Chicago Reader print issue of February 8, 2023 (Vol. 53, No. 9)

FREE AND FREAKY SINCE 1971 | FEBRUARY 8, 2024

“I’ll Have What She’s Having”

THE JEWISH DELI

NOW OPEN

THIS WEEK

C H I C AG O R E A D E R | F E B R UA RY 8 , 2 024 | VO LU M E 5 3 , N U M B E R 9

IN THIS ISSUE

LETTERS

04 Readers Respond Our readers react to recent stories.

04 Editor’s Note Time, social spaces, and other passages

CITY LIFE

NEWS & POLITICS

14 Police Chicago police data raised questions about Shotspotter’s accuracy.

COMMENTARY

18 Prisons An incarcerated writer remembers a close friend a year after his death.

ARTS & CULTURE

20 Comic Candace Hunter pays homage to the great Octavia Butler.

28 Plays of Note Magic, Love, Mystery at the Magic Lounge; The Outgoing Tide at Buffalo Theatre Ensemble; and Selling Kabul at Northlight Theatre

FILM

30 Caporale | Erotic films Local programmers and moviegoers have an appetite for erotic film screenings.

32 Movies of Note Disco Boy is dazzling and violent; Orion and the Dark is inventive and whimsical; and more.

42 Early Warnings Upcoming shows to have on your radar 42 Gossip Wolf Internet.Hotspot rings in the Lunar New Year at Pho Viet, Gerda Barker reads from her memoir of Chicago’s punk and industrial scenes, and more.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE 06 Brown | Nightlife Making intentional social spaces for Black LGBTQ+ people

44 Secret History of Chicago Music Bassist Bernard Reed has a résumé bigger than his reputation.

FOOD & DRINK 21 Exhibition Norman Teague’s Coltrane-inspired exhibition at the Elmhurst Art Museum 22 Books Bonnie Jo Campbell on her latest book, The Waters

THEATER

12 Food history An essay on Black food migration and family recipes

24 Environmental art Raven Theatre and Block Museum tackle climate change.

26 Dance review Illinoise misses the possibilities in Sufjan Stevens’s songs.

OPINION

45 Savage Love Dan Savage hears from a relationship-anxious reader.

33 Frequency Festival Six days of boundary-pushing music that invites you to widen your ears 36 Chicagoans of Note Lidia Vomito, DJ of the Graveyard Hour 38 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including the local underground hip-hop showcase Renaissance of the Culture, Kevin Drumm, and Quannnic

CLASSIFIEDS 46 Jobs 47 Public Notice 47 Matches 47 Adult Services

ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY ANYA DAVIDSON. FOR MORE OF ANYA’S WORK, GO TO ANYADAVIDSON.COM.

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FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 3

Reader Letters

m

EDITOR’S NOTE

Re: “Call me (maybe)” on Senator Tammy Duckworth’s offices and their unanswered calls, by Katie Prout, published at chicagoreader.com on February 1, 2024

I’ve called her office almost every single weekday since October and I’ve only ever had someone pick up twice. —Felix Lecocq (aliengender), via Instagram

Just a quick note to express our appreciation on the investigative work you did on the senator’s lack of contact with her constituents. Job well done! —Amina Lahsinia Goelzer, via email

I literally call her office every day and she never picks up. Maybe four to five times out of 100. Dick Durbin’s office picks up 90 percent of the time. And sometimes if I can’t get through and call his office 20 minutes later, I will get a real person. —Megan Strand-Jordan (mstrandj), via Instagram

I’ve tried calling a number of times myself and I’m so glad someone is highlighting the issue. Much appreciated. I’m sure there were a lot of people that advised you not to. I’m glad you listened to yourself and the ones that encouraged you to stay the course. —Mariam Zafar, via email The same. Called Tammy Duckworth’s office several times and no response back. In contrast, Dick Durbin’s office was responsive.

He was also one of the first senators to call for humanitarian aid.

—Priya S. (priyahealthylivin), via Instagram Same experience four months ago, before the war started. I had to print, sign, and photograph a PDF just to send an electronic message that wasn’t even addressing the issue I brought up (when I got a canned response back). This is totally unacceptable “representation.” —Tara Schnaible (taramecium), via Instagram I do regularly get to speak to live Duckworth staff, but my schedule is such that I can call dozens of times during work hours to get through. So I don’t think the lines are turned off. It’s just that many calls.

Almost no email replies, so I focus on calls.

I’d also add that her staff are always polite and have often sounded truly sympathetic to concerns for a ceasefire. —Rachel (Rachel650663951), via X

Re: “(Don’t be deceived)” on reproductive rights, by Maia McDonald, published in the January 25, 2024 issue (Volume 53, Number 8) I read this last night. Shocking and disappointing. Thank you for this important journalism. —Claire Battle (claire_battle), via Instagram Re: Editor’s Note by Salem Collo-Julin, published in the January 25, 2024 issue (Volume 53, Number 8) Loved how you wrapped up. I completely agree and still hold out hope . . . and this is coming from a person who grew up in Austin, with dozens of stories that echo yours.

—Jeff Pazen, via email

Find us on socials: facebook.com/chicagoreader twitter.com/Chicago_Reader instagram.com/chicago_reader linkedin.com search chicago-reader The Chicago Reader accepts comments and letters to the editor of less than 400 words for publication consideration.

m letters@chicagoreader.com

4 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

A Party Noire event at the Promontory LYRIC NEWBERN

I

s it spring yet? And at the same time, how is it already February? Two features in this issue might not have been intended to bolster this strange relationship to time many of us seem to be experiencing lately, but you might find yourself reading about things that happened in the past and wondering, “That again? Didn’t we learn before? Am I stuck in an episode of Quantum Leap?”

In News, Shawn Mulcahy teams up with writer Ed Vogel of Chicago’s Lucy Parsons Labs to examine the wares of SoundThinking, the company behind ShotSpotter, a brand name that many Chicagoans are concerned with. ShotSpotter’s most recent contract to bestow its services on the City of Chicago is due to expire this month. Does the technology even work in the ways that were sold to then mayor Emanuel in 2018? Take a read at what Shawn and Ed found and let us know what you think.

And in City Life, DMB dives into decades of history concerning LGBTQ+ bars and social spaces to find the common threads between those who often had to hide in the shadows to create space for their communities, and those who strive to keep similar and intentiona l space for BIPOC queer

people in Chicago in 2024 and beyond. How lucky are we to live in a city with trailblazers like Pat McCombs and Vera Washington of Executive Sweet, activists like those who were there when the Gay Liberation Front “stormed” the Normandy, and, at the same time, smart and considerate younger entrepreneurs, promoters, and scene-makers.

(I’m looking at you, Party Noire purveyors, Nobody’s Darling darlings, and Hoochie Hotspot royalty).

After I saw the movie, like many of you, I started using the title Everything Everywhere All at Once to describe this weird time continuum. The constant feeling of “It happened five years ago, but what happened five minutes ago?” (I also started using the title to describe perimenopause, but I’ll spare you until a future note.) In such a confusing world, jump back into the past and the future at the same time along with us, and hopefully all that will fall from the sky will be hearts and love, just like this issue’s cover art by our returning champion contributor, illustrator Anya Davidson. Thanks for reading. v —Salem Collo-Julin, editor in chief m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com

FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 5

CITY LIFE NIGHTLIFE

Making Black queer spaces How the last 100 years of Chicago’s LGBTQ+ nightlife influenced the Black queer party organizers of today

By DMB (DEBBIE-MARIE BROWN)

L

et’s say you threw a ticketed birthday party at a 700-person capacity venue and it completely sold out. You would be stoked. Think about it: your name would be out there, you would make bank from the event, and everyone, including you, would have danced to good music in a packed house.

But what if almost every attendee to your party was a stranger to you, and the people you had hoped would come were disregarded in the hype of the event? What if less than ten percent of the ticket holders recognized you; if none of them knew who you were?

Party Noire (PN) is a Chicago-based and events-focused organization. On the group’s website, PN describes its community as “an inclusive cultural hub” created to celebrate and hold space for “Black femmes, queer women of color [QWOC], and Black womanhood along the gender spectrum.” Party Noire threw its first party in 2015 with no expectations of what might follow. The group didn’t imagine that, eight years later, they would be able to curate 300- to 500-person parties regularly on their own, plus partner with media giants like Red Bull, Canvas Studios, and Pitchfork Music Festival at venues across the city.

Within four months of Party Noire’s genesis, reporter Britt Julious penned a December 2015 Chicago Tribune article about its arrival.

The new publicity would help grow the space far beyond their circle and would help them establish a public face. Six months later, in the summer of 2016, the group enjoyed their first sold-out event at the Promontory in Hyde Park, a 499-person capacity music venue.

The creators had mixed feelings about this turnout.

“That was the point in which we realized that we had to be super explicit about who we were finding space for,” nick alder, party cofounder, told the Reader. “Because being

6 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

placed in a media platform like the Tribune meant that there were people that were coming to the party that we didn’t necessarily need to come to the party.”

Alder and their coproducers went to Instagram and posted what would later endure as their mission statement and community agreements.

On social media, PN declared their intention to make events that celebrate and center the Black queer experience. Allies who enter are appreciated but must remain mindful of the space they take up. PN considers their parties consent-forward spaces and requests that the community in attendance checks in on one another and inquires about each other’s pronouns; they also assert that racist, classist, anti-Black, homophobic, or transphobic behavior will result in the offending actors getting dismissed from the event.

“That was one of the most important shifts that happened,” alder continued. “We want to be a Black, queer, trans, and nonbinary centered space. And we needed to be explicit in sharing that with people so they knew what was happening before they got there.”

Party Noire’s experience reminds me of Joan Jett Blakk’s review of the historic late 70s and early 80s Chicago gay and alternative dance venue the Warehouse, where house music was popularized by the resident DJ Frankie Knuckles. For the 2022 book Last Call Chicago: A History of 1001 LGBTQ-Friendly Taverns, Haunts & Hangouts, Blakk told writers Rick Karlin and St. Sukie de la Croix that the music and atmosphere at the Warehouse was funkier and sweatier than other places in the city.

Blakk would excitedly go to the Warehouse with her friends at 4 AM. The venue’s audience was mostly Black, but it wasn’t all Black, Blakk told Karlin and de la Croix. “A place that hip, you couldn’t keep white people out if you tried,” said Blakk.

In Last Call, Blakk tells the authors that there would always be one or two white “queens” on the north side that could sniff out popular spots and would thereafter go running to the previously unearthed club. Word about parties and venues that were previously catering to mainly Black audiences spread that way.

White patrons surging into hip, mostly Black spaces was the status quo even at a time when segregation was the norm elsewhere.

De la Croix has penned multiple books about Chicago gay history before and after Stonewall. He told the Reader that, in the mid–20th century, drag shows on the south side in Black clubs were a hit and all-inclusive. Joe’s Deluxe Club (1938–1954) at 6323 S. Parkway (now known as Martin Luther King Drive) and Cabin Inn (1933–1938) at 3119 S. Cottage Grove are two examples of many.

“Everybody went to the Black jazz clubs,” de la Croix said. “White people from the north side went to the south side and were welcomed in the Black jazz clubs. Black people going north, not so much.”

While researching his earlier book on Chicago nightlife, Chicago Whispers, de la Croix

interviewed an older Black drag queen who performed in the early 60s in a north-side bar who confirmed this experience. The drag artist told de la Croix that the only time he saw Black people in north-side bars was if they were playing piano or in a drag show.

That all seemed to change in the 70s with the advent of disco, which brought everyone together. Straight people started to attend the same bars as gay people, and Black gays went up north.

During the second half of the 20th century, as the straight world slowly opened up to the reality of gay people existing, organizers of LGBTQ+ social spots lost the “we get what we get and we won’t get upset” mentality in favor of asserting their right to organize their own spaces. Party curators and venue owners felt more empowered to be specific with who they wanted their gatherings to serve. Many organizers hoped that underrepresented groups chose to spend their time in these curated spaces, where identity-based discomfort or violence was less likely to occur than in mainstream venues. Although some venues and promoters found more success at this than others (success being measured by both quantity and quality of audiences), the history of this spacemaking is particularly immense in Chicago.

Chicago gay bars and hangouts were the early- to late-20th century version of modern-day dating apps, gay health bulletin

CITY LIFE an working to preserve Chicago LGBTQ+ stories. Keehnen told the Reader that as late as the 80s, gay bars either didn’t have windows, had a single tiny window for a bouncer to look through, blackened their windows with paint, or covered them in one-way reflective tape.

“You know, where you can look out, but no one could look in,” Keehnen said. “People could lose their jobs, they could lose their homes, they could lose everything they had if someone found out you were gay.

Well, if your landlord was a dick, you know?”

In Chicago, it was illegal for “transvestites” (a term widely used until the latter part of the 20th century) to wear clothing meant for the opposite gender in public with “the intent to conceal his or her sex.”

If someone born “male” appeared in public with lipstick, a blouse, or a wig, they were in danger of being arrested.

Last Call includes the story of one patron of the bar Lost & Found (1965–2008), who remembered that police harassed women who wore pants with zippers in the front instead of on the side. Front-zippered pants were considered menswear. Women were also forbidden from wearing men’s shirts, which had buttons on the left of the chest, as opposed to women’s clothes which generally have buttons up the right side. Keehnen adds,

“They would actually come in and arrest you and put you in a paddy wagon, and you’d go to jail for cross-dressing.”

Longtime Chicago activist and bar owner Marge Summit told Keehnen in a 2017 interview for Windy City Times that the Midget Inn (circa 1950s) at Montrose and Kedzie had a straight bar on the first floor and a gay bar on the second. “When it got raided, the cops had to come through the bar and up the stairs, so there was time to get out.

We kicked out the screens to the windows and j u m p e d f ro m the second floor and started running.”

De la Croix recalls interviewing an elderly woman who frequented the Volli-Bal (circa 1950s) at 2124 N. Clark. The lesbian bar was filled with all butch (masculine-presenting) and femme women, the latter of whom would wear three pieces of clothes as a protective measure. When police came to raid the bar, “butches used to grab their femmes,” run to the bathroom, and change clothes, as to avoid being arrested for cross-dressing.

Same-sex dancing was illegal in Chicago

They don’t know who [our] people are, but they know who some white guy named Jeff is who went viral on TikTok for eating a Chicago hot dog wrong.

Party Noire LYRIC NEWBERN

boards, Discord servers, and traveling queer parties. They were one of the only places a queer person could find peers of similar leanings and interact with them with marginal safety.

The Dill Pickle Club (1917–1935), originally located at 10 W. Tooker Place (now an alley near Washington Square Park) provides a good example of the sort of company that was considered commonplace where you might come across the “third sex” or “sex variants,” in the parlance of early 20th-century monikers for homosexuals. The club’s audience was largely comprised of bohemians and progressive thinkers—those that mainstream people might consider weirdos. In Last Call, de la Croix characterizes the Dill Pickle Club (sometimes spelled Dil Pickle Club) as “a rambunctious forum where hobos, poets, artists, rebellious academics, college kids, opera stars, scientists, prostitutes, psychoanalysts, revolutionaries, and con men debated, argued, performed plays, and lectured to a chorus of hecklers.” In the same rooms you might frequent to explore alternative ideas of sex and gender identity, there would be passionate speeches led by suffragists or people who thought the earth was flat, or lyrical prose about the joys of oral sex.

But going to bars and even bohemian clubs wasn’t risk-free.

Owen Keehnen is a local writer and histori-

until 1970 and cross-dressing was illegal in Chicago until 1973. In 1988, Chicago’s city council gave the LGBTQ+ community social equality under law through the Human Rights Ordinance passed that year.

Through the 1950s and ’60s, gay and lesbian Chicagoans gathered in larger numbers in areas like Old Town, Hyde Park, and Lakeview.

The consequential rise of LGBTQ+ visibility resulted in more “vigorous campaigns” to suppress the community by the city, the police department, and other municipal authorities.

As the 2005 Encyclopedia of Chicago writes, the local media facilitated gay suppression by “publishing the names and addresses of those arrested in raids.”

Encyclopedia of Chicago adds that thousands of men and women were arrested, both in bars and out on the streets, for being “inmates of disorderly houses,” which criminal law at the time described as a house where the conduct of its inhabitants outraged public decency—be that a brothel, a gambling house, or a gay bar.

One facet of Chicago bars that would offer a unique type of safety is that the majority of gay bars in Chicago (and many larger American cities) were allegedly owned by the mafia, who paid the cops not to raid their bars. Sometimes the mob bribed cops to postpone their raids until weekdays in the early afternoon—a time of day when most people weren’t patronizing the bar. Last Call explains that the mob opened illegal speakeasies after the start of prohibition on January 17, 1920. Although prohibition ended by late 1933, the mob wouldn’t relinquish control of the liquor business and Chicago gay bars until 1973.

By their nature, de la Croix writes, Chicago’s gay-welcoming bars were clandestine and flying under the radar, so many of their names have been lost over time.

GAY LIBERATION

Den One at 1355 N. Wells (1974-1978) called itself the “gay disco of the future.” COURTESY OF OWEN KEEHNEN

As time progressed, the Chicago LGBTQ+ community continued to raise their own expectations of what they wanted their social experiences to be. The community’s collective distaste for constant police raids was apparent after the Stonewall incidents in New York became well-known and accepting the status quo became nonsensical. Local gays saw what a seat at the table could look like, and they wanted to pull up one of their own.

In 1969, Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Manhattan, was raided by police. But patrons responded by fighting back, meeting violence

FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE continued from p. 7

with violence, and a four-day riot commenced.

Before Stonewall, none of Chicago’s gay bars were openly LGBTQ, de la Croix told the Reader.

Chicagoans formed gay liberation resistance groups toward the end of 1969 and start of 1970, some influenced by the work of New York City groups like Gay Liberation Front (GLF), which was founded in 1969 immediately after Stonewall. In late spring of 1970, Chicago’s version of GLF headed to the Normandy to protest. The Normandy was a massive 500-capacity bar (then the largest in the city) that forbade same-sex dancing. The GLF led a boycott of the venue for nearly two months until the owners were pressured enough to acquire a license that allowed same-sex dancing, to let attendees wear shorts, sleeveless T-shirts, and sunglasses in the bar, to ban discrimination against women at the bar, and more.

The following night, gays danced together for the first time in the Normandy, Last Call says.

“That’s when gay people started to take control, in about 1971. Two years after Stonewall, then gay people started to buy bars, they started to own bars,” de la Croix said.

At the same time, the mafia started moving out of the Chicago gay bar business, since newly invigorated north-side Chicago gays started demanding lower prices and more from the longtime ownership. By 1973, the mafia for the most part stopped owning gay and lesbian bars in Chicago. Suspicious of mob control, then U.S. Attorney James R. Thompson had been investigating the sketchy ownership of these institutions, and ultimately sent 30 to 40 Chicago police officers to jail for stealing money from Chicago bars and being bribed by mobsters.

The gay and lesbian community’s newfound appetite for a self-determined bar experience can be seen in the story of a popular lesbian bartender who called herself Dago Rose. Rose took over the management at 905 Club (905 W. Belmont), which had started as a straight bar.

Last Call recounts local lore about the first day Rose walked in in 1980, where she slammed a baseball bat down on the bar. “Anybody who wants to live, leaves now.” And from that day on it was a queer bar.

Augie and C.K.’s (1979–1994) was a popular lesbian bar on the north side located at 3726 N. Broadway that would serve as the premiere example of what would befall north-side bars that gave lesser service to Black and Latinx women.

Pat McCombs, a Black nightlife organizer

8 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

in Chicago who is a longtime veteran of Black lesbian social scenes, told the Reader about discussing the bar in the 1970s with friends.

McCombs recalls lounging with a group of girlfriends at one of their apartments. McCombs told the Reader that they were “sitting, smoking, and talkin’ shit.” One of her friends started talking about how Augie and C.K.’s wouldn’t let them in without a “green card.”

McCombs, now 75, said, “At the time, green cards were a medical card used for identification for people who were on public assistance.

But I know why they asked for that from the Black girls. And I felt that there was definitely a discrimination by them assuming all of us were on public aid. So I got mad about it.”

McCombs had noticed that once a certain number of Black women entered Augie and C.K.’s, security would start “acting funny at the door.” McCombs soon started organizing and assembled a group of people to picket the bar.

At that time in the 70s, McCombs had already been involved in numerous lesbian groups and activities with women of all backgrounds. McCombs easily put together a picket line of 35 women, Black and white. They protested outside of Augie and C.K.’s at their most popular hours and functionally closed down the bar during the weekends.

“They couldn’t make any money ’cause we wasn’t letting nobody in that door,” McCombs told the Reader. Augie and C.K.’s eventually succumbed to the pressure, and the bar publicly posted a statement detailing which types of identification were acceptable from all patrons for entry, so the bouncer couldn’t change the rules at whim.

McCombs’s memories of Augie and C.K.’s are not all bad. Even though one of the club’s bodyguards had built a reputation for making some patrons of color feel unwelcome, McCombs and her friends talked their problems through with the bouncer directly. “We worked that out [with her],” McCombs told the Reader. “She turned out to be a beautiful person.”

McCombs didn’t realize at the time that she was only just getting started with cracking down on bars. She later formed a group called the Black Lesbian Discrimination Investigative Committee. The group distributed a flyer to different community bars warning that the Black Lesbian Investigative Committee planned to randomly canvas the venues to see how easily women of color could get in.

The committee didn’t always follow through

with this, “Because really, I didn’t give a damn about them not letting us in,” McCombs said.

“I said, shit I ain’t got to spend my money where we ain’t wanted. So then I started doing private lesbian parties. And we did them for 30 years.”

EXECUTIVE SWEET McCombs was raised Baptist in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago and didn’t let people know she was a lesbian until later in her college years. She knew gay people in church who were friends of hers, but, in the Black community, McCombs said, the decision to be open with your identity can be met with a lot of hostility and violence.

Identifying as a femme, she felt she could “get away” with being a lesbian for longer than a masculine-presenting lesbian could— and she did. Her first dive into lesbian social activities was after reading an advertisement in the Chicago Maroon (the University of Chicago’s student-run newspaper) that promoted a meeting at a women’s house for lesbians.

McCombs was attending Chicago Teachers College (now known as Chicago State University) at the time.

It was ten years later, in 1983, when McCombs, in her early thirties, joined Executive Sweet, an itinerant party for lesbians, after its first event. Within two years, McCombs and a peer named Vera Washington took over running Executive Sweet (ES). The duo continued to organize parties under the ES name until 2013.

McCombs and Washington’s parties averaged 300 to 500 attendees. Larger events saw anywhere from 600 to 1,000 guests. A surplus of entertainment was always waiting for eager attendees. Pantomime, ventriloquists, dancers, singers, burlesque, strippers, magic shows, and/or poetry readings would grace the stage between DJ sets.

At an Executive Sweet party, vendors would set up shop for eager patrons along the walls of the venue. Some vendors sold jewelry, some sex toys, and some incense.

Local LGBTQ+ community organizations like Howard Brown Health, Affinity (the oldest Black lesbian community center in Chicago), and Chicago Black Lesbians and Gays also set up tables at ES events, where they could interact with their target audiences in public.

McCombs and Washington used money out of their pockets to rent out establishments for their exclusive evening festivities. They would

dress up and carry briefcases to look official as they walked into potential venues for ES parties and tried to negotiate party contracts with the bar owners. The two Black women would tell the business owners that they represented a sorority having a gathering, to avoid disclosing they were lesbians throwing a party.

Pat McCombs (left) and Vera Washington COURTESY OF VERA WASHINGTON

“We would find bars that didn’t do very good business, but were centrally located, had public transportation, [were on] streets with good lighting, and offered good and decent bar service,” They looked for places where parking was accessible and cheap, and public transportation could easily get you there. The bars were usually downtown or on the north side, because women of all backgrounds generally felt safer traveling there. McCombs didn’t feel as safe on the south side. She said, “I would tell the [owners], ‘Hopefully you got women as bar [staff ] because we are women.’”

McCombs told the struggling business owners that she and her “sorority sisters” wanted to close down their space for the night so they could make the owner “good money” behind the bar. “Back then we were discriminated against so much. When you talk money to certain people who are hungry, they don’t mind changing their view.” McCombs said. “Green

CITY LIFE is a color that has never discriminated. Yes, it seems to have a powerful message.”

Although the ES parties were full of Black lesbians, all backgrounds of women were welcome and showed up. McCombs had a lot of white friends from other parties she attended.

Attending other parties was one good method of getting guests to come to your party.

Getting folks to attend her events in a

to use their security. But I tell their security to stand outside because I don’t want my women to feel intimidated by these men.”

Upon entering an ES party, McCombs curated little games that helped the lesbians interact with one another. One game she created was called Post Office, where you’d get a number to stick on you as you walked in. On a nearby board, there were hundreds of little en-

I wanted the women to feel welcome. When they came in the door, I wanted them to feel safe. pre-Internet time was an adventure all by itself. At ES events, McCombs had “cute little femmes” walking around the parties with guest books that doubled as mailing lists.

This setup ensured that ES could capture the attendees’ addresses so they could be contacted directly for future events. But advertising regularly occurring parties to a mailing list of around 1,500 people was an endeavor that McCombs and Washington couldn’t do alone.

Sometimes McCombs would fix a meal for a group of friends, and they’d sit around a table to stamp and stuff envelopes over drinks that she provided. McCombs taught special education for 41 years, and, at the time, was working at a CPS elementary school in Pilsen. “I had them folding envelopes and putting mail in during my shift. I had my students doing it, stuffing my envelopes, said it was an activity.”

