Print Issue of February 2, 2017 (Volume 46, Number 17) by Chicago Reader

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

The Park District tees up the Obama Presidential Golf Course. 18 ShowYouSuck builds on his omnivorous hip-hop with a free-form TV show. 27

POLICE in the ACADEMY More than 240 cops roam the halls of Chicago’s public schools with no special training and little oversight—including some accused of harming children. By YANA KUNICHOFF OF CITY BUREAU 12

ALL-NEW 2017 SHOW WITH LIVE ORCHESTRA

Connecting Heaven and Earth

“

I’ve reviewed about 4,000 shows. None can compare to what I saw tonight.”

—Richard Connema, renowned Broadway critic

“Absolutely the No.1 show in the world. No other company or of any style can match this!” — Kenn Wells, former lead dancer of the English National Ballet

“Absolutely the greatest of the great!

It must be experienced.”

—Christine Walevska, “goddess of the cello”, watched Shen Yun 5 times

“This is the highest and best of what humans can produce.” —Oleva Brown-Klahn, singer and musician

“AWE-INSPIRING!”

—

“The 8th wonder of the world. People have no idea what they're missing until they come here and see the show.”

—Joe Heard, former White House photographer, watched Shen Yun 6 times

FEB 11-19

HARRIS THEATER

205 E Randolph Dr., Chicago, IL 60601 2 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

Feb 11, Sat 2:00pm & 7:30pm Feb 12, Sun 1:00pm Feb 16, Thu 7:30pm

ORDER TODAY!

Sold out in many cities across the country. Feb 17, Fri 7:30pm Feb 18, Sat 2:00pm & 7:30pm Feb 19, Sun 1:00pm

Tickets ShenYun.com/Chicago 888-99-SHOWS (74697)

THIS WEEK

C H I C AG O R E A D E R | F E B R UA RY 2 , 2 01 7 | VO LU M E 4 6 , N U M B E R 1 7

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN SENIOR WRITERS MICHAEL MINER, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI EDITORIAL ASSISTANT CASSIDY RYAN CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, DERRICK CLIFTON, MATT DE LA PEÑA, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, DMITRY SAMAROV, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS AUSTIN BROWN, ISABEL OCHOA GOLD, RACHEL HINTON, JACK LADD, ABBEY SCHUBERT

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE 24 Movies Raoul Peck’s documentary I Am Not Your Negro chronicles the civil rights years of author James Baldwin.

4 Agenda Stand-up from Theo Von, Weegee photos at Corbett vs. Dempsey, contributors to Chicago Is Not Broke: Funding the City We Deserve at Quimbys, the Iranian ﬁlm Lantouri at Siskel Center, and more recommended things to do

JUVENILE JUSTICE

Police in the academy

CITY LIFE

More than 240 cops roam the halls of Chicago’s public schools with no special training and little oversight— including some accused of harming children. BY YANA KUNICHOFF OF CITY BUREAU 12

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FOOD & DRINK

37 Restaurant review: Won

Fun The Bar Marta crew approximates the food of the Sichuan Province—and introduces 2Fun, a lounge with karaoke and tropical drinks.

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11 Transportation How would plans for a new skyscraper aﬀect service at Clark/Lake?

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ON THE COVER: PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY READER CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS.

32 Shows of note Sampha, Drive-By Truckers, 24hrs, and more 33 The Secret History of Chicago Music Blues pianist Little Brother Montgomery inﬂuenced legends as diverse as Skip James and Johnny Cash.

8 Chicagoans Meet Chicago’s meat photographer. 10 Joravsky | Politics As Trump rampages, Chicago and Illinois remain broke and dysfunctional.

VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT NICKI STANULA VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES FABIO CAVALIERI, ARIANA DIAZ, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD

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MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

ShowYouSuck builds on his omnivorous hip-hop with a free-form TV show

In just a few months, the eager collaborator has launched Air Credits with the Hood Internet and Good Luck Hunting on JBTV. BY LEOR GALIL 27

ARTS & CULTURE

18 Development What will the Obama library bring to the south side? 19 Theater Defining Rhinofest, “Chicago’s longest running fringe festival” 20 Theater Don’t belive the hype about Goodman’s Gloria. 22 Visual Art Block Museum kicks off a season of urgent art with Kader Attia’s “Reflecting Memory.”

CLASSIFIEDS

40 Jobs 40 Apartments & Spaces 41 Marketplace

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44 Straight Dope Has the incidence of PTSD increased over time? 45 Savage Love Dan takes questions from across the pond. 46 Early Warnings Willis Earl Beal, Heatwave, Bob Mould, Miranda Lambert at Windy City Lakeshake, and other shows in the weeks to come 46 Gossip Wolf The Love Lion label releases a cassette of vintage gospel to beneﬁt Black Lives Matter, and more music news.

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

AGENDA R

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

Send your events to agenda@chicagoreader.com

F aspiring rock star Barry—played by Caitlin Jackson and Nick Druzbanski, respectively—whose love story is set to German-inﬂuenced “tone poems.” —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 3/5: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 6 PM; also Mon 2/6 and 2/20, 8 PM, Refuge Records, 1415 N. Ashland, refugetheatre.com, $30.

CONCE R T Saturday, February 4 at 7:30pm CIVIC OPERA HOUSE Earthquakes in London o LEE MILLER

The biggest night in Chicago music! Renée Fleming ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

Classical

Shemekia Copeland CHICAGO

Blues

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater Cabaret Prop’d Accompanied by a different band each week, a rotating cast of storytellers, tap dancers, burlesque feather dancers, comedians, and poets test out material and perform laid-back short-form sets in this late-night variety show. At the performance I attended, the Rocombu Jazz band, led by “growl” trumpeter Yves François, filled most of the two acts with a concert of groovy rumba songs and New Orleans-style brass numbers. Generous time slots and the emcee’s discursive crowd work make for a long haul, but there are some glimmers of traditional cabaret fun. And it wouldn’t be Rhinofest without at least one quintessentially off-kilter feature: according to Curious Theatre Branch’s website calendar, the Crooked Mouth’s set (2/17) will be “folksy and Brechtian.” —DAN JAKES Through 2/24: Fri 9 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-539-7838, rhinofest.com, $12 in advance, $15 or pay what you can at the door. Cymbeline ShakeR speare’s tragicomedy, though seldom performed,

Michelle Williams ROCKFORD

Pop/R&B/Gospel

4 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

contains some of the greatest moments, and the second-most beautiful song, of the late romantic phase that culminated in The Tempest. Strawdog Theatre’s adaptation, directed by Robert Kauzlaric, sorts through the play’s dense web of cunning betrayals and mistaken identities with admirable precision. It’s also inexplicably funny. As Cloten, Gage

Wallace is an exquisite ham, but so is his character, a prancing prince bent both on honor he’ll never deserve and praises he’ll never receive. The death and resurrection of Imogen is a notorious crux for actors, but the scene is carried oﬀ with great success by Daniella Pereira. —MAX MALLER Through 2/25: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 4 PM, the Factory Theater, 1623 W. Howard, strawdog.org, $30. Earthquakes in London Mike R Bartlett’s dazzling play, making its U.S. premiere at Steep, is about our

attempt—as all-too-human creatures with puny brains—to come to grips with the end of the world. Directed by Jonathan Berry, the story is set on the eve of a seismic phenomenon so massive that it threatens to destroy human civilization. Swirling through the mass of bodies (it’s a 15-person cast in a tiny space) are a British family of four: Robert (Jim Poole), renowned climatologist and estranged father, and his three daughters, workaholic Sarah (Cindy Marker), 19-year-old hot mess Jasmine (Sarah Price), and pregnant, paranoid Freya (Lucy Carapetyan). As they try out their varied and equally pathetic tactics against disaster—cosmic despair, science, getting high, political activism—they beautifully convey our frailty in the face of forces too big to comprehend. —MAX MALLER Through 3/4: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Steep Theatre, 1115 W. Berwyn, 312-4580722, steeptheatre.com, $10-$35.

Norma Bellini’s tragedia lirica, ﬁrst performed in 1831, is an old-fashioned, stand-and-sing bel canto opera, and nothing in this Lyric Opera production, directed by Kevin Newbury, changes its static nature. The libretto is a melodrama about a love triangle between two Druid priestesses and a Roman occupier in 50 BC; Lyric’s supporting cast, clearly chosen for their outstanding vocal talent, aren’t much help in the acting department; and sets, costumes, and props (including a giant ox and a hacked-oﬀ tree), said to be inspired by Game of Thrones, are pedestrian. In short, it doesn’t work as theater. But the opera remains a marathon showpiece for the lead singer, and Lyric’s Norma— Berwyn native turned international diva Sondra Radvanovsky—is up to the task. She dominates, physically and aurally, captivating the house with a powerful, butterscotch soprano and caressing the high notes into silky whispers. —DEANNA ISAACS Through 2/24: Wed 2/1, 7:30 PM; Sun 2/5, 2 PM; Thu 2/9, 2 PM; Mon 2/13, 7:30 PM; Sat 2/18, 7:30; Fri 2/24, 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker, 312-332-2244, civicoperahouse.com, $19-$369. Saturday Night Fever: The Musical Adapted from the 1977 hit movie, this stage version manages to be even more empty, shallow, and cliche-clotted than the original. Tony Manero’s story— blue-collar kid with strong dancing skills gets a classy girlfriend and the courage to move out of his working-class neighborhood—only makes sense if you’ve seen the original. All of the gaps in the book, and there are many, are concealed by energetic cover versions of the popular (in its time, overplayed) soundtrack. These reinterpretations are fun, but, as in the original, they don’t advance the plot or deepen the characters. More successful are Rachel Laritz’s eye-pleasing, historically accurate

costumes and director Dan Knechtges’s inventive choreography; Adrian Aguilar is extremely likable as Manero. —JACK HELBIG Through 3/19: Wed 1:30 PM, Thu 1:30 and 8 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 5 and 8:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM (2 PM only 2/5), Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace, 100 Drury Ln., Oakbrook Terrace, 630-530-0111, drurylaneoakbrook.com, $45-$60. Thinking Outside the Magician’s Box Curious Theatre Branch describes the ramiﬁcations of cutting a woman in half—the central theme of this chamber opera—as “pataphysical,” an indication of the extreme eccentricity of Sue Cargill and Matt Test’s amelodic and absurdist work. Don’t expect a lot of toe tapping, but do expect a wry and occasionally hypnotic half hour of singing, seemingly improvised piano plunking, and musical-saw bowing by Carrie Drapac, T-Roy Martin, and Test. Comedic thought experiments about performance and lyrics about ﬂeas provide all of the head scratching, grandiosity, and esoterica that are the staples of unabashedly experimental opera. —DAN JAKES Through 2/25: Sat 7 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-539-7838, propthtr.org, $12 in advance, $15 or pay what you can at the door. Wit The power of Margaret R Edson’s moving Pulitzer-winning play lies in how skillfully she avoids both

melodrama and steely reportage as she reveals the story of Vivian Bearing, a brittle but brilliant academic, suﬀering through chemo and stage IV ovarian cancer. Marti Lyons’s staging for the Hypocrites echoes the cool intimacy of the script, turning the performing space into a medical theater (seats on sides, the patients in the center) that at once draws the audience in and holds them at a distance. Likewise, Lisa Tejero delivers a virtuosic performance as Bearing, a perfect balance of razor-sharp intellect and expanding heart—watching her ﬁght for a life she had not hitherto fully experienced is both devastating and redemptive. —JACK HELBIG Through 2/19: Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Thu 2/9 and 2/16, 8 PM, Den Theatre, 1329-1333 N. Milwaukee, 773-609-2336, the-hypocrites.com, $36.

High Fidelity Refuge Theatre R Project reprises its rocking 2016 production of this 2006 Broadway musical in a new pop-up “Refuge Records” location, ﬁlled with record crates and concert posters. Mopey main character Rob has already been solidiﬁed in the pop culture lexicon, thanks to Nick Hornby’s novel and John Cusack’s subsequent turn onscreen, but original Refuge star Max DeTogne provides an earnest and charming performance. Most of the inaugural cast remains, and the continuity enhances the romantic comedy’s humor, heartbreak, and eventual happy ending. There’s a standout subplot involving best friend Liz and

Cymbeline o TOM MCGRATH

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of February 2

DANCE

Belmont, 773-709-1401, hungrybrainchicago.com.

Deeply Rooted Dance Theater R R Chicago’s Deeply Rooted Dance performs a love-themed program of modern, ballet, and African dance to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Sat 2/4, 7:30 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie, Skokie, 847-673-6300, northshorecenter.org, $22-$38.

Giordano Dance Chicago R The jazz company presents a collection of past works followed by

a ballroom dance lesson for audience members. Sat 2/4, 7:30 PM, McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, 425 Fawell, Glen Ellyn, 630-942-4000, giordanodance.org, $39-$49.

COMEDY

Funny Grabs Back! Pinwheel R Records and the Ladylike Project host this comedy show featuring Kristen

Lundberg, Lisa Peters, Sonal Aggarwal, Becca Brown, and Elizabeth Gomez. All proceeds beneﬁt Family Rescue, an organization dedicated to eliminating domestic violence in Chicago. Fri 2/3, 8 PM, Pinwheel Records, 1722 W. 18th, $5.

Theo Von Writer and comedian Theo Von visits Chicago Improv for a night of stand-up. Von hosts TBS’s hidden camera show Deal With It as well as the Yahoo webseries Primetime in No Time. 2/2-2/4: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 and 10:15 PM, Sat 7 and 9:15 PM, Chicago Improv, 5 Woodﬁeld, Schaumburg, 847240-2001, chicago.improv.com, $22.

VISUAL ARTS

local artists with music from DJ Daniel Villarreal. Sat 2/4, 7-10:30 PM. 1545 W. 18th, 312-401-6344, eighteenthstreet.org. Northwestern University Block Museum of Art “If You Remember, I’ll Remember,” a collection of historical documents, photographs, sound recordings, and more examining war, internment, resistance, and civil rights movements in 19th- and 20th-century America. Opening reception Sat 2/4, 10 AM-4 PM. 2/4-6/18. Wed-Fri 10 AM-8 PM, Sat-Sun noon-5 PM. 40 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston, 847-491-4000, blockmuseum. northwestern.edu.

Arc Gallery “Seeing Red,” artists interpret what the color red means to them, whether it be emotional, political, or metaphorical. Opening reception Fri 2/3, 6-9 PM. 2/2-2/25. Wed-Sat noon-6 PM, Sun noon-4 PM. 2156 N. Damen, 773252-2232, arcgallery.org.

Vertical Gallery “Eat Crap King,” Hebru Brantley explores the personal and artistic relationship between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Opening reception Sat 2/4, 6-10 PM. 2/4-2/25. Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM. 1016 N. Western, 773-697-3846, verticalgallery.com.

Shane Campbell Gallery “Sueños Eróticos,” paintings by Alex Becerra. Opening reception Sat 2/4, 1-3 PM. 2/4-3/18. Wed-Sat noon-6 PM. 2021 S. Wabash, 312-226-2223, shanecampbellgallery.com.

LIT

Corbett vs. Dempsey “Supplements, Models, Prototypes,” a solo exhibit of Christopher Williams’s photographs. Opening reception Fri 2/3, 6-8 PM. 2/33/11. Tue-Sat 10 AM-5 PM. “Bettie Page,” black-and-white images from iconic street photographer Weegee. Opening reception Fri 2/3, 6-8 PM. 2/3-3/11. TueSat 10 AM-5 PM. 1120 N. Ashland, third ﬂoor, 773-278-1664, corbettvsdempsey. com.

Chicago Is Not Broke Chicago R Is Not Broke: Funding the City We Deserve explores where revenue

can be found for progressive and sustainability-oriented projects in Chicago. Contributors to the collection speak at Quimby’s on their research, civic policy, and the conversations they hope the book inspires. Wed 2/8, 7 PM, Quimby’s Bookstore, 1854 W. North, 773-342-0910, quimbys.com. Patricia Muth The author R discusses her book A Title in the Making: Perot Movement Laid the Foun-

dation to Take Back America. Where Do We Go From Here? Sat 2/4, 6 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-293-2665, bookcellarinc.com.

Kirsten Lundberg in Funny Grabs Back! House of Laughs Access ChicaR go Realty hosts a night of comedy featuring Kelsie Huﬀ, Cameron Gillette, Dale McPeek, and Tim McLaughlin. All proceeds beneﬁt Inspiration Kitchens. Fri 2/3, 7:30 PM, Access Chicago Realty, 2256 W. North, $5-$20 suggested donation.

The Kates on Broadway Kelsie R Huﬀ hosts a night of comedy with the Kates, an all-female comedy show-

case committed to highlighting talented female-identifying performers. Thu 2/2, 8 PM, Laugh Factory, 3175 N. Broadway, 773-327-3175, laughfactory.com, $20, $17 in advance. The Therapy Sessions Seth R Vanek hosts a singer, a speaker, and a listener to discuss their work sur-

rounding this month’s theme, “dreams.” Thu 2/2, 8 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W.

Weegee, Bettie Page, 1955, on view at Corbett vs. Dempsey Andrew Sartori Hyde Park Art Center “Precariat,” a group exhibition of photographs, sculptures, installations, and paintings responding to identity, social issues, and activism. Reception Sun 2/26, 3-5 PM. 2/5-3/12. Mon-Thu 9 AM-8 PM, Fri-Sat 9 AM-5 PM, Sun noon-5 PM. 5020 S. Cornell, 773-324-5520, hydeparkart.org. La Luz Gallery “Pilsen Art Expo,” an exhibition of installations, paintings, drawings, and live demonstrations by

Andrew Sartori Critical R Historical Studies releases its newest issue and CHS editor and author Andrew Sartori discusses intellectual history on the global scale. Fri 2/3, 6 PM, Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn, 773-752-4381, semcoop.com.

Michael Tisserand The author R discusses his book Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White, a

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

biography of the cartoonist best known for Krazy Kat. Thu 2/2, 6 PM, Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn, 773752-4381, semcoop.com. Tuesday Funk This monthly R reading series features eclectic works by local writers. February’s lineup

includes Deborah Siegel, Leonard Zawadski, Jenn Sodini, Molly Dumbleton, and Keidra Chaney. Tue 2/7, 7:30 PM, Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark, 773-334-9851, tuesdayfunk.org.

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/movies

Don’t miss an incredible roster of artists as we salute legendary Chicago vocalists of every genre in an unforgettable multimedia concert experience.

Kurt Elling CHICAGO

Jazz

NEW REVIEWS Alone in Berlin Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson play a Berlin couple so traumatized by the death of their son in the Nazi assault on France that they begin surreptitiously leaving anti-Hitler postcards all over the city. Watching this story unfold in English, with British stars, is a little weird, but you know the old saying: to the victor belongs the movie rights. Naturally Gleeson and Thompson portray their working-class German characters as sober, sexless, and socially conservative; with their joyless secret mission, they’re as gray and resolute as the regime they’re hoping to overturn. Daniel Brühl easily wrests the movie away from them in his B-story scenes as a cowardly Gestapo officer whose insufficient zeal in finding the culprits gets him stomped by the SS. Vincent Perez directed a script he and other hands adapted from Hans Fallada’s much-filmed 1947 novel Every Man Dies Alone, based on the true story of Otto and Elise Hampel. —J.R. JONES 103 min. Fri 2/10, 2 and 6 PM; Sat 2/11, 4:15 PM; Sun 2/12, 5:30 PM; Mon 2/13, 8:30 PM; Tue 2/14, 6 PM; Wed 2/15, 8:30 PM; and Thu 2/16, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center The Comedian A grouchy old stand-up comic (Robert De Niro), still living off the fumes of his 80s sitcom, assaults an audience member during a show and becomes the star of a viral video. The attack also gets him sentenced to community service; working at a soup kitchen, he meets cute with another offender (Leslie Mann) and introduces her to the world of stand-up. De Niro famously played a wacko comedian in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1983), but that was really a horror movie; director Taylor Hackford (Ray) pitches this film as a drama with comic moments, but De Niro is too loud and overbearing to be W

John Prine MAYWOOD

Folk Singer/ Songwriter

Jessie Mueller CHICAGO

Broadway

AND MANY MORE!

