Are Out Andy Fleming hosts a screening of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace with comics Adam Burke, Tyler Jackson, and Deanna Ortiz providing commentary. 8 PM, North Bar, 1637 W. North, liveatnorthbar. com.

F First Tues days With Mick and Ben On the first Tuesday of every month, the Reader’s Ben Joravsky and the Sun-Times’s Mick Dumke are given a stage to talk city politics—and whatever the hell else they might feel needs a takedown. 6:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, hideoutchicago.com, $5.

j Drink and Draw Graphic novelist Leila Abdelrazaq hosts a workshop for creating comics based on personal stories. BYOB. 6:30 PM, Spudnik Press, 1821 W. Hubbard, spudnikpress.com, $10 suggested donation.

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE

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

POLITICS

Rahm’s secret stash

There’s always money in the mayor’s ‘banana stand.’

W

ith state legislators trying to force the mayor to spend hundreds of millions of TIF dollars on the schools, it looks like the mayor’s taking a page from the George Bluth book of money management.

George is the sleazy patriarch of the hilariously dysfunctional Bluth clan in Arrested Development.

One day, Bluth’s nervous son comes to him to complain that the family’s running out of money because of a SEC investigation into their finances.

No worry, Bluth assures his son: “There’s always money in the banana stand.”

The banana stand being—aw, forget it, just watch the show.

The point is that Mayor Emanuel, like George Bluth, hides a secret stash of cash for when he needs it.

To illustrate the point, I have two examples, starting with Sara Sayigh, the much-admired librarian at Bronzeville’s DuSable High School.

Late last year, CPS officials decided they couldn’t afford Sayigh. So on December 8, they sent her a letter saying she was being laid off.

Immediately, about 50 students gathered in DuSable’s hallways to show their support for Sayigh by reading books.

They called it a read-in.

That put Emanuel in a bind. It’s hard to ignore a bunch of kids who say they love the librarian who fostered their appreciation for reading. Especially since the mayor swears up and down that he’s a voracious reader who routinely consumes impenetrable tomes the way I race through episodes of old sitcoms— like Arrested Development.

This was also around the time other teenagers were in the streets demanding that the mayor resign for his handling of the Laquan McDonald scandal.

You know, the one in which Emanuel and his crew seem to have buried ev-

idence in a fatal police shooting so as not to derail his reelection campaign. In case you forgot.

As for the kids in the DuSable hallways, I’ll bet you some semblance of the following conversation took place between Emanuel and Forrest Claypool, his schools CEO. Mayor Rahm: Get that damn librarian back on the payroll so I don’t have to see those kids and their books!

Claypool: You got it, boss!

But here’s the problem: the official line is that librarians are a luxury our broke schools can’t afford.

More than two-thirds of CPS schools are without librarians. And Claypool swears up and down that there’s no money to hire any more. So don’t even ask!

But if the mayor were to suddenly find the dough to put Sayigh back on the payroll, what’s to stop students at other schools from taking to the hallways to demand that Rahm find some money to get them a librarian?

It’s not just librarians’ salaries that miraculously appear from the mayor’s banana stand.

Sometimes Emanuel finds money for developers too.

What the mayor needed to solve this problem, to get those kids out of DuSable’s hallways, was a banana stand.

And so it was that an anonymous donor appeared out of nowhere to contribute an unspecified amount of money that was precisely the amount CPS needed to keep Sayigh on the payroll!

Imagine that.

8 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

SUE KWONG

By BEN JORAVSKY

It remains to be seen whether that anonymous donation will cover Sayigh’s salary for next year. By then the McDonald protesters may have stopped marching, leaving the mayor free to return to his old librarianfiring ways.

Better stay vigilant, DuSable students.

And actually, that goes for the rest of us as well. ’Cause it’s not just librarians’ salaries that miraculously appear from the mayor’s banana stand. Sometimes Emanuel finds money for developers too, in the biggest banana stand of them all: the tax increment financing program.

The TIFs are a surcharge the mayor slaps on property tax bills, supposedly to eradicate blight in low-income neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, the money mostly goes for projects in relatively wealthy neighborhoods. For instance, there’s the one on Montrose Avenue not far from the lake, where the mayor wants to hand out $16 million to developers to build upscale high-rise apartments.

Man, if only those young protesters would discover the TIF scam. Maybe they could stage a read-in at the next Com mu n it y Development Cou nci l meeting.

The TIFs bring in so much money every year that even the mayor can’t spend it all. At last count, he had about $1.4 billion sitting in various TIF-related bank accounts.

I call this the Tom Tresser fund, in honor of the activist who tallied up the amount by plowing through dozens of TIF reports.

After Tresser blew the whistle, the mayor said, well, yes, there’s millions in the TIF accounts, but I can’t spend the money on the schools because it falls under the category of “unauthorized anticipated project costs.”

Basically, these are projects the mayor might eventually want to fund.

So he’s going to keep the money tucked away in the banana stand—just in case.

He certainly doesn’t want anyone to think he can spend it on school librarians. All they do is try to teach kids how to be creative thinkers—the last thing any Chicago mayor wants more of.

Apparently, several Democratic legislators from Chicago have had enough of these games, what with constituents demanding they do something about bailing out CPS. They’ve joined forces with the Chicago Teachers Union to propose a bill that would redefine what the mayor can declare as off-limits for TIF funds.

In short, if there isn’t a binding contract obligating TIF money to be spent on a precise project, the mayor has to spend it on CPS if the schools are broke.

Currently, there could be as much as $350 million in those TIF funds for CPS—it’s hard to say for certain because the city’s playing so many games with the books.

The bill’s chief sponsor is state rep Barbara Flynn Currie from Hyde Park, who happens to be a close ally of house speaker Michael Madigan.

It’s one thing for Emanuel to ignore an activist like Tresser when he goes after the TIF banana stand.

But just as it’s harder to ignore students who say they just want to read, it’s harder to ignore a message from Michael—as the song goes—that comes by way of Currie.

Keep up the pressure, everyone. v

v @joravben

CITY LIFE A crowded inbound Red Line car during the morning rush last week ò JOHN GREENFIELD

TRANSPORTATION

Seeing Red

The controversial Belmont flyover has federal approval— but still faces other hurdles.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

W

hen I rode the Red Line from Uptown to downtown during the morning rush last week, my rail car was as packed as a sardine can by the time we left the Belmont stop. Damon Lockett, a copywriter who commutes daily from Edgewater to River North, told me that overcrowded trains are typical during peak hours nowadays.

“They don’t run enough trains,” said Lockett, who moved here from New York City about a year ago. “You’re waiting ten or 15 minutes for a train, while the platform’s just loading up with people.”

The CTA is planning to address overcrowding on north-side el lines with the upcoming Red-Purple Modernization project. This multibillion-dollar initiative will completely overhaul the nearly 100-year-old Red Line from Belmont to Howard and the Purple Line from Belmont to Linden, in suburban Wilmette.

The agency says the project’s single most important time-saving and capacity-building

element is the Red-Purple Bypass, better known as the Belmont flyover. This $570 million proposal would unsnarl the junction north of Belmont—where Brown Line trains cross Red and Purple Line tracks—by building a roller-coaster-like overpass.

The flyover, and the rest of the modernization plan, recently got the federal go-ahead after passing an environmental review by the Federal Transit Administration. Construction could start as soon as late 2017. But hurdles to the project remain: the CTA still needs to find $1.9 billion in funding for the first phase of plan, and many central Lakeview residents are bitterly opposed to the flyover, which would require the demolition of 16 buildings.

Local transit experts and advocates argue that the flyover is essential for meeting future demand. Ridership along the Red Line corridor north of Belmont grew by 40 percent between 2010 and 2014, according to CTA spokeswoman Tammy Chase.

The CTA estimates that, by unclogging the

so-called Clark Junction, the bypass will allow the agency to add up to eight more Red Line trains, carrying 30 percent (7,200) more riders per hour during rush periods.

“While we can live without the flyover today, it’s more to deal with the future,” says DePaul University transportation expert Joseph Schwieterman. “The project is for the 25 percent growth in the corridor that’s projected over the next 20 years—and that’s a conservative projection.”

The additional capacity made possible by the flyover would result in 43,200 additional daily trips, or more than ten million additional trips annually, according to calculations made

by UIC’s Urban Transportation Center.

In addition to increasing rush-hour capacity, Chase says, the flyover would eliminate the crossing delays that affect at least 40 percent of Red, Purple, and Brown Line trains.

“The conflict at the junction and the speed-restricted curve combine to slow each train traveling between Belmont and Addison by one to three minutes on average,” she says.

All that extra capacity comes with a hefty price tag. The bill for Phase I—which includes the flyover, rebuilding track structures and stations between Lawrence and Bryn Mawr, and making all stations wheelchair accessible—would likely be funded in part by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Core Capacity Improvements program, which provides dollars for improvements to older “legacy” transit systems. However, the federal grant would require significant local matching funds.

The price of the bypass, originally stated as $320 million when the city announced the initiative in 2014, was bumped up to $570 million last year, because the scope was expanded to include new signals and reconstruction of nearby track structures. The latter would involve straightening a curve in the Red and Purple Line tracks between Roscoe and Newport, increasing maximum train speeds.

“Obviously the big thing now is the money,” Chase says.

But residents like Ellen Hughes, a grant writer who lives just north of the Belmont station, feel the flyover project would be a waste of taxpayer money, as well as a wasteful destruction of property. Hughes runs the group Coalition to Stop the Belmont Flyover, and has helped lead the opposition to the project. This

included a November 2014 ballot referendum that involved the three precincts of the 44th Ward that would be most heavily impacted by the demolitions. The measure failed overwhelmingly, with 72 percent of 800-some residents who voted opposing the measure.

“I’m not crazy,” Hughes says. “I know that they need to repair the tracks, and the stations need to be made accessible. But I don’t think they need this thing up in the sky that’s really going to be a blight on central Lakeview.”

“I’m not crazy. I know that they need to repair the tracks. . . . But I don’t think they need this thing up in the sky that’s really going to be a blight on central Lakeview.”

—Belmont flyover opponent Ellen Hughes

“I wouldn’t be losing my house, but it’s a moral cause for me,” she adds. “I think it’s wrong to spend $570 million on this and tear down some lovely condo buildings.”

But with the number of additional new trips made possible by the flyover, the $570 million price tag breaks down to just $2.65 per additional ride when spread over two decades.

“If you compare these numbers with the best new rail lines in the country, you’ll find that the investment is very competitive,” says Steve Schlickmann, director of UIC’s Urban Transportation Center.

Also factored in: the cost of doing nothing.

“Without continued investments like the bypass, crowding on the Red Line will only get worse, as projections indicate transit demand in the area will continue to rise,” says Kyle Whitehead, campaign director for the Active Transportation Alliance. “More riders will be forced to watch packed trains go by during peak periods, and frustrated riders will consider driving.” v

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

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 9

ARTS & CULTURE

THEATER

By DOMINIC UMILE

Benjamin Holliday Wardell of Theatre Y’s Fatelessness ò BENJAMIN HOLLIDAY WARDELL

10 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

F

Can I draw a witness?

By TONY ADLER

S

b ALL AGES

LIT

This year it’s the Rhinoceros Rhinofest

ome fringe festivals have juries, others are wide open. The Curious Theatre Branch’s 2016 Rhinofest is beyond juried. It’s themed. Coartistic directors Beau O’Reilly and Jenny Magnus decided to make Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros their centerpiece: Curious itself is staging the absurdist black comedy—about a man named Berenger who feels the pressure when his neighbors start turning into bellowing animals—and selected artists have been invited to contribute original works inspired by it. This is the Rhinoceros Rhino.

The Curious Rhinoceros was still in previews during opening weekend, but I was able to see eight other entries. Of those, Rick Paul’s THE APOOCOLOCYNTOSIS OF THE FUTURE PEOPLES COMMISSAR OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT builds on the widely held view that Rhinoceros is an antifascist political burlesque.

The title comes from a Senecan comedy lampooning Emperor Claudius’s troubles in the afterlife, and Paul gives us what seems to be a despot slowly realizing that he’s dead.

Absurdism is overtaken by mystification, however, and the point gets so garbled that you end up wondering if Paul isn’t expressing nostalgia for Kaiser Wilhelm.

The Runaways Lab Theater’s JAIL is also politically inclined: a 40-minute visit with a prison inmate. Cowriter Logan Breitbart is effectively sullen as the inmate, but Jail doesn’t say much other than that correctional policies are self-defeating.

Ionesco moved the Billy Goat Experiment Theatre to create THE ADVENTURES OF BB & PEPE, EPISODE 48: FUNOCEROS RUNOCEROS, in which a girl and her talking dog foil a plot to turn humans into consumerist automatons.

It’s engaging until it grows too enamored

R READER RECOMMENDED

of its cuteness and runs on. Karen Yates’s ORANGUTAN, on the other hand, never stoops to engagement at all. A long whine about firstworlders demanding pristine beaches while orangutans go extinct, it’s entirely justified and utterly insufferable.

Things get better, though. Justin Botz counterbalances an awkward stage presence with graceful wit in SHUT UP, I’M FLYING, a meditation on communication. The Ruckus’s EXIT THE QUEEN neatly spoofs theatrical hierarchies, buoyed by Julie Cowden’s irrepressible performance as an arrogant, manipulative, despondent stage director. Mark Chrisler’s ENDANGERED takes a funny conceit—a millennial man-child-turned-rhino goes on a rampage that can only be stopped by his unrequited high school crush—and pushes it until it explodes.

Perhaps tellingly, the most profound Rhino show I saw was the farthest removed from Rhinoceros the play yet closest to it in spirit. That was FATELESSNESS from Theatre Y. Adapted from Imre Kertész’s autobiographical Holocaust novel, the piece consists of just two elements: (1) a first-person narrative, performed in voice-over, describing a Hungarian teenager’s progress through Auschwitz and other camps, and (2) Benjamin Holliday Wardell doing yoga. Strange as that may sound, the combination expresses both the isolation and the tempering—the harrowing—the boy undergoes. Like Berenger, he’s alone in a world of beasts. v RHINOFEST Through 2/28: Thu-Tue, times vary; see website, PropThtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-492-1287, rhinofest. com, $12 in advance, $15 or pay what you can at the door.

v @taadler

F

rom the inaugural issue of the Illustrated London News in 1842 to the first chapter of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning serial Maus in 1980, comics have had a long affiliation with documentary and reporting. So why isn’t the illustrated medium associated with nonfiction as reflexively as news articles and photographs? In Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form, University of Chicago professor Hillary Chute argues for recognizing comics as a substantial documentarian form that “endeavors to express history.”

“In its succession of replete frames,” Chute writes, “comics calls attention to itself, specifically, as evidence.” She explicitly connects Spanish painter Francisco Goya (identified as a “foundational artist-reporter”) and his spellbinding series of prints “The Disasters of War” to comics, and places both within the “traditions of drawn witnessing.” Goya’s 19th-century depictions of rape, mutilation, and civilian death are widely understood as a method of war reporting that emphasizes the impact of conflict on individuals. Chute establishes the painter’s connection to comics by pointing out his influence on such artists as Spiegelman and Robert Crumb. She also sees Goya’s shambolic line work in Maus, whose account of the Holocaust “cemented comics as a serious medium for engaging history.” Before launching in Spiegelman’s and Françoise Mouly’s journal Raw, Maus appeared as a separate three-page strip in the underground anthology Funny Animals in 1972, the same year Japanese artist Keiji Nakazawa finished Ore Wa Mita.

Ore Wa Mita (“I Saw It,” the title of which is traced to Goya) is an eyewitness account of Hiroshima’s horrors from the perspective of a survivor. “Shaped by the realities of war, Nakazawa’s manga established a new imaginary, a new culture, for nonfiction manga in Japan,” Chute observes. She heralds the birth of “first-person witness”

comics here, and examines Nakazawa’s life and his impact on Japan’s pervasive “culture of silence” around the bomb. Ambitious tomes like 2014’s Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present reduce Nakazawa to mere paragraphs, presumably for lack of space, so Chute’s deep dig is welcome and integral. Though reporting has long been celebrated as a vehicle for transparency, graphic narratives like Nakazawa’s still battle for position among “instruments of witness.”