Soon, McCombs had convinced coworkers to do the same.

Executive Sweet had a connection at the post office, where they paid a friend who worked there “a few dollars” to mail their envelopes.

Since Executive Sweet organizers couldn’t organically find what they were looking for at gay venues across the city, their own events were meticulously curated for women, and created to be welcoming to Black women. Only guests they wanted in the space were allowed in.

At first, McCombs and Washington attempted to have women running everything: women were hired as DJs, bartenders, and security.

Eventually, security duties fell to a combination of Washington’s brother and another gentleman, and ES also hired “butchy women” who intermingled with the crowd and weren’t easily identified as security.

“I wanted the women to feel welcome. When they came in the door, I wanted them to feel safe,” McCombs said. “Some places want you

velopes with corresponding sticker numbers on them. If someone liked the way you looked, McCombs recalled, they could put a note for you in your “mailbox.” When you checked your own mailbox, messages saying “meet me here” (or whatever message your potential suitor wanted to try) waited for you.

“People could meet folks that way,” she said.

“Because, you know, women are shy.”

So, what might you do then if you threw a party that no one you were close to attended? For Executive Sweet, they avoided that possibility by having strict entry at the door. Pat and Vera’s parties were notoriously women-centered places where women’s safety, interests, and forms of intimacy were prioritized.

And that decision isn’t surprising, considering they were following the practices many queer Chicago hangouts always had before them. Except instead of being exclusive by virtue of being shunned from society, the traveling party maintained that marginal exclusivity intentionally for more narrow and specific racialized queer identities (and allies) to avoid the intra-queer community ostracization and harassment Black and Brown women faced at the typical gay bar. It is no surprise then that some LGBTQ+ Chicago bars today still have trouble with ensuring a baseline equivalent level of comfort for every LGBTQ+ identity that walks into their rooms—especially BIPOC and trans folks. Without a foundation of intention to safeguard those patrons likely to experience discrimination, bars and other venues do not center this work.

So whether it’s a traveling party like Executive Sweet or a brick-and-mortar establishment hoping to curate who their space serves, doing so still follows a LGBTQ+ legacy that goes back over half a century in Chicago.

PARTY NOIRE Before Party Noire cofounder nick alder was dedicating their life work to creative practices and community building, they were in the mental health field. Alder is a psychologist by trade with two master’s degrees in community mental health and a doctorate in counseling psychology. Alder has worked in community health organizations, private practice, hospitals, the county jail, and “literally every setting that you can think of in terms of where people might be seeking mental health services,” they said.

Alder went into mental health wanting to support other Black people and people who came from similar backgrounds as theirs.

Alder told the Reader that they quickly realized that the medical field perpetuates “Western and white supremacist practices” that inherently disrupt opportunities for the sort of community-building they sought.

Party Noire represents alder’s work now as an independent practitioner, “still supporting folks with some of the background in mental health, but definitely trying to create my own pathways to understanding healing and liberation through creative community.”

In 2015, when the party was founded, alder said there weren’t many spaces where they and their friends felt they could be Black, queer, and femme while also feeling prioritized in the space. There were some places that had breadcrumbs of the experience they sought, and they used those examples as a starting point for the vision they had in mind. Lesbe Friends, for example, was a party coming to its end in 2015 that prioritized Black lesbians. The Dojo, a former

Pilsen DIY spot, showed alder’s team how community could cocreate experiences that were authentic and centered people—whoever those people might be—using specific music, DJs, and more.

For Party Noire, being a care-based space centered around communication and safety that is reiterated in their community agreements is one way their party is intentional.

They got this idea from a party series in New York called Papi Juice that did the same. PN has a designated team member who maintains a sober lifestyle and is on the other end of a party-provided phone number to help guests get a ride home, water, or find a low-sensory space to collect themselves if needed.

PN is attended mostly by Black millennials and Gen Zers but has also become an intergenerational space that attendees feel comfortable bringing their aunties to. Rae Chardonnay curates the music for each party, looking for new and upcoming DJs as well as established ones.

“The intentionality around music is even a little bit deepened by our request that folks really just kind of dig deeply into their Black sounds bag. We are trying to create a space where dancing is highly encouraged,” alder said. “We really want folks to move throughout the diaspora, and give us your Black Black Black sounds and music.”

Party Noire differs from Executive Sweet in that the former won’t stop you at the door for being outside of their demographic focus. However, PN does all the advertising they can on social media and in the press to make sure potential attendees know who the party is mainly for before they leave their homes.

A busy Party Noire evening at the Promontory in Hyde Park LYRIC NEWBERN

FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE continued from p. 9 NOBODY’S DARLING While Party Noire’s home is on the south side, up north in Andersonville, Nobody’s Darling is a brick-and-mortar Black and lesbian -owned bar trying to make sure queer BIPOC have a welcoming place to walk into when they are in the mood for cocktails.

Despite the bar opening in 2021, a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the Tribune reported that Nobody’s Darling had already received profiles in the Washington Post and NBC News within the first eight months of being open.

Renauda Riddle co-opened and co-owns the bar at 1744 W. Balmoral. Her day job is senior revenue auditor for the Illinois Department of Revenue, and she comes to the space with ten years of experience running a pop-up called Brunch Remix for BIPOC queer women through the Center on Halsted. Riddle worked at the Center at Halsted from 2008 until 2013, and was leading the center’s Women’s Action Committee for engagement with BIPOC women when Brunch Remix took off. That experience blossomed into Riddle starting her own creative company focused on replicating the events she had become a master at facilitating.

Riddle met corporate attorney Angela Barnes at a Brunch Remix event. They quickly bonded over a shared love of cocktails. The two would later use their own money to buy the former lesbian wine bar named Joie De Vine, which they transformed into a warm, inviting, queer and BIPOC women–centered cocktail bar.

“I think we’re probably a model for a lot of other [bar] spaces,” Riddle said. “The two best people that could open a bar are an attorney and an auditor.” Barnes brings in legal expertise to navigate all the standard legal hurdles a business might encounter, and Riddle, being an expert in tax law, can more comfortably assess business risks and how tax laws affect the business from day-to-day and monthly perspectives.

Barnes was raised in Chicago and, after returning from college, remembers attending Augie and C.K.’s, Paris Dance, and Girlbar. She has especially great memories of attending Augie and C.K.’s.

“Then the bars started closing. And things started disappearing. Pop-up parties would happen. But it became fewer and far between,” Barnes said. “There really wasn’t

10 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

HOOCHIE HOTSPOT

Dancers enjoying Party Noire LYRIC NEWBERN

anything happening.” This was stirring in their mind when they decided to open Nobody’s Darling. “Because it all of a sudden seemed like queer women didn’t really have a place. And we might as well do something about that.”

The name Nobody’s Darling comes from an Alice Walker poem and reflects how the owners want people to feel when they come into the bar.

“We wanted [patrons] to be nobody’s darling, and we wanted them to just come in and bring their whole self,” Riddle told the Reader. “You don’t have to appeal to anyone but yourself.”

The owners admit that, when considering their demographic, they wanted to ensure everyone who looks like them feels comfortable. As two Black queer women who want to feel whole and seen when they go out to decompress, they crafted the bar to do the same for their demographic. Depending on the time of the day, there might be 60- to 70-year-olds holding conversation next to a patio table where people in their late 20s and 30s are sitting. The crowd on Sundays from 4 PM to 8 PM generally spans the ages 30 to 50.

Barnes said she knows there can be a level of anxiety going into bars regarding safety, especially as a queer and Black patron. “We wanted to make sure that our bar was the space that people come in [and feel] greeted right,” Barnes said. “Once they come in, they’re recognized, people look you in the eye, they say, ‘Welcome.’”

Hoochie Hotspot is one of a handful of spaces that joined the ring in 2022 as a Black sex worker–run and sex worker–friendly event space.

“We decided we wanted to add ourselves to the list of ongoing events that prioritize, center, and advocate for the safety of sex workers, Black queer people, and their experiences in nightlife,” said Lynzo the Heartthrob, the party’s cofounder. Like alder and Barnes and Riddle, the Heartthrob and their cofounder, Fierce, felt Black and queer spaces were lacking a certain specificity of what the experience could be in regard to adding sex work accessibility and themed low-sensory spaces. Their events are usually attended by younger millennial and Gen Zer queer and trans BIPOC. The event has typically been held at an indoor-outdoor apartment space on the south side known as Hoochie Headquarters.

Their themed events have names like House on Hoochie Hill, a Halloween party that featured a costume contest and raffle for a Telfar bag, and Camp Cunt, a kickback-like autumn equinox bonfire with a DJ, themed drinks (a norm for the event series), hot dogs, and veggie kebabs to cook over a fire, plus raffled THC lube and vegan whiskey eggnog.

“Cookie Cutters was our summertime Black queer Juneteenth celebration of freedom and love,” the Heartthrob said. “That was a show that had strippers outside. We had an oil wrestling contest for a Telfar bag.”

There are always drag artists and strippers, and the organizers pride themselves on allowing guests to experience a strip club–like experience for the first time that is not catered to the heterosexual norm or male gaze.

They’ve partnered with the group Black Skrippa Brigade for a bikini car wash day party fundraiser for both groups. Another event Hoochie Hotspot held was Black Sugar Beach, a Janelle Monáe celebration at Berlin nightclub in partnership with drag king Luv Ami-Stoole. Hoochie Hotspot’s last Valentine’s Day event was hosted at the Burlington in Logan Square.

The Heartthrob admitted that it can be difficult to find more official venues to host because white bar owners don’t seem to recognize their legitimacy as event planners. They said that bar owners largely don’t understand the social stature and community leadership of Black queer people because it’s not a com-

munity they interact with.

“They don’t know who [our] people are, but they know who some white guy named Jeff is who went viral on TikTok for eating a Chicago hot dog wrong. So access to venues are a little more up in the air for us.”

Nonetheless, Hoochie Hotspot has a strong and consistent following of attendees, maintained through social media and in-person interactions, who usually return for their following events, no matter where they’re located. The group excels at curating opportunities for intimacy between attendees while still maintaining a fun party vibe. If a queer BIPOC regular party attendee can’t afford a ticket, Hoochie Hotspot allows willing and able strangers to “sponsor” tickets for someone else so they can attend.

The Heartthrob says that in communitybuilding, it’s important to look at your audience as community connections, and more than a way for you to gain capital back on an event.

“You know, these people are not supposed to line my pockets,” they said. “All these people are coming for an experience that we are providing because that’s what we signed up to do.”

These are just a few of dozens of spots that have blossomed out of a desire for specificity in who the event is for. Groups and venues like Dyke Nite, Dorothy, Strapped, Eden, Berlin, Gyrate, Dim Sum and Drag, and more have (or have had) the same mission in their own way.

But they are following the tradition of dozens of groups born in Chicago decades before them.

“I can’t even think of anything that’s in existence now that we used to do,” McCombs told the Reader regarding old clubs she’d patronize. “A lot of places have closed; they’re torn down. A lot of places are gone. They ain’t there no more.”

As one group sunsets, another one dawns.

As one popular nightclub closes, another one opens. At times, the quantity of these locales might fluctuate, but the erection of a new similar space is not unique to the 21st century, by far. Perhaps the communities curated by a sunsetting venue are seeds and fodder for those to come.

McCombs told the Reader, “I just am so glad when some of you young people call me. The history needs to be known. And usually, our history is always eliminated.” v

m dmbrown@chicagoreader.com

PLAY WITH

PURPOSE

On October 21st, 2023, We Wander into a Restaurant Labeled Online as “Mediterranean” for Dinner

®

By Czaerra Galicinao Ucol

and while we wait for the host, I scroll through photos of an action back in Chicago; my people hold a banner that reads From Palestine to the Philippines, Stop the U.S. War Machine, none of us untouched by the bloody hands of warmongers.

The walls are decorated with intricate craftwork: woven baskets, coffee pots, embroidered tapestries.

Someone greets us and takes our order:

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Could we please have a bottle of

?

I’m sorry, we’re currently out. Everything on our menu from the West Bank is currently having supply chain issues due to…

He trails off. We say, That’s okay, we understand, but we mean, None of this is okay. We are so, so sorry.

The host tells us her husband, the owner, has always dreamed of sharing his family’s recipes, inherited from his Jordanian mother. (Months later, I learn his father is Palestinian, that he is the man who took our order.) How much quiet exile has this family endured for the sake of business?

We drink wine bottled in a monastery founded in 1885, 63 years before Israeli occupation. Our server returns, This dip is on the house, it’s called Gaza salsa. As they detail its ingredients, they share a gaze of camaraderie with each of us, an invitation.

I have trouble swallowing the delicious food past the growing lump in my throat. My friends cry with each bite.

I want the people who wrote these recipes free to cook for their loved ones, free to wander into a random restaurant that has not been reduced to rubble, free to name themselves Palestinian.

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After dinner, I return to the largest tapestry on the wall. It reads TRADITIONAL PALESTINIAN EMBROIDERY, displays a map naming cities I’ve seen in the news for the past 2 weeks: Ramallah, Bethlehem, Gaza.

Thick black lines outline Palestine—how defiant a reminder of home can be.

Czaerra Galicinao Ucol (they/she) is a queer Filipino writer from Chicago. Their debut poetry chapbook Pisces Urges was published by Sampaguita Press in Fall 2023, and their poems have appeared in The Offing and beestung. They received their B.A. in Asian/Pacific/American Studies from New York University in 2020, and are the Co-Director of Luya, a local grassroots poetry organization centering people of color.

Poem curated by Faisal Mohyuddin. Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of Elsewhere: An Elegy (forthcoming March 2024 from Next Page Press), The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, and The Riddle of Longing. He teaches high school English in suburban Chicago and creative writing at Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies; he also serves as a Master Practitioner with the global notfor-profit Narrative 4 and is a visual artist.

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Opening on February 15, 2024.

Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 11

FOOD & DRINK

Find more one-of-a-kind Chicago food and drink content at chicagoreader.com/food.

ESSAY

A slice of Mississippi in Chicago Reflecting on Black food migration and family recipes

By TANIKIA CARPENTER

I

n 1947, my paternal grandmother, Essie, left the warm fields of Doddsville, Mississippi, for the cold streets of Chicago. Her husband, Sam, my grandpa, had come before her to find work and get settled. During the Great Migration—the mass exodus of Black Americans from the south to northern and midwestern states in the 1900s—they were among many who came expecting more job opportunities and higher pay. They moved to 43rd and Federal, which is now the Dan Ryan Expressway. Grandpa Sam had been trained as a butcher in Jackson, Mississippi, and found work at a variety of meat companies.

Grandma Essie stayed home to raise their four rambunctious boys. When the couple stoically posed for a black-and-white photo that unofficially symbolized their Bronzeville status, my grandmother was officially a Chicago girl.

However, she made sure to bring a piece of Mississippi with her in the form of cake.

Just like I can’t remember the first time I watched the 1985 film The Color Purple because it seemed to simply always be playing on the television, I don’t remember the first time I had my grandmother’s caramel cake.

For me, the cakes seemed to magically appear, because I was never around to witness the baking process. Grandma Essie would perch her freshly baked three-tiered cakes—including chocolate and coconut cake alongside the caramel—on the tallest dresser in their room to cool off. Like hawks, my cousins and I would stand in the doorway, sure to keep our eyes on the cakes. The moment she moved the cakes to the kitchen, we’d ask for slices bigger than our stomachs could handle, accompanied by cold glasses of milk.

My holiday memories are vibrant with Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” on the

12 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

car radio, shopping at Evergreen Plaza near Beverly on the south side, and eating Grandma’s caramel cake.

But the cake wasn’t just for special occasions; there were also regular days that may have seemed mundane until I arrived at Grandma’s house and saw the beloved cake.

The caramel cakes were always there, until they weren’t.

After keeping it to himself until he could no longer hide it, my grandfather shared his diagnosis of prostate cancer and died shortly afterward.

After Grandpa Sam was buried at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, which is also the final resting place for Mamie and Emmett Till and other Black notables, my 12-year-old self had no idea the shift that would occur in my family. The death of my grandfather was also the death of my grandmother’s cakes. Their tiny house, once overcrowded with my uncles and their families watching the Bulls playoffs and picking up hamburgers and french fries from the local mom-and-pop shop, now seemed empty and bleak. For the first time, my grandmother may have realized just how cold Chicago really was. What was meant to be a land of opportunity had resulted in the loss of her overworked husband.

One day, while sitting at her kitchen table, in an attempt to keep my grandmother’s caramel cake tradition alive, I asked her for the recipe.

And I don’t know what went wrong. Maybe I was too bold in my attempt to make caramel

The author’s grandmother and grandfather, Essie and Sam AMBER HUFF

from scratch, from a can of condensed milk like Grandma was able to masterfully do.

Or maybe I was just a city girl who needed to leave the serious baking to the southern belles. The caramel quickly hardened in the pot and didn’t move—I had to throw the whole pot away.

It became clear that I would not be the one to keep my grandmother’s cake tradition alive.

I am OK with that for now. My grandmother and I come from two different worlds. Her adolescent years moved slowly, with time for her to master cooking, baking, and all the benefits that come along with growing up in the south. My adolescent years moved quickly,

as I found myself working my first job at age 14. Grandma was a stay-at-home mom. I am a work-in-office-and-still-raise-a-child mom.

After a full day of work, sometimes I can only order takeout.

However, I’m a sincere believer in the fact that seasons c h a n ge , a n d o n e day, whether I’m in my 40s or 70s, I just may surprise myself. Maybe our shared roots trump our differences, and I’ll be able to bake caramel cakes to connect with Grandma Essie the way she baked to connect to the south.

In 2018, my grandmother became an ancestor. She was 93 years old. In a Facebook caption, along with her photo, I wrote:

The caramel cakes were always there, until they weren’t.

FOOD & DRINK sister in California. Out of all of this, however, the memory that is always present in my heart and mind is her caramel cake.

When I find myself missing my grandmother and craving her baking, I allow myself to indulge in a piece of caramel cake from Brown Sugar Bakery on 75th Street.

The inside of the cake is yellow, tender, and moist. I’m pretty sure the caramel frosting is made from condensed milk. It isn’t my late grandmother’s recipe, but it’s close enough.

It leaves me considering how soul food like this has stood the test of time, making its way from enslaved Black Americans to free people. From the south to northern cities like Chicago during the Great Migration.

From baby boomers to millennials. From my grandparents’ kitchen table to Brown Sugar Bakery, and maybe someday to my own. v

BROWN SUGAR BAKERY

R 328 E. 75th Tue–Sat noon–5 PM, Sun 10 AM–6 PM

773-224-6262 brownsugarbakerychicago.com

My Grandma Essie. 93 years young. Made the best caramel cakes. Feisty as ever. R.I.P. lil’ lady. #MississippiMud I have many memories about my spicy grandmother—she stood at 4’11” but claimed she carried a gun every day and wouldn’t hold her tongue for anyone. She was a storyteller and would often go down a rabbit hole about relatives in the south I’d never met, all while chewing and spitting out Red Man tobacco.

Grandma Essie had fair skin and gray eyes, due to her grandfather being a white man, which was the only conversation topic that was off-limits. She wasn’t keen on airplanes, but she would grudgingly get on one to visit her

Caramel cake from Brown Sugar Bakery COURTESY BROWN SUGAR BAKERY

m letters@chicagoreader.com

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FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 13

NEWS & POLITICS

Shots in the dark

AMBER HUFF

POLICE SURVEILLANCE

Chicago’s $33 million contract with SoundThinking, the company behind ShotSpotter, is up for renewal in February—yet concerns abound.

By ED VOGEL and SHAWN MULCAHY

14 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

I

n 2017, Chicago police began to slowly expand a vast network of microphones mounted atop lampposts and utility poles—the electronic ears of the controversial gunshot detection technology ShotSpotter.

This coincided with the creation of newly established high-tech, district-level intelligence centers known as Strategic Decision Support Centers (SDSC), which were developed through a collaboration between the Chicago Police Department (CPD), the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance.

If ShotSpotter and its sensors are the CPD’s metaphorical ears, then SDSCs are its brain— the centers cull and aggregate the tremendous amount of information police gather on the 2.7 million people who call Chicago home, and share that information with the central intelligence center at the department’s headquarters. Staffed by a mix of sworn officers and civilian crime analysts, these centers serve as command posts not only for officers responding in real time to potential crimes, but also for police who use historical crime data to predict future incidents.

ShotSpotter was to be a core pillar of these state-of-the-art facilities and a remedy to the city’s persistent gun violence in beleaguered Black and Brown communities, which is perhaps why an analyst at one SDSC took a particular interest in the technology.

For at least nine months, between October 2017 and July 2018, Scott DeDore tracked ShotSpotter’s accuracy in identifying confirmed gunshots. DeDore regularly shared his findings with Chicago police and ShotSpotter, and even attempted to hone the tool’s precision by working alongside the company to install additional sensors, documents obtained through public records requests show. Over the course of those nine months, according to the records, ShotSpotter correctly detected a gunshot in 63 of 135 instances in which a person was struck, an accuracy rate of about 47 percent.

One month after DeDore sent his last available report, then mayor Rahm Emanuel signed a new three-year, $33 million contract with ShotSpotter (the company has since rebranded as SoundThinking). It covered 12 police districts—100 square miles—and made Chicago the company’s largest customer at the time.

These records represent a look into a small corner of Chicago’s southwest side from more than half a decade ago. But they offer a unique window into ShotSpotter and its role in an increasingly surveilled city. And they come from a time when the city was reinventing its policing strategy. Six years later, Chicago is again at a crossroad, as a new mayoral administration “reimagines” public safety and mulls the fate of ShotSpotter when its contract expires in mid-February.

SoundThinking did not answer a list of emailed questions from the Reader. In a written statement, Mark Page, the company’s senior vice president of field engineering and customer service, said ShotSpotter is used around the clock by more than 160 agencies across the country, “each with Service Level guarantees of 90% or more in terms of detection performance.” Page claimed the technology “consistently meets or exceeds this performance criteria” and said that SoundThinking incurs financial penalties “in the event that we fail to meet our performance commitments.”

Page also pointed to a report from consulting firm Edgeworth Economics that found ShotSpotter maintained a 97 percent accuracy rate over the past four years. That study, however, was commissioned by SoundThinking and only determined whether the system accurately identified a sound as a gunshot.

NEWS & POLITICS

ShotSpotter sensors and POD cameras. Sensors are attached to lampposts, utility poles, and building facades and rooftops. MADISON MULLER

Further, the study relied on data provided

by ShotSpotter—which was reported to the company by police departments—rather than conduct its own testing of the technology.

Page said that most shootings aren’t reported to police. “In the time that it has been deployed in Chicago, ShotSpotter has led police to locate hundreds of gunshot wound victims where there was no corresponding call to 911. Those are victims who would not have received aid but for ShotSpotter.”

The CPD did not return a request for comment.

D

AMBER HUFF

eDore began as an analyst with the CPD in June 2017, according to his LinkedIn. He was assigned to the tenth district’s SDSC around the time the department was first unveiling the real-time crime centers and just a few months before ShotSpotter’s expansion into the southwest-side region.

As the gunshot detection technology went live in his district in October 2017, DeDore began to scrupulously document its ability to accurately alert officers to “bona fide” shootings in which a person was hit. According to records obtained from the CPD, DeDore tracked his findings in spreadsheets that listed, for each incident: the date, time, and location of the shooting; whether notification of the incident came from 911 dispatchers at the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications (OEMC) or from ShotSpotter; the police beat in which the incident occurred; any evidence of a shooting; and whether the technology correctly alerted officers.

The technology’s accuracy varied greatly over the nine months of available data. In the period between March 19, 2018, and April 15, 2018, for example, ShotSpotter alerted police to nine of the ten instances where a person was shot in the tenth district. But it didn’t detect any of the six shootings between May 22, 2018, and June 11, 2018.

In one of his first reports, on November 2, 2017, just a few weeks after ShotSpotter launched in the tenth district, he noted “13 MISSES with ground Evidence that occurred in the North End” of the district between October 16 and 30, 2017.

Further, DeDore found that from December 11, 2017, to February 11, 2018, ShotSpotter alerted the CPD to 65 percent of incidents when a person was shot in the tenth district.

From February 12, 2018, to March 18, 2018, ShotSpotter alerted police to nine of the 17 incidents when a person was shot, a 53 percent accuracy rate.

It’s possible some of the shots occurred indoors and were, therefore, undetectable

by ShotSpotter. When the CPD expanded ShotSpotter into the tenth district, the city’s then agreement with the company, which the Reader obtained from the Public Building

Commission, stipulated the “system will be designed to detect at least 80% of the unsuppressed outdoor gunfire, with location accuracy to the shooter’s location within 25 meters in at least 80% of the incidents.”

DeDore regularly shared his findings in emails with dozens of police across multiple units within the CPD, including the narcoti c s, i n te r n a l affairs, gang enforcement, and education and training divisions, documents show.

These emails included PowerPoint presentations with data tables that tracked how ShotSpotter’s accuracy changed over time and maps that plotted the locations of undetected gunshots in the tenth district.

“I don’t know if everybody in the new SDSC rooms appreciates the importance of improving ShotSpotter. This can only be accomplished by accurately documenting their MISSES,” DeDore wrote in a February 22, 2018, email. “The city is paying for this it’s a phenomenal tool, let’s make it better!”

