Print Issue of February 16, 2017 (Volume 46, Number 19)

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY | K I C K I N G A S S S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | F E B R U A R Y 1 6 , 2 0 1 7

Rahm, Rauner, and Trump threaten to bankrupt Chicago’s public schools. 8 Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men plays the game of Privilege—literally. 21

THE GUY DEFENDING ALL THE COPS

Attorney Dan Herbert has made it his mission to serve and protect police officers—even Laquan McDonald’s killer.

By MAYA DUKMASOVA 12

JOE BONAMASSA GUITAR EVENT OF THE YEAR FRIDAY, MARCH 10 SATURDAY, MARCH 11

BRIAN REGAN FRIDAY, APRIL 7

EXPERIENCE HENDRIX

ARETHA FRANKLIN

ALI WONG

MOVE - BEYOND

SATURDAY, MARCH 31

FEATURING BILLY COX, BUDDY GUY, ZAKK WYLDE, JONNY LANG, KENNY WAYNE SHEPHERD, DWEEZIL ZAPPA AND MORE SATURDAY, MARCH 25

SATURDAY, APRIL 8 - 7PM & 10PM

LIVE ON TOUR SATURDAY, APRIL 22 - 3PM & 8PM

GET ACCESS TO

CHASE PREFERRED

SEATING

AVAILABLE TO CHASE CREDIT AND DEBIT CARDMEMBERS.

For more info, visit Ticketmaster.com or

chase.com/chicagotheatre 2 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

M A RQ U EE PA R T N ER O F T H E C H I CAGO T H E AT R E ®

The Chicago Theatre provides disabled accommodations and sells tickets to disabled individuals through our Disabled Services department, which may be reached at 888-609-7599 any weekday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Debit cards are provided by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC Credit cards are issued by Chase Bank USA, N.A. © 2016 JPMorgan Chase & Co.

l

l

THIS WEEK

C H I C AG O R E A D E R | F E B R UA RY 1 6 , 2 01 7 | VO LU M E 4 6 , N U M B E R 1 9

TO CONTACT ANY READER EMPLOYEE, E-MAIL: (FIRST INITIAL)(LAST NAME) @CHICAGOREADER.COM

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

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE

4 Agenda Actors Gymnasium’s new spectacle Quest, stand-up from Bobby Lee, Trayvon Martin’s parents at a Chicago Humanities Festival event, the film John Wick: Chapter 2, and more recommended things to do

CITY LIFE

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

To serve and protect cops

Attorney Dan Herbert has made it his mission to defend police officers—even Laquan McDonald’s killer.

BY MAYA DUKMASOVA 12

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

7 Street View A Ghanaian immigrant’s clothing line encourages black and African people to be themselves.

7 Chicagoans Parkour makes the city look like one big playground, a practitioner of the discipline says.

8 Joravsky | Politics Rahm, Rauner, and Trump threaten to bankrupt Chicago’s public schools.

10 Transportation After an officer in an unmarked car seriously injures a cyclist, police blame the victim.

DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654 312-222-6920, CHICAGOREADER.COM ----------------------------------------------------------------

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY LUCY HEWETT. FOR MORE OF HER WORK, GO TO LUCYHEWETT.COM.

30 In Rotation Current musical obsessions include repetitive drum-set drills, the Procession reverb pedal by Old Blood Noise Endeavors, and more 33 Shows of note The Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Run the Jewels, Soft Fangs, and more recommendations 35 The Secret History of Chicago Music The Chicago blues pantheon needs more women—and Queen Sylvia Embry deserves a spot.

FOOD & DRINK

39 Restaurant review: Ronero Restaurant row gets a rum bar with a pan-South American vision.

41 Key Ingredient: Dulse Chef Ben Lustbader of Giant makes bread with the “bacon of the sea.”

CLASSIFIEDS

42 Jobs 42 Apartments & Spaces 43 Marketplace

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY

BY STM READER, LLC, 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CHICAGO READER, READER, AND REVERSED R: REGISTERED TRADEMARKS ®.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

ARTS & CULTURE

20 Lit A presidential-library expert on what to expect from the Obama Presidential Library 21 Theater Straight White Men plays the game of Privilege—literally.

21 Theater The One-Minute Festival offers a takedown of the entire Trump administration in only 60 seconds.

22 Comedy KJ Whitehead takes comedy back from straight white men.

23 Dance The Cambrians bring the mashup to the dance world.

----------------------------------------------------------------

COPYRIGHT © 2017 CHICAGO READER. PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL.

26 Lit A new biography of Dorothy Day is an antidote to trying times.

MUSIC

Overhaul of Mirrors

Jaime Fennelly enriches his solo drone project, Mind Over Mirrors, by turning it into a five-way collaboration.

BY PETER MARGASAK 27

23 Visual Art The Driehaus Museum remembers a time when ads were art.

24 Movies The Red Turtle swims against the tide of children’s animation.

44 Straight Dope What are the privacy concerns with regard to using a Fitbit?

45 Savage Love Is the only option for an asexual person in a relationship to “take one for the team”?

46 Early Warnings Descendents, Maren Morris, Metallica, and other shows in the weeks to come 46 Gossip Wolf The Burlington conjures up a witch-house night, and more music news.

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

AGENDA R

GAME CHANGERS FEB 15–26 4 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

READER RECOMMENDED

Send your events to agenda@chicagoreader.com

b ALL AGES

F funny. The result is an evening that feels at once too short and too long, full of wry smiles but few belly laughs. —JACK HELBIG Through 3/5: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, The Buena, 4157 N. Broadway, 800-737-0984, newamericanfolktheatre. org, $20.

Quest o COLE SIMON

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater The Arrow Cleans House The latest iteration of the Neo-Futurists’ absurdist storytelling series (devised by Kurt Chiang and Lily Mooney) is an “ode to misery and disillusionment” covering both pervasive downers like the election and more niche yet no less polarizing topics like genome editing. Under Chiang’s direction, the cast of five attempts to read original essays to the audience in the face of egregious interruptions from each other—everything from pseudointellectual lines of questioning about whether characters are “good guys” or “bad guys” to physical horseplay to water that’s spilled and sprayed. Essays and play interludes evolve from week to week, but these spontaneous complications, or “arrows,” are the primary form of improvisation. A surprisingly high-concept exercise, this Arrow feels like an unpolished look behind the curtain at performers workshopping their most outlandish concepts. —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 2/26: Sun 3 PM, Neo-Futurarium, 5153 N. Ashland, 773275-5255, neofuturists.org, $15.

Beowulf: An Epic Quest of Music, Monsters, and Mead Aaron Sawyer wrote and directed this two-person musical adaptation of the old English epic poem, presented here by Red Theater Chicago, but he can’t decide whether he wants to retell the ripping yarn, deconstruct it, or just poke fun at it for its ancient sexism and silly notions of heroism. The result is a noisy, messy, endlessly unfocused production, overstuffed with songs (by Pavi Proczko and Brindin Sawyer, with additional material from Brenda Scott Wlazlo) and unsuccessful in pulling the audience into the story or providing a coherent analysis.

Proczko and Wlazlo are occasionally entertaining as, respectively, Beowulf and Grendel’s mother, but in the end, I suspect the only people who fully understand what’s going on onstage are the people involved in the show’s creation. —JACK HELBIG Through 3/11: Fri-Mon 7:30 PM; also Thu 3/9, 7:30 PM,

Den Theatre, 1329-1333 N. Milwaukee, 773-609-2336, redtheater.org, free-$20.

Carmen Every featured role in this big, new-to-Chicago production of Bizet’s gypsy classic at Lyric Opera is masterfully sung, the chorus is in fine form, the orchestra is terrific, and the original spoken dialogue has been restored, providing a surprisingly fresh touch. Close your eyes, and it sounds great. Open them, and you’ll see that at the most compelling moments of the story, the focus shifts from the central characters to as many as a dozen dancers enacting a parallel performance. Mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Gubanova as Carmen (nearly erased in all-black garb) and tenor Joseph Calleja as her obsessed lover, Jose, aren’t able to generate much chemistry amid this distracting staging by director Rob Ashford, but they’re scheduled to be replaced midrun.

Soprano Eleonora Buratto, who brings a gorgeous voice and winning performance to the part of the “good girl,” Micaela, stays on. —DEANNA ISAACS Through 3/25: Sat 2/11, 7:30 PM; Wed 2/15 and Sun 2/19, 2 PM; Wed 2/22 and Tue 2/8, 7:30 PM; Fri 3/3 and Mon 3/6, 7:30 PM; Thu 3/16 and Sun 3/19, 2 PM; Wed 3/22 and Sat 3/25, 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker, 312-3322244, civicoperahouse.com, $17-$349.

Deep in the Heart of Tuna This New American Folk Theatre production compiles scenes from the first two (Greater Tuna and A Tuna Christmas) of the four plays written by Ed Howard, Joe Sears, and Jaston Williams about the fictional town of Tuna, Texas. Yet what’s commendable about the series—such as its gentle humor and amusing quick changes (each of the two actors plays multiple characters)—fails to overcome its lamentable qualities, like predictable jokes and a dependence on well-worn good-old-boy stereotypes. Comedic virtuosos might make this material sing—Sears and Williams toured for 30 years playing these characters, until Sears retired in 2012—but the two actors director Derek Van Barham recruited, Anthony Whitaker and Grant Drager, are merely pretty good, better at making these cartoon characters sympathetic and likable than at making them

The Ghoul Exhibition Writer and performer Héctor Álvarez addresses the destructive force of gun violence in this deeply affecting solo show, directed by Theatre Y’s Melissa Lorraine for the 2017 Rhinofest. For Álvarez, guns have a sort of poetic imbalance—they are an incredibly efficient invention but more often than not inspire helpless, even desperate behavior. Five different scenes use a combination of original and preexisting texts to illustrate the point. Some of them are mildly humorous; others truly audacious, most memorably when Álvarez adopts the persona of a twisted Latino lawyer defending (or abusing?) a white cop. Come ready to contribute: audience participation is a big part of the show’s effectiveness. —MATT DE LA PEÑA Through 2/23: Thu 9 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-539-7838, rhinofest. com, $12 in advance, $15 or pay what you can at the door.

Goddamn Geniuses: Legacy of Brilliance Brussels, 1927: Five physicists are having cocktails after hours at the prestigious Solvay scientific conference. Niels Bohr is present, hyping probability. Erwin Schrodinger does his cat-in-the-box trick. And Einstein, well, he’s Einstein. Suddenly the party gets crashed, excellent-adventure-style, by Nick, a visitor from the future who totes his own bong and brings bad news: “hell spirits” called Goobies are coming to kill the physicists, maybe because science is wrecking religion—I’m not sure. Anyway, plenty of ninja-like havoc ensues. Both the cocktail talk and the havoc go on too long, and lots of it is inscrutable.

But stupid/smart surprises keep coming while the cast of this Runaways Lab Theatre premiere (written and directed by Gannon Reedy from a story by Nathaniel Shane) maintain a gonzo energy.

These folks don’t take bows when their 70 minutes are up. They dance. —TONY ADLER Through 3/5: Fri-Sun 7 PM, Voice of the City, 3429 W. Diversey, 773-782-

9471, runawayslab.org, $17.

The History Boys For Eclectic Full Contact Theatre’s revival of Alan Bennett’s Hollywood-friendly 2004 drama about the fight for the minds and souls of incorrigible British schoolboys, set designer Laura Carney makes an astute decision: She places the classroom onstage and the administrative offices in distant nooks amid the audience.

The layout amplifies one of the play’s central tensions—the wide gulf between public lessons and private politics. But little else in director Katherine Siegel’s staging brings much clarity to these excessively animated, dramatically scattershot three hours. The show continually charges forward without establishing a credible stage world with recognizable stakes. The boys are being aggressively prepped for entrance exams to Cambridge and Oxford, yet their studies never seem consequential. Even the looming career collapse of Hector, the incurably, heroically nonconformist literature teacher, seems more entertaining than tragic. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 3/5: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Sat 2/25 and 3/4, 2 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6860, eclectic-theatre.com, $27-$32, $17-$22 students and seniors.

Quest Actors Gymnasium’s R latest spectacle was created and directed by 500 Clown cofounder Leslie

Buxbaum Danzig, who channels her circus-storytelling aesthetic into “The Three Questions,” a short story by Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s parable concerns a king who wants answers to three questions: How to do the right thing? Who are the most important people? And when is the right time? However vague these questions might first appear, they lead our protagonist on an inspired journey—the king eventually consults a wise hermit, who guides him to answers. AG tells the story through physical language, including aerial arts, hat juggling (a standout act by Amanda Crockett), and acrobatics, alongside an original music score by Kevin O’Donnell. —SUZANNE SCANLON Through 3/19: Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 4:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Actors Gymnasium, Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes, Evanston, 847-328-2795, actorsgymna-

The Scottsboro Boys o KELSEY JORISSEN

l

l

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of February 16

sium.org, $20, $15 students, seniors, and children under 12.

R

The Scottsboro Boys This dark, powerful concept musical marks the final collaboration between composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb—the brilliant team who created Cabaret, Chicago, and Kiss of the Spider Woman—prior to Ebb’s 2004 death.

With a book by David Thompson, it recounts a notorious true case of racist injustice—the railroading of nine black teenagers on false charges of raping two white women in 1930s Alabama—in the style of a 19th-century minstrel show, using the hallmark techniques of that form (including blackface, drag, ragtime “coon songs,” and a cakewalk dance) to bring a Brechtian distance to the story.

Porchlight Music Theatre’s Chicago premiere features a superb ensemble under the direction of Samuel G. Roberson Jr., with period-style choreography by Florence Walker-Harris and Breon Arzell and first-rate musical direction by Doug Peck. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 3/12: Thu 7:30 PM (except Thu 3/2, 1:30 PM), Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM (8 PM only 2/11), Sun 2 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252, porchlightmusictheatre.org, $45-$8, $40-$43 seniors.

Urinetown BoHo Theatre delivers this Broadway smash, a musical about what would happen if peeing were privatized, with all its scatological splendor. The powers that be in Urinetown have taken control of all urinals in the public weal, charging admission for emission in order to squeeze the city’s sooty poor of all they’re worth. Despite its incessant, hip self-mockery, this is a big old-fashioned musical, and it’s got showstoppers to prove it (Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis’s score won a Tony). Choreographer Aubrey Adams’s group dance numbers steal the show, except that a ton of mugging from the ensemble earns cheap laughs at the expense of some crucial moments in the narrative. Ariana Burks as poor Little Sally, tugging on the policeman’s sleeve with a mutilated teddy bear under one arm, has wonderful timing and a fine voice. —MAX MALLER Through 3/26: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 6 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252, bohotheatre.com, $33-$35.

DANCE

Ballet de Lorraine In conjunction R with the current Merce Cunningham exhibit, the French dance company

and Powerful Sistas returns to the Crowd for its monthly comedy showcase celebrating women of color. Sun 2/19, 7 PM, Crowd Theater, 3935 N. Broadway, thecrowdtheater.com, $5.

Echo Chamber of Secrets A R sketch revue starring Emily Batek, Becca Brown, Sam Carlyle, Alessandra Drapos, Leila Gorstein, Rolando Lepe, and Alice Stanley Jr. Through 2/25: Sat 9 PM, Blackout Cabaret, 230 W. North, 312-337-3992, secondcity.com/venues/ chicago/the-blackout-cabaret, $12.

Bobby Lee The comedian, best R known from Mad TV and Love, performs stand-up. 2/17-2/19: Fri 8 and

10:15 PM, Sat 7 and 9:15 PM, Sun 7 PM, Chicago Improv, 5 Woodfield, Schaumburg, 847-240-2001, $28.

LIT

Black Eye No 3 release To celR ebrate the Rotland Press comics anthology Black Eye No 3: A Shameful

Enlightenment, Quimby’s brings together Chicago-based contributors Andy Burkholder, Corinne Halbert, Paul Nudd, Onsmith, and Johnny Sampson. Sat 2/18, 7 PM, Quimby’s Bookstore, 1854 W. North, 773-342-0910, quimbys.com.

R

Rest in Power: The Enduring Life of Trayvon Martin Trayvon Martin’s parents, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, join the Chicago Humanities Festival to discuss their new book about how the loss of their son launched a national movement for civil rights. Fri 2/17, 6 PM, DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl., 773947-0600, dusablemuseum.org, $20.

Wit Rabbit The reading series R hosted by Sara Wainscott and Sarah Meltzer features authors Matthew Corey, Molly Dumbleton, Diddle Knabb, and Tara Stringfellow. Sat 2/18, 5 PM, Township, 2200-2202 N. California, 773384-1865, townshipchicago.com.

MOVIES Bobby Lee o KEVIN WINTER

VISUAL ARTS Arts Club of Chicago “Ralph Coburn: Random Sequence,” the Arts Club re-creates an installation of color-block paintings Coburn conceived in 1962 but never before realized. Opening reception Thu 2/16, 6 PM. 2/16-4/22. Mon-Fri 11 AM-6 PM. 201 E. Ontario, 312-787-3997, artsclubchicago.org.

Smart Museum of Art “Classicisms,” group exhibition exploring the definition of “classical.” Opening reception Wed 2/22, 7-8:30 PM. 2/16-6/11. Tue-Fri 10 AM-4 PM (Thu till 8 PM), Sat-Sun 11 AM-5 PM. University of Chicago, 5550 S. Greenwood, 773-702-0200, smartmuseum.uchicago.edu.

More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS A Cure for Wellness Director Gore Verbinski (The Ring, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise) spins a gothic horror tale in the vein of Rosemary’s Baby, though his movie seems to last forever and, when it finally ends, leaves a sour aftertaste of overproduced, overblown schlock. A young Wall Street executive (Dane DeHaan) turns up at a mysterious spa in the Swiss Alps to retrieve one of his colleagues; the tedious plot hinges on a climactic twist one can see coming from a mile away, and the protagonist is intriguing only for his strong resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio in the similar yet superior Shutter Island (2010). Jason Isaacs sleepwalks through his role as the spa’s sphinxlike founder, and Mia Goth’s character is an amalgam of sexist horror movie tropes: creepy waif, childlike victim, sex object. —LEAH PICKETT R, 146 min. Block 37, Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, River East

performs three of Cunningham’s works: Sounddance, Fabrications, and Untitled Partner #3. 2/18-2/19: Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 and 7:30 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org, $30.

R

21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings Fifty Shades Darker The title suggests a more extreme follow-up to the softcore Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), but if anything, this ersatz-noir sequel from James Foley is more laughable than Sam Taylor-Johnson’s gauzy original.

Anguished billionaire Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) renegotiates terms with his former BDSM partner Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), who since their breakup has moved on to a fasttrack career in book publishing. Their sexual trysts this time around are both kinkier and, oddly, more sedate, every frame looking tidy and airbrushed. No real threat underlies their bedroom encounters, most of which seem to lead to cunnilingus (whether it’s the punishment or the reward isn’t clear).

Any suspense comes first from a stalker, then from Anna’s sleazoid boss, and finally from Grey’s sexual mentor (Kim Basinger), tottering about like some stiletto-clad update of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca. Other than Dornan’s exceptional physique, the movie offers little gratification, delayed or otherwise.

—ANDREA GRONVALL R, 118 min. Block 37, Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings Fist Fight School’s out for the summer, and on the last day of class at a suburban middle school, a teacher who’s been laid off (Ice Cube) challenges a rival who’s survived the ax (Charlie Day) to a fistfight out in the parking lot after the final bell. I was bored by the leads’ shtick—Ice Cube seething and stonefaced, Day meek and ingratiating—yet the movie’s premise kept me chuckling for days afterward, especially the grand finale with the student body and local TV news watching the combatants face off.

Screenwriters Van Robichaux, Evan Susser, and Max Greenfield raise the satirical ante with a nicely jaundiced view of the school, which is underfunded, riven by office politics, and teetering on the brink of anarchy.

Richie Keen directed; with Christina Hendricks, Tracy Morgan, Dean Norris, and Jillian Bell, providing more than her share of laughs as a school guidance counselor who propositions and scores drugs off the students. —J.R. JONES R, 91 min. Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings John Wick: Chapter 2 This R sequel to the surprise hit John Wick (2014), with Keanu Reeves as a

COMEDY B.A.P.S. Comedy Black History Month Spectacular Beautiful

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

“Ralph Coburn: Random Sequence” at the Arts Club of Chicago

3 POWERFUL WORKS

BY TODAY’S MOST

BRILLIANT CHOREOGRAPHERS

JOFFREY.ORG

312.386.8905

laconic assassin stylishly eliminating the mobsters who killed his puppy, is even more entertaining than the first time W

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 5

AGENDA B around. Picking up a few days after the original film left off, the narrative zigzags around the world with Wick, reluctantly taking what he thinks will be one last assignment, as he alternately evades (in thrilling car chases) and battles (in exquisitely choreographed “gun fu” sequences) hordes of hit men tasked with whacking him.

Returning director Chad Stahelski and screenwriter Derek Kolstad sharpen the dark humor and seemingly triple the body count; fans of the Matrix series will delight in the onscreen reunion of Reeves and Laurence Fishburne, playing an old foe of Wick’s who agrees to help him out. With Common, Ian McShane, and John Leguizamo.

—LEAH PICKETT R, 122 min. Block 37, Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings 76 Minutes and 15 Seconds With Abbas Kiarostami The great Iranian filmmaker, who died in July 2016, appears in casual, unguarded moments captured on video by his collaborator Seifollah Samadian.

Kiarostami shoots video footage of geese on a beach and repairs to the studio to record the Foley work, flapping his own shirt into a microphone to simulate wings; he creates an art installation for which giant blowups of his nature photography are assembled to represent the surfaces of a forest; and he returns to the countryside where he shot Through the Olive Trees (1994), making a shy, affectionate visit to actress Tahereh Ladanian.

The episodes come from various points in Kiarostami’s late career and are strung together with the sort of wandering spirit he brought to his own dramas; they reveal a man of boundless imagination, though only hard-core fans are likely to stick it out to the end credits.

In Persian with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 77 min. Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeedvafa, co-authors of the biography Abbas Kiarostami, attend the Saturday screening. Sat 2/18, 8 PM, and Sun 2/19, 5 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Starless Dreams Iranian docR umentary maker Mehrdad Oskouei ventures inside a correctional center for teenage girls and gets a handful of them to open up about their lives before they were incarcerated. Like accounts of the U.S. juvenile justice system (e.g.

Ben Lear’s They Call Us Monsters), the movie is striking for its glimpses of violent offenders from squalid homes lapsing into the silliness and vulnerability of childhood: out in the yard, girls laugh and squeal as they build a snowman, and inside the cafeteria, one bold girl grabs the filmmakers’ boom mike and leads the others in a song. The difference here is that Oskouei’s subjects have grown up under a strict

6 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

Unbroken Glass religious patriarchy that not only reinforces their abuse at home (one girl remembers an uncle taking her into a room to pray whenever he wanted to rape her) but also guides the criminal justice system into which they’ve been driven. In Persian with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 76 min. Facets Cinematheque Unbroken Glass When filmR maker Dinesh Das Sabu was a six-year-old boy growing up in

Louisiana, his father died of cancer and his schizophrenic mother committed suicide. Two decades later, Sabu and his four older siblings, who essentially raised themselves, still grapple with memories of their father’s anger, their mother’s mental illness, and the parents’ sudden deaths, not to mention their own identities as Indian-Americans. For this personal, emotionally complex documentary, Sabu spent five years interviewing family members and questioning his own upbringing; the result is a study of grief, forgiveness, and how family history can provide a greater understanding of oneself. —LEAH PICKETT 57 min. Sabu attends the screenings.

Fri 2/17, 8:15 PM; Sat 2/18, 3:30 PM; Sun 2/19, 5:30 PM; Mon 2/20, 8:30 PM; Tue 2/21, 6 PM; Wed 2/22, 8:15 PM; and Thu 2/23, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center A United Kingdom Directed by Amma Asante (Belle), this ambitious historical romance revisits the scandalous 1947 marriage of Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo), heir to the throne of the Bamangwato people in the British protectorate of Bechuanaland (now Botswana), and Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), a white insurance clerk he met while studying law in London. The early scenes, detailing the lovers’ careful courtship inside the racial codes of postwar Britain, are the best, driven by the leads’ charm and onscreen chemistry. The film grows more dully instructional, however, as screenwriter Guy Hibbert (Eye in the Sky) outlines the political ramifications of this interracial marriage for the Bamangwato, who balked at accepting a white woman as their queen, and for the British, who tried to drive Khama

from the throne to protect their diplomatic relations with apartheid South Africa just across the border.

—J.R. JONES PG-13, 111 min. Landmark’s Century Centre XX Creepy animation sequences with doll parts and little antique curios (in the style of Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer) sloppily connect four horror shorts by women. Roxanne Benjamin’s Don’t Fall is an Eli Roth-style shocker about young, hip campers discovering a demonic force in the mountains, and Annie Clark’s The Birthday Party, a goof on Hitchcock’s Rope, offers a tour de force from Melanie Lynskey as a mom trying to conceal a body to salvage her child’s birthday celebration. Bookending these two duds are two genuinely disquieting stories rooted in the horror of maternity. The frustration of having a child who won’t eat fuels Jovanka Vuckovic’s opening segment, The Box, in which a little boy glimpses something strange on the subway and inexplicably begins starving himself to death. And with the concluding segment, Her Only Living Son, Karyn Kusama (Jennifer’s Body, The Invitation) spins a supernatural tale of the evil-seed variety, in which a mother dreads the 18th birthday of a cocky young son who says things like “I have dreams of an empire of misery.” —J.R. JONES R, 80 min. Fri 2/17 and Sat 2/18, midnight, and Sun 2/19-Tue 2/21 and Thu 2/23, 9:45 PM. Music Box

SPECIAL EVENTS Happiness The most famous R and probably the best film by the neglected Russian pioneer

Alexander Medvedkin (“the last Bolshevik” in Chris Marker’s video of that title). This late silent surrealist masterpiece (1934), hilarious and daring, combines the pie-eyed “magical realism” of a Gogol with what might be described as a mordant communist folk wisdom.

—JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 66 min.

David Drazin and Golosa provide live accompaniment; a panel discussion follows the screening. Fri 2/17, 7 PM. Univ. of Chicago Logan Center for the Arts v

l

l

CITY LIFE

“Your vision changes when you get into parkour. Seeing trees and rooftops—it never turns off,” Martin says. o JIAYUE YU

Chicagoans

Parkour makes Chicago look like one big playground Angela Martin, 22, parkour practitioner and teacher

Lesan Mattis and John Williams o

ISA GIALLORENZO

Street View

Empower couple

YOU GOOGLE “PARKOUR,” you’ll come up with a definition like “using movements such as running, jumping, climbing, swinging, to get from point A to point B quickly and efficiently.” That’s not wrong, but it’s limited. Parkour is more of a discipline.

Many people train in a way that’s about exploring physical limitations. Some people are just having fun with their environment, seeing the world as a playground. Others are trying to be ready to move fast and efficiently during emergency situations. I play with a bit of everything. I do love to play with my physical abilities, and also with trying to overcome fear of certain movements and objects.

There are a lot of practitioners who push themselves to do big jumps or big drops, and they’ll add flips and tricks. Because that is so flashy and eye-catching,

“FASHION IS EMPOWERING,” John Williams says. “It allows me to embrace who I am, and I believe it has the ability to do this for others.” It was with that spirit that the accounting student and Ghanaian immigrant founded the fair-trade apparel company Gyetum—which means “to embrace” in the Ghanaian language Akan—to encourage black and African people to accept “who we really are,” says Williams, pictured with his girlfriend, Lesan Mattis. “It seems like these days we are always looking to be accepted by others, changing the way we dress, speak, trying to fit in, and assimilating to other cultures that aren’t our own.

But why would we need others to embrace us if we already embrace ourselves?” —ISA GIALLORENZO

the media loves it. So when I mention parkour to random people, they say, “I can never do that. I’m not fit enough.” When I started, I was in a similar state. I felt very insecure with my body. I was overweight. Even though I didn’t start off in the best shape, as I practiced more and played with small movements, I started to feel more confident.

In my classes, I work with a lot of people who don’t have any movement background. I’ll show them basic bear crawls, crawling on the floor with hands and feet and nothing else touching the ground, keeping your back low and parallel with the ground. Then I’ll show them some simple vaults. How to take a landing. Small jumps. As they start to feel more comfortable with the movements, we take it further.

Your vision changes when you get into parkour.