The heavily footnoted Disaster Drawn likely won’t find the large audience that it demands. It’s rigid and clinical, which is unfortunate, because the underlying message is important. Joe Sacco’s jolting portrayal of a Bosnian massacre appears on the book’s cover; his comics “rethink and rework absence and silence in presenting witness on the page,” Chute writes. And his remarks at a 2012 University of Chicago conference get to the heart of Disaster Drawn. “If you are depicting something graphically and it has a pretense to journalism, the idea is to get the reader there somehow,” Sacco said. “I want the reader to open up the book and just immediately be there. I think [that is] the power of image.” v R DISASTER DRAWN: VISUAL WITNESS, COMICS, AND DOCUMENTARY FORM By Hillary L. Chute (Belknap)

v @dominicumile

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 11

ARTS & CULTURE

R READER RECOMMENDED Gordon Parks, Drinking Fountains, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 ò GORDON PARKS/COURTESY MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY PHOTOGRAPHY

VISUAL ART

The MoCP in the age of Instagram

By JASON FOUMBERG

A

s the Museum of Contemporary Photography celebrates its 40th anniversary this week, the institution faces an existential question: Should a place devoted to photography worry that the fundamental definition of the medium has recently and radically changed? The explosion of amateur pocket photographers could seemingly wipe out the need for a brick-and-mortar monument to an aging art form. Inside the museum, images are stored in dark, refrigerated vaults, while everywhere else pictures are exchanged at the speed of light. But the MoCP is celebrating its birthday by displaying about 200 of its most significant holdings, and several surprises. It’s a self-assured gesture for an establishment born out of change, which in many ways is a Chicago story.

Few realize Chicago’s role in launching photography into a legitimate art movement.

While the first photo curators and critics worked in New York, some of the first major collectors lived in Chicago, like David and Sarajean Ruttenberg, a couple whose appetite and philanthropic advocacy for the medium touched most Chicago art museums. Equally important, the first graduate-school program

12 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

dedicated to photography originated at the Institute of Design, subsequently called the Illinois Institute of Technology. The influential artwork of teachers Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind attracted attention, as did their legion of students, a few of whom went on to become some of the masters of 20th-century photography, such as Chicagoans Barbara Crane and Kenneth Josephson. Since the 1950s, photography has retained its academic position, contributing to the notion that this art form can also be an intellectual and potentially lucrative pursuit.

This is where the MoCP enters the story.

“There was real hunger to see photography, and a limited number of places to see it,” recalls Bob Thall, a photographer who came of age in the 70s. Photography was still new and urgent. Demonstrators carried cameras in the streets. Banks such as Exchange National began collecting art photography, perhaps recognizing the potential investment value of the new medium. (Exchange National later sold its collection to LaSalle Bank, then Bank of America.) Young photographers swarmed to the city, especially the new photo department at Columbia College, which had a lower threshold for admission than other local art schools.

“There was an atmosphere that something was happening. It just needed representation,” says John Mulvany, who founded the MoCP in 1974. Columbia contributed more than $5,000 to open a tiny museum in an unused classroom. (It has since relocated to prime real estate on South Michigan Avenue.)

Despite the nearby Art Institute of Chicago opening its own photography department at roughly the same time as Columbia, “there was no venue for contemporary photography,” recalls Mulvany. The distinction of “contemporary” photography is important—it was a matter of life or death, so to speak. Major museums prefer to exhibit and purchase the work of dead artists, those already established by the canon of art history. But a contemporary museum could be more nimble, less tied to the masterpiece market, and risk its exhibition space on newer, younger talent. Mulvany even set a strict policy for what enters the MoCP’s permanent collection: nothing made before 1959, and work by Americans only. Those parameters refer to the title and publication date of Robert Frank’s influential book The Americans; Mulvany considered it the start of modern photography. The new movement would finally have a good home.

The MoCP has always been free, open to the public, and surprisingly populist. “We have a very open door,” executive director Natasha Egan says. The museum accepts submissions, and every month she assembles her curatorial staff and interns to review photos—they usually see 100 portfolios at a time. “It’s not like we can give everyone a show, but we like to watch people grow,” Egan says. Photographers are partly drawn to the museum because of its high-quality book series dedicated to emerging artists, the Midwest Photographers Publication Project. The MoCP even commissioned what was proclaimed at the time as the “largest documentary photography project ever held in an American city.” Titled Changing Chicago (1989), this historic publication is presently available for $0.49 on Amazon.

The museum nevertheless routinely receives major donations from prominent artists, including, recently, 400 prints by Dorothea Lange and a few dozen by An-My Lê.

The MoCP admits it has some work to do in order to become a fully contemporary

b ALL AGES

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institution. “We have almost no African or European holdings,” says Karen Irvine, who has been a curator at the museum for 15 years.

The founder’s original edict—to buy only post1959 American photography—succeeded in making room for local, working artists, but on another level excluded international work. It was a practical decision but nearsighted, and something the current staff is trying to remedy (though the MoCP has always exhibited international and historic photography in its temporary shows).

“A lot of photo-specific museums are grappling with the future now that photographic imagery exists all over the place as files, not objects,” Irvine says. The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, for instance, ceased being an independent venue in 2009.

As for the future, “There are two schools of thought,” Irvine says. “The collection might become more special as it allows for the study of actual objects, or we embrace new-media technologies that digital natives are expecting.” Irvine and her team favor the fine-art print; indeed, that is what makes visiting the physical museum so special. But their view is not conservative: in 2012, for example, they asked local artist Jan Tichy to overhaul the MoCP’s website and make it more accessible, an unusual and functional take on a conceptual-art experiment.

Whereas many museums tend to produce solo exhibitions or retrospectives for major artists, the MoCP does something very different—it curates more group shows. These exhibitions have a concept or theme and are packaged to be relevant to both casual viewers and photography experts. Concordantly, the programs have been some of the most well attended in the museum’s history, such as last year’s “Dandy Lion: (Re)Articulating Black Masculine Identity” and “North Korean Perspectives.” It’s the exhibition-as-think-tank model, and it’s how the MoCP anchors itself against changing winds.

“People are always asking us, how do you define photography?” Egan says. “We don’t even like to try to define it. It’s image based, and images can be quite broad.” More definitively, Egan follows up, “artists lead the change.”

Does the museum have anything by Vivian Maier? “No,” Egan says. “We’re trying to discover new artists as we go, not relive the past.” v R “MOCP AT 40” Through 4/10; opening reception, Thu 1/28, 5 PM. Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College, 600 S. Michigan, 312-663-5554, mocp.org. F

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Charlotte Moorman performs Nam June Paik’s TV Cello wearing TV Glasses, New York, 1971. © Takahiko iimura.

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Charlotte Moorman 0s-1980s 6 9 1 , e rd a G tn a v A and the January 16-July 17, 2016 A Feast of Astonishments is organized by the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, in partnership with Northwestern University Libraries.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts The exhibition is supported by major grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional generous support is provided by the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation; the Alumnae of Northwestern University; the Colonel Eugene E. Myers Foundations; the Illinois Arts Council Agency; Dean of Libraries Discretionary Fund; the Charles Deering McCormick Fund for Special Collections; the Florence Walton Taylor Fund; and the Block Museum Science and Technology Endowment. Don’t Throw Anything Out is generously supported by Ellen Philips Katz and Howard C. Katz. The opening day event is co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

Details for free public programs and Block Cinema screenings:

www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu

a m e n i c K C O L B

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JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 13

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ARTS & CULTURE Jason Beghe plays watered-down police captain Hank Voight. ò MATT DINERSTEIN/NBC

SMALL SCREEN

Where’s Chicago in Chicago P.D.?

By DMITRY SAMAROV

I

’ll watch just about anything filmed in Chicago. As someone who’s lived here a long time, I like to see my city onscreen.

But films and TV shows almost never get it right. CNN’s Chicagoland was a multipart campaign infomercial for Rahm; Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq burned with righteous vitriol but could’ve been set in any American city.

Several dramatic series film here, including the wacky Shameless, which is an entertaining show but doesn’t really have much to say about the city. And for the last few years we’ve also hosted Dick Wolf’s ever-expanding franchise farm. It started with Chicago Fire, then came Chicago P.D., now there’s Chicago Med, with Chicago Law looming. Could Chicago Streets & San be on the horizon?

The formula for these shows is simple: pick a profession; assemble a group of attractive actors; give them a problem to solve in 45 minutes; repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Most of Wolf’s Law & Order shows were satisfying in the same way a fast-food meal is satisfying— they hit several pleasure points at predictable intervals, then were gone. When you tuned in the following week you could reliably expect the same feelings, in roughly the same order.

There’s a comfort in familiarity. Vacationing

families in Chicago—one of the country’s culinary meccas—will more often be found at a Chili’s or Red Lobster than at one of Rick Bayless or Paul Kahan’s restaurants. I watched a few episodes of Chicago Fire when it launched, hoping it might scratch that itch; it didn’t. It’s a show so bland that it manages to make firefighting dull. There’s a requisite collection of pretty people, sprinkled with grizzled “character” types, but I can’t recall a single story line or character trait from the few episodes I suffered through.

When Chicago P.D. launched a couple years ago I hoped it might fill the void left by the recently canceled Chicago Code. I didn’t expect it to be any good, but perhaps it would be entertaining to pick apart. Code was comically inept but great grist for the mill. A bunch of locals would live tweet every episode. There were even a few viewing parties at the dearly departed Beachwood Inn. The show got the city and its police completely wrong, but did it in such an over-the-top way that it became our own little Rocky Horror Picture Show. I can’t imagine any viewing parties for Chicago P.D. It’s a grim, humorless undertaking.

One of the virtues of Law & Order and its spin-offs is that backstory is mostly dispensed

with in order not to distract from the weekly case being solved. There’s no such discipline on P.D. or any of its Chicago siblings. We’re let in on our heroes’ affairs, family lives, and more. Somehow, though, with every revelation we only want to know these people less.

There is a rich tradition of cop shows to draw on; Kojak, Hill Street Blues, N.Y.P.D Blue, The Shield, Southland, and The Wire each added to the lexicon of the genre. P.D. doesn’t have a single character who isn’t a halfhearted pastiche of someone we’ve seen before. Hank Voight (Jason Beghe), for instance, is a watered-down version of the scary, corrupt police captain played to perfection by Michael Chiklis on The Shield. Unlike Vic Mackey, though, Voight is a cipher. We occasionally get hints of his dark past, but they have little weight because week to week there are so few consequences of his baggage for the cases his squad is solving. It’s as if the show can’t decide whether to be a procedural or a story with a long arc. One week a detective is in a drug/debauchery spiral, the next she’s soberly battling the bad guys again as if nothing happened. The one constant on the show is its violence.

Suspects are beaten mercilessly, and these beatings are never questioned. Viewed over the past few months, with the Laquan McDonald video and other revelations of misconduct as background, the interrogation scenes on the show play especially tone-deaf—it’s as if the show’s makers had hired Jon Burge himself to consult on getting the details right. In P.D.’s moral universe, police are heroes and everyone else is either a victim or a perpetrator.

On a recent episode a psychologist refers to the squad’s headquarters as “one of those famous black sites.” The detective tells him not to believe everything he reads. So are we being told to ignore the news stories about Homan Square? Is that the message?

I wonder who the audience for this thing is.

Somebody’s obviously watching, since it’s on its third season. Do cops like it? (I remember hearing a long time ago that cops loved Barney Miller. That show portrayed both the tedium and camaraderie of the job.) Of course you don’t have to love cops to love cop shows—the profession lends itself perfectly to drama because conflict is its essence. In this case, though, while many capable actors show up on Chicago P.D., from Steppenwolf ensemble

member Amy Morton to movie veterans like Elias Koteas, none survive the wooden dialogue and canned stories they’re made to dramatize. There’s a joylessness to it all—everyone’s slogging through with little enthusiasm or conviction. Every once in a while there’s a glimpse of a familiar corner of the city in the background that makes me perk up. But even this momentary thrill evaporates when a character inevitably mangles Chicago’s geography.

I understand that fiction has no duty to be true

We know every last garbage can in New York City and every last billboard in LA, but to most people our city’s still Al Capone, deepdish pizza, segregation, and not much else.

to its setting, but have never understood why using the layout and landmarks of a place correctly is such a hardship for TV shows. Getting things wrong goes beyond misnaming streets.

When one of the cops—a guy in his 20s—talks about running with a gang in Bucktown in his youth, he’s not just rearranging a couple numbers; he’s ignoring the reality and history of a whole neighborhood.

Though a major American city, Chicago is barely known to the wider culture except as painted in the broadest strokes. We know every last garbage can in New York City and every last billboard in LA, but to most people our city’s still Al Capone, deep-dish pizza, segregation, and not much else. I’m glad that Dick Wolf has given work to local actors, directors, and other film professionals, but he’s done little to tell about this city. The national news about our town right now is brutal, and deservedly so. But there are many more stories to be told here. Some of those may even interest people living beyond the city limits. In all likelihood you’ll never see any of them on Chicago P.D., but I’ll keep tuning in to anything with “Chicago” in its title, hoping for a few glimpses of the city I know. v CHICAGO P.D., Wednesdays at 9 PM on NBC

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 15

SON OF SAUL ssss

Directed by László Nemes. R, 107 min.

Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $10.

ARTS & CULTURE

Son of Saul

MOVIES

Lost in Auschwitz

By JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

“The sense of being lost is what we wanted to convey. That is what was missing before [in most earlier movies about the Holocaust]: one individual being lost.” —LÁSZLÓ NEMES TO ANDREA GRONVALL, MOVIE CITY NEWS

T

he debut feature of Hungarian writer-director László Nemes, opening this week at Music Box, is easily the most exciting new film I’ve seen over the past year, and a casual look at the prizes and accolades it’s received over the past eight months, starting with the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes, shows that I’m far from alone in feeling this way.

Even my colleagues who dislike or dismiss the film concede that it’s a stunning technical achievement. But the moment one starts to describe what the film does, or even what it’s about, a certain amount of dissension sets in.

Nemes and his lead actor, Géza Röhrig, have consistently described their intentions as wanting viewers to experience viscerally and as accurately as possible what Sonderkomssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

mando members went through in Auschwitz in October 1944. These were the Jewish prisoners obliged to lead other Jews into the gas chambers, search their clothes for valuables before, during, and after the gassing, and then dispose of their bodies—carting them off, burning them, and then shoveling away their ashes, receiving in return slightly better food and quarters before eventually being exterminated themselves. The only direct records we have of their experience were written and buried by a few members—we may be witnessing one such burial, out of focus, in the film’s opening shot—to be read by future generations. Nemes made his film to honor these accounts, adding that he’s left interpretations of this experience quite open.

Nemes compels us to witness the horrors of the Holocaust only peripherally, the way that his protagonist, a Hungarian Sonderkommando named Saul Ausländer, sees them during his forced labor. The film begins and ends with images that exist independently of Saul’s perceptions, but most of the shots in between,

ss AVERAGE

16 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

s POOR

•

WORTHLESS

while not literally subjective, are restricted to to follow the film’s narrative, and once we his field of vision, often in close-up. (Nemes accept it, we find ourselves at the center of an even extends this narrow perspective to the ambiguous parable about life as well as death. vintage technical specs, using a narrow screen This is where the real dissension sets in, not ratio and 35-millimeter film; this is why Son of only over what the film does but in what it’s Saul screens in Chicago at Music Box and not about. I would argue that Saul’s mission is a elsewhere.) And the dialogue, by Nemes and practical way of holding on to his sanity in the his cowriter, novelist Clara Royer—in German, midst of facilitating the genocide of his own Yiddish, Hungarian, and Polish—is people (even as he fails to help imequally constrained, consisting of plement a planned escape from the terse and telegraphic whispered camp and unwittingly causes the Get showtimes at exchanges that are all the prisoners death of at least one of his crew). chicagoreader.com/ can manage while being hustled or By contrast, critic J. Hoberman, movies. hurtled from one job to the next. writing in Tablet, calls Son of Saul I assume this storytelling strate“a movie set in Auschwitz that congy is what led the New York Times’s cerns a member of the SonderkomManohla Dargis to describe the film, in a report mando who goes mad,” which I suppose makes from Cannes, as “radically dehistoricized” an equal amount of sense. and “intellectually repellent”—attributes that A former assistant to Béla Tarr (SátánI’d be more inclined to assign to the period tangó, Werckmeister Harmonies), another bloodbaths of Quentin Tarantino (including Hungarian, Nemes is no less concerned than his latest, also showing at Music Box). But his mentor with implicating the viewer in the Tarantino’s pop credentials seem to grant him movements and perceptions of his characters a certain leeway denied to art movies. Dargis’s and in their moral and humanist consequencTimes colleague A.O. Scott concluded his main- es, without ever explicitly judging who they ly respectful review by writing that Nemes’s are or what they do—the style of a rigorous “skill is undeniable, but also troubling. The existential taskmaster. But Tarr’s rhythms movie offers less insight than sensation, an are slow whereas Nemes’s are frenetic, giving emotional experience that sits too comfort- us, like Saul, less time to think or reflect and ably within the norms of entertainment.” more compulsion to act or react spontaneousIn some respects this dimly recalls Theodor ly. Seeing the film as a Jew who knew about Adorno’s famous 1949 statement—“To write the Sonderkommando (and who regarded poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”—albeit their job and fate as the very worst of all the presumably revised to allow for the playfully Nazis’ crimes) but who’d never been forced impudent entertainments of a Tarantino, if not to identify with them, I found myself sharfor the visceral art strategies of a Nemes, who ing Saul’s panic and predicament, and that plays for higher stakes. response becomes part of the meaning and Complicating all this is the narrative thread significance of the parable.

