Print Issue of March 2, 2017 (Volume 46, Number 21)

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 | M A R C H 2 , 2 0 1 7

Women are still getting screwed over in Chicago theater. 16 The first post-Brexit European Union Film Festival 22

Collective and label Private Stock is a one-stop hip-hop shop. 26

The house that Jim Crow built Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr. and westside home buyers fought against predatory contract sales, the infamous practice is back—putting would-be buyers like Carolyn Smith in financial jeopardy.

By REBECCA BURNS 9

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FEATURES

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

4 Agenda The play The Columnist, stand-up from Megan Gailey, the discussion Fighting Trump and Trumpism, the film Logan, and more recommended things to do

HOUSING

The house that Jim Crow built

Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr. and westside home buyers fought against predatory contract sales, the infamous practice is back.

BY REBECCA BURNS 9

ARTS & CULTURE

39 Restaurant review: The Gundis Chicago finally gets its first Kurdish restaurant.

41 Bars: The Backroom The Field Museum pop-up bar has turned part of the Chicago Athletic Association into a scientist’s office.

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ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY ZAKKIYYAH NAJEEBAH. FOR MORE OF HER WORK, GO TO ZAKKIYYAHNAJEEBAH.COM.

7 Chicagoans Patrick O’Malley was a floor trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange before he became a doorman.

8 Joravsky | Politics Democrats can’t beat Trump if they keep fighting among themselves.

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32 Shows of note G Herbo and Lil Bibby as No Limitations, Chi-Town Blues Festival, John Bender, and more recommendations 36 The Secret History of Chicago Music One-armed blues harpist Big John Wrencher tore up Maxwell Street for decades.

CITY LIFE

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READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY

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IN THIS ISSUE

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Private Stock is a onestop hip-hop shop

This fast-growing Chicago collective puts relationships first—and provides its rappers with beats, studio space, management, and more.

BY LEOR GALIL 26

16 Theater Collaboraction’s angry and absorbing Gender Breakdown tackles inequity in the theater community.

17 Theater Robert Falls gives the Goodman’s Uncle Vanya all the clarity of his years.

17 Theater Steppenwolf’s eclectic performing-arts series LookOut winds down.

18 Theater With TUTA Theatre’s Gentle, Zeljko Djukic adapts and directs a bleak story by Dostoevsky.

19 Lit Two new books from Belt Publishing examine the language of the midwest.

20 Lit In The Brain Defense, Kevin Davis probes the role of neuroscience in the courtroom.

44 Straight Dope How did the Romans actually do any mathematical calculations with Roman numerals?

45 Savage Love Advice to a guy with self-admitted issues. Plus: spanking convos, and more 46 Early Warnings LCD Soundsystem and A Tribe Called Quest at Pitchfork, and other shows in the weeks to come 46 Gossip Wolf West-side musicbusiness institution Willie Barney dies at 89, and more music news.

MOVIES More than 60 new features make their local premieres at the 20th European Union Film Festival. 22 MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

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READER RECOMMENDED

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b ALL AGES

F it absolutely need not go. —DAN JAKES Through 3/5: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 8 PM, 3 PM, the Edge Theater, 5451 N. Broadway, chicagotheatreworkshop.com, $25-$35.

Eleemosynary Lee Blessing R balances heart and mind in his 1985 one-act character study of three

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The Beauty Queen of Leenane o DAVID MARKOWSKI

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater The Beauty Queen of Leenane Maureen (Jaimelyn Gray) is a R middle-aged woman who lives with her

senile elderly mother, Mag (Kate Harris), in a small Irish village. At her breaking point, Maureen has one last chance to be happy, but Mag is determined to stop it. The amazing thing about Irish playwright Martin McDonagh’s 1996 black comedy, here directed by Luda Lopatina Solomon for Bluebird Arts, is how it lulls you into a false sense of security—one minute you’re laughing, the next you’re cringing, as moments of tenderness are quickly outdone by grisly betrayals. The script is a wonderful balance of contrasts, and this cast knows how to interpret them, particularly Gray and Harris, who bring out McDonagh’s hardened themes, the most poignant of which is captivity. —MATT DE LA PEÑA Through 3/25: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6860, bluebirdarts.org, $28, $18 students and seniors.

The Best of Bri-Ko They may skip the azure greasepaint, oil-drum tom-toms, and Twinkies, but physical comedy trio Bri-Ko (Brian Posen, Brian Peterlin, and Tim Soszko) still have a lot in common with Blue Man Group. Both keep clear of spoken words. Both cultivate oddball, puppyish personas. Both work to a beat, whether they generate it themselves or, like Bri-Ko, cop it off Carmina Burana.

And both are very, very big on making messes. In fact, Bri-Ko would do well to adopt the Blue Man policy of handing out ponchos to audience members: one bit in this 60-minute collection involves a chef whose cuisine gets delivered to the customer via water balloon. Other pieces take familiar comic tropes— changing a lightbulb, provoking a prissy colleague—and give them a fresh spin.

The show is usually funny, always sweetly subversive. —TONY ADLER Through 3/23: Thu 8 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252, stage773.com, $17.50.