Seeing trees and rooftops—it never turns off. If I’m in a car with other instructors, we’re like, “Oh, look at this jump over there! Look at that wall!” Here in Chicago, it’s harder to find spaces where you can practice parkour and not get kicked out because of liability issues. We usually train around Grant Park, or sometimes we’ll train by the Riverwalk, where they have these ledges and stairs.

I have trouble with jumps onto rails. If the rails are only like four or five feet apart, jumping from one to the other it doesn’t feel like a natural thing. Even something as small and simple as that can get that fight-or-flight reaction going for me. With this training, you start to have a relationship with your own fear. You learn to calm yourself down, to fight the voice that says, “Don’t do it.” Once you overcome that, a world of possibilities opens up.

I don’t play too much with big scary stuff. Some of the bigger stuff I’ll do would be like six- or seven-foot drops, maybe going into a roll. Cat leaps, where you catch the edge of the top of a wall. Maybe working on flips a little bit, or balancing at height on rails. I don’t think you would be that scared to see me do it. In five years, I’ve only sprained my ankle once. —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 16

FRIDAY 17

SATURDAY 18

SUNDAY 19

MONDAY 20

TUESDAY 21

WEDNESDAY 22

ê Benefit for the American-Arab AntiDiscrimination Committee This fund-raiser features a silent auction, raffle, and performances from Sünken Ships, Stomatopod, Jigsaw, and the Icarians. 7 PM, Township, 2200-2202 N. California, adc.org, $10.

J Ramenfest Twenty chefs join Bill Kim (BellyQ, Urbanbelly) for Ramenfest, a chance for guests to try ramen from dozens of restaurants—including Big Star, Kimski, Publican, and Sunda—and vote for your favorite. Noon, Urbanbelly, 1400 W. Randolph, ramenfest2017. brownpapertickets.com, $75.

ò Winter Record Fair Eye Vybe Records, the Empty Bottle, and the Benevolent Order of Chicago Record Labels host a marketplace with vendors representing Chicago-based record labels.

Noon-4 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, emptybottle. com. F

Æ Tango: A Masquerade Ball Off-Kilter and the Hyde Park Arts Center come together for a charity ball featuring cocktails, a silent auction, and music by Just.

One. 7 PM-1 AM, the Bedford, 1612 W. Division, hydeparkart. org, $15-$250.

& President’s Day Benefit Dinner Pop-up diner Saved by the Max hosts a fundraiser with an a la carte dinner menu benefiting the ACLU. 5 PM-midnight, Saved by the Max, 1941 W. North, savedbythemax.com, $10.

& Taco Fest 2017 Mago Cantina & Grill hosts this inaugural festival featuring tacos from Antique Taco, Latinicity, and Diana Davila’s upcoming spot, Mi Tocaya.

6-9 PM, Mago Cantina & Grill, 1010 S. Delano, tacofest2017. com, $30.

Afternoon Snatch The world premiere of the new comedy webseries Afternoon Snatch, featuring a Q&A with its creators, Kayla Ginsburg and Ruby Western.

6 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, chicagoculturalcenter.org. F

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

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

CITY LIFE POLITICS

Going for broke Rahm, Rauner, and Trump threaten to bankrupt Chicago’s public schools.

By BEN JORAVSKY

P

ardon me for sounding paranoid, but it sure looks as though the three most powerful politicians in our universe are teaming up to drive our schools into bankruptcy.

Not that Rauner, Rahm, and Trump have anything against the low-income kids of Chicago—other than that you can score political points by pounding them like a punching bag.

Let’s start with President Trump, who’s turned pummeling the poor of Chicago into a Twitter art form.

It’s still not clear what damage he and Betsy DeVos, his education secretary, will do to Chicago Public Schools—beyond threatening the very existence of public education by diverting a good chunk of federal funds to private and religious schools.

Each year Chicago gets hundreds of millions of federal dollars—most funneled through the state—largely intended for schools with high concentrations of low-income students.

So if Trump whittles away at federal educational spending, the poor will suffer the most. Then Trump will tweet about murders in Chicago as though he and his programs had nothing to do with them.

Meanwhile Governor Rauner’s already started defunding CPS—the system has become collateral damage in his ongoing fight against teachers’ unions and pension funds.

If you recall, last year Mayor Emanuel finally tried to make good on obligations to the Chicago teachers’ pension fund. Roughly $215 million of the contribution to the fund was to come from the state.

But in December, Rauner vetoed the pension-funding bill on the grounds that it was not “real pension reform.” I’ll get to that in a bit.

To make up for the $215 million, Forrest Claypool, Rahm’s appointed schools CEO, ordered teachers to take four furlough days, thus slicing $35 million from the budget. And

8 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

last week Claypool cut another $46 million by reducing spending for things like textbooks, technology, after-school programs, and hourly staffers who watch the playground at recess.

So while Rahm was in California, bragging to the students at Stanford’s business school about how he brought back recess to Chicago, his appointee, Claypool, was snatching it away. And it was all thanks to Rauner, Rahm’s old wine-drinking, money-making pal.

Claypool also responded by slapping Rauner with the T-word.

“Just like Trump, Rauner is going to score political points with his base by attacking Chicago,” Claypool told reporters. “It’s the easy thing to do.”

Rauner responded by having his education-

al adviser, Elizabeth Purvis, send a letter to CPS parents blaming everything on Rahm.

“Rather than cutting services,” Purvis wrote, “it would be helpful to everyone if CPS would work with all parties to enact a balanced budget package that includes comprehensive pension reform.”

(You know, I’m starting to think that the so-called feud between Rahm and Rauner may be for real—though I have no doubt they’d go back to putting together business deals in a heartbeat should they return to the private sector.)

But anyway, pension reform—I told you I’d get back to it. That’s shorthand for cuts in pension payments to retirees.

Former governor Pat Quinn and Rahm already tried to cut pensions. Several unions

sued, and eventually they won both cases, as the Illinois supreme court unanimously and unambiguously ruled that it’s unconstitutional to cut pensions.

In short, Rauner’s making school funding to Chicago contingent on pension cuts that neither he nor Rahm has the power to make.

It’s a pretty cynical move—even by Illinois standards.

Thanks to Rauner’s cuts, CPS will undoubtedly have to borrow more money to pay basic bills. That means taking money from the classroom and spending it on bankers and bond lawyers. It’s good to know someone’s benefiting from Rauner’s school “reform.”

The city could try to make up for state cuts by raising property taxes. But Rauner wants a statewide freeze on the property taxes. It’s part of his “grand bargain”—a deal he’s trying to cook up with state senate president John Cullerton.

Property taxes are the largest source of money that locals can raise to fund the things that matter the most—like the education of their children.

As such, Rauner’s hometown, Winnetka, taxes the hell out of its property—that explains why New Trier is one of the finest high schools in the state.

I’m not saying I like paying property taxes.

On the contrary, I was howling at the moon

Rahm Emanuel, Donald Trump, and Bruce Rauner ; PAUL JOHN HIGGINS

l

l

CITY LIFE You know the schools are in trouble when Rahm’s behaving like the only grown-up in the room.

"*'0)'6(*0'3*6 /3*1,*-3*& )/&.+;'& -27(+;23- #2/ )/&.+;'& 1&217& +/66751!-*: ,((!5<!8': 48. $74=9 &!5*01*. 23#0"71"*546# 48. >#6871"*546# (75 ,./=13

ß @joravben

Never miss a show again.

6.! 80 -<.1&=5 7)-% ;7041*. !8 &7)817)8 %-483178

:$"4:""4*9$, !!!4-7%)27+3#45,-7%)27+3# $7,.45,-

"*$0 !&(%% "*$0 '/-0*1 +&0.0&&01 +&(#-10& !-,)2 +&0.0&&01 +&(#-10&

when I got my bill a few weeks ago.

But with Rauner and Trump looking to cut school aid, what choice do we have? As unfair as it is to make schools dependent on property taxes, right now it’s pretty much the only alternative CPS has to bankruptcy.

That brings me to Rahm—the man who ultimately determines how we spend much of those property taxes. As hard as this is to believe, he’s the closest thing to a rational actor in this equation. You know you’re in trouble when Rahm’s behaving like the only grown-up in the room.

My main problem with Rahm is that his priorities are often out of whack. He should be fighting to spend every nickel he has on getting Chicago’s kids the kind of Cadillac education he got in his glory days as a young high school scholar at New Trier. But instead, he can’t resist siphoning off local funds for stupid shit.

Exhibit A being his recent proposal to revive former Mayor Daley’s idea to build an express train to O’Hare so out-of-town business visitors can shave 20 minutes off their commute time to the Loop. Like that should be at the top of our priority list.

Emanuel swears up and down he won’t spend public funds on that project. But that’s what mayors always tell us about their pet projects when they want to lull us to sleep.

This is no time for sleeping, people. I’d say you should organize to elect a new school board to force the mayor to change his spending priorities. But alas, Chicago remains the only municipality in the state with a mayorally appointed board.

The good news is that we still get a say in electing the governor. Rauner’s up for reelection in 2018. As far as our schools are concerned, that election can’t get here fast enough. v

6>' (9"%#$ 69"+! .E E>' 32;@'*G;E: /C "55;2/;G7 &>;,.A/ ;G 5//8;2A C/* C#)'")HJI% 1+$F%& C#)' %I) 1J) CK == E/ -.*E;,;-.E' ;2 . ")HJI%LFC&& ')&)1'-I &%$+!M

License Revoked?

You CAN

EARLY WARNINGS Find a concert, buy a ticket, and sign up to get advance notice of Chicago’s essential music shows at chicagoreader.com/early.

<B* *'G'.*,> GEB): 5//8G .E >/= E>' ?');E'**.2'.2 );'E HEB1-%& -CJDH%H#) 1/HFH%H)& FHG) E)EC'! ;2 /5)'* .)B5EG4 8,0650 46,, <<?L;:?LA;>@ 39 ,067( *970 5%$+! /! 2'M *1'H1D .H%NJH//CD 12/12/2016

get it back.

Call us for a Free Consultation.

Flat Fees available for most cases.

Visit us on the Web at :

0F IH1D1ID

U234

CHOICE - OF STYLE

D389

http://www.chicagoduiadvocate.com

- A Law Practice Concentrated in all types of License Reinstatement Cases - Former Illinois Secretary of State Hearing Officer - Over 25 years experience with Secretary of State hearings - FREE CONSULTATIONS The Law Offices of Victor Churma 17 North State Street Suite 1700 Chicago, IL 60602 (312) 388-7999

06/07/2017

BENCH ALSO AVAILABLE

DINING TABLE W/ 4 CHAIRS - OR RPUB TABLE W/ / 4 PUB CHAIRS RS

B227

$

549

D289

SOFA & LOVESEAT EAT T W/ WOOD TRIM

988

$

7 COLO COLOR OR CH CHOICES! HOICES

CHOICE - OF FINISH

B228

U35

GLAMOUR STYLE BEDROOM W/ DRESSER, MIRROR & QUEEN BED

$

999

B226

6 PIECE MOTION ON POWER SECTIONAL NAL

$

1799

DISCOUNT D SC CORNER 708-201-7930

OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK! Monday thru Saturday 14200 Chicago Rd. • Dolton, IL 60419 9am - 9pm Sunday, 10am - 6pm

FINANCING & LAYAWAYS AVAILABLE DELIVERY AVAILABLE

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE The intersection at Wellington and Racine, where cyclist Annie Zidek was struck by an unmarked Chicago police SUV o JOHN GREENFIELD

DONATE SHOP SUPPORT big-medicine.org

“One of the best resale shops in Chicago” -Time Out Chicago

6241 N BROADWAY CHICAGO MON-SAT 11-7 SUN 12-7 773-942-6522 TRANSPORTATION

Warning signs

After an officer in an unmarked car seriously injures a cyclist, police blame the victim.

INSTALL NOW • SERVICE NOW • SAVE NOW

Our service rvice department is trained on all major brands of hearth products od FREEE IN-HOME FRE IN-HOME IN-H OME CONSULTATIONS CONSULTA CONSULTATIO LTATIO TIONS FOR MOST ST PRODUCT PRODUC PRO DUCTT PURCHAS PURCHASES P HASES ES • CHIMNEY LINERS • MASONRY REPAIRS

60

Burnings Display

200 OFF

$

Any Fireplace or Stove purchased with full installation Not valid with any other offers or specials.

Expires 3/31/17

100 OFF

$

Any Gas Log System or Custom Glass door purchased with installation Not valid with any other offers or specials.

Expires 3/31/17

20 OFF

$

Any Service, Maintenance or Chimney Sweep

Not valid with any other offers or specials.

Expires 3/31/17

SERVING CHICAGOLAND FOR OVER 20 YEARS • OFFERING THE MOST EXPERIENCED STAFF IN THE INDUSTRY

AMERICAN HERITAGE FIREPLACE & CHIMNEY SPECIALISTS 773-862-8200 • amherfire.com

VISIT OUR BEAUTIFUL SHOWROOM AT

3054 N. Western, Chicago

HOURS: MON, TUES, THURS & FRI 8:00-5:00 WED 8:00-7:30 • SAT 9:30-3:00 • SUN CLOSED

Wood & Gas Fireplaces & Stoves • Gas Inserts • Gas Logs • Glass Doors • Wood Inserts • Tool Sets & Accessories

10 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

By JOHN GREENFIELD

A

round 11 PM on Wednesday, January 18, Abigail Kruger was sitting on her couch in her Lakeview duplex, just south of Wellington and Racine, when the evening’s quiet was shattered by a loud bang.

“I thought it was a gunshot, or a car had hit a light pole,” she recalls.

As Kruger went to her first-floor window, she heard a short burst of police sirens, then silence again, followed by a young woman crying, “Help, someone please help me.” On the west side of Racine she saw 19-year-old Annie Zidek lying on the pavement, surrounded by four or five Chicago police officers.

Kruger ran outside. She says she thought Zidek had been shot, but as she approached the teen, she saw a dented and broken bicycle and realized that she had been struck on her bike. Zidek’s backpack, phone, and one of her shoes were scattered across the street.

Kruger says she then assumed Zidek had been the victim of a hit-and-run. But the motorist who injured the cyclist was actually

an as yet unnamed police officer who sped through the intersection at Wellington and Racine—which has four-way stop signs—en route to a burglary call.

The Chicago Police Department now argues that Zidek was at fault, claiming that she ran her stop sign, and that the officer who hit her had activated his emergency lights before he went through the intersection. However, Zidek’s attorney says the truth about the crash has yet to be determined, and that the police department’s refusal to accept responsibility is yet another example of our city’s larger problem of police accountability.

Zidek, a DePaul undergraduate, was on her way home from work at a Starbucks near Wellington and Broadway when she was struck, according to a male relative who asked not to be named, citing fears of police retaliation.

In the aftermath of the crash, Kruger says, Zidek lay with the left side of her face and shoulder on the asphalt, her hips rotated toward the ground. Even though Kruger didn’t yet know an officer had injured Zidek, she says

l

l

CITY LIFE she noticed the police weren’t doing anything to comfort the victim.

“The police kept asking her if she knew what had happened. And she wanted to give them the information, but she was absolutely blindsided and had no idea,” Kruger says. “She got really upset and started to cry, so I asked them to stop.”

Kruger waited with Zidek until an ambulance took her to Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital, where she was treated for a broken pelvis and leg, road rash, and injuries to her face, according to her relative.

As Kruger walked back toward her house, she saw an unmarked Ford Explorer SUV parked diagonally across Racine, south of Zidek’s bike, with a dented hood and a shattered windshield. Kruger then realized that an officer had struck Zidek.

“I was so frustrated,” Kruger says. “The police knew exactly what happened.”

Zidek and her father didn’t respond to e-mails sent through their attorney, Antonio Romanucci of Romanucci & Blandin. Zidek was recently released from the hospital, Romanuc-

ci says, and is currently undergoing challenging and painful physical therapy.

In a statement last week, CPD spokesman Kevin Quaid blamed Zidek for the crash, claiming that she “disregarded a stop sign” and that the officer who struck Zidek had his emergency lights activated when the crash occurred.

Officers responding to emergencies may disobey traffic rules, such as stopping for stop signs, if they activate their lights and sirens, according to CPD. Police also have the option not to turn on sirens if they need to roll up on a crime scene quietly, as long as it’s safe to do so.

But Romanucci argues that this doesn’t absolve the officer who struck Zidek, if it’s found that he was “acting with conscious disregard” for the safety of others.

According to both Romanucci and Kruger, it appears that no third-party witnesses saw the moment of impact. There are no traffic cameras at Wellington and Racine, and the attorney says there doesn’t seem to be security camera footage of the collision. But late-model police vehicles, like the one involved in the crash, have dash cams that automatically start

recording when emergency lights or sirens are activated, CPD confirmed.

“So if the lights were on, then the dash cam was on, and we should find out if they’re telling us the truth,” Romanucci says. “We know that the Chicago police will do whatever it takes to hide their responsibility and misdeeds and misconduct, and transparency is an issue with revealing police misconduct.”

The U.S. Department of Justice report on CPD released last month suggests that Romanucci’s claims aren’t just wild accusations.

The DOJ’s investigation found, among other things, that a “code of silence” exists among officers. “One way to cover up police misconduct is when officers affirmatively lie about it or intentionally omit material facts,” the report states.

Last month Romanucci filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all records pertaining to the crash. CPD has requested an extension until February 25.

But even if the officer who struck Zidek did activate his lights, Romanucci argues, that doesn’t free him from responsibility.

“If Annie was already in the intersection, what was she supposed to do?” he asks. “They can’t just plow into her.”

Kruger agrees: “There was this arrogance being displayed where, because the police are responding to a call, they’re above having to stop, and so the crash was Annie’s fault,” she says.

Adding insult to injury, the city mailed Zidek a $1,192 bill for her ambulance ride. Romanucci plans to file a lawsuit against the city on her behalf, although he says it’s not certain whether she’ll file a misconduct complaint with the police department.

Either way, CPD should provide the dash-cam footage of the crash, just as it would if the officer who struck Zidek was accused of harming a civilian with a gun and not a vehicle. If police drive in a manner that puts the lives of other road users at risk, that’s completely at odds with their mission to serve and protect. v

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

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 11

O

TO SERVE AND PROTECT COPS Attorney Dan Herbert has made it his mission to defend police officers—even Laquan McDonald’s killer.

o LUCY HEWETT

By MAYA DUKMASOVA

12 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

n a crisp morning in early November, attorney Dan Herbert, dressed in a blue suit and red tie, a thick, worn manila folder in hand and a razor nick drying on his chin, strides up the steps of the Leighton Criminal Courthouse on the corner of 26th and California. Inside, his client Jason Van Dyke—who was caught on video shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times—stands awkwardly in line for the metal detector, his aging father by his side. Herbert dispenses cheery hellos and friendly handshakes to the sheriff’s deputies at the checkpoint. He asks that they let Van Dyke skip ahead in line and rides the elevator to the second-floor cafeteria to fill a large Styrofoam cup with black coffee. On the way to the wood-paneled courtroom where Van Dyke and his father sit demurely in a front pew and a few reporters lounge in the jury box, Herbert admits that this is his first time defending a client on murder charges. But it doesn’t seem to sway his confidence.

“Everyone thinks murder,” he says, dropping his voice in a mock terror, “but a felony case is a felony case.”

In the courtroom, Herbert continues to glad hand and banter with attorneys and court staff, greeting special prosecutor Joseph McMahon. Herbert, a 48-year-old father of four, looks like a cross between a marine and a linebacker, with a muscular build barely contained by his unpretentious off-the-rack suits, a square jaw, and a crew cut. He’s the sort of guy that a teen-movie director might cast to greet his daughter’s prom date with a baseball bat over his shoulder. He coaches Little League and is a church-going Catholic. Herbert is also a former cop, a former prosecutor, and now, the go-to defense attorney for Chicago police officers facing misconduct allegations.

In the courtroom Herbert projects a casual confidence that couldn’t be more at odds with the demeanor of his client.

Van Dyke, who upon Herbert’s counsel declined to answer questions for this story, looks just barely alive: pale, with blank eyes, a puffy face, and slumped shoulders. “He’s very fragile,” Herbert tells me. “A lot of clients question me or pester me on every issue, but he’s so overwhelmed with everything else he’s happy to let me handle the legal proceedings. He’s really a nice guy—it’s amazing he’s doing as well as he’s doing.”

As the courtroom fills up with other

l

l

defendants on Judge Vincent Gaughan’s call, mostly black and some Latino men, it’s not clear whether they know they’re sharing a roster with Van Dyke, who became notorious after the dash-cam video of him killing McDonald was released in November 2015. The Cook County state’s attorney’s office charged him with first-degree murder the day before the video came out—an unexpected move for an office that had for decades opted not to prosecute police officers accused of misconduct. But no one sits next to Van Dyke and his father anyway. The two remain in somber silence throughout a half-hour recess during which Gaughan takes all the attorneys into his chambers to discuss the case away from the public and press.

When they file back in, Herbert winks at Van Dyke like an encouraging coach.

There’s been some progress on his fight to get McDonald’s juvenile records from DCFS, ones that would attest to the teen’s troubled childhood as a ward of the state, his being beaten, sexually abused, and in trouble with the law. This information could be relevant for what is colloquially known to lawyers as “Lynch material,” a reference to People v. Lynch, a 1984 Illinois supreme court decision that allows evidence about a victim’s past acts of violence to be used to justify killing him in self-defense. Some observers have accused Herbert of going after these records as part of a base plan to smear McDonald’s reputation before a jury. For Herbert, examining the records is a logical component of a robust defense strategy.

At the hearing, the judge sets a continuance date for December, and Herbert breezes out of the courtroom, saying good-bye to Van Dyke and stepping into an elevator with a sheriff’s deputy, who happens to be wearing a body camera.

“Jesus, they have you wearing them?”

Herbert asks. The deputy explains that some new bodycams turn on automatically when a Taser is unholstered, and on the brief ride down the two commiserate about increased surveillance of police.

Out in the courthouse parking lot, Herbert throws his suit jacket in the back of his 2006 navy Lexus with a vanity plate reading “wht sox 2.” The car was probably once quite impressive, but with its worn leather interior and peeling wood detailing is now just a way to get around.

During the drive to his West Loop office, Herbert reflects on his newfound prominence in the wake of taking on Van Dyke as a client, and what it might mean

Herbert with his client Jason Van Dyke at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse in March 2016. Herbert argues that Van Dyke’s shooting of Laquan McDonald was justified, and accuses city officials of sacrificing Van Dyke to save their own political skins. o NANCY STONE/POOL/CHICAGO TRIBUNE

for his business going forward. As prosecutors around the country have become emboldened to press charges against police officers for harming citizens, his firm is poised to be a leader in a potentially fertile area of criminal defense. Even with a new “law-and-order” presidential administration endorsed by the national Fraternal Order of Police union and other pro-cop groups, the election of the reform-minded Kim Foxx as Cook County state’s attorney in November has many local observers expecting more cases like Van Dyke’s in the years to come. Indeed, Foxx charged another Chicago cop with murder less than a month into her tenure. Nevertheless, Herbert doesn’t see himself as some kind of Johnnie Cochran for police officers.

“Honestly, I don’t think the outcome [of Van Dyke’s case] will affect my business one way or the other,” he says.

“From a bottom-line standpoint, I’m already kind of at capacity anyways . . . I’m not looking to build the biggest firm in Chicago. I’m looking to just, basically, continue to provide a good defense for my clients.”

Herbert estimates that about 60 percent of his clients are cops. The rest are mostly people who’ve heard about him through grapevines that include cops.

And criminal defense is only a fraction of his work. Since 2010 Herbert’s small law firm has netted as much as $600,000 annually representing police officers in

administrative hearings, personal injury suits, divorce cases, and state and federal matters ranging from DUIs to civil rights charges. At times he’s also sued the police department on behalf of officers for libel, for sexual harassment, and even once for discriminating against the relatives of cops in CPD hiring. Whereas most lawyers who start their own firms tend to pick a practice area to specialize in, Herbert’s cases are united by his clientele. He’s the guy who represents cops.

But police officers aren’t just Herbert’s clients—they’re family. Not only was he once a cop, his father was a cop too, and he grew up firmly ensconced in a farnorth-side Irish Catholic neighborhood full of other cops.

With activist fervor to reform or even abolish the police gaining local and national momentum since the slaying of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, Herbert thinks police officers are now “sacrificial lambs” and the “ultimate underdog.” When he takes on a case, it’s usually because he thinks his clients have been treated unfairly. “I love representing people in that situation,” Herbert says.

This belief that he’s fighting for the little guy, combined with a lifetime of close personal relationships within the police department, breeds protectiveness, maybe even myopia. Even in his role as guard dog and guardian angel for cops, Herbert is the first to admit that there

are “bad apples” among them. But he doesn’t think their conduct is symptomatic of inherent problems in policing— just shortfalls in leadership and training.

And the “guys and gals” he represents?

They aren’t the problem.

Herbert’s roster of clients, and his defense of them both in and out of the courtroom, suggests that he’s working hard to protect a worldview in which policing is inherently just and necessary, and cops, as a class, are the “good guys.”

But this worldview is increasingly under threat from politics, policy, public opinion, and in many cases, hard evidence to the contrary. Victims of police violence and reform advocates have for decades been calling attention to the rotten system that allows bad apples to thrive and multiply. Lawsuits that allege systemic corruption and cover-ups within the police department have cropped up every few years since the Reader’s John Conroy first exposed Jon Burge’s torture ring in 1990. And since the release of the McDonald video, the U.S. Department of Justice and a task force appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel have declared that misconduct is tied to a police culture in which those in charge are hesitant to jeopardize their good relationships and excessive force and racism are tolerated and go unchecked.

When someone, whether it be an activist or the U.S. attorney general, says that the police department is plagued by institutional racism, Herbert takes it as a personal insult, not a statement about the disproportionately negative effects of policing on African-American and Latino communities. And his critics say that his deep personal ties within the police ecosystem impair his ability to take corruption within the department seriously.

Herbert thinks the wide-sweeping indictments of Chicago’s policing status quo are the purview of starry-eyed children and out-of-touch suburbanites. In Herbert’s eyes, these officers aren’t bad people with bad intentions, as many believe. Rather, they’re thanklessly doing their best to protect Chicagoans from the violence that seems to be getting worse every year.

“The last thing they want to admit is that they’re scared,” Herbert says, “but they are, and I know it.” Out of that fear, he says, come the “mistakes” that land his clients in front of state or federal judges or the CPD disciplinary apparatus. But “mistakes can’t be criminalized,” he often says.

J

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 13

continued from 13 Above all, Herbert sympathizes with officers under fire because he’s been there himself.

T

he law firm of Daniel Q. Herbert & Associates is located in a three-story, yellow brick building squeezed between a converted factory loft and an Al’s Beef on South Jefferson. The postindustrial vibe on the outside couldn’t contrast more with the bungalow-belt-living-room atmosphere inside. Soft, well-worn couches are arrayed around a small coffee table in the waiting area. There’s always candy in a glass bowl, and sometimes even baked goods. The homey smell of drip coffee— poured in mismatched mugs culled from employees’ kitchens—permeates the air.

Herbert is keen on creating a welcoming environment. “My clients are blue-collar people,” he explains—they wouldn’t feel at ease in a cold, corporate atmosphere. “They usually have a spouse, three kids, a mortgage on their house. They are so fearful of opening up to anyone.” Even the staff helps in this regard: everyone who works for Herbert is tied to law enforcement either by blood or marriage.

Herbert didn’t always dream of being a lawyer. Growing up in a peaceful part of Rogers Park, his early ambitions were to become a police detective, like his father.

His best friend since kindergarten, John Glynn, describes young Dan Herbert as gregarious, charming, popular with girls, and a leader.

“He definitely had a presence and let you know how he felt,” Glynn says.

Herbert’s father, Michael, was a prominent figure in the neighborhood—a kind, funny, and generous man who also had a hard edge. As Glynn puts it, “You didn’t mess around with Mr. Herbert.”

Dan Herbert, the youngest of three kids, says his parents could be tough.

With a chuckle, he recalls that the virtue of humility was central to life both at his Catholic schools and at home. “And that was beat into me,” he says. “[Both] by the nuns and my parents.”

In his youth Herbert also had some run-ins with cops outside the family context. “We got stopped by the police all the time, I mean, every time we went out,” he says, recalling piling into a junky Dodge Dart with his buddies to cruise around on weekends. They were also regularly busted drinking beer on the beach. “And what do you do when the

14 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

“I UNDERSTAND THAT ACCUSATIONS ARE NOTHING MORE THAN THAT. I THINK THAT’S SOMETHING MY CLIENTS LIKE. THEY REALIZE THAT I’M NOT GOING TO SIMPLY LOOK AT AN ALLEGATION AND ASSUME THAT IT OCCURRED.” —Attorney Dan Herbert

police come? You run,” Herbert recalls.