Tickets from $39 Renée LYRICOPERA.ORG Fleming ARTISTIC DIRECTOR 312.827.5600 Classical FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 5

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B funny (besides, there are only so many laughs you can get when moviegoers remember you taking a bite out of someone’s face). Veteran producer Art Linson, author of the Tinseltown memoir What Just Happened?, came up with the story, and the cast is well fortiﬁed with talented old-timers (Danny DeVito, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Keitel, Edie Falco, Billy Crystal, Charles Grodin). —J.R. JONES R, 120 min. ArcLight Chicago, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Crown Village 18 Hunter Gatherer By turns R whimsical and touching, this intimate character study (2016)

stars the versatile Andre Royo (HBO’s The Wire) as a struggling, middle-aged ex-con. Dumped by his girlfriend and living with his mother, he’s a natty hustler overly confident of his persuasive powers. His chance meeting with a sweet-tempered young man earning money as a medical test subject (George Sample III) leads to their partnership as refrigerator salvagers and to the older man’s hooking up with the younger’s curvaceous aunt (Kellee Stewart), not the smartest move for someone trying to win back his ex-flame. Writer-director Joshua Locy makes his attractive cast even more so by setting them against the burnished glow of some Greater Los Angeles locations that feel fresh and authentic. —ANDREA GRONVALL 88 min. Facets Cinematheque Julieta Pedro Almodóvar adapts a trio of Alice Munro stories sharing the same protagonist, a shy classics scholar who never finds true love with a man and who spends her middle age wondering why her only daughter abandoned her. She may sound like a perfect heroine for Almodóvar, who loves strong, mature, troubled women, but he can’t resist the urge to glamorize her; played as a young woman by the darkly beautiful Adriana Ugarte and in middle age by Emma Suárez, the title character seems better suited to a Douglas Sirk melodrama than to Munro’s modest, plainspoken world. Almodóvar makes a game effort to replicate Munro’s complex, nonchronological storytelling, though the three tales don’t hang together as well as one might hope, largely because there’s a gaping hole in the narrative where the mother-daughter relationship ought to be. —J.R. JONES R, 96 min. Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21

Lantouri The harrowing R subject matter and postmodern narrative ought to make this

Iranian drama by writer-director Reza Dormishian tough to watch, but the story is driven by obsession and ends, surprisingly, as a parable of forgiveness. A gutsy photojournalist (Maryam Palizban) mixes work with social activism, trying to

Lantouri save juvenile killers from execution by winning clemency from the victims’ survivors, in accordance with Islamic law. But when she allows herself to get mixed up with a charming but unstable criminal (Navid Mohammadzadeh), she gets to experience victimhood ﬁrsthand. Dormishian fractures the narrative, assembling the story from mock interviews with various peripheral characters, and then fractures those pieces even further, periodically breaking scenes down into a cascade of freeze-frames from diﬀerent angles. Her technique demands close attention but also sustains the multiple perspectives that feed into the web of justice. In Persian with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 115 min. Screens as part of the 27th Festival of Films From Iran, through February at Gene Siskel Film Center. Sat 2/4, 6 PM, and Sun 2/5, 4:45 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

Panique French director Julien Duvivier (Pepe le Moko) spent the World War II years as an exile in Hollywood, then returned home to direct this crackerjack mystery (1946), which probes at some of his countrymen’s worst instincts. In a suburb of Paris, a woman is found murdered, and the burly, bearded Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon), a local eccentric who fancies himself a photojournalist, begins to investigate the crime, only to become the prime suspect in the eyes of the townspeople. Midway through the ﬁlm there’s a kinetic set piece in which Hire, following the real killer and his lover into a carnival bumper-car ride, becomes the target of every other car on the ﬂoor; the sequence seems like a throwaway but turns out to be eerily apropos for a story driven by gossip, hysteria, and scapegoating. The source material was a novel by Georges Simenon, creator of the popular Inspector Maigret. In French with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 99 min. Fri 2/3, 2 and 6 PM; Sat 2/4, 4 PM; Sun 2/5, 2 PM; Mon 2/6, 6 PM; Wed 2/8, 6 and 8 PM; and Thu 2/9, 7:45 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

The Salesman This gripping R Iranian melodrama by writer-director Asghar Farhadi

(the Oscar-winning A Separation) focuses on a couple acting in a Tehran production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. One should probably resist the temptation to read some subtle message into this exotic premise, because Farhadi (unlike Abbas Kiarostami) is neither a modernist nor a postmodernist but something closer to Elia Kazan: topical, sharp with actors, mildly sensationalist (this is about the consequences of a woman being attacked by a stranger while taking a shower), alert to moral nuances, but lacking a full-blown vision of his own. As in A Separation, Farhadi privileges a woman’s viewpoint without either sharing or exploring it. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 125 min. River East 21, Webster Place Saving Banksy British guerrilla artist Banksy satirized the commercialization of street art with his cheeky 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop; this provocative documentary by Colin M. Day examines the same subject, using as a springboard the murals Banksy painted in San Francisco that same year. At that time stringent anti-graffiti laws required owners of “defaced” buildings in the city to destroy the illegal art or pay fines, but local collector Brian Greif so loved a particularly fine Banksy stencil, “Haight Street Rat,” that he bought and removed the wooden panels on which it was painted. Greif had intended to donate the piece to a worthy museum for display, but to his chagrin, the only interest came from for-profit galleries. Of the various street artists interviewed for this 2015 release, Ben Eine in the UK and Kelly Graval (aka RISK) in LA offer the keenest insights into the shifting line between public and privately owned art. —ANDREA GRONVALL 70 min. Fri 2/3, 8 PM; Sat 2/4, 2:30 PM; Sun 2/5, 12:30 and 4 PM; Mon 2/6, 6:15 and 8 PM; Tue 2/7, 8:15 PM; Wed 2/8, 6:15 PM; and Thu 2/9, 6:15 and 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center v

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FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE

“All the food imagery on Instagram and Pinterest has made my job a lot more relatable to people,” Marx says. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS (PORTRAIT); JENNIFER MARX

Chicagoan

(FOOD)

Meet Chicago’s meat photographer Jennifer Marx, 52 I DON’T KNOW anyone who’s shot more raw meat in this town than me. I’ve worked with the Cattlemen’s Beef Board, the National Pork Producers Council, the American Lamb Board, Tyson, Swift. Even as a photographer’s assistant, I photographed a lot of meat. Everyone responds to a raw cut of beef, positively or negatively. Viscerally, they react to the color and the shape. It’s not bloodred; it’s more like a wine red that’s appealing to the eye. It also smells good. If it’s fresh, it smells like grass or grain. And the meat is a firm meat. It’s dimensional. Plus, there is a reverence that people have when they’re around an animal product, more than there would be for, say, broccoli or mushrooms. Not to discount those items, but because of all the resources that have gone into an animal and to create food out of it, I think there’s a different reverence for it. And anything with a bone is just beautiful. It’s so architectural, you know? But chicken, for some reason, is not attractive, and it’s a big pain in the ass to photograph. Raw chicken is so gross. Even I get grossed out by that. I don’t like photographing just a plain cooked chicken breast either, because how do you make that look interesting? You need some skin or some bone. I personally think food does not look good front-lit. I feel it looks most appetizing back- or three-quarters or

side-lit, so you get a sense of depth and texture and quality of the food. When it’s overlit, you lose the detail and the texture. And food dies on set, so you have to work quickly or have a stylist who’s good enough to revive it. Fortunately, you don’t have to work as fast with raw meat, though the color will change a little bit, and if there’s a lot of fat and it’s too warm, it can start to sag. After the shoot, we don’t generally take home the food that was on set, because it’s been touched and prodded, but anything that’s left over does not go to waste. Especially meat—oh my gosh. If it’s a huge job and there’s a lot of food left over that’s not opened, we donate it. But there is never beef left over. People are fighting to take it home. I do eat probably more meat than a lot of people, but I don’t like to cook, so I will usually take only something that’s already cooked or something to give away. All the food imagery on Instagram and Pinterest has made my job a lot more relatable to people. I tell people who want to take good pictures of their food to eat during the day, sit by a window, and use natural light. Keep your plate clean and simplify the composition. Think about the other items on the table. Me, when I go out to a restaurant, I rarely photograph my food. Sometimes I do pull out my camera and take a picture, and I’m like, “I’m never gonna do anything with this. I should just eat.” —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 2

FRIDAY 3

SATURDAY 4

SUNDAY 5

MONDAY 6

TUESDAY 7

WEDNESDAY 8

· Cont a in me nt Filmmaker Robb Moss hosts a screening of his documentary exploring the complicated issue of nuclear waste disposal at two diﬀerent nuclear containment facilities in Florida and New York. 7 PM, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th, arts.uchicago.edu. F

ò Ho use of Vans Chicago opening House of Vans opens with a free concert and photography retrospective with performances from Future Islands, Digable Planets, and Noname. RSVP at houseofvans.com. 6:30 PM, House of Vans, 113 N. Elizabeth, houseofvans.com. F

Ý Ge orge Take i A screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan followed by behind-the-scenes stories and a Q&A with Takei. 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, thechicagotheatre.com, $65-$85.

ò Anti -Super Bowl Ho use Pa rty DJs spin vinyl at this dance party revolving around Lady Gaga’s halftime show. 6 PM-2 AM, Broken Shaker, 19 E. Ohio, freehandhotels.com/chicago/ broken-shaker. F

¸ Winte r Mix-Off The Reader hosts mixologists from Boleo, Drumbar, Slippery Slope, and more going head-to-head to create the best sour cocktail. Guests vote on their favorites while enjoying brick-oven pizza and live entertainment. 6-9 PM, Roof, 201 N. State, chicagoreader.com/wintermixoﬀ, $40.

♀ Th e Grelley Duvall Show A revival of “Shelley Duvall’s Women Under the Inﬂuence Theatre,” a Steppenwolf LookOut show featuring adaptations of dramatic female-centered movie moments, this time with multimedia presentations, live music, dance, and sketch. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, hideoutchicago.com, $8.

· Ci nema Slapdown: Dea dpool Columbia College’s series returns to take on Deadpool. As with all Cinema Slapdowns, after a screening of the ﬁlm two students will sit down to duke it out over its merits—or lack thereof. 7 PM, Film Row Cinema, 1104 S. Wabash, events. colum.edu/ﬁlmrow. F

8 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

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

CITY LIFE

Governor Bruce Rauner still can't cut a budget deal with Illinois Democrats. o TED SCHURTER/THE STATE JOURNAL-REGISTER VIA AP

POLITICS

In other news . . .

As Trump rampages, Chicago and Illinois remain broke and dysfunctional.

By BEN JORAVSKY

ith President Trump issuing frightening proclamations on a daily basis—hard to believe it’s only been about two weeks since he took office—many of you undoubtedly forgot your city or state even exist. But they’re still here—as broke and dysfunctional as ever. So as a public service offering, I thought I’d catch you up on a few things you might have missed while losing your collective minds over Trump. For starters, around the time that Trump threatened to send the feds to Chicago—whatever that meant—the Chicago Public Schools forced four furlough days on its staff, saving a few shekels with a backdoor pay cut. Shortly thereafter, Board of Education member Michael Garanzini talked about trimming the school year. Apparently, the district is still broke, even with the backdoor pay cuts. And around the time that Trump was putting the ﬁnal touches on his executive order to block immigrants from seven Muslim countries, the City Council ponied up about

10 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

$4 million to settle a police torture lawsuit left over from the days of former police commander Jon Burge. Apparently, the police had tortured Shawn Whirl into confessing to murdering a cabdriver. Largely on the basis of that confession, Whirl spent 25 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Our history never really leaves us, does it? Finally, Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan sued to force Governor Bruce Rauner to cut a budget deal with her father, house speaker Michael Madigan, by threatening to shut down the state’s Department of Motor Vehicle facilities. Though I doubt Lisa Madigan would phrase it quite like that. Let’s stick with this one for a while—if for no other reason that it’s a relatively benign diversion from Trump’s latest tweet. The Madigan-Rauner fight goes back to January 2015, when the governor roared into office determined to force Democratic legislators to pass union-busting legislation that would effectively dismantle collective bargaining rights in Illinois. House speaker Madigan balked. Rauner

refused to pass a budget without his antiunion legislation. So no state budget has been passed since 2014, former governor Pat Quinn’s last year in office. In 2015, Lisa Madigan tried to force the state to stop paying workers without a budget, but a downstate judge ruled against her. That meant most state workers got paid, though Rauner’s administration did stop paying many of the contractors who tend to the aged, the indigent, and the inﬁrm. Apparently the governor came to the conclusion that his Republican base doesn’t really give a hoot about those people, so fuck ’em. On the other hand, if people were inconvenienced by, say, a shutdown of the DMVs, well, there could be an uprising that would force Rauner to drop the union busting and cut a budget deal with Madigan. In any case, Rauner kept basic services open by paying state workers, even as state debt rose. Social service providers came together in a collective called Pay Now Illinois and sued to, well, get paid. But they lost their case. Meanwhile, Rauner says the state’s backlog of overdue bills has climbed to almost $11 billion. Let’s pause to appreciate the utter shamelessness of Republicans who go on and on about the wonders of privatization. And then feel free to stiff the private vendors to whom they’ve outsourced the work. On January 25, Rauner gave his State of the State address—speaking of events you probably missed—where he again tried to make it seem as though there was a large point to his intransigence. “These problems aren’t new,” he said. “They’ve been building up for many years.” The next day, Lisa Madigan ﬁled her motion to block workers from being paid until the state had passed a budget. “The [2015 judge’s ruling] has allowed the legislative and executive branches to fail to fulfill their constitutional duties without facing the real threat of a government shutdown,” Madigan wrote in her filing. “This situation does not usually happen for a long time on the federal level . . . precisely because the possibility of a government shutdown eventually leads to the passage and enactment of a budget.” You know, that may be the only nice thing anyone’s said about the feds since Trump took office.

If she prevails, state workers will probably be furloughed. And then I don’t know who will staff the DMVs—unless that’s what Trump had in mind by sending in the feds. Perhaps that will spark outraged Raunerites from Carbondale to Waukegan to demand that their boy quit messing around and pass a damn budget already. Predictably, Rauner was incensed by Madigan’s suit, accusing Lisa of colluding with her daddy to force his hand. For their part, both Madigans swear up and down that they aren’t in cahoots.

I don’t know who will staff the DMVs—unless that’s what Trump had in mind by sending in the feds.

Anybody believe them? That’s what I figured. You know, I think we can convey those denials to the land of alternative facts—a vast, stinking sewer bubbling over with claims like Trump’s statement that his immigration order is “not a ban on Muslims.” Whatever, if that’s what it takes to get a budget, good job, Lisa. Of course, that’s easy for me to say, as I just renewed my driver’s license. By the way, if Trump really cared so much about Chicago, he could help solve most of our fiscal problems. Giving up a portion of that $20 billion he wants to effectively throw out the window by building a wall on the Mexican border would be a start. But of course, our unwillingness to meet our obligations to the aged, the indigent, and the inﬁrm has never been about a lack of money so much as a lack of compassion. v

ß @joravben

The state has proposed replacing the Thompson Center with a new skyscraper, shown here in renderings released by the governor’s oﬃce. o ADRIAN SMITH + GORDON GILL

TRANSPORTATION

Thompson Center in transit

How would plans for a new skyscraper aﬀect service at Clark/Lake? By JOHN GREENFIELD

ast month, despite marking two years as Illinois governor with no proper state budget, Governor Bruce Rauner struck an optimistic note when he floated a grand plan to replace the state-owned James R. Thompson Center with a 115-story skyscraper. I’ve nicknamed the proposed tower “Rauner’s Boner,” both for its rather phallic shape, and for the fact that historic preservationists argue that demolishing the existing postmodern structure, a unique design by Chicago architect Helmut Jahn, would be a serious folly. But there’s another key factor to consider: In addition to state offices (and a groovy below-ground food court), the Thompson Center is home to the CTA’s Clark/Lake station, a crucial hub for transfers between the Blue, Brown, Green, Orange, Pink, and Purple Lines. It’s also a link in the Chicago Pedway system. We know the 1,700-foot structure would take years to complete. But what would be the impact on downtown transportation? First, a little background on the proposal: On January 19 the governor’s office released conceptual renderings to suggest how the fullblock site might be redeveloped. The aforementioned skyscraper would include retail, offices, apartments or condos, and a hotel and observatory, designed by local “starchitect” firm Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill. Another option shown features three towers of 40, 60,

and 70 stories each. Meanwhile, Clark/Lake was the CTA’s second-busiest station in 2015, with more than 5.5 million station entries. According to CTA spokeswoman Catherine Hosinski, since Clark/Lake serves six train lines, far more transfers are made at the stop than direct entries—about 1.4 transfers for every station entry. Unfortunately, the government officials I spoke to this week were all short on details on how construction could be mitigated to keep the trains running smoothly. Hosinski wouldn’t comment on whether service at the station could be maintained during demolition and construction. She also declined to discuss the potential effects a huge new development could have on on train ridership and crowding. “It’s far too soon to speculate,” she said. Similarly, Mike Claffey of the Chicago Department of Transportation says it’s too early to comment on what impact redevelopment might have on the pedway. At the state level, Rauner spokesman Mike Theodore says that “ensuring minimal disruption to the CTA and maintaining continued access to the Pedway are priorities,” but didn’t indicate how the state planned to go about this. Despite this lack of detail, the renderings of the proposed plan do include some discussion of how the project could actually enhance

transportation access on the site. In the single-tower scenario, the edifice would be built at the south end of the property, near Randolph Street, with a freestanding “transit hub pavilion” located at the north end, near Lake Street, providing an entry to the subway and elevated trains. The three-tower site plan shows an office building at the south end and residential and hotel towers next to Lake, with a multistory atrium sandwiched between them, providing connections to all the el platforms. Both scenarios could accommodate Mayor Emanuel’s (questionable) proposal for a high-speed rail line to O’Hare, and both would improve pedestrian connectivity by making it possible to walk diagonally across the block. They also appear to create more total plaza space than now exists, since the footprint of the relatively short, squat Thompson Center currently occupies most of the block. “This creates a real opportunity to create more aesthetically pleasing spaces for [train] riders,” says DePaul University professor Joseph Schwieterman, an expert in transportation and sustainable urban development. Of course, Schwieterman adds, it all depends on whether a future developer will voluntarily act on that opportunity. During the planning of Chicago’s Trump Tower, he notes, there was a face-off between the city and the Trump Organization over preserving the Carroll Avenue Transitway, an old rail corridor that formerly served Navy Pier, which could someday serve as a new transit route. Ultimately, the city forced Trump to preserve the corridor, which added to the project’s cost. “Let’s hope we don’t have another showdown, as we did during the Trump Tower’s construction, due to the developer’s desire to short-change long-term transit needs,” Schwieterman says. There are also cautionary tales from other cities, where ambitious redevelopment plans have gone way over budget and dragged on for years, disrupting transit service in the interim. The Santiago Calatrava-designed transit station at the World Trade Center, for example, cost $4 billion and took 12 years to complete—vastly more than was first estimated. In San Francisco, the $2.25 billion multimodal Transbay Transit Center project has been plagued by funding shortfalls. While bus service is supposed to start this year, it’s unclear when or if planned rail service will materialize.

CITY LIFE

Still, it’s somewhat reassuring that there have been countless construction projects above CTA subway lines that went off without incident. “Construction and demolition of buildings atop or adjacent to CTA rail lines is nothing new and CTA engineers work with developers each time to ensure that there is little to no signiﬁcant impacts to rail service,” Hosinski said via e-mail, noting that the Thompson Center station is itself an example of this. The CTA previously had a separate Clark/ Lake elevated station and the “Lake Transfer” subway station, both of which remained open to riders, with the exception of a few weekend closures, while the state offices and the 203 N. LaSalle building were being constructed. The two transit-oriented developments currently being built at Grand/Halsted/Milwaukee, above the Grand Blue Line station, are also examples of this, she noted.

“Let’s hope we don’t have another showdown, as we did during the Trump Tower’s construction, due to the developer’s desire to short-change long-term transit needs.” —Transportation expert Joseph Schwieterman

Those examples suggest that a Thompson Center makeover wouldn’t necessarily lead to a transit apocalypse. Still, it will be important for citizens to monitor the planning process, and demand that any changes result in improved rail access. Since redeveloping the site seems to be a bit of a white whale for the governor, it’s vital to make sure any future project doesn’t wind up harpooning CTA service. v

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

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 11

More than 240 cops roam the halls of Chicago’s public schools with no special training and little oversight—including some accused of harming children. By YANA KUNICHOFF OF CITY BUREAU

12 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

; PAUL JOHN HIGGINS o BILL WHITMIRE; SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

POLICE in the ACADEMY

uring wrestling season, when the ﬁnal school bell rings at Hyde Park Academy, Darren Wright changes out of the clothing he’s worn all day and into sweatpants and sneakers to become Coach Wright, head of the Thunderbirds high school wrestling team. Training takes place in an old classroom repurposed as a gym; its ﬂoors are covered with blue mats, its beige walls splotched with paint that likely covers some student graffiti. On a snowy winter weekday evening, the room is full of high-schoolers, mostly boys and a few girls, smelling of sweat and the rubber of the mats, running through an exercise regimen Wright calls the “workout of champions”—100 push-ups, 100 sit-ups, 300 jumping jacks, and ten crawls on all fours up and down the stairs. They laugh and joke, their voices breathless, as they work through Wright’s drills. Wright says he appreciates the humility and discipline wrestling teaches his athletes. “I was in seventh grade when I started,” he says, “and I’ve been wrestling ever since.” He’s been at Hyde Park Academy for 15 years, and has coached for most of that time. The young people Wright works with say he’s always friendly and often tries to talk things out with them if they’re feeling upset. “He is one of my mentors,” says India Coleman, a recent Hyde Park graduate who was on the wrestling team her freshman and sophomore years. “You can talk to him about anything, come to him when you have problems.” That warmth extends to the school’s administration. “He has a really good temperament to deal with students—a certain kind of patience,” says Antonio Ross, Hyde Park’s principal. “He’s been extremely, extremely helpful here.” Occasionally Wright will recruit a student he encounters in a disciplinary setting to join his team—the thinking being that wrestling is a good place for kids to channel their anger and frustration more effectively. “I get a lot of my kids because they’ve gotten in trouble,” he says. That’s because although Wright is a wrestling coach by evening, by day he’s one of more than 240 Chicago Police Department officers who serve in some 500 Chicago Public Schools. Primarily charged with stepping into incidents that might warrant an arrest, Wright says that he and other cops play a dual role in the schools they serve: that of mentor, but also that of disciplinarian. He wouldn’t have it any other way. “They say you’re put here for a reason,”

Wright says, “and my reason is to be a schools officer.” But cops like Wright now find themselves at a difficult juncture. The national debate around policing has extended to schools, with incidents like the brutal October 2015 attack of a student in Columbia, South Carolina, by a school resource officer, as they’re usually called (in Chicago the term “school officer” is used), bringing increased scrutiny to the role police play in educational settings, and to the potential for abuse. In Chicago, the Police Accountability Task Force convened after the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald found in its April 2016 report that officers were “not adequately equipped to engage with youth,” and that the relationship between the CPD and youth is “antagonistic, to say the least.” The U.S. Department of Justice investigation into CPD unveiled last month found that officers repeatedly used force on young people for noncriminal conduct or minor violations, and that in some cases officers were exonerated without being interviewed. In one complaint detailed in the report, an eightyear-old girl said she was grabbed by her hair, swung around, and choked by an off-duty CPD officer stationed at her school. In several months of reporting, City Bureau and the Chicago Reader found a small handful of cops stationed in CPS schools with disturbing complaints on their records: Of the nearly 250 police officers serving in CPS schools as of April 2016, two have killed teenagers, one was sued for beating a minor, and one was recommended for firing by the police board. In addition, 33 school officers have nine or more misconduct complaints on their records, while 80 percent of all CPD officers have four or fewer complaints, according to data released by the Invisible Institute. Records from CPS’s own incident tracking system, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, revealed more than 8,000 alleged incidents involving a CPD officer and students between 2013 and 2015. Even Wright, beloved as he is by many of his Hyde Park Academy students and colleagues, has been the subject of nine separate misconduct complaints during his time as a cop. Our investigation also found a surprising lack of oversight of cops in schools, on both the part of CPD and CPS, especially in cases where officers have been accused of wrongdoing: there are no youth-specific trainings or guidelines for school officers; there is no systematic screening of officers assigned to schools or assessment of their relative fitness to work with young people; and when an officer is allegedly involved in wrongdoing,

there’s no effective disciplinary or review procedure to determine potential punishment or firing. This lack of oversight is compounded by poor communication between CPS and CPD, and between the agencies’ top brass and the principals, disciplinary deans, teachers, and other administrators who work directly with students. It also runs contrary to bestpractices guidelines laid out by the DOJ and followed by most organizations that offer school officer training, our reporting found. When asked for comment on our findings, CPS directed all inquiries about the school officer program to the police department. CPD, meanwhile, defended its oversight and management of its school officers, saying in a statement that all police officers receive adequate training, and that officers accused of any wrongdoing had been cleared by the appropriate oversight agencies. “Regardless of their assignment, CPD officers are held to the highest professional standards,” the statement reads. “Any allegations of misconduct are taken seriously and investigated thoroughly by the Bureau of Internal Affairs, or in use of force cases, by the Independent Police Review Authority. Every officer within the Department is evaluated individually for the appropriate fit to their respective assignment.” Still, these assurances are cold comfort to criminal justice reform advocates, who argue that Wright and other officers like him are unfit to work with minors, raise concerns that police in schools fast-track children into the criminal justice system, and question whether police belong in schools at all. “We cannot proactively prevent our children from having contact with the justice system,” says Michelle Mbekeani-Wiley, an attorney with the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, “when CPS’s use of police officers creates a justice system within the school.”

ops were first stationed inside public schools in Flint, Michigan, in the 1950s, as part of a community policing strategy designed to relieve tensions created by growing anger at aggressive policing in minority communities. The program was considered a success, and by the 1970s the idea of stationing police officers in schools had caught on with several major police departments, including those in Miami-Dade County and Los Angeles. Rising crime rates across the country, coupled with an increased focus on juvenile violence in the 1980s and ’90s, led other school districts to

introduce more officers into schools. By 1997 22 percent of school districts had on-duty officers. Chicago introduced police officers into schools in 1990, then-mayor Richard M. Daley’s first full year in office. The city had been struggling with increasing homicide rates and widespread violence since the mid-80s, and as of that June, looked to be heading into one of its bloodiest years yet. The situation seemed so dire that many aldermen began calling for the National Guard to restore peace in some of the most badly affected neighborhoods. In response, Daley created a new school patrol unit within CPD. He introduced his plan to bring police officers into schools at a special meeting of the City Council that fall. His proposals included Operation SAFE (Schools Are for Education), which would bring two uniformed police officers into every public high school and assign additional police patrols around elementary schools. Two years later, following a highly publicized fatal shooting that took place on a Tuesday morning in the hallway of west-side Tilden High School, Daley introduced metal detectors into all high schools. Daley also instructed the commander of CPD’s Youth Division, which was charged with operating the school patrol unit, to have ongoing meetings with CPS’s head of security. Individual officers entering the school patrol were to be trained in CPR, first aid, and conflict resolution techniques, and were advised on how to strengthen links between schools and their surrounding communities and when to make referrals to nurses or social workers. Their positions were to be funded by the Chicago Board of Education. The new program seemed to make an impact: by 1994 Catalyst Chicago reported that violence in schools had “declined steadily and dramatically”—a change CPD officials attributed to the school patrol unit, but which principals at the time said was simply due to the presence of more adults in the building. But punitive school disciplinary measures increased starting in 1995, when the Illinois legislature effectively handed control of CPS over to Daley; the school patrol unit was instrumental in enforcing zero tolerance policies for guns, which led to the increased use of pat downs and searches on students. The unit occasionally received criticism for its tactics—in one instance, a Cook County circuit court judge threw out three weapons cases involving CPS students, saying they had been unfairly searched. Then, in 2006, 16 years after its creation, the school patrol unit was dissolved. There would no longer be a unit made up specifically of J

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 13

Police in schools continued from 13

officers stationed in schools. Instead, officers would stay in schools but be assigned to numbered police districts and would be trained and supervised like any other cops. CPD now says that the unit was disbanded in order to bring officers into schools who were familiar with the unique situations faced by different police districts and the schools within them. But something was lost in the transition, according to Wright and others familiar with the department before and after the school patrol unit program was killed. Wright’s career at Hyde Park Academy spans this shift, and illustrates the ways in which the patrol unit offered key beneﬁts that officers no longer have access to today. Wright started as a member of the school patrol unit in Hyde Park Academy in 2001, after ten years in the military and four years as a CPD tactical officer in the Sixth District. He also coached wrestling at Hirsch Metropolitan High School, and, he says, looking for a way to integrate that hobby into his day job, he asked for a transfer. Applicants to the school patrol were put through a rigorous interview, Wright says. Officers who were selected were then put through an intensive training regimen. “All the school officers would go to the police academy, [and] they’d bring in paraprofessionals [trained school aides] just to teach us how to work with kids on certain issues,” Wright says. The trainings took place annually, Wright says, and were helpful to him as he dealt with the myriad of complicated situations that would inevitably come up: a young person upset because of something that happened at home who’d then take that anger into the building, a crime committed outside the school that involved one of his students. School patrol unit officers also regularly met with CPS security officials. Wright says those meetings would often be used to clarify alternatives to arresting students, such as referring them to counselors or other in-school professionals. But when the school patrol unit was disbanded, all these support mechanisms disappeared. The yearly training sessions stopped entirely, leaving established officers no way to refresh their skills, and newly stationed officers with little guidance. The changes troubled Wright. “If we were detectives, they’d send us to detective school,” he says. “If we were equestrian officers, they’d train us with horses. We’re the only unit that doesn’t get that specialized training.”