Nemes has chosen: during one operation, Saul The hero’s full name becomes another witnesses the seeming miracle of a Jewish part—not only Ausländer (German for “forboy briefly surviving the gas chamber (before eigner”) but also Saul, which suggests the being smothered to death by a Nazi soldier) Saul who became Saint Paul on the road to and then becomes obsessed with the notion Damascus, and which moves us from Judaism of giving the boy’s corpse a proper Jewish to a wider sense of humanity. After the hero funeral with a rabbi, improbably declaring to escapes with other prisoners from the camp other prisoners that the boy is his son. Given and loses the boy’s corpse in a river, he briefly Saul’s own circumstances, including his stated spies another boy—alive, Polish, and clearly conviction to another prisoner that “we’re not Jewish—and for the only time in the film, already dead,” his obsession with granting the Saul smiles, beatifically, out of the simple pleaboy a Jewish funeral is completely irrational— sure of seeing a living child. Finally, the clausthough as filmmaker Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa has trophobic spell of tribal Judaism—decreed pointed out to me, no more irrational than the in Auschwitz by the Nazis and Saul alike as obsession of Mr. Badii in Abbas Kiarostami’s the ultimate curse or blessing—has been broTaste of Cherry to find someone who will bury ken, and in the film’s closing moments there him after he commits suicide in an open grave. emerges something transcendental, fleeting, Each is a given we’re obliged to accept in order and even faintly hopeful. v

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please recycle this paper JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 17

O How Ty Money made one of the best rap records of the past year By holing up in his home studio, this Harvey hip-hop hero found a distinctive voice that speaks to injustice with rare insight.

By LEOR GALIL | Photos by RYAN LOWRY

18 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

n November 25, less than 24 hours after the Chicago Police Department belatedly released a dashcam recording of officer Jason Van Dyke shooting and killing Laquan McDonald, local rapper Ty Money dropped “United Center,” whose video consists exclusively of edited footage from that recording.

The song’s instrumental track accompanies its solemn piano melody with sizzling guitars and muffled, ominous bass that booms like an underground explosives test, and in his lyrics Money mulls over the systemic injustices that afflict Chicago’s black community and make the city’s racial divide feel like the Grand Canyon. Animating his rapid-fire rhymes with a storyteller’s eye for detail, he describes a world of crooked cops, murder victims under white sheets, and mothers with no stoves struggling to feed their children.

“Women losing kids, doing interviews on the news, whole crowd on the side,” he raps.

“Older folks stay inside till we lose a child, then the whole town come alive.” The song packs a lot of anger and grief into its brief running time, and just past the video’s two-minute mark—as Money’s final words echo and fade— McDonald spins and falls to the pavement, pierced by the first of 16 shots. Seconds later, the words “Rest in peace Laquan McDonald” appear on the screen.

When it came out, “United Center” felt like such a clear reflection of the heightened emotions in the air as thousands protested in Chicago’s streets that I assumed Money had written the song in a rush after seeing the McDonald footage. But in fact he’d recorded it five months earlier, drawing on a lifetime of watching kids like him die. “United Center” is vivid enough in its grasp of segregation, poverty, and racist policing practices that it works just as well as commentary on a specific, wellknown tragedy. “It’s like, same shit, different season—and that tripped me up,” Money says.

“I almost cried. I had a tear running down my eye when I first synched the video.”

The power of “United Center” wouldn’t have surprised anyone who’d heard Money’s third mixtape, Cinco de Money, which came out May 5. (He’d released mostly freestyles in the interim, and none of them had nearly the same impact.) Throughout Cinco de Money his fiery street-life stories (though less overtly political than “United Center”) dig deep and hit home over and over. Andrew Barber of Chicago hip-hop site Fake Shore Drive was hooked in minutes. “After the first song, I was completely blown away,” he says. “This kid is one of the most talented—if not the most

talented—lyricists in the city right now. He’s a high-caliber MC; he can paint really vivid pictures with his words. He brings these street scenarios to life and describes them in a way other people don’t.”

In just a couple lines, Money can evoke, say, the anxiety of seeing your fortunes evaporate: on “Viet Cong” he raps, “Runnin’ out of money / I ain’t ever seen it, like a unicorn.”

Raybon unloads truckloads of syllables in a fast, fluid flow that zigzags between beats.

Like BB-8 in The Force Awakens, he can switch pace and direction dramatically while barely seeming to swerve at all. On “Come Again” he even holds his own next to Twista, longtime king of supersonic stanzas.

Money’s savvy and style help listeners empathize with the characters in his tales of dread and misery—he seems to care about his people, despite their problems, and he can shine new light on old subjects. In “Rickey Killa” he raps from the perspective of the shooter in 1991’s Boyz n the Hood who murders the golden-boy student athlete played by Morris Chestnut, granting the nameless character dimension by exploring how his horrific act of violence seeps into his life: “Try ’n take my mind off the nigga Rickey / Hit my homie, told him let’s do lunch or something / Coolin’ at the spot / Eyes on the watch / Eatin’ in the lot / Fries in the pot.” Raybon’s rapid rapping underlines the killer’s paranoia and guilt, and his juxtaposition of the movie’s dramatically violent plot with this sort of mundane daily detail makes it easier to imagine the shooter’s life and grant him his humanity.

The unprecedented attention that Cinco de Money brought Money’s way—it landed on Rolling Stone’s “40 Best Rap Albums of 2015” list, for instance—motivated him to change his plans for the mixtape’s sequel. “Part two was done when part one was done, but now that Cinco de Money has been getting so many write-ups and so much attention, I had to go back,” he says. “Two gotta be better than one. Or you’re moving backwards.” Before he goes public with an entirely redone Cinco de Money 2, Money will drop a new EP—he hasn’t pinned down the title or release date, but he says it’s imminent.

B

orn Tiwan Raybon, Money hails from the south suburb of Harvey, where he’s lived for most of his 28 years, but he’s undeniably part of Chicago’s hip-hop community. “I’m originally from the Hundreds; that’s where I stayed,” he says.

“We didn’t do shit out there, so we don’t claim the Hundreds. Got love for the Hundreds, my peeps still stay out there, but we from out Sib-

ley [Boulevard].” His father turned him onto music, playing Slick Rick and Eric B. & Rakim records at home. “I remember wearing threepiece suits at two years old, a microphone in my hand, ponytail, and just singing everything my daddy put on,” Money says.

His father’s house was a magnet for parties.

“Like, if there was gonna be a party, a New Year’s party or birthday party, it was at my crib.” Extended family and friends packed the place late into the night, and Money was the only kid in the room. “I was always at these parties, bro, and always doing shit I wasn’t supposed to be doing,” he says. “I seen a lot.”

In the early 2000s, Money would go to teenage parties at the Markham Roller Rink, taking in sets of ghetto house, juke, and footwork by producers such as DJ Thadz, DJ Slugo, and DJ Spinn. “If you wasn’t at Markham Roller Rink on Saturday you wasn’t shit,” he says. Every weekend Raybon he’d head to the rink, then take the party to his mom’s house nearby— usually accompanied by one of his cousins, Isaiah Driver, who raps as I.D. Money and Driver would form a duo called FireSquad in 2005, but they cut their teeth battle rapping, sometimes together and sometimes separately. “That’s back when battle rapping was heavy,” Driver says. “We never lost a battle. We would kill guys on Chicago and Madison on the west side. Or my father had a restaurant on 81st and Cottage Grove— we used to battle a couple guys in the lobby of the restaurant.” Driver says his father, Ralph, has owned a couple restaurants over the years; the joint on Cottage Grove in Chatham was called King’s Soul Food Cafe.

Money and Driver didn’t just rap at the restaurant—they worked there too. They’d open and close the place, fry chicken, bake cakes—anything that needed doing. “We used to freestyle while we was making orders,” Driver says. “We listened to beats all day long.

Customers would come in, hear the same record instrumentals playing over and over, ’cause we was down there vibing. We knew that the music will take us [away] from washing dishes.”

Driver’s older brother, Ralph Metcalfe, who raps as Marvo, was close with Driver and Money. He also had more experience with music (he’s 31 now), and both younger rappers agree that his mentorship helped them enormously. “I had my record deal when I was about 15—I was with an independent signed through Universal Records,” Metcalfe says. “I actually taught them how to rap—I was really their main influence, honestly.”

In the early aughts, Metcalfe’s star was on the rise. In 2003 he appeared on the debut

Ty Money’s mixtape Cinco de Money, released in May 2015, landed on Rolling Stone’s list of the year’s best rap albums.

album from poet-turned-rapper Malik Yusef, The Great Chicago Fire: A Cold Day in Hell, which also features Common, Kanye West, and Twista. He was also building a hip-hop infrastructure in Harvey and its surrounding suburbs, an area he calls “Harvey World.”

“Whenever we put out something, our city embraced it—whenever we threw a show, people would come out,” Metcalfe says. “Harvey World was very receptive to our movement because we were representing Harvey. Once you got a whole city of people, then you can take over the whole south suburbs. That kind of gave us the ammunition to get us the support from Chicago.”

Metcalfe took Driver and Money into a professional studio for the first time, where they picked up skills through osmosis. “I probably engineered a few sessions for Marvo,” Money says. “They used to lock me in the studio—like, lock the door from the outside. I’d be in that bitch for hours—come out with like three songs.” And Metcalfe had other reasons to keep Money close. “Ty was in the streets, and so I was always trying to keep him with me, keep him in the studio,” Metcalfe says. “Trouble tends to find him wherever he goes.”

Driver and Money earned spots on Marvo’s 2004 mixtape, Respect & Live Vol. 1. “The response that we got off of the verses that we did on that project really gave us the gas to [be] like, ‘OK, we can do this shit on our own,’” Driver says. As FireSquad, they released a couple mixtapes—2006’s Quit Talking Get Money Vol. 1 and 2011’s Rosé, Cush & Macbooks—before Money ran into what he refers to as “some bullshit.” “I caught my first felony case,” he explains. “I was dumb. I didn’t know the law like that—I really wasn’t even supposed to go to prison.” When I ask him why he got locked up, the otherwise talkative Money balks: “I’d rather not say.” A search of Mugshots.com reveals that he served time for one count of residential burglary.

Before heading to prison in January 2012, Money recorded what would become his first solo mixtape, Free Money. “I knew I had to turn myself in, so we rushed that bitch,” he says. “It took probably like a week or two.”

He also managed to work on Free Money behind bars, writing to Driver about potential guest rappers and phoning in a freestyle that became the mixtape’s opening cut, “Jail.” Free Money had already dropped when Money was released in December 2012; Driver picked him up, and they listened to it on the drive home.

It was the first time Money had heard the finished product. “Shit was cold, bro,” he says. “I couldn’t believe it. I was happy.”

Free Money stirred up interest in Money as a solo artist. “When I got out, I met a lot of people who was willin’ to get behind and make this Ty Money thing work,” he says.

Through Metcalfe he linked up with local indie label Gold Coast Music Group, and in March 2013 the label booked Money on a show with Atlanta mixtape guru DJ Drama at Markham nightclub Adrianna’s. Metcalfe says that Clay Evans, vice president of T.I.’s Grand Hustle label, was in the house for Money’s set. “Clay saw him perform and they was like, ‘Yo, this kid is crazy,’” Metcalfe says. “Clay let T.I. hear the music, and T.I. became interested.”

Money didn’t end up signing a deal with Grand Hustle, but the growing outside interest in his career influenced his second mixtape, 2014’s stylistically broad The Turn Up G.H.O.D. The influence wasn’t all good, though: “I had a lot of people in my ear,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Man, we need this type of song, we need that type of song.’ So I ran with it. And you can kind of hear it. It sounds a little more corporate. I had a lot of features on there because [the process] was a little more political.” In contrast with Free Money, which he’d rushed through, The Turn Up G.H.O.D took about six months to record. It features contributions from the likes of King Louie and Chief Keef, but Money wasn’t happy with how much control he’d given up—and the release didn’t attract the accolades he thought it deserved.

The lengthy, tangled process of recording The Turn Up G.H.O.D motivated Money to record his next big project on his own, without a studio and with a minimum of collaborators.

Last January he holed up in his home studio for two weeks to record about 20 tracks, enlisting only two guest rappers. “I just had to find myself,” he says. “I had to get away from everybody, get away from the corporate people from a minute, get away from other peoples’ studios for a minute, and just go into my cocoon.” Money emerged with Cinco de Money and a voice that’s uniquely his: he’d fine- J

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 19

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Ty Money continued from 18 tuned his breakneck rapping, his unorthodox, slippery flow, and his novel approach to street storytelling. “I’m a Pisces, so I be thinking differently sometimes,” he says.

Money’s fierce rapping and sharp lyrics on Cinco de Money work in tandem, creating so much energy it’s as though he’s fueling himself. His corkscrew flow lights up the percussionless opening of “Reckless,” and when the track’s booming bass and brittle hi-hats kick in at the 45-second mark, the transition is like a powder keg going off. The mixtape as a whole seems to have had a similar effect on its audience: “It wasn’t until last year that I think everything clicked for him,” says Barber.

“While I thought his music was cool, it didn’t really grab me until Cinco de Money.”

The mixtape has earned Money praise not just from Rolling Stone but also from Pitchfork and other mainstream outlets, and it began a year that’s broadened his perspective. In May he opened a Metro show for Yasiin Bey (for-

merly Mos Def), who invited him to London for a weekend in June to see the opening day of the Wireless Festival from backstage— Money’s first trip outside the States. “I kind of had to step away from Sibley for a second and really just see the world from a different point of view,” he says. He says hanging with Bey influenced the content of “United Center.”

Money says that when he read Rolling Stone’s list of the best rap albums of 2015, he scrapped the material he’d planned to release as Cinco de Money 2 the same day. He has high hopes for the music he’s making to replace it, and he aims to draw on the same powerful perspective that informs “United Center.” “I’m aware of the young and dumb motherfuckers that listen to me, ’cause I am them and they are me,” Money says. “Every chance I get, I get some knowledge from somewhere that they can’t get it from, and I bring it to them. That’s the most I can do.” v

v @imleor

Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of January 28

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

Hieroglyphic Being remains enigmatic despite his rich catalog

THURSDAY28 Nick Mazzarella & Dana Hall Nate Lepine Quartet opens. 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10. b Last year’s Hyde Park Jazz Festival featured a slew of interesting duo performances, and one of the most galvanic pairings matched saxophonist Nick Mazzarella with drummer Dana Hall. Both are students of jazz’s deep history and freedom seekers unwilling to let rules hold back expression. Their hour-long, all-improvised performance was a searing journey marked by organic peaks and valleys, rhythmic fury and pensive meditation, melodic aggression and contemplative abstraction. With their ability to channel their erudition through technique, Mazzarella and Hall typically create a gripping ebb and flow that’s both logical and natural.