“We didn’t want them to take our beer; we didn’t have much money.” He didn’t always get away unscathed. When the cops caught up, “I got whacked pretty damn good.”

But one of those times the officer got so rough that, despite his fears of getting punished, Herbert told his father, who was pissed that a colleague acted this way.

“Some kid drinking at the beach—you don’t treat that person like this guy’s out doing robberies and shooting people and things like that,” Herbert says.

Herbert thinks that had he not grown up around cops, these encounters would probably have led him to have a “blanket hatred” and mistrust toward police officers. “But even at the time, I told myself, ‘OK, this guy is a moron,’” he says. “But never once did I think police are just assholes in general.”

Herbert graduated from Loyola Academy in 1986 and headed off that fall to study journalism, wrestle, and play football at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa.

He worked at the Board of Trade after graduating, but in 1991 he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and apply for the police department.

H

erbert’s career as a CPD officer got off to an inauspicious start.

The first of the 17 misconduct allegations made against Herbert during his nine years as a cop came

before he even had a chance to start off on patrol.

Responding to a crime surge, CPD rushed to hire 600 new officers in late 1991, and instead of completing full background checks on all applicants before allowing them to proceed to the academy, the department asked them to sign affidavits stating that they had no prior arrest records. The department would then continue processing the cadets’ fingerprints to confirm the information attested to.

Herbert signed such an affidavit, affirming that he’d never been arrested, taken into custody, or charged with any violation. But in May 1992, while Herbert was still in training, the delayed results of his background check came back to reveal that he had, in fact, been arrested and charged with misdemeanor battery while in his senior year of college.

The investigative documents, obtained via a Freedom of Information request, explain that the charges stemmed from an altercation with a woman outside a bar, during which Herbert allegedly “pushed her several times in the upper body and grabbed her hand hard enough to break some finger nails on her hand.”

Herbert was sentenced to one year of supervision, according to the report.

The director of CPD’s personnel division accused Herbert of falsifying his affidavit; he was then investigated by the Office of Professional Standards—the precursor to the Independent Police Review Authority. In a subsequent interview with the department, Herbert “admitted that he had lied on his affidavit,” the report says, but also claimed he’d told the officer who interviewed him for the job about the arrest. Ultimately the OPS investigator recommended that Herbert receive a 15-day suspension, but the investigator’s boss disagreed, ruling the allegations against Herbert “unfounded.”

Herbert now says the whole thing was a misunderstanding: “They were wrong about me not giving them truthful information.” He says he never lied on an affidavit or tried to conceal his arrest record, and that the arrest itself was so insignificant that he doesn’t even recall whether he told his father about it.

In the summer of 1992, Herbert began patrolling what was then CPD’s 23rd District, covering Boystown, Wrigleyville, and Uptown. The next year he was transferred to the 24th District—in his home neighborhood of Rogers Park—as part of

CPD’s fledgling CAPS community policing program.

“He was a natural—he had blue blood,” says Glynn, who also briefly worked as a cop. The work can be tough on families and relationships, both financially and emotionally, Glynn says, but Herbert seemed to thrive. “I never saw any stress or tensions.”

As Herbert describes his time patrolling the streets where he grew up, one can’t help but imagine the ideal of the neighborhood cop, a kind of Officer Friendly. Intimately knowing the places and people you’re policing is “really what community policing is all about, and that’s what makes it effective,” he says. “It gave me kind of an edge in investigating and catching bad guys over there, because I knew people in the neighborhood.”

Jim Byrne was Herbert’s partner in those years, and the two were assigned to the “school car.” If police were needed at one of the district’s 30-some schools for any reason, Herbert and Byrne were dispatched. Byrne says Herbert was great with kids, and that his local street cred was always helpful.

“Anywhere you would go, everybody knew him,” Byrne recalls. “He’s like a mayor everywhere he walks into.”

Herbert’s policing experience is at stark odds with that of many of his clients today—those white cops who live in white neighborhoods in the farthest reaches of the city and patrol black and Latino communities they may know little about. Herbert says community policing like he lived it is a “wonderful concept,” but he doesn’t see how it could be extended to every part of town.

“Police officers get paid a modest salary, but if they were to live in some of the poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods, it wouldn’t be practical for them,” he says. “Anyone that has a family isn’t going to bring their family into Englewood to raise their kids—nothing against the people of Englewood, it’s rather against the criminals and the bullets in Englewood.”

Knowing the district and its people helped Herbert and Byrne defuse and de-escalate potentially volatile situations—the sort of situations that in recent years have turned numerous police officers into Herbert’s clients.

One time the pair were called to an elementary school where a middle-aged white man had been seen acting erratically, swinging a hatchet in front of 400 kids and saying, according to court

l

l

records, “I am going to kill, kill all of you if I have to.” It’s the sort of call that “gets your blood flowing,” Herbert says.

When they arrived on the scene they found the man with the hatchet in a nearby alley. He seemed to them to be obviously homeless and probably mentally ill. Herbert says they told him to drop the hatchet, which he did. Herbert kicked it into the sewer without bothering to inventory it, and arrested the man without incident.

“This guy was not threatening. He was not going to kill any children,” Herbert says, despite the man having been heard saying just that. “He was just a homeless guy who had a knife on him, which was not unusual.”

Herbert admits that the incident could’ve had a more violent and tragic end if he and Byrne weren’t as experienced. “Could we have shot this guy?”

Herbert asks. “Absolutely.”

In fact, just a few months before that, they had shot someone. On the afternoon of January 10, 1995, they received a call about a home invasion near Granville and California. They rushed to the scene, but by the time they got there, Herbert says, the suspect, a white man, had carjacked a BMW, shot the owner, and was trying to drive away.

Byrne and Herbert leaped out of their car, pulled their guns, and shot several rounds at his tires.

“We were trained to do everything not to shoot this guy first,” Herbert explains.

The suspect kept moving on flats, barely able to pick up speed, but somehow managing to merge into northbound traffic on California.

“So we were literally running next to him, trying to get him to stop, hitting him, punching him, trying to reach for the keys, telling him to ‘Stop, stop, stop,’” Herbert recalls.

Finally, the man crashed into a busstop bench on the northwest corner of Devon and California. By then several other officers had also arrived at the scene, and they surrounded the car. “He pointed a gun at us, and that’s when we all—pow! Opened up,” Herbert says. The man was wounded in the chest and leg.

Despite recalling that day in granular detail, both Herbert and Byrne say they can’t remember the suspect’s name.

They say he survived, though, and was put on trial for attempted murder for pointing his gun at them. Herbert recalls testifying in the case, and says that ultimately the man was convicted. He also claims to have learned later that the man

Herbert, left, with his former partner Mike Conway, at a friend’s engagement party circa 1993. Herbert worked as a Chicago police officer from 1992 to 2001. o COURTESY DAN HERBERT

had AIDS, and that his behavior that day was intentionally reckless, although he says he can’t remember where he got this information. “He wanted the police to kill him because he didn’t have the guts to commit suicide,” Herbert says.

But some of the details of this incident as Herbert and Byrne recall them—especially the more inflammatory ones—are almost impossible to verify. The only news account of the shooting, from the Chicago Tribune, didn’t name the suspect (or the officers, for that matter) and was based on information provided by a police spokesman. The Reader made numerous public records requests with CPD, the clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, and the Illinois Department of Corrections in an attempt to identify the man and corroborate the story. But CPD didn’t archive use-of-force reports from the 90s, the man doesn’t appear to have filed a complaint against Herbert or Byrne, and none of the nearly 200 men still serving time in Illinois prisons for crimes committed in 1995 were arrested near the time of the shooting or charged with felonies that could have stemmed from this incident. And without the man’s name, other public records, such as arrest reports or legal case files, can’t be requested or found.

Herbert received a distinguished service award from the Fraternal Order of Police for his efforts in apprehending the man that day. He says this incident was the only time he discharged his weapon in nearly a decade on the force. And he still stands by his actions.

“That was a very good shooting.” he says. “I’ve used force on a lot of people, but I like to think that I always, always used force in the appropriate manner: to defend myself or somebody else.”

Byrne agrees with Herbert’s depiction of his time as a cop, saying that his former partner was always level-headed and used good judgment on the job: “I knew I was safe with him all the time. He wouldn’t walk into things charged up crazy.”

But some of the misconduct allegations against Herbert, which the Reader received from CPD along with the file regarding his arrest record, paint Herbert as the sort of cop who could also get rough.

Some of the allegations are trivial: Herbert and Byrne were once accused of singing Spanish songs from the intercom of their car. The complaint wasn’t sustained, and Herbert says it wasn’t unusual to receive such “bizarre” complaints.

But seven of the reports against Herbert during his nine years with CPD allege excessive use of force. Although none were

sustained—not unusual given that IPRA’s precursor, the Office of Professional Standards, sustained fewer than 10 percent of misconduct allegations in the 90s—one alleges that the victim, a 15-year-old black boy, was on his way home from school when Herbert and Byrne stopped and arrested him for trespassing. The boy claimed that one of them slapped and verbally abused him in the car and the other, once they arrived at the 24th District station, slapped him with some rolled-up papers and “passed gas” in his face.

Five use-of-force complaints allege Herbert shoving, slapping, kicking, or punching black men, and once calling a man he detained the N-word. In March 1996, a 26-year-old black man who’d been arrested for theft at a Rogers Park pawn shop alleged that the arresting officer handcuffed him to a wall of an interview room and questioned him about “previous complaints he had made against a member of the police department.”

At that point Herbert allegedly arrived, recognized the arrestee, and asked the arresting officer: “Do you mind if I get physical with him?” Herbert was left alone in the room with the arrestee, allegedly stretched, said he was “ready for a workout,” and slapped the arrestee, punched him in the stomach and chest, and attempted to kick him in the groin.

Herbert denied all the allegations at the time of the investigation, and so did all the other officers named in the complaint. The investigator ruled the allegation “not sustained” and concluded: “[Victim] related that no one witnessed the alleged physical abuse, as it occurred in a closed room. Also [victim] did not seek medical treatment to substantiate his claims.”

Herbert still maintains that none of what the man alleged occurred. But the experience of being confronted with these allegations fuels his ability to build rapport and trust with his clients—he knows both what it’s like to use force and to be accused of using it improperly.

“I understand that accusations are nothing more than that,” Herbert says.

“I think that’s something my clients like.

They realize that I’m not going to simply look at an allegation and assume that it occurred.”

O

ver the last few years Herbert has represented officers charged with the sexual assault of an inebriated woman, officers who have allegedly beaten J

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 15

continued from 15

up shoplifting teens, officers involved in domestic violence, and officers accused of planting evidence, perjury, and DUIs. He represented two officers involved in covering up the killing of David Koschman by former mayor Richard M. Daley’s nephew Richard Vanecko. He’s also represented black officers suing the city for discrimination and a female officer suing her boss for sexual harassment.

He regrets taking on some cases, but usually only because a client wound up being difficult to work with. Just about the only cops Herbert doesn’t want to defend are alleged child molesters. In November, he was glad when a CPD officer facing federal sex-trafficking charges involving a child went with another lawyer.

“In order for me to be good, I kind of have to believe in the cause, and believe in my client,” Herbert says.

The difference between a cop accused of paying to have sex with a 14-year-old girl and one accused of murder?

“I know what was going on in my client’s head in these shootings,” he explains. “There’s no malice whatsoever in these individuals.”

But the cases that have catapulted Herbert to prominence haven’t only been instances of potentially egregious uses of force, they’ve also been ones with racist overtones: Jason Van Dyke shooting Laquan McDonald; Marco Proano emptying his gun into a car full of unarmed black teens; and Timothy McDermott, who in 2002 posed for a scandalous photo with a black arrestee.

In the infamous “hunting” photo, McDermott and officer Jerome Finnigan, both of whom are white, pose kneeling with rifles next to a black man—later identified as 18-year-old Michael Spann—prone on the floor with tongue out, eyes rolled up, and deer antlers taped to his head. The photo was widely cited as yet another indicator of CPD’s deep-rooted racism, and fit into a long history of debasing and dehumanizing photographs of African-Americans created by white supremacists for fun.

At the time the photo was taken, both officers were part of CPD’s infamous Special Operations Section, whose members, according to civil litigation records and criminal investigations, beat, harassed, robbed, and kidnapped citizens. In 2011, Finnigan, the most notorious member of squad, was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for ordering a hit on a fellow officer, among other crimes. McDermott,

16 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

ations Section officers were frequently accused of doing.

When I brought this up with Herbert, he remained unconvinced that Spann was the man in the hunting photo, and insisted that the information provided by the Sun-Times was never part of the city’s case against McDermott. He said CPD wasn’t able to provide any arrest report to identify Spann during McDermott’s hearings.

Spann, who was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2007, isn’t able to speak for himself. But his uncle told the SunTimes that he remembers how terrified his nephew was that night and that the officers “were all laughing, telling him to crawl around, stick his tongue out.”

But, Herbert said, if it were true that the man in the photo was an arrestee, “I think it would change my opinion about the incident.” If that man was really an arrestee, Herbert said, then McDermott’s behavior would be “absolutely incorrect.” He’d go as far as to call it racist.

Herbert represented CPD detective Timothy McDermott, right, after a 2002 photo surfaced showing McDermott posing with fellow officer Jerome Finnigan, left, and a black arrestee later identified as 18-year-old Michael Spann. The photo was widely cited as an example of CPD’s deeprooted racism. o COURT FILE

however, was never charged with any wrongdoing, and was a detective when the photo surfaced and the department moved to fire him. Herbert represented him in administrative hearings and appeals.

Though they ultimately lost, Herbert says he still believes his client deserved to be a cop. McDermott, Herbert says, is “an extremely good man.” And in his eyes the photo was nothing more than a moment of poor judgment by a young officer trying to fit in.

No matter how “horrible” the photo might seem, Herbert insists, his having posed for it doesn’t mean that McDermott is racist or hates black people.

“It was the opposite—none of that was a factor,” Herbert says. “Mistakes can’t be criminalized. I sympathize with these people that make mistakes and having it held over their head. And Tim McDermott—that was exactly what it was.”

Statements like these are a testament to Herbert’s core belief in the fundamental goodness of people in law enforcement—but also to the mental gymnastics he’ll perform to arrive at the most charitable interpretations of their actions.

In an early conversation about the photo, Herbert argued that the picture didn’t tell the full story of what might have happened between Finnigan, McDermott, and Spann. He advanced the idea that perhaps Spann was a friend of the officers, and that the three were simply goofing around. “Everyone is assuming that [Spann] was an arrestee,” he said. “I don’t know why. Because he was black?

“We’re talking about people’s careers here,” Herbert continued. “And when we’re tagging them with the horrible tag of being a racist, we better have our facts in order.”

But the identity of the man in the photo was revealed by the Sun-Times in 2015, only a month after the image was made public. McDermott and his partner had arrested Spann, then an 18-year-old high school student, two days before Christmas 2002. The officers claimed they arrested Spann for selling weed on the street, but Spann’s uncle, who was arrested with him and witnessed the photo shoot at the station, told reporters that the cops had raided his home without a warrant—something Special Oper-

O

ver several months of reporting, Herbert and I had extensive conversations about race and racism in policing.

Most of them took place in his man cave of an office. As we talked he’d recline in a wide chair behind a desk scattered with disheveled legal pads, manila folders, a mini replica of Comiskey Park, and a business-card holder shaped like a baseball mitt. The exposed brick walls are covered with more White Sox memorabilia, degrees, awards, newspaper articles made into plaques, and family photos.

Throughout these relaxed and meandering talks it became apparent that Herbert’s conception of racism doesn’t extend beyond personal animus.

“Are there racists in the police department? I’m sure there are, just like there are in any profession,” he says. “But certainly it’s not a systemic problem where the majority of police officers are racists, by any stretch.”

Herbert remains perplexed by the argument that policing, as it currently exists, is institutionally or structurally racist. He seems unwilling or unable to grasp that regardless of the individual motivations of the workers within the criminal justice system, what makes the establishment racist is that black and brown people get disproportionately mistreated and killed—and that this form of racism is as significant as anyone’s personal malice.

l

l

Herbert recalls how angry he and other people in the police community felt when the mayor’s Police Accountability Task Force released its report last April citing institutional racism in the police department. “CPD’s own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color,” the report read.

“The way I took it, and the way a lot of people took it, is, well, [Police Accountability Task Force chair Lori Lightfoot] just called my dad a racist,” Herbert says.

“And I don’t know what her definition of institutional racism is, because I don’t think she explained it.”

And yet, when Herbert decided to defend Van Dyke, his 16-year-old daughter was furious.

“She believes in her heart of hearts that police mistreat minorities,” Herbert says. “And when I took this case, she thought what the rest of the public thought—that this was just a horrible example of police abusing their authority, especially with respect to minority communities, black communities.”

On the contrary Herbert argues that the reason there are so many black people caught up in the criminal justice system isn’t because of their race, but because they come from neighborhoods with higher rates of poverty and therefore higher crime rates. He adds that the reason such neighborhoods in Chicago are disproportionately African-American is because black people have disproportionately suffered at the hands of politicians and under harmful policies, such as the destruction of public housing and school closures.

Police, he says, stand at the end of a long chain of government intercessions in people’s lives. And he believes they are unfairly taken to task for bias against African-Americans when the real discrimination is perpetrated by politicians and policy makers at other levels of the state.

“Nobody looks at the politicians to say, ‘Well, did you make the right decision in closing this housing project or closing this school? And did you do enough to make sure DCFS was properly protecting them?’” Herbert says.

In a way, Herbert’s right—his assessment of the roots of institutionalized black poverty and criminalization squares with well-established historical facts. But of course, black Chicagoans have been complaining about these types of discrimination and pointing to

these root causes of crime for decades, and have been pleading—especially since the murder rate started spiking again in 2012—for the city to invest in their neighborhoods and fight segregation, not just hire more cops.

And yet, as we talked, Herbert seemed to be mulling over, for the first time perhaps, that maybe what makes, say, school closures racist isn’t that the people who made the decision might personally hate black people but that, overwhelmingly, it’s black children who suffered—that what makes it racist isn’t the intention, but the impact.

“I can completely understand people that are on the receiving end of those decisions thinking that it’s racist,” he eventually said, leaning back in his chair after a long pause. “You could certainly argue that certain policies or institutions have effects on minority communities that may be considered institutional racism.

But again, when I think of it, it goes back to—for the most part people are not motivated by the color of somebody’s skin . . . It’s more about other factors, if that makes any sense.”

After another pause he concluded with a platitude that seemed to be aimed as much at himself as at me: “It’s important that everyone see the perspective of the other side, and that’s not what we’re doing now. And you know what? It’s a very hard thing to do.”

T

hough Herbert has never lost his faith in the righteousness and necessity of policing, his faith in CPD has wavered over the years.

Between 1993 and 1995 he took one promotional exam for detective and one for sergeant, but never made it. And, he says, no one would explain to him what he did wrong.

“When I saw the promotional system, that’s probably the biggest reason that spurred me on to think about a life outside the police department,” he says.

The DOJ report on CPD released in January cited a persistent lack of fairness and transparency in the department’s promotional system dating back to the 1990s. Herbert says the DOJ “addressed everything I was saying to my crew of friends 20-something years ago.”

Herbert believes that promotion was then based on having the right connections more than on merit. And though his father was a decorated and well-respected detective, Herbert says he wasn’t the connected type.

“WE’RE TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE’S CAREERS HERE. AND WHEN WE’RE TAGGING THEM WITH THE HORRIBLE TAG OF BEING A RACIST, WE BETTER HAVE OUR FACTS IN ORDER.” —Herbert

“I was the son of a cop that was not somebody who was involved in the political structure of the police department,” Herbert says. “My dad never asked for a favor.”

And so, after his shifts on patrol, Herbert worked on a master’s degree in criminal justice at Lewis University and then began law classes at DePaul.

He eventually left the streets to teach at the police academy, but stayed on the force until he completed his law degree in 2001. Herbert applied for a job with the Cook County state’s attorney’s office immediately after graduating.

Herbert’s father served as a bodyguard to Dick Devine, head of the state’s attorney’s office at the time, and he became a role model for Herbert.

Devine says he was happy when Herbert, whom he’d watched grow up, decided to become a prosecutor. He seemed to have the right temperament. “I saw him as just a very classy young man—he was competitive, he was involved in a lot of sports,” Devine says. “My sense of Dan was he was very confident in himself and had a strong personality.”

Devine didn’t have many occasions to interact with Herbert as a rookie prosecutor, but says he heard only good things about Herbert’s performance from his supervisors, and that the work of a prosecutor “looked, not surprisingly, like a very good fit for Dan.” Though Herbert was only with the state’s attorney’s office for three and a half years, he managed to make it all the way to a felony courtroom—a rarity given that most new prosecutors spend

many years working misdemeanors and rotating assignments throughout the county before getting assigned to a stable position in one courtroom. As third chair in a felony courtroom in suburban Markham, Herbert helped prosecute a variety of crimes. Here, he says, as when he was a police officer, what made the job rewarding to him was putting away the bad guys.

Soon, though, a new opportunity presented itself. In 2004 a representative from the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7 approached him with an offer to be the local police union’s in-house counsel. His colleagues urged Herbert to take the job. “This is what you love doing, you love representing the police,” he recalls them saying. By that point he had two kids, so bumping up his salary from around $50,000 to $80,000 seemed especially appealing.

Herbert was the in-house attorney at the FOP for five years. “It was a big learning curve,” he says, due to the variety of legal work beyond his expertise in criminal law.

Over time Herbert learned that union leadership and members weren’t happy with the FOP’s outside law firm. He thought he could do a better job, and in 2010 decided to open up a new practice to serve the union’s needs. In the first two years of business, his firm made more than $1.25 million in legal fees from the union, according to the FOP’s public tax records.

In those early years, FOP referrals made up the bulk of Herbert’s business, and he was frequently called to represent officers interviewed by IPRA or CPD’s Bureau of Internal Affairs about alleged wrongdoing on or off duty. The practices of FOP representatives and lawyers around police misconduct were also addressed by the DOJ report. One of the difficulties with investigating misconduct allegations, the report explained, is that the same union lawyers often represent the officers accused of misconduct and officers who witnessed the incident. Thus, the lawyers facilitate a free flow of information that could contaminate officers’ testimony or lead to collusion. “Witness coaching by union attorneys is prevalent and unimpeded,” the report notes.

Herbert maintains that most of the problems described by the DOJ report don’t apply to the way he works, and that the specific incidents the DOJ cited as examples of troubling behavior by J

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 17

continued from 17

union attorneys happened precisely at the moment when he had a major falling out with the FOP. In March 2014, then-president Michael K. Shields dropped Herbert as the union’s preferred contractor. Shields accused Herbert of double billing the union, an allegation that “infuriated” Herbert. He says this was just an excuse to oust him. Though he wouldn’t get into specifics, he says that he “didn’t really agree with the ethics and morality of the people who were running the union,” and let his opposition be known.

So when he was fired, Herbert says it wasn’t a surprise, but he admits that he was “kind of immature about it,” adding, “when you lose a big chunk of business in one day and you’ve got four kids . . . ” Shields claimed in court documents that Herbert responded to the news by sending “insulting and provocative” phone and e-mail messages, calling him a “cunt,” and finally, showing up at his house drunk and threatening to kill him and his family.

“He alleged that I was stealing,” Herbert explains. “I went over there to tell him, ‘You better not do that.’ And, yeah, I got heated and, yeah, I told him I was going to kick the shit out of him. But the part about threatening his family is completely false.” Herbert also denies that he was drunk that night.

Shields took out a restraining order against Herbert, and the FOP sued Herbert to get their members’ records from his office. Herbert admits that he refused to give them back until the union settled its outstanding bills, which eventually it did, and the lawsuit was dropped.

“I was scared that these guys were going to dirty up my reputation,” Herbert says now, reflecting on the incident.

Losing the FOP’s business seemed like losing his job, not just a client. “It was a tough thing to swallow because I really thought, ‘This is going to kill my legal career.’”

Despite the financial hit, Herbert says losing the FOP as a client was the greatest thing that ever happened to him, “because I focused on other areas of law and other clients and my business flourished.”

Beginning in 2012 Herbert had a number of big wins, including $375,000 in a defamation suit by members of an electrical workers’ union and $500,000 in a personal injury suit; he also convinced a judge to suppress evidence of five kilos

18 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

“I AM SINKING IN MY FUCKING SEAT. I HAVE A LAWYER THAT I KNEW IN THAT MOMENT WAS AN ENEMY.” —Former CPD officer Shannon Spalding

of cocaine seized from a client in an unlawful search.

In that period he also continued to represent officers who came to him independently of the FOP. One such officer was whistle-blower Shannon Spalding, who in 2012 sued the police department’s top brass. As was recently detailed by Invisible Institute reporter Jamie Kalven in a series of stories for the Intercept, Spalding and her partner, Danny Echeverria, worked undercover with the FBI, investigating how top-level cops were covering for an extensive drug ring run by subordinate officers. But eventually their cover was blown, and colleagues and bosses within the department began to retaliate against them. They thought a lawsuit would protect them.

Spalding, who is no longer on the force and devotes her time to police accountability and transparency efforts, says she had reservations about approaching Herbert. She thought he might have previously represented or personally known some of the people she wanted to name in her lawsuit, and she worried about conflicts of interest.

“I told him, ‘You may know these bosses; I don’t know if you can represent me.’”

According to Spalding, Herbert acknowledged that he knew some of the people she wanted to sue, and a few days after their first meeting told her he wouldn’t take the case in order to avoid potential conflicts. He instead recommended another attorney, Patrick J. Walsh. Walsh eagerly accepted, and Spalding says she trusted Herbert’s recommendation.

On November 1, 2012, the day they were set to file and announce the suit to the media, Spalding says she got a call from Walsh.

“He says, ‘I have some great news: Dan Herbert has decided to join the case and be cocounsel.’”

Spalding was in shock. “We go down there, and Patrick Walsh and Dan Herbert have already set up the payment split and the contract and everything without even consulting my partner and I,” she says. “We’re like, ‘Wait a minute, how can Dan Herbert do this? I thought this was a conflict?’ We never got the answer to that question.”

Both Herbert and Walsh dispute Spalding’s account of these events, saying that they worked on the case together from the start—although Herbert says he had a large caseload at the time and relied on Walsh to do most of the heavy lifting, and Walsh says he did most of the legwork due to his experience with federal discrimination suits.

“If I had a conflict, I wouldn’t have taken it,” Herbert says.

Despite her initial concerns, Spalding says that amid the flurry of media attention, Herbert told her that she didn’t need to worry—he had thought it through and he would be an asset for her case.

“He said, ‘I’m 100 percent for you, but I am like your secret weapon,’” Spalding recalls. “‘I can get information from people I know in the department that we can then turn around and use to your benefit . . . It’s gonna be the biggest case ever—I definitely want my name attached to this.’ ” Herbert says he doesn’t recall saying this, but allows that his knowledge of the department’s people and policies is often an asset for his clients.

Spalding says the whole thing seemed strange, but that she had bigger worries.

“I’m terrified,” she explains of her mindset at the time. “I have to go into work with the bosses that I just announced on TV are corrupt.”

During the months after Spalding and Echeverria filed their lawsuit, they say the retaliation against them escalated.

They were threatened by colleagues and supervisors on a daily basis, and assigned to dead-end cases or dangerous ones with no backup. “I felt like they were setting us up to get hurt,” she says.

Things came to a head in April 2013, when police internal affairs sergeant Mike Barz detained Spalding and told her that federal eavesdropping charges would be filed against her if she didn’t drop her suit. Spalding told the Reader, the Intercept, and testified in a deposition that Barz and another sergeant ushered her into a tiny room at CPD’s Homan

Square facility. On the way, she yelled to Echeverria to call their lawyers.

Once the door was closed, Echeverria says he placed at least a dozen calls and text messages to Herbert and Walsh with no answer. “It was nerve-wracking because it was my partner going through something and I couldn’t be of any help,” he says.

Meanwhile, inside the room, Spalding says Barz questioned and intimidated her for some 45 minutes. The experience brought Spalding to a “breaking point.”

Eventually she was in tears.

“I knew they were about to put a false case on me,” she says. “In that instant, I knew the power the police department has to make people look guilty.”

Then Barz’s phone rang. It was Herbert.

