Print Issue of February 23, 2017 (Volume 46, Number 20)

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY | K I C K I N G A S S S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | F E B R U A R Y 2 3 , 2 0 1 7

How does Trump stack up against AMERICA’S GREATEST PRESIDENTS? 10

The MCA’s Merce Cunningham retrospective spotlights THE ART OF COLLABORATION. 22

The Barn is AMY MORTON’S WORTHY FOLLOW-UP to Found Kitchen & Social House. 31

THE EDUCATION OF GEORGE SAUNDERS

The celebrated short-story writer and recent debut novelist discusses his formative years in Chicago.

By TAL ROSENBERG 13

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN SENIOR WRITERS MICHAEL MINER, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI EDITORIAL ASSISTANT CASSIDY RYAN CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, 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, ABBEY SCHUBERT, JIAYUE YU ---------------------------------------------------------------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 ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654 312-222-6920, CHICAGOREADER.COM ----------------------------------------------------------------

FEATURE

Q&A

George Saunders, chapter one The celebrated short-story writer and 58-year-old debut novelist discusses his formative years in Chicago.

BY TAL ROSENBERG 13

IN THIS ISSUE 4 Agenda The play Peerless at the Den, Ryan Travis Christian’s exhibit “This Shit Is for the Birdies” at Western Exhibitions, the lecture “Reimagining Prison” with Arne Duncan and Kim Foxx, the Iranian film Daughter, and more recommended things to do

CITY LIFE

7 Street View A matched pair in black spotted in Bucktown

21 Movies Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and dozens of other performers comment on the emotional challenges of stand-up in Dying Laughing.

10 Joravsky | Politics How does Trump stack up against America’s greatest presidents?

12 Transportation Did Bobby Cann’s killer lie to get a light sentence?

COPYRIGHT © 2017 CHICAGO READER. PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CHICAGO READER, READER, AND REVERSED R: REGISTERED TRADEMARKS ®.

8 Space This Lego collector’s house is a world of stackable plastic bricks.

19 Theater Marcus Gardley’s new play, A Wonder in My Soul, trods well-worn territory.

19 Theater The OnEdge experimental performance series questions traditional theatrical norms.

20 Dance The Joffrey brings Justin Peck to town, and it’s worth the hype.

20 Comedy 2 Queens 1 Mic crosses racial, gender, geographic, and comedic boundaries.

FOOD & DRINK

31 Restaurant review: The Barn Amy Morton’s worthy follow-up to Found Kitchen & Social House 33 Booze Illinois’s only true meadery rides a wave of interest in the fermented honey beverage.

CLASSIFIEDS

34 Jobs 34 Apartments & Spaces 35 Marketplace

ARTS & CULTURE

READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY

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

ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY ELIAS STEIN. TO SEE MORE OF HIS WORK, GO TO ELIASSTEIN.COM.

THIS WEEK

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22 Visual Art “Merce Cunninghman: Common Time” at the MCA considers one of the 20th century’s most significant choreographers.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

23 Shows of note Dua Lipa, Tiga, Eddie Holman, Willis Earl Beal, Lee Fields & the Expressions, and more recommendations

36 Straight Dope What happens to all the items taken away at government checkpoints?

37 Savage Love What’s the key to actualizing sexual fantasies?

38 Early Warnings Com Truise, Pixies, Redd Kross, and other shows in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf Ambient artist Cinchel invites his audience to play along, and more music news.

FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

AGENDA R

READER RECOMMENDED

Send your events to agenda@chicagoreader.com

b ALL AGES

F Spaniard. —TONY ADLER Through 3/26: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 6:30 PM, Tue 7:30 PM; also Thu 3/23, 1 PM, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $58-$88.

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More at chicagoreader.com/ theater At the Table If there’s one thing that’s rarely in short supply at R storefront theater, it’s new plays that

follow the Big Chill template: classmates and old buds reunite in adulthood for drinks, memories, arguments, and unexpected self-examination. Michael Perlman’s 2015 script, about friends who surrender their smartphones at the door of a vacation home during two separate weekends, largely follows that tried-and-true format. But Broken Nose Theatre’s version, retooled by Perlman and director Spenser Davis, reflects changes in casual conversations since the 2016 presidential race and election.

The result is subtle and brilliant: over weed and whisky, Robert Altman-style conversations about social issues, relationships, politics, and adulthood collide in unforeseen ways, working wonders out of what’s often a stale formula.

—DAN JAKES Through 3/11: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PMd; also Mon 2/27 and Wed 3/8, 7:30 PM, Berger Park, 6205 N. Sheridan, 773-761-0376, brokennosetheatre.com, $1-$18.

The Fantasticks The Quest Theatre Ensemble’s imaginative, energetic rendition of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s classic 1960 musical emphasizes broad comedy and audience interaction.

Director Kent Joseph’s staging thus avoids the cloying sentimentality that can undermine this tale of a young couple who find true love only after their romantic illusions have been shattered by hard experience. But the production also fails to convey this delicate work’s wry undertones of melancholy and irony. And Jones and Schmidt’s brilliant, musically diverse score deserves better than keyboardist Sara Cate Langham’s heavy-handed and often sloppy musical direction. Still, the show is a lot of fun (especially in the first act) and, given Quest’s free-admission policy, decent entertainment. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 3/26: Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Blue Theatre, 1609 W. Gregory, 312-458-0895, questensemble.org. F

The Invention of Morel This R 90-minute fever-dream opera, composed by rock drummer Stewart

Copeland (of the Police), with a libretto

by Copeland and Jonathan Moore (who’s also directing), is having its world-premiere run at Chicago Opera Theater, which commissioned it. Based on a 1940 science fiction novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, it’s the story of a fugitive hiding on a remote island that turns out to be occupied by a mysterious group of tourists (including a beautiful woman with whom he falls desperately in love).

Intensely psychological, philosophical, interior, and circular, it’s hard stuff to stage, but the first-person narrator of the novel has been cleverly split into two lead parts (performed to perfection by could-be-twins Andrew Wilkowske and Lee Gregory). The tight-yet-right set includes the best use of video I’ve seen, and the instrumental music, played by Fulcrum Point New Music Project under the baton of COT general director Andreas Mitisek, is rich, driven, and more than dramatic enough to compensate for a mostly declamatory (though occasionally haunting) vocal score. —DEANNA ISAACS Fri 2/24, 7:30 PM; Sun 2/26, 3 PM, Studebaker Theater, 410 S. Michigan, 312-566-9800, chicagooperatheater.org, $39-$125.

Love’s Labor’s Lost ShakeR speare’s jest fests can get annoying, what with everybody competing so

hard to win points for repartee—and this early romantic comedy is as jest-festy as they get. But it’s also remarkable for the ways in which it refuses to act like a conventional rom-com. When the King of Navarre’s courtiers let infatuation get ahead of honor, love neither conquers nor forgives all. Marti Maraden’s gorgeous, compassionate staging brings out these off-tones, highlighting not only the nobles’ hypocrisy but their offhand cruelty. There’s a deep resonance in the moment when an old pedant, teased like the rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, tells his supposed betters, “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble.” Maraden’s cast works gracefully under the tree-limbed canopy of Kevin Depinet’s equally graceful set, with Allen Gilmore making himself especially vivid as a fantastical

Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus—Live! I trust I am not spoiling anything by sharing that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus—Live! is exactly what you would expect it to be: a two-hour one-man show full of stereotype-heavy ruminations on the differences between men and women, with a little pop psychology courtesy of videos of John Gray, author of the 1992 best seller. I found it slightly misogynistic and extremely heteronormative myself, but that was likely because our guide through Gray’s theories, Amadeo Fusca, is a straight man with all the prejudices you might expect.

(And also, everyone knows feminists are buzzkills.) Fusca is an energetic and agile performer, though, and he works hard to sell jokes that were ancient 50 years ago. The audience seemed to appreciate him, and that’s something, right? —AIMEE LEVITT Through 3/5: Wed-Fri * Pm, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Tue 8 PM, Broadway Playhouse, 175 E. Chestnut, 800-775-2000, broadwayinchicago.com, $65.

My Brother’s Keeper: The Story of the Nicholas Brothers Rueben D. Echoles directs, choreographs, and costars in this world-premiere production of his own play. Echoles gives himself and his cast a tall order: not only do they try to tap dance at the level of the Nicholas brothers (the greatest innovators and practitioners of the form), they also perform original songs alongside all-time classics written by the likes of Cab Calloway and Johnny Mercer. The show moves briskly for 40 minutes, reaching its emotional peak with the funeral of the boys’ beloved father, Ulysses, but never quite regains its footing thereafter. Echoles brings joy and athleticism to his portrayal of the cocky younger brother, Harold, and Shari Addison (as the boys’ mother) and Vincent Jordan (as Calloway) stand out for their powerful singing, but other players can’t quite match that charisma

or talent. Still, it’s hard not to root for Echoles and company as they labor to pay tribute to their heroes. —DMITRY SAMAROV 2/17-3/26: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM (8 PM only 2/18), Sun 3 PM, Black Ensemble Theater Cultural Center, 4450 N. Clark, 773-7694451, blackensembletheater.org, $49-$65.

Nameless Mountains This Accomplice Theatre production is a story of boredom, misery, and bad weather set at a Podunk brothel in Canada during the gold rush. The girls are tired of the blizzard; upstairs, Ginny (Megan Donahue) diddles the night away in bed with playmate Emmeline (Courtney Abbott). Suddenly, Ginny’s husband Charles (Jake Kaufman), thought to have been shot dead, rumbles in, dusts off his boots, and asks his stunned wife to please come home . . . now! She’s gotta cleave to him, he says, ‘cause that’s what wives are for: cleaving. Trouble is, Ginny’s been cleaving to every gold-digging john in the Klondike—and to Emmeline, too. Doesn’t matter, he says: you’re my wife, you do what I say! And so on.

Their fighting is monotonous and takes up almost half the play, which despite some wonderfully blasé acting (Laura Coleman, Chelsea David) is dull and sentimental. —MAX MALLER 2/16-3/11: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, The Charnel House, 3421 W. Fullerton, 773-871-9046, accomplicetheatre.com. F Nevermind, It’s Nothing This R Chicago Slam Works amalgamation of slam poetry and sketch comedy

explores love, relationships, and sex in the digital age. Directed by J.W. Basilo, the 80-minute performance’s most straightforward story line concerns a married lesbian couple, Bee (Teagan Walsh-Davis) and Alex (Kyla Norton), who are throwing a party to celebrate their upcoming divorce. Between bits of Lucille Ball-style physical-comedy theatrics, the six-person cast delivers poetry both pleasurable and perverse, covering topics from coming out to prostitution to the cliche of the circumcised penis (described with the aid of an appropriately cliche bongo drum).

Head writer Shelley Elaine Geiszler leads the talented cast—her pieces on pornography and a relationship that

Peerless o IAN MCLAREN

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Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of February 23 For more of the best things to do every day of the week, go to chicagoreader. com/agenda.

blossomed from a kinky Craigslist ad are both funny and melancholy, sometimes in the same sentence. —MARISSA OBERLANDER 2/17-3/24: Fri 8:15 PM, Sat 2 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252, chicagoslamworks, $20, $15 seniors, $10 students.

Peerless First Floor Theater R director Hutch Pimentel craftily combines absurdity, menace, and fervor

in Jiehae Park’s bracing 2015 one-act about M and L, stone-faced teenage Asian-American twins who’ll stop at nothing to get into an esteemed college.

As the sisters scheme to eliminate D, a selfless, self-loathing fellow student who’s secured the one “ethnic” early admission spot (he’s one-sixteenth Native American), Pimentel’s fleet, unflappable cast render Park’s staccato dialogue simultaneously ridiculous and chilling. Played out on William Boles’s and Arnel Sancianco’s creepily spartan set (part locker room, part dance club, part surgical theater), the action proceeds with nightmarish inevitability and cartoonish glee. While Park’s plotting falters in the climax, Pimentel never lets the tension sag—he even mines multiple Macbeth allusions without forcing his hand. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 3/11: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 2/20 and 3/6, 7:30 PM; Sat 3/11, 3 PM, Den Theatre, 1329-1333 N. Milwaukee, 773-609-2336, firstfloortheater.com, $20.

Unseen Playwright Mona Mansour’s ambition exceeds her craft in this promising but unsatisfying world-premiere one-act. Set mostly in Istanbul just before the 2016 failed coup, the story focuses on increasingly traumatized war-zone photographer Mia, her wise and patient girlfriend Derya, and her moneyed, semi-blinkered mother Jane.

Mansour never shies from big issues, whether personal (addiction, PTSD), professional (journalistic ethics in the face of human suffering), or political (Americans’ inbred penchant for isolationism). But she tends to compartmentalize the issues, often making her plotting feel contrived in service of illustration and edification. Still, she places nuanced characters in compelling situations, which gives director Maureen Payne-Hahner and her impassioned cast ample opportunities to transform stilted dialogue into deeply affecting scenes. Alexandra Main’s performance as the perpetually hamstrung Jane is meticulous and heartbreaking. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 4/9: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Gift Theatre Company, 4802 N. Milwaukee, 773-283-7071, thegifttheatre.org, $30-$40.

Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett was notoriously averse to high-concept reinterpretations of his plays. No postnuclear Endgames or subway Waiting for Godots for him. This Tympanic

Theatre Godot demonstrates the wisdom of that position. Director Aaron Mays has taken Beckett’s cosmically weary mortals, Vladimir and Estragon, and reimagined them as “travelers of Latin American ancestry . . . stranded at the border.” The upside is that Mays doesn’t do much to follow through on his conceit. The downside: The little he does deflates and confuses the nearly three-hour show, stunting its resonances. Anachronisms such as a cell phone and a campaign sticker don’t help.

Meanwhile, his Vladimir (Christopher Acevedo) and Estragon (Felipe Carrasco), though game, never penetrate the suffering, comic hearts of their characters. They’re too glib, too clean, too healthy, too young. Christian Castro is entertaining as wealthy Pozzo but lacks a necessary sense of threat. —TONY ADLER Through 3/12: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Berry Memorial United Methodist Church, 4754 N. Leavitt, 773-275-9735, berryumc.org, pay what you can.

three other comedians. Thu 2/23, 7:30-10:30 PM, The Beer Bistro, 1061 W. Madison, 312-433-0013, thebeerbistro. com. F TRL Live Stand-ups Steven King R and Tyler Snodgrass come together to count down the best TRL videos of all time. Thu 2/23, 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433, hideoutchicago.com, $10.

Zach Peterson Does an Hour R The local comedian prepares to record his first album with an hour of stand-up at North Bar. Tue 2/28, 7:30 PM, North Bar, 1637 W. North, 773-6973563, liveatnorthbar.com, $10.

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COMEDY R

BLT Comedy First Birthday Bash The comedy show celebrates their first birthday with a free stand-up performance by Chicago native Dwayne Kennedy, along with

Western Exhibitions “This Shit Is for the Birdies,” a collection of surreal drawings by local artist Ryan Travis Christian.

Opening reception Sat 2/25, 5 PM. 2/25-4/8. Wed-Sat 11-6, 1709 W. Chicago, 312-480-8390, westernexhibitions.com.

Bitch, Be Realistic This converR sation series from performance artist Kamilah Rashied invites men to

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Timeless Motion Thodos Dance Chicago presents their final performance as an ensemble-based company. Sat 2/25, 7:30 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie, Skokie, 847-673-6300, northshorecenter.org, $28-$50.

Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum “Surface Tension,” through a series of photos this exhibit explores the beauty of Lake Michigan in contrast with the pollution putting its beauty at risk.

2/23-4/16. Mon-Fri 9-5, Sat-Sun 10-5, 773755-5100. 2430 N. Cannon, 773-755-5100, naturemuseum.org, $9, $7 students and seniors, $6 kids 3-12, Thursdays free.

LIT & LECTURES

DANCE Breaking It Down: Hip-Hop History Learn the history of popping, waving, and other hip-hop dance styles at this interactive performance.

Thu 2/23, 11 AM, DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Pl., 773-947-0600, dusablemuseum.org, $10.

Rhona Hoffman Gallery.“Derrick Adams: Tell Me Something Good,” solo exhibition for the New York-based multimedia artist. Opening reception Fri 2/24, 5-7 PM. 2/24-4/1. Tue-Fri 10-5:30, Sat 11-5:30, 118 N. Peoria, 312-455-1990, rhoffmangallery.com.

Zach Peterson

share their experiences with the women in their lives. Tue 2/28, 6 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312280-2660, mcachicago.org.

o MATT WIEHL

VISUAL ARTS Document Gallery “Geraldo de Barros,” work from the famed Brazilian artist. 2/25-4/8. Wed-Sat 11 AM-6 PM, 1709 W. Chicago, 262-719-3500, www. documentspace.com.

Firecat Projects “Morality Tales,” exhibition featuring the drawings of Kathy Weaver and Mary Porterfield. Opening reception Fri 2/24, 7-10 PM. 2/24-3/24.

Mon-Sat 10-4, 2124 N. Damen, 773-3425381, firecatprojects.org.

Kamilah Rashied o ZAKKIYAH NAJEEBAH

The Conversation: Civil DisobeR dience Chris Abani, Tom Geoghegan, Kelly Hayes, Rebecca Glenberg

of the ACLU, and Aleksandar Hemon gather to discuss the importance of civil disobedience. Tue 2/28, 7:30 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, 773-7699299, womenandchildrenfirst.com.

Jilly Gagnon Book launch for R Chicago writer’s new novel, #famous. Fri 2/24, 7 PM, Book Cellar,

4736 N. Lincoln, 773-293-2665, bookcellarinc.com.

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Nelson Armour, Adagio v2, part of “Surface Tension: Beauty and Fragility in Lake Michigan” at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum

Reimagining Prison Chicago Ideas, along with the Vera Institute of Justice, discuss a new type of American prison system, in which prisons serve to rehabilitate inmates rather than weaken them. Panelists include Arne Duncan, Kim Foxx, Johnny Perez, and more. Thu 2/23, 6:30-8 PM, Jones W

Never miss a show again.

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 5

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Daughter In this nuanced Iranian drama (2016), a tense, overworked engineer at an oil refinery puts his job before his family, but when his university-bound daughter sneaks out to attend a party in Tehran and gets stuck in the city, he drops everything and drives cross-country to retrieve her. His explosive temper leads to mishaps that detain him in Tehran, and his buried past resurfaces when he reconnects with his estranged sister (Merila Zare’i of A Separation and About Elly). The film marks the sixth collaboration between director Reza Mirkarimi and cinematographer Hamid Khozouie Abyane, who brings to his widescreen images an array of vivid colors and patterns, an architectural sense of composition, and a feel for climate and terrain. In Farsi with subtitles.

—ANDREA GRONVALL 103 min. Sat 2/25, 6 and 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center The Great Wall Chinese director Zhang Yimou marries the historical grandeur of his Oscar-winning Hero (2002) to the marauding-monster action of the Lord of the Rings cycle for this overblown action fantasy. During the Song Dynasty, two Western mercenaries (Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal) encounter the Great Wall and are captured by a secret military society that’s dedicated to fighting off a legion of hideous beasts (whose giant, hairless bodies are canine but whose mouths have hundreds of teeth). Budgeted at $150 million, this is Zhang’s most expensive film ever, though its epic imagery—the rows of soldiers, the rain of spears, the surging forces—is undercut by the Saturday-matinee cheesiness of the concept. With Tian Jing, Willem Dafoe, and Andy Lau. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 104 min. Arclight, Block 37, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Cicero 14, Galewood 14, Chatham 14, River East 21, Webster Place Kedi Part travelogue, part cat video, this documentary by Ceyda Torun looks at the street-cat population of Istanbul, profiling seven felines that have taken advantage of the city’s easy attitude toward their species. There’s Aslan Parcasi, who cleaned up the rat population around a well-known fish restaurant; Gamzis, who dominates every other cat in the artists’ neighborhood of Cihangir; and Duman, nicknamed “the gentleman” for his careful delectation of roast beef and turkey scraps

Kedi from a delicatessen. Torun interviews various city dwellers about their relationships with these wild cats, and their comments form a social mosaic of sorts; too bad their remarks are limited to the role cats play in the life of the city.