The Columnist In his well-built R and weighty if occasionally ossified 2012 drama, playwright David

Auburn crafts a compelling portrayal of renowned syndicated columnist Joe Alsop. An erudite political junkie (“Politics is life!” he insists) who craves access to and influence over the Washington elite, he yearns for exuberant conservatism, mistakes his opinions for edicts, and buries himself in work to avoid the messiness of human connection. But only after intermission does Auburn progress from mounting a robust documentary to crafting a play with pressing stakes—for the increasingly dogmatic Alsop, his ineffectual but devoted brother Stewart, and his heartbreakingly unnecessary wife, Susan. Under Keira Fromm’s meticulous yet elastic direction, this ultimately exhilarating American Blues production is an astute cautionary tale about how hubris, ideology, and loyalty obscure vision. The cast, led by a gripping Philip Earl Johnson, are precise, impassioned, and deeply affecting. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 4/1: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM (7:30 PM only 3/11; 3 PM only 4/1), Sun 2:30 PM; also Mon 3/6, 7:30 PM; Wed 3/29, 2:30 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252, americanbluestheater.com, $29-$49.

Creatives There’s a lot going R right in Irvine Welsh and Don De Grazia’s strange new multiheaded beast

of a pop-rock opera. A commercially successful Adam Levine type returns to his Chicago college alma mater to host a songwriting competition for a group of students, each with their own neuroses and narratives. Composer and lyricist Laurence Mark Wythe adds original songs to an eclectic roster of classic and modern pop hits, and there’s a unique joy in hearing works by bands often relegated to dressing-room Muzak (Simple Minds, Happy Mondays) reinterpreted as musical theater. Chicago Theatre Workshop’s slick, handsome production, directed by Tom Mullen, makes a case for its own idiosyncrasies, but even a cast this strong has trouble justifying the production’s late zig in a direction

talented but eccentric women: a visionary grandmother, her distant workaholic daughter, and her high-achieving but emotionally wounded granddaughter.

In less than 90 minutes, we get to know and care about these three, their strengths and foibles, their mutual influences on one another, their stories and why they matter. Blessing’s words are brought to life in AstonRep Theatre Company’s remarkable production, codirected by Jeremiah Barr and Derek Bertelsen and performed by strong actors Debra Rodkin, Alexandra Bennett, and Sarah C. Lo, each of whom infuses her work with lots of warmth and wit, moving us while reminding us constantly of life’s many slings and arrows. —JACK HELBIG Through 3/12: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, the Frontier, 1106 W. Thorndale, astonrep.com, $20.

Eugene Onegin This stunning R production of Tchaikovsky’s late 19th-century operatic take on Push-

kin’s early 19th-century novel in verse (originally designed by Michael Levine and directed by Robert Carsen for the Metropolitan Opera) is a piece of minimalist magic that uses light, color, and a nearly bare stage to create an environment that’s the visual embodiment of a lushly lyrical score. Lyric Opera has cast Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecień as the icy title character (he sang it here nine years ago), and soprano Ana María Martínez as the literary, lovestruck young heroine, Tatiana—whom Onegin only wants when he can’t have her. It’s a role debut for Martínez, but she’s a natural for the part. The surprises are golden-voiced mezzo-soprano Alisa Kolosova as Tatiana’s sister, Olga, and tenor Charles Castronovo, who runs away with the show as Olga’s fiery doomed suitor Lensky; also, a standout lone aria from bass Dmitry Belosselskiy as Tatiana’s blissfully ignorant husband, Prince Gremin. The story turns on life-blighting social conventions from arranged marriages to pistol duels—exactly like

the one that killed Pushkin himself, and not so different from the revenge shootings that bloody the streets of Chicago today. Alejo Perez conducts the Lyric Opera orchestra and chorus; in Russian with English subtitles. —DEANNA ISAACS Wed 3/1, 2 PM; Sat 3/4, Wed 3/8, Sat 3/11, Tue 3/14, Fri 3/17, and Mon 3/20, 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker, 312-332-2244, civicoperahouse. com, $17-$349.

Gender Breakdown After the R Profiles Theatre abuse scandal and the creation of Not in Our House

comes playwright Dani Bryant’s ensemble-devised primer on gender disparity in Chicago theater. With a script assembled from interviews with more than 200 local theater makers as well as personal stories from the ten performers, these presentational 70 minutes cover a litany of deeply entrenched systemic biases: hypersexualization of certain female types, exoticization of women of color, pervasive unwillingness to see women as legitimate protagonists, near total erasure of non-cis nonmales.

Insightful and provocative, although occasionally repetitive (and largely blind to class issues), Gender Breakdown is more a compelling expression of outrage and solidarity than a nuanced examination of complicated issues.

Director Erica Vannon’s grounded cast speak with such candor they never seem to be acting at all. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 3/19: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 3/13, 7:30 PM, Collaboraction, 1579 N. Milwaukee, 312-226-9633, $15-$30.

Jesus the Jew as Told by His Brother James Forum Productions’ one-man show is a tedious deep dive into what we’re told is “another side” of Jesus— provided by his brother James (Steven Stafford) as the latter faces imminent execution. Penned by William Spatz, the meandering piece comes off as preachy propaganda, though it’s not clear on whose behalf, as James tears down Paul the Apostle for bastardizing the teachings of Jesus. His brother never intended to stray from Judaism and its tenets, says James, driving this point home with stories of his flock of “Jewish Christians” and shameless interludes of Jewish prayer and ritual. A modern, parallel story line concerning a professor

Eugene Onegin o ROBERT KUSEL/LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO

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

whose doctor brother was killed in Syria punctuates the show infrequently and with little effect. —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 3/26: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-4047336, greenhousetheater.org, $30-$35.