14 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

“If we were detectives, they’d send us to detective school. If we were equestrian officers, they’d train us with horses. We’re the only unit that doesn’t get that specialized training.” —CPD officer Darren Wright, who serves as a school officer at Hyde Park Academy

ndeed, while all CPD officers receive training upon being hired and periodically afterward—including training related to interactions with young people—we weren’t able to identify any training specific to school officers. Multiple Freedom of Information Act requests made to CPD and CPS seeking training manuals, documents, or directives directly related to the training of school officers turned up no relevant documents, according to responses received from both agencies. All CPD officers are required to undertake 1,000-plus hours of training when they’re recruited, including basic training on everything from use of firearms to vehicle stops and building entry tactics. Directives, such as those governing the use of force, guide officer behavior once they’re in the field. Additionally, all officers are required to take Crisis Intervention Training, Gang Resistance Education and Training (GREAT), and Dr ug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), according to CPD spokesman Frank Giancamilli. “Officers also receive ongoing conflict resolution and de-escalation training,” Giancamilli says. But none of these training programs is specific to school officers—CIT training, previously optional, has been made compulsory for field training officers. De-escalation training has been mandatory for all officers since September 2016, following the furor over the shooting of Laquan McDonald, and officers who only occasionally visit schools have been trained under programs like DARE since the 1980s. That leaves a significant gap in training that might address the unique challenges of working with children in a school setting—everything from grappling with schools as safer spaces than the streets to the challenges of dealing with young people’s developing brains and unpredictable emotions. For his part, Wright can remember few times since the school unit was disbanded that he was asked to review his skills in any way. That means that officers new to Hyde Park Academy, including the two Wright works with, have only him or other senior officers teaching them how to calm down an upset student or gauge when an arrest should be made. “Everything ends up in the police room,” Wright says, of the many complicated scenarios he deals with throughout the school year. The DOJ, which between 1999 and 2005 gave $725 million in grants to cities that wanted to bring police into schools, says that officers in schools must not only have ar-

resting power but be “educators, emergency managers and informal counselors.” But the key to this, experts say, is training. “A police officer assigned in a school setting should get special training to that role,” says Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International, a nonprofit that has assessed school resource officer operations in five of the country’s ten largest school districts. According to Dorn, failing to offer specialized training is “a disadvantage for the officer, department, and school system, and the students that they serve.” De-escalation training programs have proven to be effective, Dorn says, but that’s not the same as formal, position-specific training. That training can cover topics like search-and-seizure rules in schools, which differ from commonplace searches in that the burden of proof is higher within a school; what information can be shared between police and school officials under Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) guidelines; special needs students; and juvenile law. Such programs do exist: the National Association of School Resource Officers, the biggest school officer training group in the country, contracts with school departments and police districts around the country to put new school officers through 40 hours of training on topics including developing teaching skills. At the conclusion of the training, the group administers a certiﬁcation exam. Mbekeani-Wiley says that she’d like to see CPD officers undergo dedicated school officer training—a key component of the reform recommendations the Shriver Center will release in 2017. “CPS and CPD must ensure that the officers hired to work within the city’s schools have the tools and skill set to effectively engage our youth,” Mbekeani-Wiley says. “Without youth-specific training, officers will resort to what they have been trained to do on the streets: make arrests.”

n many ways, Wright seems to embody the kind of school police officer advocates like Dorn say they want. He sees himself as a mentor, and says he thinks carefully about the psychology of the young people he works with. But Wright is also one of a handful of officers serving in CPS schools whose track record raises questions about his suitability for the job, and illustrates why the lack of oversight and clear disciplinary and accountability processes creates special concerns for cops in schools.

“They say you’re put here for a reason,” Darren Wright says, “and my reason is to be a schools oﬃcer.”

In 2009, Wright fatally shot 17-year-old Corey Harris, a student from neighboring Dyett High School. Wright was off-duty at the time, and says he believed that Harris had a gun, and had been involved in a nearby shooting. Wright chased Harris in his car and eventually cornered him in an alley, where Wright shot Harris in the back, according to the autopsy report. A civil lawsuit ﬁled by Natasha Williams, Harris’s mother, claims her son was unarmed when he was shot. “He had just got out of school,” Williams says. “The only thing my son had on him was his school ID, the ten dollars I gave him that

morning, and the schoolwork paper.” Because CPD has no review or disciplinary procedures unique to school officers, Williams’s complaint against Wright was investigated the way all use-of-force misconduct allegations against CPD officers are investigated: by IPRA. But IPRA’s ability to curtail police misconduct and ensure consequences for bad behavior has been signiﬁcantly compromised, according to the DOJ’s ﬁndings. The January report describes IPRA’s investigations as a kind of toothless plea bargaining in which cover-ups have been institutionalized and investigators routinely take the word of officers over hard evidence that contradicts their

o BILL WHITMIRE

stories. The dysfunction has been so severe that in August 2016 Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced he would replace IPRA with a new police accountability board. In May 2016, IPRA cleared Wright of all wrongdoing in the case, as it has in all but two of the more than 400 police shootings it’s reviewed over the past ten years. The city eventually settled with Harris’s mother for $1.24 million, an amount signiﬁcantly larger than the average of $36,000 paid out by the city in police-related settlements, according to data compiled by the Chicago Reporter. “Only God can judge me,” Wright now says of the shooting. “It’s an unfortunate incident, and I can’t take it back.”

(Wright was later commended for his role in the shooting by the 100 Club of Chicago, which honors first responders for what it calls “acts of bravery.”) After the shooting, Wright was off work for just three days before he returned to Hyde Park Academy and resumed his interactions with students around Harris’s same age. (This was the norm at the time—in December 2015, CPD changed its rules to mandate a 30day grace period before officers involved in a fatal shooting could return to work.) Wright was also required to meet with a psychologist, but neither CPD nor CPS responded to repeated requests about whether there was any review of Wright’s mental health J

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 15

Police in schools continued from 15

or eligibility for his position following the shooting. Thomas Trotter, who served as Hyde Park Academy’s principal at the time of the shooting, declined to comment for this story. But Trotter “knew about the incident,” Wright says. “It was in the media.” Meanwhile, Harris’s mother marvels that Wright was allowed to continue working with high-schoolers. “He shot and killed my son,” Williams says, “and he goes back to work.” And Wright wasn’t the only one: In 2007 CPD officer John Fitzgerald fatally shot 18-year-old Aaron Harrison. IPR A ruled the shooting justified. But when a civil case against Fitzgerald went to trial, four witnesses contradicted his testimony that Harrison had a gun; the jury awarded Harrison’s family $8.5 million. According to data compiled by the Citizens Police Data Project, Fitzgerald has been the subject of 28 misconduct complaints—a mix of illegal search, verbal abuse, and false arrest (all of which were also deemed unfounded by IPRA) and is in the top 100 or so CPD officers with the highest number of complaints against them. According to CPD data, as of April, Fitzgerald was still with CPD, serving in a roving car that attends multiple schools.

PD and IPRA’s tendency to let officers accused of misconduct off the hook naturally leads to another question: What about CPS? Specifically, does the school district have the ability to review and even punish misbehavior by officers in its school? Principals, deans, and other school leaders we spoke to said they had never received guidance from the district or CPD about what officers’ intended role was, let alone about how to handle any concerns they might have. “I’ve never had any formal communication from CPS about the role of police officers in schools,” says Chad Adams, principal at Sullivan High School in the Rogers Park neighborhood. Adams has had a positive experience with the current officers in his school, but notes that he’d be more comfortable with a clear set of guidelines laying out “this is what a school police officer at your school is and isn’t,” he says. Alvaro Ortega, a former dean at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy in Ashburn, agrees. He also complains about the inability of principals to have a say in which officers are assigned to their schools.

16 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

“Without youth-specific training, officers will resort to what they have been trained to do on the streets: make arrests.” —Michelle Mbekeani-Wiley, attorney with the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law

“We do not have any control of who was assigned to us,” he says, adding that he’s worked in schools where the principal found assigned officers didn’t mesh with the school’s culture. Principals, it turns out, can indeed flag infractions involving officers through CPS’s own reporting system for school incidents, which is known as Verify. But much like CPD and IPRA’s complaint system, CPS’s reporting system has flaws that keep it from halting bad behavior, resulting in two separate and uncoordinated accountability processes, neither of which works well. Wright’s own history at Hyde Park Academy illustrates the complications and gaps in oversight that can arise from such a system. The Harris shooting wasn’t the only time Wright’s conduct as a police officer has been scrutinized. In January 2013, Wright was involved in another incident, this time with two students at Hyde Park Academy, that brought him under the lens of both CPD/IPRA and CPS. The incident was documented in three separate sets of documents: a Verify report, completed by Ralph Bennett, Hyde Park’s dean of behavior, and obtained via FOIA request; a complaint submitted to IPRA by one of the student’s legal guardians, also obtained via FOIA; and in a civil lawsuit filed against Wright and the city on behalf of Christiona Kearny, one of the students involved. These three separate accounts agree on a few things, starting with where the incident began: outside of Hyde Park Academy. They also agree on where the incident ended—in the police room, the base of operations for the school’s officers. At Hyde Park it’s barely more than a storage room, nearly filled by three blond-wood desks, one of which is plastered with a faded poster of President Obama. And on the door are signs with a printed warning: IF YOU ENTER THIS ROOM, IT’S ON POLICE BUSINESS. Beyond that, the three accounts differ markedly. According to the January 2014 lawsuit, on January 17, 2013, several students were involved in a fight outside the school. The suit claims that although Kearny wasn’t involved in the fight, Wright took her into custody anyway when he came to break it up. While Kearny was in custody, he “struck [Kearny] in the face with his fist,” the suit alleges. The city settled the suit for $15,000. The IPRA complaint, filed six days after the fight, offers additional details and paints a confusing scenario. The fight led to the arrest of the two victims in the complaint, one of whom is likely Kearny, although their names

were redacted by CPD. The situation started with an argument between two students outside the school and grew to involve at least four other students. According to the complaint, as Wright attempted to break up the fight, he handcuffed two of the teenagers, identified as the two victims, and brought them up to the police room. From there, the complaint alleges, he punched the first victim in the face, choked the second victim, and pushed her by the back of the neck. A police report notes that one of the victims had a swollen eye. The IPRA files include a statement Wright made to the commander of the Third District, in which he says that he “did execute an open hand stun to the face” to “gain control over an arrest situation.” The arrest report, which names Wright as the victim and complainant, notes that one of the arrestees hit Wright on the left side of his face. IPRA ruled not to sustain the complaint, as it has in all complaints against Wright. The Verify report, meanwhile, lays out a starkly different scenario, one that doesn’t hint at the allegations of misconduct. It notes what happened as follows: A student, whose name was redacted from the records we obtained, was involved in some kind of shouting match with another student outside the school. A police officer, likely Wright, told the first student to leave the area. When that student didn’t comply, Wright took her to the police room to arrest her. But once in the police room, the student “became physically resistant to Officer Wright,” according the report, “and began swinging [her] arms, hitting [Wright] in the process.” Wright disputes the version of events detailed in the IPRA report and complaint. Moreover, he says his relationship with Kearny remains positive. “She graduated this year,” Wright says. “She needs to contact me for anything, she knows she can.” Attempts to reach Kearny for comment were unsuccessful. (Wright has also been accused of rape and/or sexual assault once, of excessive or inappropriate use of force three times in addition to the Kearny case, and of conducting an illegal search once. IPRA ruled all of these complaints unfounded, and Wright says that in the sexual assault complaint in particular he was unfairly accused. We were unable to obtain records related to the other complaints made against Wright. CPD failed to answer FOIA requests for all but the Kearny complaint, and IPRA rejected similar FOIA requests because the records either

pertained to juveniles or were subject to the 2014 Fraternal Order of Police injunction, which blocked the release of several decades of citizen complaints against police.) The marked discrepancies in these accounts suggests the ﬁrst of several problems with CPS’s reporting system. Namely that although principals can flag incidents like these in Verify, they don’t have access to complaints made to CPD—complaints that might offer information beyond or in opposition to what school administrators have access to themselves. Apart from that, CPS isn’t obligated to investigate incidents involving school officers based on what’s reported in Verify, according to interviews with more than a dozen school officials, attorneys, and teachers. But even if the district did want to pursue action, there is no clear process for doing so, sources say. Nor does the district have the ability to punish officers. The best a principal can do, sources say, would be to report an incident to an officer’s sergeant and hope that the district would then remove the officer from the school. That said, all school personnel are mandated by law to report child abuse to DCFS—any physical injury that wasn’t accidental, as well as excessive corporal punishment by parents, family members, or “any employee or contractor at the child’s school.” In a January 2014 memo, the DOJ further charged administrators with ensuring student safety and enforcing laws that ban discriminatory disciplinary measures, even if they’re carried out by contractors, like school officers, not directly employed by the school. (Officers are technically contractors, per an intergovernmental agreement between CPD and the Chicago Board of Education.) All this suggests that CPS does bear some responsibility to further investigate and report use of force against students by police officers in its schools, even if the district doesn’t see it as its role. In the meantime, reformers say simply sharing information between CPD and CPS would be a good start in reducing any potential harm to students. “The conflicting narratives in IPRA’s investigative report, CPS’s Verify System, and the civil complaint filed thereafter demonstrates the need for CPS, CPD, and the city to routinely report, review, and evaluate the performance of police officers assigned to schools and share that data with each other,” Mbekeani-Wiley says. “This may prevent the assignment of police officers that students need protection from.”

ritics of police officers in schools see these cops as a crucial link in the “schools-to-prison pipeline,” in which punitive and zero-tolerance policies within schools funnel young people into the criminal justice system. Dealing with misbehavior through a police officer, rather than, say, a restorative justice counselor, can be a fast track to a criminal record, they say. Ortega, the former dean at Sarah Goode, says officers serving in schools rarely give second chances to young people who’ve done something wrong. “Once a student does some behaviors and finds themselves as a criminal in their eyes, they couldn’t really get out of that,” he says. “They were so quick to say, ‘Come on and get him locked up.’” In 2014, Christion Gunn was a 15-year-old student at Foreman College and Career Academy in Portage Park when he was involved in an altercation at school. According to Gunn, he saw another male student hit a girl. No one intervened, Gunn says, so he stepped in. Shortly after, Gunn says, the school’s officer, along with a security guard, broke up the argument and took Gunn to the principal’s office. There Gunn was accused of punching a security guard, he says, and was told he’d be be arrested for his role in the ﬁght. He was charged with aggravated assault and forced to repeat his sophomore year. Moreover, his relationship with the school’s leadership was ruined, he says—they’d eventually motion to have him expelled. (Foreman’s principal, Wayne Issa, declined to comment on the case.) Although the charge against him was eventually dropped, Gunn, who’s completing his degree at Association House High School, says that because the charge was used to expel him, much of the damage had already been done. Although Gunn was spared time in prison, he thinks that cops involved in incidents like his unnecessarily escalate everyday situations that can be resolved without intervention from law enforcement. If the situation had been handled only by school security guards, he argues, they could have asked him to sit down and cool off without resorting to an arrest. “Personally, I don’t think police should be in school systems,” he says. “It ruins the education process.” The research bears up his concern. A 2012 study published in the Journal of Educational Sociology found a link between arrests of high school students and the propensity for them to drop out of high school. A 2008 study by the Council for a Strong America, an antiviolence

nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., found that young people who drop out of high school are eight times more likely to be incarcerated than are their peers. And a study published in a 2011 issue of Justice Quarterly found that having an officer in a school more than doubled the rate of referrals to law enforcement for simple assault, and made discipline more punitive across the board. Research also suggests that relatively few students arrested ended up in the criminal justice system because of a serious offense. An analysis of arrest data by WBEZ found that of 4,600 arrests on school grounds in 2011, only 14 percent were for felonies—meaning the rest were arrests for relatively minor misdemeanors. Nor is this punishment applied evenly. School officers are most often stationed in low-income and minority schools. And mirroring racial disparities in the criminal justice system as a whole, a report by the police abolition group Project NIA found that 75 percent of young people arrested in schools in 2011 and 2012 were African-American, despite their accounting for only around 40 percent of CPS’s student population. Representatives of the Chicago Teachers Union say they’d like to see resources that go toward officers redirected to professionals like counselors or social workers—a 2016 report from the 74, a news site covering education, calculated that there were about twice as many officers as counselors nationwide. In 2015, CPS released a revised student discipline code that attempted to limit suspensions, and around 100 schools have restorative justice counselors who provide a regular alternative to cops—they aim to solve conﬂicts through the use of “peace circles,” which bring in people affected to resolve a conﬂict through discussion and encourage the school to work through problems with students rather than immediately disciplining them. Later this month the Shriver Center will release a list of recommendations for improving how school officers function in CPS schools—recommendations it’s already begun to discuss with CPS. Among the suggestions: CPD officers must have clear guidelines that distinguish between disciplinary misconduct and criminal offenses; they must be provided with additional training that teaches them how to effectively work with young people; data related to the school officer program must be published regularly; schools with stationed officers must increase student access to counselors; and any changes to the school officer program must be made with the involvement of community partners.

“We hope that the data and research collected in our report will be used . . . to eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline,” the Shriver Center’s Mbekeani-Wiley says. Gunn now works with the Voices of Chicago Youth in Education (VOYCE) Project, a youth group organizing to break the school-toprison pipeline at its source—schools’ discipline systems. The group was instrumental in passing SB 100, a state-level bill that makes suspension or arrest a last resort within schools. It’s also part of the Transforming School Discipline Collaborative, which seeks to offer concrete proposals for state-level changes in school discipline. Members are now working on a campaign to advocate arrests only for felonies within schools, more comprehensive mental health services, and training for school staff on conﬂict resolution. But many criminal justice reformers ask whether police belong in schools at all. Mariame Kaba, Project NIA’s director and a longtime antipolice activist who coauthored a 2012 report on arrests in schools, says that cops exist to arrest people—a reality no amount of training or improved guidelines can change. Cops, Kaba says, “aren’t supposed to be conﬂict resolution counselors . . . it expands their reach and mandate and asks them to take on things they shouldn’t be taking on.” Project NIA is a member of the Dignity in Schools campaign, a coalition encompassing organizations in 27 states, including Illinois, that are working to remove officers who patrol in school. For his part, Wright rejects calls to eliminate police from schools. “Anybody tell you they don’t think police officers are very necessary—they are,” he says. “In some schools, you really don’t need them, but in certain schools it’s a must.” But fundamentally Wright and the reformers have more in common than one might expect. Wright says he would love to see a return to the days of the school patrol unit, when CPD provided him and his fellow officers with additional training and other forms of support. After all, he asks: Who else is going to “build that rapport,” as he puts it, to help his students develop positive associations with police? “You build a trust with the kids,” he says. “Once they graduate, they go on and do good things and never forget you.” v This report was produced in partnership with City Bureau, a Chicago-based journalism lab.