The interviews and scenes of cats doing their stuff are broken up by aerial shots of Istanbul rooftops that are more decorative than cartographical. In Turkish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 79 min. Fri 2/24-Wed 3/1, 2, 5, 7:15, and 9:15 PM, and Thu 3/2, 2, 5, and 9:15 PM. Music Box Stacey Steers: Edge of Alchemy For these three intricate experimental shorts, animator Stacey Steers repurposes images from the silent cinema, layering them into handmade collages of Victorian-era pictorial motifs and creating surreal dreamscapes in which women are threatened by unnatural predators.

In Edge of Alchemy, Mary Pickford is a scientist and Janet Gaynor the humanoid she creates, a being menaced but curiously unfazed by oversize insects and skin-piercing plants. Night Hunter (2011) presents Lillian Gish as a lonely seamstress whose home is gradually overrun by snakes and giant eggs, and Phantom Canyon (2006) applies 19th-century figure studies by Eadweard Muybridge to a phantasmagoric tale about a nubile young woman pursued by a man with bat wings. —ANDREA GRONVALL 50 min. Steers attends the screening.

Thu 3/2, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center You’re Killing Me Susana In this offbeat romance, a happy-go-lucky actor in Mexico City (Gael García Bernal) is shocked when his wife (Verónica Echegui) abruptly leaves him and even more shocked when their mutual friends are unsurprised. Eventually he learns that she’s enrolled in the famous writers’ workshop at the University of Iowa, and upon arriving in cloistered Iowa City, he finds her having an affair with a poet (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson). Based on José Agustín’s novel Deserted Cities, the narrative pokes fun at the concept of fidelity (specifically the husband’s double standard on the issue) without fully

exploring it—a missed opportunity in an otherwise engaging film, exploring the link between honesty and intimacy. In English and subtitled Spanish. —LEAH PICKETT 102 min. Fri 2/24, 6 PM; Sat 2/25, 8:30 PM; Mon 2/27, 8:15 PM; Tue 2/28, 6 PM; Wed 2/1, 8:15 PM; and Thu 2/2, 6 and 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

REVIVALS Seventh Heaven Frank R Borzage won an Academy Award for his direction of this 1927

romance, and it remains the best known of his silent films. Janet Gaynor (who also won an Oscar) is a Parisian waif taken in by free spirit Charles Farrell; their love deepens as the clouds of World War I gather and Farrell is drafted and sent to the front. With its theme of sheltering love and its justly celebrated ending (perhaps the most serious assault on realism in the American cinema), the film is quintessential Borzage, though it seems rather simple in comparison to the masterworks that came later (including the semisequel Street Angel). —DAVE KEHR 119 min. Jay Warren provides live organ accompaniment. Sun 2/26, 3 PM. Saint John Cantius Church

SPECIAL EVENTS Chicago Feminist Film Festival Shorts and features addressing gender, sexuality, and race in mainstream media. For a full schedule visit chicagofeministfilmfestival. com.Wed 3/1-Fri 3/3. Columbia College Film Row Cinema #OscarsSoBlack A panel discussion about the historic number of black artists nominated for the 2017 Academy Awards. Scheduled to participate: Black Cinema House curator Jacqueline Stewart, film scholar Nick Davis, film critic Sergio Mims, writer Miriam Petty, and filmmaker Jennifer Reeder. Fri 2/24, 7 PM. Black Cinema House Trailer Apocalypse Oscar-winning editor Bob Murawski created this feature-length mashup of vintage movie trailers. 90 min. Fri 2/24 and Sat 2/25, midnight. Music Box v

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CITY LIFE Street View

o ISA GIALORENZO

A match made in heaven

OUT FOR A WALK after a late breakfast in Bucktown, Parke Ballantine and Lena Matz found themselves coincidentally dressed in similar outfits. “We both tend to wear a lot of black, so matching is not intentional—but coordinating suits us,” says Matz, who works at the management consulting firm Point B. Ballantine, the marketing communications manager at Hyde Park Art Center, was sporting the trench coat she received from Matz on the occasion of their third anniversary, for which leather is the traditional gift. Matz, meanwhile, strutted in stilettos, which she recently began wearing more regularly to keep up with her partner’s fashion-forward sensibility. “Parke can take anything,” Matz says, “and turn it into a statement piece you’ll see next season.” —ISA GIALLORENZO

SURE THINGS ¥

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

SUNDAY 26

¦ OscArts of Li fe Pa rty This fund-raiser hosted by the Arts of Life Associate Board features raffles, costume contests, popcorn, pizza, and a screening of the Academy Awards. 6-11 PM, North Bar, 1637 W. North, liveatnorthbar.com, $10.

THURSDAY 23

- Hy perce ption: Illusions for the Senses A performance by magician and artist Jeanette Andrews focused on heightening the audience’s five senses. 7 PM, Lincoln Park Zoo, 2001 N. Clark, lpzoo. org, $25.

FRIDAY 24

{ Juanna Rumbel Cup Four 30-minute bouts determine this year’s winner of the Windy City Rollers’ Juanna Rumbel Cup, plus half-time entertainment from Environmental Encroachment. 6-10 PM, UIC Pavilion, 525 S. Racine, windycityrollers. com, $20.

SATURDAY 25

MONDAY 27

TUESDAY 28

WEDNESDAY 29

♀ Nothin’ Like a Da me Celebrate the power of women in musical theater with a night of music, theater, and more, presented by an all-female-identifying cast including Rashada Dawan, Amanda Therese Horvath, and Bethany Thomas. 7 PM, Mercury Theater, 3745 N. Southport, mercurytheaterchicago.com, $40.

& Fat Tues day Shrimp Boil Frontier hosts its annual Mardi Gras celebration, featuring all-you-can-eat shrimp, corn, and potatoes, plus live music from Chicago’s Four Star Brass Band. 6 PM, Frontier, 1072 N. Milwaukee, thefrontierchicago.com, $35.

& Ha shbrown Ch ili Cook-Off & Carniva l Unlimited chili and games take center stage at this fest featuring tamales, a silent auction, music by DJ Pickled Beets, and, of course, a judged chili cook-off. 6-10 PM, Spudnik Press, 1821 W. Hubbard, spudnikpress.com, $25.

½ Th e Best Worst Show This variety show presented by Sally Marvel features music by Lucy Stoole and performances by AJ Le Sacc, A.j. Olson, Sylvi, Mo Less, Cruel Valentine, Pink Velvet, and more. 10 PM-1 AM, Township, 2200-2202 N. California, townshipchicago.com, $10.

FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

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Space

Legoland

Alysa Kirkpatrick’s West Ridge apartment serves as headquarters for her no-nonsense hobby.

THERE ARE CERTAIN ways to distinguish between casual Lego fans and serious enthusiasts.

“One factor is how anal you get with your sorting,” explains Alysa Kirkpatrick, a highly experienced Lego builder and ambassador for ChiLUG, the Chicago Area Lego Users Group.

“If you’re constantly organizing your Lego, you’re probably pretty dedicated.”

Which brings her to another determining factor: whether you pluralize the word “Lego.”

If you’re a pro, you know “Legos” aren’t a thing—only Lego pieces, or bricks.

Kirkpatrick, who studied architecture at

the Illinois Institute of Technology, has been obsessed with Lego for several years now, to the point it has impacted her living situation.

When the 28-year-old moved from a small apartment in Palatine to a garden unit just west of Rogers Park, she did so to be closer to her job downtown, but also to have a dedicated Lego room to work on new builds. “In Palatine, I had all my Lego in the dining room, and as the years went by, the Lego collection grew into the living room and continued to move out,” says Kirkpatrick, who participates in 15 to 20 shows a year and estimates she spends between $5,000 and $10,000 annually

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Opposite: Alysa Kirkpatrick, a true Lego maniac, constructs sets and builds custom creations from a workroom in her West Ridge residence. Above: Kirkpatrick calls Astra Luminaria, a spaceship-like orb composed of interlocking spheres, “my most beautiful piece to this day”; Kirkpatrick assembles a new portrait piece. o CHRIS BUDDY

on Lego. “I quickly realized I needed to get a bigger space.”

Now boxes full of Lego, sorted by part (brick, slope, plate, et cetera), then color, are neatly stacked along the walls of her workroom, located in the back of her apartment. It’s here that Kirkpatrick works late into the night on custom creations, from small pieces, such as the 25 ornaments she makes every Christmas (one for each day of Advent) to a seven-by-six-foot-wide mural piece bigger than the size of a car. Among her favorite works is Astra Luminaria, a giant, spaceship-like orb composed of interlocking spheres. “It was probably my most beautiful

piece to this day,” she says. She has also completed commissions for local libraries and displayed at conferences such as Brickworld.

While her home is the primary place she can let go and Lego, Kirkpatrick’s hobby has taken her around the country and world. A highlight of her life as an AFOL (Adult Fan of Lego) was a visit to the Lego headquarters in Billund, Denmark, last year. “It was with 40 strangers I’d met online—all great people,” she says. “We conversed about Lego for three days, and got to tour the production factory and the vault containing every Lego set ever made. It was the most fantastic trip ever!” —LAURA PEARSON

2545 E 79TH ST, CHICAGO IL 60649 (773) 221-4474 FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE

45th POLITICS

How does Trump stack up against America’s greatest presidents?

By BEN JORAVSKY

L

ate last year, in anticipation of Presidents Day, C-SPAN compiled its 17th annual poll of American historians to determine a ranking of our country’s 44 previous presidents.

Don’t tell President Trump, but his name wasn’t on the list, which came out February 17 and is, not surprisingly, headed by the big three in this order: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In defense of Trump, the poll was taken before he took office, so he can’t be rated yet.

But I’m sure that before all is said and done he’ll have put together a sterling record that will enable him to slip in just ahead of James Buchanan, currently ranked last.

Buchanan was the president just before Lincoln, and he’s been denigrated for his failure to prevent the Civil War. Whereas Trump, by contrast, seems determined to start a new one.

Historians rated presidents in ten categories, including “public persuasion,” “crisis leadership,” and “moral authority.”

My guess is Trump will have trouble in that last category. That is, unless future historians are willing—much like swing voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—to look past his “pussy-grabbing” behavior.

I don’t want you to think C-SPAN’s ranking

10 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 23, 2017

system is perfect. Somehow George Washington was ranked 13th in the category “pursued justice for all,” even though he was a slave owner.

Say this about Trump: at least he doesn’t own slaves.

As you can see, I’m really bending over backward to say something nice about the guy.

There’s no category in the presidential ranking system for media relations, which is good for Trump, as he’s essentially waged war on the whole concept of freedom of the press. In one recent tweet, Trump said the media was “the enemy of the American People!”

Which reminds me: I still can’t get over the February 16 press conference at the White House, during which Trump ripped into Jake Turx, a 30-year-old, mild-mannered reporter from Ami Magazine, an Orthodox Jewish weekly based in Brooklyn.

When he began his question, Turx tried to distance himself from the rest of the rabble in the White House press corps by assuring Trump that “despite what some of my colleagues may have been reporting, I haven’t seen anybody in my community accuse either yourself or anyone on your staff of being anti-Semitic.”

Having softened Trump with praise, he got down to business.

“However, what we are concerned about, and what we haven’t really heard being addressed, is an uptick in anti-Semitism, and how the government is planning to take care of it,” Turx continued. “There’s been a report out that 48 bomb threats have been made against Jewish centers all across the country in the last couple of weeks. There are people committing anti-Semitic acts or threatening to . . . ” At which point, Trump cut him off—basically telling him to shut up and sit down.

“So here’s the story, folks,” Trump declared.

“Number one, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your life. Number two, racism—the least racist person.”

Huh? “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” as Shakespeare once put it.

The C-SPAN poll doesn’t rank presidents based on their anti-Semitism, but President Richard Nixon also had issues with Jews.

Basically, Nixon thought they were part of a massive conspiracy—which supposedly also included the Kennedy family and other eastcoast elites—to bring him down.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Nixon era as the Trump era unfolds. I’m old enough to have sharp memories of the early 70s. Sometimes it feels as if I’m reliving those years, especially in regards to the still-developing

Then President-elect Donald Trump and wife Melania gaze up at the Lincoln Memorial on the eve of Trump’s inauguration. o BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/ AFP/GETTY IMAGES

drama of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and what he may or may not have said to the Russian ambassador in the days before Trump took office.

Apparently, the FBI got wind of the conversation while listening in on the ambassador’s conversations. I’m sure it’s not a big surprise that we’re spying on the Russians, just as I presume the Russians are spying on us.

After the story broke, Flynn resigned.

Trump is now railing at the unnamed intelligence sources who leaked the bit about Flynn’s call—though they may have done everyone a favor by forcing out a security adviser who thought he could have a private conversation with the Russian ambassador without the FBI and/or CIA listening in.

The real issue is whether Flynn assured the ambassador that Trump would end the sanctions President Obama had imposed on the Russians for allegedly hacking into Democratic National Committee computers during the presidential campaign, in order to leak embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton.

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

Say this about Trump: at least he doesn’t own slaves.

Now everyone wants to know the answer to an updated version of a Nixon-era question in regards to Flynn’s conversations with the Russians: What did the president know and when did he know it? (CNN and others reported that Trump knew that Flynn had allegedly misled people in his administration two weeks before Flynn resigned.)

So here’s another echo of the Nixon years: This isn’t the first time in my life that federal agents have selectively leaked intel to reporters to bring down a Republican president.

As opposed to selectively leaking intel to reporters on behalf of a Republican president, as some still-unnamed administration officials did with the New York Times’s Judith Miller, to scare Americans into supporting President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

Or as FBI director James Comey did when he notified Congress about his renewed investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails less than two weeks before Election Day. Didn’t hear any Republicans complaining about that, either.

Back in the early 70s, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were abetted in their investigation of Nixon’s Watergate scandal by an anonymous Washington insider they nicknamed “Deep Throat.”

CITY LIFE In their 1974 book All the President’s Men, Woodward and Bernstein led us to believe that Deep Throat was a righteous public servant who was sickened by Nixon’s outrageous Constitutional violations, including spying on the DNC. At the time, I was a young and exceedingly impressionable college student. And when I read their book and saw the subsequent movie, I decided that I too wanted to be a crusading investigative journalist who had clandestine predawn meetings in shadowy underground parking garages with super-secret insiders giving me the scoop about what was really going down. Just as Woodward (Robert Redford in the movie) had with Deep Throat.

But in 2005, Vanity Fair revealed that Deep Throat was a man named Mark Felt, the number two operative at the FBI. And it turned out that there was nothing particularly noble about Felt’s reasons for leaking damaging information about Nixon. Apparently, Felt was upset that Nixon hadn’t appointed him as FBI director after J. Edgar Hoover died in 1972.

By the time I learned about Deep Throat’s real motives, I was already more than 25 years into a career that had been at least partly inspired by what Kellyanne Conway might now call “alternative facts.” Alas, it was too late for me to turn back.

Ironically, Nixon and his top aides had pretty much figured out that Felt was Deep Throat almost from the moment Woodward and Bernstein began churning out their scoops. During a conversation on October 19, 1972—which the president secretly taped—Nixon and his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, speculated about Felt’s motivations.

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Haldeman: Maybe he’s tied to the Kennedy set.

Nixon: Is he Catholic?

Haldeman: I don’t know.

Nixon: Find out.

Haldeman: I think he’s Jewish.

Nixon: Christ! Mark Felt is certainly a Jewish name. Well, that could explain it too.

For the record, Felt wasn’t Jewish. In any event, rereading those old Nixon transcripts, I find it almost reassuring to recall that this likely isn’t the first time we’ve had a deceitful anti-Semite in the White House.

For what it’s worth, Nixon’s ranked 28th on C-SPAN’s list of great presidents. At the rate Trump’s going, I doubt he’ll even come close to that. v

ß @joravben

2117 W. Irving Park Rd., Chicago, IL minthomechicago.com FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 11

CITY LIFE Ryne San Hamel, left, killed cyclist Bobby Cann, right, in a May 2013 crash. o CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT; MICHELLE KLOSINSKI

TRANSPORTATION

Bearing false witness?

Bystanders say Bobby Cann’s killer may have lied to get a light sentence.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

R

yne San Hamel, the motorist who killed cyclist Bobby Cann in a May 2013 crash while driving roughly twice the speed limit with a blood-alcohol level also about double the legal limit, was sentenced at a hearing in late January. After pleading guilty to reckless homicide and aggravated DUI but before being sentenced, San Hamel addressed Cann’s family to provide a tearful—and graphic—account of trying to save the cyclist’s life.

The driver’s speech may have influenced Cook County circuit court judge William H. Hook’s final sentencing decision. While the state-mandated minimum penalty for aggravated DUI resulting in a death is three to 14 years in prison, Hooks sentenced San Hamel to a mere ten days in jail, plus four years probation and $25,000 in restitution.

But bystanders who aided Cann in the aftermath of the crash now say that San Hamel exaggerated his own efforts, and allege that several statements he made in court were false.

San Hamel struck Cann at Clybourn and Larrabee at an estimated 60 mph; the impact severed Cann’s leg and threw him onto the

12 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 23, 2017

car’s roof. When San Hamel swerved and then struck an oncoming car, the injured cyclist fell to the street.

Security video from a nearby restaurant shows that after coming to a stop in front of Yojimbo’s Garage bike shop, San Hamel got out of his car and walked over to Cann. He was followed immediately by shop owner Marcus Moore, and soon afterward by Northwestern Memorial Hospital nurse Julie Rolf, who’d been driving southeast on Clybourn.

“I just wanted to let you know that I did everything I could . . . to help him,” San Hamel said at the hearing, according to court records.

“Cupping blood out of his mouth while the nurse did the tourniquet on his leg, and the last thing I did with assisting him was holding his hand and putting my other arm on his shoulder and just praying for him to come back.”

San Hamel said that, as he prayed, Cann opened his eyes and looked at him, and then laid his head down to the side.

“At t h a t m o m e n t w h e n h i s e ye s opened . . . he was going somewhere else and going to a better place,” San Hamel told Cann’s family. “I saw it in his eyes.”

Although Cann’s mother, Maria, later described San Hamel’s speech as “offensive,” his remarks seemed to make a good impression on Hooks. Just before announcing the sentence, the judge referred to San Hamel as a “victim of this situation” and told the courtroom that he had factored the driver’s “remorse” into his sentencing decision.

There’s just one problem: both Moore and Rolf say San Hamel’s account of his actions wasn’t true.

After reading my analysis of Hooks’s judgment, Moore, a longtime acquaintance, contacted me to tell me that it was he, not San Hamel, who scooped blood out of Cann’s mouth, and that there were other falsehoods in his story.

Cann had a weak pulse but wasn’t breathing, Moore said. After securing the tourniquet, Rolf began chest compressions while Moore focused on clearing blood out of his mouth.

“I used my right forefinger and middle finger to scoop out the blood,” he says. “It was pretty messy.”

Moore used his left hand to support Cann’s head, in an effort to his keep his air passage open. He insists that the driver’s mention of cradling the cyclist’s shoulder was false because while San Hamel was in the vicinity, he wasn’t actively involved in trying to resuscitate Cann.

And San Hamel’s story of Cann opening his eyes and looking at him? Moore says that’s “either a fabrication or his imagination,” since the cyclist’s eyes were open the whole time, and he made no movements. “He was unconscious at best,” Moore says.

Rolf confirmed Moore’s account of what happened, adding that for much of the time they tended to Cann, San Hamel was standing or pacing behind Moore in a panicked state.

She’s certain San Hamel never held the victim’s hand.