Language of Angels Like many classic ghost stories with circuitous story lines, there’s no shortage of characters in playwright Naomi Iizuka’s eerie tale of loss and regret. Everyone has a connection to a missing girl named Celie (Jenna Liddle), who haunts the people who knew her best. Invariably, these former friends suffer debilitating denial, insanity, or premature death—one domino after the next, as you might expect.

Though it stumbles out of the gate, this production from the Cuckoo’s Theater Project in collaboration with Redtwist Theatre can be delightfully suspenseful.

Moody lighting plays up the huddlingaround-the-campfire-feel, which is an asset here. A live music component tends to be disagreeable, but the show’s somewhat redeemed by standout acting and direction, the latter by Marc James, who deserves credit for deftly navigating a cozy space. —MATT DE LA PEÑA Through 3/26: Wed 7:30 PM, Sat 3 PM, Sun 7:30 PM, Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-728-7529, thecuckoostheaterproject.com, $20.

Private Eyes Steven Dietz’s self-consciously postmodern 1996 comedy, here revived by Piccolo Theatre under the direction of Michael D. Graham, never reaches the levels of madness to which it aspires. The premise—a play about an illicit love affair that flowers during rehearsals for a play about an illicit love affair that flowers during rehearsals—is fun, but the resulting work is belabored and leaden. One problem is that Dietz tells his tale too slowly; another is that most of the plot twists are predictable.

But a bigger problem still is simply that his writing lacks heart: Dietz treats his characters as mere pawns in a theatrical game, leaving his actors little to do except speak their lines and avoid stumbling over the furniture. As the three points of the love triangle, Megan DeLay, Kurt Preopper, and Edward Fraim strive mightily to add warmth to this cold work, but the results are lukewarm at best. —JACK HELBIG Through 3/19: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Piven Theatre, Noyes Cultural Arts Center, 927 Noyes, Evanston, 847-866-8049, piccolotheatre. com, $25.

Venus in Fur David Ives spins the seminal novella by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (of “masochism” infamy) into this comedic contemporary two-hander.

An actress crashes the office of a playwright-director in a desperate bid to play Wanda von Dunajew, Venus in Furs’ begrudging dominatrix, in his upcoming world-premiere adaptation. Mirroring

and commenting on the book’s shifting power dynamic, the playwright-director slowly discovers that the mysterious performer’s relationship to the text may be deeper than he can handle. Jean Genet this isn’t; Ives’s script, academic and borderline smug, gets a fair amount of mileage out of its light comedy, but its broader prodding into Sacher-Masoch’s themes grows repetitive just halfway through. Still, Charlotte Drover’s well-designed, playfully blocked production for Circle Theatre provides ample opportunity for Arti Ishak as Wanda to set the roof ablaze with a rapturous performance. —DAN JAKES Through 3/19: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Mon 8 PM, Heartland Studio Theatre, 7016 N. Glenwood, 773-791-2393, circletheatrechicago.com, $28.

DANCE R

Dance Shelter The Chicago Moving Company presents new works by Timothy Buckley, Rachel Buntin, and Ayako Kato. Thu 3/2-Fri 3/3: 7:30 PM, Hamlin Park Fieldhouse Theater, 3035 N. Hoyne, 312-742-7785, chicagomovingcompany.wixsite.com, $15.

R

The Dream The Chicago Philharmonic and Visceral Dance Chicago team up for a performance based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” The University of Chicago’s Robert Bird discusses Dostoyevsky’s work before the performance.

Sun 3/5, 3 PM, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777, harristheaterchicago.org, $25-$75.

COMEDY R

Megan Gailey The former Chicagoan performs her stand-up as part of the club’s Welcome Home series. 3/2-3/5: Thu and Sun 8:30 PM, Fri 8:30 and 10:30 PM, Sat 7, 9, and 11:15 PM, Zanies, 1548 N. Wells, 312-337-4027, zanies.com/chicago, $25 plus two-drink minimum.

Asmus, Miles Hendrix, and Matt Chiaramonte, plus food from Goddess & Grocer and drinks from Lagunitas. All proceeds benefit Inspiration Kitchens.

Fri 3/3, 8:30 PM, Access Chicago Realty, 2256 W. North, free-$15.

Late Late Breakfast’s Fourth R Annual Tournament of Champions The monthly stand-up showcase

hosts a single-elimination comedy competition to crown the 2017 King of Breakfast. Eggs and waffles available along with the traditional pancakes. Sat 3/4, 2 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433, hideoutchicago.com, $8.

VISUAL ARTS Arc Gallery “Environmental Graphiti: The Art of Climate Change,” digital paintings by Alisa Singer that incorporate images of charts, graphs, numbers, and other data about climate change.

Opening reception Fri 3/3, 6-9 PM. 3/2-3/25. Wed-Sat noon-6 PM, Sun noon-4 PM, 2156 N. Damen, 773-252-2232, arcgallery.org.

Chicago Printmakers Collaborative “Postcards of Persistence,” guests learn the basics of screen printing while creating postcards to mail to legislators.

Donations benefit the ACLU. Sun 3/5, noon-2 PM. Fri-Sat noon-5 PM and by appointment, 4912 N. Western, 773-2932070, chicagoprintmakers.com.

Roman Susan “Production of an Escalating Crisis,” artist Meg Duguid transforms the gallery into a newsroom where she will create news reports about an impending nuclear catastrophe to be screened in the space throughout the exhibit’s run. Closing reception Sat 3/25, 1-3 PM. 3/7-3/25. Thu 4-7 PM, Sat 1-4 PM, 1224 W. Loyola, 773-270-1224, romansusan.org.