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 17

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18 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

The Park District tees up the Obama Presidential Golf Course By DEANNA ISAACS

ith the certainty of a Trump presidential library in our nottoo-distant future, it’s a little hard to get worked up over the Obama Presidential Center and Golf Course that’s about to emerge in Jackson Park. But the Trump library, however gilded and gross, will not be rising in Chicago. And the Obama library will. So last week’s news that the Obama Foundation wants to shut down two public streets running through the historic park deserves some attention. Closing Cornell Drive (which runs north and south) between 60th and 67th Streets and Marquette Drive (which runs east from Cornell and connects to Lake Shore Drive) isn’t a move required for construction of the Obama library, though it might improve the library’s view. The Obama building will sit on a strip of land on the west side of Cornell that now holds an athletic ﬁeld and running track. The closings would, however, facilitate the

creation of an elite 18-hole championship golf course from the Chicago Park District’s existing Jackson Park and South Shore courses, now separated by Marquette Drive. What would happen to the traffic that currently uses those roads is unclear. The Obama Foundation did not respond to questions about the proposed closings. Spearheaded by a new public-private entity, the Chicago Parks Golf Alliance, the golf course plan was a surprise when it was shared with the public, which didn’t happen until mid-December. At that point Tiger Woods had already been engaged to design the course, with work to begin as early as this spring. Park District board approval of a $1 million contract for preliminary engineering rapidly followed. As the Chicago Sun-Times has reported, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s former campaign manager, Michael Ruemmler, is a founding director of the Chicago Parks Golf Alliance. According to Woods’s TRG Design website, the historic courses “will undergo a transformative restoration,” with “special consideration” made to provide “wide landing areas” and multiple holes that “will meander along the lakefront, offering sweeping views.” Greens fees could reportedly exceed $200, though the mayor has promised that neighborhood golfers who’ve been using the links for years “will be able to continue to use and enjoy it at a reduced rate.” That’ll have to be a mega-reduction: the top rate for residents last summer was $33. A cart could be had for an additional $18. Recently released e-mails from Emanuel’s private account show that he and Kelly had been working on the golf course plan behind the scenes for months, no doubt responding to a groundswell of demand from a community more often concerned with rampant shootings, poverty, and unemployment. Or maybe they

were just inspired by Obama’s love of the game. The Obamas say they want this presidential center, expected to open in 2021, to be a hub of civic activity. They’ve posted a two-minute video on the Obama Foundation website (not to be confused with the Barack H. Obama Foundation website, which is something else altogether). In the video, Barack and Michelle explain that “this will be a design year” and invite all of us to tell them “what you want this project to be.” You can do that through the website, which is a good thing, since the local presence so far seems minimal. The foundation has an office in Hyde Park, and a former top Obama administration staffer, David Simas, was recently named as its CEO, but there’s no posted phone number on the site for the Chicago office. Press inquiries are being handled by a public relations firm in Washington. Meanwhile a separate Obama library website, run by the National Archives and Records Administration, went live on Inauguration Day. By law the archives won’t be available for public access until five years after Obama left office, but you can find everything that had been posted on the White House website there. The brick-and-mortar library will be designed by the New York firm of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, the same folks responsible for the Logan Center on the University of Chicago campus. On Monday, the Obama Foundation announced that Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, designers of Maggie Daley Park, will be the project’s landscape architect. Last week, Clinton Presidential Library architect Richard Olcott, in town to speak at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, was asked what advice he’d give the Obama library architects. Olcott said, “Engage with the neighborhood.” But Margaret Schmid, of Jackson Park Watch, an online citizens’ group, told me that “despite nice words from the Obama Foundation, there’s been no public input yet.” “There’s a desperate need for one, overall plan for the park,” Schmid says. “Jackson Park is being divided up by private money— with taxpayer money on the side—and so far there’s no public plan, and no adequate means for community input.” Friends of the Parks executive director Juanita Irizarry agrees. She says by phone that “there should be a comprehensive planning process for Jackson Park, rather than the piecemeal, private conversations that have taken place so far.” v

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ARTS & CULTURE Rhinofest coartistic directors Jenny Magnus (far left) and Beau O’Reilly (center) and friends o COURTESY CURIOUS THEATRE BRANCH

THEATER

The Grawbowski Burning Man By TONY ADLER

he Rhinoceros Theater Festival is billed as “Chicago’s longest running fringe festival,” but last year’s edition took a different tack from the 27 before it. Or seemed to, anyway. Where its predecessors appeared to follow the familiar fringe-fest pattern of ignoring patterns, the 2016 fest had a clear curatorial concept: Coartistic directors Beau O’Reilly and Jenny Magnus shaped it around Rhinoceros, the black comedy by Eugene Ionesco that, interestingly enough, didn’t inspire Rhinofest’s name. (Salvador Dalí’s rhinos did.) Magnus and O’Reilly’s own company, Curious Theatre Branch, staged Ionesco’s tale of townsfolk transformed into odd-toed ungulates, and other artists contributed work that riffed on its themes. In my review I wondered whether the thing they ended up with, interesting as it was, could still be called a fringe fest. O’Reilly e-mailed me in response, with some surprising news: the other Rhinofests had

been curated too. He and his compadres had always worked, he wrote in his ellipsis-loving style, to “strike a balance . . . between veterans and newcomers . . . between those with a draw and those with out a draw . . . between large show and small ensembles.” In other words, if fringe festivals are deﬁned by a high degree of randomness as to who gets to perform—and many are, including the mother of them all, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe—then Rhinofest was never really one in the ﬁrst place. So what is it then? O’Reilly (who also said Rhinofest’s coproducing companies, Curious and Prop Thtr, “re emphasized the open submission” for 2017) wrote that “priority is given to new work, new scripts, [and] the other major factor is that a show has to fit the festival format . . . ie, short runs, low tech needs.” Does that make Rhinofest Chicago’s longest-running new play festival? Or maybe our longest-running DIY performance expo? Having spent the last few days watching

nine of this year’s 29 entries, I’ve got a suggestion. Let’s call it an annual tribal convocation. A sort of Grabowski Burning Man. Because there’s no doubt but that the whole event is suffused with a sense of community. There are second-, third-, and (if you count a short ﬁlm called This Is a Movie of a Report I Am Making to the 3rd Grade) fourth-generation Rhino bloodlines in evidence here. Some of the more experimental local storefront luminaries lend their creativity and support. Even the relative newcomers come attended by their followers. This is one of those events where audience members don’t necessarily stand up and leave when the show’s over: everybody’s waiting for the actors to come out and say hi. Of course, you don’t have to be anybody’s pal to attend. Out of those first nine (I’ll be reviewing more next week), I’d above all recommend staying up late for HATCHET LADY (Sat 10:30 PM), Savannah Reich’s funny, punky, wild, yet sly play about a biographer having a breakdown as she tries to ﬁnish her book on bar-busting temperance fanatic Carrie Nation. Directed by Olivia Lilley for Runaways Lab Theatre, the show features a band, dancing angels, interviews with the dead, Carly Wicks running from roaring to nearly comatose as both Nation and the biographer, and the quietly hilarious Jasmine Henri Jordan as a publisher’s intern.

Also up there: The Hawkeye Plainview production of DISNEY PIXAR BEERS (Mon 9 PM), starring playwright Rory Jobst as Bud the beer, who—awfully like Woody the cowboy in Toy Story—has to deal with the developing maturity of Mark, the human BFF with whom he used to have such great times. Michael Martin’s intentionally digressive, train-wreck fascinating performance piece MARTIN ON HINCKLEY ON FOSTER: THE HOME VISIT (Fri 9 PM), in which the artist imagines himself in conversation with would-be presidential assassin John Hinckley—an exercise that yields sometimes facile, sometimes profound meditations on pop America. YOU’RE HIS CHILD (Sat 9 PM), a tender family chronicle done solo by Emmy Bean, focusing on her gospel-singing great-grandfather, Henry, and appealing mainly for the opportunities it provides to hear Emmy sing. A couple Rhinofest stalwarts have contributed digniﬁed near misses. One such is ON LOSS (Sat 7 PM), a new play cycle by Mark Chrisler, comprising nine brief vignettes that explore the confluence of dark—sometimes very dark—clouds and their freakish silver linings. Individual bits can be amusing, bleak, or both. But given their dependence on contrivance, they can’t do much more in the end than convey a mood of mild, O. Henry-esque irony. Similarly, LAST WEEK (Sun 2 PM), Beau O’Reilly’s look at Chicagoans coping with police violence, attempts to build power and momentum over the course of many quick scenes. Those scenes are so uneven, though, that escape velocity is never achieved. While O’Reilly is great at sketching personalities (among them a cranky old neighborhood guy man named Mookie, wonderfully played by Stefan Brün), his bouts of righteous wrath come off as pro forma. Speaking of wrath, you can feel Karen Orendurff Fort champing at the bit in her 90-minute drama, GROUNDSWELL (Sun 7 PM), longing to deliver a straight-out seminar on the preventable horrors of global warming. Fort cannily turns that impatience into an endearing trait: her main character, Andrea, is forever getting on her parents’ wrong side with her environmental screeds. Even so, you often feel as if the script wishes it were a pamphlet. v RHINOFEST Through 2/26: Wed-Fri 7 and 9 PM; Sat 2, 5, 7, 9, and 10:30 PM; Sun 2, 5, and 7 PM; Mon 7 and 9 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, rhinofest.com, $12 online in advance, $15 or pay what you can at the door.

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ARTS & CULTURE Jennifer Kim, Catherine Combs, and Kyle Beltran in Gloria o LIZ LAUREN

ovel el by b Adapted from the novel EDITH NESBIT

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Adapted and directed by Lookingglass Theatre’s Artistic Director HEIDI STILLMAN and CAROLINE MACON From the book by GISELLE POTTER Choreographed by SYLVIA HERNANDEZ-DISTASI Produced in association with THE ACTORS GYMNASIUM

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f we take Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2015 off-Broadway hit Gloria as an accurate satirical reﬂection of the contemporary American white-collar workplace—and much of the critical praise heaped on it insists we should— the new normal in cubicleland is cynical solipsism, unfocused ambition, and millennial entitlement. Gone entirely, at least in the office of the unnamed New York magazine where the play is set, are collegiality, decorum, purpose, and any semblance of work ethic. Everyone just wants to get ahead without knowing what getting ahead might look like. I imagine such toxic work environments exist, although Jacobs-Jenkins doesn’t portray that toxicity especially convincingly. In fact, I’d bet many of us would gladly work in this office. For the entire first act of this Goodman production (which is, curiously, a wholesale import of the original staged by New York’s Vineyard Theatre), none of the handful of twentysomethings works for longer than ten seconds at a stretch. Nor do they act on the ambition they allegedly possess. Mostly they gossip, gripe, snipe, and grandstand with abandon—and without so much as a “Could you keep it down?” from the boss seated in the adjoining office. It’s postgraduate day care. Yet we’re asked to empathize with Lorin, the head fact-checker, when he moans that the office “sucks your soul out of you.” But even if this portrayal, with attendant familiar criticisms of media and celebrity culture, amounts to verisimilitude, it’s all dramatically irrelevant.

That’s because Jacobs-Jenkins completely changes the terms of his play just before intermission. [Spoilers follow.] Act one ends with a horrific bit of violence, and from there the comparatively more interesting second act focuses entirely on the survivors’ attempts to understand, package, and ultimately profit from the tragedy. Book and TV deals loom. And fate is cruel: editorial assistant Dean, who was smack in the middle of the carnage, is so traumatized he can hardly set pen to paper, while top editor Nan, who saw nothing, ends up with a major production deal. The main thrust, laid in none too subtly, is that a self-centered, mercantile culture turns tragedy into cutthroat opportunism. But the forces that create a market for trauma porn—and Jacobs-Jenkins’s uncomplicated criticisms of them—have nothing to do with the state of the American whitecollar workplace. If the horror unfolded at a bowling alley or an auto-body shop—or a happy, collegial publishing co-op, for that matter—the results might easily be the same. Jacobs-Jenkins starts one play and finishes another, leaving neither adequately developed. Director Evan Cabnet has a winning cast and ingenious designers at his disposal, making this discursive, intermittently poignant evening quite entertaining. If only it had more to say. v GLORIA Through 2/19: Wed 7:30 PM, Thu 2 and 8 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM (2 PM only 2/19); also Tue 2/7, 7:30 PM, $26-$85.

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 21

Read Sasha Geffen’s review of the multimedia performance KJELL THEØRY by the experimental artist collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality at chicagoreader.com.

ARTS & CULTURE

Kader Attia o SEAN SU

Still from Attia’s video essay Reﬂecting Memory o COURTESY THE ARTIST

VISUAL ART

Reﬂect and repair

By LEE ANN NORMAN

hat does it mean to “ﬁx” something? If a bond—physical, social, psychological—is broken, can it ever truly be reconnected? If so, how can such a repair be achieved? Internationally acclaimed French-Algerian artist Kader Attia mines historical archives to understand complicated relationships between people: colonizer and colonized, master and slave, residents of the geopolitical north and south. He has pursued these inquiries primarily through the lens of colonial legacies, particularly in Africa, and their inﬂuence on European modernism. Attia’s research residency at Northwestern University’s Herskovits Library of African Studies

22 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

allowed him to spend a year poring over the library’s vast collection of books, journals, and ephemera, and conduct interviews with university faculty in disciplines ranging from science and philosophy to history and anthropology. “Reﬂecting Memory,” the result of this deep scholarly engagement, is an exhibition consisting of three collages, one sculpture, and a ﬁlmic essay of the same title. It expands on Attia’s preoccupation with fraught connections and the ways they manifest themselves through collective and individual memories. Attia spent his childhood between the homes of relatives in Algeria and the Paris suburbs; he then studied in Barcelona, followed by three years during which he lived in

the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These experiences made him a keen observer of cultural practices and traditions. Attia’s navigated his sometimes contentious cultural identities (Algeria remained a French colony for more than 100 years) and noticed patterns of relating to the communities where he’s lived, worked, and studied. He’s perhaps best known for the massive installation The Repair From Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures (2012), presented at Documenta(13), the international art exhibition held in Kassel, Germany, every five years. The work juxtaposes traditional African sculptures and images of African body-adornment practices with pictures of soldiers who’d undergone experimental facial

reconstructive surgeries during World War I. “Reflecting Memory” explores similar themes of heritage and the impact of relationships among various versions of history—the ways we remember events separately and together, and how those memories might shift over time. Alongside this examination of memory and relationship, Attia has also been studying loss through the notion of repair. He has come to regard repair as much more than merely “fixing” something that’s damaged or broken, but as an act of transformation. His more recent research has focused on phantom limb syndrome, a psychological phenomenon amputees may experience where they feel the presence or sensation of the appendage they’ve lost. Attia’s film Reflecting Memory (2016) argues that repair is reconciliation within the self. Throughout Reflecting Memory scholars, surgeons, and patients share different perspectives on grief, memory, and trauma, using examples as varied as the Holocaust, the Turkish government’s official denial of the Armenian genocide, slavery, terrorist attacks, and freak accidents, all in an effort to explain the perception of loss created through rupture. The doctors go on to discuss mirroring therapy as a healing technique for people with phantom limb syndrome. Scientists define mirror neurons in the brain as those that perform similarly whether we experience an action directly or simply bear witness to it. They believe misfiring neurons, those that are still generating sensations that occur even though the appendage is gone, are at the heart of phantom limb syndrome. During therapy, patients use a mirror to reflect their missing limb, giving the appearance of wholeness, as if the limb were there again. One of Attia’s

ARTS & CULTURE

Gueules Cassées (Broken Faces), 2014

o COURTESY THE ARTIST

mirroring sculptures, shown in the film, is installed in the gallery. A stainless-steel divider bisects a desk, on top of which half a typewriter is positioned against the divider’s reflective surface; the other side of the partition isn’t reflective at all. The disparity heightens an awareness of how images contribute to our sense of understanding the world. There’s a belief that not only do people need to “see” trauma in order to believe it, feel it, or understand it, they also need to have that trauma presented to them in very particular ways. Huey Copeland, associate professor of art history at Northwestern, expands on notions of memory and visual images in the film, drawing parallels between the contemporary phenomenon of people sharing video of police violence, usually against black people, and authors writing about slavery who use images of indentured servants rather than actual slaves to illustrate conditions. Much of Attia’s oeuvre rails against this flattening of culture and experience. For him there’s no singular or institutionally sanctioned way to mourn, grieve, see or feel, or repair. In a panel discussion during the exhibition opening, Attia likened repair to a cultural act, one that transforms one thing—

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positively or negatively, and in this case a social or psychological wound—into another. An amputated limb doesn’t determine how trauma might be converted into some sort of healing, but the loss, in Attia’s view, can be used as information. Rather than negating its presence (or absence), people might approach the act of repair like they approach scar tissue: it will remain even after the wound has healed. In fact, it’s part of the healing. Repair is a paradox. On one hand, repair offers hope that what’s lost can be restored eventually; on the other, repair occasions the despair that occurs when one realizes that things can’t be as they were, or as they’re remembered—a nostalgic view of the time before. Repair requires that trauma be carried forward into a new reality, a future that incorporates the present while embracing the past. “Reﬂecting Memory” is a meditation on such a daunting task. v R “KADER ATTIA: REFLECTING MEMORY” Through 4/16: Tue-Wed 10 AM-5 PM, Thu-Fri 10 AM-8 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Northwestern University Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston, 847-491-4000, blockmuseum.northwestern.edu. F

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ARTS & CULTURE I Am Not Your Negro o NICOLA DOVE

MOVIES

Voice of a preacher, heart of a nomad

By J.R. JONES

aoul Peck’s galvanizing documentary I Am Not Your Negro reacquaints viewers with one of the most powerful voices of the civil rights era, the great novelist, playwright, and essayist James Baldwin. His 1963 book The Fire Next Time, a best seller in the U.S., squarely confronted white Americans with the moral cost of their apartheid government and for several years made him a prominent public ﬁgure. As Peck’s archival clips illustrate, Baldwin was a captivating speaker, his bold language and dramatic cadences drawn right from the pulpit. His forbidding stepfather, David Baldwin, had been a Pentecostal preacher in Harlem, and 14-year-old James had followed him into the ministry, preaching the gospel for three years, before he’d turned his back on organized religion. Baldwin understood the theatrics of the sermon, and the apocalyptic tone he brought to his pronouncements on race is

24 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

no less arresting now than it was 50 years ago. The voice-over narration for I Am Not Your Negro, performed with atypical restraint by Samuel L. Jackson, consists entirely of Baldwin’s thoughts, which Peck has cobbled together from more than a dozen texts. The two key sources, however, are unpublished documents he obtained from Gloria Karefa-Smart, Baldwin’s sister and literary executor: a June 1979 letter from the writer to his agent, Jay Acton, and 30 pages of notes for a novel that Baldwin would never write, to chronicle the lives and deaths of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. “I want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other, as in truth they did,” Baldwin explains, “and use their dreadful journey as a means of instructing people whom they loved so much, who betrayed them, and for whom they gave their lives.” The book, to be called “Remember This House,” would’ve exploited

Baldwin’s status as a civil rights insider. Yet his words wouldn’t ring so powerfully today had he not instinctively thought of himself as an outsider. Peck, a native of Haiti and director of two acclaimed films about the Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba, grew up reading Baldwin, and he invests the writer’s words with new meaning by pairing them with images from our own troubled times: of black citizens protesting police violence as military vehicles roll into Ferguson, Missouri, and of Trayvon Martin, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and other black children and teens who died violent deaths. Branching out from Baldwin’s anecdotes about Evers, Malcolm, and King, Peck weaves in clips from Hollywood movies that shocked or otherwise shaped Baldwin or that illustrate his caustic thoughts on a racist popular culture. I Am Not Your Negro is a fascinating tour through Baldwin’s mind, yet the documentary reveals relatively little about the writer’s spiritual journey, which not only shaped his political rhetoric but also informed his relationships with King and Malcolm. “I was icily determined—more determined, really, than I then knew—never to make my peace with the ghetto but to die and go to Hell before I would let any white man spit on me, before I would accept my ‘place’ in this republic,” Baldwin wrote of his early teenage

years in The Fire Next Time. Presented with few options beyond a life of crime or a deadend job, he “fled into the church.” As Baldwin grew older, however, he began to recognize his own attraction to men, which put him at odds with the ministry. He also began to understand how much his stepfather’s hatred for “white devils” fed his religious feeling. As Baldwin explains in Karen Thorsen’s excellent 1989 documentary James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket, he began to see black evangelical Christianity as “a kind of fantasy revenge” in which blacks would be saved and whites damned. With that background, Baldwin was naturally fascinated by King, also the son of a minister. Baldwin first met King in September 1957, when Baldwin was writing about the Montgomery bus boycott for Harper’s and Partisan Review. By that time he’d published his novel Giovanni’s Room, whose frank treatment of homosexual and bisexual characters might have made King more guarded around him. The two men would cross paths numerous times as Baldwin became a more important voice in civil rights, and according to biographer David Leeming, Baldwin was struck by King’s willingness to serve as a symbol for the movement, which would inevitably make King the target of harassment. I Am Not Your Negro includes excerpts from a 1963 TV program in which psychologist Kenneth Clark presents a trilogy of one-on-one interviews with King, Malcolm, and Baldwin. The program highlights the growing philosophical conflict between King’s nonviolence and Malcolm’s more militant stance, a conflict that Baldwin was still trying to work out for himself. Though skeptical of nonviolence as a political tactic, Baldwin was also alienated from the Nation of Islam, whose doctrinal hatred of whites reminded him too much of his stepfather. I Am Not Your Negro includes a sequence in which Baldwin remembers his first meeting with Malcolm: giving a lecture in New York, the writer looked up to see the impressively tall minister in the front row, leaning in toward him and staring intently, which so intimidated Baldwin that he “stumbled through” his presentation. Malcolm would have been every bit as judgmental as King about the writer’s sexuality, and Baldwin was old enough to be familiar with Malcolm’s legendary past as a Harlem hustler and thief named Malcolm Little. Yet Baldwin was electrified by Malcolm’s message of black self-preservation. In one of the movie’s interview clips, he attributes Malcolm’s command over his listeners to his

ARTS & CULTURE “[articulation of] their suffering, their suffering which has been in this country so long denied. That’s Malcolm’s authority over any of his audiences. He corroborates their reality.” Baldwin’s relationship with Medgar Evers, Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, provides some of the more poignant moments in I Am Not Your Negro. They met in January 1963, when Baldwin arrived in Jackson on a speaking tour of the Deep South sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality, and during his stay he accompanied Evers on nighttime runs to question witnesses about the recent murder of a black man by a white storekeeper. Baldwin, who was terrified by the experience, sensed in Evers a resignation to his own inevitable death, and during their visit Evers told him about the tree he’d passed every day as a boy, from whose branches hung shreds of clothing from a lynching victim. I Am Not Your Negro includes Baldwin’s recollection of their last meeting, when he came over to Evers’s little ranch house to sign some books for him and his wife. In June 1963, Evers was shot to death in his own driveway, with his wife and children watching at the window, by a local member of the White Citizens’ Council. Somehow Baldwin managed to transmogrify all this into a play, Blues for Mister Charlie, that would stand as his signal literary contribution to the civil rights era after The Fire Next Time. For years he had planned to write the story of Emmett Till, the Chicago teenager who was brutally lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after allegedly whistling at a white woman; in the play Till becomes a grown man burning with the same sort of rage that animated Malcolm. When he speaks of driving the white race into the sea, his grandmother warns him, “You’re gonna make yourself sick with hatred,” to which he replies, “I’ll gonna make myself well with hatred.” His father, a minister trying to work within the system, embodies King’s philosophy of nonviolence and slow progress. Blues for Mister Charlie represents Baldwin’s attempt to work out the conflict between King and Malcolm, and yet the writer who reflects on his two friends a decade later in I Am Not Your Negro comes up with a surprising assessment: “I watched two men coming from unimaginably different backgrounds, whose positions originally were poles apart, driven closer and closer together. By the time each died, their positions had become virtually the same position. It can be said, indeed, that Marssss EXCELLENT

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tin picked up Malcolm’s burden, articulated the vision which Malcolm had begun to see, and for which he paid with his life.” Baldwin began to pull away from the struggle in late 1965 when, devastated by the end of a love affair, he moved to Istanbul. “I was never in town to stay,” he says of his civil rights activism in I Am Not Your Negro. Baldwin felt he could contribute best not as a participant but as a witness, to “get the story out.” Ironically, as he relates in the film, when he heard the news of King’s assassination in April 1968, he was in Hollywood with actor Billy Dee Williams, trying to get financing for a biopic about Malcolm X. (His script would never be filmed, though Spike Lee would deliver his own Malcolm X in 1992.) A decade later, Baldwin’s agent got him the biggest advance of his career for “Remember This House,” which would give him another shot at Malcolm’s story. But as Baldwin observes in the movie, writing it would mean returning to the south to interview Coretta Scott King, Myrlie Evers, Betty Shabazz, and each woman’s children. “It means exposing myself as one of the witnesses to the lives and deaths of their famous fathers,” he notes with some dread, “and it means much, much more than that.” Apparently, it meant too much. Peck may not be able to get inside the spiritual struggle that made Baldwin such a complex figure, but I Am Not Your Negro, with its frequent reminders that there are still two Americas, proves that Baldwin’s writing has lost none of its currency. Baldwin never joined the Nation of Islam, he explains, “because I did not believe that all white people were devils, and I did not want young black people to believe that. I was not a member of any Christian congregation, because I knew that they had not heard and did not live by the commandment ‘Love one another as I love you.’ And I was not a member of the NAACP, because in the north, where I grew up, the NAACP was fatally entangled with black class distinctions, or illusions of the same, which repelled a shoeshine boy like me.” Baldwin came at the racial crisis not as a congregant but as an individual, which is how he managed to connect across racial lines and, now, reaches across generations. v I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO ssss Directed by Raoul Peck. PG-13, 94 min. For showtimes see chicagoreader.com/movies.