Within the intimate confines of Elastic their improvisations ought to thrive all the more, whether they’re engaged in quietly rustling dialogues or frenzied joint sallies. The Nate Lepine Quartet, which includes Mazzarella, opens. —PETER MARGASAK

ò BILL WHITMIRE

HIEROGLYPHIC BEING

Sat 1/30, midnight, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $8.

YOU NEVER QUITE KNOW what you’re going to get from Hieroglyphic Being (aka Jamal Moss). Though the prolific Chicago producer’s music is rooted in raw analog house and techno, his interests extend to industrial, noise, jazz, and even goth, all of them filtered through a singular, intuitive aesthetic. He’s churned out hundreds of records over the last couple of decades under several monikers, and he’s expressed a restless curiosity throughout it all, whether there’s been an audience or not. In the last couple of years, though, there has been an audience—and it’s growing. He just did a New Year’s stint at London’s cutting-edge Cafe Oto, and appearances at Big Ears and Moogfest are on the horizon, along with a new album for Ninja Tune. Despite the acclaim, Moss remains fairly invisible in his native city, rarely performing.

Last year he turned in a chill, heavily ambient set opening for Holly Herndon at Constellation, but tonight’s headlining slot promises a more beat-heavy epic. Expect an improvised set of rude, pounding beats getting sliced and diced and ornamented by an ever-morphing series of acid squiggles, biting electronic riffs, and caustic washes of color. —PETER MARGASAK

Rock, Pop, Etc Babes in Toyland, Lil Tits, Blackbox 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Ryan Bingham, Bird Dog 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Double Speak, Katrine Jean, Dr. Death Crush 9 PM, Burlington Alejandro Escovedo 8 PM, also Fri 1/29 and Sat 1/30, 8 PM, City Winery b Karma Killers, Tribe Society, the Pact 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Star McCutchen, Goalie Fight, Action Boy 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Tor Miller, Sean McVerry, Small Tines 9 PM, Schubas Minor Characters, Furr, Hanna Ashbrook 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Mirror Coat, No Men 9 PM, Empty Bottle Ode, Glad Rags 9 PM, Whistler F Martin Sexton, Erik White 8 PM, SPACE b Hip-Hop Stalley, Saint Millie, Raxx Bills, Shaffer Jones, DJ Chris Ill 9 PM, the Promontory, 18+ Thelonious Martin, Palmer Squares, From tha 99, Drew Mantia 8 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar F Dance Madeon (DJ set) 10 PM, the Mid Marty Mars, Boy Alberto, Eeks Laroo, B-Side 10 PM, Smart Bar F Blues, Gospel, and R&B Buddy Guy, Vino Louden 9 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Classical Vera Hsu Piano. 7:30 PM, PianoForte Studios b Fairs & Festivals Chicago Psych Fest VII: Spires That in the Sunset Rise, ADT, Singleman Affair, Lavasse, DJ Dawn Aquarius 9 PM, Hideout

Obsessives ò MICHAEL ANDRADE

FRIDAY29 Dim Ne-Hi headlines; Clearance and Dim open.

9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. $10

On their self-titled and self-released debut cassette from last year, local four-piece Dim stir together a thick and beautiful blend of shoegaze, industrial, and space rock. Within the traditional rock-trio format of guitar, bass, and drums they hammer out droney, dreamy tunes reminiscent of greats like My Bloody Valentine and Ride, complemented by the same kind of spacey alt-rock you’d hear from an outfit like Failure. Sampler layers of heavy electronic beats and swirling synths pair with disenchanted, smeared vocals to create a chilly rift and a dizzying, almost alien take on shoegaze. It’s weird and eerie, but the massive slow-motion jams are so sublimely melodic—and so often crammed into two-and-ahalf-minute-long pockets—that the album occasionally borders on pop. Devastatingly heavy and overwhelmingly lush, Dim is by far the best local release of 2015, and it’s exciting to think that the band is just starting to gain momentum. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

DJ PayPal DJ Taye, Composure, and Johnathan Thomas open. 9 PM, East Room, 2828 W. Medill, $5, free with RSVP before 11 PM.

Though footwork collective Teklife will forever be associated with Chicago, it’s out-of-towner DJ PayPal who’s helped the group spread their fast-paced style and cement their international reputation.

Raised in North Carolina and now residing in Berlin, the enigmatic producer has earned a reputation as a prankster. His antibrand sticks a thumb in the eye of consumerism—he’s released records called Buy Now and Sold Out, and he’s behind a label called Mall Music Inc.—and that outsider mentality has dovetailed with the post-vaporwave community of the Web concert series SPF420, which hosted him as part of an early TinyChat-based J

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 21

MUSIC

Minsk ! MARK RANDALL BYLAND

continued from 21

show in 2013. Similarly, he’s got a penchant for sampling from unorthodox source material—or what sounds like unorthodox source material, e.g., chintzy lounge music, Muzak, and anything that employs plastic 80s synthesizers. Oh, and he released an album of nothing but edits of Drake’s music. As silly as that all might sound, DJ PayPal never lets a joke interfere with the ascendant bliss of a great dance track, or get in the way of his dedication to footwork’s 160-beats-per-minute pulse. The momentary surprise at hearing sax samples strangled into knots or African rhythms chopped and spliced in a loop melts away under PayPal’s euphoric melee. The frosty expanse of “Say Goodbye,” from his 2015 miniLP Sold Out (Brainfeeder), makes wherever you are seem as vast as the constellations. —LEOR GALIL

John Raymond Trio 7:30 PM, PianoForte Studios, 1335 S. Michigan, $15. b Though he’s part of New York’s bustling jazz scene trumpeter John Raymond hails from Minnesota, and his latest album, Real Feels (Shifting Paradigm), seeks to make those roots explicit without forsaking a deep investment in modern jazz harmony. Joined

by Israeli guitarist Gilad Hekselman and drummer Colin Stranahan, Raymond essays the folk and pop themes he grew up with on tracks like “Amazing Grace,” “This Land Is Your Land,” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair” (though none have a particular midwestern provenance). His aesthetic is reminiscent of the strain of Americana guitarist Bill Frisell explored in the late 80s, while Hekselman’s harmonies and quasi-low end recall Frisell’s work in Paul Motian’s trio with saxophonist Joe Lovano. Not everything suggests the plains, however. There’s a skittering New Orleans funk vibe to Raymond’s “I’ll Fly Away,” and there’s no missing the traditional bebop ebullience in Charlie Parker’s “Donna Lee”— the music sparkles and pulses with warmth throughout, no explanation necessary. —PETER MARGASAK

22 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

Spektral Quartet See also Sunday. 8 PM, Mayne Stage, 1328 W. Morse, $23. 18+ Having established themselves as one of Chicago’s best string quartets, the Spektral Quartet convey their trademark humor and savvy on their superb new album Serious Business (Sono Luminus). On it they deftly place Haydn’s String Quartet Op. 33, no. 2 in E-Flat, with its false-ending gag, between the absurdist mayhem contained in the words of poet Russell Edson’s The Ancestral Mousetrap—which also serves as the libretto in the piece of the same name written by Dave Reminick and is sung by the group members—and the evolved transcription of stand-up comedy in Chris Fisher-Lochhead’s Hack. Spektral Quartet violinists Austin Wulliman and Clara Lyon, violist Doyle Armbrust, and cellist Russell Rolen are unimpeachably skilled musicians who bring out a sense of daring in composers they commission. The gauntlet of vocal lines and difficult string parts is navigated by the group with witty insouciance, and Hack ditches conventional structure altogether by adding harmony and counterpoint to jagged stand-up cadences from comics like Richard Pryor, Sarah Silverman, and Dave Chappelle. Spektral Quartet play the difficult music with deceptive ease. The jaunty Haydn masterpiece provides a different vibe and historic style—a common thread among Spektral programs—but its presence is ultimately about its humor. The album also includes “Many Many Cadences,” a tightly coiled new work by Sky Macklay featuring manic, slashing lines that could fit alongside the Reminick and Fisher-Lochhhead works. Tonight’s album release concerts will feature movements from The Ancestral Mousetrap, Hack, and the Haydn, as well as Macklay’s work.

Stravinsky and Beethoven bookend the performance. —PETER MARGASAK Rock, Pop, Etc Blind Staggers, Turnspit, S.S. Web 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen

Where are the rest of the music listings?

Find them at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

California Wives, Justin Park, Vibe Dealer 10 PM, Cole’s F Alessia Cara, Kevin Garrett, Craig Stickland 7:30 PM, Metro, sold out b Catfish & the Bottlemen, Captain Coopersmith, Zoo, Wanyama 8 PM, Double Door Diane Coffee, Symposium 10 PM, Schubas, sold out, 18+ Dead Letter, Blood for the Sea, Phase Order 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Epica, Moonspell, Starkill 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Alejandro Escovedo 8 PM, also Thu 1/28 and Sat 1/30, 8 PM, City Winery b Guster, Rhett Miller 8 PM, also Sat 1/30, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Halfmoon Mad, New Schematics, Locals, 92s 8:30 PM, Subterranean Hey Marseilles, Bad Bad Hats 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Holy Alimonies, Rich Experience, Wally Dogger 9 PM, Burlington Krank Daddies 9 PM, Cobra Lounge Man Called Noon, Band Called Catch, Big Wig Mechanic, Burnside & Hooker, Leo Kidd 7:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Modern Vices, Carroll, Far & Out 8:30 PM, Township Mountains for Clouds, Cardboard Swords, Nervous Passenger, Kyle McDonald 8 PM, Double Door F Safetysuit, Connell Cruise 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b

Toasters, Beat the Smart Kids, Bumsy & the Moochers, DJ Chuck Wren 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Nicholas Tremulis Orchestra, Jay O’Rourke 8 PM, SPACE b Hip-Hop Rhymefest, T.L. Williams 8 PM, the Promontory Dance Raymond Alvarado, Enigma 10 PM, Primary Nightclub Eddie C, Olin & Faso 10 PM, Smart Bar Claptone 10 PM, the Mid Kwest_on 11:30 PM, the Promontory Seth Troxler 10 PM, Spy Bar Folk & Country Ry Cooder, Sharon White, and Ricky Skaggs 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Phil Vassar, Logan Brill 8:30 PM, Joe’s, sold out Blues, Gospel, and R&B Buddy Guy, Cash Box Kings 9 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends, sold out Keith Scott 5:30 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint F Melvin Taylor & the Slack Band 10 PM, also Sat 11/30, 10 PM, Rosa’s Lounge Jazz Fat Babies 9 PM, Green Mill

J

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 23

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continued from 23 Nate Lepine & Anton Hatwich, Bill Harris & Nick Mazzarella, Dustin Laurenzi & Jeff Swanson, Josh Berman & Matt Schneider, Jake Wark & Tomazzo Moretti 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Experimental Carol Genetti & Albert Wildeman, Nevada Green, Giant Squid Autopsy 9 PM, Elastic b International Ugochi 9 PM, Wild Hare Classical Kronos Quartet 7:30 PM, also Sat 1/30, 2 PM, Harris Theater for Music and Dance b

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Fairs & Festivals Chicago Psych Fest VII: Protovulcan, Rabble Rabble, Underground Symposium, Lutheran, DJ Travers Gauntt 9 PM, Hideout

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Black Breath Decapitated headline; Jungle Rot, Black Breath, Theories, and Ox King open.

7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $18, $15 in advance. 17+ On their previous two full-lengths, 2010’s Heavy Breathing and 2012’s Sentenced to Life, Seattle’s Black Breath summon a vitriol best expressed in blasts of rapid-fire tremolo picking, hateful and ferocious D-beat-inspired drumming, and tortured vocal howling that must be a password to at least one of the gates of hell. Like a pair of tractor trailers engulfed in flames and careening together down an icy highway, those albums were freakish and out of fucking control—and almost always better because of it. Marqueed by track names like “Reaping Flesh” and “Seed of Cain,” the new Slaves Beyond Death (Southern Lord) is loyal to the gloom and disgust of its predecessors, though

the album as a whole is more like a noose than a Gatling gun. The title track, for instance, begins with a slow and sludgy bludgeoning beat as front man Neil McAdams yowls, “I drag your soul / Through this world of darkness / I drag your soul.”

It’s lumbering and tough as nails—and appropriately loaded with double-kick rolls by awesome drummer Jamie Byrum. And though the downshifting does result in a bit too much heavy grooving here and there (“A Place of Insane Cruelty”), it also allows for some pretty saga-filled guitar work and plenty of glorious solos that rain down like fire from the sky. —KEVIN WARWICK

Minsk Generation of Vipers, Alma Negra, and Two From the Eye open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10.

New albums and live shows by this epic yet underrated doom project are a rare treat—last year’s wonderful The Crash and the Draw (Relapse) was Minsk’s first record of new material in six years.

Front man and guitarist Christopher Bennett and keyboardist and secondary vocalist Tim Mead are the founding members and anchors, and The Crash and the Draw finds them with a mostly new lineup.

The secret weapon of this band is their longtime collaboration with superproducer and sometime player Sanford Parker, who helps capture their layered complexity with a crisp clarity. That’s a quality many bands of this genre willingly abandon, but in Minsk’s case—with their sophisticated arrangements and technical fluidity—the ability to hear everything can only work to their advantage, enhancing their atmospheric grandeur and sense of total immersion.

—MONICA KENDRICK Rock, Pop, Etc Absolutely Not, Le Tour, Velocicopter, Strawberry Jacuzzi 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Altered Stage 1 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Brave Day, K-Bock & the Shirners, Wayside Story 9 PM, Burlington

Where are the rest of the music listings?

Find them at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Greyson Chance 8 PM, Lincoln Hall b Dethwarrant, Big Baby, Rat Hammer, Costanza 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon 88 Fingers Louie, Counterpunch, La Armada, Johnny Automatic 7 PM, Double Door, 17+ Alejandro Escovedo 8 PM, also Thu 1/28 and Fri 1/29, 8 PM, City Winery b Goldhouse, Comasoft, Ember Oceans, Millenium 9 PM, Schubas Guster, Rhett Miller 8 PM, also Fri 1/29, 8 PM, the Vic 18+ Lamb of God, Anthrax, Deafheaven, Power Trip 6 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ Low 8 PM, SPACE, sold out b Omni, Hecks, Pear, Daymaker 8 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar F Piece of Cake, Jackie Islands, Collar Bones 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Cathy Richardson Band 9 PM, FitzGerald’s Velvet Cadillacs 9 PM, Elbo Room Keller Williams, Kwahtro, Cabinet 8:30 PM, Park West, 18+ Workout Music 9 PM, Cobra Lounge

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Hip-Hop Brother Ali, Mick Jenkins, Rhymefest 6 PM, Harold Washington Cultural Center T-Wayne, Tate Kobang, Tk N Cash, Rejjie Snow 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+

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Dance Aly & FIla 10 PM, the Mid Kim Ann Foxman, Nathan Drew Larsen, Mazi 10 PM, Smart Bar Lost Frequencies 10 PM, Spy Bar Alex Morph, Ben Nicky 10 PM, Sound-Bar Terrance Parker, RJ Pickens, Phil Rizzo 10 PM, Primary Nightclub

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Folk & Country Bones Jugs, Deep Fried Pickle Project, Mr. Mayor & the Highballers, Sanctified Grumblers, Strictly Jug Nuts 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Blues, Gospel, and R&B Ginuwine 11 PM, the Shrine Buddy Guy, Nu Blu Band 9:30 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends, sold out Melvin Taylor & the Slack Band 10 PM, also Fri 1/29, 10 PM, Rosa’s Lounge Jazz Marquis Hill 8 PM, the Promontory Eric Schneider Quintet 8 PM, Green Mill

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International Devon Brown & Love This 9 PM, Wild Hare Eliades Ochoa y Barbarito Torres 8 PM, also Sun 1/31, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Yeni Turku 9 PM, Martyrs’

CABINET

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Experimental Vicky Chow 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+

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J JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 25

MUSIC continued from 25

Eliades Ochoa y Barbarito Torres 7 PM, also Sat 1/30, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Sean Tizzle, SLV, DJ Three K, DJ Dee Money 3 PM, the Promontory

Classical Kronos Quartet 2 PM, also Fri 1/29, 7:30 PM, Harris Theater for Music and Dance b Oberlin Orchestra with Marcy Stonikas Raphael Jimenez, conductor (Berlioz, Strauss). 8 PM, Symphony Center

Classical V3nto Brass Trio, PK Flyer, David Agee, members of Ensemble Alioni 4 PM, Armitage Concert Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music

Fairs & Festivals Chicago Psych Fest VII: Headband, Bil Vermette with Travis of Ono, Werewheels, Rob Jacobs, DJ Psychedalex 9 PM, Hideout

SUNDAY31

Darlingside Suitcase Junket open. 7 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago Ave., Evanston, $15-$28. b

There’s no denying the seamless way the four members of Darlingside blend their ethereal voices on the group’s recent sophomore album, Birds Say (Thirty Tigers). The singing brings an almost angelic splendor to anthemic folk rock. And the mix of guitars, mandolin, banjos, and harmonium—among other baroque touches—is meticulously achieved on songs that add an indie-rock flair to rustic roots.