The security video is grainy, and the figures around Cann appear small, but Rolf can be seen performing chest compressions while Moore is positioned to Cann’s right. At times San Hamel can be seen immediately to the nurse’s left.

“To be evenhanded here, maybe in his mind [San Hamel] thinks he was doing more than he actually did,” Moore concedes. But he’s inclined to believe that the driver intentionally lied in court. “It makes me sick to my stomach to think that he would pull off that kind of act in front of the family of the deceased.”

“I don’t know if San Hamel blacked out or what,” Rolf says, “but [his account] wasn’t accurate.”

San Hamel and his defense attorney, Sam Adam Jr., didn’t return messages requesting a response to these statements. Multiple calls to Hooks went unanswered. And a spokesperson for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, which prosecuted San Hamel, didn’t return messages.

But Cann’s girlfriend, Catherine Bullard, says that San Hamel’s apparent falsehoods represent yet another way the driver has made the cyclist’s family suffer.

“It is incredible how many iterations of cruelty San Hamel has shown Bobby’s loved ones,” Bullard said. “I wish there was some way to hold him accountable for the lies he told.”

Cann’s family intends to file a wrongful death lawsuit. Their attorney, Todd Smith, of the firm Power Rogers & Smith, says it would be “premature” to comment on what effect, if any, the crash witnesses’ statements might have on the civil case. Although San Hamel wasn’t under oath when he made his statement, “it’s certainly troubling if he looked at the family in court, as he did, and wasn’t telling the truth,” Smith says.

If Moore’s and Rolf’s assertions are true, hopefully they can be used to bring some measure of justice to Cann’s loved ones. For a drunk, speeding driver to kill a man, then lie to his family about trying to save his life, would be a truly heartless way to make a tragic case all the more heartbreaking. v

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

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GEORGE SAUNDERS, CHAPTER ONE

The celebrated short-story writer and recent debut novelist discusses his formative years in Chicago.

By TAL ROSENBERG

N

Ô ELIAS STEIN

o one needs another spiel about Why George Saunders Is Important. He’s “the writer of our time,” according to the New York Times Magazine, which laid that honorific at Saunders’s feet in 2013 upon the publication of his story collection Tenth of December.

And with the release last week of Lincoln in the Bardo, he became a long-awaited first-time novelist at age 58. But you’re probably aware of this already. What I wanted to find out is: What don’t we know about George Saunders?

After all, he’s filled readers in on much of his life through his nonfiction. While his stories are often set in bizarre or supernatural environments—Civil War-themed amusement parks, dystopian future societies, the afterlife—the emotional insights Saunders extracts from his characters’ experiences are timeless.

But there’s an art to taking real-life exploits and using them to speak through metaphor; it’s a skill that’s just as difficult and impressive as creating a fictional world. In “Chicago Christmas, 1984,” a personal essay from a 2003 issue of the New Yorker, Saunders recounts a gloomy time in his mid-20s when he was a broke wannabe writer living back in his hometown, in his aunt and uncle’s basement, and working on a roofing crew when he became acquainted with a coworker unable to shake off his bad habits—specifically, gambling—despite the man’s awareness of the consequences: the J

FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 13

George Saunders continued from 13

destruction of his and his family’s financial well-being. During the 2016 campaign season, plenty of prominent writers tried to decipher why Donald Trump resonated with so many people, but Saunders seemed to come closest last July in a New Yorker piece in which he used snapshots of various Trump rallies to illustrate how the reasons were more varied and complicated than most journalists and pundits realized. In “My Writing Education: A Time Line,” a 2015 piece for the New Yorker, Saunders chronologically lays out the moments that informed his development as a writer. As much as the story is a paean to Saunders’s teachers, it’s also a meditation on generosity—how trying to suppress narcissism is ultimately a path to a more fulfilling life.

Interviews with Saunders tend to focus on the art of fiction, how the writer does what he does. What’s not always apparent is the man himself. Saunders was born in Chicago and mostly raised in Oak Forest, but he isn’t often asked about his formative years. In advance of his appearance at the Music Box on March 2, an event sponsored by the Chicago Humanities Festival, Saunders spoke over the phone from his “little house” in the hills of Santa Cruz, California, about his earliest inclinations toward literature growing up in Gage Park on the city’s south side, being a countercultural control freak in high school, his transformative first experience with the work of Stuart Dybek at a downtown library, and how the Catholicism of his youth relates to his present faith in Buddhism.

Professor Saunders?

Yes, sir. George. Please, George.

But not George-boy, correct?

No, that’s OK! Whatever you want. At this point, my standards are very low.

I’d like to talk about your background in Chicago.

all the amazing things that he’d done: Africa, Cuba, friends with movie stars. You got this idea of a writer as someone who went out and did adventurous things, jotted a few notes down afterwards, and then got all this acclaim and worldwide attention. Is that the first memory you have of wanting to be a writer, or desiring to live the writer’s life, or did it come later?

I have two memories from this time when we lived in an apartment on, I think, 55th Place, which was just off of 55th and California. It was a little upstairs apartment. I remember the Kennedy assassination, and I vaguely remember that little thing about Hemingway.

I remember seeing someone on TV with the safari jacket who had just died. So those are the two early memories. Definitely there was no way I was thinking “I want to be a writer” at that time. That was just something that lodged in my head. I think the first time—I mean, I don’t know. I had a big experience with that [Esther Forbes] book Johnny Tremain when I was in third grade, which I’ve written about as when I first became aware of style. And then the next thing I can remember was in high school. I had this teacher named Ms. Williams, who was just beautiful and smart and the kind of teacher you really wanted to impress. And she taught at Oak Forest High School. And she did this film-strip presentation on great American writers. I remember listening to her talk about these writers with such admiration, and the feeling was that these were people who were both in their time and were able to step out of it. That really got in my gut. There was a picture of Nathaniel Hawthorne or a stylized cartoon of him. And I just thought, “It’d be cool if you could live your life all the way and at the same time be turned to future generations to tell them what it was like.” So that was the next time I had consciously thought about being a writer. And then the other thing that happened, maybe the next year or so, was when I was visiting family in Texas, and there was this mall called Las Haciendas, and it was the first themed mall I had ever seen. It was kind of a simulated Mexican village. We were walking around in there, and up until that point, I think I had dreams of being on the White Sox.

Oh, great, yes. That’s beautiful.

Dreams of being on the White Sox? You’ve said you came to writing gradually, and that you vaguely remember seeing something on TV about Hemingway’s death that left an impression on you when you were very young, maybe three or four. There was a photo of him in a safari jacket, and the announcer was listing

14 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Yeah, yeah, I was a big baseball fan, and it was the time of my life that I remember thinking to myself, “If I don’t make it to the majors, I’ll just kill myself—it’s just so embarrassing to be a grown-up human being and to not be in the major leagues.” So by this time in Las Ha-

ciendas I realized that this physically wasn’t a possibility for me.

But I remember having this very sweet conversation with my seven female relatives, and I was wandering around thinking, “What should I do, what should I do?” And it came to me with this great breath of relief that if I did something with my mind, it would never have to be over. You know? It wasn’t like you get to be 30 and then you’re done, which would be the case with the baseball players. So I had this weird—looking back on it—this very strange conversation, this inner monologue about, in some way, trying to be involved in intellectual things because it would have a longer resonance time or something like that.

Welcome to my world.

So 55th Place and California—is that the apartment you lived in the entire time you grew up in Chicago?

No. My dad worked in the air force, and he met my mom in Texas, and so we moved [to Chicago] when I was about one, and then we stayed there. I went to kindergarten from that apartment, and then when I was in first grade, we moved to Oak Forest, which is a south suburb.

What are your memories from Chicago? What do you remember most fondly?

Oh, so much. It’s weird because I was only there until I was about five or six or something. I’ll tell you one that I don’t know how to make sense of, but my grandmother took me to the bowling place in that neighborhood.

[Gage Park] has got a lot of classic Chicago bungalows, and the bowling place was in the basement of one of these. And it had a giant American flag over this red brick. And there was something really magical: all the grown-ups together, kind of somber, not a lot of talking, filing in there. So that was a little fragment that stuck. And I think we usually think about these things as, “Well, what did it cause?” But I think about something as, “Why did I notice that so much? What is it about that vignette that caused it to get into the ‘save’ pile?” And then the other thing—well, actually, there’s a lot.

Mostly it’s tonal, though. It’s like the mood of that neighborhood—I found it years later when reading Dybek—was that kind of feeling of a little European village picked up and transplanted to Chicago. I remember there was a girl on our corner—there were two girls named Debbie on our block, and so they were distinguished by calling them Big Debbie and

Little Debbie. And Big Debbie was probably 12 or something, and she was just this hero to all of us. At one point she got hit by a car. And this was kind of the Summer of People Getting Hit

by Cars. A hot dog vendor got hit in a parking lot—[the car went] over a curb and knocked over his cart. And [Big Debbie], I think she had both her legs broken or something. And that was very—you know in the way how childhood experiences get supersad—that was really like a malevolent universe coming to our neighborhood. And then my mom used to sell—not Amway, but the other thing. Mary Kay? No, it was before Mary Kay. Anyways, she used to sell cosmetics door-to-door. She had clients, and one of her clients also had a kid who had been hit by a car. On the same block!

These cars were going nuts! So the thing was, there was some sense we could come along on this sales call, but we had to be very quiet because this boy was very sick and, in my mind, on the verge of death. So therefore we had a lot of responsibility not to kill this kid by being bad. And it was the year that the song “Eleanor Rigby” came out. And that was somehow the theme for that afternoon. This makes no sense! But anyways, as we came up to the porch, there was a big jar, I think it was just a planter or something but it had water in it. And that crossed in my mind with the line, “Wearing a face that he keeps in a jar by the door.” I was petrified to go into this house— nothing actually happened and the kid recovered, but there was something magical about that whole time. And I suppose it’s because your brain isn’t formed yet. So metaphors are coming in, and images, and you’re trying to sort them out, and it’s this kind of beautiful dreamlike stew. Maybe this is insane, I don’t know.

Going back to Dybek—did you encounter his writing early in your life or much later?

Later, and at a very critical moment. I was actually living back in Chicago, when I was maybe 24 or 25.

Was this around the time of the “Chicago Christmas, 1984” essay?

Right about that time, exactly. I was staying with my aunt out in the suburbs and coming into town, and I was trying to figure out my next move. I know I wanted to be a writer, and I kind of came to the realization that I had never read any contemporary stuff really, that I was still stuck in the 30s, you know? And some intelligent part of myself said, “You’ve got to

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GEORGE R SAUNDERS: LINCOLN IN THE

BARDO

Thu 3/2, 7 PM, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, sold out; call 312-494-9509 to be added to the wait list.

So there’s kind of a trance form that involves distancing. But if you look at that Dybek story, he’s making very beautiful metaphors and symbols out of stuff that I could walk out my door and see. So that gave me a feeling like, “Oh, that’s what real life looks like when you fork it over into the artistic.” It was like if you had a bunch of guitars around your house and all you ever heard was symphony music, and you go, “Oh, these don’t sound right. I can’t use these things.” And then all of the sudden you heard the Allman Brothers or something, and you say, “Oh, I see, I see. I can use what’s at hand.” And the transform is what’s important: taking what’s real and what you actually know, and that little torque that you do to elevate it up into the metaphorical is what’s important.

You were in Chicago until you were five or six?

I was in the city until I was five or six, and then I moved out to Oak Forest right when I started first grade.

What was your experience in Oak Forest like?

address that.” I don’t know how I picked this up, but I took the train to the Chicago Public Library on Michigan Avenue.

When the library was in the Chicago Cultural Center, before the Harold Washington Library was established?

Right, and I just set up camp there and pulled out 50 or 60 literary journals, and thought, “Once I’m done, I’m going to discredit contemporary fiction once and for all.” And I was just reading, randomly, these literary journals. I didn’t like it that much. It didn’t do anything for me. And then I got to Dybek, and it was a story called “Hot Ice.” And I just remember sitting there and going, “Oh, fuck, this is so good. I can’t avoid this. This is as good as Hemingway, and it’s speaking to me more directly from my experience.” When I was reading Hemingway, it got put in black and white. It got transposed to 50 years before, and it was very cold and tidy, and I liked that. But with

Dybek, these were people that I recognized from my neighborhood, using phrases that I recognized, struggling with similar issues. It was just undeniably alive for me. So that was a big moment because I basically said to myself, “You idiot, you’ve been missing out on this all these years. And you have been failing to develop because you haven’t exposed yourself to this sort of thing.”

Oak Forest is made up of some really old houses that were made in the 20s, and then there were probably six or seven distinct subdivisions that had come into being at different times. So as a kid there, you really knew the distinctions. You actually knew what it was between this block of houses and that block of houses. And you could almost feel that difference within the two or three years that they were built—the water tasted different in different subdivisions. So ours was, I think it was called El Morro, and it had this vaguely Spanish-conquistador vibe. There were three main house styles that were used. And sometimes they would rotate them 180 degrees, and they were different colors of siding and so on.

So at one point my three best friends and I all lived in the same house with the same floor plan. So you would go in and you would know where everything was.

You realized that there were other people out there who could convey an experience that you yourself were having?

Because all the houses were the same.

One-hundred percent. That’s exactly it. It also felt a little bit like—I don’t know quite how to explain it, but there’s a relation to a work of art that I would call museumlike. In the world represented, there are no traces of your actual life. So, for example, if I’m reading Tolstoy, all the peasant huts and the carriages and the horses—I don’t know what that is. The formality of the people, I don’t understand it.

There were only three repeating floor plans.

So we all lived in the same kind. I think the neighborhood was called El Morro, and the house we lived was called El Vista, or maybe it was vice versa. So that was kind of cool, you know? That was really strange. All three of us had the same relative bedroom in the house.

But when we first moved out of the city, the experience was like moving into a mansion.

We’d been living in a two-bedroom walkup in the city, and when we moved out of the city it just felt expansive. I remember actually going into the house and getting lost, I didn’t know where my parents were because it was so—it felt like there were 4,000 rooms or something. It was actually just a really nice three-bedroom suburban house. But, yeah, I loved it. I feel nostalgic for it, and it was a really wonderful way to grow up.

You said you were a White Sox fan. During your childhood, did you play baseball a lot? Was it just like a lot of kids where you would play outside?

Yeah, well, at the time I kind of had a vague feeling of being a suburban, spoiled kid. But now, in retrospect, it just seems Rockwellian.

Like, we would go out and there was a nice little cul-de-sac near our house and we’d play baseball there. And one of the funny things was the house that was located next to center field belonged to the mother of that disk jockey Garry Meier. They would hate it when we would drop our ball into their lawn. Now it seems very small town. You know, we would go out to a vacant lot and play football, and there were absolutely no curfews, and we just ran ragged all over the whole place.

What were your interests at that age?

I really loved baseball and football. Basically I had that kind of universal dream that I’d play for the White Sox in the summer, and not the Bears but the Packers in the fall.

So you’d be Bo Jackson.

That’s right. In retrospect, I had a pretty strong religious bent—I went to the Catholic school, right up the block from our house, called Saint Damian. I had some really beautiful, magical experiences there, kind of mystic experiences. And also the more mundane ones that you read about in Catholic school at that time, like there was some physicality, some punishment—but it was rich. And my relationship to Catholicism was really earnest. I really felt it deeply that time, and that kind of powered me. It’s still with me, those early religious experiences.

Did you ever think about pursuing theology as a career of some kind at some point?

Well, being a priest was a big thing at that

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time. That was kind of cool. My mom tells me I had these colanders, these plastic, vaguely table-shaped things, and she would help me decorate them as altars and change the altar cloth and all that. I’d like to think that isn’t true but I’m afraid it is. But I do remember being in church at that time and being really taken by the symbolic parts of it: that on a certain holiday, everything in the church would be colored a certain way. What I really responded to was the idea that there was a kind of knowledge that wasn’t linear, that you could feel something happening. For a while we went to church every day, and we would do stations of the cross and all that stuff. There would be a mind-set that would settle in that would be very beautiful, and now I can see that it was basically meditative, your mind quieting down. So for all of the nonsense at that time of being in the Catholic church, somehow the real stuff got through to me. It was the tail end of the Dorothy Day Catholicism, which made Catholicism really beautiful. So whenever I mock Catholicism, I like to remember that really beautiful part of it.

You’re a Buddhist now, correct?

Yes.

Do you make any connection between the meditative experiences of Catholicism that you experienced as a child and the way you practice Buddhism today?

For sure. I like to describe myself as a Buddhist and a Catholic. It’s the same, it’s the same. For me it was. I mean, there were times when, just because of the boredom, you’re sitting there and your mind races around for a while, and then gradually, just like a tired dog, it just sits at your feet, and then something else happens.

In Buddhism you call it meditation and you try it, you try. But in higher levels of meditation, you don’t try—you just sit there.

Another thing that was really alive, at least in my mind, was that they were both very in love with the idea of empathy. And, I don’t know why I picked this up, although I’m sure that it was from a nun, but the idea that Jesus’s strength was—well, he was a by-product of God—but a by-product of that was that he was infinitely empathetic to everybody, from prostitutes to the people that crucified him.

So that got in my head—the idea that this kind of thing would be possible, and also noticing in yourself that it wasn’t happening, that you were full of pettiness. The idea that you could

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theoretically line yourself up in a lineage according to that idea, and that instead of being thought of as frothy or wimpy, it was the most powerful thing you could do. But if you really could feel 100 percent love for everybody, you would be God—that’s actually what God is. That kind of thought was really strong and beautiful. And again, in spite of that—you know, one time I walked in on a nun and a priest kissing in a bathroom, and another time I had a nun chasing me around a room with a whisk broom. So all that funny, surface-level stuff in Catholicism was happening at the same time as this other, beautiful stuff.

The empathy you describe—it doesn’t seem characteristic of a lot of people I knew as a child. Would you characterize your parents as very empathetic people? Would you say you absorbed that from them?

I think so, yeah. But again, I don’t think anyone has that quality, except Jesus and Buddha, and maybe some people I don’t know about—but that’s the aspiration.

But yes, my parents were really lovely. My dad was from the south side, and my mom was from Texas, and they both had these qualities that I really admired. My dad was this very—I’d call him empathetic through reason. He’s really great about destabilizing an emotion by stepping off of it and looking at it: Is this emotion doing you any good right now? Does it make sense? Is that an emotion that’s just coming out of your experience, or is it something you want to enact? At my school, Oak Forest High School, the cafeteria food was terrible. So, this being around 1973 or 1974, some of us decided to do a walkout on Friday.

We were organizing, and it was really thrilling.

On Thursday night I decided I’d better just tell my dad. I said, “You know, dad, I don’t want to bother you, but we’re going to do a walkout tomorrow.” And he was like, “OK, that’s good.

Sounds good.” But all of sudden, like Columbo, he said, “But hold on a second. I assume you’ve made your concerns known to the administration?” And I was like, “No, man. They wouldn’t listen. You know, the man.” And he said, “I’m sure you’re right, but you open yourself up for a kind of an embarrassing critique if they point out that you didn’t make your concerns known.” And I’m like, “Aw, shit, he’s right.” I thought, “OK, I’ll go in the morning and talk to the principal, and when he rebuffs me, we’ll walk out.” So I go to talk to this principal.

His name was Toby Hightower. He was from Texas. And he knew my name, which shocked me. He said, “George, what’s on your mind today?” I said, “The food in the cafeteria is an

“I’ve had that moment. You think, ‘This is my novel !,’ and then the novel kind of looks at you and gives you the finger.”

—George Saunders

Ô ELIAS STEIN

outrage.” He said, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize that. What can we do about it?” And I thought, “Oh my god.” Then he said, “Why don’t we put you in charge of a commission? You pick the students. Would five meetings be enough?