Documents also show DeDore shared his findings with various ShotSpotter representatives, and even worked with the company to increase the technology’s accuracy. On December 5, 2017, DeDore sent an email to Doris Cohen, at the time a customer success and

Initially installed in just two of the more than 20 police districts—covering three square miles—ShotSpotter would soon wrap its tendrils around large swaths of Chicago.

FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 15

NEWS & POLITICS continued from p. 15 training manager for ShotSpotter, according to her LinkedIn. (Cohen is now SoundThinking’s analytics director.) His email included an attached presentation that detailed an apparent conflict between the Latin Kings and Satan Disciples street gangs that had occurred a day earlier.

“On 4 December 2017, there were three conflict related shots fired incidents in the 010th district with no hits,” the presentation notes.

“ShotSpotter did not alert on any of the incidents, but did capture audio on each incident.”

“This is a high priority conflict area that has repeated misses,” the analyst wrote in his email to Cohen. “Yesterday was a good example.”

In another instance, on January 8, 2018, DeDore forwarded Cohen an email with an accuracy report for the period spanning December 11, 2017, to January 7, 2018. Nine minutes later, DeDore received a reply from Jeff Magee, ShotSpotter’s customer success director until 2022, asking if the analyst was available for a meeting. DeDore responded with his availability, and Magee wrote back, “I will stop over Wednesday morning.”

A couple days later, on January 10, DeDore emailed colleagues an updated ShotSpotter accuracy report. The presentation notes, “ShotSpotter has increased microphone placement in the 010th district and made adjustments in December based on geographic mapping of the documented 62 MISSES.” In an email sent the following month, DeDore writes that “ShotSpotter made several trips here after I sent these reports. They then came and installed more microphones.”

But efforts to improve the technology’s accuracy in the tenth district over the course of the nine months of data proved relatively fruitless. Documents show the year-to-date accuracy rate remained below 50 percent for the entirety of the nine months of data.

It’s unclear just how high up the command chain DeDore’s analysis reached, or whether anyone in Emanuel’s office knew of the accuracy reports ahead of the 2018 contract extension. But the documents show at least some within the department’s leadership were aware of it. Then captain (now commander) Joseph Brennan and Commander James Sanchez were included in a March 20, 2018, email in which DeDore shared his analysis. DeDore, Brennan, and Sanchez appear to also have been invited to a meeting the same day—alongside other leadership like the then commanders of the ninth and 15th districts, Randall Darlin and

16 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

AMBER HUFF

Ernest Cato III—with ShotSpotter’s Magee and Mike Will, who an email identifies as the company’s vice president of service solutions.

The meeting was about “Shotspotter Reported Misses and Service Enhancement,” documents show.

“I will map all recent MISSES before then,” DeDore wrote ahead of the meeting.

I

n July 2003, the CPD unveiled a pilot program that would install 30 remotecontrolled, 360-degree surveillance cameras on light posts in “Chicago’s most violence prone communities,” the department website notes, with the goal of “disrupting illegal narcotics operations.” Police credited these socalled police observation device (POD) cameras with cutting drug crimes by three-quarters during the summer of 2003.

By September, Mayor Richard M. Daley would take the program citywide. As the number of POD cameras grew—first from 30 to 80, eventually to thousands across the city—so, too, did their supposed capabilities.

This phase also marked the city’s first foray into gunshot detection. Second-generation POD cameras were equipped with technology from Tuscon, Arizona–based surveillance company Safety Dynamics that the CPD says could wirelessly transmit gunshot alerts to the OEMC, field control devices, district stations, and police headquarters.

Chicago’s first deal with ShotSpotter came in 2007. But it, along with the pilot from Safety Dynamics, were short-lived. A Chicago police spokesperson told NBC Chicago in 2010

that the department dumped both programs because they were costly and “not entirely effective.”

The city gave ShotSpotter another go in 2012, this time reportedly financed with funds seized from civilians through a process known as civil asset forfeiture. Initially installed in just two of the more than 20 police districts— covering three square miles—ShotSpotter would soon wrap its tendrils around large swaths of Chicago. By September 2016, the technology’s footprint had grown to 13.5 square miles, after the Public Building Commission approved nearly $1 million in funding to cover the entire seventh and 13th districts— Englewood and Garfield Park—in sensors.

ShotSpotter’s growing coverage area accompanied the rollout of the department’s first two SDSCs, in the same districts, at the start of 2017. The investment in its real-time crime centers marked a shift in strategy for the CPD that centered on “inserting technologies into district-level centers,” according to a 2019 Rand Corporation report. The study notes Chicago police desired to “better integrate technology into CPD’s policies and practices,” leverage the “very large amount of information” it already maintained on Chicagoans, and address the real and persistent problem of gun violence.

SDSCs are small, converted conference rooms in district stations. They’re staffed by a team of two to four officers and civilian analysts per shift, and supervised by a sergeant or lieutenant. These centers include access to a bevy of technologies, including ShotSpotter,

POD cameras, geospatial predictive policing software, and social network analysis, that police heralded as cutting-edge public safety tools.

In spring 2017, the CPD opened SDSCs in four additional districts, including DeDore’s tenth. By March of the following year, 13 districts would have SDSCs, with plans to eventually open one in every district.

The expansion of SDSCs and the introduction of new surveillance technology came at a time when the CPD faced a severe crisis of legitimacy. Decades of brutality, dismal clearance rates, the killings of Rekia Boyd and Laquan McDonald, and a federal investigation into a pattern of unconstitutional policing laid bare systemic issues within the department. An emphasis on high-tech policing, then, offered police an opportunity to rebrand.

City leaders from Emanuel to former Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson heralded ShotSpotter as part of a new wave of “data driven enforcement” that was central to bringing public safety to Chicago’s long divested and heavily segregated south and west sides. In announcing the opening of the tenth district’s SDSC in October 2017, Emanuel said the new focus on technology “is part of CPD’s commitment to a crime strategy that has made us smarter in our deployments, faster in our response times, and more proactive in our community engagement.”

At the same time, however, a member of that police department collected nine months of data that showed, at least in one district, in cases where a person was hit by gunfire, the technology missed as many shootings as it identified. None of the records provided to the Reader show police questioned the continued use of the technology. Instead, the department seemed resolute to maintain its relationship with the company.

Emanuel signed off on a three-year extension with ShotSpotter in August 2018.

Johnson, in a press release from the company announcing the deal, made clear he thought the technology was here to stay. “ShotSpotter has been—and will continue to be—a key component in helping our agency rebuild trust with the communities that we are serving,” the superintendent said.

Chicago’s current ShotSpotter contract expires on February 16—but, even as the deadline looms on the horizon, Mayor Brandon Johnson has remained tight-lipped about its prospects, despite committing to end the city’s contract with the company as a candi-

NEWS & POLITICS

“Acoustic analysts” review alerts detected by AI and “publish” gunshots to police, usually within 45 seconds of receiving a notification. COURTESY SOUNDTHINKING

date. Since taking office, his administration has sidestepped questions about the city’s future with the technology. He and other city officials have instead suggested that they are considering a range of options, but have so far declined to discuss specifics.

In June 2023, Chicago approved a $10 million payment to SoundThinking, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. Jason Lee, a top Johnson adviser, said at the time the payment was erroneously processed after former mayor Lori Lightfoot signed off on an extension through February 2024. South Side Weekly reported in November, however, that SoundThinking CEO Ralph Clark told investors Johnson “included funding for the continued use of acoustic gunshot detection technology” in his 2024 budget proposal, which the city council approved later that month. The budget includes a roughly $9 million line item for “Software Maintenance and Licensing.”

That same expense also appeared in the 2023 budget.

Ronnie Reese, the mayor’s press secretary, repeatedly declined to make anyone available for an interview and would not comment on whether Johnson will end Chicago’s use of ShotSpotter when the contract expires or how the city plans to spend the $9 million allocated for it. When asked by the Reader if he could provide any information on the impending decision, Reese replied, “No updates.”

Meanwhile, more than 80 community

groups and more than 500 people have signed an open letter calling on the Johnson administration to end the city’s relationship with ShotSpotter. “More than just being a waste of city resources,” the groups write, “the use of ShotSpotter results in deployments that are dangerous for Black and brown community members who historically have been killed, tortured, disappeared, and terrorized by CPD officers.”

The letter calls for greater investment into areas like housing, education, and health care. “Every penny invested in surveillance tools demonstrates a lack of confidence in community-led solutions to safety,” it says.

Whether the mayor stays true to his promise remains to be seen. But his top cop, Larry Snelling, might offer some insight. At a January community forum in Chinatown, Snelling, a longtime supporter of the gunshot detection technology, offered a full-throated defense of ShotSpotter and suggested that people who oppose it misunderstand how it works.

“You tie sound detection to a lot of things it’s not tied to. You can read studies—and I can show you how it works,” the superintendent said. “Until you actually see it, you don’t understand.”

“Shot detection does one simple thing: it detects gunshots and it allows officers to get to those locations quicker.” v

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m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 17

COMMENTARY ESSAY

Darker cells, lighter classrooms An incarcerated writer remembers a close friend, who died of an overdose last February at the Cook County Jail, and shares a vision for a more hopeful future.

By B.O.

S

omebody told me one evening that the gray-haired, heavyset Black man I’d passed in the Cook County Jail’s narrow Division I hallway hours earlier had actually passed on. That answered my previous question: why was he still in his cell, completely naked and sleeping on the toilet, while I, along with the rest of the tier’s occupants, lugged our items during what the jail calls a “mass movement”? To catch a millisecond more of the man in that position would’ve been undignified. So, I straightened my head, minded my business, and kept it moving.

That was a decade ago, a time when my heart was still hardened like the asphalt of the streets for which I was molded. In this concrete jungle, compassion didn’t hold enough currency. In my immature mind’s eye, all I could see was a dead dope fiend.

It’s something now taken much more seriously—by me, and by the Cook County Sheriff ’s Office. Nowadays, the jail has a dedicated opioid treatment program, supposedly to save lives. (If you weren’t aware, the U.S. is currently in an opioid epidemic. And, if you didn’t k n o w, d r u g epidemics are usually only publicized when it affects people of a certain race—or when an institution is being held accountable for its death toll.)

The past year, for me, has been one of darker cells and lighter classrooms. February 9, 2023, is a date forever etched in my mind—a moment when time felt like it had stopped.

Other than a solid spiritual foundation, my only relief from experiencing the lifeless body of my little brother Eric “Scooby” Gunn came from writing about it. (It became one of the final passages in my memoir, A Son of a Gun

With the Heart of a Bullet).

At 23 years young, Scooby took his last breath while incarcerated. As medical staff rushed up the long Division IX staircase, I assumed he was just having a bad episode. It’s not that any episode is good, but, after being in the Cook County Jail for a couple years, I know drug-induced seizures had become the norm.

At least one face was glued to the chuckhole in every cell as we waited for the steadfast nurses to revive him.

Soon, paramedics appeared in bunches with foreign machines. Asserting. Pumping. Doing everything they could. At the bottom of the stairs, directly in my line of sight, stood a lieutenant, his head bowed as if to silently send a prayer. More long faces soon assembled in the dayroom. To this day, it all still feels surreal.

Another person died that same week. I’m not sure if it was an overdose or a jailhouse murder. I do know overdoses happened more frequently as word got around. New batches of drug-soaked paper strips, known as order, were laced with t h e p o p u l a r, yet dangerous, opioid fentanyl.

I’ve heard that order started out as medicinal cannabis strips, though it eventually evolved into a market teeming with K2, a potent, synthetic marijuana. The sheriff ’s office posted warning signs around the facility that read, “Don’t Die In Jail.”

As fatalities around the compound began to add up, it grew increasingly difficult for me to soldier on. The media began to cover the outbreak—one that seemed to be spiraling out of control. Before I knew it, our entire deck was watching camera footage recorded from inside. No one made a sound as the 9 PM news spun its story. (To Fox 32’s credit, the coverage

It’s not hard to conclude that paper bans, aggressive surveillance, and ramped up searches have addressed the problem in as much as a Band-Aid could stop the bleeding from a deep wound.

18 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

This image is from an early 20th century series of photographs of people incarcerated at New York’s Clinton Prison showing tattoos. COURTESY NEW YORK STATE ARCHIVES

was remotely accurate.)

But that tragedy didn’t slow the chasers from chasing the marijuana-like high, one that dissipates as quickly as it sets in. Sometimes I feel like I’m in the infamous Carter apartment building from the iconic 1991 film New Jack City. The building is home to a drug syndicate running its operation and transforming the lives of those living there.

But most of the people here don’t remind me of the kingpin, Nino Brown; rather, they bear a resemblance to Pookie Robinson, a lost soul trapped in his own addiction who, even in recovery, falls deeper than before.

At first, you might think, “Why care about Pookie, if he doesn’t care about himself?” But soon, Pookie becomes the only person you

want to save. As New Jack City fans know, Pookie doesn’t make it out.

B

efore he died, I tried to talk to Scooby. I did talk to Scooby. Over the course of nine months, Scooby and I grew close to one another. I remember a day when he ran to my cell, overexcited. He’d had one of his lucid dreams, he exclaimed, and this time, he vividly witnessed a series of books branded with my last name.

Scooby was an avid reader. It’s no secret that the majority of order patients transform into truth seekers. Incarceration inherently gives people a desire to reflect with a panoramic view. Yearning to understand his complicated situation, Scooby took to stripped-

COMMENTARY down pieces of stained paper—of momentary with the heralded label “death.” For years, I’ve pleasure—like a raven takes to the hues of blue observed this mentality. Near-fatal episodes sky. In reality, human nature can only dream of are seen as premium experiences. Rather than the sky up above. being satisfied with a high in the lowest of In his thought-provoking book Power vs. places, chasers often settle for the possibility Force, David R. Hawkins details the mental of being put out of their misery. state universally known as euphoria—or, It’s not hard to conclude that paper bans, plainly stated, intoxication—where drugs or aggressive surveillance, and ramped up alcohol drown out one’s physical sensations searches have addressed the problem in as and numb one’s motor skills. It’s a state I, much as a Band-Aid could stop the bleeding myself, know. In the midst of discovering our from a deep wound. I propose that if more inner volumes, guys like Scooby experience resources were allocated to the Department a debilitating effect, an addictive crutch of Corrections’s educational programdisguised as a refuge. To avail is to escape. ming—to classes about writing, math, and Thereto comes intense vomiting, incoherence, science—then this epidemic would not have and violent episodes; you would never know caught nearly as much steam. fulfillment could be so unfulfilling.

Already a detainee, order remands one to a different carceral system altogether.

Hawkins writes, “Once experienced, it reprograms the experiencer so that he is never content again with ordinary consciousness.”

On September 28, 2023, another person (whom we all knew as Mackadoo) died from a suspected overdose, though rumors and speculation differ.

That same day, Scooby would have turned the ripe age of 24—the thought of it fills his Another from the Clinton Prison collection COURTESY NEW YORK STATE ARCHIVES loving mother’s heart with grief. Scooby’s mom, with whom I speak Brothers incarcerated alongside me, who regularly, told me she had recently gotten the have been housed in County for well over results of her son’s autopsy: fentanyl was the a decade, write speeches about the magculprit. An ugly truth. A sign of the times. A nitude that these programs represent. I’m cold plate that will continue to be difficult for reminded of young Scooby’s aspirations to his loved ones to stomach. be an author and the therapy from which he Our city deserves another vantage point. Ar- would have benefited by penning his own ticles like this one digress from placing blame. memoir.

We must encourage society to be responsible From the outside, you might see a differfor one another, even when we are not ac- ence between me and Scooby, or Scooby and countable for somebody else’s addiction.

Pookie—but all of us play that role at dif“What am I going to tell Scooby’s people?” I ferent points in our lives. I see the jail like thought, as his body was carted off Living Unit any other community: comprised of human 2B. A year later, I remind myself that I am my beings who must fight through loss, remain brother’s keeper. vigilant of addiction, and support each other The sidelines are not for me. I refuse to through it all. v stand by while fellow detainees chase not just any order, but an order that has been certified m letters@chicagoreader.com

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FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 19

ARTS & CULTURE

Learn more about the exhibition at hydeparkart.org. COCO PICARD

20 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

“A LOVE SUPREME” R Through 4/28: Wed-Thu noon-5 PM, Fri-Sun 11 AM-5 PM, Elmhurst Art Museum, 150 Cottage Hill, Elmhurst, elmhurstartmuseum.org/exhibitions, $18 adults, $15 65+, $10 students with ID, $5 children 5-17

ARTS & CULTURE

REVIEW

Searching for gratitude

contrasts a new 2D collage, Ṣọkan ti o nipọn AKA Collage-Tight Knit (2024)—a nod to Romare Bearden’s 20th-century paintings and collages depicting jazz’s nightlife and sonic “A Love Supreme” shows Norman Teague’s affection for Coltrane’s movements. album and for his own growth.

The cast horns continue in the second movement, “Resolution,” where the gallery’s

By ANJULIE RAO focal work, Jive (2024), calls visitors into the space. The yellow pegboard features one cast n these days of violence and uncertainty, the meaning of these words in relation to his horn, with “jive” tagged in red. This gallery I’ve been seeking gratitude. As such I’ve practice, providing visitors with a peek into introduces what can be considered “major” returned to Wendell Berry’s It All Turns his reflections on his eight years of designing and “minor” works: major works speak with on Affection—a brief but profound book that furniture, art objects, and public spaces. Open- volume as color, shape, and scale play a role in calls for a turn away from an aspirational ing with “Acknowledgement,” the first gallery deciding which minor objects are “flattened.” economy driven by technology and back to names the album’s influence on Teague’s Unlike Jive, the gallery’s centerpiece, Circle caring for the land around us. Affection, I practice. “I see parallels of his life in my own Sinuous AKA Sinuous Circle, is far tamer in believe, requires gratitude—for what we have tragic failures and successes,” he writes, “and color and movement, creating an interior space in an imand for what goodness the future could bring. penetrable geoWhen Berry asks us to redirect our collective metric enclosure attention to another way of being in the world, crafted in poplar. one based on devotion, learning, care, and It foreshadows reflection—all components of affection—I Teague’s third can’t help but be moved. Affection, it seems, movement, “Puroperates on a different wavelength than we, suance,” where today, might be accustomed to; Berry asks us the major work to patiently contemplate who we are in relaalso features a tionship to what lives outside our own bodies. spatial construcArguably, the arts accomplish this: despite tion. Roundthe money-driven mechanisms that fuel the house (2024), consumption and dispersion of music, art, built from strips literature, and theater, we are devoted to these and poles of popendeavors without our own economic gain, lar, maple, and returning us to affection. plywood, held There is, for instance, no “climbing the together in tenachievement ladder” when listening to John sion with fishing Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. Widely considered wire, produces one of the greatest jazz records of all time, the Installation view, “A Love Supreme,” Elmhurst Art Museum a calming, plein 1965 album is composed of four movements SIEGFRIED MUELLER PHOTOGRAPHY a i r ga t h e r i n g and was created when Coltrane was undergoing what he called a “spiritual awakening” similarly have a deep dedication to perfect my space in the third gallery.

The third and fourth movements present a after years of alcohol and heroin use. Perhaps craft.” Many artwork titles are in Yoruba and this is why the album became the bedrock for translated using “AKA”—what Teague says is departure from the first two galleries; while the latter read like contemporary presentathe Chicago-based artist, designer, and furni- the familial tongue of his ancestors.

Included in this new body of work is a tions of new work, these movements begin ture maker Norman Teague’s new exhibition, “A Love Supreme,” at the Elmhurst Art Muse- series of sculptures composed of wood and to take on a domestic feel. The third gallery um. While at first it might resemble an honest porcelain; wood bases that demonstrate includes, alongside the stunning Roundhouse, homage to the namesake album, the exhibi- Teague’s expertise in material craftsmanship less lustrous objects that spotlight Teague’s tion’s success lies in Teague’s own expression are adorned with horns from various brass work in furniture and industrial design. He of affection—toward the album, but also to his instruments cast in ceramic (done in collabo- includes Hutch naa AKA The Hutch from 2018, ration with Pilsen-based ceramicist Francisca shaped like a riff on an accordion-folding growth and that of his community.

The exhibition is divided into four distinct Villagrana). His E jowo mo n soro AKA Excuse dinner tray. It is expertly crafted but made vimovements across the museum’s main gal- me I’m Speaking (2024), which places two sually interesting only by the cast horn sitting leries and named after Coltrane’s album’s porcelain horns opposite an ash trunk, set on atop the ridged tabletop. Coat Rack in walnut original parts—“Acknowledgement,” “Resolu- a mahogany base, resembles local speaker is a bit too CB2, and the wastebaskets in the tion,” “Pursuance,” and “Psalm.” Each gallery manufacturer Specimen Audio’s gramophone gallery’s corners showcase his recent foray includes wall text in which Teague reflects on horns. The assemblage form of these materials into utilizing recycled plastics—neither are

I

particularly compelling.

But this less-than-invigorating display in the third movement is precisely what makes “A Love Supreme” so dynamic: proceeding into the fourth and final gallery, we again encounter domestic objects from Teague’s past and discover them assembled and arranged in new ways. A Composition of a Sinmi Stool and an Assortment of Asa Teague Tables features a towering stack of tables, topped with his signature rocking Sinmi stool, balancing precariously like a blossoming vine. It is surrounded by newer work, including Jazz Minisita AKA Jazz Cabinet and two Jazz Chairs—furniture rendered by abstract shapes and forms. While less refined than previous work, they are playfully messy and, frankly, musical.

Moving through the four galleries, crescendoing into this final movement, brings a whoosh of that strange sentiment—affection.

While the works on view range from earlier in his career to those made just this year, the exhibition doesn’t carry the weight of a retrospective but instead functions as a mid-career moment to display an artist’s growth and transformation. The change in tone and arrangement between each gallery allows viewers to perhaps suss out times in Teague’s career when experimentation wasn’t yielding success; or when the pressures to produce “beautiful objects” for collectors’ homes stripped away the delight a designer might find in play, failure, discovery—the stretching of the mind. The exhibition continues into the Mies van der Rohe McCormick House, where Teague cocurated a sister exhibition with Rosa Camara, inviting 35 artists to contribute works that speak to their personal moments of artistic awakening—a “bringing-along” of other artists and designers who have also dwelled in reflective growth.

“A Love Supreme” is thus a show about lingering in the struggle, returning to what one knows, and allowing it to shape what comes next. From it, we might allow Teague’s reflective process to become a mirror to ourselves, not dissimilar to the mirror that Coltrane’s album has become for the artist. Through affection—the commitment to reflection and growth—we can be changed. And for Teague’s affection, shown for this piece of music, and which he displays in his own work, I have finally found some gratitude. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE

THE WATERS by Bonnie Jo Campbell W. W. Norton & Company, hardcover, 400 pp., $30, R wwnorton.com/books/9780393248432

BONNIE JO CAMPBELL IN CONVERSATION WITH DONNA SEAMAN R Thu 2/22 6 PM, Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State, free, chipublib.bibliocommons.com/events/656e3e73a5dbe03f00749f67

INTERVIEW

The Waters follows a trio of selfreliant women in rural Michigan

really came alive for me when I ventured even farther out and started being interested in the community and the men. I love the men, they give you comic relief and they make things more urgent with all their trouble.

One theme you explore is the effect of toxic hypermasculinity on women. It is literally the trigger that sets Margo Crane, the protagonist of Once Upon a River, on her journey. How does it play out in The Waters?

“I’m really interested in those women who can’t follow the rules.”

By JACK HELBIG

W

riter Bonnie Jo Campbell is not the sort of person you expect to see on TV. She seems too real, too unawed by lights and glamour to be sharing the screen with a celebrity journalist so carefully put together she could pass for AI. Yet there she was one morning on the set of the Today show, talking with Jenna Bush Hager about her latest book, The Waters, which Hager had chosen for her on-air book club. Campbell was clearly pleased to be on the show—who wouldn’t be?—but she didn’t “put on airs,” as my grandma in Saint Louis would have put it.

Sure, Campbell has written her share of well-regarded works. Her short story collection, American Salvage, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book awards. In 2019, her novel, Once Upon a River, was adapted into an independent movie of the same name. But nothing she has written before has received as much approbation as The Waters, about three generations of strong, self-reliant women living on an island in rural Michigan and their tension-filled interactions with the nearby hidebound, male-dominated community of Whiteheart. No less than Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jane Smiley praised Campbell’s “ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world.”

When I spoke with Campbell in early January, she had just returned home to her small family farm on the outskirts of Kalamazoo, Michigan, from an out-of-town book event.

What follows is an edited version of that conversation. Note: she was on her phone for part of the interview “wandering around doing stuff,” such as feeding her beloved pair of donkeys, Jack and Don Quixote. Donkeys loom large in The Waters, both literally (one character raises donkeys) and figuratively (Dorothy,

the protagonist of the novel, is nicknamed Donkey). Campbell was friendly and talkative (we spoke for nearly two hours), but was also feeling the pressure of having a new book. “My agent said, ‘You just got to keep promoting that book because you took eight years to write it, so don’t be lazy about promoting it.’”

Jack Helbig: You wrote much of this during COVID. Bonnie Jo Campbell: People act like COVID times should have been a good time to write, but I think they were sort of a challenging time to write. Many things happened during the writing of this book that kind of shook me up.

Among them was that I had breast cancer and my mom had breast cancer and went through hospice and died. All this stuff happened while writing the book.

COURTESY THE AUTHOR

I’m no great writer. I’m just a really good reviser. I have some good ideas and I love characters. I feel like I’m a very honest writer. I can’t make anything happen that isn’t natural.