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ShowYouSuck in the booth at JBTV o FELTON KIZER

ShowYouSuck builds on his omnivorous orous hip-hop with a free-form TV show In just a few months, the eager collaborator has launched Air Credits with the Hood Internet and Good Luck Hunting on JBTV. By LEOR GALIL

26 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

ew grassroots Chicago hip-hop artists play as well with others as Clinton Sandifer, aka ShowYouSuck. His collaborations tend to turn into friendships, and those friendships lead to new collaborations—not just in hip-hop but also in punk, pop, indie rock, experimental R&B, electronic music, and even stand-up comedy. His warmth, positivity, and enthusiasm act as catalysts for all sorts of genre-crossing hybrids that might not exist without him. Hood Internet producer Steve Reidell recruited Show for his group’s 2012 album Feat—specifically “Nothing Should Be a Surprise,” which also features Arizona rapper Isaiah Toothtaker. “It was definitely a track that wasn’t made in the same room, but it still vibed well—that springboarded and ended up with those two collaborating further,” Reidell says. “It’s a cool testament to the infectiousness of ShowYouSuck. People work with him, or even if they end up on a track with him they maybe didn’t intend to collaborate on—someone just gets put onto a track—it seems to result in further collaboration.” In his hyperactive live sets, Show seems at least as excited to be onstage as his fans are to watch him, and he practically bounces off the walls—he’s in midair more often than he has both feet on the ground. He’s witty, goofy, and approachable, with a nonchalant magnetism that’s a big part of his crossover appeal. In a ShowYouSuck crowd, you’re as likely to see studded leather jackets as you are streetwear and hoodies. Show’s contagious energy extends to his omnivorous, idiosyncratic music. His lyrics feel like late-night conversations that ramble from a hit TV show to a new favorite hole-inthe-wall Mexican joint to a great metal concert to the heartache of a bad breakup. On his October 2011 debut, the One Man Pizza Party mixtape (the first of a series of four), he references back-flipping Bad Brains front man H.R., 1990s Nickelodeon summer-camp show Salute Your Shorts, and a “smorgasbord of hoagies, oatmeal, cannolis.” In December 2012, when the bleak, nihilistic drill sound ruled the Chicago scene, Show dropped One Man Pizza Party III: Rest in Pizza, where he rapped about using binge eating as an emotional crutch on “25 Slices” (a silly nod to DJ DMD’s “25 Lighters”). “He marches to the beat of his own drum,” says Fake Shore Drive founder and editor Andrew Barber. “I don’t think he watches what other people are doing—he has a unique way of doing things.”

MUSIC Over the past year, ShowYouSuck has continued to reach out and forge new relationships. The 31-year-old made his entrance into the local comedy scene, performing his songs twice at the A.V. Club’s monthly stand-up showcase, Bell Hop; he teamed up with Dark Matter Coffee for Intellectual Curiosity, a musicinspired roast that came with a ShowYouSuck cassette called Awesome Tape; he got onstage with garage-pop group Today’s Hits; and he guested on a couple Chicago installments of Daybreaker, an early-morning dance party that begins with an hour of yoga and exercise. His highest-proﬁle new project, though, is Air Credits, a band with frequent collaborators and mashup machines the Hood Internet (aka Reidell and coproducer Aaron Brink). Air Credits debuted with two singles in July 2016, and in October they released their ﬁrst full-length, the pop-centric, stylistically slippery Broadcasted. The group hit the road with Doomtree rapper Sims for 22 dates in November and December, then returned to town to open for the Hood Internet at a sold-out New Year’s Eve gig at Lincoln Hall. New musical collaborations are pretty much standard op-

erating procedure for Show, though. He’s also working on a project in a medium that’s new to him: television. Show’s TV show, Good Luck Hunting, debuts this month through Chicago-based JBTV. Founded in 1984 by former audio engineer Jerry Bryant, JBTV was originally a single music-focused program (it’s been aired on a variety of independent, digital, and cableaccess channels during its long life) and expanded last year into a 24-hour network, available on WPVN 24.7 (you need an HD antenna) and at jbtvmusic.com. Filmmaker and editor Jeremy Franklin, who’s worked on music videos for ShowYouSuck and singer Lili K., has spent the past few weeks helping Show ﬁnesse the program’s 28-minute debut episode. They haven’t let many people see it yet, aside from Bryant and JBTV executive producer Greg Corner, but Show is willing to drop some hints. “I call it a visual magazine. It’s a mix of animated shorts, music videos, interviews, live performance clips—like, random shorts that I ﬁnd on the Internet and stuff that we make too,” he says. “This is my version of MTV’s Liquid Television. Also this is my J

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FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 27

MUSIC

Headbangers Ball. This is my Yo! MTV Raps. This is my Rap City. All in one.” Show stumbled upon JBTV the show while growing up in west-suburban Bellwood in the 90s. “JBTV gave me an alternative—an alternative to see a band that I’m really stoked on get interviewed,” he says. “They would interview bands that I never saw get interviewed before. I got put on to a lot of bands by watching JBTV, just randomly.” Through the show, he discovered Veruca Salt and first heard Billy Corgan talk (instead of sing). He developed an appetite for all sorts of public-access TV. “That’s how I saw anime for the first time,” he says. “I saw superweird videos of people doing random stuff on public access.” As a kid Show got obsessed with all sorts of pop culture—not just music and oddball TV but also sneakers, vinyl toys, and clothes— and they eventually became as integral to his music as his love for hip-hop, metal, and punk and his predilection for rapping about food. On One Man Pizza Party 2: Mo Slices, Mo Problems, which he dropped in December 2011, he nicks the “What the hell do I know” line from Kanye’s “Dark Fantasy” to set up a lyric about late-night tacos, compares weed to Folgers coffee (“The best part of waking up”), and raps about watching cartoon dogs while surfing Pitchfork’s website. Show’s first two OMPP mixtapes, released within a couple months of each other, earned him a reputation as a rapper to watch. “The style of his voice really resonated right away— all the pop-culture references, that real classic ShowYouSuck style and content,” Reidell says. At the time, the Hood Internet were working on Feat, their debut album of original material (as opposed to mashups). Listening to the first OMPP gave Reidell an idea. “We had this beat and I was like, ‘Maybe this dude would want to rap on this,’” he says. ShowYouSuck, who liked to pass the time at his retail jobs listening to Hood Internet mixtapes, jumped at the chance when Reidell send him a DM on Twitter. Show’s work on Feat began one of his most fruitful musical partnerships. His 2013 Closed Sessions EP, Dude Bro, included the triumphant, pumped-up jam “Make-Out King,” produced by the Hood Internet. In March 2014 both acts performed at the inaugural Chicago Made, a city-presented showcase at South by Southwest, alongside the likes of Psalm One (performing as Hologram Kizzie), Archie Powell & the Exports, and Chance the Rapper, whose headlining set attracted such an overwhelming crowd that it got the concert

28 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

o FELTON KIZER

ShowYouSuck continued from 27

“This is my version of MTV’s Liquid Television. Also this is my Headbangers Ball. This is my Yo! MTV Raps. This is my Rap City. All in one.” —ShowYouSuck

shut down. Psalm One enjoyed sharing a bill with Show and the Hood Internet so much that she invited both acts to travel to Europe with her in fall 2014. “Me and Clinton ended up being roommates on that tour,” Reidell says. “That’s when we started toying around with, like, ‘Hey, we should—once we’re back in the States—maybe get together and make a whole project.’” ShowYouSuck and the Hood Internet scheduled a recording session with producer Professor Fox in July 2015, but after that the collaboration seemed to stall. It wasn’t till early the next year that Reidell found an opportunity to kick things back into gear: Black Moth Super Rainbow leader Tobacco offered the Hood Internet an opening spot for a couple road shows in March 2016, and Reidell figured he could invite Show along. “I did that classic move where you have a new band and maybe it’s not quite ready for a show yet, but you book a show and then you have a deadline,” he says. “I hit Clinton up. I was like, ‘Hey, would you want to do a set where I DJ some ShowYouSuck tracks but we also do some new stuff?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m down.’ So then we started getting together with a pretty high frequency to start working on whatever that was.” ShowYouSuck and the Hood Internet rehearsed and recorded in preparation for the tour with Tobacco, and though they appeared

under their own names, they were essentially operating as a distinct project—the band that would eventually be called Air Credits. The four or five songs they cut before hitting the road established Air Credits as anchored in scifi imagery—Show says he got that feeling from “Camaro,” the very first track. “He [Reidell] played the beginning of the beat—it made me think of weird, futuristic shit,” Show says. “I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m just gonna rap about it.’ Steve never was like, ‘This is weird,’ he just let me do it.” In April, after the shows with Tobacco, the new group made “No Water,” the song that cemented Air Credits’ identity: “It just unlocked something in me that I wasn’t able to make with any other producer.” The dystopian world Show describes in “No Water” provides a common ground for the stylistically disparate songs on Broadcasted. Atop the song’s hazy G-funk melody, he raps about a postapocalyptic wasteland ravaged by nuclear war, which has decimated the earth’s population and evaporated or poisoned much of its fresh water. It’s not clear how far into the future the song is set, but humans are able to travel to Mars. Trump is still in power, having abused a cloning program to ensure that a version of him will stay in the Oval Office. (Broadcasted came out a week and a half before the presidential election, when this might have seemed funny.) Show portrays himself not just as surviving but as having amassed a fortune that allows him to buy enough air to live. “Air credits don’t come cheap,” he raps on the hook. “Broke boys ain’t breathing like me.” Teaming up with Reidell and Brink has been rewarding for Show: “[Steve’s] frame of reference is huge, which is perfect for me, ’cause I live in references,” he says. “I can be like, ‘Yo, can we make this sound like the intro to Pretty in Pink?’ and he knows exactly what I’m talking about.” Forming a new band also helped Show find a better perspective on his own work. “What’s really cool about this situation is that I learned that I control my narrative—I call this a band, so people call it a band,” he says. “I guess I’m outing the Jedi mind trick about it— instead of calling it a rap group or something.” Andrew Barber sees Air Credits as a major step up for ShowYouSuck: “Show and the Hood Internet coming together—I hate to use this comparison, ’cause probably everybody’s used it, but I feel like it could be their Run the Jewels moment,” he says. “You hear them and see them together and you go, ‘Oh, this makes perfect sense—this is a perfect fit.’” ShowYouSuck changed his narrative in another way last year. Though he’s built a

MUSIC reputation as the Energizer Bunny of Chicago hip-hop, he proved that his lyrics and perspective could work with somber instrumentation too—his Bummer EP, released in May and produced by local guitarist Walking Shoe, has the darkest beats he’s ever used. “I feel like certain people started to look at me in a different way—in a good way,” he says. “I really unlocked something while working on that project, for sure, and now overall I feel really open creatively—like I’m realizing my potential for the ﬁrst time.” Show says he made Bummer because he’d been depressed and struggling to figure out what he wanted from his career. He’d quit his last retail job in 2015 to pursue rap full-time. “Music, and I even think art—it’s a completely illogical business to be in, ’cause when you do A, B, and C it doesn’t necessarily equal D,” he says. “You can have the manager, you can have this great opportunity, you can have the publicist, but sometimes it doesn’t pan out. You can drive yourself crazy worrying about this stuff, and I did for so long. I just got lost in what I wanted, and my brain had a realignment—it just got it together, and now I make things be-

cause that’s what I want to do. I do it the way I want to do it, and I make it with who I want to make it with, and it’s awesome. Now making the art gets me really stoked, and the results of the art is just extra.” Encouraged by this new mind-set, Show pitched his idea for a TV program to JBTV last summer. He’d had a personal relationship with the show since 2012, when his friend Greg Corner joined its staff. They’d met at a Rehab party earlier that year, after which Corner, then playing bass in Kill Hannah, quickly became a fan of Show’s music. JBTV had historically focused on rock, and Corner saw an opportunity to help diversify its programming. “I wanted to open up the demographic and genres of music that were getting booked there—[Show] was one of the first hip-hop artists that I booked,” he says. “His style and demeanor—even what he wears—is such a bridge between rock ’n’ roll and hip-hop.” Show was such a hit with the JBTV crowd and crew that Corner started calling on him to interview performers (and to do interviews at the North Coast Music Festival and Riot Fest in 2015 and ’16). When Show sat down with

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rapper Taylor Bennett on JBTV this past July, he learned about the new 24-hour station from the show’s staffers. “I asked them, ‘What do you guys show all the time?’ They said, ‘Archive footage,’” he says. “I was thinking, ‘They probably need content.’” Show began working on Good Luck Hunting in November, mostly by e-mailing people whose work he liked to ask them to contribute to the first episode. “I can connect people. I feel like that’s where a lot of my skill set comes from—connecting people that wouldn’t normally come across each other,” Show says. His entry into the local comedy scene demonstrates this talent. Matt Byrne of the Bell Hop stand-up series encountered him on Tim Barnes’s comedy podcast, It’s All True!, in October 2015, and ended up booking him twice. “Just coming off of those two shows, I’ve deﬁnitely passed his contact information on to a lot of folks,” Byrne says. “I know a lot of comedians that saw his set at one of the two shows were very excited.” Good Luck Hunting doesn’t have a fixed format, which Show hopes will make it easier for him to draw from the various overlap- J

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 29

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MAR 07

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MAR 17-18

ALEX LAHEY

MAR 20

JAY SOM + THE COURTNEYS

MAR 24

ALLISON CRUTCHFIELD AND THE FIZZ VAGABON + PRETTY PRETTY

MAR 31

AVEC SANS

APR 27

NEW

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THE FUNS

ShowYouSuck continued from 29 ping communities in which he’s involved. He’s already found a new collaborator through the program—avant-garde rapper and singer Sen Morimoto, who’s been a fan of Show’s since seeing him open for Yelawolf in 2012. Morimoto worked with Show on the lighthearted theme song for Good Luck Hunting. “It’s very cute and beautiful—it makes my heart warm,” Morimoto says. “That’s how I’m assuming the show’s gonna make me feel.” Franklin, who’s been working with Show since he became a fan about ﬁve years ago, is the rapper’s main collaborator on Good Luck Hunting. He’s helped edit the first episode, which ought to be broadcast early this month (JBTV had yet to settle on a date when this was published). “Clinton is different from some other artists I’ve worked with, because he’s very open to ideas and really trusts people,” Franklin says. “As a creative, you always want to be able to collaborate with people that allow you to express your vision as well as their own.” The in-progress excerpts of Good Luck Hunting that I’ve seen are full of other peoples’

visions: the shorts include an animation by rapper Probcause and local ﬁlmmaker Elijah Alvarado, a comedy bit with Chicago pop duo Celine Neon, and a Claymation piece by UK animator Maxim Northover that stars a skeleton character from his videos for ShowYouSuck’s “Make-Out King” and “Daria (Everything Sucks).” Show’s own music floats in and out of the episode, which also features brief live clips of Air Credits. Good Luck Hunting is playful and hallucinatory, a collage of creative visions whose only shared element is ShowYouSuck. He’s making things up as he goes, and the show doesn’t yet have a ﬁxed length or format—there’s so much time available on the JBTV network that he can stretch out as much as he likes. He’s not sure how often new episodes will arrive, either. “Who knows how long the next episode is gonna be, or the episode after that,” he says. “If I want to make an all-Saint Patty’s Day episode or, I don’t know, a half-hour montage of people puking all over the place, let’s do it! This is an ever-changing art piece.” v

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30 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of February 2 b ALL AGES F

MUSIC

THURSDAY2

PICK OF THE WEEK

Producer Sampha morphed from collaborator to noted pop quantity

Drive-By Truckers Kyle Craft opens. 8 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield, $30. 18+ Few working bands embrace their southern heritage as proudly as Georgia’s Drive-By Truckers, which makes their decision to wade right through the country’s political divide all the more stunning. The group intentionally dropped its strong new album American Band (ATO) at the end of September, just as the presidential election neared the height of its fractious run, and aside from the record’s meaty guitar chords, raw soul, and raucous attack there’s nothing to please the supporters of our new president. In the press materials, founding member Mike Cooley says, “I wanted this to be a no bones about it, in your face political album. I wanted to piss off the assholes.” On the opener Cooley tells the story of Texan Harlon Carter—a former leader of the NRA who at 17 was convicted of murdering a Mexican boy, Ramon Casiano, in Laredo—eventually fanning out to examine the toxic mix of violence and racism that has been spreading throughout the country: “Men whose triggers pull their fingers / Men who’d rather fight than win / United in a revolution / Like in mind and like in skin.” Cooley’s “Ever South” offers a more complicated indictment, digging into the south’s deeply ingrained racism from the perspective of white ethnics—themselves once reviled. Patterson Hood’s plaintive “Guns of Umpqua” paints a no less disturbing portrait of America, toggling between bucolic images of rural Oregon and the deadly classroom shooting at the Umpqua Community College in October of 2015. Pulling off this kind of album isn’t easy, but the gritty melodies and stomping rhythms only enhance the righteous messages that transcend particular moments in American history, even as they unmistakably spring from the present. —PETER MARGASAK o JAMIE-JAMES MEDINA

SAMPHA, MAL DEVISA

Mon 2/6, 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, sold out. b

WHAT DO SOLANGE’S A Seat at the Table, Frank Ocean’s Endless, and Kanye’s The Life of Pablo have in common? Well, besides being some of the most talked-about releases of 2016, they all feature golden vocal contributions from London singer, songwriter, and producer Sampha Sisay, better known as Sampha. (Kanye didn’t actually add the knockout “Saint Pablo” with Sampha till months after he first dropped Pablo, but I’m counting it all the same.) Sampha has been a pop quantity since 2011, when his work on SBTKRT’s self-titled Young Turks debut helped deﬁne the London producer as a cultural (if not commercial) hit. Sampha inked a deal with the same hot UK label, and after years of allowing his voice to suit the ideas of his collaborators he just dropped his debut solo full-length, Process. A recent Fader cover story mentions that Sampha’s father, who relocated the family from Sierra Leone a few years before he was born, decided to buy a piano when Sampha was three. And you can hear Sampha’s emotional history in the tinkling of ivory keys and in the tremble of his voice on the bare ballad “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano.” His performance does a great job of letting listeners into his world. —LEOR GALIL

Salvation Fake Limbs headline; Lasers and Fast and Shit, Salvation, and Den open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $7. A combo of tortured and deﬁant, the hard-nasal wail of Salvation front man Jason Sipe is one that every angsty young punk who grew up on the streets of the 90s fantasized about. Like Cobain meets Yow meets Dremel Saw-Max applied to pavement, it slices through the trio’s loosey-goosey noise rock— which lands somewhere between the posthardcore of early era Rye Coalition and the manic punk of Louisville’s long-gone Lords—and drags the gnarled remnants behind. More plaintive and drugged out than the trio’s 2015 LP Royal Fucks, Salvation’s new Sore Loser (oﬃcially out March 31 via local imprint Forge Again Records) is still as pained and loud. The dudes might take pickaxes to a track’s underlying groove—like on “The Protagonist”—or stretch out and leave plenty of space for Sipe to hit his most disturbed, his vocals shifting from Buffalo Bill to high-strung and heated in a second (“Voices in the House”). Tonight’s show is the release party for Sore Loser, and LPs will be available. —KEVIN WARWICK J

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

MUSIC

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32 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

24hrs Ye Ali and James & the Giant Trap Beat open. 6 PM, Double Door, $20, $15 in advance, 1551 N. Damen. b 24hrs is waiting to receive plaudits like those collected by R&B-rap crossover acts Ty Dolla $ign—a frequent collaborator—and the also anonymously named Dvsn, if only because he’s as yet nowhere near as lyrically acute as the former or as spiritual as the latter. The Artist Formerly Known as Royce Rizzy is Atlanta to the bone, and his addiction to slick hooks and arrhythmic stutters no doubt shows off his firm reliance on the sonic tropes of the ATL (not to mention his mixtape partner, MadeInTYO, is also his brother). What’s really unexpected is his range. While 24hrs made his name on the downcast, confrontational “You Know,” his recent posse cut “What You Like” with Dolla $ign and Wiz Khalifa (and production from Hit-Boy) glides along with summery synths and a light but insistent 808 rhythm—it’s more an invitation than a warning. 24hrs has released only a few EPs and is still discovering his sound, but though it’s early, there’s an undeniable wholeness to his persona, which makes the recent self-released Sunset Blvd EP feel like it’s from a fully formed, multifaceted sex fiend. —AUSTIN BROWN

FRIDAY3 Daniel Bachman Moon Bros. and Jim Becker open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10.