Vertical Gallery “Unreliable Narrators,” an exhibit featuring work by Max Kauffman, Jack “Nice-One” Chappel, and Troy Lovegates. Opening reception Sat 3/4, 6-10 PM. 3/4-3/25. Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM,

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1016 N. Western, 773-697-3846, verticalgallery.com.

LIT & LECTURES

Emil Ferris The author discusses R her debut graphic novel, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters. Sat 3/4, 7

PM, Quimby’s Bookstore, 1854 W. North, 773-342-0910, quimbys.com.

Fighting Trump and Trumpism R CPS teacher Michelle Gunderson and former U.S. Army ranger Rory Fan-

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ning discuss Trump’s public education, foreign policy, and immigration agenda with Jacobin associate editor Micah Uetricht. Followed by a party celebrating the release of Jacobin issue 24. Fri 3/3, 7 PM, In These Times, 2040 N. Milwaukee, 773-772-0100, inthesetimes.com.

Kate Hennessy Dorothy Day’s R granddaughter, author of Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by

Beauty, discusses the social activist with Rosalie Riegle, author of Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her. Sat 3/4, 3 PM, Seminary Co-op Bookstore, 5751 S. Woodlawn, 773-752-4381, semcoop.com.

A People’s History of Chicago R A celebration of the launch of Kevin Coval’s new book featuring 77

poems, one for each neighborhood W

R

RSM

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Megan Gailey House of Laughs Inspiration R Kitchens teams up with Access Chicago Realty to put on a night of

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Alisa Singer, Great Lakes Ice Cover Decline as part of “Environmental Graphiti: The Art of Climate Change” at Arc Gallery

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 5

SLEEP RESEARCH STUDY FOR PEOPLE WITH LUNG DISEASE: Volunteers are invited to join this study: you must be over age 45 years, have either emphysema or chronic bronchitis and difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep to qualify.

We are testing a program to improve sleep in people with lung disease. Volunteers eligible for the study will participate in 6 weekly sessions in one of four behavioral or educational programs. The programs are offered by the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Hines VA. Health evaluations include an overnight sleep study, lung function tests, two blood draws, activity monitoring and questionnaires. Compensation is provided to enrolled participants, all program activities and testing are free and free parking is provided.

12/09/2016

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For more information go to cbti-copd.uic.edu or call Mary Kapella PhD, RN or Franco Laghi MD at (312) 996-1575, 9:30AM to 4:00PM, Monday thru Friday at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Center for Narcolepsy, Sleep & Health Research. This study is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

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AGENDA B of Chicago. The evening includes spoken-word performances and live music. Sat 3/4, 5-8 PM, Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State, 312-747-4300, chipublib.org.

Logan

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/ movies NEW REVIEWS Before I Fall A popular 17-year-old (Zooey Deutch) keeps waking up on the same day, which ends with her death in a car crash, in this artful adaptation of the 2010 young-adult novel by Lauren Oliver.

The main characters are high school bullies, but director Ry-Russo Young (Nobody Walks) refuses to stereotype them; they can be sweet and endearing one moment, petty and cruel the next, but their motivation is always clear. The thorny protagonist unpacks what being a good person means, and why being one matters, through a long and satisfying character arc.

If only this nuance extended to the frizzy-haired loner the clique taunts (Elena Kampouris), a cartoonish Carrie type who seems to belong in another movie. With Halston Sage, Logan Miller, and Jennifer Beals. —LEAH PICKETT PG-13, 99 min. Block 37, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Cicero 14, City North 14, Ford City, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings Get Out Sketch comedian Jordan Peele (of Comedy Central’s Key and Peele) makes his directing debut with a horror movie that sticks closely to genre convention even as its ribbing of white liberals hardens into a social point. A young photographer (Daniel Kaluuya) travels to upstate New York with his white girlfriend (Allison Williams) to stay with her easygoing parents (Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford) and meet their middle-class friends; plunged into this white world, he endures a series of awkward and condescending remarks and begins to suspect his hosts have sinister intentions toward him.

Peele, backed by the cagey horror outfit Blumhouse Productions (Insidious, Paranormal Activity), demonstrates a fannish love for cliche, which gradually dilutes his idiosyncratic take on the perils of assimilation. With Caleb Landry Jones and Betty Gabriel, wonderful as the family’s spooky black maid.

—J.R. JONES R, 104 min. Block 37, Century 12 and CineArts 6 Land of Mine Denmark coughs up an unpleasant episode from its past with this World War II drama (2015) about the German POWs, many of them teenagers, who were forced to remove the 2.2 million land mines their invading army had bur-

ied along Denmark’s western seacoast. Roland Møller roars through the movie as a battle-scarred Danish officer whose delight in brutalizing the young men gives way to pity and compassion; you could call it a character arc, though as written and directed by Martin Zandvliet it’s more like an acute angle.

Ham-fisted though the drama might be, this 2015 Danish-German production will almost certainly keep you awake, not least because every few scenes some poor kid is getting blown to bits through fear, incaution, or plain bad luck. In English and subtitled Danish and German. —J.R. JONES R, 100 min.