I kept messing with the shape of it and the plot, but you’ll see it kind of spirals.

For some reason these men, their masculinity, is threatened by the circumstances of the world, their jobs and such. So they’re expressing a kind of hypermasculinity that’s really not natural. And I think that’s what’s going wrong right now, is that the men are not comfortable because their role is changing. You know, where are they supposed to work?

Herself [aka Hermine, Donkey’s grandmother] is not against men. The truth is I think a lot of us are tired of this hypermasculine society we’re living in.

Is the setting for the book based on the rural area where you live?

Well, somewhere in southwest Michigan. It’s sort of a hot mix-up. The two places that mean the most to me are Kalamazoo County and then Berrien County, which is where Saint Joe, Michigan is. My grandparents have a cottage there, on an island. So that’s where that inspiration [for the setting of the book] came from.

Have you read Salman Rushdie? There is “The truth is I think a a fairy-tale magical realist quality to his lot of us are tired of this After you had complet- work. hypermasculine society ed a draft, you aban- No. I know it’s a terrible thing to admit, but doned the manuscript? in the last few years, I’m just reading women Do you have a working farm in Kalamazoo? we’re living in.” writers because I feel like I neglected them all

22 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

I just thought it wasn’t rich enough. The world is filled with mediocre novels, and I thought it doesn’t need me to write another one.

Would it be accurate to say that The Waters was carved out of that original manuscript?

It was carved out of it, but then that was a long time ago that that happened. I wrote something that was very long, I mean the thing swelled to 650 pages before I realized that I had to decide where the beginning and end of this story was. That was one writing of it. It got a lot better when I cut it down. I learn as I write, and I learn what I’m writing as I write it. I write like a short story writer. I write organically.

through college.

I’m reading this mythologist named Sharon Blackie. She’s really interesting. After I finished this novel, I read one of her books and she talks about the post-heroic novel. She talks about the heroine’s journey instead of the hero’s journey.

That idea fits The Waters. These are heroines’ journeys.

I’m really interested in those women who can’t follow the rules. They just can’t get jobs.

They just can’t get up in the morning and make meals for people.

I started out trying to just tell Donkey’s story. Then I enlarged the scope to telling the story of the whole community. The book

No, it’s just donkeys and some chickens. This is my mom’s house, and we bought it. The world of the novel is the world inside my head that’s created as a result of knowing the landscape and knowing the history. So it’s a fabrication, but it comes from my intimate knowledge with what is here and also kind of knowing the history or something.

It does seem like the same kind of world as the world of Once Upon a River.

Yeah. It’s rural Michigan, where the men are men and the women are scared. The men are well armed. But here on this island [in The Waters], the women do what they want. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

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FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 23

THEATER ENVIRONMENTAL ART

Raven Theatre and Block Museum tackle climate change Interconnectivity is the key to a new play and a traveling art exhibition on planetary peril.

brother sister cyborg space

2/8-3/17: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177 raventheatre.com, $45 (previews 2/8-2/11 $35, students/military/industry $15)

“ACTIONS FOR THE EARTH: ART, CARE & ECOLOGY”

Through 7/7: Wed-Fri noon to 8 PM, Sat-Sun noon-5 PM, Block Museum, 40 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston, 847-491-4000, blockmuseum. northwestern.edu, free

By DILPREET RAJU

L

ast year was the hottest year in human time where the current chapter seems to be history. Including 2023, five of the hottest coming to a close?” years on record have been in the past 20 Though lofty questions are asked in the years. Yet, there is still an inclination for most play, the most relatable piece for audience to turn the channel (literally or figuratively) members will likely be about political division between two people who simply can’t see eye when climate change is mentioned.

Rapid climate change is a reality the Earth to eye.

Thomson said, “2016 was one rupture. I and everything on it—from plants to humans to oceans to animals—will face in some way think 2020 was another rupture. We may or another. COVID was just the latest major have further ruptures where we’re asking this signal flare to the world; as the Earth heats, question of how do we stay in relationship migration of various species may lead to un- with family members when we can’t agree on things like climate change, vaccines, who won known consequences of disease.

Chicagoans and Evanstonians will have the the election. I think that’s something we’re all chance to settle into those feelings through art that hopes to connect audience members instead of fueling discontent about our planet’s heating.

The creatives behind the script for the play brother sister cyborg space and behind the curation of the traveling exhibit “Actions for the Earth,” Paul Michael Thomson and Sharmila Wood, both cited climate change and the emergence of COVID as inspiration for their latest work.

With a world premiere this week at Raven Theatre, brother sister cyborg space examines a loving, if politically dissonant, sibling relationship between Giselle (Brittney Brown), an environmental Brittney Brown in brother sister cyborg space JENN UDONI/ justice activist, and Elon (Matthew FRANCO IMAGES Bowdren), a billionaire interested in space struggling with.”

Directing the premiere run is Terry Guest, exploration.

Global investments in outer space explora- who said he hopes the play doesn’t just ention have only increased, and the recent “space tertain but influences people to reconsider whatever fraught relationships they might be race” also influenced playwright Thomson.

Last week, Thomson wondered what an- experiencing.

“I hope that people will think about the famthropologists think of those with enough money to sway swathes of society. “What if ily members that they have complex relation[billionaires] see themselves as continuing ships with, and that this play will help them the next chapter of human civilization at a take a step toward repairing some of those

24 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

relationships, if they should be repaired,” Guest said.

In questioning where humanity is going, Thomson believes art can give us room to digest the terror while realizing the need for community.

“I think we turn to art during this time because it allows us to ask questions and imagine alternative futures in a way that is actually going to be really, really important,” he said.

Guest said the process of directing a world premiere means Installation view of fiber work by Eric-Paul Riege in "Actions for “We’re finding it all out right the Earth" COURTESY THE BLOCK MUSEUM now on its feet.”

“One of the many, many Indigenous, and whose work for the most part things that I love about theater is that it disap- we’ve not presented at the Block before,” she pears almost as quickly as it appears,” he said. wrote in an email.

“So if it sounds interesting to you, get a ticket.”

As climate anxiety mounts, Berzock wrote Late last month, the exhibit “Actions for that the exhibit offers a “grounding experience the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology” opened at the in tumultuous times” through “guided selfBlock Museum of Art. It’s a traveling exhibi- reflection and contemplation.” tion featuring artists from around the world, Stephanie Smith, consulting guest curator with each piece focused on interconnected- at the Block, helped arrange the exhibit within ness and care. It’s easy to notice the focal the Evanston museum. points, between observer and artist, human Smith said to me in an email, “Urgent proband Earth, and so on. lems like climate change can create debilitat“Themes connecting care for ourselves, care ing frameworks of crisis— fostering responses of others, and care for our world and remind- like denial, despair, and isolation. Much of the ing us that we’re part of an interconnected art that Sharmila Wood selected invites visiliving network are critical as we increasingly tors to slow down.” experience the impacts of climate change and Neither art piece is going to reverse the social upheaval in very personal ways,” wrote Keeling Curve, but Smith argued it may just Kathleen Bickford Berzock, associate director offer us some comfort in knowing that this is of curatorial affairs at the Block Museum. everyone’s planet to care for.

“Actions for the Earth” presented an op“I hope visitors will leave feeling more conportunity for the museum to present works nected with distant people and landscapes, of Indigenous artists from Chile, China, India, more firmly grounded in the environments and Western Australia, to name a few. around them right now, and actively account“We were excited about how ‘Actions for the able for both.” v Earth’ brings together artists primarily from the southern hemisphere, several of whom are m letters@chicagoreader.com

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In her acclaimed signature style, Mary Zimmerman conceives a brand new theatrical adaptation of Mozart’s beloved opera.

Playful and imaginative, it’s big music in a small space. This “matchbox” presentation of The Magic Flute features a cast of 10 and orchestra of five—following the fantastic adventures of Prince Tamino and Princess Pamina. With dragons, a man who is a bird, trials by fire and water and underground corridors, Day and Night do battle.

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FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 25

ILLINOISE

Through 2/18: Tue 7 PM, Wed 1:30 and 7 PM, Thu-Fri 7 PM, Sat 2 and 7 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; ASL interpretation Fri 2/9, audio description and touch tour Sun 2/11, open captions Wed 2/14 1:30 and 7 PM; Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $41-$125

THEATER

standing in for a bed, one person lying knees up, another in a fetal position. Henry starts from the bed, puts on his pink adventuring cap, and leaves his boyfriend Douglas (Ahmad Simmons) for a quest to Illinois, the vast plain of which is represented by a cornfield, in a town marked “Small Town Middle of Nowhere” on the set (designed by Adam Rigg). In this cornfield is what appears to be a writers’ retreat entirely populated by a joyful multiracial cast o f w i n s o m e, energetically dancing young folks. (The problem of dancers trying to represent writers is that writing is essentially an activity with very little visible action. Here, they clutch notebooks and wonder if they are “writing from the heart”—inspiration is represented by holding light bulbs above heads. It is, like the cornfield, a touch corny, though the use of handheld lights throughout becomes a nice motif.)

Gathering lanterns to create a campfire, one by one they begin to tell their stories. Rachel Lockhart is powerful in “Jacksonville,” tossing out triple turns in sneakers with aplomb before Byron Tittle takes it away on taps. In “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts,” the ensemble floats a picnic blanket like the cape on Superman. Two horror pieces, “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” and “They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! . . . ” bring laughs and chills with a murderous clown and politicians as the undead.

Henry is anxious about sharing his work— but finally the others draw him out with empathy for a story that lasts eight full songs and takes him from his youth to the present day.

An idyllic childhood with best friend Carl (Ben Cook), with all manner of fine boy activities like stone skipping and balance competitions, is interrupted by girl Shelby, who wrecks the bromance by stealing Carl’s heart, which is especially heartbreaking for Henry, who is in love with Carl. The boys take a road trip (light bulbs return as car headlights) from Nowhere to Chicago to New York City. Henry, who meets Douglas, opts to stay in New York—Carl goes home to Shelby, who promptly dies of cancer. (“Cancer” sing the vocalists, and an IV rolled onto the stage lets us know that Shelby is sick.

Little is done to establish the relationship between Shelby and Carl, so the moment feels

more like a plot point than a matter of the heart.)

Henry begins to have nightmares about Carl, and Douglas comforts him, without minding that his boyfriend is obsessed with another man.

Like Hamlet, Carl dies at least three times before kicking the bucket: driving alone as headlights pass him like the lights of a train before it runs you down, appearing as a ghost i n H e n r y ’s dream, his body passing like a vapor through his friend’s hand as Shelby looks on from the afterlife. The moment when it finally happens is quite lovely, three angelic figures (with light bulbs) beckon and implore, before a thoroughly disquieting hand extends through them. Like a bad Expedia deal, this dark figure (Alejandro Vargas) entices Carl to the Sears Tower by gesturing at the posters on the wall that say “Sears Tower,” while the ethereal voice of Shara Nova sings “The Seer’s Tower”—and we see them, all dressed in black hoodies, jumping bodies, dropping from the ledge as though it were nothing at all. The moment when Carl leaps, his body fully lit in relief in the air—we never see him fall.

Everyone hugs Henry. When Douglas arrives in the cornfield because he loves Henry that much, Henry continues in yet another dance of self-absorption before he comes to his senses.

The man has traveled from New York City to Nowhere, Illinois(e), like Penelope swimming to Odysseus, for crying out loud.

Words and lyrics do the heavy lifting on the storytelling. Vocalists Elijah Lyons (also on keyboard), Nova (also on electric guitar), and Tasha Viets-VanLear (also on electric and acoustic guitars and percussion), whimsically winged like Puck, Ariel, and Oberon on acid, preside from the midlevels, and you have to listen carefully to follow the action, despite choreography that often feels pantomimic and literal. It feels like a lost opportunity that in a cast with so many strong dancers, with so many historic and narrative possibilities in Stevens’s music, the central plot revolves around an egocentric man who needs to be babied to tell his stories and then takes up all the space in the room when he does so. v

The problem of dancers trying to represent writers is that writing is essentially an activity with very little visible action.

Illinoise at Chicago Shakespeare Theater LIZ LAUREN

REVIEW

Illinoise misses the possibilities in Sufjan Stevens’s songs Chicago Shakespeare’s production has strong performances, but the central story sags.

By IRENE HSIAO

I

llinois. Land of Lincoln. The Prairie State.

The Inland Empire State. Home to Illinoisans, Illinoisians, and Illinoians. Algonquin for “tribe of superior men.” State bird: the cardinal. State fish: the bluegill. State amphibian: the eastern tiger salamander. Plenteous grower of pumpkins, home to the “world’s largest bottle of catsup”—what isn’t there to celebrate about our great state?

“Sort of the center of gravity for the American Midwest . . . a healthy, industrious kind of average American state . . . [not] a great leap from Michigan,” said composer Sufjan Stevens about his second state album Illinois (2005), “a 74-minute symphonic fever dream outfitted with oboes, glockenspiels, sleigh bells, and dramatic overtures.” The album includes songs featuring Illinois local history, including UFO sightings, serial killers, the Black Hawk

26 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

War, Casimir Pulaski Day, the Columbian Exposition, and Carl Sandburg.

Nineteen years after the debut of Illinois, Illinoise puts a narrative spin on Stevens’s music and lyrics, with a story by Justin Peck and Jackie Sibblies Drury, and direction and choreography by Peck. Featuring a superstar cast of musicians and dancers, the 90-minute nonstop extravaganza premiered at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on February 3, to the evident delight of the packed house. The kids can sing and they can dance (in fact the cast contains several alumni of So You Think You Can Dance, including season 11 winner Ricky Ubeda, who plays lead character Henry, and season 12 winner Gaby Diaz in the role of Shelby), and for those who enjoy a song and a dance, this show will feed you heartily.

The story begins in medias res, on a blanket

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FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 27

THEATER create moments where audience members can feel as smart as they are surprised. One illusion even let the volunteer feel like she was performing magic, even if she didn’t understand its origin.

But the best moment wasn’t a trick at all. A couple was on stage for a gag about unlocking a heart, and when Samelson asked the wife about her favorite band, she couldn’t stop nervous laughing, attempting something that sounded like “Sixty chickens! Sixty chickens!”

Her husband tried to chime in with something that also sounded like “sixty chickens.” Eventually, Samelson understood “Dixie Chicks.” Everyone collapsed into laughter as they shared her frenzied enthusiasm. In a room where seats are set up to allow talking between tables, audience participation is part of the show, and filming is taboo, I felt that much more invested as the trick unfolded, which ended in the husband getting down on one knee and reproposing after 16 years of marriage. Magic may be a manipulation, but Samelson harnesses the intimacy of the Magic Lounge to make the emotional payoffs real and fun. —MICCO CAPORALE

OPENINGS

Dogs, kitties, and fish . . . oh my!

Dog Man: The Musical is big and goofy.

Dav Pilkey’s popular series of kids’ books about a crime-fighting superhero mutant dog form the basis for this touring TheaterWorks USA musical production, which has settled in at the Studebaker this month. It’s a goofy, high-energy affair that somehow often feels a little big even for the large stage it’s on; there’s a fair amount of the sort of exaggerated mugging in the performances that parodies of children’s theater have sent up for ages.

Created by composer Brad Alexander and librettist/ lyricist Kevin Del Aguila (the pop/rock music is prerecorded), the story here mostly draws on Pilkey’s A Tale of Two Kitties (because kids love a good Dickens pun, I guess), in which Dog Man has to track down evil Petey the Cat and the sweet little kitten he’s cloned in his thirst to rob the banks in town. There’s also a subplot involving Flippy, an evil fish bent on destroying the city altogether.

Stretched over 90 minutes and two acts, the story here (directed and choreographed by Jen Wineman) gets a little convoluted, with some of the jokes obviously geared more for the adults and feeling like they’re shoehorned in, rather than seamlessly integrated, as in the old Jay Ward cartoons. But the framing device of two boys, George (Marcus Phillips) and Harold (Max Torrez), creating the story in their tree house as a graphic novel does set the stage for encouraging kids to use their imaginations. So do the props, costumes (Heidi Leigh Hanson), and scenery (Tim Mackabee), which all have a charming homemade quality to them and look like things kids themselves would devise. And the youngsters around me seemed to be having a good time, which is the ultimate test for a show like this. —KERRY REID DOG MAN: THE MUSICAL Through 2/25: Fri 7

PM, Sat 11 AM, 3 PM, and 7 PM, Sun 1 PM and 5 PM; also Mon 2/19 11 AM and 3 PM and Fri 2/9 3 PM; Sun 2/11 1 PM only; Studebaker Theater, 410 S. Michigan, 312-753-3210 ext. 102, fineartsbuilding.com/studebaker, $44.50-$84.50, recommended for ages 5+

R The power of memory

Drury Lane’s Fiddler on the Roof captures “the essence of remembrance.”

Mark David Kaplan is terrific as Tevye in Drury Lane’s new production of the Jerry Bock–Joseph Stein–Sheldon Harnick classic. The show opens in a deep haze, transporting us into Tevye’s memories with a staging that, according to director Elizabeth Margolius, explores “the meaning, movement, and essence of remembrance.”

For the most part, Margolius’s approach works; Fiddler’s dichotomy between the old and the new—always at the emotional core of the show—lends itself to becoming a full-fledged memory play.

Occasionally, the staging seems plodding. For example, Tevye sometimes has his conversations speaking to the audience while the characters he engages stand solemnly in the background. The overreliance on stillness here—slow processionals, characters standing motionless on opposite sides of the stage—means the audience misses out on the lifeblood of Anatevka. I also couldn’t grasp whether the haze in the pogrom scene—emitting as the villagers thrash violently in slow motion—was sup-

28 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

MAGIC, LOVE, MYSTERY Through 3/27: Wed 7 PM; Chicago Magic Lounge, 5050 N. Clark, 312-3664500, chicagomagiclounge.com, $42-$47.50

Owais Ahmed in Selling Kabul MICHAEL BROSILOW posed to suggest debris, reinforce the idea of Tevye’s hazy memory, or portend the even more horrible fates that awaited so many European Jews.

Still, Fiddler’s fans won’t be disappointed here, and there are many moments where the staging works brilliantly. Anatevka’s residents stand together proudly during “Tradition,” strategically leaning to and fro to reveal the characters they sing about. The solemnity of “Sunrise, Sunset” effectively transitions to the exuberance of Tzeitel and Motel’s wedding (the couple played

by Emma Rosenthal and Michael Kurowski).

Whoever plays Tevye is carrying most of the show on their back and Kaplan is up for it, mastering the milkman’s good humor, sadness, and anger as he feels the ground becoming undone beneath him. Janna Cardia is also great as Golde, and Kurowski’s rendition of “Miracle of Miracles” was the best performance I’ve seen of that song. —MATT SIMONETTE FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

Through 3/24: Wed 1:30 PM, Thu 1:30 and 7 PM, Fri 7 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM; Drury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace, 630-530-0111, drurylanetheatre.com, $85.75-$96.25

In the Heights falls short

Despite strong performances, Marriott’s production feels muddled.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pre-Hamilton musical In The Heights (book by Quiara Alegría Hudes) is not a work of genius, but it deserves a better production than it’s currently receiving at Marriott Theatre under James Vásquez’s direction. First, a work with this many crosscurrents can only be muddied by the in-the-round staging that is Marriott’s stock-in-trade; before you can figure out what’s going on between one pair of characters, they’ve moved to the far side of the stage and been replaced by another, and then another. Adding to the confusion is a sound design (by Michael Daly) that requires vocalists to struggle to be heard over the orchestra (music direction by Ryan T. Nelson), leaving the impression that every duet consists of people singing against rather than with each other. Repetitious choreography by William Carlos Angulo suggests that Latin

American dancing consists entirely of pelvic thrusts.

Not quite buried beneath these errors are a few fine performances: Joseph Morales as Usnavi, our immigrant protagonist trying to make his way in the titular Manhattan neighborhood; Michelle Lauto as a mostly silenced wife and mother who finally asserts herself; and Lillian Castillo as the owner of the local hair salon, another maternal figure—though one who’s anything but silent.

But are we supposed to care about the ingenue’s having dropped out of college or her secret romance with her father’s employee? About Usnavi’s awkward passion for Vanessa (Paola V. Hernández) or his scheme to return to the Dominican Republic with his grandmother (Crissy Guerrero, in fine voice)? About who, if anyone, will win the lottery? Both Marriott and Miranda have done better work; wait for that. —KELLY KLEIMAN IN THE

HEIGHTS Through 3/17: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 1 and 5 PM; also Thu 3/7 and 3/14 1 PM; Marriott Theatre, 10 Marriott Dr., Lincolnshire, 847-634-0200, marriotttheatre. com, $60-$73

R Love, mystery, and 60 chickens

Peter Samelson’s Magic Lounge show offers some real emotional payoffs.

What’s most apparent in Peter Samelson’s Magic, Love, Mystery is the magician’s love for his craft and its ability to bond people. Samelson is a seasoned magician who’s renowned for how he brings poignancy and humanism to an art form that’s easy to deride as cheesy or passé.

In this show, he uses a variety of illusions, tricks, and sleights of hand to tell the story of Noah and Grace, two lovers and criminals playing a passionate game of cat and mouse. Noah tracks down Grace through a series of clues revealed at the end of each segment.

The characters and plot are loosely developed, and most of the bits reinforce tired, heteronormative relationship tropes. Still, it’s difficult to resist Samelson’s passion and knack for sorcery, like taking a photo on his phone from the safety of his pocket or predicting what words people are tickling in romance novels. Magic is often reduced to duping, but Samelson uses his skill to

Mommy wars

Gift’s Mothers is funny—until it’s not.

Anna Ouyang Moench is having a moment on Chicago stages right now; her play In Quietness, about women at an evangelical Homemaking House, is playing at A Red Orchid Theatre. Now Gift Theatre presents the local premiere of Moench’s 2019 dystopic comedy Mothers, directed by Halena Kays. It also looks at the conflicts between “traditional” wives and mothers and those who have chosen a different path, but with a very dark twist. (Interestingly enough, Brittany Burch, one of the co-artistic directors for Gift, is also in Red Orchid’s play.)

Set in a Mommy and Me–like playgroup, Moench’s play features four women and one man. The central trio of combatants in the Mommy Wars of the first act are Vick (Krystel McNeil), Meg (Stephanie Shum), and Ariana (Caren Blackmore). Vick is visiting her old college BFF Meg (sans her own child), but feels judged by both Meg and her “guru” in mothering, the insufferably smug Ariana. An array of familiar arguments (breastfeeding vs formula, to vax or not to vax, how and when to discipline children, the point of women getting an education if they’re just going to stay home with kids) plays out in an often hilarious display of bourgeoise privilege and microaggressions. Mostly sitting on the sidelines are Ty (Alex Ireys), the lone dad in the room, and Gladys (Lynnette Li), the nanny for one of the kids (who are all embodied by teddy bears).

But the low-stakes conflict turns into real shit in the second act, when some sort of horrible conflict (maybe a civil war, maybe a foreign invasion) turns the parents into prisoners in the playroom. Do things get feral and grim? Of course they do.

Kays’s staging and the cast are both sharp and highly watchable. But Moench’s play, to my mind, hasn’t resolved the difference in tone between the first act and the second. Raising the question of just how far maternal love will get you in a real crisis (as opposed to sniping at other moms about their life choices) is great. But though the second act is arresting and mournful, several points raised in the first (including most notably the reversal of racial dynamics, where

THEATER “beige” people like Ty are seemingly marginalized) are quickly dropped. (Having the nanny be the one person who seems to know what to do is also its own stereotype of the Strong Working-Class Woman.) Still, Moench as a writer has razor-sharp comic chops and a bold willingness to examine the ways that women’s doubts about their life choices can turn them into their own worst enemies—until an even greater threat upends their lives. —KERRY REID MOTHERS Through 3/3: Thu-

Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; captioned performances Sat 2/17 and Sun 2/18, audio description and touch tour Sun 2/18, sensory-friendly performance Sun 2/25; Filament Theatre, 4041 N. Milwaukee, 773-283-7071, thegifttheatre.org, $35-$45 (students/veterans $15)

R Sundowning

The Outgoing Tide traces the effects of Alzheimer’s on one family.

If you wanted an example of a pretty well-structured contemporary American play you could do worse than Bruce Graham’s drama The Outgoing Tide. Graham’s characters—an elderly man with Alzheimer’s, his heartbroken wife, and their emotionally damaged son—are well drawn. His dialogue feels real but is witty enough to keep our interest. God knows, the story is compelling.

Everyone who lives long enough must face the existential questions (Is life worth living? Is it time to put a loved one in a nursing home?) Graham raises.

The play, commissioned originally by Northlight Theatre, where it premiered in 2011 with the late John Mahoney cast as the aging protagonist, is not perfect.

The story unfolds a little too slowly for my taste.

Graham, a prolific playwright and screenwriter, adores decorating his work with obvious tropes—a flock of geese to mark the transition to winter, a repeated bit in which a character tries and fails to skip stones until that magical moment when, after a moment of personal revelation, he can.

The current revival, directed by Steve Scott, suffers from its own faithfulness to the material, rising when Graham’s script rises—the scenes between the father (played brilliantly by Bryan Burke) and son (Nick DuFloth) are particularly poignant—and grows flaccid when the storytelling flags. Happily, the play’s slow moments are few. Graham is a capable enough writer to keep us interested, and then at the end deliver a final scene moving enough to send us home with a lump in our throat. —JACK HELBIG THE OUTGOING

TIDE Through 3/3: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; ASL

performance Thu 2/22; Buffalo Theatre Ensemble at McAninch Arts Center, College of DuPage, 425 Fawell, Glen Ellyn, 630-942-4000, btechicago.com, $44

R The price of safety

Selling Kabul is powerful in its words and silences.