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES 2/8 Friends of the Gamelan 2/15 Gros Ngolle Pokossi

continued from 31

Daniel Bachman continues to see past the limitations of acoustic guitar music. He’s only 26, but he’s already waxed nearly a dozen albums (not counting side projects released under diﬀerent names), revealing a quiet virtuosity that’s always subservient to mood and tone. His strongest work yet, November’s eponymous album for Three Lobed, artlessly braids together some of the related strains

on which his playing has recently focused. Like so many fingerstyle players, he’s fully conversant in the American Primitive approach pioneered by John Fahey, whether it’s an ambling blues or a meditative ragalike vibe. One example is “The Flower Tree,” which blossoms from patiently ornate tendrils into a virtual constellation of intense arpeggiated counterpoint and cascading rhythms. Still, Bachman is more interested in creating disparate environments and dispositions. Each side of the album opens with a hovering acoustic drone called “Brightlife Blues”— the first is a ruminative sort of propulsion, while the much longer second maintains a shimmering vibrato for nearly 15 minutes as Bachman toggles between circling figures of baroque richness and hydroplaning stasis. —PETER MARGASAK

Daniel Bachman o JESSE SHEPPARD

Sinai Vessel Ratboys, Options, and Close Kept open. 10:30 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $8. 17+ In a recent interview with radio program cum music site the Alternative, Sinai Vessel founder and front man Caleb Cordes said his band’s brand-new fulllength, Brokenlegged (Tiny Engines), is “about living

MUSIC

with a new awareness and how that can alienate you from having contact with people who don’t have the same awareness.” Cordes, who’s written songs about falling out of step with evangelical Christendom, is speaking from a fairly liberal perspective, though in these divided times perhaps one of the few things that folks on diﬀerent sides of the ideological divide can relate to is the use of language; alt-right brand manager Richard Spencer speaks with a similar tone to describe the “red pill” moment when he became a new-age white supremacist. But the similarities between Spencer and Cordes’s emo band end right there—as do the similarities between Spencer and a vast majority of the planet. Cordes’s clean, uncompromisingly earnest vocals evoke empathy for those who face persecution. On the

plaintive yet exultant “Dogs” Cordes applies the language of Judeo-Christian religion to scenarios where faith is used to wall oﬀ those it’s meant to embrace, delivering the words with the care that everyone deserves. —LEOR GALIL

SATURDAY4 Tim Presley Cate Le Bon headlines. 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $17, $15 in advance. Over the last couple of years LA underground rock fixture Tim Presley (aka White Fence) has been working regularly with beguiling Welsh J

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 33

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Guitar forever. 34 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

continued from 33

singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon. In 2015 they released a fascinating mess of a record under the name Drinks, and last fall Presley dropped his first album under his given name, one on which Le Bon serves as producer. The music on The Wink (Drag City) is smeared with her fingerprints as she redirects Presley’s deep affection for the Who and early Pink Floyd toward something rooted in British postpunk, with clipped phrasing, stiff and twitchy rhythms, and a loose, probing quality. On “Solitude Cola” his guitar sounds manic in a hyperstrumming post-Velvet Underground fashion—his fake English accent also sounds thicker than ever—while “Long Bow” shifts from rapid rhythmic spasms to a kind of woozy torpor. “ER” is one of several tunes where Presley sounds utterly drugged, but there’s something gripping about the fraught tension of the performances that has kept me glued. Le Bon headlines, so I’m hoping there’ll be plenty of collaboration, since she plays all over his record. —PETER MARGASAK

This Long Island quartet threw down a gauntlet with their 2013 debut EP Freaks: 14 filler-free minutes of wickedly efficient prog metal. But on their debut self-released full-length, Chromaparagon, Moon Tooth stretch out and settle in, proving that they can comfortably sustain their inventiveness over a long span. There’s a little bit of Converge and the Melvins in the heaviest moments—plus a suggestion of a vestigial bluesiness that’s all but vanished from slicker and noodlier outfits—and for the most part the 12 diverse tracks are so full of left-field turns that it can get a little bit exhausting. Front man John Carbone is a warm-blooded howler who rides shotgun on riff-driven guitar duels—yet when Moon Tooth slow down or lay back just a little, their flexibility is delightful. Some of the longer tracks have a tendency to drift, but when they’re tight, they’re on fire. —MONICA KENDRICK

Sampha See Pick of the Week (page 31). Mal Devisa opens. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, sold out. b

MONDAY6

White Lies Vowws open. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $25.

Moon Tooth Astronoid, Tanzen, and Lower Automation open. 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 2105 S. State, $12, $10 in advance.

On last October’s Friends (BMG) White Lies have almost all of the ingredients for greatness: the lean and direct rhythms of early U2, the airy synths of

Celebrating 60 Years of Making Music! New adult group classes are now open! Browse our class schedules online at oldtownschool.org

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

MUSIC Lemuria o RYAN RUSSELL/ COURTESY THE ARTIST

1800 W. DIVISION

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

(773) 486-9862 Come enjoy one of Chicago’s ﬁnest beer gardens! THURSDAY, FEB 2 .............. SMILING BOBBY AND THE CLEMTONES FRIDAY, FEB 3 .................... SKIPPIN ROCK SATURDAY, FEB 4 .............. ROCKING BILLY AND HIS WILD COYOTES SUNDAY, FEB 5................... FOOTBALL PARTY WEDNESDAY, FEB 8............ ELIZABETH HARPER’S LITTLE THING THURSDAY, FEB 9 .............. THE FLABBY HOFFMAN SHOW FRIDAY, FEB 10 ................. LUNCH TIME SATURDAY, FEB 11 ............ GUNNELPOMPERS TELEPATHS EVERY MONDAY AT 9PM ANDREW JANAK QUARTET EVERY TUESDAY AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMI JON AMERICA

154-era Wire, and the hopeful-albeit-dark melodic sense of New Order. But the one major component missing from this London-based postpunk trio’s formula is the actual punk—these tunes are about as edgy as a Jell-O mold. While the toothless and safe approach on Friends sounds downright menacing compared to White Lies’ earlier output, it clocks in below Interpol on the dark-and-heavy scale. Still, White Lies can play an important role in the contemporary popular music landscape despite their lack of authentic edge: thanks to their following and major-label backing, they’re a shoe-in to be the gateway drug to Joy Division, the Smiths, and the Chameleons for a whole new generation of young punks. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

TUESDAY7 Lemuria Cayetana and Mikey Erg open. 8:30 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $15. 17+ During emo’s pop phase in the 2000s, pointed, unambiguous sexism was unfortunately welcome, but as the bands propagating that mes-

sage began gasping their last breaths at the end of the decade, Buﬀalo trio Lemuria emerged from the underground with Get Better (Asian Man). Not only did the album hint at emo’s groundswell of creative rejuvenation, but it also suggested the genre could be more than a boys’ club. The glum and forceful “Lipstick” is particularly evocative. Atop a wistful melody singer-guitarist Sheena Ozzella lingers over everyday details that can be harbingers of a crumbling relationship. Her sweetly intoned vocals reﬂect feelings of passion and longing as she sings, “When you wear lipstick / I always want to kiss you / But you use your lipstick / As an excuse not to kiss me.” Lemuria’s narrative ambiguity is as strong as their grasp of pop dynamics, and their choices reverberate beyond their songs. The brief sketches of the characters in “Lipstick”—and Ozzella’s choice to sing from the perspective of someone who doesn’t use cosmetics (“Maybe I should wear lipstick too”)—represent a challenge to heteronormative behavior. Tonight Lemuria play Get Better in its entirety to celebrate the album’s new reissue and its tenth anniversary—technically it came out in 2008, but any excuse to listen to this LP is a good one. —LEOR GALIL v Moon Tooth o COURTESY THE ARTIST

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FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 35

S P O N S O R E D

N E I G H B O R H O O D

C O N T E N T

Chicago has always been a city of distinct neighborhoods with their own sense of identity and tradition — and each with stand-out bars and restaurants that are worthy of a haul on the El or bucking up for parking. Explore some local faves here, then head out for a taste of the real thing!

ALIVEONE // LINCOLN PARK Wednesday: 1/2 price aliveOne signature cocktails

PHYLLIS’ MUSICAL INN // WICKER PARK Everyday: $3.75 Moosehead pints and $2.50 Hamms cans

REGGIES // SOUTH LOOP $5 Absolut & Bacardi Cocktails Every Day special

ALIVEONE .COM

7 7 3 . 4 8 6 .9 8 62

REGGIESLIVE.COM

EATALY, LA PIAZZA // RIVER NORTH Tues: 5-9 pm, $15 housemade beer + Margherita pizza alla pala

LINCOLN HALL // LINCOLN PARK All Lagunitas beers are $6

RED LINE TAP // ROGERS PARK $3 PBR drafts & well drinks, $5 wine, M-Su Happy Hour 5-7pm

E ATA LY . C O M / C H I C A G O

L H - S T. C O M

R E D L I N E TA P. C O M

FITZGERALDS // BERWYN Two Brothers Cane & Abel Red Rye Ale $5 pints

SCHUBAS // LAKEVIEW All Lagunitas beers are $5.50

MOTOR ROW BREWING // NEAR SOUTHSIDE Thu, Fri, Tue, Wed: Happy Hour noon-6pm, $2 oﬀ all beers

FITZGER ALDSNIGHTCLUB .COM

L H - S T. C O M

MOTORROWB REWI NG .COM

R I SV O EU R TNHO LRO TO HP

REGGIES // 2 1 0 9 S S TAT E // R E G G I E S L I V E .C O M

BAKED MAC ’N’ CHEESE

Reggies brings music fans’ ultimate dream to reality with a terrific bar and grill, kickin’ rock club, and a music lover’s record store! Their menu—from amazing jumbo wings to creative burgers and sandwiches—offers comfort food with bit of home in every bite. While you’re at it, don’t miss their just-like-grandma-made Baked Mac ’n’ Cheese with Reggies favorite creamy blend of gourmet cheeses. Complement your meal with a full bar selection of beers, wine, spirits, and liquors.

“Mac ’n’ cheese was awesome. Really cool rooftop deck . . .” 36 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

— DAN / GOOGLE

FOOD & DRINK

NEW REVIEW

Won Fun plays with Chinese food

The Bar Marta crew approximates the food of Sichuan Province—and introduces 2Fun, a lounge with karaoke and tropical drinks. By MIKE SULA

or certain species of north-siders, suburbanites, and tourists, Chinatown might as well be in China. The reasons are manifold. The very idea of navigating the Land Rover around the south side is out of the question. Didn’t someone say someone found bedbugs on the Red Line? Why spend money on an Uber when you could drop it on that sweet Tilted Kilt wife-beater? That’s why Stephanie Izard has people lining up at 4:30 PM outside Duck Duck Goat on Restaurant Row. It’s why an Indonesian chain is making rainbow-colored soup dumplings at Imperial Lamian in River North. And it’s even why Tony “the Mayor of Chinatown” Hu has held on to his Michigan Avenue outpost of Lao Sze Chuan after getting sentenced in federal court for tax fraud. These savvy professionals all know that there are a lot of people (mostly white people) who won’t ever learn a thing about the one neighborhood in our city that—through its restaurants alone—opens a window onto China itself. Consequently, these folks also know that if you want to open a Chinese restaurant that absolutely nobody will be afraid to go to, you put it on the Mag Mile. Or in River North. Or on Randolph

WON FUN | $$$

905 W. Randolph 312-877-5967 funfunchinese.com

Clockwise from left: the interior looks somewhere between an opium den and a Hong Kong whorehouse; the “mouthwatering rabbit” dish; ﬁre ﬁsh o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

Street, which is where Austin Baker planted his new Chinese restaurant Won Fun, in the space that once stored dried beans, canned tomatoes, olives, and cheese for the great and venerable Italian grocery store J.P. Graziano. Jim Graziano now collects Won Fun’s rent check, and Baker wants to know if the Fulton Market District is ready for some fire fish and biang biang mien. Are you ready, Fulton Market District? Are the dan dan noodles, Chongqing chicken, and ma po tofu two blocks away at Duck Duck Goat growing tiresome? Gee, the neighborhood’s starting to look like a little town in China or something. Maybe one in Sichuan Province? One that has a karaoke machine, and a chef who actually served in the army under General Tso. OK, I don’t know if that last part is true about Ben Ruiz, but I do know he’s been the chef at Bar Marta for a while. That’s the Humboldt Park restaurant Baker and others opened when they left the nest at Brendan Sodikoff’s Hogsalt Hospitality. They have great steak frites at Bar Marta. But they don’t have fried rice. They do at Won Fun. It’s in this opium den send-up that Ruiz offers four kinds on a menu that largely hews to an approximation of the food of China’s southwestern Sichuan Province, home of buzzing peppercorn ma la, blazing chile heat, and deep fermented funk. There’s still some of the Old World left in this space. On the second-floor lounge, which is named 2Fun and which hosts karaoke and serves tropical drinks, the original wood floor remains, freshly hand sanded. And the faces of the bars upstairs and down are the old steel plates that once supported Graziano’s weighty inventory. The brick is raw. The front doors are original. Otherwise the space could be meant to replicate a Hong Kong whorehouse. The red lanterns are raised. You could safely expose film in the ambient lighting. And the scarlet leather booths are tall and private enough to host a secret assignation with O-Ren Ishii. It’s either that or the bar, part of which offers a direct view of Ruiz’s crew, toiling amid a rising haze of steam and fryer oil to ensure your table’s ticket for a second round of Chonqing chicken is just as hot, crackly, and spicysweet as the first one. If you get in a certain mind-set, there’s something about eating Sichuanese food that does feel a bit like walking over hot coals. You reflect upon the tiny flame icons signaling the spice levels on specific dishes and you wonder, “How much can I take?” And then your J

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 37

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

FOOD & DRINK

Won Fun continued from 37 central nervous system reminds you what endorphins do and you order the ma po tofu, dan dan noodles, dry chile prawns, and fiery fried chicken all at once. At Won Fun, your jones may or may not be satisfied, depending on what you order. That ma po tofu is respectful of its elders. Old PockMarked Ma herself might appreciate the way the silky bean curd slides down the throat on an oily lava flow of chiles, and fermented bean paste abuzz with Sichuan peppercorns. Then there’s the “mouthwatering rabbit,” a dish whose Chinese name can also be easily read as “saliva rabbit,” a plate of cold shredded leporid flesh bathed in a fragrant and stinging chile oil. Normally there are tiny bones among the meat, which can make for sporting eating, but here it’s been thoroughly worked over and goes down without a fight. Dry chile prawns are butterflied and armored in a crunchy bodysuit; if you fail to eat the shatteringly crisp heads and tails, you’ve failed the dish and yourself. A heaping mound of fresh cucumber quickly absorbing a shower of black vinegar provides a false sense of cool relief

38 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

Dan dan noodles o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

when its garlic-chile dressing makes its presence known. To be sure, there are some thrilling dishes on the menu, but others won’t scratch the itch. House-made dan dan noodles are so delightfully fat and chewy that it’s almost easy to overlook their lack of adhesive properties, which allows most of the minced beef-chile sauce to settle at the bottom of the bowl. Relatively mild catfish is subbed for muddier, more aggressive freshwater fish like carp and snakehead that are typically used in the dish the menu refers to as “Fire Fish,” which sounds

a lot more appealing than “boiled fish–Shui Zhu Yu Recipe,” which is what you’d call it in Chinese. If Baker and Ruiz wanted to swing their balls around, they could use one of the invasive Asian carp currently terrorizing the Mississippi downstate—but that’s hardly the problem here. It’s the volcanic brew in which the fish is suspended that’s lacking much of the heady spice ideally provided by anise, cinnamon, and black cardamom, but most importantly a baseline of fermented broad-bean paste that should give the dish its foundation. Without doubanjiang it’s not powered with the deeply umamic engine that delivers a lot of the soul you should taste in this intense food. That’s odd, because doubanjiang is name checked across the menu. It’s in the ma po tofu, it’s in the Sichuan fried rice, and even its exalted extra-aged brother Pixian is in the almost pillowy-tender beef short ribs with cracked rice. About that fried rice. For ballers Won Fun offers a $24.99 plate with roasted duck and foie gras, but a few of the more prosaic versions, like a basic egg-and-scallion variant ($11.99) and one with shrimp missing some

promised smoked catfish ($19.99), are priced at a level commensurate with the rents this neighborhood commands, while offering little in terms of execution or quality of product to recommend them over anything you can ﬁnd in Chinatown. That’s the big question that hangs over Won Fun: Is it worth it? You’ll find puzzling price points across the menu, from a $9.99 plate of sesame-dressed raw napa cabbage to three saturated pork wontons bobbing in admittedly rich stock for $8.99 to blistered string beans stir-fried with oil-sodden pork floss for $11. Sure, it has those lanterns, a rocking soundtrack, and a sophisticated cocktail program by former Gilt Bar alum Remy Walle. It also has one peacock of a dessert and nothing more—a cement-colored pile of mildly sweet taro-root-flavored shaved ice garnished with various fresh and preserved fruits. But there isn’t much else to undermine the case for conquering your fears to walk the coals of less simulated Sichuanese food just a few miles to the south in Chinatown. v

ß @MikeSula

JOBS

General CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT MANAGER (Bensenville, IL) – Coord implem of telecomrltd SW dev projcts from testng to prodction phases. ID client reqs & collct specs, metrics, key perform indicatrs. Intermittnt travl Champaign, IL. Reqs: MS comp sci/ eng/info sys or sim IT-rltd & 2 yrs telecom-rltd SW dev exp or BS comp sci/eng/info sys or sim IT-rltd & 5 yrs SW dev exp; prof UML, XSLT, Weblogic, UNIX, J2EE, JSP, Servlets, JNDI, EJB, JMS, Web Servics, JNLP, XML, DHTML, HP, SUN, RIM, MCSS, Windows/Compaq Wrkstations, C/C++, COBRA, CGI/ Perl, SQL, PL/SQL, Pro*C, Pascal, MS ODBC/Visual Basi c/Projct, Oracle 11i w SQL*Plus, JBuilder, Eclipse, TOAD, ASP, VBScript; wrkng knwldg app dev lifecycl, desgn pattrns, open source fr amwrks/tools, MVC, SOA, DB normalization, perform optim, Agile dev; wrkng knwldg impact anlysis, channel strat, order/account mgmt, bill/rating systms, CRM apps, resource mgmt, test methods; telecom domain knwldg & understand stakeholdr relations. Res: Amdocs, Inc., careersta@ amdocs.com, Ref HR-1015 ELECTRICAL ENGINEER, LA

Grange, IL: Conduct electrical design, analysis & testing of locomotive traction systems. Provide engineering support & mfg. problem resolution related to assembly of locomotive electrical rotating machinery & components. Coordinate testing & validation of new designs & equipment. Provide physical schematic design for electrical control system & wiring diagrams for changes to DieselElectric locomotives using E3 schematic, generating & running E3 Unix scripts, AutoCAD, Team Center & NX Unigraphics. Provide all circuit & wire routing modification designs of electrical schematics for railroad engines. Interact with OEM directly on design changes & modifications. Analyze & interpret customer locomotive electrical specs. Require a Master of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering, or foreign equivalent, and U.S. permanent work auth. Resumes to: Sterling Engineering, Inc., Two Westbrook Corporate Center, Ste. 300, Westchester, IL 60154 Attn: SL Customer Service

F/T BILINGUAL (FRENCH/ ENGLISH) Seasonal Travel Consultant Rail Europe, Inc., a European based company is in search of F/T Bilingual (French/English) Seasonal Staff employees to start work in January for the launch of its new 2017 product line. The sales oriented consultants we seek must enjoy working w/our customer base via phone and/ or email in a Customer Care Center environment. Strong customer service minded individuals are a must. All paid training will be done in-house at our Des Plaines office location. Fluency in French is required. Our $15/hr. w/monthly sales incentive and Loyalty Bonus is just the start of our compensation package. We offer excellent Health and Travel benefits. Applicants may fax resumes to Attn: JW at 847-916-1002 or EMAIL to: 2hr@raileurope.com EOE

ACCOUNTING MANAGER, RISK ASSURANCE – ADVANCED RISK & COMPLIANCE ANALYTICS (MULT. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Advise clnts in Fin’l, Healthcare Provider & Payer indus on how to incr use of anlytics. Req Bach in Acctng, MIS, Engg, Bus Admin or rel + 5 yrs post-bach prog rel work exp in cnsltin, data anlys, compliance, intrnl audit or risk; OR Master in Acctng, MIS, Engg, Bus Admin or rel + 3 yrs rel work exp in cnsltin, data anlys, compliance, intrnl audit or risk. Travel up to 60% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1119, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607. PURCHASING AGENT: OBTAIN bids, negotiate & buy mater. for fabrication of store fixtures. BA degree & 6mo exp. req. Mail res: Fixture Hardware Co, 4711 N Lamon Ave, Chicago, IL 60630

Intern Architect at John Ronan Architects, Chicago, IL; Candidates must have an accredited Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture. Posses excellent design and communication skills and be detail-oriented. Excellent visualization skills are valued: digital modeling, presentation, graphic design, and rendering. Expertise in the following software is required: AutoCad, Revit, Adobe Creative Suite (including Photoshop, In Design, Illustrator), Rhino, Vray, Grasshopper,3D Max. Send cover letter,resume and work samples to personnel@ jarch.com,

CHEF, CHICAGO, IL Reply by Mail. House of Hunan: Prepare, season and cook authentic Chinese-style specialty cuisine, Min. 2 yrs exper. as a Chinese-style cook . Send Resume to House of Hunan, 444 West Fullerton Pkwy, Chicago, IL 60614

RADIX TRADING LLC seeks a Quantitative Technologist in Chicago, IL to apply mach learning techs to existing stat mdels for imprvmnts, optmzng prdctve trms. Reqs. Ms in Comp Sci, Math, or rltd; + 1 yr exp; 1 yr of exp in mathe optimztn; 1 yr of exp with C++; 1 yr of exp prgram for multicore & distrib systs; & knwldge of: prg anlys & optimztn, frml verif & test, stats & mach learng, & num mthds. Send cvr lttr & resume to recruiting@ radix-trading.com ; subjct: ref#2017QR16

Logistics Analyst KOFCO USA, Inc. Manage inventory control, purchasing, sales, and accounting through web ERP. Bachelor of Mathematics or Business Administration required. Resume to 2500 West Higgins Road, Hoffman Estates, IL 60192

CAPITAL ONE seeks a Software Engineer in Chicago Metro Area, IL (multiple positions available) to perform technical design, development, modification, and implementation of computer applications using existing and emerging technology platforms. Requires a bach. + 3 yrs. of exp. Must pass company’s assessment. See full req’s & apply online: https://www. capitalonecareers.com/Req # R18184. CAPITAL ONE seeks a Software Engineer in Chicago Metro Area, IL (multiple positions available) to perform technical design, development, modification, and implementation of computer applications using existing and emerging technology platforms. Requires a bach. + 3 yrs. of exp. Must pass company’s assessment. See full req’s & apply online: https://www. capitalonecareers.com/ Req # R18183. CAPITAL ONE seeks a Software Engineer in Chicago Metro Area, IL (multiple positions available) to perform technical design, development, modification, and implementation of computer applications using existing and emerging technology platforms. Requires a bach. + 3 yrs. of exp. Must pass company’s assessment. See full req’s & apply online: https://www. capitalonecareers.com/ Req # R18189. SINAI MEDICAL GROUP seeks Physician, Child Psychiatrist in Chicago, IL: diagnose & treat mental, emotional, or behavioral disorders in children & adolescents. Reqs: med. degree, IL physician lic., completion of 3yr psychiatry residency & 2yr child/ adolescent psychiatry fellowship. Send CV to J.Vazquez, SMG, California Ave. at 15th St., Chicago, IL 60608

Hendrickson USA, L.L.C., Project Engineer. Woodridge, IL. Coordinate all leaf spring project requirements from initial quote through successful production launch. Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and 4 years as a Product Design Engineer required. Send resume to humanre sources@hendrickson-intl.com referencing the Project Engineer position. Zurich American Insurance Company (Schaumburg, IL) seeks Enterprise Data Specialist I to leverage the value of data assets throughout org. & participate on teams identifying/validating data scenarios w/in Zurich Enterprise Integration & Data Mgmt. business unit. Apply at: www. zurichna.com/en/careers Job ID: 1700008A. SALON MANAGER (Chicago, IL). Supervise salon workers; schedule guest appointments; assign work schedules; maintain client d/base; analyze business data; order supplies; & perform mktg. High School & at least 2 yrs of exp. Send resume to Pinky Nail Inc. 1500 N. Damen Ave. Chicago, IL 60622. EOE

Japanese restaurant is seeking a chef w/ two yrs exp and high school diploma. Job duties include directing the cooking of Japanese cuisine. Worksite in Des Plaines. Resume to Asiana Services, Inc., Attn: Eun J. Lee 493 Leslie Ct, Unit 102, Des Plaines, IL60016

NUTS ON CLARK POPCORN

stores HIRING FOR NEW LOCATION: Sales, cooks, stock, paid training. Starts immediately when working with a team. Apply in person @ corp. office, 3830 N. Clark St. Chicago 9 am to 10 am Mon Thru Fri. Must bring ID’s to apply

Morningstar seeks Software Architect to develop high-perf. APIs. MS in Comp. Sci. or related req’d. 3 yrs exp. in software dev. req’d. Add’l specific skills req’d (see website). Submit resume via employer website; ref. job ID REQ-004772

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $500-$599 Chicago, Beverly/Cal Park/Blue Island Studio $575 & up, 1BR $665 & up, 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Prkg. 708-388-0170

STUDIO $600-$699 LARGE STUDIO NEAR Morse el.