As Spalding later testified in the deposition, the room was so small that she could hear the conversation on both sides of the line.

She remembers Herbert’s cheery voice. “I hear, ‘Hey buddy, how are you?

What’s going on?’”

The two made small talk, and Barz asked Herbert whether he’d make it to an upcoming gathering. “You’re my best friend, buddy,” Spalding says she heard her lawyer say to the man detaining her.

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“I am sinking in my fucking seat,” she recalls. “I have a lawyer that I knew in that moment was an enemy.”

Eventually Barz told Herbert that he had Spalding.

“Dan says: ‘You don’t really have shit on her, do you?’” She heard Herbert tell Barz that he’d need to let her go. She recalls Barz responding: “I’ll make this disappear, but you have to promise me that you do not make me part of this lawsuit.”

Herbert says he doesn’t recall this conversation with Barz, but confirms knowing Barz and having “a lot of friends in common.” He also challenges Spalding’s claim that Barz would have leveraged charges against her in exchange for not being in her lawsuit, describing him as a “by-the-book guy.”

Barz, meanwhile, denies or challenges Spalding’s account of these events, insisting that he never detained her, that the conversation actually happened in her office, and that it lasted just 15 minutes. He remembers speaking to Herbert during the encounter, but says they had no personal relationship and couldn’t have discussed a friendly get-together. He denies offering Herbert a quid pro quo.

l

l

“To suggest that I was involved in some kind of shenanigans with Dan Herbert is an absolute lie and it’s an attack on his credibility and mine,” Barz says.

Eventually Spalding was released. She knew she’d need a new lawyer as soon as possible and took her case to Smith, Johnson & Antholt. She never saw or spoke to Herbert again.

Herbert remembers Walsh calling him to tell him Spalding had taken her case elsewhere, but not the reason why.

“I’m like, ‘Good,’” he remembers saying. “I know they were driving Pat nuts, so I felt bad that I brought Pat into it.

They were difficult clients.” (Walsh declined to comment on what Spalding and Echeverria were like to work with.)

Spalding became convinced that Herbert got involved in her lawsuit in order to undermine it. When Herbert and Walsh filed her complaint in November 2012, “they wrote it so weak that the defense could win the case,” Spalding says she realized after getting a new lawyer.

“If it had remained the way it was, I wouldn’t have won anything.”

She knew that Herbert was on the outs with the FOP at the time, and now thinks that his true goal was to steer her litigation in such a way that she and Echeverria would lose and their bosses would be vindicated.

“It’s completely meritless and it makes no sense from a logical standpoint,” Herbert says of this allegation.

“There’s no way that that lawsuit could have affected my relationship with FOP in any way.”

In May of last year, shortly before Rahm Emanuel was supposed to testify in the suit, the city settled with her and Echeverria for $2 million.

Spalding says that she hopes her experience with Herbert will serve as a cautionary tale for other Chicago police officers who might not think twice when the union guides them to Herbert’s door. While Herbert could be doing a great job for some clients, Spalding thinks it’s only as long as the clients’ interests aren’t in conf lict with the city’s. After all of her experiences, she’s sure that, despite outward adversarial appearances, Chicago’s top politicians, the FOP leaders, and CPD’s top brass are all playing on the same team. And she’s convinced that Herbert is there to make sure they win when they need to.

“He blows with the wind,” Spalding says. “Whatever the city wants will dictate how Dan Herbert represents you.”

Herbert’s homey office in the West Loop feels more like a man cave. He says his clients are “blue-collar people” who wouldn’t be at ease in a cold, corporate atmosphere. o LUCY HEWETT

B

y the end of 2013, the FOP leadership that fired Herbert was itself on the way out. Shields was removed as president after, among other things, he accused negotiators of fixing police contracts with the city through back-room deals.

Current president Dean Angelo Sr. was elected in April 2014, and Herbert was quickly restored as the FOP’s preferred contractor.

“We were anxious to bring Dan back into the fold,” says Angelo, who first met Herbert when the two were working on their master’s degrees at Lewis University. “Knowing Dan, knowing his dad—to me there’s a major trust factor there.”

Herbert says he was glad to be back, but that he made it clear he wouldn’t stand for any more accusations of theft or impropriety. Since then, he says things have been running smoothly, adding that Angelo and his team are “gentlemen” in the way they do business.

He estimates that about 45 percent of his work now comes from FOP referrals.

Herbert’s tenaciousness in the courtroom, his comfort going to trial, and the way he publicly champions his clients have earned him respect and confidence.

Even when Herbert loses cases, his reputation and his business don’t seem

to suffer. Though some people grumble about him in anonymous online venues such as the Second City Cop blog, his wholehearted devotion to police officers seems rarely to be questioned.

Aldo Brown, a black former police officer convicted on excessive force charges for beating a south-side convenience store clerk and currently serving two years in federal prison, says he was happy with Herbert’s representation and commitment to the case. It didn’t faze him that Herbert wasn’t necessarily the premier expert on federal criminal defense.

“There’s always the question, because I ended up in prison—could I have made a better decision [about a lawyer]?” he muses. But then again, he’s also met plenty of inmates who spent many thousands of dollars hiring the best federal criminal defense experts and still ended up right where he is. “I think Dan did do an exceptional job given that I only got sentenced to two years and not longer,” Brown says.

Herbert is currently shepherding Brown’s case through appeal.

I heard similar appraisals of Herbert’s dedication and professionalism from other clients, including Marco Proano—currently facing federal criminal charges—and James Horn, a former

Glenview cop recently acquitted on perjury charges.

But it’s Van Dyke who will keep Herbert in the spotlight for many months to come. If his client beats the charges of first-degree murder and official misconduct, Herbert is sure to be seen as a miracle worker. For now, he’s trying not to think too far ahead. “At the end of the day I’m just a guy out here with a small law practice doing the best I can to help my clients and help my family,” he says.

At a hearing on the Van Dyke case in early February, Herbert is radiating energy. He paces around the courtroom, makes small talk with Van Dyke and his father, and greets various lawyers there on other matters.

While Van Dyke, slumped in a pew, silently mouths prayers, Herbert files new motions to dismiss the murder charges that will likely keep the case from going to trial before the end of 2017. One claims that Van Dyke’s rights were violated under statutes that protect public employees from prosecution if they give incriminating statements during investigations by their employers. The other argues that the Cook County state’s attorney’s office improperly instructed the grand jury while hustling to charge Van Dyke before the release of the video.

Many criminal defense attorneys are motivated by their love for the legal chess game. Others have a principled dedication to the notion that everyone, even people accused of commiting horrific crimes, deserves equal protection under the law. But Herbert seems principally fueled by the belief that his clients are innocent, respectable, hard-working people scapegoated in today’s political climate. He sees their persecution as dangerous to the social order and defending their honor as a matter of his.

“There was a rush to sacrifice Jason Van Dyke to the angry mob that was out there,” Herbert says firmly to Judge Gaughan. As usual, he argues, it was the lowly officer who was forced to take the fall as politicians scrambled to save themselves. If people want the police to act differently, Herbert believes they should lobby Springfield to change state laws that regulate cops’ use of force, and then take CPD to task on how well it trains its officers, instead of placing the blame at the feet of cops like Van Dyke.

“The shooting,” he concluded, “was justified.” v

ß @mdoukmas FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 19

ARTS & CULTURE

The Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Arkansas. Presidential libraries have grown exponentially since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s was constructed. o DANNY JOHNSTON

queue and we estimate that it will be fulfilled in 12 years.

You blame the presidential foundations for tweaking history. Do they run the museums?

The initial idea was that the president would create an organization to raise the money privately to build and equip the building and then donate it to the federal government.

And up to now there’s always been a single director for both library and museum, a federal employee. But the Obama Foundation recently did something unprecedented: it advertised for the position of director of the museum, to be employed by the Obama Foundation. It seems to indicate that they will not jointly operate, nor will they donate, the museum portion.

LIT

An interview with a presidential-library expert

By DEANNA ISAACS

I

n spring 2003, Anthony Clark wrote a graduate-school term paper on presidential libraries that his professor said ought to be a book. Twelve years later, he published The Last Campaign: How Presidents Rewrite History, Run for Posterity, and Enshrine their Legacies.

It’s the surprising story of the disparity between what presidential libraries are supposed to be and the spin factories and event venues they’ve become.

From 2009 to 2011, Clark served on the staff of the House Committee on Oversight and Governmental Reform, where he planned hearings and oversaw investigations of the libraries and the National Archives, which operates them. There are now 14 presidential libraries, including Obama’s. Among Clark’s observations: attendance typically falls off a cliff after the opening year. Clark spoke with me last week by phone about the history of these presidential monuments, the foundations that control them, and what we know so far about the one coming to Chicago.

historic site. And I was struck by how convincing the exhibits tried to be. It wasn’t just like “Washington slept here.” It was, if you look at these 500 artifacts—if you read his report cards and his mother’s notes, if you look at the locks of his hair—if you see and feel and experience all this, then you can understand what a great person he was, what a great president he was. That’s universal in all the presidential libraries. It is a campaign. It’s an attempt to sell. And once I got to Reagan and Nixon, boy, that was a whole different level of that campaign. It can be thrilling to go to some of these places; my concern is the way they’re operated, the use of federal tax dollars, the fake history.

What sparked your interest in these wonky historical institutions?

The first one I had seen was Franklin Roosevelt’s. I thought it was just going to be an

They’re much more than that now. What happened?

Roosevelt, the first president to build a library for his papers, had the world’s largest stamp

20 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

What are the libraries supposed to be?

They’re supposed to be archival repositories of official presidential records. That’s the legislative purpose for presidential library funding, currently at $100 million per year: to preserve and make available the records of the presidency.

collection and the world’s largest collection of naval memorabilia. So he said, let’s have a couple rooms where the public can come in and pay a nickel and see what the president does and what he collects, and that can help fund the operation of the library.

And then Truman said, let me take that a step further—maybe we can have a replica of the Oval Office and an explanation of what the presidency is. It was the Kennedy and Johnson libraries that began the monumental building idea.

But they’re still housing the records and making them available, right?

There’s a huge problem with access. The federal government estimates that, at the current pace, it will take 100 years for the national archives to fully open a given presidential library’s records. No record is available under FOIA for five years. Initially they thought all the records could be arranged and processed in that time. It was a stunningly shortsighted view of how long it would take. There are records from the Truman library that are still being withheld. My favorite example: three years ago a researcher requested a single electronic record at the George W. Bush library and received a reply that said it’s in the

Why would they want to split the museum from the library?

In 1986, Congress passed an amendment to the Presidential Libraries Act that said these things are getting too big and too costly.

You’ll have to provide an endowment when you donate the library. President Obama is going to have to give 60 percent of the cost of his library to the national archives. However, if he doesn’t deed the whole property he doesn’t have to provide 60 percent of the whole property. So maybe that’s an inspiration for the foundation to say we will operate the museum.

Let’s say the Obama library and museum costs $100 million. He’d have to give $60 million as an endowment. But if the portion deeded to the government is only $20 million, then it’s 60 percent of $20 million.

I’d also like to think that the critics, who have been beating this drum about skewed history in taxpayer-run institutions for years, have been heard. Maybe they’re heeding that call and saying fine, we’ll just do it on our own.

What advice would you give the Obama Foundation?

(1) Don’t succumb to the impulse to write history the way you want it rather than the way it happened.

(2) If you’re going to separate the archives from the museum, don’t leave the archives to fend for themselves. Help fund whatever they need; help them digitize the records and get them out. Because seeing original documents, saying this is the proof of what happened, that’s the antidote to fake news. v

ß @DeannaIsaacs

l

l

R READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

F

Alan Wilder, Madison Dirks, Ryan Hallahan, and Brian Slaten o MICHAEL BROSILOW

THEATER

His three sons

By TONY ADLER

The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. —Greek drunkard-god Silenus, quoted in Straight White Men by way of Friedrich Nietzsche

S

traight White Men isn’t an adequate title for the 2014 play by Young Jean Lee, getting its Chicago premiere now at Steppenwolf Theatre under Lee’s direction.

Something like The Allegory of Straight White Well-Educated Liberal Bourgeois Gen-X American Men From Good Homes would be more apt, if awkward. By turns funny, smug, compassionate, intentionally annoying, and just as intentionally didactic, SWM is a morality play—a kind of Everyman—for the current cultural moment.

Or a certain piece of that moment, anyway. As my revised title would indicate, Lee’s everyman isn’t really every man but a member of a very specific demographic.

Fortysomething Matt has been to Harvard and Stanford and done good works in Ghana.

He was a ferocious do-gooder in high school

too. As portrayed by the sweetly charismatic Brian Slaten, he’s even a pretty good tumbler.

But Matt has lately retreated back home to the midwest, where he leads an apparently aimless life, staying with his widowed dad, Ed, while working a measly temp job at a not-for-profit.

Matt’s drift is all the more evident because his two high-achieving younger brothers— banker Jake (Madison Dirks) and New York Times-reviewed novelist Drew (Ryan Hallahan)—are in town for Christmas.

And there beginneth the allegory: Jake and Drew are, of course, the white male faces of commerce and art, and Lee makes sure we understand how clubby they are. Long early stretches of SWM show them in unrestrained adolescent-regression mode, triggered by their return to the cozy family seat. They roughhouse over a video game, find gross things to do with dice during a board game, snack on crap, talk dirty, relive old adventures, and drink themselves sick.

Pater Ed (Alan Wilder) abets the general slide into juvenility by enforcing family rituals such as the Christmas Eve dinner of Chinese takeout. A preposterously good and jovial dad, he hangs stockings and supplies PJs for everyone, in matching holiday plaids.

The camaraderie gets stacked so high it topples over into archetype: puppyishness as an American male essence, echoing generations of post-WWII fraternal depictions from My Three Sons to Death of a Salesman.

Still, these guys are no Neanderthals. They know how to speak the language of equity, diversity, and inclusion, thanks in large part to their late mom. That board game Drew and Jake play? It’s a politicized version of Monopoly she rigged up and called Privilege.

(Sample card: “‘What I said wasn’t sexist/ racist/homophobic because I was joking.’

Pay $50 to the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center.”)

In short, they’re as socially evolved as they are goal oriented and successful. The good kind of white guys.

Matt’s listlessness is therefore a challenge for everybody, especially insofar as it’s a conscious decision rather than, say, a lapse in meds. He’s concerned that his very identity makes him a liability to the future. That the only equitable, ethical choice open to him as a scion of the hegemony is to abdicate his position in it. After the events of November 8 we can see he’s kidding himself: yet another intellectual so enthralled with his crisis that he misses the main play. But he makes an interesting point. As a member of the boom generation, I’ve often thought how we can’t help but destroy everything that attracts our attention; Matt believes he’s part of the next rank of locusts.

On that score SWM can be thought of as a variation on the scene in Independence Day where the U.S. president asks an alien, “What is it you want us to do?” only to have it reply, “Die.” Lee isn’t without sympathy for Matt’s situation, though. (Why should she be when that situation smacks so much of authorial wish fulfillment?) In fact, she seems at times to have greater regard for him than for her audience. We enter the theater to hip-hop specially selected for the sexual candor of its lyrics and played at black-opssite volume. Next we’re taken in hand by two people “in charge,” who feel called upon to educate us about gender fluidity. It’s an effective alienation device but a cheap and condescending shot, suggesting that Lee sees the people who’ve come out for her show as 280 seats worth of cultural/racial/regional/ class complacency in need of a shock. Maybe we are, but then again maybe we’re not. v R STRAIGHT WHITE MEN Through 3/19: WedFri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Tue 7:30 PM; also Sun 2/19 and 2/26, 7:30 PM; Wed 3/1, 3/8, and 3/15, 2 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $50-$74.

IN THE WAKE OF a tumultuous presidential election, this year’s One-Minute Play Festival at the Den Theatre puts politics at center stage. In its seventh year, the festival—this edition is titled “America Is . . . ”— features dozens of minute-long performances that comment on the state of both the country and the city of Chicago under the Trump administration.

The One-Minute Play Festival travels all across the United States and makes an effort to include and highlight diverse perspectives. Last year’s fest featured an entirely female-identifying cast, and the show aims to showcase artists of various ages, races, and cultures. The Chicago leg of the tour, curated

by Dominic D’Andrea and Caitlin Wees, takes this mission to heart, presenting more than 60 local playwrights and directors who occupy different identities.

“The opportunity to gather the community of artists, activists, and citizens and focus on ways that we might begin to design the world we want to live in is a beautiful and necessary action,” D’Andrea said in a statement.

Each of the screenwriters and directors participating in the festival brings a personalized story to the stage, but one of the most noteworthy moments in this year’s show comes from Coya Paz, a writer, director, and self-proclaimed “lip-gloss connoisseur” who’s passionate about art’s ability to incite social change. As the artistic director of Free Street Theater—one of the first racially integrated theaters in town—and a cofounder of the Proyecto Latina collective, Paz has devoted the bulk of her life to celebrating Latinx arts and culture. —ABBEY SCHUBERT ONE-MINUTE PLAY FESTIVAL: AMERICAN IS . . . Tue 2/21-Wed

ß @taadler

2/22, 8 PM, Den Theatre, oneminuteplayfestival. com, $18.

o THE ONE-MINUTE PLAY FESTIVAL

THEATER

The One-Minute Play Festival returns to Chicago

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE KJ Whitehead o LINDSAY WILLIAMS

at The CHOPIN THEATRE

COMEDY

KJ Whitehead takes comedy back from straight white men

By BRIANNA WELLEN

K

12 O’CLOCK TRACK SERIES

A SIDE OF JAM WITH YOUR

LUNCH EVERY WEEKDAY

THEBLEADER.COM

22 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

J Whitehead, a black genderqueer performer (who prefers the pronoun “they”), takes pride in being able to go into the “straight white men’s lair” of the Chicago comedy scene and introduce a new perspective. At a recent open-mike night, after sitting through an evening of racial jokes all made by white comics, Whitehead got onstage and turned the tables. “I don’t want you guys to feel left out,” the 25-year-old said, and performed a set making fun of white people.

This month Whitehead premieres their new comedic political talk show, America’s Dead.

Let’s Party!, and in March the comedian will teach a new class at Second City called “Radical Comedy: Straight White Men Welcome,” a course outlining how performers who are women, people of color, or LBGTQ can safely navigate Chicago’s comedy scene without sacrificing their identity.

“I’ve been discouraged to go out to comedy shows in my skirt and heels and makeup only because if I get on stage like that, I’m going to have to explain it,” Whitehead says. “It’s turned some audiences off to me, but I’ve also gotten a whole new fan base. And then I get in touch with a whole new group of gender-fluid performers.”

But Whitehead’s goal isn’t to shut out white men completely—it’s to start a conversation. Part of the class is about how to clearly establish lines of racism, sexism, misogyny, and homophobia that shouldn’t be crossed in comedy, lines that Whitehead says many per-

formers are just unaware of. And the monthly lineup of America’s Dead. Let’s Party! isn’t restricted to politically and socially like-minded people like inaugural guests Matt Brown, Jillian Ebanks, and Prateek Srivastava—an open invitation stands for any conservatives to come on and safely discuss their point of view.

“I’m clearly black and I’m clearly fabulous, and people already look at me like I’m not even human,” Whitehead says. “Why am I going to do that to someone else? Sure, their logic could be flawed or their facts are flawed, but at the end of the day they’re still human beings.”

The most important thing, Whitehead says, is to foster an environment of support and acceptance, both in the political world and in the comedy scene.

“I fear getting harassed, not just for my skirt but for the color of my skin, especially with who our president is now,” Whitehead says.

“As a straight white person, especially if you’re male, you won. The least you can do if you already have the privilege is to let people know that ‘Hey, there are other people who don’t look like us because they were born a certain way. Let’s listen to them.’ ” v AMERICA’S DEAD. LET’S PARTY! Thu 2/16, 8 PM, Playground Theater, 3209 N. Halsted, theplaygroundtheater. com, $10, $5 for students. “RADICAL COMEDY: STRAIGHT WHITE MEN WELCOMED” 3/8-3/29: Wed 7-10 PM, Second City Training Center, 230 W. North, secondcity.com/classes, $170.

ß @BriannaWellen

l

l

ARTS & CULTURE DANCE

Théophile Alexandre Steinlen, Motocycles Comiot, 1899

Remix and match

o DRIEHAUS MUSEUM

Meredith Webster and Ariel Freedman o BENJAMIN WARDELL

LOCAL DANCE TROUPE the Cambrians aren't a sedentary bunch. What began as the Nexus Project—an experimental one-off in 2013, conceived by former Hubbard Street dancer Benjamin Holliday Wardell—has morphed into a network of “dance personalities” with a growing international pedigree.

Since informally rebranding to what’s now known as the Cambrians, Wardell has enlisted friends, colleagues, and former collaborators to partake in a type of nomadic residency, pairing two (sometimes three) dancers at a time in different cities with different choreographers. After learning several pieces of source material, the performers mix the choreography together to produce an original dance. As with the Nexus Project, the concept is to “treat the performers as the main drivers of what’s on stage.”

“There’s certainly a lot of overlap,” Wardell says. “It’s one of those things where every relationship is different.” The relationship in Empress Archer, the company’s latest, “goes to far more places than any other we’ve done,” he continues. Performers Ariel Freedman (from Israel) and Meredith Webster (California) spent time in Tel Aviv, Vermont, San Francisco, and Montreal to unpack material from 11 local and international choreographers, each with their own style and taste.

There are a lot of contrasts and surprises in the remix, according to Wardell: Webster is five foot ten, Freedman is five foot two; there’s aggression, tenderness, and power dynamics; the piece fluctuates in tempo; and technically the two of them are “just fuckin’ crazy.”

—MATT DE LA PEÑA EMPRESS ARCHER 2/162/19: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 1 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, 909 W. Armitage, 773-728-6000, thecambrians.com, $20.

VISUAL ART

Art for sale, sales for art

By DMITRY SAMAROV

A

dvertising is a dark art. After all, subterfuge is usually required to convince someone to become a customer. But commerce can be a source of amuseument. Think of the Super Bowl, for instance: a sizable chunk of the audience tunes in each year to see new ads, rather than the game itself.

A new exhibit at the Driehaus Museum, “L’Affichomania: The Passion for French Posters,” pays tribute to artists from the dawn of the advertising age. In her catalog essay, curator Jeannine Felino quotes critic André Mellerio referring to French street posters as “frescoes, if not of the poor, at least of the crowd.” These are the ancient ancestors (and far more elegant predecessors) of the pop-up ad and the infomercial.

Prior to the belle epoque—the early 1870s

until Word War I, the era that “L’Affichomania” covers—color lithography was mostly used for reproductions of paintings. The process was laborious: each image was printed using multiple heavy pieces of flat limestone, and every color in the print required its own stone, so the paper had to be run through multiple times (you can see registration marks, used to line up the colors, in some of the works in the exhibition). But the technique produced beautiful, polychromatic sheets, and marketers were able to push products in front of the masses in a new, enhanced format. Issued on cheap paper and plastered all over the walls and kiosks of Paris, the posters were an instant hit with crowds and soon attracted art collectors. In no time enterprising manufacturers crafted editions on improved paper stock and often

with no text at all, subtly turning them into stand-alone art prints.

At the head of the stairs to the second-floor galleries, you can see Alphonse Mucha’s Cycles Perfecta. Mucha’s images—whether selling Job cigarette papers or promoting Sarah Bernhardt’s latest play—convey a premodern fairy-tale timelessness. His enchanted maidens, with their curlicue tresses, are backed by elaborate geometric patterns—they seem ill-suited to market much but their own beauty, yet the artfully included text always directs the viewer to the product or event being offered. In one room, Jules Chéret’s joyful lasses pirouette around delighted gentlemen, leaving colorful stardust in their wake, but not before informing the casual glancer of that night’s burlesque act, or the latest trendy cocktail. As with much successful marketing, what these happy girls are promoting is “the good life” rather than a lowly commercial product: Come with us, they seem to say, and all your worries will melt away.

A couple of the artists on display tried to subvert the ad-poster medium. Théophile Alexandre Steinlen was able to insert social commentary into his work and occasionally irritate the constraints of polite society. His La Traite Blanche (White Slavery) was censored because one of the prostitutes portrayed in it was bare breasted; he grudgingly covered her up with a lacy brassiere, but even so his sympathy for the plight of working girls is unmistakable. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec greatly empathized with those in the demimonde—he sometimes lived in brothels and was a fixture in nightclubs alongside the performers he illustrated.

Up on the third floor, in the smallest gallery, there’s a tiny scale model of businessman and museum founder Richard Driehaus’s office, created by miniaturist Henry Kupjack. There are replicas of some of the posters from “L’Affichomania” hung on the fine, imitation-wood walls. Looking into this little room made me ponder the journey these humble street ads have traveled: from the walls of fin de siécle Paris through countless reproductions and variations to skyrocketing auction prices and finally here in 21st-century Chicago, doll-sized inside of a millionaire’s mansion, punctuating the inescapable relationship of art and commerce. v “L’AFFICHOMANIA: THE PASSION FOR FRENCH POSTERS” Through 1/7/18: TueSun 10 AM-5 PM, Driehaus Museum, 40 E. Erie, 312-482-8933, driehausmuseum.org, $20, $12.50 seniors, $10 students and kids 12 and under, free for members.

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 23

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE

MOVIES

A complete background check

By J.R. JONES

L

ast weekend brought the nationwide opening of The Lego Batman Movie, a computer-animated whizbang that uses the Lego brand’s spark-plug characters and interlocking construction bricks to spoof the Batman/Superman/DC Comics universe. Like many children’s animations, the movie is a pinball machine of gags, wisecracks, and knowing pop-culture references, designed to feed the attention deficit disorder of kids and adults alike. Everything is foregrounded, everything is in your face, and your eyes dart around in the darkness of the theater like a caged bird. The Lego Batman Movie is an exercise in media overload, the density that is the void, the endless endlessness of modern entertainment.

The Red Turtle, which also opened in Chicago last week, embodies the opposite principle: it’s a movie about the background. Danish animator Michael Dudok de Wit has enjoyed a four-decade career in the business, contributing to such Hollywood projects as Heavy Metal (1981) and Fantasia/2000 (1999) while also directing his own lovely and idiosyncratic ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

shorts. Among his fans are the founders of Studio Ghibli, the revered Japanese animation outfit, and in 2006 the studio approached De Wit to direct his debut feature, partnering with the U.S. production company Wild Bunch.

The Red Turtle is the first European animation ever backed by Ghibli, though the film differs in some respects from the studio’s typical output—the characters are more simply drawn and characterized, and they occupy a more humble place in the story, enveloped in highly detailed natural environments.

In the movie’s press notes De Wit recalls needing to pare down his story in development, and that was a wise impulse: what remains is so spare and elemental that the entire 80-minute film transpires without a word of dialogue. The opening shot reveals massive blue waves lashed by rain and broken suddenly by a man’s head as he pops out of the water, gasping for air. Washed onto the beach of a remote island, the castaway revives and explores the terrain, finding himself alone.

He harvests bamboo trunks from the forest adjoining the shore and fashions himself a

ss AVERAGE

24 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

s POOR

•

raft to escape from the island, but when he takes it out on the water he’s menaced by a giant turtle with a ruby-red shell that batters his raft from below and eventually shatters it. Later the man discovers that the turtle has washed ashore and lies beached on its back— scorned by the man, it eventually dies in the hot sun, and its shell cracks. But then, in the middle of the night, the dead turtle magically transforms into a beautiful woman with a long mane of ruby-red hair.

Despite the human characters, there are almost no facial close-ups in The Red Turtle; De Wit’s narrative building block is the extreme long shot, usually from an overhead angle. As the man explores the island, moving inland from the shore’s stark horizon line of blue sky meeting white sand, the story unfolds in dazzling, minutely detailed landscapes, which were drawn with charcoal on paper and then digitized. There are gently sloping mountains; steep cliffs overlooking the ocean; and lush, green bamboo forests with hundreds of individually drawn leaves, the tall trees reaching vertically across the frame as the man weaves

through them. The detail is rendered in black line work, and the coloring is even and subtly toned. The complexity of the backgrounds can be stunning: at one point the man wakes in the bamboo forest near a clearing, from which the moonlight illuminates the tree trunks and casts a mesh of diagonal shadows. This is one of those animations that creates a world so mesmerizing the characters need only wander around in it.