But the voices command center stage. The musicians got their start a decade ago singing a cappella at Williams College, which can be heard in the ease with which they harmonize. Still, the melodies feel like petri-dish formulations of music you’d hear in current TV commercials, where group-harmony folk-pop clones seem inescapable. Luckily, Darlingside’s arrangements are more interesting. At their best they lean closer to Simon & Garfunkel than the Lumineers—but I’m not convinced quite yet.

—PETER MARGASAK

R. Andrew Lee 5 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15. 18+ R. Andrew Lee is a master of timing. While the Denver-based pianist’s handling of transitions between sound and silence makes the decay of a note as affecting as the moment when the sun dips below the horizon, the clarity of his long view ensures a piece’s coherence even when he’s playing lengthy, sparse works by Wandelweiser composers like Michael Pisaro, Eva-Maria Houben, and Jürg Frey.

26 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

MONDAY1 Rock, Pop, Etc Bubbles Brown, Arc & Stones 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Sam Prekop, Jeremy Lemos, Peter Speer 9 PM, Hideout Jake Shimabukuro 8 PM, also Tue 2/2, 8 PM, City Winery b

John Raymond Trio ò COURTESY THE ARTIST

But the ultimate test of both the micro and macro aspects of his musicianship is his four-hour, 53-minute-long recording Dennis Johnson: November (Irritable Hedgehog, 2013). Johnson was an early associate of minimalists La Monte Young and Terry Jennings. The scale of November is a precursor of Young’s expansive The Well-Tuned Piano, and the tonal quality and additive construction of its gorgeous, repetitive motifs prefigure the work of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. But since Johnson withdrew from public performance in the early 60s without publishing a recording or score, November has been minimalism’s mirage, its influence sensed but its form never touched. That is, until Young slipped a fragmentary home recording of Johnson playing it to composer, musician, and music critic Kyle Gann, who reconstructed it and mounted a performance with fellow pianist Sarah Cahill in 2009. Lee, in the audience, was so taken with the piece that he not only made the first commercially available recording of it but incorporated it into his repertoire. Tonight he performs it in its entirety— and for only the fourth time publicly. Don’t assume that he’ll bring it back to Chicago again. Note the early start time. —BILL MEYER

Spektral Quartet See Friday. 3 PM, Logan Center for the Arts Performance Penthouse, 915 E. 60th, $10. b

Rock, Pop, Etc Josh Berman, Ami Saraiya & the Outcome, Detholz!

Ben Miranda’s Groundhog Day Tribute Party. 7 PM, Hideout Francesca Blanchard, Edwin 8 PM, Schubas Medicine Woman, Dally Auston, Malcolm London, Hurt Everybody 8 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar F Queensryche, Meytal, Halcyon Way 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Sewn Up, Displeasures, James Dean Death Cult 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Stomatopod, Rutabega, Thoughts Detecting Machines 7 PM, Empty Bottle Warehouse Eyes, Arclight 9 PM, Whistler F Dance Derrick Carter, Michael Serafini, Garrett David 10 PM, Smart Bar Mia Wallace, Derek Specs, Elliott Osborne 10 PM, Primary Nightclub Folk & Country Alan Doyle Band 8 PM, City Winery b Wandering Dirt 9 PM, Red Line Tap F Blues, Gospel, and R&B Buddy Guy, Special 20s 7:30 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends International Gizzae, DJ Craig 9 PM, Wild Hare

Jazz Anthony Bruno, Mikel Avery, and John Sutton 9 PM, Whistler F Open Forum Project, Moods 9 PM, Elastic b Experimental Tar Pet, Michael Zerang 7:30 PM, Experimental Sound Studio b In-Stores Gerrit Hatcher, Lane Beckstrom, and Phillip Sudderburg 7:30 PM, Myopic Books F b

TUESDAY2 Flux Bikes Waddupp Sonn open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $5.

Rob Frye has gained notoriety over the last couple of years for the malleable approach to musical hypnosis and melodic beauty he’s brought to both Bitchin Bajas and Cave, but the weekly February residency at the Hideout that begins tonight will show there’s more to his aesthetic. Perhaps nothing demonstrates his ideals better than his project Flux Bikes, which he refers to as a “social practice.” Until recently I knew that this venture generated certain sounds by using contact mikes to amplify different bicycles parts as percussion, but I never knew how integral the bike was. Frye designs

Where are the rest of the music listings?

Find them at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

1800 W. DIVISION

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Come enjoy one of Chicago’s finest beer gardens!

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FRIDAY, JAN. 29........................SKIPPIN ROCK DR. UNK SATURDAY, JAN. 30...................DJ BEN CAFFERY WEDNESDAY, FEB. 3 .................SUSIE CHAY THURSDAY, FEB. 4 ....................SMILING BOBBY AND HIS BLUES MACHINE FRIDAY, FEB. 5..........................ENVIRONMENTAL ENCROACHMENT SATURDAY, FEB. 6.....................1ST WARD PROBLEMS MONDAY, FEB. 8 .......................RC BIG BAND @7PM TUESDAY, FEB. 9.......................THE FLABBY HOFFMAN SHOW WEDNESDAY, FEB. 10 ...............ELIZABETH HARPER’S LITTLE THING THURSDAY, FEB. 11 ..................THE FLABBY HOFFMAN SHOW FEATURING. NATALIE @ 8PM SATURDAY, FEB. 13...................JAMIE WAGNER BAND BAD FORUM SUNDAY, FEB. 14......................HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PLAYERS WEDNESDAY, FEB. 17 ...............SUSIE CHAY JEFF MAUCK @ 8PM THURSDAY, FEB. 18 ..................HOMESTREET FRIDAY, FEB. 19........................4D BLUES BAND SATURDAY, FEB. 20...................BUCKTHORN EVERY MONDAY AT 9PM CHRIS SHUTTLEWORTH QUINTET EVERY TUESDAY AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMI JON AMERICA

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martyrslive.com

THU, 1/28

THE EVENING ATTRACTION, FINE SUBTERRANEANS, BRENDAN & THE BLACK JACKETS FRI, 1/29

BANDS FOR BELL 13 W/BOBBY CONN, TEACHERS PET, BETA DOGS, ROBBIN PROPER SAT, 1/30

YENI TÜRKÜ TUE, 2/2

ANGELUS, MYSTERY TRAIN, JOHN SAN JUAN each performance as a kind of sustainable ritual by first riding to the show and then turning the bike into an instrument. The practice has extended well beyond Chicago, as he’s toured on wheels throughout Spain and between Austin and New Orleans— during which he was outfitted with a solar-powered sound system. This makes for a lovely backstory, but the music Frye creates in this manner measures up to the method. As heard on his 2014 cassette Prototype (Catholic Tapes), directed by a keen sense of dynamics, he builds mesmerizing percussive grooves that convey a strangely enveloping warmth akin to West African music, with passages of flute, saxophone, bass clarinet, and guitar beautifully floating over the loops. For this performance Frye will be joined by percussionist Dan Bitney of Tortoise fame, and Kyle Drouin will deliver abstract video accompaniment. —PETER MARGASAK

Heck No, Nancy (Near Mint), show that youngsters today have the capacity to see beyond their phones and get the bigger picture. The Philly-via-D.C. emo duo employ euphonious guitars that ache and droop, sturdy drums that stay the course like a speeding car splitting lanes between semis, and yearning vocals that hold on like a mountain climber ascending a cliff. They’re barely out of high school, but the Obsessives have thought about the world beyond the reaches of sleepy suburban D.C. On “Nodding Off” front man Nick Bairatchnyi sings “Nodding off to pictures of you that decorate my room / High school sucks when you’re stuck on someone who’s given up.” The performance evokes soul-slaying langour but is informed by the wisdom of someone who knows how to move forward.

—LEOR GALIL

Rock, Pop, Etc Angelus, Mystery Train, John San Juan 8 PM, Martyrs’ Heavy Times, Mama, Vamos 8 PM, Schubas F Oscillator Bug, Mark Solotroff, M Baptista Benedict 9 PM, Empty Bottle Jake Shimabukuro 8 PM, also Mon 2/1, 8 PM, City Winery b

Rock, Pop, Etc Akenya, Highness 6:30 PM, Double Door b J A Cohen, Paul Kalil 7:30 PM, SPACE b Grizfolk, Max Frost 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b High Priests, Brook Pridemore, Texas Chainstore Manager, Mecha Shiva 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Hot Sugar, Edamame, Fee Lion 6:30 PM, Schubas b Leadfoot Band, Found Hounds 9 PM, Martyrs’ Matchess, Peter Speer, Mike Weis 9 PM, Hideout So Pretty, Rashita Joneses, Dead Drugs 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint

Hip-Hop Kid Cudi 8 PM, Riviera Theatre b Pell, Daye Jack 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b

WEDNESDAY3

Folk & Country Wynonna & the Big Noise, Tim & Myles Thompson 8 PM, City Winery b

Obsessives Household open. 6:30 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, downstairs, $10. 17+

Jazz Rob Clearfield Trio 9:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ F

Think-piece writers often utilize a great list of scapegoats, and some of the targets currently near the top are millennials, that amorphous collective of youngsters who get thrown under the bus anytime someone makes an argument about dwindling attention spans or Tinder’s erosion of historical dating patterns. Thank goodness for the Obsessives, who on their 2014 debut,

International Pradhanica 8:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music F b

WED, 2/3

THE LEADFOOT BAND, FOUND HOUNDS THU, 2/4

BIG C JAMBOREE… CHRIS CASELLO & THE CORSAIRS FRI, 2/5

THE LULABELLES, CARDINAL HARBOR, LUNO SAT, 2/6

BRAZILIAN CARNIVAL 2016 HOSTED BY MARCOS OLIVEIRA

FINDHUNDREDSOF READER-RECOMMENDED

RESTAURANTS EXCLUSIVE VIDEO FEATURES ANDSIGNUPFORWEEKLYNEWS CHICAGOREADER.COM/FOOD

Classical Jaime Gorgojo & Alexandre Tsomaia Violin and piano. 12:15 PM, Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center F b v

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 27

THURSDAY, JANUARY 28 | 6-9PM | ROOF ON THE WIT | 201 N STATE | 27TH FLOOR

WINTER MIX-OFF

Drink the heat Cool off with the ice Don’t miss the 2nd Annual Winter Mix-Off featuring the top mixologists in the Midwest as they battle it out for the best FIRE and best ICE cocktail. $40 tickets @ chicagoreader.com/wintermixoff

INCLUDES COCK TAILS, BITES AND LIVE ENTERTAINMENT

28 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

FEATURED MIXOLOGISTS

R O O F Michael Simon

C H D I S T I L L E R Y Azrhiel Frost

P R E S I D I O Alex Renshaw

T A C K R O O M Dustin Drankewicz

T H E D A W S O N Harrison Ginsberg

P U M P R O O M Mea Leech

B O R D E L Marissa Danielle

G R E E N R I V E R Julia Momose

P U B R O Y A L E Kristina Magro

T H E B E T T Y Brian Bolles

FOOD & DRINK

SERAI | $$ R 2169 N. Milwaukee 872-206-8368 seraichicago.com

NEW REVIEW

Serai fills the Malaysian food void

The Logan Square restaurant serves up the city’s first proper Malay cuisine in eight years.

By MIKE SULA

A

From top: char koay teow, Hainanese chicken, curry laksa ò NICK MURWAY

friend was eating lunch with family in Kuala Lumpur a few weeks ago when he received a tweet announcing a brand-new Malaysian restaurant had opened in Chicago. It came with a photo of the restaurant’s mango chicken—a sweet-spicy stir-fry of poultry, bell peppers, and onions served in a hollowed-out mango. As the phone was passed around the table loaded with homemade dishes, the family had a good snort. That’s Malaysian food, eh?

Well, maybe not. There’s also crab Rangoon on the menu at Logan Square’s Serai, located on a relatively desolate stretch of Milwaukee Avenue. There’s also pad thai, orange chicken, Indonesian gado gado, and a lot of Sichuan dishes. All are clearly not Malaysian in origin, but that’s really nothing to complain about considering the city hasn’t been host to a true Malaysian restaurant in the eight years since Chinatown’s Penang literally went up in smoke.

That’s because Serai still has a lot of Malaysian food on the menu, representing that syncretic blend of Indian, Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, British, Dutch, Portuguese, and native influences. And it’s good enough to skip a long trip out to Penang in Arlington Heights or Asian Noodle House in Hoffman Estates whenever you get a hankering for curry laksa, char koay teow, or Hainanese chicken and rice. Serai does all of those Malaysian classics and more, and it does them quite a lot better than its suburban competitors.

The aforementioned chicken-and-rice dish originated with southern Chinese immigrants but was adapted all over southeast Asia. And yet a decent version is hard to come by in Chicago. Serai may have captured the lead in that arena by offering a boiled and blanched bird with flabby, fatty skin, hacked and arrayed on the plate with a garlicky, gingery sauce and the all-important rice, infused with the richness of the bird’s boiling medium. Who performs that crucial last step anywhere else in town?

J

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 29

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

FOOD & DRINK FOOD MEDIA

Requiem for the Midwestern Diner As TOLD TO JULIA THIEL

AFTER BEING LAID OFF from his job at an advertising agency in 2014, Vincent LaBriola started the site Midwestern Diner (midwesterndiner.com), which consists of long-form interviews and videos profiling chefs, brewers, distillers, and other people involved in the local food and drink scene. A filmmaker by training, LaBriola was intrigued by similarities he saw between making food on a large scale and making movies, and wanted to create a series of short documentaries about people who work with food and drink in Chicago. He added written interviews after realizing how long the videos took to complete—though those interviews, which often run to several thousand words, were time-intensive themselves. For a year LaBriola worked on the project nearly full-time, taking on freelance gigs to pay the bills and occasionally recruiting friends to help with photo or video. Last fall, he put the site on hold indefinitely. The 28-year-old spoke recently about what made him start the Midwestern Diner—and what ultimately made him end the project.

On the Midwestern Diner, LaBriola paired long-form interviews with his own photography. ò COURTESY VINCENT LABRIOLA

I

don’t relate to a lot of foodie culture. I approached [the Midwestern Diner] from the perspective of looking at the craftsmanship of food in a more artistic way. I saw a parallel between running a contemporary restaurant and running a film set.

You can make a film that’s just a series of iPhone videos cut together. A chef can do a pop-up dinner where you get 16 people in a room, cook the whole thing yourself, bust your ass, and you’ve got a wonderful dinner. But in order to reach a larger group of people, to make a larger cultural impact, there’s a significant amount of logistical work, things that are not glamorous. That’s often overlooked.

People are much more interested in the beautiful finished thing on the plate, the same way that people watch a film and they don’t care so much about how the filmmakers got to that.

I’ve had dining experiences that have affected me as much as any artistic thing. I was shocked and dismayed when Homaro Cantu died. I’d gone to Moto for my 21st birthday; he took us in the back and showed us how to cook with lasers.

It was tremendous. I remember being really blown away by how cinematic the experience was.

At the beginning of Midwestern Diner, I interviewed anybody who’d give me the time of day. With all the chefs I walked in with the same basic pitch: I know you guys will often be quoted out of context, or you’re asked to provide some sanitized, easy quote. What I’m going to do is the exact opposite. I’m going to let you speak your mind as fully and completely as possible.