We’ll get a bus, we’ll take you to these different schools, and you come back, you recommend who we should hire, and we’ll do it next year.” And I’m like, “My god!” So we canceled the walkout, and they did exactly what they promised to do. So, yeah, that was my dad’s influence in compassion.

And my mom was just the most tender person I’ve ever met, just in the way she accepted all the other people. You’d bring someone over and they’d be a little odd—no problem.

She totally accepted them and joked with them and made them feel at ease. And also, I think, in her attitude towards me—I read somewhere that we posit our understanding of the universe by the way that our mother understood us. I would do stupid shit or embarrassing, neurotic stuff that, in my mind, was pretty crazy. I would confess all these things to her, and she never did anything but totally accepted what I had to say. That made me—or really, only now, because I’m 103 years old—that made me try to think that way about the world, just by osmosis.

I’ll tell you one other thing that was emblematic of her. This was maybe ’72, ’73—you know, it was kind of like Doobie Brothers, very Allman Brothers, very back to the land.

I bought Neil Young’s Harvest album, and I said to my mom, “I really think we should cut down our own Christmas tree this year,” which at that time was unheard of. But she found a place, my aunt took us out there, and I had my Neil Young costume and my mullet, and I went out and cut down this tree and brought it home. Back at the house, it’s like a Charlie Brown tree: it’s got huge, four-foot gaps in it and it’s dying in places. I was really crestfallen and heartbroken because I felt that this was my first really male, familial responsibility, and I botched it. My mom said, “You know, I think we can make do.” And obviously the thing to do was to throw it in the shit pile and buy a new one from the lot. But instead she said, “Let’s see if we can do something with this.” This is a great training in part. She cut off the lower part of the tree, retained the good branches, drilled holes into the trunk, and then put those in skillfully. And it was the most beautiful tree in the world. It took her about— well, actually, it took her most of the night. But she said, “Let’s not reject it, let’s redo it.” So we sat there and did that together, we had a lot of laughs—she both kept me on the hook and got me off of it at the same time. Just her care and hardworking spirit.

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So in high school, you were a sort of countercultural person?

Yeah, but I wasn’t. I was a weird control-freak countercultural person because I never did drugs and I never drank. I was a completely straight arrow. But to look at me, you wouldn’t think so. I had long hair and was pretty good at guitar and fully bought into the counterculture scene, except for the drugs part of it. I don’t know why. I mean, I was a control freak, and I still am. I want to control my phenomena as much as I can. And I saw a lot of—when you’re straight and you see people who are fuckedup, if you’re a control freak, it’s offensive. I just didn’t want to go there.

When did Buddhism become a big part of your life? And how did your parents respond when you made that move?

It was no problem. I was probably in my 40s.

It was very gradual. My wife got interested in it, and I saw how much fun she was having, and how beautiful it was, and I just kind of followed her, as I do with most things. And honestly, I’m a little uneasy, because with this book in particular, I mean, the tendency of putting me in this position as a Buddhist when really I’m just a newcomer and an amateur, even though I’ve been doing it a long time—I’m definitely not very knowledgeable, certainly not in an academic sense, and I’m a little hit-or-miss in practice. So I’m wary of being the poster boy for something that I understand so poorly.

About the book—one thing I was thinking about while reading Lincoln in the Bardo is that Abraham Lincoln is such an essential figure in Illinois history. As a child growing up in Illinois, did you have a particular appreciation or engagement with Lincoln?

Oh, sure. He was sort of the patron saint of Illinois. You know, let me try something. I’ve never tried to articulate this before, but I have a thought that people who end up being artistic—well, maybe I shouldn’t generalize it.

I can look back in my life, and I can see certain reveries I tended to fall into as a kid. I fell into them because they were kind of beautiful.

It’s almost like they came from a different life set. There’s something about prairie life and Lincoln and that kind of Aaron Copland-y American plainness that I can remember being an old—I don’t know if I’d call it a vignette or a mental vista—but that was really with me. When we were kids and we would drive

by a cornfield with a little shed—something about that just resonated. So in some ways I wonder—we can talk so logically about art and where things come from, but those somehow seem powerful to me. Another way of saying it is there are certain little blocks that seem cool to me. Like, the Civil War seemed cool to me. And the music and the uniforms—that all seemed charged to me. So Lincoln was always in that category. Again, I don’t know about the relation with that and coming to write about him, except maybe those little pods tend to yield interest. You feel like staying there for a long time. But I didn’t study him or anything like that.

So where did the kernel for Lincoln in the Bardo come from?

About 20 years ago, when Clinton was president, we were in D.C., and I heard that anecdote about how Lincoln had reportedly gone into the crypt to hold his son’s body a few days after he died. My wife’s cousin just threw it out there. And it doesn’t happen that often, but that just got into my head. It’s such a beautiful image: him in the moonlight with his son’s body across his lap. I kept pushing it away because it just didn’t seem like something about which I would write. It seemed totally . . . not funny! So I kept booting it to the curb, but the image kept coming back. And normally I don’t work from that sort of thing.

I distrust that kind of thing, where someone tells you a story and you go, “Oh, that would make a great novel.” That doesn’t work. But in this case it was just this persistence. It was like if a man kept asking a woman to marry him, she’d eventually go, “All right, all right.

You must be correct or you wouldn’t be so persistent.”

The story takes place in this historical time period, but the book’s also about all these other characters and their experiences. Was that the original intent when you began writing?

Actually, no. My shtick is always—especially with my stories—that I’m always better when I don’t know anything in advance, when I don’t have any big agenda in advance. I don’t know why exactly that’s the case, but I’ve found it out by hard experience. Whenever I have a projected idea of a theme, it never ends up getting finished. So my usual approach is just to say, “OK, so-and-so interests me.”

Maybe it’s a story, maybe it’s just a fragment of language or a mental image, as we’ve been talking about. Then I just really try to

aggressively hold all the ideas about it away.

You know, the reasons why it’s a good idea or why it’s rich or why it’s relevant to this time.

I try to hold those ideas at bay for as long as I can, and then just get into it on a language level, and then just start fucking around with it. And it kind of has an energy of its own. We were talking about Dybek, and he said once, “A story is always talking to you, so you have to learn how to listen to it.” That’s really my deal. So in this case I just thought, “I really love this image. I wonder if I can try to get at that.” And then what happens is you get into it, and the idea has problems built into it, but it also causes everything—structure and form and style, and all of that.

Did the project start out as a story, or did you know pretty early on that this was going to be a novel?

It started out as a section, actually. That first section, actually, I started writing in [Hans Vollman’s] voice, just messing around a bit with that party scene. But again, that’s actually one of the things—to not have any notions about length. Because I’ve had that moment.

You think, “This is my novel!,” and then the novel kind of looks at you and gives you the finger. I really believe this: a paragraph has a DNA that tells you everything about it. It tells you the arc of the story, it tells you the length, but it’s not discernible just from looking at that one paragraph.

You have to extend it out to the next paragraph, and then the next paragraph, and pretty soon the DNA, just like in the real world, will start to make forms for you. So for me the whole thing is to deal with the insecurity of not knowing what the thing’s going to be by insisting, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” It’s better that it tells you what it is, rather than you tell it.

Right. I mean, you said that this idea came to you 20 years ago. I’m sure you couldn’t possibly have known the book would come out at the same time as all of this happening with our current president.

It’s funny because even a year ago, when I finished it, it seemed like—I mean, I imagined it would be coming out when Hillary was president. And it would have been a heartwarming story about American values. So that you can’t control. It’s like if you were an elephant with a two-year gestation period, and your baby was born on the day the zoo closed. But in a way I’m actually happy with the timing. For me it’s

two things: The first thing is it’s hope—this ambition is still valid, and that the artistic way of thinking is much more capacious and generous than the other way of thinking. And the other thing is that it’s a reminder that we’ve been in this shit before as a country, and the way we get guided out of it is not through aggression. Well, it is aggression, but the way we get out of it involves some real patience, and a real kind of character. Maybe we think now of these qualities like forbearance and courage and endurance are kind of old-school.

But I think we’re going to find out, especially for progressives, that these are the essential qualities.

Back in July, you wrote a piece for the New Yorker about going to a series of Trump campaign rallies. How did you come to do that assignment?

David Remnick e-mailed me and asked, “What do you think about writing about Trump a la Norman Mailer, ‘Superman Comes to the Supermarket’ [from the November 1960 issue of Esquire]?” And at first I was like, “I’m on break. I just finished this book.” But then my wife, who’s always my best counselor, was like, “How could you not?”

Did you have any idea that this could be the outcome, that he could become president? Or did it still feel totally unrealistic when you finished this assignment?

When I started, it seemed completely unrealistic. But after I went to the rallies, I was still saying to people, “It won’t happen, it won’t happen.” But I think I had a rising panic that, I think, had to do with what I saw at those rallies. Because I didn’t really see the crazy kind of people that I had hoped to see. They were pretty normal, measured people who were nice to me, and yet they were still supporting this guy that seemed to me an unimaginable candidate. So that made me a little panicked.

Also the raw energy at his rallies—you’d go from one of his rallies to one of Hillary’s and you’d be like, “Come on, people! Wake up!

You don’t know what you’re up against here.”

Although I also went to a Bernie rally, and that was more energetic in a different way. That really gave me hope. Talk about “I Hear America Singing,” that was it: every type of person, happy. And he gave a speech—I had never heard a speech like that where every sentence you’re like, “Yep, yep, yep, thank you, yep,” all the way through the end. But, well, you know how that turned out.

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 17

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George Saunders continued from 17

Lincoln’s time and the present day?

That anger and energy you saw among Trump supporters at the rallies—we haven’t been seeing it so much in the media since he won.

One thing is the idea of the two mythologies producing rhetoric that can’t cross talk. Like, when you look back at the Civil War, I used to always think, “Gee, I wonder why they couldn’t just negotiate.” And then when you really get into it, you realize that that was not going to happen. There was too much money in it, there was too much at stake, and two very separate rhetorical histories that were just walking right past each other. In reality, blood was going to solve it. There was no way you were going to talk that thing through. Now, I don’t think we’re in that situation, but it’s certainly scary, because the two mythologies are certainly in existence, and I think they’re rapidly being solidified by the climate of social media. And I certainly have experienced this existential dread of seeing two nice people—the same age, the same life basically—just scream at each other with absolutely no attempt at communication. And that’s scary.

You don’t go from that position to anything but violence. Unless something really wonderful happens, and I don’t know what that is. I mean again, [the two eras are] not comparable, but you can see in miniature the same kind of division. And once the ball gets rolling down the hill, it just gets difficult to roll it back up.

Well, the anger now is ours. It’s on the left, and rightly so.

The funny thing I noticed was that the crowd wasn’t that angry on its own. And then when Trump would start talking, there was this agitated energy that would just ripple out. Some would get giddy and some would get mean. But literally it was timed with his speaking. It was like wind in a wheatfield. I remember standing out in Tucson with the protesters, and they were angry and chanting. And then the Trump people came out and were really passive. They were kind of mellow and smiling, and the protesters were up in their faces, and I thought, “Oh, that’s really clever.” The Trump movement—its excesses were built right into the program. So nobody had to be angry, they just had to say, “We don’t want immigrants here” or “We think a Muslim ban is a good idea.” And that puts the brunt of the work on the protesters, who are the ones being insulted and humiliated and affronted by these policies, and they had to get angry. So it’s a real conundrum.

It’s almost like a passive-aggressive form of demagoguery. And this was complicated by the fact that, like I said, most of the people that I know who were Trump supporters weren’t belligerent. When I left for that thing, I had in mind this huge mathematical machine into which you could pop somebody and tell whether somebody would be a Trump supporter. But then I thought, “Well, it doesn’t even matter.

This is 33 percent of the population. Who cares what the machine looks like?”

When you were writing the novel, were you reading a lot about Lincoln?

I started reading about him casually, way back when, but nothing too serious. And then I started writing this book, and I got this table with about 200 books on it. And I would just find whatever I could. And I had some idea of which particular moments I was looking for.

The theory was—if you could imagine having a hopper on top of your head with everything about Lincoln just pouring in—to let it percolate down and then at the moment needed just do a little improv based on that glob of information.

You said, “We’ve all been in this shit before as a country.” What parallels do you see between

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I take it your view on social media is fairly pessimistic?

Well, as a writer, I try to have multiple views.

My simple view is that, yeah, it’s problematic, and it’s a little like eating too much sweets.

I don’t even do that much of it, but I have an author page, and I see when I’m on there arguing with people, I can just see my mind has shrunken and I’ve gotten neurotic and I’m thinking about these people even when I’m taking my dog for a walk. And it’s just such a marked difference to the head I’m in when I’m writing a book. I know I like the book head better than the social media one. But again, as a writer, one of the things I try to do is to constantly be saying, “On the other hand . . . ” So social media is a blight and it makes us stupid.

Yes, but on the other hand—and then I run to the other side of the table and remember how fun it is, to engage in it, and how energizing it is. I think the highest form of artistic thought is to have multiple things be true simultaneously and have the strength not to have to choose one over the others. Now in real life, you have to choose, but I think it’s energizing to, briefly in that moment, let the plates spin without moving one way or another. v

@talrosenberg

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ARTS & CULTURE

R

Greta Oglesby, Camille Robinson, Jacqueline Williams, Donica Lynn, and Linda Bright Clay

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

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o CITY OF CHICAGO

o LIZ LAUREN

THEATER

A Wonder full of blunders

By JACK HELBIG

L

ife isn’t fair. The race doesn’t always go to the swift. The boss’s child gets the promotion. The well-connected singer gets the Grammy. None of this is news, and not much is new about Marcus Gardley’s new play, A Wonder in My Soul, receiving its world premiere at Victory Gardens.

Here’s another truism from the show: Somehow, we survive. Here’s yet another: Life happens while you are making plans.

And yet another: New friends are silver, old friends are gold. The problem with A Wonder in My Soul is that it’s packed with lots of well-worn maxims and folksy wisdom—good parenting is important, gentrification hurts poor people, the past influences the present, gospel music stirs the soul, Jim Crow is evil, Starbucks stores attract white people. And Gardley just flits from one to the other, never settling long enough on a single aphorism to uncover something new or deepen the audience’s understanding of received knowledge.

He also doesn’t succeed in telling a com-

pelling story. Set in an unspecified neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, the play concerns a pair of African-American friends who are near retirement age, Aberdeen “Birdie” Calumet (Greta Oglesby) and Bell Grand Lake (Jacqueline Williams), and their beloved, iconic neighborhood beauty shop (which they are about to lose to foreclosure).

Calumet was a rising singer in the early 1960s but her career was cut short by racism (her label thought she was too dark to feature on an album cover) and by her devotion to Lake (instead of focusing on her career, Calumet helped raise her friend’s two children after their dad left).

There’s enough here for several interesting plays, but the final product feels like a cumulative early draft of all of them. Some scenes run too long, others feel too short; the show endures, mercilessly, for two and a half hours.

Gardley intersperses the dialogue with bits of live music (mostly soul and gospel) and flashbacks to Calumet and Lake’s past (they’ve been friends since they were young girls

down home in Mississippi), yet the music is mostly filler and the flashbacks rarely provide much insight about the characters.

Gardley isn’t a rookie: he has an MFA from Yale; he’s written a number of plays, including An Issue of Blood and The Gospel of Loving Kindness (both produced at Victory Gardens); and he’s earned lots of awards. But the many flaws in this show feel like rookie mistakes. Perhaps director Chay Yew rushed it into production too quickly (though, if Yew’s director’s note is to be believed, this play was initially slated to run in the spring of 2015 but was delayed so Gardley could write a response to the killing of Eric Garner in New York City).

As Victory Gardens’s artistic director, Yew is fiercely invested in A Wonder in My Soul, and nowhere is that more evident than in the show’s casting—it’s packed with strong actors. Oglesby really knows how to capture an audience’s attention: She begins the second act with a powerful piece of performance poetry, about the strength of black women, that makes one yearn for a full play written in that style. Likewise, Williams finds both the comedy and pathos in Calumet’s likeable but hapless friend and business partner. The supporting actors similarly deliver first-rate performances that never quite elevate the not-so-great material.

But the biggest issue with A Wonder in My Soul is how imitative it is of scenes and characters and bits of dialogue in other plays, novels, movies, and poems. The setting immediately reminds one of Barbershop (2002) and Beauty Shop (2005), the characters of the women in Steel Magnolias (1989). Parts of the script sound like August Wilson, though Gardley doesn’t have Wilson’s ear for dialogue.

And the evening’s indulgent, interminable ending—in which, one by one, each character is given stage time to reflect a bit on life and then say goodbye—feels like it was lifted straight from Chekhov. By the end, A Wonder in My Soul registers not so much as a powerful play but a hodgepodge of cliches and overly familiar references—it’s desperately in need of more reflection, rumination, and lots of rewriting. v A WONDER IN MY SOUL Through 3/12: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 PM and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Victory Gardens, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773-549-5788, victorygardens.org. $20-$60

THEATER

The OnEdge experimental performance series returns

IN ITS FOURTH YEAR, the OnEdge series returns to Chicago for a month of experimental theater and dance shows that examine the intersections of identity, history, psychology, and more, all through an unconventional lens.

OnEdge kicks off on February 23 with Swiss choreographer Marie-Caroline Hominal’s dance performance The Triumph of Fame, running through February 25 at DFBRL8R Gallery. Rather than showing the piece before a traditional audience, Hominal pulls one spectator to the stage for 20 minutes at a time, from 5 PM to 10 PM, for an intimate one-on-one performance. Inspired by I Trionfi, a series of poems by Italian poet Petrarch, the allegorical production explores how fame, death, time, and eternity all interact and battle each other.

The series continues the following month with another standout show, as multidisciplinary artist Nic Kay visits Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater from March 15 to 17 for a performance of Lil BLK. Functioning as both an autobiographical narrative and a broader celebration of the body, Lil BLK features spoken word, dance, and music to illustrate Kay’s experience growing up black, queer, and gender nonconforming in the Bronx. The show draws influence from New York City’s queer ballroom scene, praise dance, voguing, and more.

The other shows in the series include Erin Markey’s A Ride on the Irish Cream, Ligia Lewis’s Minor Matter, Every House Has a Door’s Three Matadores, and Court/Garden by Yanira Casto (aka A Canary Torsi). —ABBEY SCHUBERT ONEDGE 2/23-3/25, various locations and times, cityofchicago.org/city/en/ depts/dca/supp_info/onedge8.html. F

FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 19

ARTS & CULTURE

Dylan Gutierrez & Jeraldine Mendoza; Year of the Rab Rabbit o CHERYL MANN

DANCE

Kellye Howard and Brandi Denise

Charge it to the ‘Game’

o MIKE JUE

By MATT DE LA PEÑA

T

he Joffrey Ballet continues to add big-ticket draws to its repertoire, most notably from young and exciting choreographers with mainstream appeal. But none of them are as prodigious as Justin Peck.

At just 29, Peck is the boy wonder of classical and contemporary ballet, the subject of a popular documentary called Ballet 422, and only the second resident choreographer in New York City Ballet’s almost 70-year history. On top of all that, he’s a soloist in the company. Pulling double duty as a dancer and a choreographer, he has increasingly found himself negotiating a tight schedule to accommodate the people (and companies) who hope to benefit from his current status.

“Game Changers,” the latest program of mixed works from the Joffrey, is an appropriate title, if only because Peck is legitimately a once-in-a-generation talent. Year of the Rabbit, his collaboration with musician Sufjan Stevens, is one of three works in a program that includes Christopher Wheeldon’s Fool’s Paradise and Wayne McGregor’s Infra—the latter two pieces are both exquisite, yet they’ve appeared in previous programs by the Joffrey.

Still, the show stands out because Year of the Rabbit so magnificently highlights Peck’s youthful, adventurous aesthetic. He has a knack for conceiving all kinds of intricate geometric formations, at times robust and others understated, but none of them pretentious.