Sitting in near silence in an apartment, curtains drawn, television above a whisper, and fans oscillating to feign static sound. That is how we meet Taroon (Owais Ahmed). Alone in a Kabul residence, he is fighting the Wi-Fi router, trying desperately to connect with his American military allies. Taroon is in hiding for his own safety after the Americans withdrew from Afghanistan, but now the Taliban want him dead for working with the enemy. The birth of his child raises the stakes.

That is the premise of Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul.

Khoury begs us to evaluate what trades we are willing to make for money, our own safety, our families’ safeties, and even our homelands’ integrities. Her story, artfully directed by Hamid Dehghani for Northlight Theatre, trades moments of silence for painstaking tension and tea times for quiet contemplation. The power of this work is undoubtedly its realism. Here, there is as much strength in what is not said as there is when something is spoken.

Ahmed is a powerful actor in the role of Taroon. We can feel his ache for freedom and family, a deep-seated inner conflict in opposition to his need for connection with his sister Afiya (Aila Ayilam Peck). Peck, too, offers us a deft demonstration of emotional range. Both Ahmad Kamal as Afiya’s husband, Jawid, and Shadee Vossoughi as her cousin Leyla cap this incredible performance of verisimilitude. Selling Kabul is a much-needed reminder to our present-day selves that nothing we do is in a vacuum. —AMANDA FINN SELLING KABUL

Through 2/25: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; open captions and relaxed/sensory friendly performance Fri 2/16, open captions and audio description/touch tour Sat 2/17 2:30 PM; Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $49-$89 (students $15, subject to availability)

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Sunsets in a basement

Open Space Arts revives a pair of early queer plays by Cal Yeomans.

The term storefront gets tossed around as a catchall for modestly budgeted performance spaces. But Chicago stage artists and viewers are likely familiar with an even more shoestring venue category: garden view Some of my most indelible theater memories have been of productions that have taken place in living rooms and literal basements (including Mercury Fur from the defunct EX-Pats), and in a city with more stages closing than opening, the Open Space Arts residential-to-studio converted micro–black box feels like a step in the right direction.

David Zak directs two 1979 short plays by Cal Yeomans, a forebear of modern queer theater whom Zak describes as overlooked. In The Line Forms to the Rear, John Cardone monologues as a retired drag queen who suffers a nervous breakdown, then finds solace performing no-cocks-denied public restroom philanthropic fellatio; in At the End of the Road, Aaron Cappello and Christopher Sylvie meet in a series of decreasingly anonymous encounters, ultimately confronting their own understandings of what same-sex intimacy means.

Both acts feature age-related casting choices that seem at odds with the stories Yeomans is telling, but not so dramatic of discrepancies that they feel like a choice.

It’s also hard not to get some peep show vibes from the latter half, as the experience does amount to—flowery prose and soft Muzak notwithstanding—a dozen or so folks in folding chairs watching young men simulate sex in a basement. But there is some definite value to experiencing queer work last performed in the early 80s and seeing how gay art, as well as the communities they reflect, have and haven’t changed. —DAN JAKES

TICKETS FOR $30, $15, OR LESS!

chicagotheatreweek.com

SUNSETS: TWO ACTS ON A BEACH Through 2/18: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; Open Space Arts, 1411 W. Wilson, openspacearts.com, $25 ($20 students/ seniors, $15 OSA members) v

FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 29

FILM EROTIC FILM

Hot & Heavy R Thurs 2/15–Sat 2/24, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, $13 general admission, $6.50 Film Center members, $8 youth and students, $5 SAIC students and faculty and Art Institute staff siskelfilmcenter.org/hotandheavy

Valentine’s Day in the winter than hot films for cold temps?’”

Fons tried to check a lot of boxes. Diversity was paramount, not only in terms of cultures and sexualities but also in terms of aesthetics and approaches. Lust, Caution is a South Asian erotic espionage film with an NC-17 rating from 2007, while Weekend is a British sensual, dreamy, gay romance from 2011 by the same director as All of Us Strangers. I, You, He, She is a subtle black-and-white road odyssey from 1974 that meditates on female sexuality, while Shakedown is an electrifying documentary from 2018 about a Black, lesbian underground strip club in LA. The movie has streamed on both PornHub and Criterion Channel—and came to Fons at the recommendation of

at the Leather Archives in March 2023. Five years ago, they began as a volunteer at Facets and slowly worked their way up from concessions to their current role in development. In the last few years, they learned to program on the side—not only how to find theaters and pitch screening ideas, but also the process of licensing films and contacting distributors.

One series idea was even a finalist for Doc ChiProgramming like the upcoming Hot & Heavy series at the Gene Siskel cago, but it didn’t get final approval.

Film Center continues to prove that local programmers and moviegoers In late 2021, Facets leadership began inviting programming pitches from workers across the have an appetite for erotic film screenings. organization (previously, the opportunity had

By MICCO CAPORALE only been open to management), so in 2022, McDevitt got to program their first film: a Pride month screening of Paris is Burning. In October n recent years, many film critics have high- the Gene Siskel Film Center. In September, she 2022, they programmed a vampire double-fealighted a shift in cinema that’s happened programmed a series called Contra/Banned ture at Facets called Undead and Queer featurover the last two decades: the decline of which featured ten ing Daughters of Darkness and The Hunger. It sex and eroticism onscreen. This makes the influential films that was accompanied by an art pop-up of vintage upcoming series Hot & Heavy at the Gene Sis- were censored or horror erotica curated by the Gerber/Hart kel Film Center something of a revelation. The banned, including Library and Archives. Looking to expand the exselection features ten tantalizing works that John Waters’s Pink hibit and take it to other venues, McDevitt concross genres, times, and cultures to raise ques- F l a m i n g o s , P a u l tacted the Leather Archives to see if they could tions about what sex on film can or should do; Verhoeven’s cut of borrow from their collection, too. During a tour it challenges viewers to sit with feelings rang- RoboCop, and King of the facility, McDevitt was shown the Etienne ing from arousal to disgust. In the last year, Donovan’s Promises!

Auditorium—a modest theater with a screen half of those ten titles have been programmed P r o m i s e s ! , w h o s e surrounded by fetish murals and paintings. at the Fetish Film Forum at the Leather s t o r i e d h i s t o r y Suddenly, they had a more pressing interest Archives & Museum and Facets, as well as of censorship for than the art show: Did the for Smut Sundays at the Music Box Theatre.

Archives screen movies?

Without traditional institutional backing, Within three weeks of those independent programmers have faced the tour, McDevitt had greater challenges getting the same material put together a multi-year onscreen, but they prove there’s an appetite proposal for Fetish Film for it. Does erotic programming at a landmark Forum that was rooted in theater mean winds are shifting? the Archives’s mission and Spend a day on film Twitter or film TikTok spoke to highbrow and lowand you’ll quickly find spirited debates about brow cinephiles, kinksters, sex onscreen. In recent cultural memory, and queer and trans people. there’s never been a louder demand to be They were approved for protected from sex in entertainment despite a ten-month test period, the fact that chaste cultural content abounds. which included foreign Writing for Playboy in 2019, Kate Hagen noted language films, arthouse that only 1.2 percent of films made since 2010 classics, and even a Disney have depicted sex—the lowest amount since movie. Among the titles the 1960s, when the MPAA rating system rewere Secretary, Querelle, placed the Hays Code to allow for a broader Clockwise from top left : Olivia Hunter Willke, John McDevitt, Rebecca Fons, Henry Hanson, Brian McKendry KYLE LETENDRE and Belle de Jour—three range of creative expression in filmmaking.

Sex onscreen peaked during the 1990s, Hagen showing Jayne Mansfield’s breasts began Jada-Amina Harvey, the lead curator for the movies that are part of Hot & Heavy. Despite continued, but four times as many movies in Chicago following a Playboy spread Film Center’s Black Harvest Film Festival. One anxieties about being a fledgling program of the crown jewels of the series is a director’s at a venue not known for its movies, every were produced in the 2010s than in the 90s. In promoting the film. “[Contra/Banned] was a response to the cut of David Cronenberg’s Crash in 35 mm—a screening has turned a sizable profit, selling that time, we’ve been inundated with cultural products that sidestep or outright avoid any- kinds of conversation we’re witnessing movie John McDevitt had encountered several upwards of three times the amount necessary to break even. Audience Q&As have also grown thing having to do with one of the most human around banning books, films, and people,” obstacles to screening only a year before.

McDevitt is the community engagement from around ten people to more than 50, and Fons says. “While working on it, I was finding things of all: the urge to fuck.

Film’s sanitization and a broader culture of a lot of films that didn’t quite fit the mold, so manager at Facets and the programmer be- the series has been approved for another censorship are some of what’s on the mind of they became part of my little list. And then I hind Fetish Film Forum, a film series focusing year. It’s the most frictionless programming Rebecca Fons, the director of programming at thought, ‘What’s a better way to celebrate on kink, leather, and BDSM that launched experience McDevitt has had.

‘The excitement of watching excitement onscreen’

I

30 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

Corruption (1983) R Programmed by Olivia Hunter Willke X, 79 min. Fri 3/15, 11:59 PM

FILM

Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, $12 musicboxtheatre.com/films-and-events/corruption

But screening at unusual venues has its drawbacks. Initially, McDevitt wanted to program Crash, but the distributor gave them a swift “no.” Sometimes distributors will deny requests to venues not typically recognized as theaters. In June 2023, McDevitt cohosted a three-day screening of Cronenberg films at Facets with their colleague Naomi Vaughan. It was promoted as an auxiliary edition of Fetish Film Forum. With a screening at an established theater, they decided to try for Crash again—specifically the NC-17 director’s cut.

“What’s a better way to celebrate Valentine’s Day in the winter than hot films for cold temps?”

Some distributors only have licensing rights for certain formats—e.g. DCP or 35 mm—and will only distribute them if theaters meet certain standards, like specific accreditations. Mostly this comes down to protecting things like rare or fragile prints, but some programmers believe it’s about protecting certain films’ prestige. In the case of Crash, McDevitt was denied the director’s cut in multiple formats until they requested the Criterion Blu-Ray. Approval was a welcome surprise because Blu-Ray is considered the lowest quality screening format. It was Facets’s second soldout screening since lockdown.

The first was the hometown premiere of Henry Hanson’s Bros Before in the summer of 2022. It was part of a series Hanson curated called Free Yr Dick, which included one adult short film: Mes Chérie. That was Hanson’s first time programming. Independent programmer Brian McKendry had been following Han-

son on Twitter and knew he was passionate about erotic film as both a genre worthy of its own artistic consideration and an archival format for queer life and desire. After seeing a restoration of Fred Halsted’s Sextool (1975) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, McKendry knew he wanted to bring one of the arthouse S&M director’s films to Chicago— and that he couldn’t do it alone.

McKendry is a very DIY programmer. In recent years, most of his screenings have happened at the Music Box, where he rents the theater. This makes him responsible for his own promotion and ticketing. Few programmers do rentals because it’s extremely difficult to break even. McKendry can do this thanks to community partnerships and specializing in genre films, like kung fu and horror, that he knows have audiences he can reach. It also helps that, since 2023, the Music Box started including rental programming on its website alongside in-house programming.

Porn was new territory for him, and in July 2021, he made his first attempt by teaming up with Reader contributor Kat Sachs to show a double feature of Arthur Bressan Jr.’s Forbidden Letters (1979) and Passing Strangers (1974). It was followed by a taped conversation between Sachs and queer film historians Jenni Olson and Liz Purchell. The screening only sold 36 tickets, but it was early after vaccines were introduced. A year later, the horror porn Sex Demon (1975), rediscovered and distributed by Purchell, played Music Box of Horrors to an audience of more than 300 people. Hanson believes Purchell—who got her programming start in Austin, Texas, and has been running a gay history porn podcast called Ask Any Buddy since 2020—has almost single-handedly popularized an understanding of porn as an important source of queer film history.

Then, in January 2023, Sleeping Village hosted a screening of independent queer erotica that attracted over 200 people, which Hanson helped facilitate. (The venue canceled subsequent screenings over trumped-up fears about losing licenses.) All of this demonstrated to McKendry that the appetite was there if he could connect with the audience, and Hanson was already doing that. A Twitter DM led to a phone call, and by the end of March, the pair screened a sold-out show of Fred Halsted’s magnum opus, L.A. Plays Itself (1972). In June, they teamed up for another sold-out gay porn screening: Wakefield Poole’s Bijou (1972).

Around that time, McKendry met Olivia Hunter Willke, a recent transplant from Austin who’d relocated to become involved in the

Chicago film scene. As a film writer and the daughter of an avant-garde filmmaker, she believes porn should be treated with the same critical rigor as any genre film and champions how Golden Age pornography demonstrates people doing a lot with a little: a lot of style, creativity, and innovation. In a category clouded by its reputation for catering to “the male gaze”—a term many lesbian erotic film enthusiasts have pushed back on—Willke appreciates the nuances brought by female directors like Roberta Findlay.

“People rarely see sex onscreen from a woman’s perspective,” Willke says. “Whether it’s an assault scene or a romantic scene, the difference can be palpable.”

McKendry invited Willke to program straight porn, and in August, her programming debut SexWorld (1978) sold out. McKendry’s done several other screenings with Hanson and Willke, christening them Smut Sundays. Most theaters don’t offer Sunday night screenings because no one comes. Despite this, most Smut Sundays have turned a profit. But McKendry’s at the whim of when space is available, and he fights technological obstacles to stay afloat. In the last four months, McKendry says the Music Box has only offered him one Sunday, and if he programs on a different weekend night, he has to compete with art and music shows.

McKendry is not tech or marketing savvy, so he relies on Hanson and Willke’s social media skills—but still notices algorithms suppressing or censoring anything too overt about the adult nature of Smut Sundays. He’s also been ticketing through Brown Paper Tickets and is among the many who are owed thousands by

the company. He offers a Venmo option but worries about randomly losing the money; Venmo and its parent company PayPal have strict rules against sales related to adult material and services.

Since the pandemic, all five programmers have noticed an uptick in appetites for in-person screenings, especially for bold movies that challenge notions of sex or the body.

Hanson also notes that there’s a novelty to watching porn in theaters for those who grew up consuming it privately online. Despite this, critics like Kyle Turner have noticed an uptick in male full-frontal nudity on streaming TV like Righteous Gemstones that remains rare in publicly screened films. Film discourse is struggling to make sense of how attitudes about sex onscreen are—or aren’t—changing.

In December, the New York Times ran an article called “Provocative Sex is Back at the Movies - But Are We Ready for It?” There’s a growing audience in Chicago that insists yes— if venues can keep up.

“Since announcing Hot & Heavy, I’ve connected with more people in Chicago who, much to my embarrassment, I didn’t realize were programming so many similar films or programs,” Fons explains. She’s invited McDevitt to introduce Secretary, Querelle, and Belle de Jour, and promote Fetish Film Forum because she recognizes its dynamism. “I feel like I’ve been kind of thrust into a community of people who think similarly about the excitement of watching excitement onscreen. It’s very thrilling.” v

m mcaporale@chicagoreader.com

FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 31

R READER RECOMMENDED

FILM

Get showtimes and see reviews of everything playing this week at chicagoreader.com/movies.

Indus Blues JAWAD SHARIF FILMS

NOW PLAYING

R Disco Boy

Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese lands his dazzling and violent feature debut by following the lives of two men. Accompanied by a synthy soundtrack, Jomo (Morr Ndiaye), a guerrilla fighter in the Niger Delta, meets Aleksei (Franz Rogowski), a Belarusian immigrant serving in the French Foreign Legion, and two worlds collide.

Set to the tune of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the viewer wanders through the jungle of Niger and into the dance clubs of France. What connects these two men is the torture of the self. Disco Boy is ambitious in style and plotline.

After a sudden violent moment—a knife fight versus a fist fight—the viewer is taken through a series of nervous breakdowns with Aleksei. He is shattered. His longtime goal of becoming a French citizen is a second thought; his increasing hallucinations and imperialistic guilt have consumed him. Soon, that guilt begins to take a physical form.

Congenital heterochromia—aka the case of different colored eyes—is a genetic mutation that affects melanin in the iris, and Jomo and Udoka, Jomo’s sister (Laetitia Ky), both share this identifying mark. Throughout the film, what the eyes have seen and how they change become a key theme.

We know very little about Jomo, who, while traveling down a river in a small boat, thinks about what he would have been in another life, had he been born another race. He is called a “disco boy,” a dancer in a club, something his sister ultimately becomes, adorned in disco reflectors and performing for a crowd who indirectly contributed to the violence of her kin.

We can’t look at Disco Boy, however, without men-

32 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

tioning the eerie similarity to Beau Travail by Claire Denis from 1999. Both are about the French Foreign Legion and both end like other films this year have.

Think Saltburn.

However, Disco Boy makes up for this predictability with its haunting trance-like collage of scenes, with cinematography that is so spellbinding, it’ll leave you watching long after the credits roll. —S. NICOLE LANE

92 min. Gene Siskel Film Center

R Indus Blues

Imagine sitting in your hometown’s square.

You’re playing a traditional musical instrument you’ve spent your whole life learning. Officials far younger than you show up and tell you to stop and leave. And when you try to tell them you’re playing the music that’s an essential part of your country’s culture, they scoff and say: “This is not even a part of our culture.”

This is the opening scene of the 2019 documentary Indus Blues, the first film scheduled for the South Asia Institute’s new bimonthly screening program, SAI Screenings, on Saturday, February 10.

Created by independent filmmaker Jawad Sharif, Indus Blues travels along the Indus River from the Karakoram mountains to the southern coastline to capture the fading folk music and its musicians. Traveling through 15 regions of Pakistan across more than 2,000 miles, the documentary captures the lives of various folk musicians and how they serve as the last guardians of Pakistan’s diverse and vibrant musical heritage.

Indus Blues creates an open space for folk musicians to share their raw and unfiltered truths and experiences.

These musicians talk about how radicals continue to believe music and dance, especially traditional music forms, to be against Islamic laws. They speak of a loss of tradition and how the younger ones refuse to carry

the musical heritage. Many share the difficulty they went through to master their craft and how the amount of time needed to invest in the learning process alone makes it nearly impossible to pass the craft down.

Indus Blues also paints a beautiful picture of acceptance, resilience, and loyalty. One restores his instrument burnt by haters of music. Another continues to bring folk dance to the public by finding her way around legislative bans. The musicians still gather, regardless of religious suppression, in squares and in homes to perform.

The film is a biography of Pakistani musicians rather than an interrogation of the multitude of factors leading to the extinction of their crafts. It is the solemn declaration that these folk artists remain unwavering regardless of hardship—they will play their music until the very last one of them takes their last breath. Indus Blues archives the ethnic, linguistic, and musical diversity of the Indus region so that someday in the future, someone may try to rekindle the lost arts in a new form.

Like Ustad Ziauddin, one of the last Sarangi craftsmen, said: “It is not possible [for our music to die out].

It is the order of nature. Nothing vanishes from this world.” —XIAO DACUNHA 76 min. Screening at the

South Asia Institute, 1925 S. Michigan, Sat 2/10, 3:30–5 PM, $5

R Orion and the Dark

Written by the wonderfully imaginative filmmaker Charlie Kaufman, Orion and the Dark was always going to take a quirky approach to the animation genre.

But the man who dreamed up Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Anomalisa doesn’t deserve all the credit for creating such a delightfully unique and hugely enjoyable tale of overcoming your fears. Orion and the Dark is an adaptation of British illustrator Emma Yarlett’s picture book, while it also marks the debut feature film of director Sean Charmatz.

Voiced by Jacob Tremblay, Orion is seemingly an average elementary school kid who likes to avoid trouble and keeps to himself, while harboring a huge secret crush. At the same time, he’s struggling to deal with the increasingly anxious thoughts that are rushing through his head.

Orion is overwhelmed and scared by everything that he encounters and immediately assumes that the worst is going to happen at any given moment. His biggest fear is the dark. One night, a literal embodiment of the Dark (Paul Walter Hauser) takes Orion on a journey across the world to try and convince him that there’s nothing to be afraid of while introducing him to the other entities that people deal with once the sun goes down.

Endlessly creative, full of alluring colors, and with a pace that grabs hold of viewers and doesn’t let go, Orion and the Dark is made up of dynamic characters that you never could have imagined. While it sometimes goes too far in its pursuit of being original, it’s too inventive and

whimsical to ever come close to disappointing.

Plus, its message encourages us to celebrate the beauty of the world and to stop seeing ourselves through the eyes of others, something that people of all ages should be reminded of. —GREGORY WAKEMAN

TV-Y7, 90 min. Netflix

The Underdoggs From the title alone, expectations are clearly set, and Snoop Dogg’s R-rated efforts at family entertainment don’t even try to break the mold. Washed-up hotshot forced to do good? Check. Team of lovable, scrappy . . . outcasts, shall we say, just to vary it a bit? Check. Love interest (Tika Sumpter) who encourages the selfish, self-absorbed fallen star to open up and bond with the team he’s forced to coach? Yep. The sport in question is football, and Snoop is Jaycen “Two Js” Jennings, a former pro athlete who got it all and long since lost it all. After hitting rock bottom, he’s forced into community service in his old Long Beach neighborhood to coach a peewee football team in the hopes of rebuilding his public image.

Snoop Dogg, who’s also a producer, has long since proven that humility isn’t exactly on brand for him, so even the stakes remain low, with Jaycen in no danger of losing any of the cushy trappings of his celebrity lifestyle. But director Charles Stone III still has a point to make about how Jaycen has isolated himself, with wide shots that emphasize his empty, lonely state, only pulling in for more warmth when old friends come calling for— what else?—a smoking session.

There’s still a surprising amount of fun to be had, mostly because The Underdoggs allows the neighborhood and its inhabitants to shine, and everyone is clearly having a blast in this shiny commercial for Snoop Dogg’s actual work in youth football. There’s also a central, unanswered question in what makes an underdog, what happens after the so-called losers win, and why we insist on so many of our heroes remaining underdogs. But chances are, no one involved was much interested in seeing the forest for the smoke. —ANDREA THOMPSON

R, 101 min. Prime Video v

The Underdoggs WILFORD HAREWOOD/MGM STUDIOS

MUSIC The Frequency Festival invites you to widen your ears

This year’s lineup includes Chicago debuts by pipe-organ drone explorer Ellen Arkbro, historic reconstructionists Zarabanda Variations, and the voice-and-viola duo of Jessika Kenney and Eyvind Kang.

By BILL MEYER these musicians are connected by practice and personal acquaintance, despite not sharing anything like a geographically defined “scene,” and to underline the existence of this far-flung community, the Reader asked each of them what they value about the festival and who they’re looking forward to hearing.

The festival’s six concerts—five at Constellation, one at Bond Chapel—appear chronologically below. When more than one artist will perform, headliners are listed first.

BCMC / andPlay Tue 2/20, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20, 18+ Ellen Arkbro COURTESY THE ARTIST

Eyvind Kang and Jessika Kenney EYVIND KANG

Zarabanda Variations with Kyle Motl, Wilfrido Terrazas, Keir GoGwilt, and Alec Goldfarb NICK BURCHARD

T

he eighth edition of the Frequency Festival begins in Chicago on Tuesday, February 20. This annual event (COVID canceled the 2021 installment) grew out of the Frequency Series, founded in April 2013 by programmer Peter Margasak (a former Reader staff writer who now lives in Berlin) and hosted by Constellation. Margasak initially conceived the series as an opportunity to present new classical and experimental music to the venue’s audience of adventurous jazz and rock

fans, and that ideal still informs the festival’s lineups.

This year’s roster is heavy on string players who apply classical chops and rigor to music that incorporates non-European influences, exploits new technological and conceptual resources, and explores the eternal quandaries of creating order from pitched sound with various tuning systems. In what’s shaping up to be a festival tradition, though, for the third year in a row an improvising, rock-informed

duo with an electric guitarist will headline the opening night—this time it’s locals Bill MacKay and Cooper Crain as BCMC. Most of this year’s performers live in the U.S., but the two who’ll be traveling from abroad—American violinist Sarah Saviet and Swedish composer-organist Ellen Arkbro, both based in Berlin—are making their Chicago debuts. (The Frequency Festival is Saviet’s second Chicago concert; she also plays at the Logan Center the weekend before.) Many of

For three years running, the headliner of the festival’s first bill has been an exploratory, guitar-oriented act that falls outside the Frequency Series’ usual parameters. Tonight that act is BCMC, the Chicago-based duo of guitarist Bill MacKay and keyboardist Cooper Crain. Crain is an in-demand producer and engineer, as well as a member of Bitchin Bajas; MacKay is a solo recording artist, a ubiquitous sideman, and a participant in several other instrumental collaborations. On their debut LP, last year’s Foreign Smokes (Drag City), they jointly explore convergences of twangy atmosphere, ambient drone, and Ethiopian soul across four long tracks. While the music meanders, it never feels lost—both men are compositionally minded improvisers, adept at completing other people’s ideas. MacKay anticipates that they’ll extend the album’s tunes and present some new ones; between the two of them, they’re looking forward to festival sets by Ellen Arkbro, Nate Wooley, and the duo

andPlay SHERVIN LAINEZ

FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 33

MUSIC continued from p. 33 opening this concert, andPlay.