6824 N Wayne. Hardwood floors. Pets OK. Laundry in building. $695/ month. Heat included. Available 3/1. 773-761-4318, www.lakefrontmgt. com

7500 SOUTH SHORE Dr. Brand New Rehabbed Studio & 1BR Apts from $650. Call 773-374-7777 for details.

STUDIO $700-$899 LARGE STUDIO APARTMENT

near Metra. 1904 W Pratt. Cats OK. Laundry in building. $725/ month. Heat included. Available 3/1. 773-7614318. www.lakefrontmgt.com

WOW!! MUST SEE!

Newly Remodeled 1, 2, & 3 Bd Apts $650 & up. Chgo. So. & West side No SD, & 1 Mo. Free Rent w/aprvd Credit. Sect 8 & All Credit Welc. to Apply. (773) 412.1153 Wesley Rlty.

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

CHICAGO W. SIDE 3859 W Maypole Rehabbed studios, $425/ mo, Utilities not included. 773-6170329, 773-533-2900

HOMEWOOD- Sunny 900sf 1BR

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

SECTION 8 WELCOME 7620 S.

1 BR OTHER

CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE Beauti-

Colfax New remodel, 1 & 2 Bedrooms, heat/appl incl. 312-493-5544

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

1 BR $700-$799

8200 S. DREXEL XL 1BR $665 /MO.HEAT & APPLS INCL. LR, DR, NEWLY REMODELED. NO SEC DEP. SECTION 8 OK. CALL 312-915-0100.

bedroom apartment for rent. Newly remodeled. Next door to food store. $800 per month plus security deposit. Near shopping area. Monica, 773-592-2989.

CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up. 773-637-5957 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 CHICAGO - South Shore Large 1BR, $660/mo. Free heat. Near Transportation. Section 8 Welcome. Call 708932-4582 û NO SEC DEP û

6829 S. Perry. Studio/1BR. $465-$520/mo. 1431 W. 78th St. 2BR. $605/mo. HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

WINTER SPECIAL $500 Toward Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. 773-287-4500 www.wjmngmt.com Newly updated, clean furnished rooms, located near buses & Metra, elevator, utilities included, $91/wk. $ 395/mo. 815-722-1212

SOUTHWEST BEAUTIFUL MODERN 1BR, near 82nd & Paulina,

$630, nice 2 br near 83rd Hermitage, $730, heat included, 773-783-7098 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $130/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970 CHICAGO 70th & King Dr, 1BR, clean, quiet, well maintained bldg, Lndry + Heat. Section 8 ok. $680/ mo. 773-510-9290.

CALUMET CITY: 3BR, 1BA, fin bsmt, spacious, very nice area. Laundry ready, cac, private prkg, $1100 + security. 708-261-4881 79TH

WOODLAWN 2BR

$775-$800 76th & Phillips 2BR $775-$800 Remodeled, Appliances avail. Free Heat. 312-286-5678

SECTION 8 WELCOME

Bronzeville 4950 S Prairie. 1BR. Heat, cooking gas, appl incl. $660 & up. Call Zoro, 773-406-4841

HUMBOLDT PARK. ONE

7939 S. EBERHART. 3BR, 1.5BA,

hdwd flrs, new kitchen and bath, spacious nice block in Chatham. $1300/mo. 773-375-3323

5701 W. WASHINGTON. 1BR Apt. $700/mo. Heat Incl. Parking available, appls incl, No Pets. 773-907-0302

AUSTIN AREA 1-2 BR apts, $750-1000, heat & appliances incld Section 8 OK, close to transportation 708-267-2875 AUBURN GRESHAM: 79TH & Paulina, 1-2 Bedroom, $745-$795, Free heat. Call 773.916.0039

1 BR $800-$899 MONTROSE/ CLARENDON VINTAGE one bedroom. Sunny/

bright, across from park, heat/ gas included. Miniblinds/ ceiling fans. Free laundry, private porch, block Montrose Harbor. $895. 773-9733463.

RIVERDALE, IVANHOE SECT, 1 & 2BR, newly remod, $700$800/mo. Lndry, priv pkng, sec cam. Wtr/heat incl. No crdt chk, Sec 8 ok 708.308. 8137

Great Kitc, New Appls, Oak Flrs, A/C, Lndry & Storage, $995/mo Incls heat & prkg. 773.743.4141

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. THE HAWK HAS ARRIVED!!! OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG PLENTY OF PARKING 1BDR FROM $750.00 2BDR FROM $895.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000*** APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. OLD MAN WINTER IS HERE!!! MOST UNITS INCLUDE.. HEAT & HOT WTR STUDIOS FROM $475.00 1BDR FROM $495.00 2BDR FROM $745.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled. Rent is based on 30% of annual income. For details, call us at 847-546-1899 ∫

ONE OF THE BEST M & N MGMT, 1BR, 7727 Colfax ** 2 Lrg BR, 6754 Crandon ** 2 & 3BR, 2BA, 6216 Eberhart ** Completely rehabbed. You deserve the best ** 773-9478572 or 312-613-4427

EXTRA, EXTRA LARGE 4.5

LARGE 3BR $895 LARGE 1BR $725 Section 8 OK, free cooking gas, newly decorated, carpeted, stove/ fridge, laundry, elevator, NO APPLICATION FEE 1-773-919-7102 or 312-802-7301

ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT

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

rooms. 1-2 bedrooms, hwfl. Near North Park College, Northeastern University. Two blocks Brown Line. Near Kennedy Expressway. $850 includes heat. 773-710-3634. near Warren Park and Metra, 6804 N Wolcott. Hardwood floors. Heat included. Laundry in building. Cats OK. $875/ month. Available 3/1. 773-7614318, www.lakefrontmgt.com

RIVERDALE - NEWLY decor, 1 & 2BR, appls, heated, A/C, lndry, prkng, no pets, near Metra. Sec 8 ok. $675-$800. Call 630-4800638

W. HUMBOLDT PK 900 sq ft 1/

BR, large kit, new appl FDR, oak floors, new windows & blinds $825/ mo + util 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com

77TH/LOWE. 2BR. $750 & up. 6 9th/Dante, 3BR. $850 & up. 71st/ Bennett. 2 & 3BR. $795 & up. New renov. Sec 8 ok. 708-5031366

1 BR $900-$1099

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

SOUTH, LAKEFRONT CONDO, 4800 S. Lakeshore Dr. Newly remodeled, 1BR, 19th floor, appliances included, $1 000/mo. Call773-717-6092

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

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

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

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

2 BR UNDER $900 91ST & HALSTED, 2BR, appls & parking incl., hdwd flrs. $82 5/mo + sec. Near transportation. Avail February 1st. 773957-3684 2404 E. 77TH St(77th/Yates). Sunny 2BR, free heat, appls, glistening hrwd flrs, c-fans, picturewindows w/blinds. $795. 312-513-1999 2207 E 87TH ST: 2BR, new bldg, across from Chicago Voc H. S., lndry, hdwd flrs, $875 incls gas, heat & prkg, 708-308-1509 or 773493-3500

CHICAGO - 7630 S Emerald, 2BR, separate living & dining room $650/mo. 1 mo sec + 1 mo rent + all utils. Call Dee 773-818-3340

VICINITY 65TH AND St. Lawrence, modern, tenant heated, 2BR Unit. $725/mo. No Sec Deposit Agent Owned, 312-671-3795 CHICAGO, 7134 S. Normal Ave. Nice 2BR, 1BA. Appliances, carpet & hot water included. $650/ month. Call 312-683-5174

LANSING - 18346 Torrence Ave. 1 Bedroom Apartment, $650/mo. Heat & Water included. No pets. Call 708-895-4794 CHICAGO

7600 S Essex 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! 773287-9999 /312-446-3333

2 BR $900-$1099 AUSTINWESTSIDE OF CHICAGO,

2 BR/5 rm apt. $1,000 + 1 mo security. No Pets, heat incl Hdwd flrs throughout, lg bathroom compliment this newly renovated & decorated apt. 773-261-4415

BUCKTOWN/ WICKER PARK.

Milwaukee/ Ashland/ Division. Four rooms, two bedrooms, 2nd floor, hwfl, Victorian building. Two blocks Blue Line. One block expressway. $970. 773-710-3634.

FREE HEAT! CALUMET CITY 2BR, 1BA Condo Style, A/C, heat incl, LR, DR, Balcony, W/D, off street pkng, nr Hwy. $925 + sec. 312-310-7887

STUDIO OTHER LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888 CHICAGO - HYDE PARK 5401 S. Ellis. 1BR. $535-$600/mo. Call 773-955-5106

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188

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

REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN.

1 BR UNDER $700 WINTER SPECIAL: STUDIOS starting at $499 incls utilities. 1BR $550, 2BR $599, 3BR $699. With approved credit. No Security Deposit for Sec 8 Tenants. South Shore & Southside. Call 312-4463333 7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

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

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FEBRUARY 2, 2017 | CHICAGO READER 39

New Cream Works for Men in a Way Sex Pills Can’t!

New invention triples sensation and gives overwhelming pleasure to those who use it.

Steven Wuzubia Health Correspondent Clearwater, Florida – Think about it. No matter what drugs you take; If you don’t have enough “feeling” in your penis, it’s impossible to get an erection. The formula for great sex is simple. The more penile feeling, the more aroused you get, which provokes a ﬁrm and lasting erection and a full orgasm whenever you want. For years, men begged Dr. Yeager for a solution that would work to end lack of penile sensitivity. But now, his new cream promises to give you what no other pill can… incredible sensation, even from the slightest touch. It’s ﬁxing erection problems a whole new way. The new cream makes penile sensitivity double, even triple. So even those that have little to no feeling at all in the penis suddenly experience mind blowing sex again! “Even men without E.D. problems are buying up more than we can produce”, says Dr. Yeager. “Many men do not feel comfortable telling even their doctor about trouble with erections, and a lack of feeling and pleasure during intercourse.” “They are too ashamed that they cant ‘make it work’ in bed. And if this is your problem, you’re not alone.”

of his patients. He wanted to make a mark and decided to do something about it. He spent long sleepless nights locked up in his lab ... researching every study he could get his hands on regarding penis sensitivity and came up with a cream that changed sexual medicine as we know it. He put special natural ingredients into a cream for men and the results have been remarkable. Men who use this cream report much more penile feeling, arousal, sensitivity and pleasure from their sexual intercourse. They have less or no more difﬁculty in stimulating the penis, getting and keeping a hard erection, and achieving orgasm at the right time. ED pills like Viagra, Cialis and natural pills work for many men, but men with RPS end up taking more than directed in the hope of increasing their penile sensitivity, and even then they often don’t work good enough.

“A REAL MARRIAGE-CHANGER!” “This has caused our sex life to be like we are teenagers again! My wife and I are both much happier and more satisﬁed. A real life-changer! I am so glad for Dr. Yeager’s invention to ﬁx this problem with no dangerous prescription drugs.”

- Robert H., West Palm Beach, FL

WHY YOU NEED IT

Reduced Penile Sensitivity (RPS) is commonly associated with aging, diabetes, circumcision, certain surgeries and prescription drugs. RPS is estimated to strike over 500 million men on a worldwide basis. Dr. Yeager states “It’s not a man’s fault. They did nothing wrong. They are not any less of a man. And now, men don’t have to suffer any longer.”

HOW IT WORKS

These men suffer from Reduced Penile Sensitivity (RPS). This can cause loss of conﬁdence, frustration, even depression and anxiety. Let’s face it. The inability or long wait to reach orgasm is bad enough. But failure to achieve a ﬁrm erection is devastating! It’s one of the leading causes of relationship problems. And avoiding sex often leads to a failed marriage. It is a horrible problem. Dr. Yeager wasn’t about to ignore the suffering

The name of the cream Dr. Yeager invented is SENSUM+®. Men rub the cream on their penis twice daily for the ﬁrst two weeks then once a day for eight additional weeks. There is a nice cinnamon smell and no residues. The main ingredient, natural Cinnamaldehyde, activates the TRPA1 receptor (IC50= 9.5μM). This increases the reaction of sensory neurons to stimulus such as warmth, cold and touch. This activation results in more sensitivity of the penis and a pleasurable sensation.

You may have a different problem than you think. Specialist, Dr. James L. Yeager’s invention helps men suffering from RPS. Now you can double, even triple your penile feeling and sensation. The result? MIND-BLOWING SEXUAL SENSATION! The nutrients in this cream help you get and keep a hard erection very easy, and also to climax when you want to. For example, Joe Romas, 52, from Oakland, was not feeling any penile sensation during sex and it took too long to ejaculate because of this. And the lack of feeling made sex unpleasurable. Within one week after he started applying SENSUM+® cream, he reported, “I now have my old feeling and pleasure back. Sex is fun again and feels great. My wife and I are much happier now.” “I have full feeling and sensitivity back in my penis. This cream has been a Godsend for me,” raves Otto Garangton of Seattle.

SENSITIVITY AND SATISFACTION DOUBLED, TRIPLED

Clinical studies prove SENSUM+® ends these common male sexual problems fast and effectively. The result of two clinical studies on men, both circumcised and not, show SENSUM+® more than doubled penis sensitivity and more than tripled sexual satisfaction. (By the way, their partner’s sexual satisfaction also tripled.)

Dr. James L. Yeager reported. Readers can now join thousands of other men who have ended their sexual issues and enjoy their sex life again like back when they were much younger. “Its almost like a miracle for men who want to improve their penis feeling and performance in bed” says Dr. Yeager. The sooner you start using this cream, the sooner you can have more feeling in your penis again to get and keep a hard erection and enjoy sex more than ever. SENSUM+® is NOT sold in stores. No prescription or doctor visit is required.

HOW TO GET SENSUM+® IN Illinois

This is the first official public release of SENSUM+® in Illinois. In order to get the word out about SENSUM+®, the manufacturer, Innovus Pharmaceuticals is offering special introductory discounts to all Illinois residents. A special phone hotline has been set up to take advantage of deep discounts during this ordering opportunity. Special discounts will be available starting today at 7:00am. The discounts will automatically be applied to all Illinois callers. The Special TOLL-FREE Hotline number is 1-800-9450665 and will be open 24-hours a day. Only a limited supply of SENSUM+® is currently available in your region. Consumers who miss out on our current product inventory PRIVACY GUARANTEED SENSUM+® is patent-pending. The product is will have to wait until more become available. But discretely shipped in a plain unmarked package this could take weeks. The maker advises your so privacy and confidentiality is assured. It is for best chance is to call 1-800-945-0665 early. both circumcised and non-circumcised men. No side effects or medicine interactions have been

THESESTATEMENTSHAVENOTBEENBYTHEU.S.FOODANDDRUGADMINISTRATION.THESEPRODUCTSARENOTINTENDEDTODIAGNOSE,TREAT,CUREORPREVENTANYDISEASE.RESULTSBASEDUPONAVERAGES.MODELSAREUSEDINALLPHOTOSTOPROTECTPRIVACY.

40 CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 2, 2017

Why Viagra Is Failing Men

Soaring demand expected for new scientiﬁc advance made just for older men. Works on both men’s physical ability and their desire in bed.

By Harlan S. Waxman Health News Syndicate

The new men’s pill is not a drug. It’s something completely different

New York – If you’re like the rest of us guys over 50; you probably already know the truth… Prescription ED pills don’t work! Simply getting an erection doesn’t fix the problem” says Dr. Bassam Damaj, chief scientific officer at the world famous Innovus Pharma Laboratories.

Because you don’t need a prescription for Vesele®, sales are exploding. The maker just can’t produce enough of it to keep up with demand. Even doctors are having a tough time getting their hands on it. So what’s all the fuss about?

As we get older, we need more help in bed. Not only does our desire fade; but erections can be soft or feeble, one of the main complaints with prescription pills. Besides, they’re expensive… costing as much as $50.00 each Plus, it does nothing to stimulate your brain to want sex. “I don’t care what you take, if you aren’t interested in sex, you can’t get or keep an erection. It’s physiologically

JAW-DROPPING CLINICAL PROOF SATISFACTION RATE (% Patients)

100

With Vesele 82.0%

Baseline 41.1%

Baseline 47.9%

SATISFACTION

DESIRE

Vesele

Satisfaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88.1% Frequency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79.5% Desire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82% Hardness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85.7% Duration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79.5% Ability to Satisfy . . . . . . . . . . . . 83.3%

THE BRAIN/ERECTION CONNECTION

In a 16-week clinical study; scientists from the U.S.A. joined forces to prove Nitric Oxide’s effects on the cardio vascular system. They showed that Nitric Oxide could not only increase your ability to get an erection, it would also work on your brainwaves to stimulate your desire for sex. The results were remarkable and published in the world’s most respected medical journals.

40 20

The new formula takes on erectile problems with a whole new twist. It doesn’t just address the physical problems of getting older; it works on the mental part of sex too. Unlike the expensive prescriptions, the new pill stimulates your sexual brain chemistry as well. Actually helping you regain the passion and burning desire you had for your partner again. So you will want sex with the hunger and stamina of a 25-yearold.

Vesele takes off where Viagra® only begins. Thanks to a discovery made by 3 Nobel-Prize winning scientists; Vesele® has become the ﬁrst ever patented supplement to harden you and your libido. So you regain your desire as well as the ability to act on it.

With Vesele 88.1%

WORKS ON YOUR HEAD AND YOUR BODY

THE SCIENCE OF SEX

Baseline 41.4% 44.9% 47.9% 36.2% 35% 44.1%

impossible,” said Dr. Damaj.

MADE JUST FOR MEN OVER 50 But now, for the ﬁrst time ever, there’s a pill made just for older men. It’s called Vesele®. A new pill that helps you get an erection by stimulating your body and your brainwaves. So Vesele® can work even when nothing else worked before.

The study asked men, 45 to 65 years old to take the main ingredient in Vesele® once a day. Then they were instructed not to change the way they eat or exercise but to take Vesele® twice a day. What happened next was remarkable. Virtually every man in the study who took Vesele® twice a day reported a huge difference in their desire for sex. In layman’s terms, they were horny again. They also experienced harder erections that lasted for almost 20 minutes. The placebo controlled group (who received sugar pills) mostly saw no difference. AN UNEXPECTED BONUS: The study results even showed an impressive increase in the energy, brain-power and memory of the participants.

SUPPLY LIMITED BY OVERWHELMING DEMAND “Once we saw the results we knew we had a game-changer said Dr. Damaj. We get hundreds of calls a day from people begging us for a bottle. It’s been crazy. We try to meet the crushing demand for Vesele®.”

New men’s pill overwhelms your senses with sexual desire as well as ﬁrmer, long-lasting erections. There’s never been anything like it before.

VESELE® PASSED THE TEST “As an expert in the development of sexual dysfunction, I’ve studied the effectiveness of Nitric Oxide on the body and the brain. I’m impressed by the way it increases cerebral and penile blood ﬂow. The result is evident in the creation of Vesele®. It’s sure-ﬁre proof that the mind/body connection is unbeatable when achieving and maintaining an erection and the results are remarkable” said Dr. Damaj.

HERE’S WHAT MEN ARE SAYING • I’m ready to go sexually and mentally. • More frequent erections in the night (while sleeping) and in the morning. • I have seen a change in sexual desire. • Typically take 1 each morning and 1 each night. Great stamina results! • An increased intensity in orgasms. • My focus (mental) has really improved… Huge improvement. • Amazing orgasms! • I really did notice a great improvement in my ability.

HOW TO GET VESELE® This is the ﬁrst ofﬁcial public release of Vesele® since its news release. In order to get the word out about Vesele®, Innovus Pharma is offering special introductory discounts to all who call. A special phone hotline has been set up for readers in your area; to take advantage of special discounts during this ordering opportunity. Special discounts will be available starting today at 6:00am. The discounts will automatically be applied to all callers. The Special TOLL-FREE Hotline number is 1-800-647-3494 and will be open 24-hours a day. Only 300 bottles of Vesele® are currently available in your region. Consumers who miss out on our current product inventory will have to wait until more become available. But this could take weeks. The maker advises your best chance is to call 1-800-647-3494 early.

THESE STATEMENTS HAVE NOT BEEN EVALUATED BY THE U.S. FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION. THIS PRODUCT IS NOT INTENDED TO DIAGNOSE, TREAT, CURE OR PREVENT ANY DISEASE. RESULTS NOT TYPICAL.

FEBRUARY 2, 2017 | CHICAGO READER 41

110TH & VERNON. Large 2BR,

Quiet Building w/ many long term tenants, Heat/appls, Laundry Rm, $925/mo no sec/appl fee, 312-388-3845

CHICAGO - BEAUTIFUL 2BD/ 1BA in a 2 unit bldg, large enclosed backyard, new carpet, utils incld. $950/mo. Contact 773-680-4174

2419 W. MARQUETTE Rd - 2BR, Appls, c-fans, intercom, tenant pays utils, lndry room avail, sec 8 OK. $90 0/mo. 773-316-5871

ENGLEWOOD 2-4BR unit apts in 2 unit gated bldgs, hdwd flrs, pets OK, no sec dep, W/D & appls incl, tenant pays own utils 872-3153900 8947 S. COTTAGE Grove, Unit

3C. 3rd flr, 2BR Apt. Ten htd, lndry / appls incl. Credit check $700 mo + $350 move in fee 773-721-8817

AVAIL IMMED renov 2BR apt. Nr Univ of Chgo. Lrg kit, washer/ dryer in unit, storage, wood flrs. Tenant pays utils. 773-629-0314.