Year of the Rabbit dates back to 2012 and is rife with frenetic, lively pacing. It’s set to Stevens’s astrology-inspired electronic song cycle Enjoy Your Rabbit, which gets a classical rendering here with a live performance by the Chicago Philharmonic. The string section is often screechy and piercing, like an irrepressibly jumpy bunny, darting from one end of the room to the other. The dancers channel a similar energy, leaping through space with bright smiles plastered to their faces. It’s playful, teasing, excitable—executed with equal parts grace and meticulous timing. Performing the piece for the first time, the Joffrey pulls it off: it seems tailor-made for the company, which, historically, has always valued the personality of its dancers more than the technique.

At one point, an encounter between dancers Dylan Gutierrez and Jeraldine Mendoza recalls two wide-eyed lovers flirting with each other. It felt like an indie movie—I kept getting the impression that the inspiration came not from anything dance-related, but from Peck’s Instagram feed. I’m speculating, of course, but that would seem appropriate given his age— an asset for ballet in general. v R “GAME CHANGERS” Through 2/26: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 PM and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, 312-341-2310, joffrey.org. $34-$159

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COMEDY

Brandi Denise and Kellye Howard are Queens of comedy

By BRIANNA WELLEN

I

f the names Brandi Denise and Kellye Howard sound familiar, it’s because they’re two of the hardest-working stand-ups in town, regularly featured in lineups around Chicago. But now the comics have paired up to show their fans more of their talents, and in the process introduce new audiences to local performers who don’t often leave the north side.

The showcase 2 Queens 1 Mic at the Revival in Hyde Park features Denise and Howard hosting both as themselves and as other characters, performing sketches, songs, and improv sets. Each month revolves around a theme—the first show in January was “newness” and February’s is “love”—with guests like Dwayne Perkins, Plus Pierre, and Kristen Toomey. Denise and Howard are both graduates of Second City, but haven’t yet found an opportunity to step out of the stand-up bubble, so they created one for themselves.

“Female comics, we’ve got it hard anyway,” Howard says. “When we try to go out and do something different, it’s not the same as when a male comic goes out and tries to do something different. Sometimes you get onstage with all white males, we go do these shows, and we can’t trust that where they’re going is somewhere we want to go. [Denise] and I, we have that trust factor built with each other— we both understand that world that we’re in.”

Second City’s Lisa Beasley joined 2 Queens 1 Mic as a producer after guesting

on the first show—she wanted to be a part of a more inclusive environment, especially after leaving the E.T.C.’s A Red Line Runs Through It in October because of discriminatory remarks from the audience.

Denise and Howard say it’s important to introduce comics to new types of crowds— hence the south-side location—but 2 Queens 1 Mic should also offer visitors new styles of comedy. The neighborhood’s only mainstay for years, the now defunct Jokes & Notes, focused exclusively on stand-up, so the Revival is expanding the range of what performers can do.

Because they run their own show Denise and Howard have the power to play whomever they want, regardless of gender or race. During January’s performance, they were Nancy Grace and Melania Trump; this month, they’ll be a pair of bros talking about sex and relationships—those aren’t roles they’d have in many other instances, but they’re ones they know they can perform. In fact, they say they’re willing to take on anything.

“We’re like, ‘Do we need jugglers?’” Denise says. “No, we’re jugglers! We’ll juggle!

I don’t feel like there’s any limitations on what we can do.” v R 2 QUEENS 1 MIC Sat 2/25, 9:30 PM, the Revival, 1160 E. 55th, the-revival.com, $10.

ß @BriannaWellen

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Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE

Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Sarah Silverman in Dying Laughing

MOVIES

Dying is easy, comedy is hard

By J.R. JONES

B

ack in 2002 the Weinstein Company released the documentary Comedian, which recorded Jerry Seinfeld’s return to New York comedy clubs after the ninth and final season of his cherished NBC sitcom. Over the course of a year, director Christian Charles trailed Seinfeld as he tried out new material at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village, the Gotham Comedy Club in Chelsea, and other venues, gradually working up a brand-new one-hour set he could take to the concert stage. Comedian’s narrow focus on the craft of stand-up was relatively novel at the time: Seinfeld, submitting once again to the merciless judgment of club audiences, labors over his material, commiserating with his fellow comics in the bar after each set and endlessly revising every gag to get the biggest response. One leaves the movie with a fresh appreciation of how much skill, judgment, and hard work go into a performance that seems effortless onstage.

Fifteen years later, you can take your pick of nonfiction projects exploring the inside baseball of comedy performance. Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza interviewed dozens of comedians for their film The Aristocrats (2005), which uses a legendary dirty joke to ponder what makes people laugh, and nearly 100 performers discuss the stand-up life in Jordan Brady’s film I Am Comic (2010). Veteran club ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

comedian Marc Maron found his true calling in 2009 as host of the cult podcast WTF With Marc Maron, inviting fellow stand-ups to talk shop and spill their guts, and two years later Seinfeld himself, inspired by a DVD extra he’d recorded for Comedian, launched the self-explanatory web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The sitcom legend also turns up in the new UK documentary Dying Laughing, which screens this week at Facets Cinematheque. Gathering commentary from more than 60 comedians, directors Lloyd Stanton and Paul Toogood focus on the emotional challenges of doing stand-up, a rich topic but one that often collides with the calling’s inflated mystique.

The movie kicks off poorly, with a battery of familiar conceits from big stars. “We’re the last philosophers,” Chris Rock brags. “Everybody now that talks is reading from a preapproved script. Even our alleged ‘smart people’ are corporately controlled. So there’s only one group of people that kinda say what they want to say.” Seinfeld bypasses philosophy altogether and heads straight for sorcery: “It’s beyond art,” he says. “It’s a magic trick. Real magic!” Asked to explain what drives people to perform, Sarah Silverman falls back on the notion of “some fucked-up need inside of you to have approval from strangers.” Most of those interviewed make a concerted effort to keep it

ss AVERAGE

s POOR

•

real, but as the commentary accumulates, so do the old, vain cliches surrounding the trade: the stand-up as truth teller, the stand-up as healer, the stand-up as damaged soul working out his personal issues in public.

Stanton and Toogood bring more to the discussion when they quiz comedians about the mental process of creating comedy. As Keenen Ivory Wayans points out in the film, some people write their routines in advance, whereas others prefer to take a concept onstage and let it develop as the audience responds. Amy Schumer explains how a personal anecdote told to girlfriends or family members might turn into a routine as she goes about “finding the punch lines.” Kevin Hart, holding up his cell phone for the camera, scrolls endlessly through the notes he records all day, every day, and digests into new material. Jamie Foxx explains how, doing club gigs across the U.S., he’ll test black-oriented material with white audiences and political material with black audiences, looking for gags with crossover appeal that he can incorporate into a set for broad consumption. Again and again the performers cite the dedication required to revise a joke dozens of times until it hits; Emo Phillips likens every joke to a piece of blackboard chalk containing the calcified remains of millions of sea creatures.

Even more than the mental process, Dying Laughing dwells on the emotional demands of performing stand-up, most powerfully in the 20 solid minutes devoted to bombing onstage.

Because a stand-up offers the audience nothing but his own thoughts, the rejection can be excruciating. “It’s about as personal as it gets,” Provenza explains. “It’s an existential crisis.”

Bobby Lee says he can never remember bomb-

ing because the humiliation causes his mind to shut off, as if he were being raped in prison.

Felipe Esparza reaches even further inside for the proper simile: “Bombing feels like your dad slapping you in front of everybody at a barbecue. And then you gotta go sit down with your face burning and your eyes tearing up for no reason and pretend like nobody saw shit.”

Bombing may represent the emotional nadir of stand-up, but the comedians interviewed for Dying Laughing also rave about the power they wield over their audiences. “I’ll never forget that feeling of making a crowd of people laugh,” says Steve Coogan, recalling his first success in college. “When I went offstage, I just remember thinking, ‘That was so exciting, that felt so good, I have to do that again, I want to do that again.’” As Provenza points out, comedians are trying to provoke an involuntary physical response (this may be the reason so many of them compare it to sex). Partly this involves keeping the audience under one’s command, a topic discussed at length in the movie. Seinfeld opens his act by razzing select audience members; asked by the filmmakers if he’s seeking the audience’s approval, he replies, “I’m seeking their sublimation. Like: ‘This guy’s a little scary.’”

Not as scary as some. One of the more memorable moments in Comedian occurs when Rock, hanging out with Seinfeld in a restaurant, urges him to check out Bill Cosby in concert. “Best comedy show I ever saw in my life,” Rock enthuses, reporting that the 63-year-old veteran performed two and a half hours of new material without an intermission. “Two and a half hours of killer shit. Killer! And it’s so much more edgy now, and mean. Ooh, you gotta see it.” At the time the footage was shot, Seinfeld was in his mid-40s and Rock his mid-30s; to hear these two young stars deferring to an old master was heartwarming, and near the end of the movie Seinfeld drops in on Cosby in his dressing room to collect a few pearls of showbiz wisdom. Obviously the film doesn’t play the same way anymore now that Cosby’s alleged need to keep people spellbound has become a matter of public concern. Every comedian wants to render people helpless with laughter; some crave the laughter, others the helplessness. v DYING LAUGHING ss Directed by Lloyd Stanton and Paul Toogood. 79 min.

Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton, 773-2814114, facets.org, $10.

ß @JR_Jones

WORTHLESS

FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE A composite image of Merce Cunningham pieces: (interior) Merce Cunningham Dance Company performing Anniversary Event during the exhibition of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project at Tate Modern in London, November 2003; a screen shot of Décor for Scramble (1967) on Event for Television, 1977. o FRANK STELLA/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS)/COURTESY WNET-TV NEW YORK ARCHIVES

VISUAL ART & DANCE

Merce Cunningham, the great collaborator

By MATT DE LA PEÑA

Y

ou’d never mistake Merce Cunningham for a traditionalist. A tap dancer growing up, the striking, hollow-faced innovator of postmodern movement is credited with creating some of the most influential and radical dance-theater works of the mid to late 20th century. He did so until his death in 2009, at the age of 90. But he didn’t do it alone.

“Merce Cunningham: Common Time,” a new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (concurrently on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis), is an eye-opening look at the cross-collaborative, multidisciplinary artists who were instrumental to Cunningham’s repertoire and the legacy that emerged from it—more than 150 new works since the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was founded at Black Mountain College in 1953. The MCA carved out 12,000 square feet of space up on the fourth floor to house a

22 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 23, 2017

collection of set pieces, music, archival video footage, costumes, and documents from artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Pauline Oliveros, and Charles Atlas, each of whom worked closely with Cunningham throughout his career; the collection dates back to the 1950s and until the early 2000s, when Cunningham was making work well into his 80s. Yet even for those familiar with Cunningham’s history, “Common Time” is immense and insightful.

Cunningham’s artistic philosophy is on full display: the idea that “music and dance and art could be separate entities independent and interdependent, sharing a common time.” It’s this principle from which the exhibition derives its name, and the concept that distinguishes the Cunningham style during the post-World War II era.

Considered a break from the traditional model of dance making, in which the choreographer takes ownership of all aspects of

the creative process, Cunningham’s belief was that a coexistent relationship was a recipe for avoiding artistic boredom. For example, one of the quirks that came to define the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was that the dancers sometimes heard a piece of corresponding music for the first time while onstage—the performance became as spontaneous as it was planned. Much of what the exhibit highlights is the extent to which the Cunningham principle succeeded.

“Common Time” induces an incredible, and in some ways subtle, realization of the scope and quality of the composite artistry of several of Cunningham’s masterpieces. For a work called Antic Meet (1958), Rauschenberg designed costumes, displayed in the exhibit, using fur coats and dresses made of parachute fabric; the material was reportedly so heavy that the dancers were dumbstruck when they put them on for the first time, since the outfits hampered their movement.

A room filled with Mylar balloons, bouncing peacefully from wall to wall, is borrowed from Andy Warhol’s installation Silver Clouds. Cunningham saw the work at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1966 and later asked Warhol for permission to use the balloons for a piece called Rainforest (1968), in which the dancers negotiated “free-wheeling anarchy through floating decor that cannot be controlled,” as former New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff once described it. The MCA also set up listening stations to take in scores by composers like David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, and Cunningham’s longtime collaborator and future life partner John Cage, who famously composed the fragmented score of the choreographer’s first solo performance, Root of an Unfocus (1944), which laid the foundation for Cunningham’s “common time” practice.

Of course, dance is a significant part of “Common Time.” At the press opening on February 10, the MCA invited local choreographer and former Cunningham company member Paige Cunningham Caldarella (no relation) to give a brief demonstration of choreography from three Cunningham pieces, including the popular Sounddance (1975).

Without the music, Caldarella described the evolution of Cunningham’s technique, which looked progressively more challenging with each passing era. (This is one of several live demonstrations that the MCA has planned during the course of the exhibit, which runs through April 30.)

Most memorably, a portion of the gallery is dedicated to an 18-minute video installation called MC9 by video artist Atlas, who began working with Cunningham as a production assistant in 1974. The compilation includes excerpts of 20 pieces that Atlas made in association with Cunningham, intermixed with single colors and vintage film-leader countdowns. One of the videos features a much older Cunningham (nearly 90) standing at a barre and gesticulating his arms and gyrating his legs, as though he’s conceiving a future dance. He’s frail but surprisingly nimble, energized from head to toe. v R “ MERCE CUNNINGHAM: COMMON TIME” Through 4/30: Tue 10 AM-8 PM, Wed-Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312-2802660, mcachicago.org. $12, $7 students and seniors, free for members, military, police and fire departments, veterans, and children 12 and under; Tue free for Illinois residents

ß @mattydelapena

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MUSIC

Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of February 23 b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

Singer Dua Lipa shows how much fun it is to play the game of pop

Anne La Berge o COURTESY THE ARTIST

THURSDAY23 Anne La berge, Dana Jessen, Katherine Young, and Sam Pluta 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10 suggested donation. b

o NICOLE NODLAND

DUA LIPA, RO RANSOM

Fri 2/24, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $20. b

ACCORDING TO THE PODCAST and arbiter of celebrity minutiae Who? Weekly, famous people can typically be separated into the “thems” and the “whos”—the omnipresent ones you recognize and the obscure ones you probably don’t. In the current sphere of pop music, singer Dua Lipa undeniably qualifies as a “who.” She’s not ironic enough to ingratiate herself with the indie crowd like Marina & the Diamonds, and she’s not quite direct enough to suck in the soccer moms and dads. For the rest of us, though, that’s just fine. What we get is a sincere sneer from an aspiring celebrity who revels in exposing just how much fun the game of pop is to play. A single like “Blow Your Mind (Mwah)” scans first as a braggadocious come-on

but ends up doubling as a clear confession of her aspirations toward stardom—along the same lines as Charli XCX but without the need to indulge arty impulses. Lipa’s arsenal is straightforward post-Teenage Dream pop fare, with a gauze of synths stretched out over each track and a jigsaw puzzle of drum machines and sampled melodies that’s reliably pleasing if a tad confining. She opts to dance atop it all, respecting the craft of pop even as she pokes around within it while winking back. It’s unclear whether all this will make Dua Lipa a “them” when she releases her eponymous debut full-length via Warner Bros. this June—but it sure makes her interesting.

—AUSTIN BROWN

This transatlantic group represents a small but growing species in experimental music: players who are fluent in both composed contemporary music and free improvisation. In fact all four musicians make it difficult, if not impossible, to indicate which discipline their work privileges. Bassoonist Katherine Young has long been a key figure on Chicago’s scene, composing rigorous, full-scored works and directing her often unwieldy instrument with an electrifying liquidity, while Sam Pluta, who arrived at the University of Chicago just last fall, showcases a latency-free mastery of live signal processing, refracting the lines and gestures of his collaborators with quicksilver grace. Amsterdam-based concert flutist Anne La Berge also moves easily between worlds. Her latest album, The Hum (Unsounds), features a pair of text pieces performed with improvising bassist Joe Williamson that blur the line between radio play and minimalist improv. Bassoon virtuoso Dana Jessen, who also logged time in Amsterdam, now teaches at Oberlin College, leads the winds quintet Splinter Reeds, and recently dropped a stunning solo album called Carve (Innova). Between electronics-saturated pieces by Pluta, Paula Matthusen, Peter V. Swendsen, and her cohort in Splinter Reeds Kyle Bruckmann, Jessen interweaves short improvisations that demonstrate particular techniques—like playing without a reed or using a reed only—and seamlessly connect composed material. It’s still early, but Carve is one of the strongest records I’ve heard in the New Year.

I’m intrigued by how the unique timbres of two bassoons and flute will sound tonight, especially with Pluta distorting, twisting, and dicing their sounds in real time. —PETER MARGASAK J

FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 23

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continued from 23

Jamire Williams Junius Paul opens. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10. 18+

FRIDAY24 Dua Lipa See Pick of the Week (page 23).

Ro Ransom opens. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $20. b Ne-Hi Deeper and Cafe Racer open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12, $10 in advance.

On their second full-length, Offers (Grand Jury), Chicago sweethearts Ne-Hi take poppy indie rock and elevate it to new levels of grandeur. Formed in 2013 by four college friends at the now-defunct DIY space Animal Kingdom, Ne-Hi released their self-titled debut via Manic Static the next year, building a beautiful, fuzzy racket by smearing sweeping melodies over their grimy basement-punk roots. On Offers Ne-Hi edge even farther away from their garage-y genesis—not to mention the dreary sounds of members’ side projects Dehd and Earring—into sophisticated pop majesty. With slick production, complex melodies, and lush, Beach Boys-inspired vocal harmonies, the record is a huge step forward for the boys, proving they’re more than just cute garage-pop faces. Ne-Hi have been destined for greatness since they first started banging around,

and Offers represents their working toward that.

—LUCA CIMARUSTI

Tiga Harry Cross opens. 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $15 in advance.

Electronic producer and songwriter Tiga helped build Montreal’s techno scene, though he’s not one to confine his own music to that genre’s rigid pulse. On his third full-length, last year’s No Fantasy Required (Counter), Tiga delights in skin-crawling electroclash synths (“Bugatti”), sumptuous disco flair (“Tell Me a Secret”), and hiccupping

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acid (“Planet E”). He’s chameleonic in his pop sensibilities when he smoothes out his percussion’s hard edges, sets instrumentals at their quietest, and sings in contemplative, hushed tones. The title track and “Blondes Have More Fun,” which bookend No Fantasy Required, are the kind of atmospheric, slow-building numbers that lure people onto the dance floor as if drawn by a magnet. And anyone yearning for the return of LCD Soundsystem’s cheeky hits should turn on “3 Rules,” a twisting, percussive-heavy track rife with inside jokes that feel specific to Tiga’s world and will likely get a chuckle out of someone who pays close attention to astrological signs. —LEOR GALIL

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Drummer Jamire Williams spent time in New York in the aughts, working with high-level bandleaders like Robert Glasper and Herbie Hancock and pursuing an R&B-informed vision of jazz. These days he lives in Los Angeles, making music that routinely flouts expectations of what a jazz drummer should be. He was a key part of Jeff Parker’s fantastic groove-oriented 2016 album The New Breed (International Anthem), deftly interweaving acoustic and electronic beats with appealingly off-kilter propulsion, but you can really hear what he’s about on his recent solo effort ///// Effectual (Leaving), where the crisp snap of his playing hits hard. On some tracks concise grooves are buffeted by spasming accents and sly displacements; “Dos au Soleil” homes in on a rolling groove with a blown-out kick drum and a brightly pinging cymbal, while “In Retrospect” complements Williams’s ferocious playing with sharply deployed electronics—in this case a droning synth interrupted by dive-bombing tones. In some ways the album feels like a clinic, but Williams delivers enough variety and sense of scale to keep it from getting there.