I chose Midwestern Diner because I thought “midwestern” spoke to more of an aesthetic as opposed to a particular geographic location.

I’m of the opinion that everybody has something at least a little bit interesting to say—or their own way of saying something that maybe a million people have said before. When things would go off topic, I left it in. I liken it to an interview with Bruce Springsteen: part of it will address the thing that’s coming out, but the rest of it will be whatever else the hell Bruce Springsteen wants to talk about—and you’re interested because he’s an artist.

[In the video with chef] Michael Dean Reynolds, a significant part of it was him talking about growing up and going to see Fugazi in Washington, D.C., and playing in a Tom Waits cover band. You’d J

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 31

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I

S G N

Vincent LaBriola ò COURTESY MIDWEST DINER

Midwestern Diner continued from 31 be surprised how many times chefs would be like, “And that’s why I do that at the restaurant, because it’s a personal thing.”

I was always looking at that divide between what [the interview subjects] want to accomplish creatively and how, practically speaking, they can do it. You get a sense of what their true, pure artistic goal is, but also how difficult it can be to accomplish that on a daily basis. If one of your waiters screws up or one of your chefs down the line screws up—despite your best efforts you sometimes miss these things.

I was very interested in how these restaurants operate, how you balance the creative with the practical and financial and logistical demands of running a restaurant.

I really admire these guys for sticking to their guns knowing how razor thin the margins are, how long the hours are. That’s the same thing filmmakers and musicians do.

There was this notion that everybody brought up—some people were more skeptical than others—that the community supports each other. Especially brewers. Brewers would be like, “I didn’t have this sort of hops, so I just called up this other guy and was like, ‘Do you have any hops that I can have?’ And they’re like, ‘Sure!’” I think there’s a sense of community and identity here.

The original interview transcripts were all edited down at least by half, but I kept them very long. One thing that frustrated me was that food [coverage] was dominated by the conventions of social media, with certain exceptions. If it doesn’t fit in a tweet it’s not relevant; if I can’t take a screenshot of it and put it on Instagram it’s not relevant. That really

frustrated me because I’m the type of person that likes to dig in.

I am not a fan of social media at all. I’m not on it personally. I grossly underestimated how important it was to getting the word out. That was a mistake. Getting the word out to the general public was the biggest—I don’t want to say outright failure, but it was very difficult.

When I started this guy told me, “Your photos are just too nice for Instagram. You need a shitty filter and a half-eaten bite of food.” I was like, “You might be absolutely right, but if you are this is not right for me.”

I tried to emulate places like Grantland and the Dissolve. And to see those sites go dark—it’s a question of being able to monetize it, and quite frankly I don’t know how. I don’t think the Dissolve or Grantland knew, and those were backed by large media companies.

Toward the end of this, I was like, Is this just a hill I have to die on?

When the Midwestern Diner was ramped up, I was probably working at least 25 hours a week for it. I knew that in order to do this, for it to be successful, I’d need to put in somewhere close to full-time. That being said, everybody has bills to pay. It just reached the point where I didn’t feel comfortable putting my resources in it anymore. I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I am dismayed by how, with discourse in general, the pendulum has swung toward the fewer characters the better. I hope that when you look at Midwestern Diner you see someone who’s really trying to push that pendulum in the other direction—even if it’s in vain. v

v @juliathiel

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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)

10508 S. MARYLAND, 1st flr, 1BR, carpet, A/C, stove/ fridge, c-fans, enclosed porch, indiv. heat. $575 + sec. Call 773-704-4153, 10a6p.

CHICAGO SOUTH - YOU’VE tried the rest, we are the best.

Apartments & Homes for rent, city & suburb. No credit checks.

773-221-7490, 773-221-7493

JANUARY 28, 2016 | CHICAGO READER 33

CHICAGO, BEVERLY / Cal Park / Blue Island Studio $530 & up, 1BR $650 & up, 2BR $875 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Prkg. 708-388-0170 CHATHAM, 708 E. 81ST (Langley), 1BR, 3rd flr. 744 E. 81st (Evans), 1BR, 1st flr. $65 0/mo + security.

Call Mr. Joe at 708-870-4801

CHICAGO W. SIDE 3859 W Maypole Rehabbed studios & 1 Bedrooms, $425-500/mo, Utilities not included. 773-617-0329, 773-5332900

97 & CALUMET 4 & 2 FB, gar

$1500. 143/Eggelston. 3/1 FB, gar $1150. 142/Lasalle 3/1, SS, gar. $1075.

New Reno. Appt Only.

773.619.4395 Charlie 818.679.1175

CHICAGO: 6511 S Seeley, 2BR, 1BA, LR, DR, enclosed yard, separate utilities, $750/mo + sec deposit, 773-450-3046 EOH

CHICAGO 71ST SANGAMON, $400 per month, quiet furnished room, share kitchen & bath. Please call 773-609-3109

79th & Woodlawn and 76th & Phillips 1BRs $650-$700, 2BRs $775$800; Remodeled, appls avail. Sect 8 welcome. Call 312-286-5678

1 BR $700-$799 1BR, 1645 E. 85TH PL, $725.

7724 S. Jeffery, $725. 409 E. 72nd St, $725. 7203 King Dr, $690.

Studio, 106 E. 70th St., $575.

Heat and appliances Included.

Shown

by Appt. 773-8742556

PLAZA ON THE PARK 608 East 51st Street. Very spacious renovated apartments. 1BR $722 - $801, 2BR $837 - $1,009, 3BR $1,082- $1,199, 4-5BR $1,273 - $1,405. Visit or call (773)548-9300, M-F 9am-5pm or apply online at www.plazaonthepark apts.com Managed by Metroplex, Inc

PLAZA ON THE PARK 608 East 51st Street. Very spacious renovated apartments. 1BR $722 - $801, 2BR $837 - $1,009, 3BR $1,082- $1,199, 4-5BR $1,273 - $1,405. Visit or call (773)548-9300, M-F 9am-5pm or apply online at www.plazaonthepark apts.com Managed by Metroplex, Inc

ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT

near Warren Park and Metra. 1904 W Pratt. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. $ 830/ month. Available 2/1. 773-7614318, www.lakefrontmgt.com

1 BR $900-$1099 EDGEWATER. 1055 W Catalpa 1

bedrooms starting at $925 heat and cooking gas included! Application fee $40. No security deposit. Parking available for an additional fee. Laundry room in the building, wood floors, close to grocery stores, restaurant, CTA Red Line train, etc. For a showing please contact Millie 773561-7070 Hunter Properties,Inc. 773477-7070 www.hunterprop.com

Hyde Park West Apts., 5325 S. Cottage Grove Ave., Renovated spacious apartments in landscaped gated community. Off street parking available. Studio $674 Free heat, 2BR $995 - Free heat. Visit or call 773324-0280, M-F: 9am-5pm or apply online- www.hydepark west.com.

Managed by Metroplex, Inc

SECT 8, NO DEP, FREE HEAT nr

73rd & the Dan Ryan on 73rd & Harvard Ave. spac XL 1BR w/dining & den, 3rd fl 773-895-7247

BURNHAM 2 BR Apt

SOUTHSIDE - 8535 South Green.

Well maintained 1 & 2 bedrooms starting at $625-$750/mo. Security deposit required. Call 773-8748451

Stove & fridge included. C/A. Newly decorated. $775/month + 1 month security. Call 708-288-3255

BEAUTIFUL REHAB 1 & 2BR, 1st CHICAGO - HYDE Park 5401 S. Ellis.

1BR. $535-$600/mo Call 773-955-5106

EXCHANGE EAST APTS 1 Brdm

$575 w/Free Parking,Appl, AC,Free heat. Near trans. laundry rm. Elec.not incl. Kalabich Mgmt (708) 424-4216

6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $560-$850, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

RIVERDALE - NEWLY decor, 1 & 2BR, appls, heated, A/C, lndry, prkng, no pets, near Metra. Sec 8 ok. $675$800. 708-798-4465

flr, spac, appl, lndry facility, hdwd flrs, Quiet bldg. Sect 8 ok. $750. 773344-4050

1 BR $800-$899 Lawrence. 1 bedrooms starting at $825-$895 include heat and gas, laundry in building. Great view! Close to CTA Red Line, bus, stores, restaurants, lake, etc. To schedule a showing please contact Celio 773-3961575, Hunter Properties 773-4777070, www.hunterprop.com

455 West Belmont. Available now.

The charm of the old and and the ambience of the new. 2 buildings from the lakefront. Super sized rooms. Large kitchens, full dining rooms, burnished oak floors. Resident engineer. Heat and appliances included. 4 room/ 1 bedroom $1330.

To see call 312-822-1037 weekdays until 5:30PM, Saturdays to 3pm and Sundays to 2pm.

EVANSTON 1125 DAVIS, 1603

Ridge. Near Northwestern, downtown Evanston, shops, restaurants, movies, el, Metra. Large kitchens, spacious closets, laundry on premises, hardwood floors. Heat and appliances included. 3.5/1 bedroom.

Available now $1245. For appointment call 312-822-1037, weekdays until 5:30pm, Saturdays to 3pm, Sundays to 2pm.

WE’LL PUT YOU in our place.

DePaul District. 2901 North Seminary #103. Available 2/1-4/30 option to renew. Cabinet kitchens and updated baths. Heat and appliances included.

2/1 bedroom $1170. For appointment call 312-822-1037 weekdays until 5:30pm, Saturdays to 3pm and Sundays to 2pm.

1 BR $1100 AND OVER LINCOLN PARK. 512-1/2 West

Addison. Available now and 3/1.

Magnificent apartments, super light and airy, set off by a beautiful courtyard. Laundry room, storage lockers.

Steps from the lake, steps from transportation and steps from shopping and recreation. Resident engineer. 4/1 bedroom garden $1245$1350. Heat and appliances included.

To see call 312-822-1037 weekdays until 5:30pm, Saturdays to 3pm and Sundays to 2pm.

BERWYN - CICERO: 1 B e d rooms, Heat included. No dogs.

Call Ken 773-391-1460

LAKESIDE TOWER, 910 W

LINCOLN PARK LANDMARK,

EVANSTON. 818-1/2 FOREST

Ave Apt C-3. Stately building on quiet street, near Sheridan Road. Sedate residential area. Near Main Street, shops, restaurants and transportation. Heat and appliances included.

We will fax floorplans upon request. 1 bedroom. Available now-6/30 option to renew. $1250. For appointment call 312-822-1037 weekdays until 5:30pm, Saturdays to 3pm, Sundays to 2pm.

BUCKTOWN, 1907 W CORTLAND 1st floo r,, 1 bedroom, clean, spacious, central air, laundry in building, $1300/mo. Available now. 708-448-2337.

1 BR OTHER ON 1/11-3/4/2016 THE 6900 S. CRANDON APARTMENTS WILL BE TAKING APPLICATIONS FOR THE STUDIO & 1BR WAITING LIST AT THE MANAGEMENT OFFICE FROM 2:00PM-4:30PM. UNITS INCLUDE APPLIANCES, HEATING, ON-SITE LAUNDRY FACILITIES AND OFF-STREET PARKING. TO BE CONSIDERED FOR OCCUPANCY, APPLICANTS MUST BE AT LEAST 62 YEARS OF AGE & HAVE INCOME AT OR

BELOW HUD INCOME GUIDELINES. APPLICANTS ARE SCREENED AND MUST MEET THE TENANT SELECTION CRITERIA. ON 3/31/16 THE WAITING LIST WILL BE CLOSED. PROFESSIONALLY MANAGED BY EAST LAKE MANAGEMENT GROUP.

PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT LOS VECINOS Apartments, located at 4250 W. North Avenue, Chicago, Illinois, is opening its subsidized Section 8 Waiting List for individuals in need of (SRO) Apartments.

Rent calculations are based upon your annual income and income limitations apply in order to qualify for residency. All requests for preapplications must be completed in person only and will be accepted at: Los Vecinos Apartments 4250 W. North Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60639 11:00 A.M. to 3:00P.M. Wednesday, February 17, 2016

PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT Karibuni Apartments, located at 8200 S. Ellis, Chicago, Illinois, is opening its subsidized Section 8 Waiting List for individuals in need of (SRO) Apartments. Rent calculations are based upon your annual income and income limitations apply in order to qualify for residency.

All requests for preapplications must be completed in person only and will be accepted at: Karibuni Apartments 8200 S. Ellis Chicago, Illinois 60619 10:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. Tuesday, February 16, 2016

CALUMET CITY 158TH & PAXTON SANDRIDGE APTS 1 & 2 BEDROOM UNITS MODELS OPEN M-F, 9AM-5:30PM *** 708-841-5450 ***

ROYALTON HOTEL, Kitchenette $135 & up wk. 1810 W. Jackson 312-226-4678

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MANAGEMENT & INVESTMENT LTD. THE HAWK HAS...

ARRIVED!!!

MOST INCLUDE HEAT & HOT WTR STUDIOS FROM $510.00 1BDR FROM $575.00 2BDR FROM $745.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1175 **1-(773)-476-6000** CALL FOR DETAILS

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

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

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

Applications will be accepted immediately between the hours of 11:00am-3:00pm at the above address. 773-268-2120

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MANAGEMENT & INVESTMENT LTD. THE HAWK IS HERE! HEAT, HW & CG INCLUDED 1BDR FROM $725.00 2BDR FROM $895.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1175 **1-(773)-476-6000** CALL FOR DETAILS

SUBURBS, RENT TO O W N !

Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit.

Call 708-868-2422 or visit w ww.nhba.com CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708-868-2422 or visit www. nhba.com

EAST GARFIELD PARK Conservatory Area. 1, 2, 3 & 4BR Units.

Newly renovated buidling with all appls, hdwd flrs. Call Mike, 708-372-6774

RIVERDALE - COZY 5 room, 2BR, 2BA. LR w/ firplc & FR. 2 car gar w/ side drv. $1000/mo.

Crdt chk & sec dep req’d. By appt, 708-946-2745

CHICAGO - BEVERLY, LARGE 2 room Studio & 1BR, Carpet, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $640-$750/mo.

Call 773-233-4939

SOUTHSIDE, RECENTLY RENOVATED, 1, 2 & 3BR Apartments.

Section 8 ok, $650-$1400/mo.

Call Sean, 773-410-7084

CHICAGO, 3-4BR TOWNHOUSE & Single Family Homes.

Beautifully renovated, new kitchen, hardwood floors. Cash Only.

708-557-0644

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

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

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200

2 BR UNDER $900 2 KING SIZE BRS, 5 rms, 6122 S. St. Lawrence, new kit, BA, fans, crpt, appls, balc, lndry, $795 + utils. Sec 8/Seniors Welc. 312504-2008

CALUMET CITY 2BR, 3rd flr, crpt, appls, window a/c, heat + ckng gas incl, $850/mo + $850 sec. $25 credit check fee. 708-955-2122

2051-53 W. GARFIELD. 4 rooms w/2 BR. Heat & cooking gas included. $800/mo + 1 month security. Proof of income. Call 773-436-6922

SOUTH SHORE - 1 & 2 BR apts, heat & appliances included.

You pay cooking gas & elec. $725 - $875 + Sec. 773-624-2292

FREE HEAT 94-3739 S. BISH-

OP. 2BR, 5rm, 1st & 2nd floor, new appls, storage & closet space, near shops/ trans. $850 +sec 708-335-0786

GREAT 2BR W. H u m b o l d t 850sft; eat-in kit, new appl, new carpet, new windows $850/mo + util., 773-743-4141 www.urbanequities.com

WINTER SPECIAL $500 ToCHICAGO, 7727 S. Colfax, ground flr Apt., ideal for senior citizens. Secure bldng. Modern 1BR $595. Lrg 2BR, $800. Free cooking & heating gas. Free parking. 312613-4427

77TH/LOWE 1 & 2BR. 101st/May 2BR, 69th/Dante, 3BR. 71st/ Bennett 2 & 3BR. 71st/Hermitage 3BR. New renov. Sec 8 ok. 708-5031366

CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE Beauti-

ful Studios, 1,2,3 & 4 BR’s, Sec 8 ok. $500 gift certificate for Sec 8 tenants. 773-287-9999/312-446-3333

ward Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. 773-287-4500 www. wjmngmt.com

Large Sunny Room w/fridge & microwave. Nr. Oak Park, Green Line, bus. 24 hour desk, parking lot. $101/week & Up. 773-3788888

7945 S DOBSON, Beautiful 2 bedroom apartment, hardwood floors mini blinds. $840. per month security deposit negotiable. Call 773.793.9862

7701 S. South Shore Dr. 2 BDs with 1.5 Baths, Large Combo Living-Dining Rm, FREE Heat & cking gas. Prkng extra. $785-$800, Kalabich Mgmt (708)424-4216

NO MOVE-IN FEE! No Dep! Sec 8

ok. 1, 2 & 3 Bdrms. Elev bldg, laundry, pkg. 6531 S. Lowe. Ms. Payne.