Landmark’s Century Centre Logan This third and final R Wolverine spinoff to the X-Men franchise takes place in

2029, when the heroic mutant (Hugh Jackman) is aging, ailing, and hitting the booze. Most of the X-Men have been wiped out, and several decades have passed without record of a new mutant birth, so their deteriorating commander, Professor X (Patrick Stewart), rejoices when the hero inherits an abandoned child who shares his superpowers and retractable bone claws (Dafne Keen, fantastic). The film earns its R rating with extreme violence and excessive F-bombs; it’s also the most shocking, thrilling, and emotionally resonant X-Men film to date. Director James Mangold, returning after the second installment, The Wolverine (2013), orchestrates several jaw-dropping action sequences, heightened by Jackman’s and Keen’s intense performances and by Marco Beltrami’s taut and plunky score. With Boyd Holbrook, Richard E. Grant, and Stephen Merchant. —LEAH PICKETT R, 135 min. Block 37, ArcLight Chicago, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Cicero 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Lake, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Webster Place Rebel Rossa This spirited documentary follows Irish-American brothers Williams and Rossa Cole as they explore the legacy of their great-grandfather Jeremiah

O’Donovan Rossa during a 2015 trip to Dublin and West Cork to mark the centenary of his death. A key figure in Ireland’s independence movement, Jeremiah was imprisoned and later exiled by the British for his anti-imperialist activism; from his new home base in New York City he became an early practitioner of modern terrorism and openly planned bombing campaigns against the UK. A hundred years later the Irish revere him as a patriot, and his great-grandsons are welcomed by everyone from rural villagers to Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams. A family memoir, travelogue, and history lesson rolled into one, the film benefits from the siblings’ genial banter and the lucid narration of Williams, who also directed. —ANDREA GRONVALL 88 min. Screens as part of the Chicago Irish Film Festival; for a full schedule visit chicagoirishfilmfestival.com. Sat 3/4, 4 PM. Logan

SPECIAL EVENTS Chicago Irish Film Festival Irish shorts and features screen as part of this annual event; for a schedule visit chicagoirishfilmfestival.com.

Thu 3/2-Sun 3/5. Logan, Society for Arts Fire Escape Films: Winter Premiere Works by student filmmakers that explore what it means to be “a Chicagoan, student, family member, and friend.” Thu 3/9, 7 PM. Univ. of Chicago Doc Films Juggernaut Film Festival Sci-fi and fantasy shorts, collected by Chicago Filmmakers and Otherworld Theatre Company. Sat 3/4, 11 AM. Music Box Reel Film Day A celebration of 35-millimeter film, with a double feature of Punch-Drunk Love (2002) and the silent romance Lonesome (1928). Sun 3/5, 3:30 PM. Music Box Revolution: New Art for a New World Margy Kinmonth directed this documentary about the Russian Revolution and the avantgarde art it produced. 85 min. Wed 3/8, 7:30 PM. Music Box v

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CITY LIFE Chicagoans

The doorman Patrick O’Malley, 51

PEOPLE LOVE TO KNOW what other people are up to, and they know the doorman knows. Sometimes they’ll be direct and ask if the doorman knows what’s going on. It kind of comes with the job. But a good doorman sees everything and tells nothing. One of the hardest things is when you have a couple going through a divorce and you’re put in the middle of trying to pick sides, and you want to stay neutral, because the doorman doesn’t have a problem with either person.

A big part of my job is calming people down who are stuck in elevators. A lot of times when an elevator gets stuck, it’s between floors, so you have to figure out where they are. I can’t get ’em out, though.

The only ones who can get ’em out are the fire department or the elevator company. So it’s my job to calm the people who are in the elevator and let them know that help is arriving and that it’s not as dire a situation as it might seem. I’ve had to do that many times, and trust me, not everyone can stay calm in an elevator.

I got stuck in the elevator one time when I was delivering the newspapers. I was the only one on duty.

I was stuck for about 45 minutes when I heard the maintenance guy starting his shift, so I banged on the door. It turned out the guy from the elevator company was coming from his house, and he lived like an hour and a half away and was stuck in morning rush hour.

When they told me I was gonna have to wait till this guy arrived, I just kind of laid down on the floor and relaxed. I know the routine.

I was a f loor trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange before I became a doorman. I loved it; it

o JIAYUE YU

“A good doorman sees everything and tells nothing.”

was just very stressful. By the time I did my eight years down there, I was burned out. There’s a lot of money going around, and things can be easily misconstrued, so I might tell you that I’m gonna sell you five, and things are so crazy you might say, “Oh, you just sold me 50,” so you better have the money for 50. You always have to have the wherewithal in your mind to know the money you’re playing with. It’s very stressful to be on top of all that every second.

Being a doorman has moments where it’s demanding, but not all the time. There’s quiet times where

nobody’s coming in or out. I’m lucky because I work across the street from the lake, so there’s always something for me to look at. This month is my 20th anniversary in the building. Twenty years goes by in the blink of an eye.

The hardest part of this job? Being in a good mood.

I can never have a bad day. You just have to have a switch to turn off the negative feelings. Sometimes my tenants, they have bad days, and when they come home and I’m smiling at them, their day is suddenly much better. A smile goes a long way in this world.

—AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 2

FRIDAY 3

SATURDAY 4

SUNDAY 5

MONDAY 6

TUESDAY 7

WEDNESDAY 8

o Darkroom An annual benefit celebrating Chicago’s photography community. The night includes cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, and an auction of work from artists such as Dawoud Bey, Lindsay Lochman, and Hyounsang Yoo. 6:30-9 PM, Venue Six10, 610 S. Michigan, mocp.org, $150.

ò Dance Th ro ugh the Decades Beauty Bar celebrates its seventh anniversary with a dance party featuring tag-team sets from resident DJs. 9 PM, Beauty Bar, 1444 W. Chicago, thebeautybar. com, $5.