The record closes with “Collaborate With God,” a tender gem made with Frank Ocean cohort Chassol. —PETER MARGASAK J

UPCOMING SHOWS 2.23

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 25

PRESENTS

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o DEVIN PEDDE

Album Release

continued from 25

SATURDAY25 Music for Merce See also Sunday. 7:30 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, $30, $24 members, $10 students. b A couple of weeks ago “Merce Cunningham: Common Time,” a major exhibition devoted to the work and associates of the relentlessly experimental choreographer, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art. (Read a review on page .) The show incorporates sets, costumes, video, and photographs along with other ephemera reflecting Cunningham’s deep connections with visual artists like Bruce Nauman, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. His most famous collaborator in art and life was composer and thinker John Cage, who helped foster Cunningham’s fertile partnerships with some of the most important experimental composers of the 20th century—Maryanne Amacher, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Gordon Mumma, Jim O’Rourke, and Yasunao Tone among them. For most of his career the choreographer developed pieces that radically dissolved the typically strict connection between movement and pulse, and by working with music that cleaved to similar principles he created exponentially powerful and provocative experiences.

This weekend several composers and musicians who collaborated with Cunningham gather to perform two programs over two days. Some of the works were part of the repertoire of Cunningham’s own company—including pieces by Cage, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, Earle Brown, and David Behrman—while others were written after his passing. But all share a spirit of freedom and exploration. The remarkable lineup of players reflects the choreographer’s range and influence: Wolff, Behrman, John King (who organized these concerts), vocalist Joan La Barbara, Radiohead drummer Philip Selway, Fast Forward, Ikue Mori, harpist Zeena Parkins, trombonist George Lewis, and Quinta.

—PETER MARGASAK

SUNDAY26 Eddie Holman 6 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park, $20-$40. b Now this is a random blast from the past. Eddie Holman is famed for “Hey There Lonely Girl,” a sweet, vulnerable Philly soul ballad that rocked AM radios during the winter of ’69. It wasn’t his only hit, but it overshadowed the others—visit his website and the opening bars are the first thing you hear. On the track Holman is clearly on the outside looking in as he consoles a lady who just got dumped while not so subtly offering up himself as a replacement. Ruby & the Romantics had success with the same song in 1963 (as “Hey There Lonely Boy”), but their version had a glimmer of optimism. Holman chose to wallow in the depths of his lonely girl’s misery while offering salvation—and that’s why it works. On the fringes of the Philly soul scene for a while, he got going with his 1965 single “This Can’t Be True.” In the aftermath of “Lonely Girl” Holman bounced from one label to the next during the 70s, scoring the occasional minor hit, and even getting in on the disco trend with the uncharacteristically uptempo “This Will Be a Night to Remember” (1977) for the dance-floor-happy folks at Salsoul Records.

These days he’s singing gospel music in the church and classic soul on cruise ships. This Chicago visit is unexpected, but it’s good to have him back.

—JAMES PORTER

Julian Lage & Chris Eldridge Matt Brown opens. 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, $24, $22 members. b Julian Lage and Chris Eldridge are both virtuosic guitarists in their chosen milieus—jazz and bluegrass, respectively—but they’ve long demonstrated a broad curiosity about other styles. Their desire to collaborate felt natural enough, and on 2014’s Avalon (Modern Lore) each player gently crossed the proverbial aisle—some dena- J

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 27

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

continued from 27

tured jazz manouche here, some spry pop bluegrass there, with Eldridge singing in a pretty yet bland conversational tone. The playing ended up being too polite, as if the pair were tentatively feeling each other out, but thanks to subsequent tours and further collaboration, that restraint has since vanished. On their much-improved follow-up, Mount Royal (Free Dirt), the melodic lines are rigorously integrated, the arrangements more involved, the harmonies more ravishing—and there are fewer tunes with vocals. The opener, “Bone Collector,” one of three cowritten tunes, draws from modern jazz in the harmonic interplay of its fluid improvisations without belying the track’s folk foundations. Other tunes tap more into the intricate forms Eldridge navigates with his main band, the Punch Brothers: “Everything Must Go” feels like a jazz ballad written by Paul McCartney, flush with a gorgeous melody and tender interplay. And when Eldridge does sing, as on an unexpected cover of Pearl Jam’s “Sleeping by Myself,” he feels connected to the material (even as he thankfully tamps down Eddie Vedder’s excesses).

—PETER MARGASAK

Music for MErce See Saturday. 3 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, $30, $24 members, $10 students. b

MONDAY27 Willis Earl Beal Quinn Tsan and Soft Pink open; Minimal Beat DJs spin. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. F Indefinable musician Willis Earl Beal hasn’t made much of an appearance in his hometown of Chicago since January 2015, when he performed a synthheavy set that coincided with the debut screening of the restless 2014 indie flick he starred in called Memphis. Since then Beal has dropped three releases through Tender Loving Empire, an arts shop/ record label based in Portland, where he now lives.

The imprint first rereleased his 2015 EP Noctunes, then came an EP called Through the Dark last April, and in July there was A Chaos Paradigm, which Beal made under the name Nobody. A Chaos Paradigm is the latest in a string of new beginnings for Beal since my 2011 Reader feature on him, which caught the eye of XL Recordings and led to the release of two albums through its Hot Charity subsidiary. In the six years since his discovery, Beal has toured Europe, opened for his musical hero Cat Power, reunited with an old girlfriend, moved to New York, gotten married, moved to Washington State, broken things off with XL, and gotten divorced. I can’t blame him for starting anew with a different stage name as he seeks out new musical directions—especially since his old catalog still burbles along the

Lee Fields o COURTESY THE ARTIST

edges of pop culture. Recently some of his old XL songs were used to soundtrack the boxing biopic Bleed for This, and though I haven’t seen the film, the bluesy, stomping “Too Dry to Cry” is so expertly placed in the trailer that I just might care about it. These days Beal zigs and zags from the ethereal to the experimental to both at once, while his powerhouse voice and unpredictable songwriting continue to mesmerize—off A Chaos Paradigm, “Monuments Fall.” pitter-patters with the grace of a sweet, easygoing 70s soul hit. And I still never know what to expect from Beal’s performances—when he appeared at the Hideout in 2014 for CIMMFest he shut off the lights and asked the audience to sit in silence while he played recordings of his material.

Whatever he ends up doing, it promises to be memorable. —LEOR GALIL

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I don’t think veteran soul singer Lee Fields foresaw an increasingly divided and polarized United States

when he recorded “Make the World,” a song from last fall’s terrific Special Night (Big Crown). Over a hard, almost martial groove inspired by vintage James Brown, Fields urges unity, deploying military cadences to suggest the potential destruction awaiting us if we don’t fall in line together. On “Work to Do” Fields pledges devotion to his wife after being called out on his drinking and carousing, giving his promise a contemporary feel with lines like “Now I know it’s time for me to take some responsibility / That’s why I’m gonna be at the counselor’s office at quarter to three.” The new record was coproduced by multi-instrumentalists Leon Michels and Thomas Brenneck—both experienced neosoul figures who’ve helped overlooked vets like Fields find late-career surges—and from song to song the arrangements evoke a hybrid of classic sounds: a little Stax here, some Hi there.

(Even the intro to “Never Be Another You” seems to cop the muted guitar technique that’s partially responsible for making the Ann Peebles classic “I Can’t Stand the Rain” so memorable.) But the songs are so strong—and Fields brings them to life with such authority, grit, and grace—the production doesn’t much matter. We’ve heard it all before, but when it works, it feels as fresh as anything in the air today. —PETER MARGASAK J

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Necks o CHRIS HOLLY

ON STAGE TOGETHER FOR ONE HISTORIC EVENING

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continued from 28 Knocked Loose Eternal Sleep, Pains, and Kharma open. 6:30 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $12, $10 in advance. b Late-90s beatdown-styled hardcore—of the ilk that chugs in step with the sweet rhythm of a double-kick pedal—has been quite on the up and up in recent years, and Kentucky’s Knocked Loose have been stoked to provide some of the better pickinup-change breakdowns of the resurgence. Last September’s Laugh Tracks (Pure Noise) is a fury of metalcore-heavy guitar licks that act as bridges from one mosh pit to the next, vocalist Bryan Garris’s raspy gasp toeing the line between exasperation and rage. With so many heavily compressed guitar grooves, of course, there tends to be a shuffle or three through nu-metal territory, but Knocked Loose mostly keep focused on stirring the pot.

What they’re expert at is leading a track of torpedoing riffs toward its devolvement without much tipping their hand. Opener “Oblivions Peak,” for example, revs and sputters and churns and trudges from one measure to the next but never quite uncontrollably spins out of the album’s orbit. If video footage is any indication, tonight’s show is likely to explode into a fury of flailing arms and legs. Stay safe out there. —KEVIN WARWICK

Withered Immortal Bird and Varaha open.

9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10, $8 in advance.

Since this Atlanta blackened-death quartet released its 2010 LP Dualitas half of its lineup has changed. Departing guitarist Dylan Kilgore was replaced by Ethan McCarthy of Primitive Man, and bassist Mike Longoria passed the torch to Colin Marston, who’s played in an impressive list of bands that includes Behold the Arctopus, Dysrhythmia, and Gorguts. So is there still much continuity between last year’s Grief Relic (Seasons of Mist) and Dualitas? Yes. The latter certainly wasn’t as weird as its predecessor, Folie Circulaire—instead

30 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 23, 2017

it streamlined the band’s attack while greasing and growling it up. And Grief Relic is even more satisfyingly gnarly. The opening track, “Leathery Rind,” gives a brutal introduction to what you’ll be gnawing on for the rest of the record, which eventually settles into a mostly eldritch black-doom hybrid that lurches and chugs and occasionally explodes in your face. —MONICA KENDRICK

WEDNESDAY1 Necks 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20, $15 in advance. 18+ This spellbinding Australian trio have adhered to a singular method for three decades now, consistently pushing one another to build meditatively powerful performances from the simplest of kernels: a short phrase or pattern generated in real time by keyboardist Chris Abrahams, bassist Lloyd Swanton, or percussionist Tony Buck, then elaborated on for about 60 absorbing minutes. But despite the Necks’ roots in jazz tradition and deep improvisational chops, their live results are genre agnostic, shying away from any particular sound, and on recordings the trio have relaxed their modus operandi, deploying overdubs and postproduction. For this month’s double LP Unfold (Ideologic Organ), the trio applied yet another set of parameters, requiring each of the four pieces, which range from 15 to 22 minutes in length, to fit on a single side of vinyl. The truncated time window forced the Necks to further alter their usual MO—“Overhear,” for example, which features Abrahams on organ, hovers more than it moves forward, with Buck creating a kind of spectral rattle and Swanton playing a soothing, repetitive arco pattern that throbs rather than glides or scrapes. Likewise, the twinkling piano and percussion on “Blue Mountain” endlessly expand and contract, each clench and release offering shifting detail and texture. Still, I’m always happiest when I can sit back and drink in a full hour of the trio’s slow build as they perform live.

—PETER MARGASAK v

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FOOD & DRINK

THE BARN | $$$ R Rear 1016 Church St., Evanston 847-868-8041 thebarnevanston.com

New York strip o NICK MURWAY

RESTAURANT REVIEW

The Barn is Amy Morton’s worthy follow-up to Found

At the Evanston steak house located down an alley in a former stable, chef Nicole Pederson does amazing things with steak and vegetables.

By AIMEE LEVITT

I

n general, people go to steak houses for two reasons: for work, or to celebrate something. Technically, I was at the Barn in Evanston for the first reason, but everybody else was there for the second.

The enormous wire chandelier covered with little white bulbs like a Christmas tree made the message clear: we were all here to enjoy one another’s company, and many of us were also going to eat enormous slabs of meat. Not just eat them—we were going to savor them, because a perfectly cooked steak should be a rare pleasure, associated with the people we love best, not compensation for being forced to endure the corporate ritual of kissing up to the out-of-town boss.

The Barn is Amy Morton’s second restaurant, after Found Kitchen & Social House, which Sam Worley declared “Best Everything” in the Reader’s 2013 Best of Chicago issue, and it is a worthy follow-up. The two restaurants share an aesthetic of dark woods and offbeat decor (on the wall of the Barn there’s a delightful life-size portrait of an alpaca named George, because why not?) and, more significantly, a chef, Nicole Pederson (formerly of Lula Café), who knows how to do amazing things with steak and vegetables.

But while Found is the sort of restaurant that beckons you in from the sidewalk, the Barn is something else entirely. First, you’ll need a reservation, unless you eat on a Fort Lauderdale or a Madrid meal schedule—that is, dinner before 6 PM or after 9. Second, it’s nowhere near a sidewalk. It’s in a former stable in an alley just west of the Davis Street train station. You would not randomly stumble upon it unless it’s your habit to wander the back alleys of Evanston. (The history of this stable, which used to be the headquarters of Borden Dairy’s delivery service, is told in detail on the back of the menu. “Wow,” one of my dining companions said after reading it. “It must have been such a pain to bring this place up to restaurant code.”)

Once you push your way in through the heavy blackout curtain blocking the front door, though, you feel mildly victorious, maybe the way people in the 1920s did when they managed to find the speakeasy. Or maybe I just thought of a speakeasy because of the old-school touches around the place, like the red leather banquettes up in what used to be the hayloft, the brief menu of classic cocktails, and especially the salads, fish, and desserts that are tossed, deboned, and flamed, respectively, on little carts set up tableside.

J

FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

FOOD & DRINK

Little Gem salad with Dijon; the sweetbreads are served with capers, potatoes, and cipollini onions, all covered in a lemony brown butter sauce. o NICK MURWAY

The Barn continued from 31 The best food at the Barn is brown, starting with the sweetbreads and ending with the chocolate mousse. The sweetbreads are ideal for people who think that sweetbreads are bread. They’re served with capers, potatoes, and cipollini onions, all covered in a lemony brown butter sauce. It’s true that lemons and brown butter are a magical combination that can make just about anything taste good, but the meat is also perfectly cooked, tender and slightly caramelized, with just the slightest metallic aftertaste to remind you what you’re actually eating. The mousse, meanwhile, is light and not too sweet, topped with chopped candied hazelnuts for texture. In between are the roasted maitake mushrooms, which come as a side, and give a perfect hit of umami with a full, meaty texture. As I ate the final bite, I felt genuine sadness.

32 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 23, 2017

And then there are the steaks. I would be remiss here if I didn’t mention that Amy Morton’s late father, Arnie, was the Morton of the minichain Morton’s the Steakhouse, but heredity alone cannot account for her and Pederson’s ability to source such excellent meat and Pederson’s skill at cooking it.

The steaks they’ve chosen are prime heritage Angus. They’re not hung up in a special refrigerated room or aged for a specified length of time. There are just three cuts to choose from: New York strip and rib eye, both with the bone in, and filet mignon. The preparation for all three is the same: a simple red-wine demi-glace (as if making a good demi-glace doesn’t take hours), though you can also have a side of bearnaise if you like. There’s no layer of black char, no crust of potatoes or duxelles, nothing to distract you from the meat, which is uniformly buttery-tender throughout, without a hint of

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gristle. It tastes of blood and minerals and salt, with a warm coating of fat (more so in the rib eye than in the strip). This sounds disgusting, I realize, but good red meat is probably supposed to remind us of the victory of a fresh kill, and if we’re honest, that’s why we love it so much. You would be foolish to order anything else.

Still, if you must, the pork chop with apple-hazelnut relish is OK, as long as you don’t mess it up for yourself by tasting somebody else’s steak. The bison Bolognese, however, is a bizarre misstep. Bolognese sauce is usually made with pork and veal, which create a nice emulsion of fat that gives the sauce a smooth texture and adds an extra layer of flavor. Bison, however, is a lean meat, so it doesn’t render that extra bit of fat. I’m sorry to be so pedantic here, but the Barn’s bison Bolognese is an object lesson in what happens if you try to make a lean Bolognese: it tastes, as my dining companion complained, “like dog food.” (He was doubly bitter because I got the steak that night. Restaurant reviewing can be a ruthless business.)

It’s conventional wisdom that an orgy of meat should be broken up with vegetables so you feel more like a civilized creature than a meat-gorging beast. The Little Gem salad with creamy Dijon dressing isn’t likely to inspire the same passion as the steak, but it is nicely balanced, with pumpkin seeds that add an unexpected nutty flavor. The creamed Swiss chard is more delicious than any bitter green has the right to be, probably because the cream cancels out any nutritional value from the chard.

Still, vegetables are vegetables, right?

Service is friendly and ranges from leisurely to slow. The seating upstairs in the loft is quieter, but the extra privacy means you may be neglected by your server for long stretches of time. During one of those long stretches, though, it turned out our server was in the kitchen tracking down the provenance of the butter on the dinner rolls. This is extremely valuable information because that butter, from the Farmhouse Kitchens Cooperative of Bonduel, Wisconsin, is good, creamy and perfectly salted.

When I think back on my meals at the Barn, I will think of the steak. And also the mushrooms. But I will also remember the feeling of sitting at a brightly lit table in a big, dark room with people I adore, looking out at other tables full of people talking and laughing and enjoying being together. It felt like a break from regular life. That was something to celebrate. v

ß @aimeelevitt

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FOOD & DRINK

9030 S. Hermitage, 773-233-7579, wildblossommeadery.com

Beekeeper and mead maker Greg Fischer at Wild Blossom’s new taproom; mead aging in bourbon barrels; Fischer pours a cranberry cyser.

BOOZE

Feeding the increasing need for mead

By JULIA THIEL

T

he first time Greg Fischer made mead it was 1975, and he was 15 years old. “It was not very good,” he says of the alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey with yeast. “It tasted like rocket fuel. I said, ‘I’m not going to try that again.’” He’d been making wine since he was 12, learning the craft from his grandfather.

“I made everything from dandelion wine to sassafras and wintergreen,” he says. “I was intrigued by the fermentation process.”

He was more interested in making wine than drinking it, though—until he turned 15. “I was like, oh, I got alcohol here! I started getting a lot more friends.”

Fischer also learned beekeeping in his teens, while working in his uncle’s 300-acre apple orchard in the Hudson Valley. He liked it so much that he decided to make it his profession, studying soil science in college and working for beekeepers all over the country during the summers. After college, though, he was drawn back to wine. He worked at Kevin Zraly’s Windows on the World wine school in the World Trade Center, then got a marketing job with Seagram’s that brought him to Chicago.

In 1990, 15 years after he’d sworn off mead making forever, Fischer tried it again. He also began working on a plan for Bev Art, the wine-making and brewing supply store he’d open in Beverly in 1995. He continued to experiment with making mead there, and so did his customers. “We made all kinds of stuff, and customers made all kinds of stuff,” he

says. “They’d bring it in, ‘Here’s our peppermint-chocolate cookie mead.’ And sometimes it would be like, ‘This is so good.’ And sometimes . . . it wasn’t.”

Mead was popular in ancient Greece but has fallen out of favor over the last few millennia. In 2001, when Fischer got his license for Wild Blossom Meadery & Winery (located in the Bev Art space), it was the first meadery in Illinois and the first winery in Chicago. In fact, it’s still the only meadery in the state, though there are a few wineries that make one or two meads. Wild Blossom, by contrast, makes two dozen, along with several wines.

Fifteen years ago, Fischer says, most people didn’t even know what mead was. Those that did “thought it was syrupy pancake stuff, and it was kind of a hard sell.” But his products got picked up by the Hopleaf, Clark Street Ale House, and a couple other places, and by 2004 business was good. In more recent years the popularity of mead has exploded in the U.S., with the number of meaderies growing from 60 in 2011 to nearly 300 last year, according to the American Mead Makers Association.

Fischer attributes the recent interest partly to the growing popularity of cider. “We say cider is the gateway drug to mead,” he says.

He also credits the farm-to-table movement, noting that it’s hard to find a product more local than mead. Wild Blossom’s is made entirely with honey produced in or near Chicago, much of it from the 125 bee colonies that Fischer owns and tends with the help of two employees. He has hives in the Morton Arboretum, Schaumburg Forest Preserve, on top of the Marriott Hotel downtown, and “at the end of 87th Street where the old steel mills used to be.”