When De Wit does focus on his characters, they’re often birds or sea creatures, and his imagery emphasizes their role in the grand design of nature. At the beginning of the movie, when the man has been washed ashore, a little crab pops out of the sand, scuttles and stops, scuttles and stops, circles the man’s foot and stops, then crawls up his pant leg, rousing him from his sleep. Later he’s awoken on the gray nocturnal beach by a tiny turtle crawling toward the sea, which he picks up and inspects.

A school of these guys is making its way down the beach to the waterline; as the tide comes in, it pushes them back momentarily before pulling them in. (Moving water is one of the hardest things to animate, and De Wit does it fluidly, so to speak.) The only character in the movie to win an extreme, silent-film-style close-up is the title character, which stares at the man with obsidian eyes, its skin covered in irregular brown blotches that form a floral pattern around its central nostrils.

The cumulative effect of all this is to reduce the hero to his proper place in the cosmos.

In the early scenes he struggles against his fate, but once the woman comes into his life, he begins to surrender to the environment.

Numerous scenes occur after nightfall, the characters staring up into a sky lit by hundreds of points of light and giving themselves up to the immensity of it all. The turning point of the story is a wordless but visually eloquent sequence in which the man, standing on the beach, watches from a distance as the woman wades into the ocean and casts away her shell, and the woman, returning to the cover of the forest, spies on the man as he returns the gesture, shoving his half-finished second raft out to sea and renouncing rescue to grow old with her on the island. Good choice, dude—nothing awaits you back home but The Lego Batman Movie, and madness, and death. v THE RED TURTLE ssss Directed by Michael Dudok de Wit. PG, 80 min. Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $11

ß @JR_Jones

WORTHLESS

l

l

PRESENTED BY STUDIO GHIBLI THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU SPIRITED AWAY, PONYO AND THE WIND RISES

ACADEMY AWARD NOMINEE ®

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

“ONE OF THE BEST PICTURES OF THE YEAR!” -Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES

RED TURTLE

THE

WWW.SONYCLASSICS.COM

A FILM BY

EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT

MICHAEL DUDOK DE WIT

NOW PLAYING

VIEW THE TRAILER AT WWW.THEREDTURTLEMOVIE.COM

)%' ".*) /$+),-' *%!(

164 North State Street

$"'+ #! , (& *) ## -.

Between Lake & Randolph

MOVIE HOTLINE: 312.846.2800

UNBROKEN GLASS

LOVING Starring Ruth Negga, Oscar nominee for Best Actress!

Feb. 17 - 23

Fri., 2/17 at 8:15 pm; Sat., 2/18 at 3:30 pm; Sun., 2/19 at 5:30 pm; Mon., 2/20 at 8:30 pm; Tue., 2/21 at 6 pm; Wed., 2/22 at 8:15 pm; Thu., 2/23 at 8:15 pm

Feb. 17 - 23

Fri., 2/17 at 2 pm & 6 pm; Sat., 2/18 at 7:45 pm; Sun., 2/19 at 3 pm; Mon., 2/20 at 6 pm; Tue., 2/21 at 7:45 pm; Wed., 2/22 at 6 pm; Thu., 2/23 at 8:15 pm

*$#&$#& $# )%' -.$# $"'+ (# , (% *) #&/%& -.

#2/ .%2(+$4'. 03) 0)*03,' +$,"'+.1 *$.$+ +%'!2&03+%'0+/'-,24

New from Kartemquin Films!

Filmmaker in person at all screenings.

NEWLY RESTORED! • JOSEF VON STERNBERG’S ANATAHAN • FEB. 17, 18, 22 BUY TICKETS NOW

at

www.siskelfilmcenter.org

g olve to ev supportin e m i t r o s . f ’ s n It s etera ethod our m impaired v spine

www.BrewView.com 3145 N. Sheffield at Belmont

Movie Theater & Full Bar

Never miss a show again.

# BACKVETSUP

EARLY WARNINGS orthoinfo.org

$5.00 sion admis e for th s Movie

18 to enter 21 to drink Photo ID required

Sat-Sun, February 18-19 @ 3:15pm

Moana

Sat, February 18 @ 9:45pm Fri, Mon-Thr, Feb 17, 20-23 @ 6:30pm

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Sat-Sun, February 18-19 @ 5:15pm Fri, Mon-Thr, Feb 17, 20-23 @ 9:00pm

VISIT ORTHOINFO.ORG/BACKVETSUP

spine.foundation

RSM

R

Arrival

Sat-Sun, February 18-19 @ 7:30pm 40th Anniversary!

Slap Shot

Tix $5 at http://slapshot40th.bpt.me

Wayne's World 25th Anniversary

Feb 25 & 26! Tix $5 at http://waynesworld25th.bpt.me

chicagoreader.com/early

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 25

ARTS & CULTURE

LIT

How to live with a saint

By AIMEE LEVITT

E

ven during the most tumultuous times in her life, Dorothy Day would wake up early every morning and spend several hours drinking coffee and reading the psalms. I am not one for psalms, but in these past tumultuous weeks, I have found comfort in reading about Day, specifically the lovely new biography Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty, by her granddaughter Kate Hennessy.

Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933, in the depths of the Depression. Their goal was to combine the philosophy of love from the Gospels with the communist ideal of bringing people together, particularly the poor, to care for one another and create a better world. Or, as Hennessy puts it, “to change the hearts and minds of men and give them a vision of a world where it was easier to be good.”

The Worker (as it was known) encouraged

26 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

its followers to embrace pacifism and cooperative living, to actively support human rights and labor unions, and to offer hospitality to anyone who needed it. Day herself lived in voluntary poverty in a series of communal houses and farms run by the Worker. She devoted her life to keeping the organization united and spreading the good word through its newspaper, also called the Catholic Worker, which she edited for nearly 50 years. Well into her old age, she continued to march in protests against the Vietnam war and for the rights of laborers. Since her death in 1980, there’ve been active campaigns to elevate her to sainthood; Pope Francis has said that she's one of the four Americans he admires most, along with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Trappist monk and philosopher Thomas Merton.

But Hennessy’s book is as much about Day’s daughter, Tamar, as it’s about Day herself. And

it’s also a little bit about Hennessy, who’s the youngest of Tamar’s nine children and cared for her in her final years. She contributes her own memories to her account of Day’s already extremely well-documented life, but more crucially, she presents Tamar as an interesting and complex person in her own right. Unlike Dorothy, Tamar wasn’t much of a talker or a writer, and she spent most of her adulthood living quietly in rural Vermont. Hennessy assembled her story piecemeal, through an extended 30-year conversation.

If it’s difficult to be a saint, it may be even harder to live with one. Tamar was seven years old when Dorothy established the Worker. Up till then, Dorothy’s life had been an erratic search for meaning. Starting in her late teens, she earned her living as a journalist and sometimes as a nurse, and was part of the bohemian community in Chicago and Greenwich Village. She had love affairs and an abortion, which she described in an autobiographical novel called The Eleventh Virgin (which she later tried to suppress during what Tamar called her “severe and pious” phase), and a brief and unhappy marriage.

She lived for several years with Tamar’s father, Forster Batterham, but her gravitation toward Catholicism and his refusal to follow made their relationship unsustainable.

Though Batterham visited with Tamar regularly and paid child support when he could afford it, Dorothy was essentially a single mother—she and Tamar leaned on each other.

“I was a terrible child,” Tamar told Hennessy.

“I scolded her all the time.” She always called Dorothy by her first name, never “mother.”

Her first memory was saying to Dorothy, after they’d gotten into a car accident, “Why can’t you be more careful?”

As the Worker grew, Dorothy and Tamar became part of a large, extended, and loving family—but it came with a price. “At the age of seven,” Hennessy writes, “[Tamar] was asked—and would continue to be asked throughout her life—for a sacrifice that possibly would have damaged a less wise and sensible child. . . . Tamar was asked to give up Dorothy—to give up Dorothy the mother for Dorothy the saint.” When Dorothy was away on speaking tours, Tamar was left in the care of other adults in the Worker house or on the Worker farm. Later, she was sent away to boarding school, and she married young, when she was just 18.

Her husband, David Hennessy, was 13 years older and had his own issues, which Tamar, a constant reader, later described to

her daughter as a combination of The Great Santini and Lolita. (The Lolita part she never explained, much to Kate Hennessy’s relief.)

Tamar was a woman who could’ve benefited from a relaxing of the Catholic doctrines against birth control and divorce, and it was Dorothy’s great failing as a mother—one she acknowledged—that she didn’t encourage Tamar to pursue an education instead of marrying or leaving David sooner.

But she did leave, eventually, with Dorothy’s help, and her life became a small-scale mirror of her mother’s. Instead of taking care of the world, she tended various farms, gardens, and livestock and cared for her nine children, their friends, and neighborhood strays and, much later, Dorothy herself.

Like her grandmother, Hennessy is a writer of great skill, blending interviews, family letters, writings by Dorothy and other members of the Worker, and her own memories into a coherent whole. She stays close to the main thread of Dorothy and Tamar’s often chaotic lives, full of children and friends and Catholic Worker characters; like a sermonizer, she gently reemphasizes the important points so they don’t get lost. She clearly absorbed Dorothy’s belief that, as the title says, the world will be saved by beauty, and she insists on finding it in her mother and grandmother’s sometimes sad and difficult lives. (Tamar, by contrast, had what Hennessy calls “a cold, scientific eye.”)

There are pages and pages devoted to loving descriptions of Mott Street, then part of Little Italy, where the Catholic Worker set up one of its earliest homes; the back-to-nature Hennessy home in Vermont; and the beach on Staten Island, where Dorothy and Tamar spent their happiest times together.

But this book is more than the product of access, research, and skill. Like the Catholic Worker itself, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty is a work of love, not greed or pride, and that’s what gives it much of its beauty and made it such a comfort during the past few weeks. Through Dorothy, and also Tamar, Hennessy lets you see a way toward a better world, not through anger and coercion, but through love and kindness. v R DOROTHY DAY: THE WORLD WILL BE SAVED

BY BEAUTY By Kate Hennessy (Scribner). Hennessy will give the keynote address at “Revolution of the Heart: A Symposium on Dorothy Day,” Fri 2/17, 11 AM, Loyola University Klarchek Information Commons, 6501 N. Kenmore, 773-508-8000, luc.edu. F

ß @aimeelevitt

l

l

MUSIC

Jaime Fennelly o TIMOTHY BREEN

OVERHAUL OF MIRRORS Jaime Fennelly enriches his solo drone project, Mind Over Mirrors, by turning it into a five-way collaboration.

By PETER MARGASAK

I

n spring 2015, keyboardist Jaime Fennelly drove to Milwaukee to meet with David Ravel, the curator behind the long-running Alverno College performance series Alverno Presents. Fennelly has been making drone-based music under the name Mind Over Mirrors since a few months before settling in Chicago in 2010, and Ravel had met him earlier in 2015, when Fennelly played the Alverno series as a member of the Death Blues project led

by Milwaukee percussionist Jon Mueller. Ravel offered Fennelly his own spot in the series in March 2017. “He was like, ‘What do you want to do?’” Fennelly says. “‘What space do you want

to perform in? If you had a budget, what would you want to do?’”

Ravel’s offer represented a potentially transformative opportunity for Fennelly and Mind Over Mirrors. For much of the preceding decade, Fennelly had stuck to a modest, low-overhead approach—he recorded his music cheaply at home and played solo at small venues. Whether at conventional clubs such as the Empty Bottle and the Hideout or at DIY shows in houses or basements, he tended to perform on the floor in the midst of the audience, creating an unmediated experience using hypnotizing layers of harmonium and

MIND OVER MIRRORS, BROKEBACK

Fri 3/3, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, constellation-chicago.com, $15, 18+

synthesizer and a compositional style inspired

by Terry Riley’s minimalism. But with institutional support, he could tap into the energy of collaboration to create an event bigger than an ordinary concert—something more like a performance piece.

Fennelly immediately thought of the work he’d done in New York in the early 2000s with dancer and choreographer Miguel Gutierrez.

“Everything came back to the experiences I had with him and [choreographer] John Jasperse and the Kitchen in New York—a venue that provided time and financial resources to allow you to make work beyond playing a show,” he says. His meeting with Ravel prompted a flurry of activity, which has transformed Mind Over Mirrors into a grouporiented endeavor for the first time. Fennelly learned from Ravel in December 2015 that his Alverno appearance had been canceled—the college had pulled funding from the 56-yearold series, claiming it needed the money for student services—but Mind Over Mirrors has sustained the momentum that the offer helped create. If all goes according to plan, it will culminate in an immersive multimedia performance in spring 2018 at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Fennelly is still developing the project, so for the time being he’s a bit vague on the specifics. It won’t involve dance (that’s no longer so big a part of his creative life), but it will feature visuals and a full band.

In part because Mind Over Mirrors hasn’t released an album since The Voice Calling in 2015 (with guest vocalist Haley Fohr of Circuit des Yeux), Fennelly decided to put together another record that would bridge his solo practice and this new, larger group—as well as raise the project’s profile in advance of its big coming-out party next year. On Undying Color, which comes out Friday, February 17, via North Carolina label Paradise of Bachelors, Fennelly is deftly aided by Mueller, Fohr, vocalist Janet Bean (Freakwater, Eleventh Dream Day), and multi-instrumentalist Jim Becker (Califone), who plays mostly violin and Indian flutes.

When Mind Over Mirrors opened for William Basinski at the cathedral of Bohemian National Cemetery in December, everyone but Fohr joined him onstage.

Fennelly wrote and recorded the core tracks for Undying Color alone, as he usually operates—he did most of the work last winter, holed up for two weeks in a remote cabin in the southwest Wisconsin village of Soldiers Grove.

When he returned to Chicago he spent a month communicating with his collaborators J

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 27

MUSIC Mind Over Mirrors continued from 27 about what he had in mind for their overdubs.

The extra voices don’t disrupt Fennelly’s meditative, cosmic-rustic sound—instead it blossoms with a much richer and better developed palette of timbres and a broader dynamic range.

Fennelly, who turns 37 next month, grew up in Long Island, where he began piano lessons at age eight. His family moved to the Boston area in 1994, when he was 14, and his new teacher gave lessons in her own electronicmusic studio. She gave Fennelly an old Mac Plus computer and showed him how to connect it to his Roland keyboard, helping him learn the rudiments of sequencing. As his tastes evolved—from Pink Floyd and jazz to Chicago postrock and the New York scene surrounding the Knitting Factory—his instructor augmented his piano training with electronic-music tutorials and listening sessions. In 1998 he enrolled at George Washington University in D.C. to study engineering, but music—especially avant-garde jazz and free improvisation—had become his obsession.

When Fennelly learned he could take music lessons at GWU, he put his keyboards aside and rented a double bass. He pursued that instrument for the next four years, quitting school after the first two in order to move to New York in 2000—he’d been spending an increasing number of weekends there thanks to a rail pass given to him by his father, who worked for Amtrak. He went to countless shows at legendary downtown venue Tonic, and even attended workshops there led by percussionist Milford Graves and bassist Mark Dresser.

Fennelly moved with a girlfriend who was a dancer, and she helped widen his artistic perspective—by going to dance performances, he got to know the experimental and contemporary classical players who often provided the music. In 2001 he took a summer trip to Durham, North Carolina, for the American Dance Festival, where he volunteered as an intern, making himself available as a musician.

But a chance encounter with Gutierrez at a performance of a John Jasperse piece set him on a new trajectory. “I rarely have a visceral experience with dance, but when I saw this Jasperse piece it totally felt next level, sending chills down my spine,” he says. He approached Gutierrez about working together, and by the end of summer they were making plans. Their partnership was delayed by 9/11, but eventually Fennelly moved into the dancer’s Bushwick loft space and they began a long collaboration.

28 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

The LP version of Mind Over Mirrors’ new Undying Color

While Fennelly was working with Gutierrez on their first piece together, he met experimental percussionist Fritz Welch, who contributed wall drawings to the performance. He and Welch enlisted guitarist Chris Forsyth to form an improvising trio called Peeesseye, and for the next five years, Fennelly’s creative life was dominated by collaborating with Gutierrez and playing in that band. In both contexts, he put aside his bass and started working with electronics and samplers.

Fennelly enrolled at Hunter College in Manhattan and earned an anthropology degree in 2003, at which point he figured his formal education was over. But then a friend told him about a freewheeling interdisciplinary arts program at Bard College in upstate New York that’s held across three consecutive summers.

Fennelly jumped at the chance to learn from its illustrious artist-teachers—a diverse mix that included Pauline Oliveros, David Behrman, Maryanne Amacher, George Lewis, and Richard Teitelbaum. “That was the education I had wanted, but I hadn’t been able to access,” he says.

By the time Fennelly finished the program in 2005, he was beginning to move away from the noisy, aggressively abstract, feedbackheavy sound he’d developed in Peeesseye. On tour with the trio, he’d encountered his first harmonium while crashing at the Philadelphia home of psych-rock band Espers. He was so

enraptured by his experience playing the bellows-driven keyboard—common in Indian music—that he bought one upon returning to New York. It soon became his primary instrument.

The following year, Fennelly says, he lost his day job, split with a long-term girlfriend, and reached the end of his collaboration with Gutierrez, which had taken him around the U.S. and Europe—the dancer’s loft space was being sold. “I was feeling restless and disconnected,” he says. “A lot of things ended, and nothing new presented itself.” That summer he visited a friend from Bard who lived off the coast of Washington, on the remote Waldron Island north of Seattle. He enjoyed his time there enough that in April 2007, when his friend’s family offered him a job on their property as a sort of caretaker and handyman, he took them up on it—in exchange for his time, he’d get a small rent-free cabin, free meals, and a bit of spending money.

A three-month stay became 18 months, though Fennelly ended up in different lodgings after meeting tattoo artist Serena Lander, a former Chicagoan, on one of his occasional trips into Seattle. They began a relationship and lived together in a cabin that relied on a dodgy solar setup for electricity and rain catchments for water. To cover rent, Fennelly did forestry work and Lander regularly traveled back to Chicago to do tattoos.

l

l

MUSIC In early 2010 she convinced Fennelly to move with her into an apartment in Seattle. “I mean, I’m from New York,” he says.

“There’s only so long that I can talk about goats.

It’s cool and I loved the whole experience, but I couldn’t talk to people about what I was really into.” That fall the couple packed a U-Haul and relocated to Chicago, where Fennelly only knew a couple of people. He’d played mostly harmonium on the island, refining the sound that would become Mind Over Mirrors—due to the dicey solar-power system he didn’t record anything, but when he had electricity he experimented with tape delays and harmonizer effects. He’d begun the first Mind Over Mirrors record, 2011’s The Voice Rolling, while in Seattle, though he didn’t buy synthesizers till after he arrived in Chicago. He continued his solitary music making here, and over the next few years he played sporadic shows and released several albums in small editions, including 2013’s When the Rest Are Up at Four on Chicago label Immune. In 2014 he met Fohr after Circuit des Yeux and Mind Over Mirrors played that year’s Austin Psych Fest, and they began collaborating on The Voice Calling.

“I was starting to feel the need to work with other people,” Fennelly says. “I can only work by myself for so long, and I was really, really ready.” His record with Fohr came out in early 2015, around the same time he joined Mueller for his Alverno Presents concert in Milwaukee.

Ravel’s subsequent invitation allowed Fennelly to pursue some collaborations he’d been considering.

Despite the demise of the Alverno series, Ravel has continued to work with Fennelly, functioning as a sort of project manager to help him develop a budget and secure grant money. They eventually enlisted the support of the MCA. “From the start of our conversations, Jaime had a specific idea for the performance experience he was going for,” Ravel says.

Fennelly has talked with Paradise of Bachelors about releasing a recording of the 2018 MCA project, but he and the label decided he should make another album in the meantime.

“Instead of [going from] working with boutique labels and not having much presence in Chicago to suddenly doing a two-night show at the MCA, we thought, let’s take this incremental step—and that’s where Undying Color exists,” Fennelly says. “The whole piece was skeletal. I created the album essentially on my own and brought in everyone within a threeday recording session at Minbal.” Cooper Crain of Bitchin Bajas engineered the overdub

session with the guest players and mixed the finished record.

“When I first started developing Mind Over Mirrors, I had set out to capture the essence of the types of sounds we associate with vernacular instrumentation, such as voice and fiddle, and embed those timbres deep in the threads of my solo work,” Fennelly says. He eventually decided he wanted to pull some of those threads to the foreground. “In meeting Jim and Haley, it clicked that those were the appropriate people to help me do that, as well as bringing their own highly personalized and creative input into the music,” he continues.

“Bringing in drums is perhaps musically the most radical shift, and I hadn’t been thinking about percussion as a primary instrument until I met Jon and we worked together in a couple different capacities. The trick for me was that in starting to think about extended instrumentation, I didn’t want to make the music any denser than my solo recordings—on their own, the harmonium and synthesizers have the capacity to be quite maximal (or minimal).

I was really seeking a way to transform my solitary voice into a richer and fuller palette.”

Fennelly and Mueller had met when the percussionist played in Chicago to support his album The Whole in late 2010, and they later shared a bill. “Undying Color was mostly composed by Jaime, so he had a lot of thoughts and direction on what happened with the other instruments,” Mueller says. “Our ideas are pretty sympathetic to each other, though, so his interest in what to play made a lot of sense to me.” Two weekends ago, the eventual MCA band—Fennelly, Mueller, Becker, Bean, and superb Virginia guitarist Daniel Bachman—met in Indiana for their first rehearsals, where they came up with parts spontaneously. “As we continue to play, it seems there will be more room for individual voices to enter the mix, which so far sounds and feels pretty nice,” says Mueller.

Mind Over Mirrors play a record-release show for Undying Color at Constellation on Friday, March 3, with Fennelly joined by Mueller, Bean, and Becker. The new album contains some of his strongest compositions, but like Mueller he sees a lot of potential in generating material for the MCA project using a collaborative approach. Other than that, he’s stingy with details about the forthcoming piece.

“I didn’t have the band in place for Undying Color,” he says. “I want to use the band as a compositional tool.” v

Chicago forever.

Celebrating 60 Years of Making Music!

We’ve been singing and strumming with Chicago since 1957!

Join the party with a class this year in guitar, banjo, dance, ukulele, and so much more!

New classes begin the week of March 6.

Celebrate with us and learn more at

oldtownschool.org

ß @pmarg FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 29

MUSIC IN ROTATION

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

The cover of the Bestial Raids album Master Satan’s Witchery

Stella Veloce o COURTESY THE ARTIST

The Procession reverb pedal by Old Blood Noise Endeavors o COURTESY CHICAGO MUSIC EXCHANGE

PHILIP MONTORO

JASON SHANLEY Solo performer as Cinchel, guitarist in the Mirror of Nature

CHRISTINA DENNAOUI Performs

Harvey Averne Barrio Band, “Cucaraca Macara” I don’t even remember how this scorching 1971 Latin-funk number ended up in my overstuffed iTunes library, but every time the song pops up on shuffle it perks me up.

The rhythms boil, swing, and slam, and every riff drills straight into your brain. Best of all, the exuberant and ridiculously catchy chanted chorus glows with the hovering tones of ostentatious vibraphone stings.

Littlebow, Three I was drawn to this album for two reasons: 1.) practically everything that UK label Rural Colours releases is perfect, and 2.) I recently became a big fan of everything I’ve heard by flutist Katie English (mostly released under the name Isnaj Dui). On Three, she plays as part of instrumental trio Littlebow, who augment her flute with wonderful vocals, harp, guitar, percussion, and cello. It gives me the feeling of a sunny hillside somewhere by the sea. I listened to this almost constantly from August through November.

Old Blood Noise Endeavors, Procession pedal To say I have an obsession with reverb pedals would be an understatement. The Procession pedal, however, is in a different league. It adds an unexpected, almost hallowed quality to every sound you run through it. Equal parts quirky and elegant, the pedal makes tinkering with soundscapes a pure joy.

OBNE’s technical demo of the Procession is as amusing as it is instructive.

Reader music editor

FIND HUNDREDS OF

READER-RECOMMENDED

RESTAURANTS EXCLUSIVE VIDEO FEATURES AND SIGN UP FOR WEEKLY NEWS CHICAGOREADER.COM/FOOD

30 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

Repetitive drum-set drills When I saw drummer Jon Mueller speak as part of a live event that the Trap Set podcast held in Milwaukee in November, he mentioned casually that when he practices he often plays the same thing for an hour straight. Since then, I’ve been trying something similar. Though I can’t yet get past ten minutes, I enjoy the oddly meditative aspect of attempting to repeat a full-kit pattern over and over, without variation or error, until my limbs burn out. It can feel almost like an out-of-body experience, as you gradually drift from playing the drums into listening to yourself play the drums.

Bestial Raids, Master Satan’s Witchery The recent third album from this Polish war-metal band handily illustrates how even the most furiously ugly music can end up sounding soothing. The insane speed of the blastbeats, the murky guitar tones, the stolid cycling of the primitive riffs, the cavernous reverb applied to the vocalists’ howls and shrieks—it all helps this evil, assaultive noise feel almost ambient, like the buzzing and thumping of your tires on a nighttime highway drive.

Foie Gras, Innermost Shrine, Heavily Gilded Foie Gras has been making haunting dronefolk albums for a few years now. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but I gravitate toward this release from 2013 (maybe because it contains her excellent cover of Eno’s “On Some Faraway Beach”). It’s both soothing and sad, like a fog that obscures just enough to give you comfort but requires you to move carefully. I believe she’s working on a new album, and she recently released the single “Devotee.”

Stella Veloce, For a Flat I don’t know much about cellist and multi-instrumentalist Stella Veloce or this group, but I discovered For a Flat because I’ve been following the many interesting and wonderful releases on Pan y Rosas Discos, a Chicago netlabel that specializes in abstract/noise/jazz music. The cover photo depicts a cello being recorded in a small bathroom full of plants, and the album invites a kind of close listening that really makes me feel like I’m hanging out in that room while music just happens around me.

ambient electronic music as Volutes

Austra, Future Politics I’ve long admired Katie Stelmanis’s ability to combine intelligent lyricism, operatic melodies, and electronic music. Her 2011 release Feel It Break has been a constant favorite over the past six years. With each new release, her writing and production grow more sophisticated and selfassured. Future Politics manages to weave political idealism and criticism of neoliberalism into gorgeous, disco-tinged jams. Future Politics will no doubt be among my favorite albums of 2017.

Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa, Absolutely on Music I had no idea this book existed until I received it as a Christmas gift last year.

Consisting of conversations between author Haruki Murakami and conductor Seiji Ozawa, the book explores their respective views on music, the creative process, and specific classical works. I often find it difficult to explain the esoteric alchemy that goes into making music: I’m often creating something from nothing. I look forward to borrowing from their words and wisdom wherever I can.

l

l

1035 N WESTERN AVE CHICAGO IL 773.276.3600 WWW.EMPTYBOTTLE.COM

NAOMI PUNK

THU

2/16

PC WORSHIP • THE BUG HARD COUNTRY HONKY TONK WITH

FREE

THE HOYLE BROTHERS

FRI

93XRT WELCOMES

RIVER WHYLESS

2/17

OHMME • LUKE CALLEN WINTER RECORD LABEL FAIR

12PM-FREE

2/18

FEAT.

TROY ANDERSON

THE EVENING ATTRACTION

RED FRANCIS • FAUX FURRS

RED BULL SOUND SELECT PRESENTS

SUN

2/19

$5 W/ RSVP

AIR CREDITS

FREE

MON

2/20

DAN DEACON

MARIJUANA DEATHSQUADS

NO MEN CASS CWIK

BLACK ATLASS

WED

W/ SPECIAL GUEST

FEAT. FORBIDDEN ROOT FINE BOTANTIC BEERS

THU

2/23

OVERWERK

MUSIC, FRIENDLY, BEER DINNER

6PM

THALIA HALL STAFF INFECTION 9PM

FEAT.