ª Da pper Ball AMFM, Slo ’Mo, and Boi Society present a celebration of queer culture with music from DJ Dapper and Slo ’Mo’s Audio Jack, cocktails from the Violet Hour, performances, a “swag-off,” and a dance party.

8 PM-midnight, Hairpin Arts Center, 2800 N. Milwaukee, slomoparty.com, $25.

& Ch icago Wi ngFest Dozens of local restaurants submit their strongest wings to a blind taste test to determine the “best of fest.” The day also features live music, raffles, eating contests, and games. 1-6 PM, UIC Pavilion, 525 S. Racine, wingfest.net, $50.

V What ’s Next for Illinois? Alderman Ameya Pawar leads a discussion about what issues matter at a state level and how to get reliable candidates to run for office. 7 PM, Heartland Cafe, 7000 N. Glenwood, heartlandcafe.com. F

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

& Internati onal D inner Craw l The Edgewater Chamber of Commerce celebrates International Women’s Day with samplings from the neighborhood restaurants like Ethiopian Diamond, Summer Noodle & Rice, and Mango Pickle. A portion of the proceeds benefits Girl Forward.

5-8 PM, various locations, edgewater.org, $35.

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

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

CITY LIFE Newly elected Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez, right, and Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison o AP PHOTO/BRANDEN CAMP

POLITICS

Party poopers

The Dems can’t beat Trump if they keep fighting among themselves.

By BEN JORAVSKY

I

n the months leading up to this past weekend’s election for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Republican commentators were already playing the Farrakhan card on Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, one of the top candidates for the gig.

You could see it in their public remarks, as they reminded people that, years ago, Ellison wrote op-eds praising Minister Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, implying that by voting for Ellison Democrats would be somehow endorsing Farrakhan and his anti-Semitic views.

It didn’t matter that Ellison—a six-term congressman from Minneapolis—had already repudiated Farrakhan.

“I have long since distanced myself from and rejected the Nation of Islam, due to its propagation of bigoted and anti-Semitic ideas and statements, as well as other issues,” Ellison wrote when he first ran for Congress in 2006.

In fact, Farrakhan had repudiated Ellison for having repudiated him.

But clearly Republicans relished the potential of an Ellison victory, if only because it would give them a chance to exploit a wedge

8 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

that divides Democrats—in this case, dormant tensions between blacks and Jews—while diverting attention from the anti-Semitism in the Bannon wing of their own party.

Ellison didn’t win. The Democrats instead chose former labor secretary Tom Perez, who’d been backed by many of the same party leaders who supported Hillary Clinton in last year’s Democratic primary against Bernie Sanders.

So did Republicans hail the Democrats for taking a stand against Farrakhan? Yeah, right.

No, they forgot all about the Farrakhan connection, and simply found another wedge issue to exploit—the still unhealed Clinton/ Sanders divide.

“The race for DNC Chairman was, of course, totally ‘rigged,’” President Trump tweeted on March 26. “Bernie’s guy, like Bernie himself, never had a chance. Clinton demanded Perez!”

As though Donald Trump really gives a shit about Sanders voters.

I guess there are two ways of looking at Perez’s win: You can agree with Trump, seeing it as proof of a party rigged by leaders to exclude lefties from positions of power. Or you can see

it the way I do: Given a choice as to which set of internal divisions they’d allow Republicans to exploit, they chose corporate Dems vs. progressives instead of blacks vs. Jews.

Look, people, no one said it was easy to be a Democrat. The party’s a thinly papered-over coalition of political tribes that, more often than not, are at each other’s throats. No matter who wins, someone’s upset.

For the life of me, I can’t see a whole lot of difference between Perez and Ellison. It’s not like one is a saint and the other is Satan.

We’re basically talking about two people from roughly the same left-of-center faction of the Democratic Party.

Ellison would be a great party leader. He’s passionate and smart and speaks from the heart about closing the economic gap that separates the haves from the have-nots. But, hell, it’s not like Perez is a corporate stooge.

The son of immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Perez grew up in Buffalo, graduated from Harvard Law School, and went to work in the Obama Justice Department. For the last four years he served as Obama’s labor secretary.

His campaign against Ellison was treated as a replay of Sanders vs. Clinton because Sanders had endorsed Ellison and many Clinton backers had endorsed Perez.

And because Perez jumped into the race in December, when it looked like Ellison was a shoo-in, two weeks after Haim Saban, an American-Israeli businessman and major Clinton donor, smeared Ellison, saying “he is clearly an anti-Semite,” overlooking the fact that he’d already repudiated Farrakhan.

In the aftermath, reporters were quick to smear Perez as a puppet of corporate Democrats.

But two can play this game. New York senator Chuck Schumer endorsed Ellison. He’d also endorsed Hillary against Sanders and has been one of Wall Street’s biggest defenders against Obama-proposed regulations.

So if you’re guilty by association, then Ellison must also be a tool of Wall Street because he has Schumer’s backing.

Hey, man, everyone can play this game.

I realize many Sanders supporters are still bitter over the machinations employed by the Clintons and their backers at the DNC to keep Bernie from winning the nomination. And clearly, Perez was at the very least encouraged

to run to appease Saban and temper the nasty fight we’re getting anyway. But in many ways this wing of the party is tone deaf. They seem to believe that the only reason rural white people in Michigan and Wisconsin voted for Trump was because of Hillary’s ties to Wall Street.

For what’s it’s worth, I was rooting for Ellison—just as I voted for Sanders in the primary. In general, I’m what you might call a New Deal Democrat, someone who keeps hoping that FDR and Harold Washington will come back to life to lead the party.