The 2023 Frequency Festival included music by Jules Reidy and Pascale Criton that used just intonation, a tuning system based on whole-number ratios that obtains particularly radiant tonal interactions from stringed instruments. This year New York–based duo ANDPLAY will perform the two long pieces on their 2023 album, Translucent Harmonies (Another Timbre), both of which employ just intonation. Violinist Maya Bennardo and violist Hannah Levinson formed andPlay in 2012 with an eye toward growing the string-duo repertoire. Translucent Harmonies includes a duo version of Catherine Lamb’s “Prisma Interius VIII,” which the composer recorded in 2019 with the Berlin-based Harmonic Space Orchestra. This stripped-down arrangement also accelerates the music, and its less crowded palette lets you hear more clearly how each player’s long, resonant passages affect the other’s. The album’s second piece, a commission from Swedish composer Kristofer Svensson called “Vid Stenmuren Blir Tanken Blomma” (“By the Stone Wall, Thoughts Become Flower”) that Levinson and Bennardo premiered in 2018, foregrounds the duo’s close mutual attunement with its deliberate progress and almost conversational layering of shorter strokes. Unlike some of the festival’s other performers, andPlay will stick around for a few days. “We are lucky to call a lot of the artists friends and colleagues,” Bennardo says. “We are looking forward to all of it, but we love Sarah Saviet’s artistry and are looking forward to hearing her perform live, since that is a rarity in the U.S. Sarah and Nate Wooley will make such a dream team.”

Nate Wooley / Sarah Saviet Wed 2/21, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20, 18+ In his guises as a jazz-informed, communityconscious improviser and as a solo performer who regularly confronts his physical and psychic limits, NATE WOOLEY is no stranger to the Frequency Series or Chicago stages in general. Here he will present two pieces he originally commissioned for his own For/ With project and festival series: Monologue

by Sarah Hennies, premiered in Brooklyn in 2019, and Straw by Martin Arnold, premiered in Norway in 2023 and making its American debut tonight. “Subconsciously, I may have chosen composers that shared some of my

34 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

desire to push the trumpet outside of its tradition—whether that is by pushing my physical comfort or the aesthetic expectations of what trumpet is supposed to do—and so the pieces have shared some of the precariousness of my own solo work,” Wooley says. “I think this is especially true of the Arnold and Hennies, as both seek to play on the delicacy of the instrument as opposed to its strength, which is something I love.”

Wooley also has specific praise for Margasak’s efforts as a programmer. “The importance of the Frequency Festival is not limited to the midwest,” he says. “We need more festivals like this in the U.S., period. The thing that I find most exciting about Frequency is Peter’s ability to break down the provincialism between scenes for a few days. For many of the festivals I’m involved in, the different musicians and aesthetics are partitioned off.

And that makes sense, especially for larger festivals where people may be paying only to see the free jazz or the experimental improv or the electronic music. But here, Frequency has kept its scope tight enough so the listener is invited to explore something that may be new to them alongside a performer or composer that they have a long relationship with. That’s exciting, and it’s artfully done.”

When Berlin-based violinist SARAH SAVIET commissioned A Coiled Form from UK composer Bryn Harrison on behalf of the London-based Riot Ensemble, it was supposed to be five minutes long. But the two of them soon developed a process that would allow its length to vary, and on the 2022 album of the same name, it lasts more than 50 minutes—it’s the only piece Saviet will play at the Frequency Festival. The composition consists of intricate, quickly articulated passages, and she’s repeatedly reordered its pages and modified the way pages and phrases are repeated, transforming it so thoroughly that when Harrison heard her play her extended versions, he was surprised and pleased to see A Coiled Form become

Nate Wooley JULIA DRATEL

something potentially indefinite.

It’s easy to lose yourself while following Saviet’s alternations between brief expositions and lengthy investigations; though the material is written out, it imparts a feeling of giddy abandonment. The effect of experiencing this demanding work in person promises to be mind-blowing.

“I am particularly excited to see the string-loaded festival program,” Saviet says. “I already know Maya [Bennardo], Keir [GoGwilt], and Austin [Wulliman], and am such a fan of their work as violinists and composers. I’ve been speaking with Maya and Keir separately over the last little while about finding chances to play together, so this will be a great time to continue this conversation and make some plans. And I’m really excited to hear everyone’s shows and get inspired! I hardly perform in the U.S., even though I grew up in Washington, D.C.—I’ve lived in Europe for the past 12 years. So it’s really meaningful for me to come and play.”

Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang / Zarabanda Variations Thu 2/22, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20, 18+ JESSIKA KENNEY’s immaculately controlled singing is informed by Persian and Indian traditions, and EYVIND KANG’s improvisational versatility as a violist has enabled him to make equally apposite contributions to the music of Bill Frisell, John Zorn, and the Sun City Girls. The two of them have collaborated for more than 20 years, and they’ve evolved a shared vocabulary that transcends genre.

On their 2023 LP, Azure (Ideologic Organ), their intimately entwined tones hover like slow-moving clouds. Its predecessor, 2016’s Reverse Tree (Black Truffle), has a similarly glacial pace but uses it to summon a ceremonial vibe. Though Kang has played in Chicago many times, including in the avant-garde band Secret Chiefs 3, this is the duo’s debut here.

They plan to make a pilgrimage to the grave of anarchist and labor leader Lucy Parsons at Forest Home Cemetery in Forest Park.

Bach enjoyed a good sarabande (zarabanda in Spanish), but if you look at what the powers that be had to say about this dance when it first emerged in Spanish territories during the 16th century, you’ll be reminded of the

Sarah Saviet COURTESY MOSTRA SONORA

moral panics over twerking or the Charleston—Spain banned the zarabanda in 1583. As ZARABANDA VARIATIONS, violinist Keir GoGwilt, flutist Wilfrido Terrazas, guitarist Alec Goldfarb, and bassist Kyle Motl speculatively reconstruct that underdocumented, antique naughty dance, taking inspiration from writing on the Latin Baroque by Alejo Carpentier, Ned Sublette, and Ana María Ochoa Gautier.

Long before the zarabanda became the courtly dance beloved by Bach, it arose from encounters between Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous Americans in what was then New Spain. Though the music of Zarabanda Variations is spirited, it overtly reckons with the violent convergences and transformations of American history. GoGwilt, who was born in Edinburgh but grew up in New York, explains: “I don’t think one’s own genealogy has to fit neatly with any of these groups in order to understand that as a musician in the Americas (and even the States) you’re still somehow a participant in this history of messy encounters.” The proclivities of the players, some of who are also involved in improvisational music, add another layer of messiness: Motl’s “A la Sombra del Naranjo” flirts with Art Ensemble of Chicago–style cacophony before launching into a sprightly rhythm.

Ellen Arkbro Copresented by the Renaissance Society.

Fri 2/23, 8 PM, Bond Chapel, 1025 E. 58th St., free, all ages In 2022, Ellen Arkbro and arranger Johan Graden released the postbreakup song cycle I Get Along Without You Very Well on Chicago indie label Thrill Jockey. But for Arkbro’s first Chicago appearance, the Swedish composer, singer, and keyboardist will present a different aspect of her wide-ranging practice—one document-

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THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE A video by Daniel Bruno will play overSALT one secSHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED tion of the concert, and Alec GoldfarbTHE of ZaraSALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT banda Variations will play Wulliman’s “DownTHE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SHED

UPCOMING SHOWS

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ed on the 2020 release Sounds While Waiting (W. 25th), issued on LP last year. That album consists of carefully calibrated long tones played on a church organ, which effectively turns the sanctuary into a resonating chamber for shuddering, slow-moving masses of sound.

At this free concert, she’ll perform a work called Sculptures, extending the installationadjacent practice of Sounds While Waiting and inviting the audience to explore the way interference patterns and psychoacoustic effects vary throughout the space. Due to construction, the concert has been moved from Rockefeller Chapel, its original venue—Arkbro will execute this music using the 1,640 pipes of the Reneker Organ at Bond Chapel.

Ensemble dal Niente Sat 2/24, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20, 18+ Ensemble dal Niente and the Frequency Series go way back. The local chamber group appeared on the first Frequency bill in 2013, and this will be its sixth festival appearance.

A ten-person configuration will present four pieces: Lei Liang’s Listening for Blossoms for flute, harp, violin, viola, double bass, and piano; Carlos Carillo’s Will the Quiet Times Come for violin and piano; a new orchestration by Kari Watson; and the world premiere of Louis Goldford’s large-scale Transom, commissioned for Ensemble dal Niente by the Fromm Music Foundation.

Pat,” a new composition for MIDI-triggering guitar.

In his associations with Ingrid Laubrock, Sylvie Courvoisier, and Tyshawn Sorey, pianist CORY SMYTHE dissolves the boundaries between jazz and classical music. His 2022 recording, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (Pyroclastic), uses the Jerome Kern/Otto Harbach standard as a conceptual launchpad for a meditation on loss and despair in response to the environmental catastrophes wreaked by drought-driven forest fires. The album includes song-based ensemble performances with a vocalist as well as a series of abstract solo pieces. On the latter, Smythe’s mastery of pedals and preparations turns the piano into

crying at the shed A FILM FESTIVAL

Austin Wulliman / Cory Smythe Sun 2/25, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20, 18+ Violinist AUSTIN WULLIMAN is a member of JACK Quartet, one of the world’s premier string quartets performing contemporary music. Before he moved to New York to join that group, he was deeply entrenched in Chicago’s new-music scene, working as Ensemble dal Niente’s program director and cofounding Spektral Quartet. That makes his appearance at the festival a bit of a homecoming. “I’m looking forward to having a shot of Malört at the Sovereign and a hot bowl of lentil soup at Taste of Lebanon,” Wulliman says. “I miss my old neighborhood comforts and am pretty inconsolable that Thai Spice on Devon is no more.” In between visits to old haunts, he will present a new aspect of his work: last year’s The News From Utopia (Bright Shiny

FEB 14–16

Austin Wulliman ANNELIESE VARALDIEV

FEB 23

COLD WAR KIDS . . . . . . . THE SHED

FEB 24

INZO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE SHED

WITH JOE P

WITH EAZYBAKED, CHMURA X DAGGZ,

BLOOKAH AND LHASA PETIK

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an unplugged electroacoustic orchestra, and WITH DRAIN, BEARINGS those pieces have proved to be an inexhaustible source of material for solo concerts—inAND HIGHER POWER cluding the one Smythe will play tonight. “I’ve been continuing to try to develop the solo, augmented piano improvisations on Smoke WITH TIGERCUB Gets in Your Eyes, with some real worry that I ought to be moving on to other things!”

SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT Smythe says. “But that’s the problem,THE I guess, SHED with trying to turn your piano playing intoTHE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED swirling, shape-shifting, quasi-acousmatic ON SALE NOW SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT sensation. It takes a while. Or at leastTHE it’s takSHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE ing me a while.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

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NATHAN BROWN

CHICAGOANS OF NOTE

Lidia Vomito, DJ of the Graveyard Hour “I like to visualize people sitting in their homes and turning on the radio and making their own visuals in their minds as they listen. It’s sort of like Lights Out.” As told to JAMIE LUDWIG Lidia Vomito is a Chicago DJ and vinyl collector who also works at the Loop location of Reckless Records. She got her start as a punk and metal DJ in the mid-2000s, and in 2015 she launched the Lumpen Radio show Release the Hounds to share her passion for dark and heavy music. Her best friend and longtime DJ partner, Bryan “Chump Change” Robertson, joined a few months later, and the two have been cohosting ever since. Robertson also fronts long-running hardcore outfit Spare Change, and in 2005 he and Vomito founded the defunct Rock Bottom Records in Bridgeport.

36 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

These days Vomito says she wants to collaborate with DJs in other cities and countries. As she builds those connections, she continues to expose local audiences to new and classic music. You can tune in to Release the Hounds from 10 PM till midnight on the first and third Mondays of every month, either via Lumpen Radio’s online stream or at 105.5 FM. Robertson begins the show with his Metal Hour, spinning obscure and classic metal and hardcore; Vomito closes it out with her Graveyard Hour, where she explores darkwave, goth, industrial, horror soundtracks, and more.

was raised in Chicago, but I also grew up in Mexico for a little bit. When I first came here from Mexico, I started listening to my father’s records. That’s where it all stems from. Music was constantly playing in my home. For so many Mexican families, music is everything. The very first English bands I ever heard on vinyl were Creedence and Bootsy Collins and Deep Purple. And my dad had a lot of Spanish music like Pedro Infante, mariachi, rancheras, and norteños. So I became an immediate collector of music, buying cassettes as a kid.

In 2000, I started collecting vinyl. I gave up all other formats and decided, “This is where I want to be.” [Playing vinyl gives me] chills.

It’s the sound. It’s the whole ritual, right down to the record, the artwork. That’s how I found out about a lot of bands—just looking at the T-shirts [that musicians wore in photos]. Like, “I love this band, and they have this T-shirt on. And that one’s got that T-shirt. I’ve gotta listen to that!”

There’s a revival of vinyl happening, even though it’s so expensive now. Before, we didn’t take care of our records as much; we were constantly playing them and stacking them on top of each other.

Now you have to take care of them and baby them.

I didn’t really take out my vinyl for a long time, just for fear of it getting damaged or stolen. But I’ve been DJing since 2005 or 2006, starting with clubs, and [around 2010] I started doing radio at WLUW. It wasn’t my show, but they said, “Keep coming!” And then I did some shows with WZRD and now with WLPN-LP. I did metal and punk for many years, and that became an obsession. It’s like a downward spiral—you just keep trying to find more obscure records, whether they’re from Belgium or Chile. And I love to expose [people to them].

Now there’s Rebel Radio, but before that no one was really playing metal or punk on the airwaves in Chicago. When I started doing Release the Hounds, I thought, “This is a place where I can expand.” My roots are really goth and industrial—from the early to mid-90s—so I wanted to go back into that. I’d dedicated my DJ career to punk and metal, but with this I get to explore.

Music scenes were so, so segregated. You were a punk or a metalhead or you were into

goth or new wave. So if you mixed any of those genres together, it was an automatic disqualification. Like, the metalheads would leave. Or the goths. It just never balanced.

Now we’re in a time where everything is a little more accepted. People just truly love music. There’s none of this cliquishness or these ideas of what’s cool and what’s not— nobody cares! This whole resurrection of postpunk, I’ve never seen that before. And darkwave! It is massive, and I’m here for it.

Death metal is also huge right now. It’s a great time to be around and see it happen.

I have a hard time accepting any compliments, but it means so much to me when someone says, “Hey, I listened to your show, and I learned so much.” That means so much more to me than anything that I’ve ever done. I feel like, “Oh, they’re listening—someone’s actually listening!” It brings me back to being a kid and listening to my favorite radio host and thinking, “That’s going to be me someday.”

And then making little cassettes with my best friend and acting like radio personalities.

[When I DJ, my choice of songs] just de-

“I did metal and punk for many years, and that became an obsession. It’s like a downward spiral—you just keep trying to find more obscure records, whether they’re from Belgium or Chile.” pends on the type of event that it’s going to be.

I try to bring new bands, and of course I always pay respect to the classics—because to me, they will never be forgotten, and I want people to always know where the music comes from.

So I always pay homage, but there’s a new generation I love too. I love the sounds, and I love the new bands that are coming out, especially from California and Detroit and of course Chicago. And Texas.

I’m always supporting local and traveling bands, no matter what. Always DIY. That’s another reason this show means a lot to me; my quest is to always bring in new bands and new sounds I want people to hear. I know everyone is streaming and doing the Spotify thing. It is what it is. I’m indifferent to it. I’m always on Bandcamp trying to find new music, or I’m constantly looking at people’s Spotifys to see what things sound like. I love to support our local record stores. We all support each other,

MUSIC

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SUPER SAPPHIC II

HOSTS: Pepper Jelly / Party Mom Kristen

Lidia Vomito rehearses for the next full moon. COURTESY THE ARTIST

and you can’t say [vinyl] is dying—it’s thriving. If I don’t get a record at Reckless or one of our other record stores here, I’ll buy directly from the band and have them send it to me.

I love to support the bands directly too and see them live and buy from them, so they can keep producing and keep going. It’s a hard business, and I think the only way bands can really make money is to tour.

I don’t even know [how many records I own]. It’s a combination—my whole basement, basically. My best friend and I—my DJ partner [Bryan “Chump Change” Robertson] lives directly downstairs from me. So I’m like, “Hey, I’m gonna put my records down there too, man.” So it’s like a tiny little museum, and then I have upstairs to do too. . . . He takes care of the Metal Hour on Release the Hounds, and I trust him fully because he’s been collecting records since ’85—hardcore since ’85—and we owned the record store together.

Then I’ll do the second hour, and that’s my way of being able to express myself fully. That’s where there are no barriers and nothing’s holding me down. Nothing. I love playing metal and punk, but I love to be able to explore other styles and play some darkwave and postpunk—because it has a really unique sound—and other kinds of music as well, like garage and soundtracks.

I can’t go out to the club and play soundtracks, you know? I’d put everybody to sleep

or something. But at the radio station, I can play all the horror soundtracks I like and fulfill that horror-host kind of element. I’ve been a big fan of horror films since I was very young, so I always want to incorporate that. It’s all intertwined. I like to visualize people sitting in their homes and turning on the radio and making their own visuals in their minds as they listen. It’s sort of like Lights Out or these [old-time] radio shows that would create these haunted-house sounds. People tell me all the time, “I heard your show, and I feel like I’m in a haunted mansion or some sort of Bela Lugosi Dracula film.”

I don’t actually know who is listening. I wish I had a way to find out, but at the same time, I don’t know if I really want to know. I feel like I’m in this room, and I’m playing for an audience, but I’m really playing for myself.

That’s really what it comes down to. My friend was telling me there is a way to find out who is listening, and I was like, “Don’t tell me! I don’t want to visualize a crowd.” I just want to be in my room and speak into the mike, and I’m playing for whoever cares to know. But it’s really for my inner child.

When you fall in love with rock ’n’ roll, you never turn your back on it. You’re in, and it’s not a phase. Once it bites you, once it hits you, that’s it. You’re in it forever. v

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m jludwig@chicagoreader.com FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 37

Recommended and notable shows and releases with critics’ insights for the week of February 8

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b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

Renaissance of the Culture showcases some of Chicago’s best underground hip-hop

Freddie Old Soul (left), Rufus Sims (top), and TheGr8Thinkaz (bottom) THOUGHTPOET

Vic Spencer COURTESY THE ARTIST

THURSDAY8 Kevin Drumm, J. Krohn 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20. 18+ Kevin Drumm’s work over the past quarter century has variously aligned with noise, experimental, ambient, and improvised music, but it remains very much a realm unto itself. He begins with sounds sourced from analog and digital electronics, field recordings, and tabletop guitar, then distills them to obtain extremes of gaseous insubstantiality, pulverizing harshness, and textural variety. His pieces are often long and slow-moving, but if you match the pace of your listening to the pace of their progress, the superficially static tones prove to be teeming with mesmerizing activity. Drumm is a format agnostic with a penchant for exploiting the characteristics of a given mode of delivery to intensify the music’s effect. The single track on the 2015 CD Imperial Horizon (Hospital Productions) stretches for nearly an hour and feels forever out of reach. On the other hand, the B-side of his most recent LP, last year’s Battering Rams (A Sunken Mall), consists entirely of the piece “Old Shoes,” which lasts ten minutes and 47 seconds. While Drumm certainly doesn’t lack for music that could’ve filled out the LP—he currently has 215 releases, many digital only, on his Bandcamp page—the track’s placement establishes an isolation that amplifies its flickering beauty. Drumm lives in Chicago, but he rarely performs here; this is his first local concert since February 2019, when he collaborated with the duo Rage Thormbones as part of that year’s Frequency Festival. This time, he’ll perform alone. Opening is another local electronic musician, J. Krohn, who’s recorded music that bridges industrial and techno under the names Stave and Talker (the latter is a duo with Karl Meier). On last year’s Caustic Language (Standards & Practices), his debut under his own name, Krohn achieves a looser, crunchier sound by tinkering with programmed rhythms until they wobble and throb, then threading panels of hammered-thin metallic sound between the beats. —BILL MEYER

RENAISSANCE OF THE CULTURE Open session with Rufus Sims, TheGr8Thinkaz, Freddie Old Soul & Stepchild, Defcee, IAMGAWD, Vic Spencer, A.M. Early Morning, Sweet Juices, Panamera P, Ju Jilla, and WateRR. Beats by Rashid Hadee, Doc da Mindbenda, and iLL Brown. Hosted by Shabazza and ThoughtPoet with DJs Shon Roka and Ves 120. Sat 2/10, 9 PM, Subterranean (downstairs), 2011 W. North, $5. b

TO INDEPENDENT HIP-HOP artists living in Chicago, the city’s music scene can often feel overcrowded and underfunded. Vanishing DIY venues reveal an even colder game, but a few champions of homespun talent are still standing.

Renaissance of the Culture overflows with some of the city’s hungriest acts in a showcase aimed at educating Chicagoans about Chicago hiphop—a subject whose territory is effectively infinite, given that the city never stops producing viable talent. “This show is about Chicago’s artists reclaiming their power and combining resources to shine light on those who’ve been overlooked,” says WateRR, the shape-shifting south-side MC who curated the event. “Renaissance of the Culture will be the best show of the first quarter.”

38 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

The lineup has an almost absurd amount of underground representation. You might recognize some of the performers because they’re always working, but the ones you haven’t heard of are no less captivating.

Among the highlights are Rufus Sims (formerly known as Weasel Sims), who’s released tons of hard-nosed rap over the past few years; Evergreen Park veteran Ju Jilla; pragmatic spitter A.M. Early Morning; Sweet Juices, who at times reminds me of Da Brat in her prime; hip-hop collective TheGr8Thinkaz; and widely celebrated, razor-sharp rapper Defcee. The show is hosted by Shabazza and ThoughtPoet (the latter is also a Reader contributor), and DJs Shon Roka and Ves 120 hold down the turntables.

Anyone curious about the diverse buffet of Chicago rap should plan a visit to Subterranean for this bona fide hip-hop seminar. —CRISTALLE BOWEN

Kevin Drumm PETER GUMASKAS

J. Krohn COURTESY THE ARTIST

MUSIC bands in extreme heavy music. On this tour, the death-metal outfit will celebrate their 40th anniversary with a career-encompassing set list that covers all the twists and turns they’ve taken. On their early demos, 1986’s Live in Decay and 1989’s Necrolust, Vader operated in a raw, grimy, blackened style.

Nine years later, they put out their debut full-length, The Ultimate Incantation, a sturdy, thrashy slab of quintessentially lean ’n’ mean death metal. They’ve released 11 more albums since, most recently 2020’s Solitude in Madness (Nuclear Blast). Vader have evolved with each new record, and on Solitude they adopt a crisp, modern production style without sacrificing the raw brutality of their riffs. Vader can always be counted on for proper no-frills heaviness, and this retrospective performance promises to be gnarly from all angles. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

WEDNESDAY14 Yuma Abe Lake J opens. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15. 21+

Escuela Grind JONATHAN VAHID

Escuela Grind Take Offense, Brat, and Bonginator open. 7 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $20. 17+ At first listen, Escuela Grind’s punishingly aggressive music may seem unapproachable, but this brutal grindcore unit will welcome you with open arms.

The Massachusetts four-piece have expanded from their foundations in powerviolence and grindcore to include elements of death metal, noise, and doom, with occasional nods to 90s alt-rock, hip-hop, and other genres beyond extreme music (“Cliffhanger,” from their 2022 LP Memory Theater, borrows a famous lyric from Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message”). Escuela Grind’s eagerness to experiment, along with their ferocious performances, socially conscious lyrics, and staunch opposition to gatekeeping, have resonated with fans and peers alike. Their audience has grown swiftly, and they’ve landed higher-profile shows and tours with heavyweights such as Baroness and Napalm Death. Sadly, their success seems to have provoked backlash.

In 2019, Escuela Grind had a handful of UK shows canceled due to unfounded rumors that the band’s members—three of whom identify as queer—were homophobic. More recently, an anonymous poster on Lambgoat suggested that “deep pocket management” was supporting their busy tour schedule, alleging that they don’t sell enough tickets to justify their bookings. Another theorized that the band are underwritten by grants from LGBTQ+ interest groups. Escuela Grind responded just as you’d expect: they printed the comments on the sleeves of a new shirt design with the words “Funded by Big Homo” across the front.

In December, Escuela Grind headed back into the studio with Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou, who produced Memory Theater, to work on a yet-to-be-

named third album. And last month, they released the third entry in a genre-based EP series, a tight four-track crusher called Ddeeaatthhmmeettaall (MNRK Heavy) whose closing track, “Meat Magnet,” features a vocal duel between front woman Katerina Economou and Napalm Death’s Barney Greenway. This Reggies date is part of a five-week headlining tour for Escuela Grind, and because it’s a 17-and-up show, it could be someone’s initiation into the world of extreme music—even as it reminds the rest of us of what makes that world so vital.