OOPS

FALCOR 3 • BRUCE LAMONT

HARD COUNTRY HONKY TONK WITH

FREE

THE HOYLE BROTHERS

FRI

NE-HI (

RECORD RELEASE

)

MEAT WAVE (

RECORD RELEASE

)

2/24

DEEPER • CAFE RACER

SAT

2/25

PAPER MICE • MELKBELLY • FOUL TIP 12PM-FREE

DUMPSTER TAPES PRESENTS

SON OF A GUN • PARENT

[SOUNDSYSTEM]

YVES TUMOR

2/22

WINTER FORMAL 2017

SAT

GAIKA

TUE

2/21

SUN

2/26

3PM FREE 9PM

BLEAK BRUNCH W/ DJ BLEAK V [LUGGAGE] EMPTY BOTTLE BOOK CLUB DISCUSSES

THE HANDMAID’S TALE BY MARGARET ATWOOD

REZN (

RECORD RELEASE

)

DISROTTED • BLUNT • BOTTOMED

2/27: WILLIS EARL BEAL (FREE!), 2/28: WITHERED, 3/1: DEATH BY UNGA BUNGA, 3/2: CROCODILES, 3/3: DURAND JONES, 3/4: MUSIC FROZEN DANCING FEAT. METZ • SCREAMING FEMALES & MORE! (1PM, FREE!), 3/4: WINDY CITY SOUL CLUB (9PM), 3/6: THE FUNS (FREE!), 3/8: TELEFON TEL AVIV, 3/9: DEHD (TAPE RELEASE), 3/10: MOVING UNITS PRESENTS THE SONGS OF JOY DIVISION, 3/11: HANDMADE MARKET (12PM, FREE!), 3/13: PARLOR WALLS (FREE!), 3/14: ZANIAS, 3/15: GLITTER CREEPS: LASERS & FAST & SHIT, 3/16: ALL THEM WITCHES, 3/18: SAM PATCH, 3/19: 7TH ANNUAL CHILI-SYNTH COOK-OFF NEW ON SALE: 3/25: QUINTRON & MISS PUSSYCAT • NOBUNNY #EB25, 3/26: TORTOISE (2 SHOWS) #EB25, 4/13 @ CONSTELLATION: BING & RUTH, 4/14: THE COOL KIDS #EB25, 4/15: NEW BOMB TURKS #EB25, 5/27: LOCAL H #EB25

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

®

4544 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG • 773.728.6000

JUST ADDED • ON SALE FRIDAY! 3/26

Shanta Nurullah's Sitarsys Album Release 4/22 Mr. Nick Davio • Album Release 5/6 & 5/7 Laurie Anderson THE LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE 11/18 Bruce Cockburn VISIT OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG TO BUY TICKETS!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16 8PM

Dobet Gnahoré FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17 8PM

HUMMING HOUSE DON MIGGS THIS FRIDAY! FEBRUARY 17 PARK WEST 8:00pm • 18 & Over

SPECIAL GUESTS:

SPECIAL GUEST: OH

PEP! THIS MONDAY! FEBRUARY 20 PARK WEST 8:00pm • 18 & Over

George Kahumoku, Jr., Nathan Aweau & Kawika Kahiapo Masters of Hawaiian Music

NORM MACDONALD

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17 7PM

A conversation with

Stewart Copeland and The Invention of Morel From Musician to Opera Composer 909 W Armitage Ave • Armitage Concert Hall

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16 8PM FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17 8PM SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18 8PM SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19 1PM

The Cambrians present Empress Archer In Szold Hall TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21 9:30PM

Billy Bragg Back to Basics:

SPECIAL GUEST:

THE RUSS LIQUID TEST FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24 • VIC THEATRE 9:00pm • 18 & Over

®

Songs from Life's A Riot, Brewing Up, and Taxman

SATURDAY, APRIL 15 VIC THEATRE 7:30pm • 18 & Over ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26 7PM

Julian Lage & Chris Eldridge THURSDAY, MARCH 2 8PM

Sam Bush FRIDAY, MARCH 3 8PM

Typhanie Monique

RIVIERA THEATRE SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7 7:30pm • All Ages

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM! BUY TICKETS AT

32 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

Album Release

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

2/24 3/3 3/4 3/8 3/9

Global Dance Party: Volo Bogtrotters Global Dance Party: Sexteto Milonguero Vishtèn World Music Wednesday: Lazer Lloyd Fred Eaglesmith

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE

2/15 Gros Ngolle Pokossi 2/22 Lone Piñon

l

l

Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of February 16

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F PICK OF THE WEEK

The Crazy World of Arthur Brown tours the U.S. for the first time in over 40 years

o COURTESY THE ARTIST

THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR BROWN, ELECTRIC CITIZEN, KILLER MOON Tue 2/21, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $30, $25 in advance. 17+

THURSDAY16 Bonelang Deep Fayed and Illphonics open.

9 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $10.

Shortly after Bonelang dropped Pleasure Palace, an April 2015 EP that levitates as its vocal harmonies recall the effervescence of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and the rapid-fire elasticity of Aesop Rock’s Bazooka Tooth, MC Samy.Language told hip-hop site One Throne that the Chicago rap duo’s sound had gelled just “in the last couple months.”

Pleasure Palace sounds like it was made by musicians who know each other as well as they know themselves, and it helps that Samy and his bandmate, Matt Bones, spent about six years together playing indie rock before launching Bonelang.

Sidewinding melodies and dark passages that embrace both the outsider streak of late-aughts indie rock and the euphoria of that era’s pop manifest themselves on the new self-released EP Venn Diagrams (Pt. 1). On the single “Mushroom Moon” Samy and Matt growl and swoon over rollicking, ever-changing instrumentals that move from amber organs to intergalactic blues riffs to som-

ber splashes meted out in muffled drum loops.

Bonelang celebrate the release of Venn Diagrams (Pt. 1) tonight as part of Harmonica Dunn’s three-night, multivenue affair Dunn Dunn Fest.

—LEOR GALIL

PC Worship Naomi Punk headline; PC Worship and the Bug open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10.

Released on a series of tapes in 2009, PC Worship’s earliest material was dominated by heady, tripped-out, psych-folk drones that spanned up to 15 minutes in length. Employing cellos, bowed saws, and clarinets, the project, led by Brooklyn’s Justin Frye, was rooted in eerie and hypnotic soundscapes, a far cry from the sleazy noise-rock perfection of this month’s Buried Wish (Northern Spy Records). Written by Frye and recorded with a cast of some of New York’s freakiest collaborators—including monster Liturgy and Guardian Alien drummer Greg Fox and Dreebs member and Jordonna mastermind Jordan Bernstein— Buried Wish revels in the glorious moments of the late 80s and early 90s when noise rock start-

I HESITATE TO call someone a “genius” musically or otherwise, but what other term is there for the guy who basically invented glam-horror-soul-psychedeliaindustrial-infused rock music? Who has a voice that can shatter glass? Who’s known for wearing a flaming helmet? Who was one of the first to use a drum machine onstage? Most folks know Arthur Brown for his 1968 hit “Fire,” a bit of satanic-leaning acid rock inspired by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins that has Pete Townshend credited as associate producer. His corpse-painted face directly inspired Alice Cooper and Kiss, and his primordial shriek was mimicked by many a budding metalhead. Always forward-thinking and ahead of his time, Brown later began the early-70s dystopian group Kingdom Come (not to be confused with the German glam-metal band Kingdom Come), which utilized bizarre costumes to reflect its higher concept—there was a human traffic-signal getup, and Brown attached himself to a cross. The band was also among the first to use the EMS VCS 3 analog synthesizer along with other pioneering electronics, allegedly influencing Throbbing Gristle. In the 80s Brown moved to Texas and explored bizarre new wave—finding air time on MTV even—while collaborating with the Mothers of Invention’s Jimmy Carl Black on both music and a house-painting company (named Brown and Black, natch). This is the first Crazy World of Arthur Brown tour in the U.S. in more than four decades, and the band will perform material from throughout its entire career, including the surprisingly good 2014 LP Zim Zam Zim. Bassist Bruce Hughes, drummer Chip Vayenas, keyboardist Dane Farnsworth, and guitarist Carter Arrington will be in tow, along with a light show and dancers. I saw Brown perform in London a few years ago, and the man still has moves, costumes, and a voice so powerful it boggles the mind. —STEVE KRAKOW

ed edging into pop territory. The second track, “Black Touch,” pays homage to the grimy call-andresponse of Sonic Youth, while “River Running Sideways” channels the drowned-out folky punk of Dinosaur Jr.—and the disorienting strings and saxes of Frye’s early work are smeared atop it all.

—LUCA CIMARUSTI

FRIDAY17 Russ Johnson, Aruan Ortiz, Michael Formanek, and Gerald Cleaver 8:30 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10.

Since trumpeter Russ Johnson moved to Milwaukee in 2011—and thanks to his comfort with the 90-minute commute to Chicago—the local jazz and improvised music scene has been injected with a brash yet thoughtful presence and an aesthetic that connects postbop fundamentals with freedom-seeking impulses. Another benefit has been Johnson’s vast network of collaborators from New York, as quite a few top-notch figures have traveled to the midwest to work with him. But I don’t recall

anything equaling the artistic promise of the quartet Johnson debuts here this weekend. New Yorkbased Cuban pianist Aruan Ortiz, bassist Michael Formanek, and drummer Gerald Cleaver—each a highly individual player and bandleader in his own right—will convene to play a new book of tunes the trumpeter has put together for the combo. Early performances by new bands are always risky propositions, but these players have all worked together in various contexts. In the company of Cleaver and bassist Eric Revis, Ortiz dropped an astonishing trio album last year called Hidden Voices (Intakt), which sprinkles the pianist’s Afro-Cuban roots within a rhythmically tensile attack and a harmonic palette that bridges the knotty phrases of Monk and the freedom of Ornette Coleman. Last month I got to hear Cleaver playing in New York as part of Formanek’s muscular quartet, making ridiculous displacements and time-altering accents. Plus Formanek himself is coming off one of his most sublime accomplishments, a big-band record called The Distance (ECM) that masterfully balances arrangements both lush and brooding while ceding space to some of the city’s most daring improvisers.

I can only imagine what they’ll all do with Johnson’s superb writing. —PETER MARGASAK J

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 33

1800 W. DIVISION

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

(773) 486-9862 Come enjoy one of Chicago’s finest beer gardens!

3855 N. LINCOLN

martyrslive.com

THU, 2/16

FRIDAY, FEB 17 .................. JIMI JON AMERICA

LOOMS, V SPARKS, VICTORIES, EFFIGEE

SATURDAY, FEB 18 ............. FIRST WARD PROBLEMS

FRI, 2/17

SUNDAY, FEB 19 ................ TONY DOSORIO TRIO

MEHMET ERDEM

WEDNESDAY, FEB 22.......... ANDREW HUBER

SAT, 2/18 - SILVER WRAPPER PRESENTS...

THURSDAY, FEB 23............. MIKE FELTON

LIL SMOKIES, MOONRISE NATION

SUNDAY, FEB 26 ................ DJ WHOLESOME RADIO

SUN, 2/19

WEDNESDAY, MAR 1........... JAMIE WAGNER BAND THURSDAY, MAR 2.............. SMILING BOBBY AND THE CLEMTONES EVERY MONDAY AT 9PM ANDREW JANAK QUARTET EVERY TUESDAY AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMI JON AMERICA

RALPH TOWNER MON, 2/20

LOUDER THAN A MOM TUE, 2/21 THIRD TUESDAYS WITH...

40,000 HEADMEN

WED, 2/22 WINTER WEDNESDAYS WITH...

CORNMEAL

AARON KAMM & THE ONE DROPS %EE' M XP6M.LL7 4366 K=3QSMX

THU, 2/23

MATT CAMPBELL, BAILEY DEE & THE LATE NIGHT BATE, CALVIN CONWAY FRI, 2/24

"E< /F>$,:W 2&@5 5$:& 0YC[, R,<<, FYA :&, 3$??,><

1&, =D[,$<: G 7,D$[$:W G P8<:,>F G 7@Y,ISY 1&, 4[FDDW V@TZFY 2&@5 .@Y: 2:FW 7,FA G 4[,<& 4F$[8>,< 1&, NF(Y$O,><

28YAFW M$(&: RFUU 2,>$,< *:\ N$!, 4$YY,>:W FYA :&, V,F:Z,>C&FY:< L?,Y N$C &@<:,A DW ;,>Y$, FYA :&, .@[* P,<<@Y< J 25$Y( 7FYC$Y( 5$:& 9&$CF(@ 25$Y( K>@#,C: 7,,? 4>$,A K$C![, K>@#,C: G 1&, M,5 25$:C&,>@@ G 1&, N@8Y:F$YF$>,<

CYCLES, THE JAUNTEE, THE DROPPER SAT, 2/25 - 7PM

NUDE COFFEE

SAT, 2/25 - 9PM

GEORGE HARRISON BIRTHDAY TRIBUTE CONCERT W/ELLIS CLARK & THE BIG PARADE FEAT ARY JEEBIE PLUS SPECIAL GUESTS

12O’CLOCK

TRACK SERIES A SIDE OF JAM WITH YOUR LUNCH EVERY WEEKDAY

THEBLEADER.COM

...H367PSM61=KH9LN %%-HB%+H)+'34 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

l

l

MUSIC Run the Jewels Gaslamp Killer, Gangsta Boo, Nick Hook, and Cuz open. 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence, sold out. 18+ Killer Mike and El-P up the ante on their self-released third album as Run the Jewels, tapping into floor-rumbling old-school Miami bass fundamentals—albeit a strain that pushes the tradition into the present—and laying out classic, rhythmically agile, hectoring flows. Both MCs convey steamroller energy, infusing every track with a ferocity that draws juice from our current political environment even though their words rarely address it directly. Much of the power comes from a sense of triumph, both in that Killer Mike and El-P have achieved supremacy so late in their careers, and that Run the Jewels have refused to play by rules other than their own (this is to say nothing of Mike’s surprising political influence in supporting Bernie Sanders). On the unstoppable “Call Ticketron” the duo trumpet their authority as El-P brilliantly changes up a rhythmic accent every four bars while Mike spits lines like “We be the realist of killers of the fuck shit squadron / Movin’ through the streets and we lootin, robbin’ / Mobbin’, marchin’, carrying our carbon.” Later on the album “Thursday in the Danger Room” dares to expose vulnerability while operating with a keen sense of righteousness. Mike yields to life’s uncertain preciousness: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will leave us mumbling and blind / So we stumble blind through the depths of the dawn looking for something divine.” —PETER MARGASAK

SATURDAY18 Chicago Opera Theater’s The Invention of Morel 7:30 PM, Studebaker Theater, Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan, $39$125. b

continued from 33 Bill Orcutt Austin Wulliman open. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15. 18+ When Bill Orcutt—the abstract guitarist of 90s experimental noise-rock technicians Harry Pussy, now a prolific solo artist and collaborator—pairs his gnarled acoustic blues technique and akimbo tuning style with an equally intrepid drummer, the results can sound like an overflowing toolbox that’s been chucked down a metal flight of stairs.

And it’s all you can do to not listen and stare in wonderment. On his 2015 duo album with Jacob Felix Heule, called Colonial Donuts (released via Orcutt’s own Palilalia imprint), he leads the way with violent, stabbing lines backed by his faint primitive groans and chants, while Heule fills in

the space through improvisation, often dragging behind Orcutt and branching out in peculiar ways.

The moments when they find the groove together and move in step, like on “This Song Is Called Reify,” make those when they splinter apart all the more exciting and jarring. Orcutt’s work with Rangda drummer Chris Corsano, as heard on last year’s double LP Live at Various/Various Live (also on Palilalia), can be dizzying in how frantically the two flail and sprint through their wild improvisations, but damn if they’re not in the pocket throughout, working their instruments as though suspended in a trance. For his Frequency Series Festival performance tonight, Orcutt plays solo, which will present a wholly different kind of beat as his guitar wrings and stretches out a rudimentary rhythm as opposed to barely following one.

—KEVIN WARWICK

Chicago Opera Theater cocommissioned this new opera by prolific composer Stewart Copeland, best known as cofounder and drummer of genre-bending rock band the Police. Based on the 1940 science-fiction novel La Invencion de Morel,

by Argentinian writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, it’s the mysterious story of a fugitive who takes refuge on a remote island only to find that his hideout’s also occupied by an extremely strange group of tourists.

The novel also purportedly inspired Alain Resnais’s enigmatic 1961 French New Wave film Last Year at Marienbad. London-based actor, director, and playwright Jonathan Moore wrote the libretto and will direct; COT artistic director Andreas Mitisek conducts the Fulcrum Point New Music Project orchestra. —DEANNA ISAACS

Lasse Marhaug 8 PM, Graham Foundation, 4 W. Burton, free with RSVP. b Though he’s often tagged a noise musician, Norwegian sound artist Lasse Marhaug has proven to be much more than that over a career that spans two decades plus. He’s clearly enamored by abstraction and loudness, but he’s also developed keen listening abilities that have made him a regular collaborator with some of the world’s greatest free improvisers—and none of this is to overlook his fasci- J

FEBRUARY 17TH

OVERKILL & NILE

FEBRUARY 18TH FEBRUARY 23RD

SLUSHII

FEBRUARY 24TH FEBRUARY 25TH FEBRUARY 25TH

GANJA WHITE NIGHT LATE SHOW

MARCH 3RD

TROLLPHACE

W/ SKISM, TRAMPA

MARCH 10TH

TCHAMI

W/MERCER

MARCH 11TH

BORGORE NIGHT ONE

W/ 12TH PLANET, PRINCE FOX

MARCH 11TH

THE KNOCKS LATE SHOW W/ BIPOLAR SUNSHINE, GILLIGAN MOSS

WWW.CONCORDMUSICHALL.COM 2047 N. MILWAUKEE | 773.570.4000 FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 35

Valerie June o COURTESY THE ARTIST

MUSIC continued from 35

nation with exploring how sound changes in different environments. Marhaug is a trusted partner of drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, and together they’ve made a pile of disparate recordings with folks like keyboardist Jim O’Rourke and multi-instrumentalist Otomo Yoshihide—but he’s always been game to tangle with horn players as well. On the 40-minute slugfest Close Up (for Abbas Kiarostami) (Audiographic) Marhaug matches the high-intensity honks and snorts of Ken Vandermark, while on Generasjon Lindemenn (KBA) he forges a writhing series of hisses, scrapes, and static that take part in a quicksilver dance with the striated machinations of Norwegian reedist Kristoffer Berre Alberts. Marhaug’s superb new album On the Silver Globe (Sofa) is a collaboration with Norwegian guitarist Kim Myhr that favors richly textured ambience and subtle crunching. His astute feel is also apparent on recordings with cellist Okkyung Lee and singer Stine Janvin Motland, where context radically transforms acoustic sounds. For his first visit to Chicago in nearly a decade he’ll premiere a new work combining voice, objects, synthesizer, and field recordings of Saltstraumen, a small Norwegian strait with one of the world’s strongest tidal currents. Also included will be a piece from 2016 in which his electronics are combined with the work of Motland, tuba player Martin Taxt, and the improvising trio Sult.

—PETER MARGASAK

ing, and mystery. The crystalline production and vanishing quietness of early ECM recordings might as well have been tailored especially for his lyrical melodies, gently swinging rhythms, and gnomic improvisations on piano, brass, and acoustic guitars.

Towner has always made his most intimate music with 12-string and classical guitars, and that’s all he plays on My Foolish Heart—and all he’ll play tonight.

The titular song is treated with a subdued sweetness that suggests he remembers impetuous love more fondly than Evans did. —BILL MEYER

SUNDAY19 Ralph Towner 8 PM, Martyrs’, 3855 N. Lincoln, $25, $20 in advance.

In the liner notes to the new My Foolish Heart (ECM), Ralph Towner recalls how hearing pianist Bill Evans’s 1961 recording of Victor Young’s ballad launched him on a quest to achieve something similarly reverent. As a sideman with the Paul Winter Consort, a member of the jazz and world-fusion ensemble Oregon, and a recording artist for the ECM label for 45 years, Towner has found many ways to evoke dimensions of introspection, yearn-

1200 W RANDOLPH ST, CHICAGO, IL 60607 | 312.733.WINE

JUST ANNOUNCED

MONDAY20 Valerie June Oh Pep! open. 8 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage, $20. 18+ On her forthcoming album The Order of Time (due from Concord on March 10) Tennessee-bred singer-songwriter Valerie June settles into a more naturalistic groove, adjusting from her 2013 breakout Pushin’ Against a Stone—influenced by the heavy hand of producer Dan Auerbach—to something that feels more like it belongs to her. Her music continues to draw from a wide swath of influences: bits of gospel, soul, blues, pop, and even a version of Tinariwen’s Saharan blues (“Shakedown”) are folded into an atmospheric amalgam that toggles between

Marty Stuart ANA & his Fabulous POPOVIC Superlatives

ON SALE AT NOON THURSDAY 2.16 ON SALE TO VINOFILE MEMBERS TUESDAY 2.14

3.30 4.16 5.5 5.13 5.15 6.11

THE SHADES & BRENDAN FLETCHER TIMOTHY B. SCHMIT (OF THE EAGLES) 2ND SHOW ADDED DON MCLEAN - 10PM SHOW ADDED ROBBIE FULKS ANAT COHEN & TRIO BRASILEIRO JOHN WAITE

don’t miss...

2.20 | GIMME DANGER: LONG LIVE THE STOOGES (DOCUMENTARY SCREENING)

36 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

12.18 2.22

2.23

ASSAD BROTHERS SERGIO & ODAIR ASSAD

JACK INGRAM

W/ SPECIAL GUEST ELISE DAVIS

2.26

tender and taut, with June’s nasal drawl pulling everything together. The album opener, “Long Lonely Road,” seems to reflect on her journey from rustic beginnings: “Gran made the best yeast rolls” and “Pops earned his bread in dust” she recalls while looking back on her decision to leave home for New York at 18, the song’s air of melancholy spiked with hazy optimism. —PETER MARGASAK

Soft Fangs Advance Base, Liquid Gardens, and Colorines open. 6:30 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $10. 17+ When singer-songwriter John Lutkevich wrapped up last year’s The Light (Disposable America/ Exploding in Sound), his debut full-length as Soft Fangs, he told Independent Music News that he “became obsessed with the idea of transcendence, of struggling through something in order to reach a higher state.” It’s unclear what, if anything, Lutkevich may have been struggling with personally, and that lack of definition allows The Light to breathe: trembling guitars, mumbling vocals, and whispering electronic blips exude a deep sense of sorrow as they shade in emotions rather than articulate them. What is more definitive is Lutkevich’s musical evolution. Since Soft Fangs’ self-titled 2014 debut EP, he’s figured out how to make his swelling notes land with more force, in part because he’s learned

UPCOMING SHOWS 2.17

HEAD FOR THE HILLS WITH SPECIAL GUESTS COYOTE RIOT

2.19

PARIS COMBO

2.21

THE ANDALUSIAN TRAIL: THE ROOTS OF PLMJFIKG Q CHICAGO FLAMENCO FESTIVAL KICK OFF CONCERT

2.26

SAM FAZIO: ACOUSTIC SOUL 12PM BRUNCH SHOW

2.27

JEANNIE TANNER’S WORDS AND MUSIC ALBUM RELEASE SHOW

2.28

KATHY MATTEA FEAT. BILL COOLEY THE ACOUSTIC LIVING ROOM, SONGS & STORIES

3.1

THE IDES OF MARCH FEAT. JIM PETERIK

TUV

LMNRO MLQSMMHN

3.3

AN EVENING WITH DEACON BLUES: AMERICA’S FQQR<;F= ;=BCS;I ;N <;IIQK >FO GIF;S=BOE E=FPPK LBOOI= DNLF=> QIMK

3.4

TOM PAXTON FEAT. THE DONJUANS A>NO DIO=K H ?NO MIJOI=@

3.5

SIERRA HULL

3.7

MARCIA BALL

l

l

THE NEW RESPECTS

ROBERT RANDOLPH AND THE FAMILY BAND

MAR 17

MIPSO

APR 01

JOE HERTLER & THE RAINBOW SEEKERS

APR 06

DELICATE STEVE

APR 09

MAD DOGS & ENGLISHMEN

APR 20

NEW

MUSIC

COIN

ARIZONA

APR 23

NEW

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

MEAT PUPPETS AND mike watt + the jom and terry show

MAY 19

ODDISEE & GOOD COMPNY

MAY 20

NEW

Lone Piñon o WENDY JOHNSON

THE NORTH 41 + CHURCH BOOTY

NEW

MAX AND THE MILD ONES

Jake Xerxes Fussell Jim Elkington opens.

9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $10.

Singer-guitarist Jake Xerxes Fussell grew up in Durham, North Carolina, surrounded by American folklore, raised by a father, Fred Fussell, who often took him on expeditions to document the rural blues and old-time music of the south and hang with fellow sonic archivists like George Mitchell and Art Rosenbaum. The experience made an indelible impression on Jake, who as a kid began studying and playing the music his father exposed him to. He interpreted the Piedmont blues of North Carolina, hung out in Berkeley with documentary filmmaker Les Blank, and toured with bluesman Robert Wilkins (from whom the Rolling Stones swiped “Prodigal Son”). It was actually on the Wilkins tour that Fussell met guitarist William Tyler, who would go on to produce the singer’s superb 2015 eponymous debut for Paradise of Bachelors. Fussell freely adapts early American roots music, both black and white, teasing out new melodic subtleties and oversee-

Lone Piñon 8:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln. F b The members of this Santa Fe trio have channeled a relatively broad array of musical interests into the traditional folk of northern Mexico and the American southwest. Only Noah Martinez—who doubles on the upright bass and its mammoth Mexican six-string cousin the guitarrón—is of Mexican lineage. He grew up in Los Ranchos de Albuquerque on a diet of norteño, ranchera, and the music of the Onda Chicana movement, and has undoubtedly helped familiarize his bandmates with those traditions. Fiddler and accordionist Jordan Wax hails from Missouri, where he grew up playing the music of the Ozarks, while guitarist Greg Glassman followed an interest in banjo music to Morocco, where he played with Gnawa musicians. The trio’s wide-ranging performances on both last year’s self-released Trio Nuevomexico and their assured follow-up, Días Felices (due in May from LM Duplication, the label operated by Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost of a Hawk and a Hacksaw), are characterized more by passionate enthusiasm than by rigorous purity, but Lone Piñon are clearly still exploring, and there’s no missing the fact that they deliver a boisterous good time. This is their Chicago debut.

—PETER MARGASAK v

MIKE DUNN

ALEX DEZEN OF THE DAMNWELLS

MAR 14

THE IKE REILLY ASSASSINATION

MAR 17-18

THE RAD TRADS + FOREST & THE EVERGREENS

MAR 19

AIRPARK

MAR 21 APR 02 APR 18

CRYSTAL GARDEN

APR 20

SWEET CRUDE

APR 22

NEW

WEDNESDAY22

TICKETS AT WWW.LH-ST.COM

THE REGRETTES

NEW

The Crazy World of Arthur Brown See Pick of the Week (page 33). Electric Citizen and Killer Moon open. 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $30, $25 in advance. 17+

ing small-band arrangements that bring a crystalline folk-rock glow to decades-old songs. His recent follow-up, What in the Natural World, is even better. On it he brings an avuncular chill to lyrics once sung by Ivie Anderson on the Duke Ellington gem “Jump for Joy,” and also adds a rambling, contemporary vibe to the Bill Chitwood and Bud Landress obscurity “Furniture Man,” showing that a 1925 tune about repossession is still relevent today. Fussell gets crack support from a lean Nashville combo that includes guitarist Chris Scruggs, who ornaments the songs with a wonderfully light, airy touch that never impinges on Fussell’s charming Paul Burchlike delivery. —PETER MARGASAK

THE OCTOPUS PROJECT

NEW

TUESDAY21

FEATURING OLIVIER ST. LOUIS

FEATURING BOYD TINSLEY OF DAVE MATTHEWS BAND

NEW

how and when to trim his instrumentation. He’s also become more adventurous while maintaining Soft Fangs’ mellow intimacy. Some of the best moments on The Light are when Lutkevich fiddles with lo-fi electronics, be it the aquatic tick-tock percussion on “Back of a Horse” or the muffled, arrhythmic loop of what sounds like a field recording of an owl on “Birthday.” —LEOR GALIL

A REVIVAL OF THE ENTIRE 1970 JOE COCKER / LEON RUSSELL CONCERT EXPERIENCE

MOTEL RADIO

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 37

S P O N S O R E D

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

C O N T E N T

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

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

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

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

ALIVEONE .COM

L H - S T. C O M

FITZGERALDSNIGHTCLUB .COM

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

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

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

MOTORROWB REWI NG .COM

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

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

SCHUBAS // LAKEVIEW All Lagunitas beers are $5.50

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

REGGIESLIVE.COM

L H - S T. C O M

7 7 3 . 4 8 6 .9 8 62

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

R I V E RB N RT E ROW YH N

FAVE > CHAR-GRILLED SURF & TURF

OLIVER’S // 6 9 0 8 W I N D S O R // C H E F - O L I V E R S .C O M Oliver’s features contemporary American with seasonal international dishes—that includes prime cuts, fresh seafood and farm to table specialties in a relaxed casual environment.