2 BR $1500 AND

OVER

2 BR $1100-$1299 CHATHAM BEAUTIFUL REMOD 2 & 3BR, hdwd flrs,

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 4010 S. KING DR. 3BR, heat incl, $1025. 1535 W. 79th St. 4BR, 1.5BA Apt ($925) & resturant for rent, 708-4217630 / 773-899-9529

CHICAGO 5842 S. Shields, Unit 1, 3BR, 1BA, newly refurbished,new carpet, 1st flr, no pets, fridge, stove. $800 + utils. 773-752-8328 NR 87TH & Stony Island, 3BR, 3rd flr Apt, $1000 + heat, 1 mo sec + 1 mo rent, rec renov ba & kit, Not Sec 8 reg. 773-771-0785

custom cabinets, avail now. $1100$1200/mo + sec. 773-905-8487 Sec 8 Ok

CHICAGO, 1138 N. Waller, 3BR, 1st floor, newly decorated, hdwd floors throughout. $950/mo. Section 8 welcome. 630-915-2755

73RD & DORCHESTER, 2BR, refrig, $1150/mo, gas incl; 119th &

1505 Kasten Dr, Dolton, IL Newly remodeled ranch style, 3 BR, $1000/mo plus $1000 security Call 773-651-8673

Calumet, 3BR, 2BA, $1250/mo. No Sec Dep. Sec 8 ok. 773-684-1166

2 BR $1300-$1499

RIVERDALE 3/4BR, 1.5BA Townhome, hdwd flrs, 1 car garage, near Metra & PACE, starts at $900/mo + sec. 708-539-0522

SKOKIE: 2BR, 1100sqft, SS appl, granite ct, oak flrs, ac, lndry, $1325 incls ht/pkg/storage. 773743-4141 www.urbanequities. com

2 BR OTHER

LUXURIOUS CONDO IN the

CHICAGO, PRINCETON PARK HOMES. Spacious 2-3 BR Townhomes, Inclu: Prvt entry, full bsmt, lndry hook-ups. Ample prkg. Close to trans & schls. Starts at $844/ mo. w w w . p p k h o m e s . com;773-264-3005 ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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

heart of Lakeview/Roscoe Village. 2 bdrm, 2 full bath elevator building with indoor parking. Hardwood floors,stainless appliances, in unit laundry, balcony and much more. Immediate occupancy. $1950 per month plus $1000 deposit. 312-618-4362 or ruben.orta@att.net

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 68th/Hermitage 2BR. $725. 3BR, $825. 68th/

Emerald, 3BR. $800. 63rd/May. 3BR. $900 heat incl. 65th/Aberdeen. 7BR, 2BA House. $1175. 847-977-3552

SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo. 708-288-4510 7651 S DREXEL , 1st fl, 3BR, liv rm, kitch., newly remodeled, ceramic tiles, heat not incl, $1100/ mo plus 1 mo sec 708-474-6520 5900 W & 300 N. 1/2 block from G reenline & Oak Park. Renovated

3BR, sanded floors, heat incl. $1200/mo + sec deposit. Call 773626-8993 SOUTHSIDE- 3BR, 1.5BA,

Chicago Landmark, new paint and carpet, Appliances, $1195/month, no dep. 312-375-7295

SEC 8 WELCOME DIXMOOR 14225 S. Lincoln. 4BR, 2BA, quiet block, near school, driveway, huge backyard. $1200/mo. 773-501-0503

AVALON PARK - 4BR, 1BA, fenced yrd, full bsmnt, close to schools & park. Sec 8 wel. $1300/mo + sec. Available Now! 773-902-7011

FOR SALE

COUNTRY CLUB HILLS vic of 183RD/Cicero. 4BR, 1.5BA $1400. Ranch Style, 2 car gar. 708-369-5187

WASHINGTON PARK, SPACIOUS 4br, 2ba, dining rm, laundry , off street parking, balcony, avail now, $1300 mo, appl fee, no sec, 773-552-5228

non-residential

1436 S TRUMBULL, 3BR $1300/ month, no security deposit. New rem. Hrdwd flrs, lndy.Sec system in bldg .Section 8 Wel 708-308-1788 SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 1701 W 59th, 4BR, 2BA house, appliances included, $1300/mo. 708-288-4510

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799 MARQUETTE PARK 7313 S Artesian, beaut rehab 3BR/2BA house, granite ctrs, SS appls, whirlpl tub, fin bsmt, 2-car gar. $1575. 708-288-4510

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

NEWLY REHAB 5BR $1500,

CHICAGO, 5 large bedrooms, 2 full bath, good neighborhood, 10117 S. LaSalle St.. Section 8 welcome. Call 847-520-3760 8457 S BRANDON, 2nd flr, 4BR in beautiful 2-flat house, laundry, Sec 8 ok, 3 or 2 BR voucher ok. 847-926-0625. . 8322 S BAKER, 3BR or 5BR available in beautiful 2-flat house, Sec 8 ok. 3 or 2BR voucher ok. Call 847-926-0625. CALUMET PARK 12946

S Carpenter, 3BR, 1.5 BA, fireplace & basement, 1 car garage, Sec 8 Welc 773-995-9370 or 773-718-1142

FAR SOUTH CHICAGO - around

127th and Sangamon. Ranch Style 3BR, no basement. Avail Now! Please call: 312-720-1264

84th & Peoria; 4BR, $1300 97th & Oglesby; 3BR, $1200, 97th & Jeffrey. Section 8 Welcome 312-8043638

13131 S. FORRESTVILLE. 3BR.

CHICAGO, S. TROY, 4 to 5BR Apt, 1BA, newly renovated, st ove/fridge incl. Also, 2BR Apt Available. Call 773-7277608

BEAUTIFULLY RENOVATED 3-5BR Single Family Homes, new

CHICAGO NEAR 79TH & Kedzie, 4BR, 1.5BA, 2 car garage, LR, kitch/DR combo, bsmt, newly decorated, hdwd floors, 312-4980899

Playmates or soul mates, you’ll ﬁnd them on MegaMates

19 E. 120th Pl. 4BR. 8243 S. Marquette. 4BR. Sec 8 Welcome, SS appls. 847-778-8808

kit, fridge & stove included, hardwood floors. 708-557-0644

CHICAGO SOUTHSIDE, Newly remodeled 3BR/2BA with appls & w/d Also, newly remod 2BR with appls. Call 773-908-8791 CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent. Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail. 312-446-3333 or 708-752-3812

GENERAL Rogers Park – 1700 W Juneway 312-593-1677. 3-4 bedrooms from $1175 Free heat. No deposit

UNFORGETTABLE, RELAXING, THERAPEUTIC Deep Tissue Massage for your physical, mental, spiritual health. Returning to business, previous clients welcome. Jolanta 847650-8989. Addison /Laramie. By appointment. Lic.#227000668.

WE BUY HOUSES CASH 757-236-0998

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

units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue. 773-685-6868. South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

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

roommates ROOM AVAILABLE, 112th near State. $450/mo + $50 Move in fee. Shared kitchen & bath. Cable incl. Smoking Ok. Call 773-454-2893 AVAILABLE NOW! S p a c i o u s Rooms for rent. $400/mo. Utilities and bed incl. Seniors Welcome. No Sec Dep. 312-973-2793

GERMAN ROTTWEILER PUPPIES AKC, vet checked, all shots,

great with kids and other pets, male and females available . text or call 978-471-4386 for more information.

LOVELY HEART HOME Care,

LLC. High Quality Affordable Caretakers, 833 W. Chicago, Chicago, IL. Call Luz 312-243-7501. Licensed, Bonded, Insured.

SOUTH SHORE, Senior

Discount. Male preferred. Furnished rooms, shared kitchen & bath, $545/ mo. & up. Utilities included. 773-710-5431

ADULT SERVICES

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STRAIGHT DOPE By Cecil Adams Q : Is there any research on whether the

A : Every war, WWII included, has scarred its combatants’ psyches. The term nostalgia, in fact, was coined in the 17th century to describe a mysterious ailment afflicting Swiss soldiers, making it the first medical diagnosis of war’s psychological effects. Many other names would be proposed before the American Psychiatric Association put it in the books as post-traumatic stress disorder in 1980. The symptoms, though, have remained consistent: PSTD sufferers relive traumatic events, avoid situations that bring them to mind, endure negative feelings about themselves and others, and generally feel anxious and keyed-up. No psych evals were conducted during the Trojan War, of course, but the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs site finds literary antecedents for PTSD symptoms extending back to Homer. And mercenaries from the Alps stationed in the European lowlands had been suffering from bouts of anxiety and insomnia for some time before the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer named their disorder “nostalgia” in 1688. Apparently stricken with a longing for their far-off homes (often triggered by the melodies of traditional cow-herding songs), these otherwise sturdy fellows supposedly fainted, endured high fevers and stomach pain, and even died. But though physicians now had a name for it, they lacked a cause, and for treatment they fell back on the standard: leeches and opium. During our own grisly Civil War, soldiers’ anxiety expressed itself in palpitations and difficulty breathing, a condition dubbed “irritable heart” or “soldier’s heart.” Some researchers, scrambling to find a physical mechanism behind the symptoms, blamed the way the troops wore their knapsacks, while the high-minded saw a spiritual failing—sufferers were seen as oversexed and prone to masturbation—and faulted the afflicted for their “moral turpitude.” The condition was treated (when treated at all) with drugs to lower the heart rate. The term “shell shock” came into use during the Great War, born of the belief that mortar fire had psychologically disoriented the boys. With unending need for trench fodder, the

SLUG SIGNORINO

incidence of PTSD has increased over time? Could the stout farm boys who fought in World War II cope with greater stress than modern soldiers, or did we just sweep it under the rug back then? —KEITH BARKLEY

warring nations simply shipped 65 percent of traumatized men back to the front; the more serious cases received electrotherapy, hypnosis, or hydrotherapy—essentially a relaxing shower or bath. The psychological effects of World War I were so widespread that when the sequel arose, military experts hoped to curtail what they called “combat stress reaction” with intense psychological screening of combatants, believing they could ID those most likely to suffer. They couldn’t. “Battle fatigue” plagued soldiers in World War II. Hard-asses would equate this condition with cowardice or goldbricking, none more notoriously than General George S. Patton, who on two different occasions slapped and browbeat afflicted soldiers for seeking medical care. But the problem remained too widespread to ignore—a conservative estimate is that 5 percent of WWII veterans suffered symptoms we’d associate with PTSD. By midcentury the U.S. Army had come around to the idea that—to quote John Huston’s army-produced 1946 documentary Let There Be Light—“every man has his breaking point.” Still, the psychiatric community struggled with how to conceptualize PTSD. The first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (1952) listed the condition as “gross stress reaction”; when it appeared under its modern name in 1980’s DSM-III it was in part because of research on veterans of the war in southeast Asia. Thanks to this timing, PTSD will forever be connected with Vietnam vets, and in fact as many as 30 percent of them were diagnosed with symptoms at some point. But the numbers haven’t been much better for American conflicts since—between 15 and 20 percent. And of course, civilians suffer as well. About 7 or 8 percent of all Americans will have PTSD at some point, though for women the number is closer to 10 percent, most likely because of the greater likelihood of trauma, especially sexual assault, that women face. There are other kinds of hell than war. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

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SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Cuckold fantasy or revenge fantasy? Dead or alive? Dan takes questions from the across the pond.

Q : I am a 26-year-old heterosexual European man. I have been for four years in a monogamous relationship with my girlfriend. Recently she cheated on me. When she told me what she did, I felt a very strong pain, even stronger than I expected. After a few days of pain, however, I found that the sexual attraction for my girlfriend, instead of decreasing, increased after her adventure. In particular, I am now having a cuckold fantasy. I would like that she tell me everything she did, without sparing any detail, while we have sex, or that we try to play an actual cuckold game where she has sex with someone else in front of me while I give her instructions and tell her exactly what to do. My problem is that I am not sure what her reaction would be if I ask her to play out these fantasies. She feels very guilty and witnessed my pain when she told me she cheated. I fear that talking to her about these fantasies would scare her. I also fear that, as she is feeling guilty, she would say yes, but without really wanting to do this. I also don’t want her to think I liked what she did when she cheated on me. I did not like it, but I would like to relive it in a playful way, in which I have complete control. How do you think I should approach this talk? Which reactions should I expect? How can I make sure that she is really into this if she says yes? —FEELING OBSESSED

REPLICATING TREASON & DOMINATING ADULTERER

A : Cuckolding, like all fetishes and/or fantasies, is unique to the person and adaptable within particular relationships. But it’s erotic humiliation—of the person being cheated on—that

distinguishes cuckolding from hot wiﬁng/husbanding or swinging. The cuck’s partner, aka “the cheater,” is in control, and the cuck gets oﬀ on having his nose rubbed— sometimes literally—in the evidence of his partner’s cheating. (That’s the theory, anyway; I’ve gotten lots of letters from women—and some men—who are married to very controlling cucks.) Zooming out: Your reaction to learning you’d been cheated on—pain and shock, quickly followed by increased feelings of lust for your girlfriend—is not uncommon. It’s less common for the cheatee to eroticize the betrayal; a couple may reconnect sexually in the wake of an affair, but rarely does a couple wind up incorporating eroticized infidelity into their sexual repertoire. But in your fantasy, FORTDA, you would be calling the shots, giving instructions, and telling your girlfriend what to do. That’s definitely not a cuckold fantasy, FORTDA, and it may be a revenge fantasy. But a cheating crisis presents a good opportunity for both parties to be completely honest with each other about what they want going forward. And that’s what you should do, FORTDA: Be completely honest. First, make sure your fantasy is an authentic impulse, not an excuse to punish your girlfriend for cheating. If it’s a genuine turn-on, FORTDA, share everything you’ve told me. She might freak out. She might be into it. She might freak out and then later be into it. You can figure out the parameters later, if you decide to explore this at all, but it starts with a conversation. Good luck.

Q : I write you from Italy,

where I follow you through Internazionale. I am a guy in

his 30s sexually paralyzed with his girlfriend. We are together four years, and during the last year sex has gradually faded away, leaving me alone with my skillful hand (left one). The sexual paralysis is beginning to aﬀect our behaviors. We don’t accept each other anymore. We are starting to mutually ignore. Verbal communication is poor. However, we are exceptional friends. I am good-looking, sociable, ﬁt, and with plenty of semen. Girls are quite interested, but I don’t want to cheat. I don’t believe in monogamy, but my girlfriend could never tolerate betrayal. What the fuck to do? —LITERALLY OUTTA ORDER PENIS

A : Sometimes a relationship

dies but we insist on propping the body up in a corner, LOOP, and pretending it’s still alive. We do this because even if the relationship is dead, our partner isn’t. And we can’t declare the thing dead without hurting someone we used to have romantic feelings for and may still very much like as a person. So we tiptoe around the decomposing corpse until the stench can’t be ignored any longer. This relationship is dead, LOOP: You no longer accept each other, you ignore each other, and the sex dried up a year ago. On top of all that, LOOP, you don’t believe in monogamy and she can’t tolerate betrayals. End the relationship, do your best to salvage the exceptional friendship, and stop letting all that semen go to waste. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Listen to the Savage Lovecast weekly at thestranger.com. ß @fakedansavage

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Besnard Lakes o BRENDAN KO

NEW

Willis Earl Beal 2/27, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Besnard Lakes 5/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Chainsmokers, Kiiara 4/29, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM Cold as Life 3/17, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Conan, North 5/17, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Crystal Fighters 4/2, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM, 18+ Day Wave 6/8, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 2/3, noon, 18+ Deep Purple, Alice Cooper 9/6, 6:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM Mac Demarco 5/16, 7:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM, 18+ Dexateens 2/24, 10 PM, Hideout Dickies 3/31, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Dwele 4/21, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 2/2, noon b Entrance 4/10, 9 PM, Hideout Fishbone 4/1, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Floating Points 4/9, 9 PM, Double Door, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM, 18+ Sallie Ford 4/7, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 2/3, noon Jake Xerxes Fussell 2/22, 9 PM, Hideout G Herbo & Lil Bibby 3/8, 9:30 PM, Metro, 18+ Greg Graﬃn 3/4, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Happyness 5/26, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM Heatwave 6/6, 7 and 9:30 PM, the Promontory, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM

Inc. No World 3/13, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Mason Jennings 3/24, 8 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 2/3, 8 AM b Eilen Jewell 5/4, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 2/2, noon b Michael Kiwanuka 5/27, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM b Gaelynn Lea, Sarah Potenza 3/6, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Lewis Del Mar 5/6, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM b Mike Mains 4/6, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen Charlotte Martin 4/10, 8:30 PM, Double Door, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM, 18+ John Mayer 4/11, 7:30 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 2/3, noon John McLaughlin & Jimmy Herring 11/17, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM Don McLean 5/5, 7:30 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 2/2, noon b Austin Millz 3/25, 4 PM, Metro Chante Moore 7/13, 7 and 10 PM, the Promontory, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM Bob Mould 4/21, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Pallbearer 3/31, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Pond 5/3, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM Queen & Adam Lambert 7/13, 8 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM Allan Rayman 4/21, 10 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Real Estate, Frankie Cosmos 5/12, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 2/3, noon, 18+ 75 Dollar Bill 4/8, 9 PM, Hideout Steep Canyon Rangers 5/13, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 2/3, 8 AM b

46 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 2, 2017

Tash Sultana 10/9, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 2/3, noon, 17+ J.E. Sunde 3/2, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Tech N9ne 5/25, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM, 17+ Terry Malts 4/20, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen They. 3/29, 8 PM, Double Door, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM, 18+ Tossers 3/17, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Gloria Trevi, Alejandra Guzman 6/17, 8:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM Betty Who, Verite 4/20, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Jamire Williams, Junius Paul 2/24, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ The Wind & the Wave 5/26, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM b Windy City Lakeshake with Thomas Rhett, Big & Rich, Lauren Alaina, Miranda Lambert, and more 6/23-25, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 2/3, 10 AM

UPCOMING After the Burial, Emmure 2/24, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Against Me! 2/24, 7 PM, Durty Nellie’s, Palatine b Allah-Las, Babe Rainbow 3/16, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Dan Andriano, Matt Pryor 3/25, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Architects, Stray From the Path 3/8, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Bastille 4/3, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom Bear Grillz, Terravita 3/31, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Adrian Belew Power Trio 4/1, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b

b Suzy Bogguss 4/28, 8 PM, City Winery b Greg Brown 2/18, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Zac Brown Band 8/26, 7 PM, Wrigley Field b Hayes Carll 2/16, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Max & Iggor Cavalera 2/23, 6:30 PM, Portage Theater, 17+ Chairlift 4/14, 8 PM, Double Door Eric Church 4/13, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Clap Your Hands Say Yeah 3/10, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Cloud Nothings 2/10, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 18+ Dan Deacon, Marijuana Deathsquads, Air Credits 2/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Dead Meadow 3/8, 8:30 PM, Double Door, 18+ Electric Guest 3/1, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Flaming Lips 4/17, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Foxygen 3/31, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Brantley Gilbert, Tucker Beathard 3/2, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard 4/8, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Jackie Greene Band 4/13, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall GZA 2/28, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Head for the Hills 2/17, 8 PM, City Winery b High Kings 3/19, 8 PM, City Winery b Infamous Stringdusters 3/17, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Jack Ingram 2/26, 8 PM, City Winery b Billy Joel 8/11, 7 PM, Wrigley Field b Juicy J, Belly, Project Pat 3/17, 8 PM, House of Blues, 18+ Knocked Loose 2/28, 6:30 PM, Subterranean b Lambchop 3/24, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Nikki Lane, Brent Cobb 3/11, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Hamilton Leithauser 2/15, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall The Life and Times 2/10, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Loudness 4/19, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Magnetic Fields 4/19-20, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Aimee Mann, Jonathan Coulton 4/29, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Marduk, Incantation 2/10, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Laura Marling 5/7, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Bruno Mars 8/16, 8 PM; 8/18-19, 8 PM, United Center Dave Mason 4/10-11, 8 PM, City Winery b Mastodon, Eagles of Death Metal, Russian Circles 5/13, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Dan Navarro 2/11, 7 PM, Schubas The Necks 3/1-2, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

Never miss a show again. Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Nothing 3/2, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Overkill, Nile 2/17, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Maceo Parker 2/12, 5 and 9 PM, the Promontory Priests 2/9, 7 PM, Beat Kitchen b Revivalists 3/18, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Bebe Rexha 3/20, 7:30 PM, Metro b Lionel Richie, Mariah Carey 3/25, 7 PM, United Center Rival Sons, London Souls 5/14, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Six Organs of Admittance 4/9, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Regina Spektor 3/24, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Mavis Staples 2/17, 8 PM, Symphony Center b Train, O.A.R., Natasha Bedingﬁeld 6/30, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park b Trentemoller 3/19, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Tribal Seeds 2/16, 8 PM, Double Door, 18+ Trollphace 3/3, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Withered, Immortal Bird 2/28, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Ray Wylie Hubbard 5/6, 8 PM, City Winery b Xiu Xiu 3/31, 9 PM, Empty Bottle The XX 5/1, 6:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom Zombies 4/13, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

SOLD OUT Flat Five 3/24-25, 8 PM, Hideout Japandroids, Craig Finn & the Uptown Controllers 2/15, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Joy Formidable 2/27, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Tove Lo 2/16, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Mayday Parade 4/22, 7 PM, House of Blues b Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, Atlas Genius 3/24, 7:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Menzingers, Jeﬀ Rosenstock 3/3, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ New Found Glory 4/11-13, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Maggie Rogers 4/2, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b Run the Jewels 2/17, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 18+ Vulfpeck 5/4-6, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene GOSSIP WOLF CAUGHT a spectacularly hushed and elegiac drone set in December from Implodes guitarist Matt Jencik, who’s also been a touring member of Slint and Circuits des Yeux over the past few years. That night Jencik mentioned that he might have an LP of similar sounds on the way—and we didn’t have to wait long! On Friday, February 3, he’ll drop his solo debut, Weird Times, via French/UK label Hands in the Dark. Critic Marc Masters (who has bylines at Pitchfork, the Wire, and elsewhere) has already declared it one of his top ten albums of 2017—and any fan of glowing ambience should ﬁnd much to love in its rolling, hypnotic textures. Chicago instrumental hip-hop producer Radius has been busy, delivering three slabs of wax within a month. Early in January, he and Tokyo beat maker Budamunk dropped a split seven-inch via Chicago imprint the Secret Life of Sound—Radius’s contribution is the laid-back “Get Into Something/Becoming.” Late in January, Memphis label Culture Power45 released a seven-inch with a track from Radius and local rapper Sense on the A side; physical copies are sold out, but you can stream it on the label’s Bandcamp page. And Mathematics Recordings, run by Jamal Moss (aka Hieroglyphic Being), is about to drop the Radius 12-inch Portal to Canis. The down-tempo, house-flavored EP is available through Groove Distribution—preorders will go up at bit.ly/rad_math. It’s been a minute since Gossip Wolf heard from Love Lion, the cassette microlabel run by former Chicagoan and Angel Olsen bassist Emily Elhaj, but last week it dropped the compilation Shout Music. Elhaj put together its selection of old gospel in 2010, while working as a buyer for Reckless Records, in order to accompany an article she wrote for New Orleans magazine Antigravity. Proceeds from the tape go to the Black Lives Matter movement— you can get copies at Reckless or from Love Lion’s Bandcamp. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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FEBRUARY 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 47

RICCARDO MUTI RETURNS

with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra! FEBRUARY 16-18

Muti, Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 4 & Bronfman

Yefim Bronfman piano ROSSINI Overture to Semiramide BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 4 MENDELSSOHN Symphony No. 5 (Reformation) FEBRUARY 17

Muti Conducts at Holy Name Cathedral 735 N STATE ST

Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago HAYDN The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross FEBRUARY 23-25

Muti Conducts Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible with Gérard Depardieu Gérard Depardieu narrator Sasha Cooke mezzo-soprano Mikhail Petrenko bass Chicago Symphony Chorus Duain Wolfe chorus director Chicago Children’s Choir Josephine Lee artistic director

And don’t miss a FREE* film screening of Ivan the Terrible Parts I & II on Sunday, February 19, 7:30 at Symphony Center *tickets required

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

RICCARDO MUTI

ZELL MUSIC DIRECTOR

CSO.ORG/MUTIFEBRUARY • 312-294-3000 • GROUP SERVICES 312-294-3040 Artists, prices and programs subject to change.