773-874-0100

MOVE IN SPECIAL!!!

B4 the N of this MO. & MOVE IN 4 $99.00 (773) 874-1122

CHICAGO, NEWLY

renovated 2BR Apartment. 69th &

Maplewood, unheated. $650/mo.

Call 773-905-4567

62nd & May 2BR $800 - 3BR $900 HEAT INCLUDED.847-977-3552

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1652 W 80TH St, 2 bedroom, $825, hrd wd flrs, updated kitchen and bath, NO SD, Appliances INC, large bdrms, 312.208.1771 72ND & JEFFERY - 2BR, $750+ 1 .5 Sec Dep. 2nd Floor, New decor, heat incl. Good public trans.

312-221-3724

RENT TO OWN 2, 3, 4 & 5BR Homes 2 & 3 BR apts also avail, Sec 8 OK. 708-737-2036 or 312-662-3963

NO SEC DEP 1431 W. 78th. St. 1B R/2BR. $495-$595/mo . 6829 S.

Perry. Studio $460. 1BR. $515.HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

64TH/RICHMOND, 2nd flr, 2BR newly remod, new bath/kit, hdwd flrs, security cameras, laundry. $730-

$1000/ mo. Sec 8 ok 708-932-6254

CHICAGO

LINCOLN PARK LANDMARK.

3166 N Hudson #3. Available 3/19/30 option to renew. 2 buildings from the lakefront. Super sized rooms. Large kitchen, dining room, burnished oak floors. Resident engineer. Heat and appliances included. 5 /2 bedroom $1385. To see call 312822-1037 weekdays until 5:30pm, Saturdays to 3pm and Sundays to 2pm.

EAST L A K E V I E W / WRIGLEYVILLE Newly renovated, sunny, 2 bedroom apartment in elegant vintage greystone building w/hardwood floors, dishwasher, air-conditioning, backyard patio, washer/dryer on premises. $1400/ month. Call Nat 773-880-2414.

APARTMENT FOR RENT 5 1/2 large room apartment in 2 floor building, newly decorated, $1300. Heat included. Deposit needed. No pets. 5845 N Maplewood, Chicago. Call 773293-3399

7600 S Essex 2BR

$599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! 773287-9999 /312-446-3333

CHICAGO: 1518 W. Marquette Rehabbed 2BR, $650/Month, Utilities Not Included. Section 8 Ok. 773-617-0329, 773-533-2900

Move in Special! Cicero-2BR $850/month .Free cooking gas & heat, laundry, security camera 708-990-1911 or 703-346-2020

2 BR $900-$1099 2BR/1BA RENOVATED; hdwd floors; large closets, laundry available; free heat & water. $1000/mo + $1000 dep. 8350 S Drexel; 773952-8137.

EVANSTON 818 FOREST Ave Apt A-1. Stately building on quiet street, near Sheridan Road Sedate residential area. Near Main Street, shops, restaurants and transportation. Heat and appliances included.

We will fax floor plans upon request.

Large 5.5 rooms/ 2 bedrooms/ 2 baths. Available 3/1. $1650. For appointment call 312-822-1037 weekdays until 5:30pm, Saturdays to 3pm, Sundays to 2pm.

GOLD COAST.

1548 North LaSalle #105. Available 2/1-4/30. Option to renew. Authentic 1890s unbelievable charm. A modernized antique updated for today’s living. Magnificent courtyard building in Most Wanted area of Chicago. Many apartments have gas fireplaces. Heat and appliances included. 4/2 bedroom $1765. For showing call 312-822-1037 weekdays until 5:30pm, Saturday to 3pm and Sundays to 2pm.

2 BR OTHER Chicago, 9121 S. Cottage Grove, 2BR apt. $900/mo Newly remod,

appls, mini blinds, ceiling fans, Section 8 welcome. Call 312-9150100

DOLTON - 2BR RANCH House, newly renovated, C/A, tenant pays utilities, $1000/mo + 1 mo sec. Call 708-259-8720

CALUMET CITY 2 BR condo style apartment, all appliances, in unit W/D & C/A off street parking incl. Mike, 708-372-6774

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 Cornerstone Apts., 4907 S. St Lawrence, Newly Remodeled. 3 BR starting $1038- $1090/mo., 2 BR w /1.5 bath for $900 heat included.

Visit or call (773) 548-9211. M-F: 9am-5pm or apply on line. www.

4907cornerstoneapts.com Managed by Metroplex, Inc.

61ST/LANGLEY. 3BR/1BA. 2ND flr of 2 unit bldg. Avail Now. Sect 8 ok. Beaut apt, New fridge & stove. W/D in bsmt. Hdwd flrs.

Nr Transp, 1blk from schl. $950/ mo. 312-464-2222

CHICAGO, BEVERLY, 1316 W. 100th Pl. Total rehabbed, heat & A/C incl. 6 rms, 3BR, Sec 8 Welcome, $1000/mo. 773-3390182

2 BR $1500 AND OVER

7440 S. VERNON. 2BR, remod hdwd flrs, Sec 8 OK, heat and appls incl, laundry on site. $780 & up. Call Z. 773-406-4841

BURNHAM - 14500 S. Torrence Beautiful 2 BR in a class of it’s own, tile floors, appls, lndry room, a/c, heat incl. 773-731-5010

CHICAGO, PRINCETON PARK

HOMES. Spac 2 - 3 BR Townhomes, Inclu: Prvt entry, full bsmt, lndry hook-ups. Ample prkg. Close to trans & schls. Starts at $816/mo. www. ppkhomes.com;773-264-3005

BEAUTIFUL NEW APT! 6150 S. Vernon Ave. 3Bdrm

NR 43RD/PRINCETON 3BR $850 & 4BR $950, stove/refrig furn, tenant pays cook gas & elec, 1 mo rent + 1 mo sec dep, credit ck req 312-806-6370

6343 S. ROCKWELL - 3BR, incl heat. hdwd flrs, lndry facility, fenced in bldg, fireplace, garage & appl.$ 1000/mo. Sec 8 ok. 773-791-

PARK FOREST - 3 Bedrooms, 2 bath ranch, $1,150/mo + security.

Section 8 OK. Appliances included.

No calls after 5pm. 708-756-7918

3BR APT - 5639 S Princeton.

1st flr, newly decorated. $800 + sec dep. Tenant pays utils.

773-858-3163

WOODLAWN COMMUNITY

(CLOSE to U of C campus) 3 BR, 1 BA, includes heat, Sec. 8 OK. $1,050/ mo. 773-802-0422

3 BR OR MORE

LAKEVIEW! 1739 W. Addison.

OPEN HOUSE SUN. 15630 Ingleside, Dolton, 1-2p, 3BR $1400 /. 3691 W. 175th Pl., Cntry Club Hills. 3-4p. 4BR, $1800. 708-7249200

Must See. 3 bedrooms at $1725.

Hardwood floors, completely renovated apartments, 1 blk to CTA Brown Line on Addison, walking distance to shops, restaurants, Wrigley Field, and more! Application fee $40. No security deposit! Parking space available for a monthly fee. For a showing please call Saida 773-407-6452, Hunter Properties 773-477-7070 www. hunterprop.com

Side -Newly Rehab 3BR Apts. $850 - $1195 / month 773-230-6132 or 773-931-6108

SOUTHSIDE 8035 S. Marshfield, 3BR, 2nd floor, no Pets, $875/mo. + 1 mo. sec. dep. & all utilities.

773-873-4549

SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo.

708-288-4510

CHICAGO HEIGHTS 3 bdrm house for rent, exc cond, available now. $1050/Mo, 1st mo + sec dep.

Tenants pay all utils. 708-343-8629

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

1920

8001 S. Dobson – 1BR $700, 2BR $775, 3BR $900, H/W flrs. Stove, fridge, & heat incl’d.

Sec. 8 Welccome. 312.208.1771 or 708.890.

1694

5034 S. Michigan: Newly renovated 3BR, 2BA $1350. Hardwood flrs Stainless appls w/DW, Central heat/air, 312.208.1771 or 708-890-1694

61st/Rhodes. Newly Decorated 3BR, 7 rooms, heat incl. $875/ mo.

74th & East End, 2BR/DR, $825.

773-874-9637 or 773-493-5359

3 BDRM APT 11425 S. Forest, Chi

SAUK VILLAGE - 3BR House,

3 BR NEWLY renovated apt walk-

(W-Pullman). applncs, intercom buzzer entry, & more. $1100 w/o util, $1220 w/util. 773-445-0645

ing distance from shopping & public transportation in quiet area. $1300.

Section 8 ok. 312-437-6830

NICE 3 BEDROOM apartment available. Water is included. No pets and no smoking. Please call John at 708-774-8010

DELUXE 4BRS ($1300) & 1BRs ($800). Hardwood flrs and appls incl, close to trans, schools.

Sec 8 Welcome. 773-443-3200

CHICAGO VIC. OF 1 2 0 t h / Michigan 3BR house, Comp. remod, Fenced yard, security system. $1100/ mo + sec & utils. 815-806-0881

PARK FOREST 3 Kentucky Ct, 3BR, 2BA, newly dec $1300/mo. avail now. 1 m sec &1 mo rent. Tenant pays heat. 773-851-4576

OTHER

CHICAGO HEIGHTS 4 OR 5 BR,

2 BATH, NEWLY REMODELED, SECTION 8 OK. 96 W. 15TH. NO SEC. DEPOSIT. 708-822-4450

EAST GARFIELD PARK, West

COUNTRY CLUB HILLS vic of 183RD/Cicero.

4BR, 1.5BA $1400 & 3BR/2BA. $1450.

Ranch Style, 2 car gar. 708369-5187

hardwood floors, ceramic tile in kitch/bath, A/C, stove/fridge incl., basement. $1000/mo 312-404-3017

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799

RICHTON PARK, 22822 East Dr., 3BR Split Level, 2.5BA, eat in kitchen, separate DR, spacious LR, close to trans, screened in back porch.

Avail now. $1600/mo. 847-4178449

PILL HILL: 9107 S Paxton, beaut rehab 4BR, 3BA house, granite ctrs, SS appls, ca, whirlpool tub, fin bsmt, 2-car gar, $1600/mo 708288-4510

SEC 8 WELCOME, no security dep., 6717 S Rhodes, 3-level, 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl, $1300/mo.

708-288-4510

BRICK, 4 BED, 2 bath, w/ bsmt, 2 car gar., 87th Fairfield, Evergreen Park. 1 Mos Sec Dep, $1575/mo. Call Al, 847-644-5195

3 BR OR MORE $2500 AND OVER

LAKEVIEW LUXURY 3BR/ 2BA TRI LEVEL. Huge living/dining,

FP, 10-FT ceilings, CAC, skylts, hardwood floors, custom maple & granite kitch w/fam room. Jacuzzi, steamshwr, marble mstr bth, 2 lrg decks, W /D, garage space. $3895. 630-7174989.

CHICAGO, 65TH & Paulina.

Large 6 room apt, 3BR, Newly remodeled, enclosed back porch, $810 /mo. Call 708-545-5652

SLEEP RESEARCH, UP to $2300. Overweight age 21-40, sleeping 6.5 hours or less. Dr. Esra Tasali at University of Chicago. Further information, please email: sleepstudy@ uchicago.edu

fully developed Lots w/water and sewer connection for sale. Only $15,000 per lot. Call 815-469-8283

WE BUY HOUSES CASH Apts & Commercial foreclosures, any area, price or condition. We close fast! 708-506-2997

non-residential SELF-STORAGE CENTERS. T W O locations to serve you. All

legal notices

MARKETPLACE

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16145181 on January 21, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of MCMILLER COMMUNICATIONS with the business located at: PO BOX 12414, CHICAGO, IL 60612.

The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s) /partner(s) is: KRYSTAL MCMILLER 2333 W. MONROE CHICAGO, IL 60612, USA

GOODS

Dolton,

14511 Avalon, fully renov 3BR, 1BA, all appls incl, W/D, fully fin bsmt, fncd in yrd. A/C. CHA insp. Sec 8 ok. 773-317-4357

MATTESON, SAUK VILLAGE &

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499 near Northwestern, downtown Evanston, shops, restaurant, movies, el, Metra. large kitchens, spacious closets, laundry on premises, hardwood floors. Heat and appliances included.

4 bedrooms. Available. $2395. For appointment call 312-822-1037 weeekdays until 5:30pm, Saturdays to 3pm, Sundays to 2pm.

MESSAGES

units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue.

773-685-6868.

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NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16145049 on January 8, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of FOURLETTERHOME with the business located at: 780 S. FEDERAL #604, CHICAGO, IL 60605. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owners (s) /partner(s) is: AMY KRISTINE KALISKI, 780 S. FEDERAL #604, CHICAGO, IL 60605.

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NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to "An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State," as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16145140 on January 14, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of SB Carpentry Co with the business located at 4149 Eberly Ave, Brookfield, IL 60513. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/ partner(s) is: Safet Besirevic, 4149 Eberly Ave, Brookfield, IL 60513, USA

2442 E. 77th St. 2Bdrm Stainless Steel!! Appliances!! Hdwd flr!! marble bath!! laundry on site!!

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Addison #118. Available now-4/30 option to renew. Magnificent apartments, super light and airy, set off by a beautiful courtyard. Laundry room, storage lockers. Steps from the lake, steps from transportation and steps from shopping and recreation,. Resident engineer. 5/2 bedroom $1465.

Heat and appliances included. to see call 312-822-1037 weekdays until 5:30pm, Saturdays to 3pm and Sundays to 2pm.

MATTESON 2 & 3 BR AVAIL. 2BR, $990-$1050; 3BR, $1250-$1400.

Move In Special is 1 Month’s Rent & $99 Security Deposit. Section 8 Welcome. Call 708-748-4169 CHICAGO - 7008 S. MORGAN, 2 & 3BR, $650-750/mo, 7630 S Emerald 2BR $650. 1 mo sec + 1 mo rent, plus utilities. 773-8183340

SECTION 8 WELCOME 7334 S. Jeffery & 7620 S. Colfax New remodel, 2 Bedrooms, heat/appl incl. 312493-5544

COLLEGE GIRL BODY RUBS $40 w/AD 24/7

224-223-7787

JANUARY 28, 2016 | CHICAGO READER 35

STRAIGHT DOPE

BEST OFCHICAGO24-7 AT CHICAGOREADER.COM/BEST

36 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

Q : I recently learned that in India people clean up differently after going to the bathroom—pouring water down their backsides with one hand while cleaning themselves with the other. Toilet paper, I’m told, doesn’t even factor into the equation. What I want to know is: Which is better for us and for the environment? Should we, as Americans, be switching?

SLUG SIGNORINO

GET THE

By Cecil Adams

—ANONYMOUS, FOR OBVIOUS REASONS

A : Heck, they don’t just eschew toilet paper.

Many in India eschew toilets altogether, with 67 percent of rural households reporting, in a 2011 survey, defecation en plein air. Part of the Indian style of relieving oneself stems from a lack of widespread indoor plumbing, sure, but the water method isn’t just about not having toilets that can handle Western-style TP; using water rather than tissue to clean one’s parts is common in plenty of places that have the economic wherewithal to afford sturdy sewage systems—Japan, for instance. So your question’s a good one: What are they on to? And should we be taking cues?

The stakes aren’t low. As of 2009, Americans were using 36 million rolls of the stuff each year, something on the order of 15 million trees. Recycled material’s fine if you don’t mind a slightly scratchy experience, but popular ultrasoft varieties require tree fiber—some of it from old-growth forests.