Appetizers include oysters, shrimp, sliders and delicious small plates. Chef Oliver’s famous scallops merited a special TV appearance on ABC’s 190 North and several mentions in Chicago publications. The exceptional fare is complimented by a wide variety of signature martinis, extensive selection of craft beers and a unique wine list.

“Outstanding! Wonderful appetizers & martinis!”

38 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

— PAMELA B. / YELP

l

l

FOOD & DRINK

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Ronero is a rum bar with a pan-South American vision Chef Cory Morris is at once creative and compelling, familiar and formulaic.

By MIKE SULA

I

t’s difficult to imagine a dish more universally Latin American than arroz con pollo.

Everyone eats it, but it’s different everywhere you go. It’s cooked with achiote in Puerto Rico. They add ketchup in Nicaragua. In Peru it’s dark beer. But even with all the variations from country to country, one thing unites them all: the pollo is always cooked in the arroz. The reason for that is elementary. You give that rice to the chicken, and the chicken gives back to the rice.

That’s especially true of the juicier, gnarlier, darker pieces of the bird: thighs, legs, wings, necks—and feet, if you mean business. Their copious fat, collagen, and fuller flavor infuse

RONERO | $$$$

738 W. Randolph, 312-600-6105, ronerochicago.com

Saladlike deconstruction of matambre, the Argentine stuffed flank steak o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

the broth and then are absorbed into the rice. When all is said and done, the only part that isn’t 100 percent happy about this treatment is the precious and delicate breast, that white, f lavorless, often unnaturally enhanced muscle that is the primary source of protein for Pilates instructors and people with an unusual disinterest in food.

When it rises from the rice, a thigh literally falls from the bone and into your mouth, and you can hear its glutamates singing as they disappear down your throat. A breast needs to be dissected with effort and a sharp knife after it’s disinterred from the pot, and its juicelessness is a rebuke to your palate and entire mandibular structure. Even Martha Stewart, when she’s dabbling in the cuisines of her domestic servants, knows you have to cook the rice in the chicken.

Arroz con pollo is the first entree listed on the menu at Ronero, a new pan-Latin rum bar on the West Loop’s ever-teeming restaurant row from “Actor/Musician/Style aficionado” (as his Twitter bio identifies him) Nils Westland, who also paid industry dues at Nellcôte and Rockit Bar & Grill. Cory Morris was recruited as chef, and he’s a good get; Morris was chef de cuisine at both Mercat a la Planxa and Rural Society, two restaurants that ought to be in the normal rotation of anyone who enjoys living in Chicago. That Morris thrived in Jose Garces’s restaurant orbit is a good sign for the food at Ronero, which adopts, as Garces often does himself, a pan-South American approach (if Cuba is included within those borders).

Ronero inhabits a long, dim art-decoinspired layout of dining room/bar/dining room in a space that last housed a business that wasn’t a restaurant, an increasingly endangered species in this neighborhood. The upstairs bar and party space, judging from photos on Instagram, seems more populated by leggy ladies and dudebro sausagefests than anything on Morris’s menu.

That’s too bad, because there are some pretty mackadocious plates coming out of the tiny kitchen at the rear of the restaurant, where Morris paces in front of the pass, making sure they’re just so.

He’s managed to make a plate of black bean dip look pretty: a silky lavender compound of smashed beans and tahini, showered with cloudy white feta, embedded with ribbons of fried plantain. There’s a tangle of shaved purple and orange carrots too, with tissues of ivor y-streaked beef, cured until J

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 39

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

FOOD & DRINK

Ropa vieja with goat cheese is a powerhouse of a starter; the delicate mahi-mahi ceviche is bathed in leche de tigre. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

continued from 39

crimson, hiding wedges of boiled egg. It’s a saladlike deconstruction of matambre, the Argentine stuffed flank steak, drizzled with tangy chimichurri that’s been emulsified to prevent stray parsley from getting stuck in your shiny grill. There are also uncommonly large hearts of palm that somehow defy the customary expectation that they’ll taste like canned tree trunks. They’re the stars of another inspired salad, though they’re almost camouflaged under sheaves of purple radicchio and Belgium endive, the bitter greens asserting themselves among the more soothing presence of sweet pears, cream, and crunchy hazelnuts.

Not everything is that pretty. A cast-iron pan of braised goat shredded into the “old clothes” known in Cuba as ropa vieja is a powerhouse of a starter, especially with the scoop of rapidly melting goat cheese that you’ll swirl into the meat. Normally after eating something like that I’m ready for a shot of bitters and a nap, but that would give short shrift to the albondigas, beef-and-pork meatballs wallowing in a thin, hot peanut sauce that will awaken your inner five-year-old. But then these meaty little plates can be countered by something as delicate as a mahi-mahi ceviche.

Mahi-mahi is a stupid fish—the chicken breast of the sea—but here it’s fresh at least, bathing in a tamed leche de tigre, its bite muzzled

40 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

by ample amounts of creamy leche de coco.

There’s definitely a party going on this “para compartir” section of the menu, and you will indeed share these plates even if it means breaking up the flaky, baked empanadas of the day like animals, just so everyone can get a taste of what’s inside.

For all the surprises among the starters, Morris’s selection of entrees, though written in Spanish, tells a familiar story populated by characters you’ll be accustomed to if you eat out with any regularity. There’s a burger.

There’s a steak. Some scallops, some lamb chops. There’s more of that mahi-mahi.

There’s a risotto for your vegetarian friends, and there’s pork belly for the bloodmouths.

The restaurant’s disciplined adherence to the rote protein-side-sauce approach at least is filtered through Morris’s South American sensibility. So the hamburguesa sports a chorizo marmalade, and the lamb chops try to keep it real with a Peruvian purple potato hash and a sauce made from the minty Andean herb huacatay. The pork belly is arrayed in glistening, crispy mouthfuls across a hummuslike white bean puree with thinly sliced mangoes duking it out with charred brussels sprouts.

It’s difficult to see what coordinates the saffron-butternut squash “winter” risotto is trying to navigate from, given its lack of any discernible flavor profile. An aggressively charred but internally pink hanger steak has

a little chimichurri to cut through the bitter black backnote, but it gets lost among mashed potatoes and sauteed oyster mushrooms.

And then there’s the arroz con pollo—lovely Spanish bomba rice with long slivers of Gordal olives deployed to cut through what are some truly fat, meaty, flavorful grains. But something’s wrong. Mounted atop the rice is the chicken, a thick, grilled white breast, sliced and fanned out to announce it has arrived— and it is simply exhausted. No other parts have made it, sorry. This arroz con pollo wasn’t intended for someone who eats for pleasure. It’s for the person in your party who would rather think she looks good than feel good.

The kitchen offers a few premium-priced spectacles: a whole deep-fried snapper listed at an intimidating $80, a 16-ounce Brazilian rump steak for $68, and a $58 pork shoulder cooked in banana leaves. But it’s hard to gamble on such performances when the entrees are so pro forma and the appetizers are so compelling.

Desserts reside somewhere in the middle of this quandary. There’s everything from a light and creamy arroz con leche sporting thin fans of dried pineapple to dense sweet potato doughnuts for dredging through chocolate syrup to a thick, warm espresso mousse covered in icy granita—two textures that don’t belong in the mouth at the same time.

A “ronero” is a master rum distiller, in case

you’ve forgotten this is a rum bar. Beverage director Allie Kim (formerly of Boka) has assembled an awe-inspiring collection of more than a hundred sugarcane spirits, some of which are employed in house cocktails, classics, highballs, and postprandial drams to make sure the goat goes down easy.

Best of all there’s the friendliness and expertise that should be operative at any good bar. Even if your companion takes political exception to the rum of a particular country (say, Nicaragua’s Flor de Caña, whose sugarcane workers suffer from chronic kidney disease at a rate six times that of their countrymen), your bartender will be only too happy to entertain your selected substitute (even if it makes no sense at all).

There’s a much-debated notion that in certain kinds of restaurants the appetizers are always better than the entrees. Some argue that hunger has a way of influencing how the beginning of the meal is perceived to the unfair disadvantage of the end. But I think, in the case of a someone as talented as Morris, the tyranny of the large plate has locked the chef into a formula that demands a piece of sauced protein and some stuff on the side. It’s a formula that’s easily broken, at least in the case of one special dish. All he has to do is cook the pollo in the arroz. v

ß @MikeSula

l

l

FOOD & DRINK

Ç Watch a video of Ben Lustbader working with dulse in the kitchen—and get the recipe—at chicagoreader.com/food.

KEY INGREDIENT

Chef Ben Lustbader of Giant makes bread with the ‘bacon of the sea’

By JULIA THIEL

Dulse sourdough bread; dulse o JULIA THIEL

D

ulse, a type of seaweed that grows in the northern Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, is lauded as a health food that, according to some, tastes remarkably similar to bacon.

CHEF BEN LUSTBADER OF GIANT, challenged by Publican Anker’s A.J. Walker to create a dish with the seaweed, was skeptical. “People call it the bacon of the sea,” he says. “I don’t really think it tastes a whole lot like bacon. One of my cooks described the flavor as malty, which seemed a little more on point to me.”

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t like the flavor, though. “It’s actually kind of nice. It has a minerality, a salinity . . . it definitely tastes of the sea,” he says. The dulse that Lustbader bought was dried, and he experimented both with rehydrating it—which didn’t work very well (“the texture gets kind of gross”)—and frying it, which did.

Seaweed is most often associated with Asian cuisine, but Lustbader did a little research and found that dulse is also popular in northern Europe—particularly Ireland and Wales, where it’s often incorporated into soda bread. Since the chefs at Giant make their own sourdough bread daily, sourdough with dulse seemed like a natural fit. In addition to the fried dulse, Lustbader folded some typically Asian ingredients into the dough: Thai bird chiles, Thai basil, and lemon zest.

To go on the bread, Lustbader cured salm-

on and made cream cheese with ingredients designed to reflect the flavors he’d used in the sourdough. He rubbed the salmon down with Hendrick’s Gin and layered Thai basil, lemon peel, and fennel seed into the cure of salt and sugar. For the cream cheese, he says, “I threw in togarashi and took some scallions and seared the crap out of them on the plancha until they blackened, then chopped them up and put them in.” After spreading cream cheese on the sliced bread, Lustbader added a few sliced cucumbers, then folded thinly sliced cured salmon on top, sprinkling the whole thing with sesame seeds, scallions, Thai basil, and pieces of fried dulse.

The seaweed flavor in the finished product is subtle, Lustbader says. “It definitely adds that little bit of minerality, but as far as oceanic flavors are concerned it’s not overwhelming in any way.” And he still doesn’t understand the bacon comparison, he says.

“You’re not going to fool anyone by subbing it for bacon.”

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

WHO’S NEXT:

Lustbader has challenged EMILY STEWART, executive chef at BANG BANG PIE & BISCUITS, to create a dish with umeboshi, or pickled ume fruits traditional in Japan. v

ß @juliathiel FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 41

JOBS

SALES & MARKETING TELE-FUNDRAISING: EXTRA CASH! American Veterans helping Veterans. Felons need not

apply per Illinois Attorney General regulations. Start ASAP, Call 312-2565035

General Financial Quantitative Analyst: Gather fin,trading & quant.data.

Analyze data utilizing backtesting and simulations. Analyze results using statistical and other quant. methods so results can be incorporated into larger models.Utilize pricing theory and financial modeling for trading instruments across asset classes such as futures, options, and securities.

Write and develop mathematical models and algos based upon statistical and empirical theory that will directly integrate and enhance trading systems intended to limit risk and max gain.Develop and test standalone math models used for fin forecasting and portfolio optimization.Responsible for development and application of advanced methods of quant modeling of financial markets.

Implement and take live asset allocation research projects that have been identified to limit risk and max performance of investment criteria.Utilize analytical and programming skills,including the use of C++/C or Java, Matlab, an d/or S-Plus, in the application of the statistical theory and empirical modeling, and for strategy development and improvement. Utilize program skills, such as relation database and Python, and risk-based haircut calculation for trading position management, risk management and margin management. **Work is at Employer’s Office (500 W. Monroe, Suite 2630, Chicago, IL, 60661) with no travel involved. Requirements: Master’s Degree in Mathematical Finance, Mathematics, Financial Engineering,Finance, or closely related plus 3 years of progressively responsible Financial Analyst/Financial Quantitative Analyst/Financial Engineering experience. Must have 3 years of

experience in modelling financial markets, 3 years of experience in developing mathematical models for trading algorithms and trading strategies, 3 years of experience developing pricing models for futures, options, or exchange traded markets, 3 years of experience in conducting simulations of financial models for trading algorithms and trading strategies, and 3 years of experience in backtesting quantitative models against securities, futures, options, or exchange traded markets. Must have 3 years of experience working with regression models, stochastic analysis, Python, C++, Matlab,SQL, and VBA. Email resume/CV and contact information to jobs@cmtam. com of CMT US Holdings LLC. No phone calls please.

TRANSUNION,

LLC

SEEKS

Consultants, Analytics for Chicago, IL location to consult w/clients to apply mathematical, analytical & statistical methods to develop business intelligence analytic solutions. Master’s in Statistics/Analytics/Applied Mathem atics/Economics + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Statistics/Analytics/Applied Mathematics/Economics +5yrs exp. req’d. Must have statistical programming & analytics modeling exp. w/ full credit data cycle (acquisition through final presentation) incl. credit risk models for acquisition & account management, propensity models for customer acquisition & retention, portfolio models for regulatory applications & response models, client-facing presentations of complex statistical/analytics concepts to non-statistical audience, segmentation analyses, logistic & linear regression modeling, constrained optimization, gradient boosted trees, random forests & w/R, SAS, SQL, SAS Enterprise Miner, Unix/Linux, Xeno/Fico Model Builder. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: SK, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

TRANSUNION,

LLC

SEEKS

Consultants – IT-Batch Credit Services for Chicago, IL location to analyze, develop & implement business requirements. Master’s in Comp. Sci. /Comp. Info. Systems/ Comp. Applications + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. Info. Systems/ Comp. Applications + 5yrs exp. req’d.

Req’d Skills: sw development w/ datawarehouse ETL development & analysis, SQL, Ab-Initio incl. Plans &

Meta Programming, Informatica, mainframe, scripting, web services (S OAP/REST), Unix/Linux/AIX, Oracle, Autosys, Control M, Tivoli, JCL, SyncSort, DB2, Hadoop/Big Data technologies.

Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: HSGB, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

NUTS ON CLARK POPCORN

ACCOUNTING MANAGER, RISK ASSURANCE – ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS RISK AND CONTROLS (ESRC) (MULT. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chicago, IL. Prvd stratgc intnl audit outsourcing & co-sourcing solut to mitgte clnts’ risks & imprv bus perfmnce. Req BS in Acctng, Bus Admin, Info Sys or rel + 5 yrs post-bach’s prog rel work exp; OR MS in Acctng, Bus Admin, Info Sys or rel + 3 yrs rel work exp. Travel up to 60% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1131, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

Senior QA Engineer responsible for QA process. bachelor’s in computer science or engineering, or related plus 5 yr exp. required.

Apply to: CellTrak Technologies, Inc. 1051 Perimeter Dr #1000, Schaumburg, IL60173, Attn: HR

COMPUTER SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR (Bachelor’s or equiv. w/2 yrs exp.

OR Associate’s or equiv. w/4 yrs. exp. or other suitable qualifications) Job entails & req. exp. to include IBM AIX, Red Hat Linux Server, IBM server LPAR, Oracle Solaris, OpenLDAP, Samba, DNS, DHCP, NTP, Squid, LVM, NFS, SSH, TSM, Tivoli, HMC, Apache.

PgSql, MySQL, FTP, Sonicwall, NETASQ, NIM, VIOS, Remedy, UNIX, SuSE Linux and Windows.

Relocation & travel to unanticipated locations within USA possible. Send resumes to HR, Sunpower Consulting LLC., 3410 West Van Buren St, Ste A, Chicago, IL 60624 TRANSUNION,

LLC

SEEKS

Consultants, Info. Tech., Application Development & Design (Developer) for Chicago, IL location to design, implement & maintain Content Management Systems. Master’s in Comp. Sci. /Comp. Eng./any Engineering field + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci./ Comp. Eng./any Engineering field + 5yrs exp. req’d. Req’d kills: Must have sw development exp. w/content management systems (TeamSite/ LiveSite), Core Java, Perl, Shell scripting, SQL database. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: JS, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

ACCOUNTANT (WEINBAUER, INC.) Wine Importer lo-

cated in Chicago suburbs seeks Accountant. Successful applicant must have Master’s degree in Accounting; 6 mos. exp. using VIP Accounting software; 6 mos exp. or coursework using Excel spreadsheets to organize, analyze, and present data, incl. use of Adv. Functions and Formulas; and 6 mos. exp. in state Liquor Tax prep. and filing. Send resume and cover letter to Manfred Bauer, President, via email to Manfred@ weinbauer.com

SOFTWARE ORACLE AMERICA, INC.

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

42 CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 16, 2017

has openings for Software Development Consultant positions in Westmont, IL. Job duties include: Develop and deliver detailed IT solutions through consulting project activities. Responsibilities include client identification through final invoicing for engagements.

Apply by e-mailing resume to randy. yarger@oracle.com, referencing 385.

18220. Oracle supports workforce diversity.

PRODUCTION TECHNICIAN: WEST loop digital printing lab

looking for full time production help.

Computer experience is required.

The new hire will be crossed trained on various printers as well as finishing services. E-mail resume to chris@ americancolorlabs.com

MARBLE- TERRAZZO REFINI SHER/RESTORER needed by

established company of 20 years.

Make very good money including bonus, profit sharing & 50% health insurance. Must be experienced.

Immediate start for the right person.

Email: mike.sungloss@gmail.com

stores HIRING FOR NEW LOCATION: Sales, cooks, stock, paid training.

Starts immediately when working with a team. Apply in person @ corp. office, 3830 N. Clark St. Chicago 9 am to 10 am Mon Thru Fri. Must bring ID’s to apply

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $500-$599

1 BR $700-$799

WOW!! MUST SEE!

HUMBOLDT PARK. ONE

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

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

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

773-221-7490, 773-221-7493 2819 W LEXINGTON - 2BR, appls incl’d, 1st flr, $800; 25 N Latrobe, 2BR bsmt apt, appls & heat incl’d. $700. Contact RD, 708655-1228

SOUTH SHORE AREA Newly remod Studios. Near Metra & CTA, appls incl. $500-$525/mo.

Steve 312-952-3901

NEWLY REMOD 1BR & Studios starting at $500. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/ hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St., 773619-0204

LARGE STUDIO NEAR Morse el.

6824 N Wayne. Hardwood floors.

Pets OK. Laundry in building. $695/ month. Heat included. Available 3/1.

773-761-4318, www.lakefrontmgt. com

CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms

Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone, cable ready, fridge, private facilities, laundry avail. Switchboard. Start at $ 160/wk Call 773-493-3500

7500 SOUTH SHORE Dr. Brand New Rehabbed Studio & 1BR Apts from $650.

Call 773-374-7777 for details.

STUDIO $700-$899 LARGE STUDIO APARTMENT

near Metra. 1904 W Pratt. Cats OK. Laundry in building. $725/ month.

Heat included. Available 3/1. 773-7614318. www.lakefrontmgt.com

CHICAGO, 8907 S. Cottage Grove, 1BR, living room, eat in kitchen, appliances.

Individually heated. $625 + sec.

Shawn, 773-221-7221

1 bedroom, heat, A/C, appliances & carpet included, $670/month + security, 708-957-2043

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

6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

Call 773-955-5106

EXCHANGE EAST APTS 1 Brdm

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

WEST PULLMAN (INDIANA

Ave) Nice,lrg 1BR $575; 2BR $650 & 1 3BR $850, balcony, Section 8 Welcome. 773-995-6950

79TH

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

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

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

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

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200

1 BR UNDER $700 FREE HEAT 7100 S. Jeffery LARGE 1BR $695 Section 8 OK, free cooking gas, newly decorated, carpeted, stove/ fridge, laundry, elevator, NO APPLICATION FEE 1-773-919-7102 or 312-802-7301 MIDWAY AREA/63RD KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All

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

Paulina, 1-2 Bedroom, $745-$795, Free heat. Call 773.916.0039

1 BR $800-$899 ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT

near Warren Park and Metra, 6804 N Wolcott. Hardwood floors. Heat included. Laundry in building. Cats OK. $875/ month. Available 3/1. 773-7614318, www.lakefrontmgt.com

RVSWOOD 4800N spacious 3/ rm studio; full kitchen, new appl, oak floors, vintage built-ins $850 /incls ht 773-743-4141 urbanequities.com

1 BR $900-$1099

$600 & $700/mo. Large 1 & 2BR 75th & Union. Near public trans, schools and shopping, appl incl. Sect 8 Welc. 708-334-5188

&

WOODLAWN 2BR

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

NOW

LEASING!!

NEWLY

Rehabbed Single Family Homes & Townhomes in the South Suburban Area. For Info Call 708-748-4570 Newly updated, clean furnished rooms, located near buses & Metra, elevator, utilities included, $91/wk. $ 395/mo. 815-722-1212 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $130/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970 CHICAGO 70th & King Dr, 1BR, clean, quiet, well maintained bldg, Lndry + Heat. Section 8 ok. $680/ mo. 773-510-9290.

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

newly rehab, 1 BR, h/w flrs, sec alarm, heat & hot water incl, laundry, Sec 8 & Seniors Welc. Call for appt (773)418-9908

CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE BeautiAUBURN GRESHAM: 79TH &

CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up.

773-637-5957 CHICAGO - South Shore Large 1BR, $660/mo.

Free heat.

Near Transportation.

Section 8 Welcome. Call 708932-4582

ONE OF THE BEST M & N MGMT, 1BR, 7727 Colfax ** 2 Lrg BR, 6754 Crandon ** 2 & 3BR, 2BA, 6216 Eberhart ** Completely rehabbed.

You deserve the best ** 773-9478572 or 312-613-4427

CHATHAM CHARM , Vintage, CHICAGO, 8018-20 S. Eberhart, large, newly renovated, 1BR in Chatham. Heat & appliances. $775 + sec. Shawn, 773221-7221

WEST RIDGE STUDIO: new kit,

CALUMET CITY - Comfortable

CHICAGO - HYDE PARK 5401 S. Ellis.

1BR. $535/mo. Studio $470/mo

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

WINTER SPECIAL $500 Toward Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. 773-287-4500 www.wjmngmt.com

STUDIO OTHER

2746 E 81st St , studio apt, tenant pays electric only $475-500/ mo plus 1 mo security Available Now! 773-264-3419

heated, appliances, ceiling fans, laundry room, $670 + security deposit, Call 312-296-0411

û NO SEC DEP û

6829 S. Perry.

Studio/1BR. $465-$520/mo.

1431 W. 78th St. 2BR. $605/mo.

HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

Chicago, Beverly/Cal Park/Blue Island Studio $575 & up, 1BR $665 & up, 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Prkg.

708-388-0170

STUDIO $600-$699

CHICAGO - 1214 W 91st St, 1BR,

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impeccably Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park.

Laundry & Security on Premises.

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

new appl, carpet AC, new windows $ 825/heated 773-743-4141 urbanequities.com

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

Best Price, Best Location.

Jackson Highland. Studio, $590.

1BR, $690. 2BR, $790.

Call 312-443-2300 SUBURBS, RENT TO OW N! Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT NO MOVE IN FEE 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM APTS (773) 874-1122 ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

2 BR UNDER $900

SMOKE FREE BUILDING!!!

SOUTH SIDE 5 rooms, 1BR 7839 S. KINGSTON. Newly deluxe. 101st/King Dr. well maint. a rehabbed Jumbo 2BR, C/A, encl ppls/heat incl. $795/mo. plus sec. rear porch, laundry room, $700 + 1 Mr. Ben. 312-802-9492. mo sec. Sec Dep can be waived for well qualified applicants.

847-491-1637

1 BR $1100 AND OVER EDGEWATER 1000 S FT 1/B:

new kit, ss appl, formal DRm, oak floors, new windows, Red Line/Lake MI $1150/incl ht 773-743-4141 urban equities.com

1 BR OTHER APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. THE HAWK HAS ARRIVED!!!

OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG PLENTY OF PARKING 1BDR FROM $750.00 2BDR FROM $895.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000*** APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. OLD MAN WINTER IS HERE!!!

MOST UNITS INCLUDE..

HEAT & HOT WTR STUDIOS FROM $475.00 1BDR FROM $495.00 2BDR FROM $745.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled.

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

126 EMERALD 5 & 2, 2 story, $1450.

142 Lowe 3 & 1, App Inc., $1150.

143rd Emerald 6 & 4, $1695.

Appts 773.619.4395 Charlie 818.679.

1175

CHICAGO 5246 S. HERMITAGE: 2BR bsmt $400. 2BR 1st floor, $525. 3BR, 2nd floor, $625.

1.5 mo sec req’d. 708-574-4085.

2BR, 6148 S. Rhodes, LR/DR, encl porch, appls, lndry, new kitc & bath, $805/mo tenant pays utils. Seniors & Sect 8 Welc. 312504-2008 RIVERDALE APARTMENT FOR rent. Newly decorated 2BR, heat incl. $825/mo + security.

Section 8 Welcome. Call 773852-9425 CICERO - 2 BEDROOM, $850$875/mo. Newly remodeled, laundry, free cooking gas and heat. 708-990-1911 or 630-673-6157 7701 S. South Shore Dr. 2 BDs with 1.5 Baths, Large Combo Living-Dining Rm, FREE Heat & cking gas. Prkng extra. $785-$850, Kalabich Mgmt (708)424-4216

SOUTHWEST NICE 2 br near 83rd Hermitage, $730/mo, heat included, 773-783-7098

CHICAGO

7600 S Essex 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! 773287-9999 /312-446-3333 VICINITY 65TH AND St. Lawrence, modern, tenant heated, 2BR Unit. $725/mo. No Sec Deposit Agent Owned, 312-671-3795

2 BR $900-$1099 BUCKTOWN/ WICKER PARK.

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

l

l

BLUE ISLAND - Freshly remodeled, 2BR Apartment, 1.

5BA, heat included. $900/ mo + 1 mo sec. Call 708-5293836 5331 W BARRY 2/BR: spacious

CHICAGO, near 80th & Green, spacious 6 rooms, 3 BR with heat included.

Near transportation. $975/mo. 1 month rent + 1 month security. 773874-4755

3BR, 5729 S. MICHIGAN, new kit, new appl, oak floors, AC, 3BR, 5723 S. yard, garage $975/+ util 773-743- $950 + sec.

Michigan, $900 + sec.

4141 urbanequities.com

2 BR $1100-$1299 CHICAGO, 6627 S. DREXEL, 2BR, 1.5BA Condo, SS appls, granite ctrs, $1100/mo, heat included.

Section 8 ok. Call Jarry, 773-699-5774

2 BR $1300-$1499 West Ridge: 2B 7000N New kit,

granite, SS appl, FDR, oak floors, new windows $1300/heated 773-743-4141 urbanequities.com

2 BR OTHER BEAUTIFUL NEW APT! 6150 S. Vernon, 4BDRM 743 E. 72nd St, 2BDRM 8129 S. Ingleside, 2BDRM 7649 S. Phillips Ave 1, 2 & 4BDRM Stainless Steel!! Appliances!!

Hdwd flrs!! Marble bath!! Laundry on site!!

FREE 42IN TV Sec 8 OK. 773- 404- 8926 CHICAGO, PRINCETON PARK HOMES. Spacious 2-3 BR Townhomes, Inclu: Prvt entry, full bsmt, lndry hook-ups. Ample prkg. Close to trans & schls. Starts at $844/ mo. w w w . p p k h o m e s . com;773-264-3005 ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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

AFFORDABLE 2 & 3BRS FROM $575.

Newly decorated, heated/ unheated. 1 Month Free for qualified tenants.

CRS (312) 782-4041

ENGLEWOOD 2-4BR unit apts in 2 unit gated bldgs, hdwd flrs, pets OK, no sec dep, W/D & appls incl, tenant pays own utils 872-3153900 NEWLY REHABBED 1BR Apt. $750. 3 & 5BR single family homes w/ 2BA. $1200-$1500. Sect 8 Welc.