So I think we need more progressives like Ellison.

But it’s not like I’m going to sulk over Perez’s win or bolt to the Green Party. Sometimes you have to lick your wounds and move on.

Otherwise you’ll wind up like these old lefties I know, still bickering about sectarian battles from 1968.

Meanwhile, your party will be so riddled with divisions that a rapacious wingnut who appeals to white supremacists will seize control of the White House.

Wait—that’s already happened. And Democrats are still fighting each other. Oh, brother.

No wonder they’ve lost the House, the Senate, and hundreds of state legislative seats.

Look, I realize that by making this argument I’m coming dangerously close to sounding like Mayor Rahm. God help me. Perhaps I’ve fallen victim to Stockholm syndrome, having forced myself to repeatedly listen to his recent talk at Stanford’s business school.

In that talk, Rahm sneered at the lefties in his party, writing them off as a bunch of losers who’d rather be self-righteous than victorious.

“Winning’s everything,” he said. “If you don’t win, you can’t make the public policy.

I say that because it is hard for people in our party to accept that principle. Sometimes, you’ve just got to win, OK? Our party likes to be right, even if they lose.”

I hate to say it, but he sort of has a point— though he’d be more convincing if he’d ever taken a tough stance on progressive issues.

And if he hadn’t closed public schools and mental health clinics and buried the Laquan McDonald tape, and if he weren’t so freaking patronizing and . . .

You know, once I start ripping Rahm, it’s awfully hard for me to stop.

Sometimes I wish I were a Republican.

They’re basically the party of white people who hate paying taxes. Compared to the Democrats, they sure have it easy. v

ß @joravben

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The house that Jim Crow built

Fifty years after Martin Luther King Jr. and west-side home buyers fought against predatory contract sales, the infamous practice is back.

By REBECCA BURNS

Carolyn Smith, right, her mother, Gwendolyn, and their dog sit on the porch of Smith’s home in Austin. o ZAKKIYYAH NAJEEBAH

For an interactive map of properties purchased by contract-for-deed sellers go to chicagoreader.com.

V

W

hen Carolyn Smith saw a for sale sign go up on her block one evening in the fall of 2011, it felt serendipitous. The now 68-year-old was anxiously looking for a new place to live. The landlord of her four-unit apartment building in the city’s Austin neighborhood was in foreclosure and had stopped paying the water bill. That month, she and the other tenants had finally scraped together the money themselves to prevent a shutoff and were planning to withhold rent until the landlord paid them back. Exhausted with this process and tired of dealing with “slumlords,” Smith wanted to buy a home in the neighborhood to ensure that she, her mother, Gwendolyn, and their dog, Sugar Baby, would have

a stable place to live. But due to a past bankruptcy, Smith thought she would never be able to get a mortgage. So when she saw a house on her street for sale with a sign that said “owner financing,” she was excited. The next morning, she called the number listed and learned that the down payment was just $900—a sum she could fathom paying. “I figured I was blessed,” she says.

Her good fortune continued. A man on the other end of the line told her she was the very first one to inquire. The seller, South Carolina-based National Asset Advisors, called her several more times and mailed her paperwork to sign. Smith says she never met in person with anyone from National Asset Advisors or Harbour Portfolio Advisors, the Texas-based company that owned the home. But she says

the agents she spoke with assured her that her credit was good enough for the transaction, despite the past bankruptcy. Next, they gave her a key code that allowed her to go in and look at the house, explaining that she’d be purchasing it “as is.” Smith thought the two-flat looked like a fixer-upper—the door had been damaged in an apparent break-in, and there was no hot-water heater, furnace, or kitchen sink—but given her poor luck with apartments of late, she felt she couldn’t pass up the chance to own a home. Both she and her mother, now 84, had been renting their whole lives; after pulling together the down payment, they beamed with pride when, in December 2011, they received a letter from National Asset Advisors that read “Congratulations on your purchase of your new home!”

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MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 9

Contract housing continued from 9

But within a year, Smith discovered that the house was in even worse shape than she’d realized. In her first months in her new home, Smith estimates that she spent more than $4,000 just to get the heat and running water working properly, drinking bottled water in the meantime. Then the chimney started to crumble. Smith would hear the periodic thud of stray bricks tumbling into the alleyway as she sat in her living room or lay in bed at night; she began to worry that a passerby would be hit in the head and soon spent another $2,000 to replace the chimney. Public records show that the house had sat vacant earlier that year, and the city had ordered its previous owners to make extensive repairs.

Had Smith approached a bank for a mortgage, she likely would’ve received a Federal Housing Administration-issued form advising her to get a home inspection before buying.

But as far as she recalls, no one she spoke to ever suggested one, and in her rush to get out of her old apartment, she didn’t think to insist.

The documents Smith signed with Harbour and National Asset Advisors required her to bring the property into habitable condition within four months, and with all the unexpected expenses, she soon fell behind on her monthly payments of $545.

Smith’s retirement from her job as an adult educator at Malcolm X College, in the spring of 2013, compounded the financial strain. Living on a fixed income of what she estimates was around $1,100 a month in pension and social security payments, she fell further behind, and the stress mounted.

“When we got to be two months behind, they would call me every day,” she remembers.

National Asset Advisors also began sending her letters threatening to evict her. That’s when Smith had a heart-stopping realization: She hadn’t actually purchased her home at all.