Now Fischer’s problem is a good one: he can’t produce enough mead to keep up with demand. The solution, of course, is to expand.

o JULIA THIEL

In 2015 he bought a 9,000-square-foot former warehouse, also in Beverly, and he’s spent the last couple years rehabbing it and getting the necessary permits to make and sell mead there—the second of which he can’t do at his original location because it’s in an area that’s zoned dry. It’ll allow him to increase production from about 3,000 gallons of mead per year to 30,000, at which point Fischer hopes to expand to national distribution.

Fischer is already brewing in the space, and he’s moved Bev Art’s brewing and winemaking classes from the old location to the new one. On March 3, he’ll open a tasting room there, a prospect he’s particularly excited about because it’ll allow him to educate the public about mead. Despite the rise in demand for the beverage, Fischer says, there are still misconceptions about it. For example, while three to four pounds of honey go into each gallon of mead, yeast converts most of that sugar to alcohol. He compares it to a wine like cabernet sauvignon that starts out as sweet as mead does but ends up bone dry.

Mead can be just as dry—like Wild Blossom’s Blanc de Fleur—though most of Fischer’s have some sweetness. Or it can combine the honey with fruits, herbs, tea, or chile peppers to create flavor variations. Some of Wild Blossom’s meads, known as cysers, are made by fermenting the honey with apples and then carbonating it; one is aged in bourbon barrels; another is hopped with Nelson Citra hops.

“Mead makers are finding out how versatile mead is,” Fischer says. “The future’s looking really good. The only thing that would kill off the mead industry is if all the bees die.

But if the bees died, the whole world would end too. So I don’t think we have too much to worry about.” v

ß @juliathiel FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 33

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 HAVI GLOBAL SOLUTIONS is seeking an IT Business Solutions Manager in Downers Grove, IL with the following requirements: BS in Engineering or Computer Science plus 5 years related experience. Required skills: manage onsite and offsite teams for software application enhancement projects (4.5 yrs); design and develop software solutions with at least five out of the following technologies: Oracle, SQL Server, PLSQL, XML, Informatica, ASP, Visual Basic, J2EE, and Business Objects (2 yrs); evaluate client requirements and identify appropriate IT strategies and solutions (4.5 yrs); act as liaison between clients and application area in the analysis of problems outlined by systems analysts in terms of detailed requirements and capabilities (4.5 yrs); lead the support and deployment of software applications into production in conjunction with operations area technical staff (2.5 yrs). Please submit resume to: Vi cky.Ott@havi.com and reference Code 111674 in subject line of email

GereMarie Corp. seeks Quality Engineer, Lake Zurich, IL. Dev. quality rev. and procedures for product improve. & cost effic. Use lean principles, root cause analysis, Kaizen, 5S, TPM, & Six Sigma. Bach. deg. in Indust. Eng’g req’d. 5 yrs exp in auto. eng’g req’d. Prior exp. must incl: exp. with ISO9001 cert. org and implement ISO process/proced.; 5 yrs ERP sys. work; 5 yrs customer requested quality syst. Audit; prev. passed prior audit; 5 yrs exp work for quality dept in auto.

Component mfg industry spec. in aluminum mach. and fabric. Send resume: c/o Sheri Principato, 1275 Ensell Rd., Lake Zurich, IL 60047.

TECHNOLOGY SAP TPM MANAGER (MULT. POS.),

PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Provide strategy, mgmt, tech. & risk consulting services to help clients anticipate & address bus. challenges.

Req. Bach’s deg. or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Electronic Engg or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s progress. rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg. or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Electronic Engg or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel req. up to 80%. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1150, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

CAPITAL PROJECTS & INFRASTRUCTURE SENIOR ASSOCIATE

(Mult. Pos.), PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Provide tech. & risk consulting services to help clients anticipate & address bus. challenges. Req. Bach’s deg. or foreign equiv. in Engg, Construction Mgmt, Bus or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg. or foreign equiv. in Engg, Construction Mgmt, Bus or rel. + 1 yr rel. work exp. Travel req. up to 80%.

Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1147, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

FULL-TIME AND PART-TIME

opportunity for experienced and hard-working DOG DAYCARE ATTENDANT!!!!! Previous professional experience managing groups of dogs is PREFERRED but we can train qualified applicants. Must have basic knowledge of dog behavior, be able to multitask. Position requires maintaining a clean, safe and healthy facility, supervising dogs, heavy cleaning, bathing dogs, customer service! Qualified candidates may email/fax resume,ONLY QUALIFIED APPLICANTS WILL BE CONSIDERED AND INTERVIEWED! Email gulia@ furtastik.com

34 CHICAGO READER | FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Housekeeper.

Keep private household clean/orderly. Make beds, replenish, iron linens, purchase foodstuffs, prepare meals.

48/hrs/wk. Mo-Sat., 7:30am4:00pm . Cary, IL. Requ.: proof of 3-mo. exp. Apply: Andrzej Grudzien, P. O. Box 765, Cary, IL 60013

KCURA LLC (CHICAGO, IL)

seeks a Software Engineering Manager - Performance responsible for building/leading team of software engineers/working w/ dept. contacts to support demands of dept. & meet needs of product devlp. process.

Must handle Level II technical support calls after hours on a rotation w/ other senior engineers/managers, 2x or 3x per year. Occasional travel w/in U.S. Apply at: recruiting@kcura. com and reference Job ID: 2017-MM-ENG-1007.

BUSINESS LinkedIn Corp. has

openings in our Chicago, IL location for Staffing Accountant Executive Learning Consultant (6597.1280) Head of NAMER LTS-Sales Effectiveness to vet & drive Sales Effectiveness strategy for Search & Staffing Segment. Please email resume to: 6597@linkedin.com. Must ref. job code above when applying.

PAYROLL CONSULTANT:

Implement client Payroll functionality in the Workday Human Capital Management system. Mail resume: DayNine Consulting, Job #P039, 111 W. Jackson Blvd, Ste 2200, Chicago, IL 60604

Apartments is a multi-family development, federally subsidized through a HUD/Section 8 Subsidy, which is PROJECT BASED and therefore it cannot accept rent vouchers or certificates. El edificio de Apartamentos Armitage Commons ubicado en la comunidad de Logan Square en Chicago, está reabriendo su Lista de Espera de Vivienda Subsidiada el jueves, 2 de marzo del 2017 de 9:00 am - 3:00 pm. Sólo se aceptará un máximo de 120 tarjetas de preaplicación (para 1 dormitorio). Por favor tenga en cuenta que las unidades de 1 dormitorio son para personas de la tercera edad (62+). La Lista de Espera se cerrará una vez alcancemos el número máximo de tarjetas de pre-aplicación por correo. DEBEN llamar a la Oficina de Gerencia al (773) 489-1126 el 2 de marzo del 2017. NO SE ACEPTARAN TARJETAS DE PRE-APLICACION EN PERSONA. Por favor, tenga en cuenta que el edificio de los Apartamentos Armitage Commons es un complejo multifamiliar subsidiado a través de HUD/ Subsidio de Sección 8, el cual es “BASADO EN EL PROYECTO” y por lo tanto no puede aceptar Vales de Elección de vivienda (rent vouchers) ó certificados. Managed by: Hispanic Housing Development Corp., a Licensed Real Estate Broker Corp.

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

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

708-388-0170 SOUTH SHORE AREA Newly remod Studios. Near Metra & CTA, appls incl. $500-$525/mo.

Steve 312-952-3901

STUDIO $600-$699 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. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Laundry in building. $725/ month. Heat included. Available 3/1.

773-761-4318. www. lakefrontmgt.com

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

1BR. $535/mo. Studio $470/mo Call 773-955-5106

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

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

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

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

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200

1 BR UNDER $700 ARMITAGE COMMONS APARTMENTS located in the Lo-

gan Square community of Chicago is re-opening their Subsidized Housing Waiting List on Thursday, March 2, 2017, from 9 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. They will only accept a maximum of 120 (1bedroom) pre-application cards.

Please be advised that 1-bedroom units are for seniors (62+). The waiting list will close upon reaching the maximum pre-application cards. Persons interested in receiving a preapplication card in the mail, MUST call the Management Office at (773) 489-1126 on March 2, 2017. NO WALK-INS WILL BE ACCEPTED. Please Note: Armitage Commons

OPEN HOUSE 39 Indianwood Blvd, Park Forest, IL 60466 Saturday 2/25, 9am-1pm

NOW LEASING!!

Newly Rehabbed Single Family Homes & Townhomes in the South Suburban Areas.

For Info Call 708-748-4570 WOW!! MUST SEE!

Newly Remodeled 1, 2, & 3 Bd Apts $650 & up. Chgo. So. & West side No SD, & 1 Mo. Free Rent w/aprvd Credit. Sect 8 & All Credit Welc. to Apply. Ask us about our Rental Assistance Program for Qualified Applic ants.(773) 412.1153 Wesley Rlty.

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

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

Laundry & Security on Premises.

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

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)

WEST PULLMAN (INDIANA

Ave) RENT SPECIAL 1/2 Off 1 month rent + Sec dep. Nice,lrg 1BR $575; 2BR $675 & 1 3BR $850, balcony, Sec 8 Welc. 773-995-6950

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 1BR, 1ST FLOOR APT. N e w l y rehab, hdwd flrs, spac, appls, lndry facility, Quiet bldg.

Gated backyard.

Sec 8 ok.

773-344-4050 108TH & PRAIRIE: 3 room studio incls BR, kitch & bath, 1st flr, $590, newly decorated, heat & appls incl’. Section 8 ok. 888-2497971 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

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

l

l

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 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

CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up.

773-637-5957 CHICAGO 70th & King Dr, 1BR, clean, quiet, well maintained bldg, Lndry + Heat. Section 8 ok. $680/ mo. 773-510-9290.

SOUTHSIDE - 8535 S. Green, 1 & 2 BR Apts, well maintained, hdwd/ crpt flrs, $650-$750/mo, sec dep req. Call 773-874-8451

$600 & $700/mo. Large 1 & 2BR 75th & Union. Near public trans, schools and shopping, appl incl. Sect 8 Welc. 708-334-5188 6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

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

79TH

&

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 - 1214 W 91st St, 1BR, heated, appliances, ceiling fans, laundry room, $670 + security deposit, Call 312-296-0411

1 BR $700-$799 HUMBOLDT PARK. ONE

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

AUBURN GRESHAM: 79TH & Paulina, 1-2 Bedroom, $745-$795, Free heat. Call 773.916.0039

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

bright, across from park, heat/ gas included. Miniblinds/ ceiling fans.

Free laundry, private porch, block Montrose Harbor. $895. 773-9733463.

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 WEST RIDGE STUDIO: new kit,

new appl, carpet AC, new windows $ 825/heated 773-743-4141 urbanequities.com

1 BR $900-$1099 PORTAGE PARK: 1BR, central heat & A/C, 800 S.F. 4-unit building. nice & clean, carpet, No pets. $900/mo.+ utilities (not included).

Available now. 773-817-3578

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 PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT SUNNYSIDE PROPERTIES, located at 840 W. Sunnyside Ave., Chicago IL. Will open its federally subsidized Section 8 wait list on March 3, 2017 at 10:00am for individuals age 18 years and older, in need of a one bedroom apartment. In accordance to unit occupancy, only two people per one bedroom Apt. Applications will be given to the first 25 individuals and the wait list will then close.

Sunnyside Properties, LLC and Group Fox management hereby notifies all applicants that a full credit history and criminal background check will be conducted according to current leasing criteria, applicants who do not meet these criterias will be informed according to HUD and Local regulations.

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 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 CALUMET CITY 158TH & PAXTON SANDRIDGE APTS 1 & 2 BEDROOM UNITS MODELS OPEN M-F, 9AM-5:30PM *** 708-841-5450 *** HYDE PARK, 52ND near Drexel, large 3BR, 1.5BA, $1300. 53rd near Maryland, small 1BR, $675.

Section 8 ok. 773-593-7440 LARGE 1BR, 63RD & Kimbark, $750. 66th near Greenwood, 3BR, 2BA, $1000. Section 8 ok.

Call After 5pm, 773-706-4169

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

rent. Utilities incl’d. Seniors Welcome. $400/mo. Call 773-431-1251 ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

2 BR UNDER $900

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

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

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

CRS (312) 782-4041

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

GARY, 38TH & ADAMS, 2 B R , 5 rooms, partially finished basement, $650/mo.

Call 773-859-0169 CHICAGO - 7630 S Emerald, 2BR, separate living & dining room $650/mo. 1 mo sec + 1 mo rent + all utils. Call Dee 773-818-3340 CHICAGO 7600 S Essex 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! 773287-9999 /312-446-3333 East Chicago, IN 2BR $675 heat incl; tenant pays utils. 1 mo. free rent w/lease. Call MIKE 773-5779361

2 BR $900-$1099 GLENWOOD - LARGE 2BR CONDO, H/F High School.

Balc, C/A, appls, heat, water incl. 2 parking, lndry. $975/ mo. Call 708-268-3762 110TH & VERNON. Large 2BR,

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

Chicago, 92nd/Ada, Spacious 1BR w/ DR, fplc, sunrm, heat & appl incl, hrdwd floors, $925/mo + sec. Section 8 Welcome.

773-415-6914 BRONZEVILLE - 42ND & Indiana. Gut rehabbed 2BR, $980, hardwood flrs, new kitc cabinets. New windows, Sec 8 Welc. 773-447-2122 5331 W BARRY 2/BR: spacious

new kit, new appl, oak floors, AC, yard, garage $975/+ util 773-7434141 urbanequities.com

2 BR $1100-$1299 5 ROOM 2 Bedroom Apartment.

Hardwood Floors, Tenant Pays Own Utilities, $1250 Per Month Plus One Month Deposit. 4010 N Central Park.

Call ZINGG REALTY 708 355-1106.

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 3 BROOM 1BATH. AT 6250 N.

Claremont parking, washer/dryer.

Hardwood Floors Nice Appliance.

Granite Counter Tops central Heat/ Air. $1450.00/month. + one Month Rent Deposit. Tenant pays Gas and Electric. Available now. 773-2309156. Carlos

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 FREE HEAT!! NO DEPOSIT!!

Near University of Chicago.

1, 2 & 3BR. Section 8 Welcome !!!

773-955-1133

NEWLY REHABBED 1BR Apt. $750. 3 & 5BR single family homes w/ 2BA. $1200-$1500. Sect 8 Welc.

847-962-0408 or 224-800-4480

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 SECTION 8 WELCOME $400 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

BRONZEVILLE, 4542 S KING DR., 3rd flr, 3BR, 2BA, hdwd flrs, kitchen, pantry, LR & DR, lots of closets, sun porch, ten pays gas & heat.$1000 + sec.

Call 773-965-1584 after 6pm.

VICINITY OF 61ST & KING DR, modern 3BD, 1BA, tenant heated apt, 1st flr, $950/mo & up, no sec dep, Sec 8 Welc agent owned 312-671-3795

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 BEAUTIFUL 4BR Apt for rent, nice block, 6137 S. Rhodes, hdwd floors throughout. Sec 8 welc $1100/mo. 312-505-8737

7240 WEST FOSTER AVE, CHI-

JEFFREY MANOR 3BR, 1BA Townhouse, Newly Remod, gar, side driveway, $895/mo. Nr trans. Call Mr. Brown, 312-459-6618

3 BR OR MORE

CHICAGO 6405 S Wolcott. 3BR,

CHICAGO HEIGHTS, 3BR, 1BA, NEWLY REMODELED, APPLS INCL , SECTION 8 OK. NO SEC. DEPOSIT. 708-8224450

1BA, newly remodeled, tenant pays utilities, $750/month + $450 Move-In Fee. Call 773-494-9727

Chicago 7811 S Aberdeen, Move Right In! Totally rehabbed, luxury 3 bedroom, new appliances $1000. Section 8 ok 708-979-9435 CHICAGO - 7112 S. EUCLID

Garden apartment 2BR, all ceramic. $695/mo. Call 773-285-3206

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

CHICAGO, PRINCETON PARK CHICAGO, NEWLY DECORAT- HOMES. Spacious 2-3 BR TownED 2BR Apt, near 87th & Exchange, homes, Inclu: Prvt entry, full bsmt, E. GARFIELD PK Adams/ $700 /mo. Tenant pays utils. Section lndry hook-ups. Ample prkg. Close California 3BR, 2BA + Den, A/C, to trans & schls. Starts at $844/ 8 accepted. 773-928-3922 tenant pays heat. garage avail. mo.

Avail 3/1. $1350. Credit check req.

80TH & PAULINA, completely w w w . p p k h o m e s .

847-951-2515 remodeled, 4 room, 2BR, tenant com;773-264-3005 heated, $750/mo & Up. No securROSELAND, SINGLE FAMILY ity deposit. Agent Owned, 312- ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Home, 3BR, 1.5BA, C/A, newly 671-3795 Villas is accepting applications for renov. 9600 Blk Wentworth, Subsidized 2 and 3 bedroom apt $1400. Sect 8 ok. Call Mr. JohnAUGUSTA/ SPRINGFIELD waiting list. Rent is based on 30% of son, 630-424-1403 Large 2 Bedroom Apartment. annual income for qualified appli$750/month, tenant pays cants. Contact us at 847-546-1899 JUST REHABBED 3 bed rm ranch,Sauk Village. utilities. for details Housing Choice Vouchers WELCOME. Call 312-401-3799 Call for rental info 708-957-8431 AFFORDABLE 2 & 3BRS RIVERDALE APARTMENT 7939 S. EBERHART. 3BR, 1.5BA, FROM $575.

FOR rent. Newly decorated 2BR, flrs, new kitchen and bath, spahdwd Newly decorated, heated/ heat incl. $825/mo + security. cious nice block in Chatham. unheated. 1 Month Free for Section 8 Welcome. Call 773$1200/mo. 773-375-3323 qualified tenants.

852-9425

CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE Beauti-

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

West Ridge: 2B 7000N New kit,

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

OTHER

8322 S Baker, 3BR or 5BR 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.

CAGO, IL 675 SF-5,400 SF Prime Retail Spaces located at Harlem and Foster Avenues. Anchor Tenants include Jewel-Osco, B.O.A. Pet Supplies, Ace, Zip Fitness, O’Reilly’s and Baker’s Square. Competitive rent and below market CAM and Tax Rates.

For leasing info contact: Voice: 773631-4000 E-Mail: property.manager@ harlemfoster.com www.shopharlemfoster.com

LOGAN SQUARE Office Suites for rent, short & long term leases includes conference room, Wi-Fi, common area maintenance, utilities included. Call 847-254-0585

roommates

CHICAGO, 107TH & 123rd, 4BR Home. Calumet Pk 1BR Apt. Dolton 3BR Home New remod., all appls.

Sec 8 OK. 773-220-0715

ROOM AVAILABLE, 112th near State. $450/mo + $50 Move in fee.

Shared kitchen & bath. Cable incl.

Smoking Ok. Call 773-454-2893

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

CHICAGO 67TH AND Emerald furn. rooms, 45 + pref, share kitchen and bath, util. included, cable ready.

From $350. 773-358-2570 SOUTHSIDE - 55TH & Ashland,

GENERAL LOOKING FOR AFFORDABLE

Housing? Check Out Cyril Court Apartments. Studios and 1 bdrms available. Preference given to applicants age 62 or older, disabled, homeless, or displaced. Applicants subject to HUD income eligibility and other screening requirements. Rent based on 30% of adjusted montly income. Call now 773-288-4812 TTY (711 National Relay) 7130 S. Cyril Court, Chicago, IL 60649

Clean Rooms, use of kitchen and bath. Available Now. Call 773-434-4046

MARKETPLACE

GOODS

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 ASHBURN: 7601 S. Maplewood.