847-962-0408 or 224-800-4480

8947 S. COTTAGE Grove, Unit 3C. 3rd flr, 2BR Apt. Ten htd, lndry / appls incl. Credit check $700 mo + $350 move in fee 773-721-8817

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 SECTION 8 WELCOME

$300 Cash Move-In Bonus, No Deposit 6227 S. Justine & 25 W 103rd Pl, Both 3BR/1BA 7134 S Normal, 4BR, 2BA, 225 W 108th Pl, 2BR/1BA, each incl crpt, appls & heat 312-683-5174

ADULT SERVICES

2BR Grdn 720 W 61st St $800+sec. Ten pays utils. Call 773-858-3163

CALUMET CITY, 3-4BR, 2 BA 2 car gar, fully rehab w/ gorgeous finishes & hdwd flrs. Beautiful bkyd. Sec 8 ok $1175-1375/mo.

510-735-7171 80TH/PHILLIPS, 3 lrg BR,

BEAUTIFUL

1.5BA, new reno, hdwd flrs & appls incl, intercom. Avail Now! $1000/mo & up 312-818-0236

7651 S DREXEL, 1st fl, 3BR, liv rm, kitch., newly remodeled, ceramic tiles, heat not incl, $ 950/mo plus 1 mo sec. 708-474-6520 68th/Hermitage 2BR. $725. 3BR, $825. 68th/

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

ELEGANT 4BR APT for rent, nice block, 6137 S. Rhodes, hdwd floors throughout. Section 8 welcome. $1100/mo. 312-505-8737 SOUTH SUBURBS 4BR, 1.5BA, modern kitchen and bath, section 8 OK, 2 car garage, basement. $1075 and up + sec. 847-909-1538 JEFFREY MANOR 3BR, 1BA Townhouse, Newly Remod, gar, side driveway, $895/mo. Nr trans. Call Mr. Brown, 312-459-6618

CHICAGO - 7535 S Vernon,

5 bedroom, 2 bath house for rent, hardwood floors, finished basement, uptairs. 773-218-7520

7921 S. INGLESIDE. 3BR, 2BA,

2 story brick bungalow, good cond. $1200/mo heat incl. Sec 8 OK. Fred 773-443-0175

OARK PARK, 405 S. Maple.

2BR, 1.5BA. Heat, C/A, appls & parking spot incl. Near trans. $13 00/mo + 1 mo sec. 773-671-3826 HARVEY Sec 8 Welcome $500 cash back. $0 Security for Sec 8. 3BR, $1300/mo. Fine condition. ADT Alarm. 708-715-0034

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

MARQUETTE PARK 7313 S Artesian, beaut rehab 3BR/2BA house, granite ctrs, SS appls, whirlpl tub, fin bsmt, 2-car gar. $1575. 708-288-4510 EVANSTON VINTAGE 1100 S FT 3/BR: New Kit, new appl, oak floors, sunny corner apt; large windows $1500/incl ht 773-7434141 urbanequities.com MARQUETTE PARK 7313 S Artesian, beaut rehab 3BR/2BA house, granite ctrs, SS appls, whirlpl tub, fin bsmt, 2-car gar. $1575. 708-288-4510

CHICAGO HEIGHTS-large 4BR, 4BA, separate living rm, dining rm, large eat in kitchen, $1650/mo plus sec Call Dee 773-818-3340

û16880 S. ANTHONY-

3BR, wall to wall carpet. $1175/mo.

Section 8 Welcome. 773-285-3206

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 STUNNING 5BR MASTERPIECE, Brick home, rent to own. $1300/mo + 2 mo sec dep, new kitchen, vaulted ceilings, 2 marble baths, marble fireplace w/TV, new hdwd flrs throughout, finished walk-out bsmt, new appls, concrete side drive, XL yard, quiet Morgan Park/ Beverly area, 620 minimum credit.

Call 630-709-0078 5939 W. RICE, Newly Remod 3BR, tile kit & jacuzzi tub, SS appls incl., new hdwd flrs, c-fans, $1200+. S ection 8 Welc.

773-474-3266

ROSELAND, SINGLE FAMILY Home, 3BR, 1.5BA, C/A, newly renov. 9600 Blk Wentworth, $1400. Sect 8 ok. Call Mr. Johnson, 630-424-1403

ADULT SERVICES

ROGERS PK 2000 sft/ 3BR-2BA:

new kit, SS appl, FDR, oak flrs, new windows, private deck & sunroom, nr lake/Red Line; $1925/inc ht 773-7434141 urbanequities.com

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

7955 S. JUSTINE. 5BR, 2 full bath., Hdwd floors. 953 W. 71st St. 5BR, 1.5 BA, hdwd flrs. 10215 S. Perry. 3BR, 1 full BA, hrdwd flrs.

743 E. 84th Pl. 2BR, 1.5BA apt, hdwd flrs. Sec 8 Welcome, 708296-5477 CHICAGO NEAR 79TH & Kedzie, 4BR, 1.5BA, 2 car garage, LR, kitch/DR combo, bsmt, newly decorated, hdwd floors, 312-498-0899 CHICAGO, 107TH & 123RD, 4BR House. Calumet Park 1BR Apt. Newly remod., all appls incl.

Section 8 Welcome. 773-220-0715

Never miss a show again.

8322 S BAKER, 3BR available in beautiful 2-flat house, Sec 8 ok. 2

or 1BR voucher ok. Call 847-3125643.

8457 S BRANDON & 2861 E 93rd St, 2nd flr, 4BR in beaut 2-flat house, lnry, Sec 8 ok, 3 or 2 BR voucher ok. 847-312-5643.

Section 8 Welcome, Chatham 3-4 BR voucher, C/A, 2 parking garage, brick, fenced, all appls, 503 East 89th St 312-804-0209 CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent.

Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail.

312-446-3333 or 708-752-3812

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

708-288-4510

Chicago 1646 W. Garfield.

3 bdrm, 1 bath, newly renovated, hardwood floors, appliances included. $825/mo. 773-285-3206

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499

GENERAL

EARLY WARNINGS

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

ADULT SERVICES

FOR SALE OPEN HOUSE. 2421 W Berteau.

February 19th, 1-4pm. Lincoln Square / North Center. Solid quality, state-of -art custom home. Spacious rooms, high ceilings, red oak floors, kitchen w/ center island open to family room combo with kitchen opening to new deck for entertaining. Lower level family room, storage, full bath, 4th bedroom, amazing master bath. 2 car garage with storage.

MLS #09360376, Virtual tour: http:// refinedagent.com/listings/2421-wberteau-avenue-chicago-illinois/ Call Mary, Solid Realty Services, 773-5906500/

2 9-UNIT BLDGS, near Mid-way,

$600,000 each; 1 2-sty bldg w/2 apts & 2 store fronts, W. 71st St.; $125,000; Lansing 24-unit bldng, $1.2 million 773-925-0065 or c.sassoc@ att.net

non-residential GREAT RESTAURANT OPPORTUNITY For Sale $167,000 / Lease $1,750

2320 E. 79th St. Hand Sink, 3 Compt.

Sink, Grease Trap, Hood Exh Sys. Wade 773-617-8534

MARKETPLACE

GOODS

CLASSICS WANTED ANY CLASSIC CARS IN ANY CONDITION. ’20S, ’30S, ’40S, ’50S, ’60S & ’70S. HOTRODS & EXOTICS! TOP DOLLAR PAID! COLLECTOR. CALL JAMES, 630-201-8122

WANTED: R12 FREON. Certi-

fied buyer will pick up and pay CASH for cylinders of R12. 312291-9169 or sell@refrigerantfinders.com

MASSAGE TABLES, NEW and

used. Large selection of professional high quality massage equipment at a very low price. Visit us at www. bestmassage.com or call us, 773764-6542.

SERVICES C A R E G I V E R /CO M PA N I O N AVAILABLE FOR errands, driving to doctors, light cooking, light cleaning, medication monitoring.

Reasonable rates. North Shore and Northwest suburbs. Call Nancy: 847347-2380

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

773-685-6868.

South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

FINANCING AVAIL. FOR PROP. OWNERS: From Prog.

Lenders for Bus, RE, Personal or Maj. repairs. Call 773-703-8400, fax 773-568-5990

ADULT SERVICES

LOOKING FOR A creative and

motivated person to operate a thrift store benefiting a non-profit animal welfare organization. Duties include setting up displays, managing inventory, and initiating/ monitoring online auctions and promotions. Contact: Gloria Lissner at fido@famousfidorescue.com

legal notices NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-

suant to "An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State," as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D17149438 on January 26, 2017, under the Assumed Business Name of The Journey of She with the business located at 3858 W 124th Pl, Alsip, IL 60803. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner( s)/ partner(s) is: Taneisha Fleming, 3858 W 124th Pl, Aslip, IL 60803, USA.

HEALTH & WELLNESS FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

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

BUSINESS OPS

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-

urbs. Hotels. 1250 S Michigan Avenue. Appointments. 773-616-6969.

suant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D17149332 on January 19, 2017 Under the Assumed Business Name of CAFE COLAO with the business located at: 2638 W. DIVISION ST, CHICAGO, IL 60622. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/partner(s) is: WANDA COLON 2638 W. DIVISION ST., CHICAGO, IL 60622, USA

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

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

LOVELY HEART HOME Care,

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

UKRAINIAN MASSAGE. CALLS in/ out. Chicago and sub-

Find a concert, buy a ticket, and sign up to get advance notice of Chicago’s essential music shows at chicagoreader.com/early.

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 | CHICAGO READER 43

STRAIGHT DOPE SLUG SIGNORINO

By Cecil Adams Q : I bought a Fitbit for my company’s health

60 MINUTES FREE TRIAL

THE HOTTEST GAY CHATLINE

1-312-924-2082 More Local Numbers: 800-777-8000

challenge, and I was surprised to see how it could not only monitor steps but also track sleep, calories, and resting heart rate. This made me wonder what other information about me could be learned from these data.

What are the privacy concerns? I don’t care if my employer knows I ride my bike 50 miles a week, but could they know if someone was at the bar until 2 AM? —DENNIS HUSSEY

www.guyspyvoice.com

Ahora en Español/18+

WE ARE HERE TO HELP! NOT JUDGE!

HEROIN AND PAIN PILL ADDICTION LOW COST & CONFIDENTIAL *$20.00 TRANSPORTATION CREDIT FOR JOINING with mention of this ad. *Some Restrictions Apply

• Same Day Dosing • FREE Gourmet Coffee • Compassionate Staff • FREE Phone Use (local & long distance) • All Public Transportation • FREE Week of Services on Your Birthday at Front Door

Sundance Methadone Treatment Center

4545 BROADWAY, CHICAGO • (847) 744-0262 • WWW.SUNDANCECHICAGO.COM

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS

chicagoreader.com/early 44 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

A : A nosy boss snooping on your off-the-clock

peccadilloes may be the least of your worries.

Fitness trackers can upload a nearly complete record of where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing during your every waking moment—and then how soundly you slept at night too. As police and judges recognize the evidentiary value of such data, it’s possible that every step you take can and will be used against you in a court of law. And most of these devices—Fitbit’s the best known, but its competitors are legion—lack some basic security precautions. Even if you’re one of those upstanding nothing-to-hide types, you might not want someone creeping in and tracking your movements, or worse.

Fitbit privacy has been a gradual process for maker and wearers alike. At first, the device’s default settings made your online user profile public. Soon enough, those who hadn’t paid attention to such details discovered that a quick Google search would turn up their Fitbit-measured activity—potentially including their, ahem, most intimate. Now publicly visible data is an opt-in, not an optout. Another privacy upgrade was a business necessity: In 2015, Fitbit voluntarily became compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal law that sets privacy and security requirements for medical info. Though HIPAA doesn’t cover wearable devices, Fitbit had to adopt its standards in order to partner with corporate wellness programs.

But the big security hole for fitness trackers, according to a study published last year by the Canadian nonprofit Open Effect, is the way the wearable device gets your activity stats online for storage and review—namely via a Bluetooth link with your phone. A Bluetooth signal can’t travel far—only about ten meters—but a set of monitors arrayed strategically in a mall could trail you from store to store, whether for overzealous inventory-control purposes or to build a profile of your shopping habits that marketers would pay well for.

Increasingly, law enforcement is also curious about what your Fitbit might have to say.

The U.S. Supreme Court says police need a warrant to search your cell phone, so fitness trackers would probably be similarly protected; Fitbit’s privacy policy allows that your data may be disclosed “if we’re required to by law.”

But where other tech companies including Google and Facebook regularly issue transparency reports, providing stats like how often the authorities have requested user info and how often the company has complied, Fitbit has yet to adopt such a policy.

And reported on or not, fitness tracker data is finding its way into legal proceedings. In 2015, a woman in Pennsylvania who told police she’d been raped was charged with making a false crime report after the cops found that tracking information from her Fitbit contradicted her story. A cyclists’ tracking app showed that Christopher Bucchere was over the speed limit when he rode his bike through a San Francisco crosswalk in 2012 and killed a 71-year-old pedestrian; he pleaded guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter.

It may seem surprising how quickly insurers and courts are coming to accept tracker data as fact, given what seem to be real limits on the systems’ reliability. Independent studies have found that devices have difficulty consistently measuring heart rates accurately; the FDA announced last summer that it wouldn’t regulate them. And tracker apps are hardly impervious to hacking—about a year ago, e-intruders busted into some Fitbit accounts and tinkered with user names and passwords, apparently hoping to use customer warranties to get replacement devices and sell them. The Open Effect study reports that some other fitness trackers are even more vulnerable, allowing hackers to delete or modify activity data, and you could do the same if you’ve got knowhow and lack scruples. Modified heart-rate stats might convince an insurance company you’re a fitter specimen than your doctor might think you are. And a tweaked itinerary?

A solid alibi for the cops. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

l

l

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Advice for the asexual Is the only option to “take one for the team”? Plus: an autistic lesbian in a bind Q : I’ve been reading your

advice column in the Coast in Halifax for a while, and it seems that most solutions to relationship problems revolve around sex. What about someone who doesn’t want to have sex, ever?

I’ve asked other people for advice, and the answer is usually “take one for the team,” have sex to keep them happy. Is that the only way I could find happiness in a relationship? It’s not something I want to do—but at this point, I don’t see any other options. —ALL ALONE ACE

A : I’m a sex-advice columnist.

Consequently, AAA, people tend to write me when sex is the problem, and sex (in some new and improved form) is often-but-not-always the solution. I also get and respond to questions from asexuals, and I’ve urged sexuals not to regard asexuals as defective—or, for that matter, to view committed-but-sexless relationships as defective. So long as both people in the relationship are content and happy, it’s a good and healthy and functional relationship whether the sex is vanilla or spicy or nonexistent. Strictly companionate marriages can be good marriages.

As for “taking one for the team,” that’s not advice given only to asexuals. A woman who’s married to a foot fetishist, for instance, may be advised to “take one for the team” and let her husband perv on her feet. A vanilla guy married to a woman corrupted by Fifty Shades of Grey (it’s baaaaaack) may be advised to “take one for the team” and tie the wife up once in a while. And while there are certainly lots of asexuals out there taking one for the team, you know who doesn’t have to take one for

the team, ever? Asexuals with other asexuals.

Dating another asexual is the other option, the obvious option, and may be the best option for you, AAA. A quick Google search brings up several asexual dating sites: Asexualitic.com, AsexualMatch.com, Ace-Book. net, AsexualPals.com. You can also choose to identify as asexual—and search for other asexuals—on mainstream dating sites like OkCupid and Match.

I can already hear you composing your response, AAA: Asexuals are just 1 percent of the population. But! Good news! There are 7.5 billion people on the planet! And 75 million of them are asexual!

I have a good friend with a unique array of kinks—a crazy, specific, and rare constellation of kinks—and he cast a wide net on kink dating apps.

He eventually wound up flying to the other side of the world, then moving abroad to be with Mr. Kink Match on the Other Side of the World.

Asexuality isn’t a kink, I realize, but you can and should cast a wide net, AAA, like my kinky expat friend.

You may not be able to afford to fly halfway around the world, but you can get your ass to the next province over if you hit it off with an asexual in New Brunswick or Quebec.

Good luck.

Q : I’m a 22-year-old lesbian

living in Utah. I’m finally going back to college this fall. I have autism (high functioning), and I couldn’t handle going to school fulltime while working. Thus I will be stuck living at my parents’ house. The problem is, my parents are super Republican and religious.

While I live at home, I can’t date (they are against me being gay). But I can’t afford to move out, either. I’m shy

and socially nervous, so I don’t have any friends who could help me out, and I can’t see living with roommates who are strangers. I’ll be 29 by the time I graduate, and I don’t want to live like this for that long. Any advice? I don’t want to hurt them. —UNDER THEIR AUTHORITARIAN HOMOPHOBIA

REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN.

Meet sexy friends who really get your vibe...

Try FREE: 312-924-2066

Try FREE: 773-867-1235

More Local Numbers: 1-800-811-1633

More Local Numbers: 1-800-926-6000

Ahora español Livelinks.com 18+

vibeline.com 18+

A : If they were just enforcing

“their rules” about, say, booze in their house, that would be one thing. But requiring your adult daughter not to date anyone, or not to be a lesbian at all, is just mean. And leveraging their daughter’s autism and social isolation and economic dependence against her in order to control her? Meaner still.

You say you don’t want to hurt your parents—you’re a good daughter—but it’s clear your shitty parents don’t care if they hurt you.

So you’ll have to ask yourself what you value more: freedom now or getting your degree sooner rather than later. If it’s your freedom, move out, get a job, go to community college, and take your time getting that degree. If it’s getting your degree before turning 30, knuckle under, spend a lot of late nights “studying in the library,” and go to the student resource center on your campus and ask if there are any campus services/ support groups for students with autism or Asperger’s syndrome. Who knows? You might meet some people who you could see yourself living with, as roommates and friends, and be able to get out of your parents’ house sooner rather than later. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. ß @fakedansavage

ADMIRAL ★★ #$!%#"! ★★

3940 W LAWRENCE

OPEN 7PM TO 6AM ADMIRALX.COM (773) 478-8111

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS

chicagoreader.com/early

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 45

b

UPDATED Four Year Strong 3/19, 5 PM, Bottom Lounge, moved from Double Door, sold out Peter Himmelman 5/25, 8 PM and 5/27, 8:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, 5/25 sold out, 5/27 added b Gladys Knight, Jeffrey Osborne 3/17-18, 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino, Hammond, second show added, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM Don McLean 5/5, 7:30 and 10 PM, City Winery, late show added, early show sold out b Timothy B. Schmit 4/16, 8 PM and 4/18, 8 PM, City Winery, second show added b

UPCOMING Perfume Genius o LUKE GILFORD

NEW Marsha Ambrosius, Eric Benet 5/14, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Laurie Anderson 5/6, 8 PM and 5/7, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 2/17, 8 AM b Archspire, Arkaik 4/2, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ As It Is 5/3, 6 PM, Subterranean b Bing & Ruth 4/13, 8 PM, Constellation, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM Sarah Cahill 3/12, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Charly Bliss 5/13, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Bruce Cockburn 11/18, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 2/17, 8 AM b Anat Cohen & Trio Brasileiro 5/15, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 2/16, noon b Coin 4/23, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 2/17, noon b Cryptopsy, Rivers of Nihil, Visceral 6/9, 6 PM, Wire, Berwyn b Crystal Garden 4/20, 9 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 2/17, noon Cult of Luna 8/21, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Descendents 10/7, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM b Justin Townes Earle, Sadies 5/20, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds, Brandy 5/13, 8 PM, Arie Crown Theater, on sale Fri 2/17, noon Joe Ely 5/4, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM b FKJ 3/30, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Flint Eastwood 4/21, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+

Steve Forbert 5/19, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM b Future 6/2, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 2/17, noon Matt Hires, Kyle Cox 4/5, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Sam Hunt, Maren Morris, Chris Janson 7/8, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM Jack Johnson 6/2, 7:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM K-Ci & JoJo, Monica, Jagged Edge 4/21, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 2/17, noon Kilter 5/4, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 2/17, noon, 18+ Aaron Lewis 3/11, 8:45 PM, Joe’s Live, Rosemont Little Simz 5/7, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Meat Puppets, Mike Watt & the Jom & Terry Show 5/19, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 2/17, noon Meiko 4/25, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM b Melodime 4/8, 6:30 PM, Subterranean b Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold 6/18, 6 PM, Soldier Field, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM Moose Blood, Trophy Eyes 3/21, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge b Nick Moss Band 6/10, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 2/17, 11 AM Nightlands, the Building 2/25, 9 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM Nordic Effect 4/9, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Octopus Project 4/18, 9 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 2/17, noon Perfume Genius 2/25, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM

46 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 16, 2017

Psychedelic Furs, Robyn Hitchcock 4/8, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM, 17+ Pwr Bttm 5/30, 7 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 2/17, noon b Regrettes 4/2, 7 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 2/17, noon b Saint Pe 4/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Screaming Females, Metz 3/4, 1 PM, Empty Bottle Fb Sales 4/14, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Sturgill Simpson 9/22, 8 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Thu 2/16, 10 AM Slants 5/3, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Special Consensus, Chris Jones & the Night Riders 4/1, 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 2/17, 11 AM Straight No Chaser, Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox 7/13, 7:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Sat 2/18, 10 AM Marty Stuart & the Fabulous Superlatives 4/9, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM b Super Duper Kyle 4/14, 7 PM, Metro b Sweet Crude 4/22, 10 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 2/17, noon Otis Taylor Band 4/28, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 2/17, 10 AM b Teenage Bottlerocket, Bollweevils 4/21, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Billy Bob Thornton & the Boxmasters 4/23, 7 PM, Joe’s Live, Rosemont Tink 4/8, 6 PM, Portage Theater b John Waite 6/11, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 2/16, noon b Winger 3/31, 8:30 PM, Joe’s Live, Rosemont

All Them Witches 3/16, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Dave Alvin & the Guilty Ones 5/6, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn Amorphis, Swallow the Sun 3/26, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Devendra Banhart 3/6, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Bastille 4/3, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom Bayside, Say Anything, Reggie & the Full Effect 5/5, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall b Willis Earl Beal 2/27, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Big Sean, MadeinTYO 3/31, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom Black Angels, A Place to Bury Strangers 5/11, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 18+ Chameleons Vox 9/14, 8:30 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Coheed & Cambria, Dear Hunter 5/19, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Cosmonauts 4/3, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Dawes 3/1, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, Edgar Winter Band 9/6, 6:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Electric Guest 3/1, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Entrance 4/10, 9 PM, Hideout Flaming Lips 4/17, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Brantley Gilbert, Tucker Beathard 3/2, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard 4/8, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ GZA 2/28, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Happyness 5/26, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Griffin House 4/23, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Jojo 3/12, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Knocked Loose 2/28, 6:30 PM, Subterranean b

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

F

Never miss a show again.

Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Knocks 3/11, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Nikki Lane, Brent Cobb 3/11, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Magnetic Fields 4/19-20, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Mastodon, Eagles of Death Metal, Russian Circles 5/13, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Nails, Toxic Holocaust 3/28, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Ne-Hi 2/24, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Of Montreal 4/22, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Chris Stapleton 6/29, 7 PM, Wrigley Field Queen & Adam Lambert 7/13, 8 PM, United Center Rise Against, Deftones, Thrice 6/9, 6:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Juelz Santana 5/13, 8 PM, Portage Theater, 17+ Blake Shelton 3/17, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Six Organs of Admittance 4/9, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Sleigh Bells, Tunde Olaniran 3/21, 8 PM, Metro b Telefon Tel Aviv 3/8, 9 PM, Empty Bottle The-Dream 2/25, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Third Eye Blind 7/6, 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion b Tortoise 3/26, 6 and 9:30 PM, Empty Bottle UK Subs 4/4, 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Matthew Logan Vasquez 5/4, 8 PM, Subterranean Vaster Than Empires 3/5, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Martha Wainwright 4/15, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b M. Ward 3/27-28, 8 PM, City Winery b Roger Waters 7/22, 8 PM, United Center The Weeknd 5/23, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont The Wind & the Wave 5/26, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Withered, Immortal Bird 2/28, 9 PM, Empty Bottle The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die 3/26, 6 PM, Cobra Lounge b Ray Wylie Hubbard 5/6, 8 PM, City Winery b Xiu Xiu 3/31, 9 PM, Empty Bottle The XX 5/1, 6:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom Zeshan B & the Transistors 2/28, 8 PM, The Promontory Zombies 4/13-14, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene IF YOU’RE AT ALL like Gossip Wolf, the wrongheaded dummies in the Trump administration have you feeling nostalgic for a time before this new national nightmare—maybe the early 2010s, when witch house was still a thing. This wolf ripped on a few sorta midwestern practitioners of the form (remember Salem?) but actually has a soft spot for the much-maligned, short-lived genre. (It comes with the territory when you really like goth wear and chopped-and-screwed dance music!)

Local industrial/vaporwave DJ Satanic Hispanic is launching a witch-house night called Black Magick at the Burlington on Wednesday, February 22. Organizers say there will be live performances from Lake Radio and Vril Ya (the “V” and “a” are triangles, per witch-house tradition), DJ sets from Alpha Omega, Maldicion, and Dyonna Cross, plenty of incense and sage, and a Ouija board. Sounds like these folks know how to “tarot” a party!

On Saturday, February 18, at the Empty Bottle, Thee Benevolent Order of Chicago Record Labels hosts a winter record fair, with more than 20 local labels slinging vinyl and cassettes. The biggest name is probably Trouble in Mind, but you’ve also got contemporary-classical connoisseurs Parlour Tapes, garage mavens Dumpster Tapes and Tall Pat Records, undergroundrock experts Maximum Pelt and Eye Vybe, and experimental specialists Hausu Mountain and Moniker. The fair runs from noon to 4 PM, and admission is free.

Chicago noise-rock miscreants Wishgift haven’t released anything since 2011’s single-sided cassette Folk Twain, and this wolf was beginning to wonder if the trio had decided to wait a full decade. Well, no! In fact, Wishgift release a self-titled album on Saturday, February 18. It’s a collaboration between Louisville label Sophomore Lounge and Chicago’s Lake Paradise, and if you preorder the LP from the latter, you also get a cassingle of two previously unreleased Wishgift tracks. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

l

l

JAZZ at LINCOLN CENTER ORCHESTRA and WYNTON MARSALIS return to Symphony Center H MARC3 1&

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 1, 8:00 SCP JAZZ SERIES

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra returns for another stellar evening at Symphony Center. Don't miss musical icon Wynton Marsalis leading one of the world's greatest jazz bands in unforgettable performances of original tunes and classic selections. "You know it's a good gig when you can't tell if the band or the audience is having more fun" (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

FRIDAY, MARCH 3, 8:00

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis: A Night with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Edwin Outwater conductor GLINKA Overture to Ruslan and Ludmila ELLINGTON Selections from The River MUSSORGSKY Pictures from an Exhibition Selected movements performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra along with movements arranged and performed by members of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

MARSALIS All-American Pep from Swing Symphony Widely considered "the greatest large jazz ensemble working today" (Chicago Tribune), the mighty Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis comprises some of today's most outstanding and virtuosic jazz musicians. They join forces with the unparalleled musicians of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for an electrifying, one-night-only event that includes classical works paired with newly arranged jazz versions and a selection from Marsalis' own Swing Symphony, which The Telegraph calls "a journey through jazz history and the sounds of America itself."

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA | RICCARDO MUTI ZELL MUSIC DIRECTOR | SYMPHONY CENTER PRESENTS CSO.ORG â&#x20AC;˘ 312-294-3000 Group Services 312-294-3040 Artists, prices and programs subject to change.

SCP Jazz series sponsor:

SCP Jazz series media sponsors:

FEBRUARY 16, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 47

To Organize Delirium February 18–May 7 This exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. At the Art Institute of Chicago, lead funding is generously provided by the Diane and Bruce Halle Foundation. Major support is provided by Caryn and King Harris, The Harris Family Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Maureen and Edward Byron Smith Jr. Family Endowment Fund, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Sara Szold. This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Annual support for Art Institute exhibitions is provided by the Exhibitions Trust: Neil Bluhm and the Bluhm Family Charitable Foundation; Jay Franke and David Herro; Kenneth Griffin; Caryn and King Harris, The Harris Family Foundation; Liz and Eric Lefkofsky; Robert M. and Diane v.S. Levy; Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff; Thomas and Margot Pritzker; Anne and Chris Reyes; Betsy Bergman Rosenfield and Andrew M. Rosenfield; Cari and Michael J. Sacks; the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation; and the Woman’s Board.

Hélio Oiticica. PN1 Penetrable (PN1 Penetrável), 1960. César and Claudio Oiticica Collection, Rio de Janeiro. © César and Claudio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro.

l