—JAMIE LUDWIG

Tokyo-based singer-songwriter Yuma Abe is best known as the leader of decade-old Japanese indierock trio Never Young Beach. Over the past few years, though, he’s pursued a solo career as well. His sunny, laid-back 2021 album, Fantasia (Thaian/Temporal Drift), mixes folk influences (Devendra Banhart plays guitar on a number of tracks) with fruity psychedelia worthy of Japanese pop icon Haruomi Hosono, who shows up to do some production work. Abe’s most recent release, a seven-inch single on his own Thaian Records, features “Hokeruna,” a catchy swing-dance-worthy shimmy with a yodeling “ai-yi-yi-yi-yi” chorus. The single’s B-side, “I’m Falling for You,” is an effervescent bit of synth-sprinkled yacht rock with a hint of funk. Abe has a way with twee hooks that recalls Paul McCartney, and though he can sometimes seem a little too cute, it’s hard to take offense when he’s so obviously enjoying himself. It doesn’t hurt that he takes such care with his craft—he drops in a wah-wah solo here and a weird

groaning background chorus there, ensuring that the inescapably easy melodies never get a chance to sound bland. Not every performer could get away with titling an EP Surprisingly Alright (Thaian, 2023), but it’s a good summation of Abe’s charm.

Whether on his records or at his shows, his music urges you to nod along gently or even burst into giggles. —NOAH BERLATSKY

The Kills The Paranoyds open. 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 4746 N. Racine, $45. 18+ Try as we may, time comes for all of us—even the leather-swaddled and Ray-Banned indie sleaze bands of yore. But the Kills wear their vintage well— their weathered aura magnifies their archetypal coolness. Many acts who make it past the twodecade mark are fueled by little more than halfbaked nostalgia, but the Kills remain vigorous. On October’s God Games, their sixth album and first since 2016’s weary Ash & Ice, the duo are at their most gallant.

Built atop fragments of music that guitarist Jamie Hince was working on for a side project, God Games harnesses the inventiveness of contemporary hip-hop and bids farewell to the brawny, blues-infused guitar riffs of Kills gone by (partly an aesthetic decision but mostly the result of a career-threatening tendon injury that almost cost him a finger). The absence of Hince’s signature instrument has left room for the Kills to slink around in new musical pastures, where wobbly dub beats, bedeviled funk syncopation, and slick flamenco flourishes dominate. Vocalist Alison Mosshart remains as tarry and unfazed as ever in her headlong delivery, whether she’s hexing VIP exes (“Wasterpiece”) or doling out snotty sprechgesang (“Kingdom Come”). God Games also benefits from a cameo by the Compton Kidz Club Choir (“My Girls My Girls”), supersaturated production from Paul Epworth, and song-doctor services from Beck, so that the album feels like a full hand of aces that proves the Kills’ mastery in the not-so-subtle art of reinvention. As Hince and Mossheart head to the

SATURDAY10 Renaissance of the Culture See Pick of the Week at left. Open session with Rufus Sims, TheGr8Thinkaz, Freddie Old Soul & Stepchild, Defcee, IAMGAWD, Vic Spencer, A.M. Early Morning, Sweet Juices, Panamera P, Ju Jilla, and WateRR. Beats by Rashid Hadee, Doc da Mindbenda, and iLL Brown. Hosted by Shabazza and ThoughtPoet with DJs Shon Roka and Ves 120. 9 PM, Subterranean (downstairs), 2011 W. North, $5. b

TUESDAY13 Vader Origin, Inhuman Condition, and Morbidity open. 7 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $30, $27 in advance. 17+ Vader formed in Poland in 1983 and have gone on to become one of the most reliably rock-solid

Yuma Abe COURTESY THE ARTIST

FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 39

UPCOMING CONCERTS AT

MUSIC

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NEW SHOWS ANNOUNCED • ON SALE NOW! 4/27 David Wilcox 5/5 Judy Collins SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17 8PM

Parker Millsap

with Caleb Caudle

In Szold Hall

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18 11AM

Justin Roberts & The Not Ready For Naptime Players

Kids & Family Show!

In Maurer Hall

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 22 7:30PM

Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre Inside/Out with American Catracho In Myron R. Szold Music & Dance Hall

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24 10AM

Black History Folk Futures Symposium Free, Please RSVP

in Szold Hall

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25 7PM

Beausoleil avec Michael Doucet In Maurer Hall SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25 7PM

Matt Andersen with Old Man Luedeke In Szold Hall THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 29 8PM

Masters Of Hawaiian Music George Kahumoku Jr,

continued from p. 39 Riviera on the 22nd anniversary of the duo’s first show, they remain adventurous and eager to introduce new versions of themselves to their audience— and to each other. —SHANNON NICO SHREIBAK

THURSDAY15 Laura Jane Grace See also Fri 2/16. Sincere Engineer (solo) and CalicoLoco open. 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $35.54, $29.50 in advance. 21+ Throughout her long career, whether as the front person of Against Me! and the Devouring Mothers or as a solo artist, Laura Jane Grace has worn her raw and messy heart on her sleeve. That’s part of what’s made her a relatable beacon for a generation of disaffected youth and (over the past decade) a punk-rock queer icon. Her very public transition— which she detailed in the 2014 documentary series True Trans With Laura Jane Grace and the 2016 autobiography Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, written with Dan Ozzi—helped educate the masses about gender dysphoria and transgender life while showing that a punk-rock adolescence can be a training ground for a powerful role model.

Grace recorded her solo debut, 2020’s Stay Alive, at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini, taking advantage of a period when COVID restrictions made it impossible to work with the Devouring Mothers. The solo format suits her well. Her new album, Hole in My Head (recorded at Native Sound in Saint Louis), is conversational and intimate in all the best ways, cruising through country, rockabilly, folk, and acoustic punk. Grace’s poetic lyrics quote Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me” (possibly unironically) and confront dysphoria, shame, a challenging past, and death itself with singular aplomb.

On “Dysphoria Hoodie,” “Birds Talk Too,” and “Give Up the Ghost,” she’s raw and present. Elsewhere she turns nostalgic, taking pride in her punk leg-

Daniel Ho & Tia Carrere In Maurer Hall

Jess Williamson In Maurer Hall

SUNDAY, MARCH 3 3PM & 7PM

Lúnasa In Maurer Hall WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE

2/14 2/21 2/28

PETER JERICHO & MGENI BEPPE GAMBETTA NANI

OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG 40 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

acy on “Punk Rock in Basements” and “Keep Your Wheels Straight” (where she includes a reference to the CBGB in Saint Louis—which one did you think she meant?). And when Grace plays it fierce, as she does on the title track and “I’m Not a Cop,” she evokes a spirit mighty enough to shake the rafters at a basement show or a stadium. For this two-night Hole in My Head release celebration at Sleeping Village, she’ll be joined by local emo act Sincere Engineer (whose Deanna Belos will perform solo) and dream-pop duo CalicoLoco. —MONICA KENDRICK

Roy Kinsey Part of CIVL Fest 2024. Jesse 5k and DJ Ca$h Era open. 9 PM, Cole’s Bar, 2338 N. Milwaukee, 21+. F The ineffable smoothness of Roy Kinsey dominates and shapes the Chicago rapper-librarian’s 3 Rings, a compilation of 2023 singles and one new track that

he dropped on Christmas. His relaxed flow lends his succinct bars a manicured suavity, and though his instrumentals vary widely in mood—mature elegance, nighttime bustle, radiant joy—he retains this composed polish throughout. On the album’s harder tracks, he especially shines; the tough percussion and thwacks of bass on “Circle Round” lend Kinsey’s self-possessed rapping a badass intensity. Kinsey recruited a handful of Chicago greats for 3 Rings, including puckish MC Chris Crack and drill queen Katie Got Bandz, and these collaborations don’t just show how well he plays with others—they also make me wish that more Chicago artists would invite Kinsey to add features to their songs. —LEOR GALIL

FRIDAY16 Laura Jane Grace See Thu 2/15. Sincere Engineer (solo) and CalicoLoco open. 9 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, sold out. 21+ J. Robbins Band Allen Epley and Deep Tunnel Project open. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $15. 17+

FRIDAY, MARCH 1 8PM

with Esther Rose

Laura Jane Grace BELLA PETERSON

Roy Kinsey STEVEN VARGAS

J. Robbins has been part of the punk scene in Washington, D.C., for almost as long as it’s been nationally important—and thanks to his hometown’s major role in the all-ages movement, he got started young. He joined established hardcore band Government Issue as a teenager in the mid-1980s, just as they made the leap to big indie label Giant and issued the 1987 album You, which featured Robbins’s visual art and bass playing. After GI flamed out in 1989, Robbins founded posthardcore group Jawbox, which remains the biggest success of his long career. His ear for melody gave Jawbox’s intense, rough-hewn sound an endearing touch of pop, and they ended up one of only two bands (alongside Shudder to Think) to leave storied D.C. indie Dischord for a major label during the “alternative” boom of the early 1990s. After Jawbox broke up in 1997, Robbins kept making music with Burn-

MUSIC

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Quannnic ERANINE ing Airlines, Office of Future Plans, and other projects. He’s also built an impressive career as an audio engineer, and since 2012 he’s run a studio in Baltimore called the Magpie Cage. His work behind the boards rivals his own output in cultural import, with credits including the Dismemberment Plan, Against Me!, Coliseum, Small Brown Bike, and the Promise Ring—and anyone who had a hand in the 1994 Texas Is the Reason album Do You Know Who You Are? is a legend to me.

Robbins’s solo career is fairly new: his first solo album, Un-Becoming, came out in 2019. But the music he’s released under his own name is a clear continuation of everything he’s done over the past four decades. Robbins made the new Basilisk (Dischord) with two Office of Future Plans bandmates: bassist and keyboardist Brooks Harlan (who plays guitar in the reunited Jawbox) and drummer Darren Zentek (who played with Robbins in Channels). Basilisk uses a lot of longtime Robbins hallmarks, including sturdy, driving rhythms and barked vocals touched with honey. Robbins began dab-

J. Robbins SHANE K. GARDNER

bling in electronic instrumentals during the pandemic, inspired in part by his engineering work for experimental metal group Locrian, and he incorporates that new development into Basilisk too—the album glimmers with his subtle synthetic touches.

—LEOR GALIL

SATURDAY17 Quannnic Jane Remover headlines. 7 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, advance tickets sold out. b I’m iffy about TikTok as a vector for transforming obscure songs into viral sensations. A lot of my complaints are aesthetic, because when I sampled the posts from shoegaze TikTok that had helped propel Quannnic’s “Life Imitates Life” onto Billboard’s “Hot Hard Rock Songs” chart in November, much of what I found was misguided, tacky, or just dumb.

I can only assume that those posters were trying to hijack the drowsy splendor of “Life Imitates Life” for their own ends, but that’s doomed to fail if you pair the song with (for instance) a grim montage of Joaquin Phoenix stumbling through The Joker. Quannnic benefited from this viral springboard just as the Florida teen dropped their second album, Stepdream (deadAir), whose compelling mishmash of altrock styles includes emo and of course shoegaze— I’ve heard a similar blur of sounds while falling down Internet rabbit holes to research impossibly niche bands and songs late at night. Quannnic’s forlorn vocals connect the watery grunge of “Sheets” to the blown-out space rock of “Comatose” (a dead ringer for Hum circa You’d Prefer an Astronaut), but the more important through line is the music’s ardent, expressive emotional force. The cascading, caustic guitar solo that opens “South” convulses like a sustained wail, its every dive and freak-out enacting catharsis—I’ve been obsessed since I first heard it months ago. People love to talk about the obsolescence of rock, but I refuse to believe that it can die when someone half my age can keep me spellbound with a guitar. —LEOR GALIL v

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EARLY WARNINGS

UPCOMING CONCERTS TO HAVE ON YOUR RADAR

b ALL AGES

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

SUN 3/31 Sarah & the Sundays 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+

BEYOND WED 4/3 Kiltro, Nina de Freitas 8:30 PM, Sleeping Village THU 4/4 Paul Cherry, JW Francis 8:30 PM, Hideout SAT 4/6 Connor Price 8 PM, Park West b THU 4/18 Spanish Love Songs, Oso Oso, Sydney Sprague, Worry Club 7 PM, Metro, 18+

Justin Timberlake CHARLOTTE RUTHERFORD

FEBRUARY THU 2/22 Eyvind Kang & Jessika Kenney, Zarabanda Variations (part of the Frequency Festival) 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ SUN 2/25 Heet Deth, Cave Brain, Pudding 7:30 PM, Schubas F

MARCH FRI 3/1 Atlus 7 PM, Cobra Lounge b FRI 3/8 Black Eyes, Lifeguard, TALsounds 10 PM, Empty Bottle Matt Ulery’s Mother Harp 8 PM, Green Mill MON 3/11 Saltwater Tap, Madame Reaper & the Gentleman’s Club, Olive Avenue 8 PM, Schubas F MON 3/18 Real Boston Richey 7 PM, the Promontory b WED 3/20 Voivod, Prong, Black Cross Hotel 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ FRI 3/22 Jessica Ackerley, Mai Sugimoto, and Tim Daisy; Jessica Ackerley (solo) 8 PM, Elastic b

Early Warnings newsletter: sign up here SUN 5/19 Freddie Gibbs, Madlib, El Michels Affair, Eyedress 7 PM, Salt Shed (outdoors) b FRI 5/24 Lords of Acid, Praga Khan 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ WED 5/29 Ladytron, DJ Hiroko Yamamura 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+

FRI 4/19 Lotus 8:30 PM, Park West, 18+

FRI 6/21 Justin Timberlake 7:30 PM, United Center b

SAT 4/20 Buffalo Nichols 8 PM, Judson & Moore Distillery

SAT 6/22 Justin Timberlake 7:30 PM, United Center b

TUE 4/23 Louise Post 9 PM, Empty Bottle

FRI 6/28 Adrianne Lenker 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre b

FRI 4/26 Perpetual Flame Ministries presents Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter with David Eugene Edwards 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ SAT 4/27 Perpetual Flame Ministries presents Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter with David Eugene Edwards 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ SUN 4/28 Alex Cuba 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b THU 5/2 Jozef van Wissem 9 PM, Empty Bottle FRI 5/3 Atmosphere, Hebl, Nofun! 8 PM, Salt Shed (indoors), 17+ Robyn Hitchcock 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b SAT 5/4 Robyn Hitchcock 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b WED 5/8 Dustin Kensrue, the Brevet, Brother Bird 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ WED 5/15 Sean Paul 7 PM, Radius, 18+ SAT 5/18 Combo Chimbita, Pachyman 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+

42 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

FRI 7/5 J. Holiday 7:30 PM, City Winery b WED 7/10 Grails 9 PM, Empty Bottle TUE 8/13 Green Day, Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid, Linda Lindas 5:30 PM, Wrigley Field b THU 8/22 King Buzzo & Trevor Dunn, J.D. Pinkus 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ SUN 9/1 King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Geese 6:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion b THU 10/3 Mt. Joy 7 PM, Salt Shed (outdoors) b FRI 10/4 Mt. Joy 7 PM, Salt Shed (outdoors) b SAT 10/5 Mt. Joy 7 PM, Salt Shed (outdoors) b SUN 10/27 Justin Timberlake 7:30 PM, United Center b MON 10/28 Usher 8 PM, United Center b TUE 10/29 Usher 8 PM, United Center b v

ON SATURDAY, February 10, dance party Internet.Hotspot hosts its second- annual Lunar New Year celebration, with a lineup that consists entirely of Asian DJs. As usual, Internet.Hotspot cofounder Brandon Lee is throwing the party at Pho Viet (4941 N. Broadway), a restaurant owned by his parents. Lee DJs under the name Fefe, and he’ll spin a back-toback set with Ranee. “The last couple years, I embraced my cultural identity,” Lee says. “It’s a big reason why I wanted to throw the party.”

Lee grew up in Uptown and started working at Pho Viet as a kid, which helped keep him engaged with Vietnamese culture. He lived with a grandmother who spoke Vietnamese with him, though he attended majority white schools. “I would get bullied for the food and cultural differences,” Lee says. “I was kind of ashamed of being Asian.” In college, his perspective changed: he takes pride in his identity, and he’s made several trips to Vietnam.

Lee was studying at DePaul when he cofounded Internet.Hotspot in late 2018. He’d invited a couple friends to an event at Pho Viet, and one of them suggested they throw their own party there. Lee’s parents had the required city licenses for a show, and the restaurant had a stage and sound equipment.

Internet.Hotspot debuted in February 2019. “I remember the first one being super successful,” Lee says. “The ones after that weren’t as successful.” Within four or five shows, though, Internet.Hotspot found its crowd.

Lee now lives in New York, but he often returns to Chicago. Internet.Hotspot continues to grow: last year it hosted an unofficial Pitchfork afterparty with Detroit hip-hop crew HiTech, and international electronic-music news outlet Resident Advisor lists its events.

Saturday’s party features two other back-toback sets—NormalDrugs with DirtyMoneyBeats and Francine with Jaxx. Tickets cost $15 ($10 in advance), and admission is 21 and up; a portion of the proceeds benefits the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.

LAST YEAR, Chicago native Gerda Barker published the memoir Don’t Stand in Line, where she recounts her years in Chicago’s arts and music communities—beginning during the local emergence of punk in the late 1970s. Barker now lives in Portland, Oregon, but on Friday, February 9, she’s visiting to read from her book at Gman Tavern.

Barker started going to the city’s first punk disco, La Mere Vipere, with artist Steve Miglio. He introduced her to the makers of Praxis, a glossy arts and music zine with a

punk and new-wave aesthetic. “I became the literary editor—unpaid, of course,” Barker says. “I was 19 at the time. I got to know a lot of musicians and writers.”

Barker’s artist friends also helped her when she was looking for paid work. “They were encouraging me to go talk to Jim [Nash] and Dannie [Flesher] at Wax Trax!,” she says. “It was fun—it was a safe place to be and to work and to just kind of be yourself.” Don’t Stand in Line also documents Barker’s involvement in the industrial scene anchored by the Wax Trax! shop and record label. She later became a criminal defense lawyer, and until last year she was married to Paul Barker of Ministry.

Jill Hopkins will interview Barker at Gman.

Julia Nash of Wax Trax! and her partner, Mark Skillicorn, will DJ. The reading, which is part of the bar’s author series, is free with RSVP and begins at 7:30 PM. ON FRIDAY, February 9, Fallen Log hosts the second Hallogallo Raveup, an all-ages dance party inspired by mod culture and postwar pop. “It was kind of the first major youth culture,” says Hallogallo linchpin and Lifeguard guitarist Kai Slater. “It centered on the same ideals as what we’ve always been doing, which is the importance of young people and spaces where you can get your kicks—where you can dance and sing.” Slater credits reunited 90s mod punks Chisel as an influence; he interviewed them last year for his Hallogallo zine, and Quinn Dugan, son of Chisel drummer John, fronts teen-scene band Uniflora.

Slater devised the raveup with his roommate, Fallen Log talent buyer Cole Hunt, who plays in rock duo TV Buddha. Most dance parties play electronic music and require you to be at least 21, but Slater and Hunt wanted an alternative—all all-ages event focused on postwar pop, soul, doo-wop, and R&B. For the first Hallogallo Raveup in December, Slater and 11 friends formed three bands to play sets of oldies covers. “The first was just definitely one of the most fun concerts I’ve done in a while,” he says. “It’s very easygoing.”

Slater wants the Hallogallo Raveup to become a bimonthly event. Friday’s party again features three cover bands; Hunt will spin Motown, classic doo-wop, and other oldies. Everyone is welcome to dance, Slater says, and you’re encouraged to wear your finest mod fashions. The party begins at 7 PM and costs $5. —LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 43

MUSIC THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC

Bassist Bernard Reed has a résumé bigger than his reputation He’s worked in blues, soul, funk, jazz, and more for nearly seven decades—including gigs with the likes of Aretha Franklin, Syl Johnson, and Howlin’ Wolf.

By STEVE KRAKOW Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

I

decided to include Bernard Reed in my Winter Blues series, because for the past few decades he’s excelled as a bluesman.

But the masterfully versatile bassist has also played doo-wop, R&B, soul, funk, jazz, gospel, and pop—he’s even dabbled in grunge, if you believe him when he says on his Facebook page that he backed Chris Cornell of Soundgarden at the Cubby Bear in the late 90s. I couldn’t independently verify it myself, but I’d love to hear the story. Reed must be full of them—in the course of my research, I also found unconfirmed claims that he’s played with Rodney Dangerfield, Redd Foxx, and Stevie Wonder!

Bernard Reed was born in Chicago on May 22, 1945, and raised on the west side by his grandparents. (His older brother, Danny, also a future musician, lived with his mother on the north side.) Reed went to elementary school at Calhoun and high school at Marshall, learning sousaphone in class, and by the end of the 50s he’d joined the Constellations, a doo-wop vocal group.

Inspired by the Impressions, Reed sang bass in the Constellations, and bandmate Elmore

44 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

STEVE KRAKOW FOR CHICAGO READER

Nunn tutored him on bass guitar. The group played school events and talent shows and eventually graduated to gigs at the historic Regal Theater. In 2010, Reed told Kevin Johnson at the magazine Big City Rhythm & Blues that the first bass line he learned came from Bobby “Blue” Bland’s signature tune “Turn On Your Love Light,” which he’d picked up after seeing Bland at the Regal.

The Chicago version of the Constellations never released any recordings, but several members worked as studio musicians for Chess, Roulette, Smash, and other labels.

Reed got to watch seasoned session aces on the job, among them guitarist and bassist Phil Upchurch, trombonist and bassist Louis Satterfield, and bassist and arranger Johnny Pate.

This all had a huge impact on him.

Reed also jammed with his guitarist broth-

er, Danny, while getting his bass chops up.

When Danny returned from a big tour backing Major Lance, he joined beloved soul group the Artistics (covered by SHoCM in 2020), who often worked as Lance’s backing band. Danny then brought his bassist brother aboard, and Reed played his first out-of-town gigs with the Artistics. In that group he also made significant strides as a songwriter.

Because the Artistics were on Okeh Records, run by celebrated impresario Carl Davis, Reed became a house bassist for Okeh. After Davis left Okeh in 1965 and moved to Brunswick, Reed (and the Artistics) followed him, and Reed also went to work for Davis’s label Dakar.

At Brunswick and Dakar, Reed’s supple bass adorned tracks such as Tyrone Davis’s hit “Can I Change My Mind” and Young-Holt Unlimited’s “Soulful Strut” (which neither Young

nor Holt likely played on, in an infamous case of music-biz shenanigans). He also played on classic recordings by the likes of the Chi-Lites, Jackie Wilson, Betty Everett, Gene Chandler, and Ramsey Lewis, some of them for other labels.

Davis and Reed did great work together, but they were both headstrong and frequently sparred. Reed was angry at not being credited for “Soulful Strut” (he considered himself a cowriter), and he resented getting passed over for a producer’s job at Brunswick. In summer 1969, when Davis decided to eliminate the horn players from the label’s house band, Reed quit and took several colleagues with him.

They backed Syl Johnson on several Twinight Records releases, including the 1969 Black liberation anthem “Is It Because I’m Black,” and they formed the nucleus of a large devotional

SAVAGE LOVE

MUSIC funk ensemble called Pieces of Peace (covered

by SHoCM in 2019). Their excellent self-titled LP, recorded in 1972, ended up shelved at the time and only finally came out on Quannum Projects imprint Cali-Tex in 2007—the same year the Numero Group reissued a few singles featuring the group.

Throughout the 1970s, Reed would play with a staggering array of stars, including soul and R&B royals Aretha Franklin, Natalie Cole, and the Deacons (with Syl Johnson’s big brother, Jimmy); funk heroes General Crook and Charles Earland; jazz giants Ari Brown and Della Reese; gospel greats Marvin Yancy and the Soul Stirrers; blues gods Howlin’ Wolf and Little Milton; and genre-straddling Renaissance man Oscar Brown Jr. Because sidemen are often uncredited, even that wild list is likely selling Reed short.

(Rodney Dangerfield, Redd Foxx, and Stevie Wonder aren’t on it, for instance.) And his extensive work in film, television, radio, and advertising is even more difficult to enumerate accurately.

Reed backed away from music for most of the 1980s, frustrated with the business, and when he returned he adapted his nimble playing to the blues. He became a soughtafter bassist for the likes of Eddy “the Chief” Clearwater, Magic Slim, Otis Clay, Mighty Joe Young, Swamp Dogg, and Sugar Pie DeSanto.

In 1996 he backed Screamin’ Jay Hawkins at the Chicago Blues Festival—Hawkins brought some of his most famous props, including a giant toilet and a coffin, and I was lucky enough to see the show.

Reed later rejoined Syl Johnson’s band and frequently performed in productions at the Black Ensemble Theater. He’s toured as far afield as Japan, Africa, and Malaysia and gigged at events as varied as the traveling Efes Pilsen Blues Festival in Turkey and the King Biscuit Blues Festival in Helena, Arkansas. In recent years his schedule has thinned out a bit, but in 2022 he played the Chicago Blues Festival again, backing beloved funky arranger Willie Henderson as part of the Big Bad Blues Band—another set I was glad to catch. Here’s hoping we can all see a gig by this living legend in 2024. v

The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived at outsidetheloopradio.com/tag/secrethistory-of-chicago-music.

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

Obsessed

How can I work on my issue with relationships when I’m not in a relationship?

By DAN SAVAGE Q: A therapist suggested I might have “relationship OCD,” which is obsessive-

compulsive disorder with the obsessions and compulsions focusing on romantic relationships. While I haven’t been formally diagnosed, it rings true to me. As soon as I get close to someone, I experience so much anxiety. If I kissed a partner and they kissed me in a way I didn’t like, I would think, “Why didn’t you like that?