Beaut. 4BR, 2BA house, Granite ctrs, whirlpool tub. fin bsmt, SS appls, $1600/mo. 708-288-4510

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499

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.

HEALTH & WELLNESS FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

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

OPEN HOUSE - 33160 N. Cove

Rd., Grayslake. February 26, 1-4 p.m.

Meet designer at new custom, LEED Gold, Aging in place home - stunning views of Gages Lake, swimming, boating, fishing. 2 Metra lines. 2 + large bedrooms, sunny open plan, roll in showers, screened porch, concealed elevator shaft, low maintenance. More at www.welchdesignllc. com MLS# 09479006. $439,899.

Call Michael Steber ReMax - 312-2134432

M FAWN CANE Corso Pup ICCF Registered 10 Months Old Great W/Kids Basic Obedience Trained Crate Trained All Shots 2500 OBO 7732303798

$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

GLENVIEW:

VALLEY

ROGERS PK 2000 sft/ 3BR-2BA:

UKRAINIAN MASSAGE. CALLS in/ out. Chicago and sub-

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-

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

773-685-6868.

South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

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

legal notices

LOW

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

LOVELY HEART HOME Care,

urbs. Hotels. 1250 S Michigan Avenue. Appointments. 773-616-6969.

2 9-UNIT BLDGS, near Mid-way,

CHATHAM BEAUTIFULLY REMODELED 6BR Home, custom

new kit, SS appl, FDR, oak flrs, new windows, private deck & sunroom, nr lake/Red Line; $1925/inc ht 773-7434141 urbanequities.com

WANTED: R12 FREON. Certi-

sealed vintage bottles and decanters.

PAYING TOP DOLLAR!! 773-263-5320

FOR SALE

townhouse, 2BR, new appliances, paint, carpet ceramic tile & furnace.

Pool location. Appt. only: 773-8441066

cabinets, hdwd flrs, granite countertops. $1800/mo. Sec 8 OK. 773-9058487

ready now. Health guaranteed. vonduewerhaus.com 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

BUYING OLD WHISKEY/ BOURBON/RYE! Looking for full/

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

PARK MANOR: 7532 S VERNON, beautiful rehab 3BR, 2BA house, granite ctrs, SS appls, whirlpl tub, fin bsmt, $1450/mo.

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

ST.BERNARD AKC PUPPIES

JOHN

DEERE GATOR 825i $4000, Very low hours (66.5), all glass cab with heat. Call 779-3243998

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.

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

708-288-4510 SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 340 W 58th St., 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl., $1300/mo. CALL 708-288-4510 SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 1311 E 69th St. 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl., $1300/mo. Call 708-288-4510 CHICAGO - 6747 S. PAXTON , garden apartment, 2BR, 1BA. No gas or electric bill. $800/mo.

Call 773-285-3206

JOLIET W BELLARMINE. Beau-

tiful townhome, 3BR, 1.5BA, remod Close to I-80, Tenant pays util. $980/ mo. 815-730-6873 or 708-422-8801

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

FEBRUARY 23, 2017 | CHICAGO READER 35

STRAIGHT DOPE

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36 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 23, 2017

had to pass through TSA-type metal detectors at the entrance. It was a spontaneous visit and I had my Leatherman multitool attached to my belt. The Secret Service promptly confiscated it and told me I wouldn’t be able to recover it after the tour.

What happens to all the items taken away at these checkpoints, or at the airports? —PETER

A: You’re lucky they let you in at all. While you might not find any mentions of climate change on the official website of the executive branch, you will see this: “Individuals who arrive with prohibited items will not be permitted to enter the White House.” As you learned, most absentmindedly armed visitors—as well as those bearing purses or bags, lotion, makeup, or other no-nos—can just hand the offending items over to the agents.

But don’t expect to get a claim ticket. The White House site again: “No storage facilities are available on or around the complex.” Surely there’s enough petty cash in the budget to spring for a locker or two, but we’re talking about the federal government here, and rules are rules.

And rule number one is that government officials can’t return items handed over to them. The stuff is classified as “voluntarily abandoned property”—as the government sees it, you volunteered to surrender your Leatherman, since you had the option to turn around and walk home with it instead.

The methods an agency may use to dispose of these lawfully gotten gains are prescribed by the General Services Administration, the bureaucrats in charge of administering government bureaucracy. Their regulations apply not just to White House guards, but to our handsy pals at the Transportation Security Administration.

Though TSA employees don’t get to keep your goodies themselves, the agency is permitted to retain abandoned property if there’s some official use for it—except, as per statute, “large sedans and limousines,” which wouldn’t fit underneath your seat or in the overhead compartment anyway. As the agency has no pressing need for nail clippers or pump bottles of Jergens, a large portion of the TSA’s haul is slated for what the federal code calls “abandonment and destruction.”

Most of the more valuable stuff, though, goes up for sale. Federal agencies aren’t allowed to turn a profit on abandoned goodies, but nothing prevents the state where the airport’s located from making a buck, and there’s a thriving secondary market for this plundered booty at state-run surplus stores.

The TSA gathers up their haul periodically and ships it out for resale, and there’s quite a

SLUG SIGNORINO

Q: On a recent trip to the White House gardens, I

load to ship—the “property custodian” at Newark, for instance, visits ten sites and gathers up more than 100 pounds of stuff daily, maybe twice that on holidays. Some states give cops and firefighters first dibs on the loot, but usually it goes straight to the shelves, or is sold online through private companies like Govdeals.com, which says its inventory comes from “8,500 government entities.”

And what are these shops and sites peddling? Well, they’re overstocked with Leathermans, along with kitchen knives, baseball bats, and many pairs of scissors. You might even find a samurai sword or a replica WWII-era German submachine gun.

What you won’t find, even though plenty get seized at airport checkpoints, are actual, working guns. The TSA maintains a blog, presumably intended to make the agency seem more upfront and friendly, and here they disclose their weekly weapons haul. In one week this January, for instance, the TSA found 70 guns (63 loaded, 18 chambered), and that seems to be a fairly typical number. These get turned over to local law enforcement, who may destroy them or resell them. Each new TSA post contains boilerplate language gently chiding forgetful airport-bound gun owners, but it doesn’t seem to be working. One starts to understand why those agents can act so testy.

Of course, the White House and the airport aren’t the only entry points where the feds diligently empty your pockets. A lot of crap, for instance, was confiscated—sorry, abandoned—at the entry to last month’s inauguration festivities. As at many large-scale events, umbrellas were prohibited (leaving George W. Bush to don a poncho as best he could), but a BBC employee reported that his colleague had to surrender a banana; according to a McClatchy article, other impounded items included two cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli and a tin of sardines, which one volunteer suggested might wind up as lunch for event staffers. A mild enough joke, but the General Services Administration probably doesn’t think it’s funny at all. 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

When Team Fantasize meets Team Realize

The key to actualizing sexual fantasies? Acknowledging them.

Q : I’m a straight married

man. My wife and I have a four-year-old and a threemonth-old. We’ve just started having intercourse again. For Valentine’s Day, we spent the night in a B&B while grandma watched the kids. We had edibles, drank sparkling wine, and then fucked. It was amazing. After we came and while we were still stoned and drunk, my wife mentioned she was open to inviting others into our sex life. I asked about getting a professional sex worker.

She said no. But maybe if we were in a bar (we’re never in bars) and met someone (a unicorn), she might be into it. Anal came up. She’s always said she’s up for trying anything once. I have a desire to experiment with anal. (Not just me entering her, but her pegging me as well.) I asked if she would use the vibrator we brought on me, just to experiment.

She said she was too high to do anything. I felt let down. I feel she unknowingly teased me with fantasies I have, not knowing I actually have them.

We have a good sex life, and I’m willing to write off the fantasies we discussed while high and drunk. It’s the teasing that drove me crazy.

—HAVING AND REALIZING DESIRES

PS: I’m in no hurry. We just had a baby, and I don’t want to pressure my wife right now. My fear is that she may only like the idea of exploring our sexuality together and not the reality of it.

A : Some people think about,

talk about, and masturbate about certain fantasies without ever wanting to realize them. Let’s call them Team Fantasize. Some people think about, etc, certain fantasies and would very much like to realize them.

Let’s call them Team Realize.

There’s nothing wrong with either team. But when someone on Team Fantasize is married to someone on Team Realize, well, that can be a problem. Knowing your spouse is turned on by fantasies you share but rules out realizing them—or sets impossible conditions for realizing them—can be extremely frustrating. And sometimes a frustrated Team Realize spouse will say something like this to their Team Fantasize mate: “Talking about these fantasies together—this kind of dirty talk—it gets my hopes up about actually doing it. If it’s never going to happen, we have to stop talking about it, because it’s frustrating.”

The problem with that approach? Swingers clubs, BDSM parties, and the strapon-dildo sections of your finer sex-positive sex-toy stores everywhere are filled with couples who used to be on opposite teams but are both on Team Realize now.

And what got them on the same team? Continuing to discuss and share fantasies, even at the risk of frustrating the Team Realize spouse.

So if you ever want to have that threesome or experiment with anal, HARD, you need to keep talking with your wife about these fantasies—and you need to tell her your fantasies too! Let her know these are things you would actually like to do, and the more you talk about them, the more you want to do them. If she keeps talking with you about them, that’s a sign. Not a sign that she’s a cruel tease, HARD, but a sign that she’s inching closer toward pulling on a Team Realize jersey.

PS: If your wife doesn’t know you have these fantasies—and is consequently teasing you “unknowingly”—that’s your fault, HARD, not hers.

Q : I’m a 30-year-old

straight woman who’s been with the same guy for the last 13 years. We love each other deeply, best friends, etc. The problem isn’t that the sex isn’t good—he’s very good at making me come. But the sex is vanilla and routine, and I’d like us to go beyond that. Yet talking about sex makes my husband REALLY uncomfortable. If I ask him what he’d like me to do to him while we’re having sex, he’ll say, “Everything you do is good,” and leave it there. In the very few conversations we’ve had about this stuff, he’s said that he feels intimidated and doesn’t know what to say. This is incredibly frustrating for me. How do I get him to loosen up and feel more comfortable about talking to me so that we can eventually progress to some new experiences?

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A : Have you told him what you want? If you haven’t— if you’re as vague in your conversations with him as you were in your letter to me—you’re essentially asking your husband to guess at your undisclosed interests or kinks. He doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know what to say—but he’s told you he’s fine with whatever you want to do. So stop asking him what he wants to do to you, WHIP, and start doing whatever it is you want to do. Take the initiative, be the change you want to see in the sack, lean in or bend over or whatever. v Send letters to mail@savagelove.net.

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FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 37

b Every Time I Die o COURTESY EPITAPH RECORDS

ALL AGES

F

Never miss a show again.

Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

NEW

Balance & Composure, From Indian Lakes 5/1, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM b Blasters, Delta Bombers 5/12, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 2/23, noon b Bongripper, Harm’s Way 5/26, 8 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 2/24, noon, 18+ Chris Brown, 50 Cent 4/28, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Sat 2/25, 10 AM Com Truise, Clark 6/3, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM, 18+ Cowboy Mouth 4/14, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM b Dead to Fall 4/14, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Deap Vally 4/3, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 2/24, noon Lee DeWyze 5/18, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM b Dispatch, Guster 7/1, 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM Dwarves 6/2, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Every Time I Die, Wage War 5/14, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 2/24, noon b Four Voices: Joan Baez, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Indigo Girls 6/11, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 2/24, noon Frode Halti’s Border Woods 3/26, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Incubus, Jimmy Eat World 7/29, 6:45 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM J. Cole 7/24, 8 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM Joshua James 4/3, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 2/23, noon b Jethro Tull 8/19, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM Kidz Bop Kids 7/30, 3 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM

Hakon Kornstad 4/30, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Robby Krieger 5/9, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 2/23, noon b Metz, Screaming Females 3/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Midnight Oil 5/18, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM, 18+ Miyavi, Slot Machine 4/25, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM, 17+ Mobb Deep, DJ Paul 3/17, 8 PM, Portage Theater, 17+ Shawn Mullins 4/5, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 2/23, noon b Peter Mulvey 4/28, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 2/24, 8 AM b Jennie Oh Brown 5/21, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Old Crow Medicine Show 6/8, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM, 18+ Bernadette Peters with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra 3/31, 7:30 PM, Auditorium Theatre Pixies, Mitski 10/8, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM Record Company 5/24, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM, 17+ Red City Radio 5/12, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Redd Kross 5/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Rosetta 4/10, 9 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Becca Stevens 4/17, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 2/23, noon b The Story So Far, Turnstile, Drug Church 5/17, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Styx, REO Speedwagon, Don Felder 6/1, 10 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM Supersuckers 4/27, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Sweet Spirit 4/7, 9 PM, Empty Bottle They. 3/29, 8 PM, Subterranean, 18+

38 CHICAGO READER - FEBRUARY 23, 2017

Sara Watkins 5/30, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Cheryl Wheeler 4/23, 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 2/24, 8 AM b Windhand, Satan’s Satyrs 5/21, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM 070 Shake 4/20, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, on sale Fri 2/24, 9 AM b

UPDATED Dada, John San Juan 3/2, 7 PM, Park West, moved from Double Door, 18+ Floating Points 4/9, 8 PM, Metro, moved from Double Door, 18+ Four Year Strong, Can’t Swim 3/18-19, 5 PM, Bottom Lounge, 3/19 sold out, second show added b Griswolds 3/10, 7 PM, 1st Ward, moved from Double Door b Jack Johnson 6/1-2, 7:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, second show added Hayley Kiyoko, Flor 4/1, 6:30 PM, Park West, moved from Double Door b Magpie Salute 7/28-29, 9 PM, Metro, second show added, 18+ John McLaughlin & Jimmy Herring 11/17-18, 8 PM, the Vic, second show added, on sale Fri 2/24, 10 AM The Revolution 4/23-24, 8 PM, Metro, second show added, 18+ Sleaford Mods 4/3, 8 PM, Metro, moved from Double Door, 18+ Martha Wainwright 10/15, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, rescheduled from 4/15 b

UPCOMING Lydia Ainsworth 4/28, 10 PM, Schubas Airpark 3/21, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Dan Andriano, Matt Pryor 3/25, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+

Architects, Stray From the Path 3/8, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Devendra Banhart 3/6, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Adrian Belew Power Trio 4/1, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Besnard Lakes 5/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Black Angels, A Place to Bury Strangers 5/11, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 18+ Bring Me the Horizon, Underoath, Beartooth 3/13, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Bush 5/15, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Chainsmokers, Kiiara 4/29, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Chameleons Vox 9/14, 8:30 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Bruce Cockburn 11/18, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Coheed & Cambria, Dear Hunter 5/19, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Dead & Co. 6/30-7/1, 7 PM, Wrigley Field Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, Edgar Winter Band 9/6, 6:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Entrance, Thompson Springs 4/10, 9 PM, Hideout Fishbone 4/1, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Flint Eastwood 4/21, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Jackie Greene Band 4/13, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall Nick Hakim 3/9, 9 PM, Schubas Heatwave 6/6, 7 and 9:30 PM, the Promontory High Kings 3/19, 8 PM, City Winery b Iron Maiden, Ghost 6/15, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Ampitheatre, Tinley Park b Jain 4/1, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Juicy J, Belly, Project Pat 3/17, 8 PM, House of Blues, 18+ Kolars 3/30, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Kreator, Obituary, Midnight 4/7, 7:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

Jenny Lewis, Springtime Carnivore 3/12, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall 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 Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold 6/18, 6 PM, Soldier Field New Bomb Turks 4/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Oddisee & Good Company 5/20, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Periphery, Contortionist, Norma Jean 4/9, 5:15 PM, House of Blues b Idan Raichel 3/20-21, 8 PM, City Winery b Revivalists 3/18, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Tink 4/8, 6 PM, Portage Theater b Toro Y Moi (DJ set) 3/31, 10 PM, the Mid Adam Torres 3/5, 9 PM, Hideout Tortoise 3/26, 6 and 9:30 PM, Empty Bottle Train, O.A.R., Natasha Bedingfield 6/30, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park b Trentemoller 3/19, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Gloria Trevi, Alejandra Guzman 6/17, 8:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Trollphace 3/3, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Tuck & Patti 4/19, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Sofi Tukker 3/12, 7:30 PM, Schubas, 18+ Twiddle 4/14, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ 2Cellos 10/28, 3 and 8 PM, Chicago Theatre b Tycho 4/28, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Whitechapel, Cattle Decapitation, Goatwhore 3/4, 6 PM, House of Blues b Betty Who, Verite 4/20, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Why? 3/17, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Keller Williams & Leo Kottke 3/10, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Wilson Phillips 3/19, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b The Wind & the Wave 5/26, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid to DIe 3/26, 6 PM, Cobra Lounge Zakk Sabbath, Beast Maker 6/2, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Zombies 4/13-14, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene THE SPONSORED ARTIST PROGRAM at Chicago’s High Concept Labs supports working artists in a range of disciplines for four months at a time, providing free equipment, logistical support, and access to HCL’s space in Mana Contemporary’s Pilsen warehouse at 2233 S. Throop. Each program ends with a send-off event at HCL, and on Friday, February 24, guitarist and composer Cinchel (aka Jason Shanley) takes his turn, hosting the site-specific performance Walking Into an Unfamiliar Place You Already Know. The piece combines his live guitar explorations with a sound installation that invites the audience to ring bells, play a xylophone, mess with a contact mike, sing, wander around, or just sit and contemplatively listen.

Matt Williams has worked at the Empty Bottle since 2003, bartending and booking and bar managing. He’s also drummed in a bazillion awesome garage bands over the past 20 years, including the Guilty Pleasures, Vee Dee, the Baseball Furies, and Hot Machines. On Sunday, February 19, Williams worked his last shift at the Bottle, and this wolf hears that in March he’s moving to Nashville, where he’ll keep doing a couple jobs that don’t require him to live here—that is, tour managing for the Black Lips and Nick Waterhouse. Good luck, Matt! You’ll be missed!

Last month Save Money rapper Dally Auston dropped an EP called 99¢, surprising folks who for months had been expecting him to release the long-in-theworks mixtape Roses instead. This wolf is keen on the low-key 99¢, and on Thursday, February 23, Auston celebrates its release at 1st Ward. To support him he’s assembled a doozy of a local lineup: it includes turntable titan Elz the DJ, Sahar Habibi of LA-based collective Soulection, west-side MC Stunt Taylor, UG Vavy of Fight Me, Quality Control signee Jayaire Woods, and Evanston hip-hop band Manwolves.

Tickets are $15 at the door, $12 in advance; the show is 17+ and starts at 7:30 PM. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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THIS WEDNESDAY! MARCH 1ST RIVIERA THEATRE

SPECIAL GUEST:

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

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THURSDAY, JUNE 8 • VIC THEATRE 8:00pm • 18 & Over

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

SPECIAL GUEST: JOHN

SAN JUAN

NEXT THURSDAY! MARCH 2 PARK WEST 8:00pm • 18 & Over

FRIDAY, MARCH 10 PARK WEST

4TH & FINAL SHOW JUST ADDED!

3/18 SHOWS & 3/19 EARLY SHOW ARE SOLD OUT!

SUNDAY, MARCH 19 VIC THEATRE 10:00pm • 18 & Over

THURSDAY, MAY 18 VIC THEATRE 8:00pm • 18 & Over

TICKETS ON SALE NOW!

ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

2ND SHOW JUST ADDED!

VIC THEATRE SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 18 ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM LIMITED TICKETS AVAILABLE FOR NOV. 17 SHOW

BUY TICKETS AT FEBRUARY 23, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 39

MAY 24 TICKETS AVAILABLE AT THE CHICAGO THEATRE BOX OFFICE OR THECHICAGOTHEATRE.COM 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.

Ticketmaster orders are subject to service charges.

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