(Less than 2 percent of toilet tissue sold for in-home use in the U.S. is made from 100 percent recycled paper.) This isn’t the only way that TP is problematic, environmentally speaking. Scientific American reported that, trees aside, U.S. TP consumption requires, per annum, 473 billion gallons of water, 253,000 tons of chlorine (for bleaching; this can have harmful downstream effects on the immune and reproductive systems of wildlife), and 17.3 terawatts of energy. That’s some footprint.

The obvious alternative is the bidet—historically a stand-alone fixture, but increasingly available as an electronically controlled add-on to an existing toilet bowl. Let’s assume that, given the environmental impact of TP, bidet use is probably better for the planet. But is it better for the body?

Alas, the scientific world is not flush with information regarding health and bidet

usage. A 2011 paper out of South Korea reported that, at the correct setting, the electronic bidet could reduce anorectal pressure in people experiencing conditions such as fissures or hemorrhoids. But researchers seem keener to demonstrate its potential for improving the lives of elderly or disabled people, for whom wiping might be a challenge:

• A 2007 study found that an electronic bidet could be used by patients with spinal-cord injury to successfully induce bowel movement.

• In 1995 the Brunel Institute for

Bioengineering introduced to the world the “Port-a-Bidet,” which people with disabilities could tote around to ease the experience of going to the bathroom away from home.

• A preliminary report in the journal

Gerontologist suggests that “wash-anddry” toilets may improve resident comfort and cleanliness in nursing homes.

• A Yale infectious-disease specialist has

proposed that bidets may help prevent urinary tract infections in the elderly.

On the other hand, a 2010 study of subjects in Japan, where bidet usage is common, linked regular warm-water cleansing with the aggravation of vaginal microflora. And you’ll thank me for not describing the pictures published in a case study of an elderly patient’s perianal burns, caused by an excessively hot stream.

So, a mixed bag. We should note that in some places where water is involved, the prevailing toilet design is different from the

American style—more of a hole that the user squats over. Here there’s a clearer benefit: the simple act of squatting, as opposed to sitting, requires less straining on the part of the defecator—an easier experience all around, plus it may reduce hemorrhoid risk.

In a public-facilities setting, there’s also the obvious hygienic plus of not coming into contact with a seat that’s touched more asses than you’ll find at a Kenny Chesney concert.

Why haven’t Americans gone in for the bidet thus far? It might have to do with good old American exceptionalism. Like the hydrogen bomb and the Big Gulp, toilet paper is a proud U.S. invention, whereas it was the decadent French who brought us the bidet.

(The word bidet, by the by, originally translated as “pony”—a reference to what one looks like astride the thing.)

Things may be changing, but in both directions. On the one hand, there’s U.S. defecatory imperialism: we’re TPing the globe, as increasing usage in Brazil and China accounts for more of the toilet paper revenue picture overall.

On the other hand, last year the New York Times published not one but two articles about nascent American enthusiasm for a particularly high-tech line of Japanese bidet toilet seats, the Toto Washlet series, tricked out with heaters and dryers and pulsating sprayers. Toto (which recently opened a $60 million toilet museum back in Japan) has apparently dialed up its sales push in LA, Chicago, Boston, and New York, hoping to finally establish a U.S. beachhead. Who knows? It might end up finding a solid market here after all. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Sounding for beginners

WORLD FAMOUS

If that’s what you’re into, here’s how to do it safely.

Q : Down to business:

Christmas came and went, and every present I bought for my extraordinary husband could be opened in front of our children.

He deserves better, and I have a particular gift in mind for Valentine’s Day. My husband has expressed an interest in sounding, something we’ve attempted only with my little finger.

He seemed to enjoy it! But the last thing I want to do is damage his big beautiful dick. So is sounding a fun thing? Is sounding a safe thing? Recommendations for a beginner’s sounding kit?

Or should I scrap the idea and just get him another butt plug? —SAFETY OF SOUNDING PS: Here is a picture of the big beautiful dick I don’t want to damage.

A : Sounding, for those of

you who didn’t go to the same Sunday school I did, involves the insertion of smooth metal or plastic rods into the urethra. Sounding is sometimes done for legitimate medical purposes (to open up a constricted urethra, to locate a blockage), and it’s sometimes done for legitimate erotic purposes (some find the sensation pleasurable, and others are turned on by the transgression, particularly when a man is being sounded, i.e., the penetrator’s penetrator penetrated).

So, yeah, some people definitely think sounding is a fun thing, SOS. “But whether or not something is a safe thing depends on knowledge of the risks/ pitfalls and an observance of proper technique,” said Dr. Keith D. Newman, a urologist and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons. “The urethral lining has the consistency of wet paper towels

and can be damaged easily, producing scarring. And the male urethra takes a bend just before the prostate.

Negotiating that bend takes talent, and that’s where most sounding injuries occur.”

Recreational cock sounders—particularly newbies— shouldn’t attempt to push past that bend. But how do you know when you’ve arrived at it?

“SOS’s partner should do the inserting initially,” said Dr. Newman, “as the bend in the urethra is easily recognized by the soundee. Once he is clear on his cues—once he understands the sensations, what works, and when the danger areas are reached— SOS can participate safely with insertion.”

And cleanliness matters, SOS, whether you’re sounding the husband or serving burritos to the public.

“Infection is always an issue,” said Dr. Newman.

“Clean is good, but the closer to sterile the better. And be careful about fingers. They can be more dangerous than sounds because of the nails and difficulty in sterilizing.”

So for the record, SOS: Your previous attempts at sounding—those times you jammed your little finger into your husband’s piss slit—were more dangerous than the sounding you’ll be doing with the lovely set of stainless-steel sounding rods you’ll be giving your hubby on Valentine’s Day. Moving on . . .

“Spit is not lube,” said Dr. Newman. “Water- or silicone-based lubes are good; oil-based is not so good with metal instruments.” Speakng of which, using “glass or other breakable instruments” as sounds is a Very Bad Idea. Dr. Newman was pretty emphatic on this point—and while it sounds like a fairly obvious one, anyone who’s

SEE ALL OF ME at

worked in an ER can tell you horror stories about all the Very Bad Ideas they’ve retrieved.

Now let’s go shopping!

“Choosing the best ‘starter kit’ is not hard: Pratt dilators are not hard to find online, they’re not that expensive, and they will last a lifetime,” said Dr. Newman. (I found a set of Pratt dilators on Amazon for less than $30.) And when your set arrives, SOS, don’t make the common mistake of starting with the smallest/skinniest sound in the pack. “Inserting something too small allows wiggle room on the way in, hence the potential to stab the urethral wall,” said Dr. Newman.

The doc’s next safety tip will make sense after you’ve seen a set of Pratt dilators: “Always keep the inserted curve facing one’s face, meaning the visible, external curve facing away toward one’s back.”

Your husband’s butt should be plug-free during your sounding sessions, SOS, as a plug could compress a section of his urethra. If you’re skilled enough to work around the bend—or if you’re foolish enough to push past it—the sound could puncture his compressed urethra. And a punctured urethra is every bit as unpleasant as it sounds.

Finally, SOS, what about coming? Will your husband’s balls explode if he blows a load while a metal rod is stuffed in his urethra?

“Coming with the sound in place is a matter of personal preference,” said Dr. Newman. “There is no particular danger involved.”

PS: Thank you for the picture. v

ADMIRAL ★★ THEATRE ★★ LAWRENCE & PULASKI

ADMIRALX.COM OPEN TIL 6AM

Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at thestranger.com. v @fakedansavage

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 37

b Yung Lean 3/26, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall b

UPDATED Chvrches 3/13-14, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 3/13 is sold out, 3/14 added, 18+

UPCOMING

Black Lips ! PARADIGM AGENCY

NEW

Amon Amarth, Entombed A.D. 5/5, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM b At the Drive-In 5/19, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM b Roy Ayers 2/23-24, 8 PM, the Promontory, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM Banners 3/1, 6:30 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM b Big Pink 3/7, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Biz Markie 3/24, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Black Lips 2/28, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires 4/28, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM, 17+ Brian Jonestown Massacre 5/13, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM, 18+ Cactus Blossoms 2/27, 9 PM, Hideout Larry Campbell 4/13, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM b Tommy Castro & the Painkillers 4/16, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 1/29, 11 AM Andrea Centazzo 3/12, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Rhys Chatham 5/20, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Jon Cleary & the Absolute Monster Gentlemen 2/20, 9 PM, Wire, Berwyn, 18+ Fred Eaglesmith’s Traveling Steam Show 4/1, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 1/29, 11 AM The Falcon 4/8, 8 PM, Double Door, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM Geographer, Crookes 4/10, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM

Nikki Giovanni & Morris Gearring 7/10, 3 and 6 PM, the Promontory Gogol Bordello 3/3-23, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 1/29, noon, 18+ Vivian Green 3/11, 7:30 and 10 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/28, noon b Issues, Crown the Empire, One OK Rock 4/18, 5:45 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM b Eilen Jewell 5/8, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/28, noon b Jon Wayne & the Pain 4/15, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Joy Formidable, Everything Everything 4/6, 8:30 PM, Double Door, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM, 18+ Konshens, Trina 2/5, 10 PM, the Shrine La Sera 5/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM Laid Back Festival with Gregg Allman 7/16, 4 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion b Lazyeyes 3/24, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Local H 4/15, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 1/29, noon Michael McDermott 3/12, 7:30 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/28, noon b Moderat 5/21, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Mud Morganfield 2/19, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 1/29, 11 AM Joey Muha 3/30, 6:30 PM, Wire, Berwyn b Music Frozen Dancing with Black Lips, the Spits, Meat Wave, and more 2/27, 1 PM, Empty Bottle Fb Naughty by Nature 2/20, 9 PM, House of Blues, 17+ George Perris 4/27, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 1/28, noon b

38 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016

Red Elvises 6/10, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 1/29, 11 AM Residents 4/18, 6:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM, 17+ Jeff Rosenstock 2/17, 6:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b Rufus Du Sol 4/9, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Say Anything, Mewithoutyou 5/6, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Silento, ILoveMemphis, Dlow 3/19, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Sat 1/30, 10 AM Sting, Peter Gabriel 7/9, 8 PM, United Center, on sale Mon 2/1, 10 AM Subways 4/22, 9 PM, Schubas Tauk 4/2, 10 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 1/29, noon, 18+ Teddy Thompson, Kelly Jones 4/11, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM b Jeff Tweedy 5/13-14, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 1/29, noon b Unknown Mortal Orchestra 5/10, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM, 17+ Amy Vachal 3/22, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM b M. Ward 6/16, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM, 17+ Gin Wigmore 4/13, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM, 17+ Wild Feathers 4/15, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM, 17+ Windy City Lakeshake with Lady Antebellum, Tim McGraw, Jason Aldean, Martina McBride, Travis Tritt, and more 6/17-19, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 1/29, 10 AM X-Clan, Brand Nubian 2/20, 9 PM, the Promontory

Abbath, High on Fire, Skeletonwitch 4/8, 6:45 PM, Metro, 18+ All Dogs 4/9, 6:30 PM, Subterranean b Aurora 4/14, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Beacon 2/4, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Black Mountain 5/12, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall David Bromberg Quintet 2/24, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Chon, Polyphia 3/25, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Coheed & Cambria, Glassjaw 2/26, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom Cradle of Filth 3/1, 6 PM, House of Blues b Dawn of Midi 4/7, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Howie Day 2/25-26, 8 PM, City Winery b Dengue Fever 4/24, 8 PM, Schubas Fetty Wap, Post Malone 2/17, 6 PM, House of Blues b Future, Ty Dolla $ign 2/18, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ Ellie Goulding 5/6, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont b Hatebreed, Devildriver 5/14, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Judah & the Lion 3/25, 8 PM, Metro b Jennifer Nettles, Brandy Clark, Lindsay Eli 3/18, 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino, Hammond Sarah Neufeld 4/6, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Never Shout Never 2/5, 6:15 PM, House of Blues b Nicky Jam 4/1, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ Nields 4/2, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Heather Nova 4/12, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Oneida 3/13, 9 PM, Empty Bottle A Palo Seco 2/23, 8 PM, City Winery b Graham Parker Duo, Brinsley Schwarz 4/22, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Penny & Sparrow 4/1, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Peter & the Test Tube Babies 4/2, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Pig Destroyer 4/8, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Noam Pikelny 2/18, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Polica 4/16, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Ron Pope & the Nighthawks 2/26, 6:30 PM, Metro b

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

F

Never miss a show again.

Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Prince Rama 4/8, 10 PM, Schubas Joe Purdy 3/22, 8 PM, City Winery b Chris Pureka 4/30, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b William Singe 2/16, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Skizzy Mars 2/19, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall b Slaves 4/4, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Slayer, Testament, Carcass 2/19-20, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 2/19 sold out b Unearth, Ringworm 3/22, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Wolfmother 2/25, 8:30 PM, Metro, 18+ Woods, Ultimate Painting 4/23, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Pete Yorn 3/24, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Chris Young, Cassadee Pope 2/4, 7:30 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont b Young Fathers 3/26, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+

SOLD OUT AC/DC 2/17, 7:30 PM, United Center Courtney Barnett 4/28, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Beach House 3/1, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Chevy Metal 2/20-21, 9 PM, Metro, sold out, 18+ Gary Clark Jr. 4/1, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ The Cure, Twilight Sad 6/10-11, 7:30 PM, UIC Pavilion b Daughter 3/11, 8 PM, Metro b Greg Dulli 3/18, 8 and 11 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Julia Holter 3/2, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Carly Rae Jepsen 3/12, 8:30 PM, Metro b Less Than Jake 3/3-4, 7 PM, Double Door, 17+ Melanie Martinez 3/17, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Rachel Platten 3/19, 7:30 PM, Park West b Charlie Puth 3/22, 7 PM, Park West b Shellac, Mono 3/30, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ They Might Be Giants 3/20, 3 PM, the Vic b Thrice 6/23, 6:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Underoath 4/7, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b X Ambassadors 4/6, 6 PM, House of Blues b v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene LOCAL MULTI-INSTRUMENTALIST and composer Ben Miranda, who died in November, was a beloved jack-of-alltrades. Not only did he play bass for electro-pop weirdos Detholz!, he was also a Web developer, armchair scientist, motorcycle nut, and pantomime magician with a talent for making people laugh. As a tribute to Miranda’s annual Groundhog Day parties, his pals are throwing a show at the Hideout on Sun 1/31 that includes a reunited Detholz! (with keyboardist Jon Steinmeier on bass), Ami Saraiya & the Outcome, a group led by Josh Berman, and a rotating-cast “house band” playing Miranda’s own songs—plus the traditional screening of the classic 1993 screwball comedy Groundhog Day. The soulful Caribbean dance night Feel the Rhythm should be more, um, rocksteady—the previous installment was all the way back in September! The F.T.R. crew—DJs E.N.G., Sonido Tritón, and Bryan “Selektah” Martin—spin vintage 45s of 1960s reggae and Jamaican soul (from “before it went ‘rasta and/or mainstream,’” they say) on Sat 1/30 at Crown Tap Room in Logan Square. Gossip Wolf thinks F.T.R. gives Windy City Soul Club a run for its dancing-shoe money!

Chicago postpunk outfit Ganser have big plans for 2016. They aim to drop their first physical release, the three-song cassette Audrey, and take a brief Pacific Northwest tour in the spring linked to festivals in Portland and Vancouver. To cover travel and recording costs, they’ve launched a Kickstarter that doubles as a way to preorder merch—tapes, T-shirts, posters, and more. The campaign closes Sun 2/14, and the details are at bit.ly/ga_k.

On Sun 1/31 at 2 PM, join Gossip Wolf’s very own J.R. Nelson at the Chicago Athletic Association for a talk with Tim Kinsella! Prepare for an exceptional discussion about Chicago’s music and literary communities. It’s part of CAA’s Storytelling series, and it’s free with RSVP at bit. ly/caa_ss. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

JANUARY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 39

40 CHICAGO READER - JANUARY 28, 2016 © 2016 Goose Island Beer Co., Goose IPA®, India Pale Ale, Chicago, IL, Baldwinsville, NY, & Fort Collins, CO | Enjoy responsibly.