Maybe you don’t really love them. Maybe you don’t even like people of this gender. Maybe you’re lying to yourself.” And before I know it, I’m spinning out of control and panicking.

When I’m single, I never have thoughts like this.

I was in a four-year relationship that just ended. While I’m sad it ended, I understand why it needed to and I’m trying to move forward. However, I’m stuck on the impact my obsessions had on our sex life. In the first two to three years I didn’t have these obsessions, but during the last one I started to experience such bad anxiety that I couldn’t enjoy sex. It was devastating. Perhaps foolishly, I viewed this person as the exception to my obsessive thinking, but it seems like as the stakes in the relationship heightened, so did my obsessive thoughts.

I’m single again now, and I learned a valuable lesson from this relationship: no matter what relationship I’m in or how much I love my partner, I will have these obsessive thoughts. I’m in therapy, and I would like to have a long-term relationship with someone that includes living together, traveling together, and maybe even having kids together. But I find it hard to work on my issue when I’m not

in a relationship. Is there anything I can do right now, while I’m single, that will help me in my next relationship? —SAD THAT

RELATIONSHIP ELEVATES STRESS SYMPTOMS

moment you realize you’re seeing someone you might actually fall in love with—the moment you start picturing a future that includes marriage and kids—the stakes shoot through the roof.

“When the love ‘risk’ is higher, the greater the chance the psychological defenses of someone suffering from ROCD will try to keep them safe by pointing out

a: I shared your question with Sheva Rajaee, a licensed marriage and family therapist, author, and public speaker. The founder and director of the Center for Anxiety and OCD, Rajaee wrote the book— the literal book— on relationship OCD: Relationship OCD: A CBTBased Guide to Move Beyond Obsessive Doubt, Anxiety & Fear of Commitment in Romantic Relationships.

“Part of what makes relationship OCD (ROCD) so painful and damaging is that these incessant doubts seep into every corner of our relationships,” said Rajaee. “And cruelly, it’s loudest in our most viable relationships.

Maybe you don’t really love them. LIZA SUMMER/PEXELS ROCD doesn’t care about your summer fling with an expiration perceived flaws and incompatidate. Nope! ROCD is coming for bilities,” said Rajaee. “ROCD is a the relationship with actual legs.” misguided attempt to keep you Basically, STRESS, your ROCD safe by keeping you separate and is going to lay more or less dorwhat STRESS describes—what mant when you’re seeing someshe just went through—is a textone you can’t see yourself with book example of relationship long-term. That summer fling is OCD. It’s the spiraling nature of gonna end with the summer, and worries that take small imperthe potential downside of pickfections or incompatibilities (‘I ing the wrong person for that don’t love the way they kiss’) and summer fling is minimal. But the blows them up to worst-case out-

comes (‘I’m lying to myself and to them’).”

So, can a person work on their ROCD when they’re not in a relationship and/or they’re enjoying the kind of casual connection—summer flings, vacation fucks, sex friends—that don’t trigger their ROCD? “Yes and no,” said Rajaee.

“STRESS can work on anxiety in general, practicing riding waves of discomfort and even panic without getting caught up in the scare stories. She can examine her expectations of love and relationships and practice exposure therapy, so that when these thoughts surface in her next good relationship— as they likely will—she’ll have a solid strategy to address them.”

But the most important work—the work that will help you contain and control your ROCD—can only be done during one of those high-stakes relationships.

“In STRESS’s case, this means opening herself to sex, love, and connection and then working through near-crippling anxiety while trying to maintain a healthy relationship,” said Rajaee, “and that’s guaranteed to introduce some conflict into her next partnership. But I want her to know that it’s possible to do this and that I see it done— and done successfully—all the time. In fact, for many of my clients, doing this work brings them closer together.”

The Center for Anxiety and OCD’s website is at caocd.com.

The Center is on Instagram and Threads at @theshrinkwrap. v Ask your burning questions, download podcasts, read full column archives, and more at the URL savage.love. m mailbox@savage.love

FEBRUARY 8, 2024 - CHICAGO READER 45

CLASSIFIEDS JOBS GENERAL

MATCHES PUBLIC NOTICE ADULT SERVICES

JOBS Morningstar, Inc. seeks a Senior Quantitative Analyst (multiple positions) in Chicago, IL to analyze large data sets & condense complex information into concise, relevant, & easy to communicate results (10%).

BS deg in Finance, Comp Sci or relevant quant or financial discipline & 3 yrs of relevant exp as Quant Analyst or rltd position involving software engg or finance. In alternative, MS deg in Finance, Comp Sci or relevant quant or financial discipline & 1 yr of relevant exp as Quant Analyst or rltd position involving software engg or finance. Add’l specific skills req’d. For position details & to apply, visit: https://www.morningstar. com/careers; ref. job ID REQ-043002.

Dental Group of Chicago seeks Dentist in Chicago, IL to diagnose & treat dental conditions, perform tooth & gum-related procedures, provide cosmetic dentistry services & coordinate treatment w/ specialists.

Must have DDS or DDM degree; 18 mos. exp. as Dentist; IL dentist license & IL controlled substances license. Must work 2 evenings per week until 8 pm & 1 Saturday per month. E-mail CV to r ro b e rg @ d g o c h i c a g o . com. Use job code 1556.

QA Senior Associate (Chicago, IL) for Adams Street Partners, LLC to dvlp & execute s/ware tests to identify s/ware problems & their causes.

Reqs Bach deg in IT & Mgmt, Comp Sci, Comp Engg or rltd field of study, & 5 yrs exp in any job title/occupation/position involved in Quality Assurance in a fin\’l svcs firm. Exp specified must incl 5 yrs exp w/ each of the following: s/ware testing & automated testing techniques; & maintaining the quality throughout the entire SDLC. Exp specified must also incl 3 yrs exp w/ each of the following: API platforms & rltd testing using tools such as Postman; querying relational d/base systems incl SQL Server; & reqmt analysis & test plan documentation.

Te l e c o m m u t i n g is permitted up to 3 days/ wk in accordance w/ co. policy (subject to change). Salary: $117,000/yr. To apply v i s i t h t t p s : / / w w w. a d a m s s t re e t p a r t n e r s . c o m / c a r e e r s j o b - p o s t / ? g h _ jid=4193974007 Specialist w/ McKinsey & Co, Inc. US (Chicago, IL) Help hospitals

implement strategies, operating models, & org enhancements that sustain improvements in the quality of care and boost cost-effectiveness. Telecommuting permitted.

Req’s Masters or foreign degree equiv & 2yrs exp working on hospital/ clinical projects focused on healthcare advanced data analytics, workforce mgmt, clinical operations, operational improvement, & strategic planning for healthcare providers.

Domestic travel typically required. Destination & frequency impossible to predict. Email your resume to CO@mckinsey. com and refer to Job # 7214481.

IT Positions: IT Positions: Schaumburg, IL. Must be willing to travel and reloc to unanticipated client locations throughout the US. Multiple Openings: Software Developers JOBID: SSD123 Extract data from Sauce Analytics platform and build visualizations in Tableau to display defects in different phases of SDLC. Create and deploy ETL packages using Talend, Tableau, Jenkins, Oracle SQL, Cassandra, K2View, Linux, GIT Lab, IntelliJ IDEA, C# .net, Python.

Reqs MS in comp sci, sci, eng or rel w/2 yrs exp. Full Stack Developer JOBID: FD124: Design, develop, enhance, code, test, deliver debug s/w using Java, JavaScript, microservices, Spring Boot, Spring Framework and SQL. Reqs BS in Comp Sci, Sci, Engg or rel w/ 2 yrs exp: Mail resumes referencing the Job ID to Cyberbridge Intl Inc. DBA Creospan Inc. 1515 E Woodfield Rd, Ste370, Schaumburg, IL 60173.

Software Developer (Multiple Openings) Software Developer (Multiple Openings): Design, develop, test & impl. application s/w utilizing java8, spring framework, spring boot, restful microservices, hibernate Jenkins, docker, Gradle, GIT, MySQL, Oracle, Cassandra & cucumber, angular, reactjs, ELK, Splunk. Must be willing to travel and relocate to unanticipated client locations throughout the US. Reqs BS in Comp Sci, Engg or rel w/5 yrs exp. Mail resumes to Cyberbridge Intl, Inc. Dba Creospan Inc, 1515 East Woodfield Road, Suite 370, Schaumburg, Illinois 60173 Trader PEAK6 Capital Management, LLC seeks Trader in Chicago, IL to be responsible for mng’ng an equities portfolio consisting of both stocks & options. Reqs: Master’s degree or foreign equiv in

Finance, Financial Math., or rel. field & 2 yrs of post-bacc. exp. as Trader, Trad’g Assoc., or rel. role.

Exp. must incl. trad’g & financial analysis; trad’g on an equities platform; Python; SQL; & Bloomberg terminal. Email resume: aernst@peak6.com Information Technology Project Manager (Multi Openings w/ National Placement out of Cook County, IL). Bach’s Deg in either Comps,Eng’g, Info Sys’s, IT, Mgmt, Bus or related field.Foreign Edu equival’t is acceptable.

Any suitable combo of edu, training or exp is acceptable. Candidate will plan, initiate,& mng info tech (IT) proj’s. Lead & guide the work of tech staff. Serve as liaison between bus & tech aspects of proj’s Plan proj stages & assess bus implications for each stage. Monitor progress to assure deadlines, standards, & cost targets are met. Although no exp is req’d candidate must have coursework or internship in Proj Mgmt; as well as either Vendor Mgmt; Data Mgmt or Database Sys’s & Network Security. Must be able to trvl/relo to unanticipated client sites as needed.

9-5, FT. $82,243yr. Ref# ITPM-0523 & send resume to Prudence, Inc. 540 N Lakeshore Dr., #210, Chicago, IL 60611 or jobs@prudenceinc. com. Prudence, Inc. is an EOE M/F/V/D. Senior Accountant Samsic Airport America LLC seeks a Senior Accountant. Mail resume to 9815 Lawrence Ave. Schiller Park, IL 60176.

Structural Engineer NLP CONCEPTS, LLC seeks a Structural Engineer. Mail resume to 824 W Superior, STE 203, Chicago, IL 60642.

Senior Product Designer Tempus Labs, Inc. seeks Senior Product Designer in Chicago, IL. Create end-to-end design solutions that address user and business needs, develop user stories and user flows to visualize and communicate the proposed solutions. Telecommuting permitted.

Travel to New York, San Francisco, and Chicago office for onsite meetings (10%). Apply @ www. j o b p o s t i n g t o d a y. c o m #13453.

Associate Engineer CTC Trading Group, LLC seeks an Associate Engineer in Chicago, IL to use a test and data driven approach to write impactful and reliable high-performance C++ applications. Telecommuting is permitted.

Apply at https://www. jobpostingtoday.com/ Ref # 11072.

WANT TO ADD A LISTING TO OUR CLASSIFIEDS? Go to classifieds.chicagoreader.com

46 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 8, 2024

Sr. Software Development Engineer in Test PEAK6 Capital Management LLC seeks Sr. Software Development Engineer in Test in Chicago, IL to rev., anlyz, dvlp, and implmnt banking & financial industry app. s/w.

Reqs. Master’s degree or foreign equiv in Comp.

Sci. or rel. field & 2 yrs of post-bacc, exp. as S/W Dvlpmnt Eng’r in Test, S/W Eng’r, or rel. role.

Exp. must incl. auto’mtn test’g, test plann’g & strategy, Agile, Exploratory, Test NG Framework, Pytest, Gradle, Java, Go, JavaScript & Python.

Pos’n will be HQ’d in Chicago, IL & allows for telecommut’g & remote emplymnt from various unanticipated worksites throughout U.S. Email resume: aernst@peak6. com.

Senior Trader PEAK6 Capital Management LLC seeks Senior Trader in Chicago, IL to generate wide range of options volatility trades by undrstnd’ng mrkt patterns & signals. Reqs. Master’s degree or foreign equiv in Bus. Admin., Fin., or rel. field & 2 yrs of post-bacc. exp. as Options Trader or rel. role. Exp. must incl.

P&L analysis, & cndct’ng stat’l analysis using Python, SQL, & Excel VBA. Pos’n will be HQ’d in Chicago, IL & allows for telecommut’g & remote emplymnt from var. unanticipated worksites throughout U.S. Email resume: aernst@peak6. com.

A l g o r i t h m i c Tr a d e r PEAK6 Capital Management LLC seeks Algorithmic Trader in Chicago, IL to build adv’d models to auto execute new quantitative strategies to generate income.

Reqs. Master’s degree or foreign equiv in Math., Fin’cl Math., or rel. field & 2 yrs of post-bacc exp. as Quantitative Analyst, Quantitative Trader, or rel. role. Exp. must incl. conduct’g data & stat. analysis using Python, SQL, & Excel VBA; & statistical methods & models incld’ng Linear, Lasso & Ridge Regression & principal component analysis. Pos’n will be HQ’d in Chicago, IL and allows for remote emp. from various unanticipated worksites throughout U . S . E m a i l re s u m e : aernst@peak6.com.

ENGINEERING DRW Holdings LLC has openings in Chicago, IL: SR SVC RELIABILITY ENGR (Pos ID RE/IL/ P059) Own & impr patterns, processes, stds for migrating apps to Kubernetes. Req MS CS, SE, or rel+2yrs DevOps exp.

ALT: BS or foreign equiv in CS, SE or rel+4yrs of DevOps exp. EM resume: apply@drw.com Attn: M. CARTER. Must ref Pos ID when applying. EOE.

OPERATIONS DRW Holdings LLC has opening in Chicago, IL for TRADING OPERATIONS SPEC (Pos ID TO/ IL/S058) Analyze trade capture, trade confirm, reconcil & P&L calc. Req BA/BS in Bus, Agribus, Fin, Econ, or highly quant field+ 2yrs commodities fin analysis exp. EM resume: apply@drw.com Attn: M. CARTER. Must ref Pos ID when applying.

EOE DATA ENGINEER Kraft Heinz Foods Company seeks Data Engineer in Chicago, IL to work closely with a multidisciplinary agile team to build high quality data pipelines driving analytic solutions. Degree & commensurate exp. req\’d.

Apply online by searching keyword R-78605 at careers.kraftheinz.com/ careers/SearchJobs.

Director of Fresh Water Research: Send resume to Shedd Aquarium Society, 1200 S Lake Shore Dr, Chicago, IL, 60605.

Attn: S. Nathan.

TECHNICAL Yum Connect LLC is accepting resumes for the following position in CHICAGO, IL: Senior Android Engineer (REF#7212387): Build an Android-based pointof-sale and operations platform that will be a critical tool in tens of thousands of restaurants around the world. Up to 30% domestic travel required. Send resume to Yum Connect LLC Yum. Recruitment@yum.com.

EOE. Must include REF code.

Senior Operations Manager Manage ops for excavation bids, oversee depts, secure new projects. Master’s in Bus. Ad. or Econ. Req. 3 yrs exp. Any prior title or occ ok if exp. incl. 3 yrs construction mgmt. Occ. travel every 2 wks w/in 10-20 mi. Send resume: American Backhoe Service and Excavation Co., 2560 Federal Signal Dr., University Park, IL. 60484.

Northwestern Memorial Healthcare seeks Program Managers for various & unanticipated worksites throughout the U.S (HQ: Chicago, IL). Bachelor\’s in Supply Chain/Eng Mgmt, Industrial Eng/Stats/ related field +2yrs exp req’d. Req’d skills: 2yrs w/Data extraction, manipulation, reporting, & visualization; working w/ business users to dev analytical solutions to meet business needs; Tableau/Crystal Reports/ SSRS/Power BI; SDLC: analysis, design, dev & support; structured programming; present quantitative analysis; multiple project mgmt.

Hybrid work permitted within commuting dis-

tance to Chicago HQ. Background check & drug screen req’d. Apply online: http://jobseeker. nm.org/ REF: REF60997S Northwestern Memorial Healthcare seeks Medical Laboratory Scientists for Chicago, IL location to perform test procedures.

Bachelor\’s in Med Tech/ Lab Science/Clinical Lab Science/Chem/ Bio or Allied Health field qualifying applicant for ASCP cert exam req’d.

ASCP M, MLS, MT req’d (ASCPi also accepted).

Must be willing to work 1st shift. Drug test & Background check req’d.

Apply online: http:// jobseeker.nm.org/ REQ ID: REF59495B .Net Developer (Chicago, IL) Design, develop, test, implement, and support web applications using Agile Methodology. Master’s degree in computer science, Information Technology, or related. Full-time, multiple openings. Occasional travel or relocation may be required. Send resumes to: HR Dir, Platinum Consulting Services, Inc., 2425 West Lawrence Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60625; EOE. Senior Business Analyst positions avail w/ McKinsey & Co, Inc. US in Chicago, IL. Determine & apply analytical skills & tech expertise to mgmt consult engagements & complete discrete pieces of study/work stream such as data gathering, factual & stats analys.

Req’s Bachelor’s in Bus Admin, Fin, Econ, or nonbus undergrad degree, & 2 yrs exp as Business Analyst w/ a major top-tier int’l mgmt consulting firm. Domestic & int’l travel typically required.

Dest and freq impossible to predict. Email resume to CO@mckinsey.com and refer to CTR0125.

Multiple positions.

Oracle Consulting Sr Manager, Huron Consulting Services, Chicago, IL: Plan, shape, & deliver tech solutions that deliver results & seamlessly align w/ client goals, visions, & missions. Build long-standing partnerships w/ clients, while collab. w/ colleagues to solve enterprise software challenges. Work w/ Huron team members throughout entire implementation lifecycle, incl. plan, configure, design, build, test, train, change mgmt, go live, & post-production support.

Must have Bach in Comp.

Sci., Comp. Eng\’g, or rel field & 5 yrs exp. w/: (i) Interpret client bus. needs & translate to app & operational reqrmnts; (ii) Rec. overall structure of implemnt. models & decomp. of sys., incl. layers of software, pkgs, & components; (iii) Consult

on data integration & data reporting consider.; (iv) Provide tech & functional assist. in identifying, evaluating, & dvlping sys. & procedures that meet user-defined reqrmnts; (v) Dvlp long term roadmaps & facilitate evolution of sys.; (vi) Deliver successful implement., data design, & data validation; (vii) Perform sys. cutover involving migration of software app; (viii) Lead workshops w/ users for conf. room pilots, UAT, & user training sessions; & (ix) Agile & EPBCS, Hyperion Planning, & Essbase.

Of exp. req\’d, must have 3 yrs exp. w/ project implement. of cloud apps, incl. EPM & CRM offerings. Exp. may be gained concurrently. 80% travel to unanticipated worksites throughout N. America & will report to US HQ. Telecommuting allowed when not traveling. Individuals may reside anywhere in US. To apply, send resume to: apply@hcg.com.

Technical Operations Specialist Apex Fintech Services LLC seeks Technical Operations Specialist in Chicago, IL to monitor & support daily batch processes & triage/troubleshoot production batch issues.

Reqs. Bachelor’s degree or foreign equiv in Comp Sci, Telecomm En’gg or rel. field & 2 yrs of postbacc. exp. as a Tech Ops Specialist or rel. role.

Exp. must incl. Linux OS troubleshoot’g skills & BASH/SH script’g; Cloud Tech platforms AWS, Azure, GCP; & dzn, dvlp & maintain PostgreSQL DBs. Pos’n will be HQ’d in Chicago, IL but is a telecommut’g pos’n, allow’g for remote employment from various unanticipated worksites throughout U.S. Email resume: bsprague@ apexfin techsolutions. com Sales Representative Solicit new clients, sale svces of constr comp to max profits. Comm w/clients, real estate agents, attorneys.

Marketing.

Prep contracts, estimates for constr bids. Prep time, cost, materials, labor estimates. HS. 1 yr exp as sales representative.

Res: MK Construction& Builders, Inc. 2000 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago IL 60647 Gray Matter Analytics, In c. i n C hi cago, I L is seek’g a Sr. Data Scientist to apply advanced, theoretical knowledge of computer science & engg. 10% dom. trvl. WFH Benefit.

Email resumes to: dlocke-brown@gray matteranalytics.com Client Excellence Manager Mercer (US) L L C ( F T; C h i c a g o , IL – Remote work

may be permitted w/ in commutable dist from worksite). Focus on client retention & satisfaction, executing on rqts effectively & bringing new ideas on how to operate more efficiently & evolve their benefits in line w/ their benefit philosophy. RQTS: Bach deg or foreign equiv in Biz Admin, Mkting, or rel + 5 yrs exp in position offered, or as a Client Mgr, Acct Mgr, or rel. Alt, employer will accept a Master\’s deg or foreign equiv in Biz Admin, Mkting, or rel + 3 yrs exp in position offered, or as a Client Mgr, Acct Mgr, or rel. Employer will accept p r e - / p o s t - M a s t e r ’s exp. Must have 5 yrs (or 3 yrs w/ Master’s) of exp w/: Working in a Global Benefits B2B environment; Mnging multinational client relationships incl maintaining & dvlping client satisfaction. Travel: 30% domestic & int’l travel req’d to various & unanticipated co & client sites. APPLY: https:// careers.marshmclennan. co m using Key word R_258269. EOE

Associate Quantitative Credit Strategist Associate Quantitative Credit Strategist sought

by Legal & General Investment Management America in Chicago, IL to assist with the development of new risk analytics, relative value analysis, and visualization of portfolio risk using Python for USD, GBP, and EUR credit portfolios stored in Oracle/PostgreSQL database, AWS cloud and Bloomberg API. Position requires a US Master’s degree, or foreign equivalent, in Mathematics, Finance, Financial Mathematics or related field and two (2) years of experience coding and data mining in Python; developing quantitative models; designing, shaping, and extrapolating quantitative and m a t h e m a t i c a l methodologies; preparing platform migration by developing a data migration methodology in preparing data, ensuring data security and w o r k i n g w i t h c ro s s functional teams; launching Python and SQL software optimizations; supporting the analysis o f m a c ro - e c o n o m i c environment; data collection from API; designing and maintaining an integrated data infrastructure including a real-time data pipeline, various data pre-processes, and interactive data visualization; overseeing data cleansing work for generation of historical time-series; handling cash bonds

in fixed income securities including: discounting cash flows, computing yields, difference between date conventions, calculations, impact on bonds, and calculating profit and loss; and, performing relative value analysis on market sectors. Two (2) years of experience in technical tools: Python, SQL, Oracle/PostgreSQL, Bloomberg (including Bloomberg API), Excel, AWS cloud, and LaTeX. Any suitable combination of education, training or experience is acceptable.

Telecommuting allowed 2 days per week. Send resumes to Legal & General Investment Management America at Katie.Edeus@lgima.com Thorek Memorial Hospital seeks Clinical Data Analyst for Chicago, IL location to apply knowledge of healthcare to analyze clinical data. Master\’s in healthcare admin/ Data Analytics +3yrs exp req\’d. Req\’d skills: Meditech Magic EHR incl Data Repository; Report dev in SQL Server (queries, SP, SSRS); Clinical nomenclatures & mapping; Meaningful Use Program, MIPS, eCQM reporting; Advanced Excel (pivot t a b l e s , V L O O K U P, formulas); Jupyter Notebooks; Python; Pandas; Tableau; VBA scripting. Email: hr@ thorek.org , REF: MI Manager IT Exelon Business Services Company LLC seeks Manager IT in Oakbrook Terrace, IL to mng telecommunications IT projects involving wireless, LTE netwrks, & other backhaul technologies, incl. planning & executing RF activities, mnging & improving netwrk performance, performing & reviewing RF dsgn, optimizing RF parameters, providing RF tech supp., & performing netwrk wide audits.

Reqs U.S. or foreign equiv. bach.’s deg. in telecommunications e n g r. , c o m p . e n g r. , elec. engr., info. tech., or a rel. discipline + 5 yrs comp. netwrking or telecommunications exp. Incl. 3 yrs mnging RF projects involving 5G, VoLTE, & LTE wireless technologies. Telecomm.

From w/in normal commuting distance of Oakbrook Terrace, IL is permitted. Reply by e-mail with resume to jobposting@exeloncorp. com.

Azure Synapse Pipeline Developer (Chicago, Illinois) Develop, analyze & implement complex data pipelines using various Azure Synapse platforms in

Power BI. Configure, design, develop, and test dashboards using Power BI using Oracle, Oracle Utilities, ETL tools or any other relational database and tools.

Master of Science in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field or foreign equivalent. Frequent travel and relocation may be required. Send resumes to: HR Dir, Platinum Consulting Services, Inc., 2425 West Lawrence Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60625; EOE Quantitative Researcher Aquatic Group is seeking a Quantitative Researcher in Chicago, IL. Design computer programs that extract signals from finance data, train models to predict future returns, and optimize the execution of portfolios to maximize profits.

Must live within normal commuting distance of worksite. 20% remote work allowed. Email resume to HR@Aquatic. com and reference code 80065 in subject line.

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AN OPERA BY TERENCE BL ANCHARD

LIBRET TO BY MICHAEL CRISTOFER

Fight with pride.

January 27 - February 11 Sung in English with English titles.

Starring Reginald Smith, Jr. and Justin Austin Enrique Mazzola, conductor

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lyricopera.org/champion

Lyric’s 2023/24 Season is sponsored by Invesco QQQ and Julie & Roger Baskes.

Lyric Opera of Chicago thanks its Official Airline, American Airlines, and acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Champion is commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera.

Originally commissioned by Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, co-commissioned by Jazz St. Louis. A co-production of Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Metropolitan Opera.