The document she had signed wasn’t a traditional mortgage, as she had believed, but a “contract for deed”—a type of seller-financed transaction under which buyers lack any equity in the property until they’ve paid for it in full. Since Smith didn’t actually have a deed to the house, or any of the rights typically afforded home owners, she and her mother could be thrown out without a foreclosure process, forfeiting the thousands of dollars they’d already spent to rehabilitate the home.

“I know people always say ‘buyer beware’” she acknowledges. “But I’d never had a mortgage before, and I feel like they took advantage of that.”

What felt like a private nightmare for Smith has been playing out nationwide in the wake of the housing market crash, as investment firms

10 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

step in to fill a void left by banks, now focused on lending to wealthier borrowers with spotless credit histories. In a tight credit market, companies like Harbour, which has purchased roughly 7,000 homes nationwide since 2010, including at least 42 in Cook County, purport to offer another shot at home ownership for those who can’t get mortgages. Such practices are increasingly common in struggling cities hard hit by the housing crash. A February 2016 article in the New York Times titled “Market for Fixer-Uppers Traps Low-Income Buyers” examined Harbour’s contract-for-deed sales in Akron, Ohio, and Battle Creek, Michigan.

The Detroit News has reported that in 2015 the number of homes sold through contract-fordeed agreements in the city exceeded those sold through traditional mortgages.

But the practice of contract selling is especially notable in Chicago, where out-of-state investors are reprising an infamous practice that once targeted African-Americans on the city’s south and west sides. In the mid-20th century, contract selling by small-time speculators flourished in Chicago as the result of banks’ refusal to make mortgage loans in black communities—a policy known as redlining. By one estimate, 85 percent of homes purchased by black Chicagoans in the 1950s were sold through contracts rather than traditional bank mortgages. When Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Chicago in 1966 to combat the rampant discrimination in the housing market, he made the case that economic disenfranchisement was as central a civil rights issue as the vote or ongoing racist violence.

“We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the north,” King told a crowd at Soldier Field on July 10, 1966. “We are tired of paying more for less.”

The next year, African-American home buyers came to the same conclusion when they began to organize the Contract Buyers League, which went on to launch a series of dramatic payment strikes and a pair of groundbreaking federal lawsuits. These campaigns helped drive a wave of new civil rights legislation, including the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Yet 50 years after buyers first organized to fight the practice, contract selling is back.

This time, as the New York Times has reported, it’s large firms—many of them formed following the foreclosure crisis and helmed by Wall Street veterans—that are selling large numbers of houses on contract. The companies have attempted to give the old practice a new spin. South Carolina-based Vision Property Management manages more than 5,500 homes nationwide and, with its associated companies, has purchased at least 330 in Cook

“We never addressed racially targeted disinvestment. For most of the 20th century, we’ve just had a swing back and forth between no lending and predatory lending.”

—Rutgers University historian Beryl Satter

County. The company emphasizes its role in reducing blight, operating under the slogan “restoring America’s neighborhoods.”

But an investigation by the Chicago Reader and the Investigative Fund has found that while contract-for-deed deals can be immensely profitable for the investors who have flocked to them, they rarely pan out for wouldbe home buyers.

It’s impossible to determine exactly how frequently such sales take place, because the state of Illinois doesn’t require them to be registered publicly—individual sellers have for years used contracts for deed to sell small numbers of homes on terms that may be disadvantageous for buyers. But through a review of Cook County deeds records and interviews, the Reader identified three out-of-state companies that began selling homes through contract-for-deed agreements in Chicago in the wake of the foreclosure crisis: Harbour Portfolio Advisors, Vision Property Management, and Battery Point Financial, a New York-based company founded by a former Goldman Sachs mortgage trader that has attracted a reported $40 million in private equity funding. Copies of the contracts, obtained by the Reader and reviewed by housing experts and lawyers, reveal that they share key similarities that may stack the deck against customers from the get-go. All three companies identified in the research require customers to purchase properties “as is” and make all repairs in addition to paying property taxes and home owner’s insurance. Despite assuming the responsibilities

of home owners, customers are not granted the same protections. According to federal regulations established by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in 2013, banks can’t foreclose on home owners until they’re 120 days delinquent on their mortgage payments. Under Illinois law, banks must also sue for foreclosure in court. But contract sellers, according to the agreements, can often declare a customer in default as soon as she misses a single payment.

Meanwhile, the contracts and public records show high interest rates and prices that far exceed what the companies paid for a home, as well as, in many cases, the home’s estimated value. According to the agreements obtained by the Reader, all three companies charge interest rates of between 8 and 10 percent—roughly double the current interest rate for a standard federally backed bank loan.

Over the course of one 30-year contract-fordeed agreement we examined, a buyer could pay upwards of 35 times more for a home than the seller paid to acquire it; if successful, Smith would pay more than 200 times more for her home than the seller paid. Many customers, like Smith, may fail to make monthly payments or fall behind on taxes and repairs long before that point.

The Reader’s investigation also suggests that contract-for-deed sales continue to take place overwhelmingly in communities of color. A search of public records revealed at least 380 properties in Cook County purchased by Harbour, Vision, Battery Point or associated limited liability companies since 2009. While this amounts to a fraction of the roughly 430,000 sales of residential properties that have taken place in Cook County since 2009, the growing prevalence of contract sales—and their concentration in communities still struggling to recover from the housing crash—raises alarms. According to the most recent available U.S. Census data, Cook County is about 24 percent African-American and 25 percent Hispanic or Latino. Yet according to an analysis of our data provided by the mapping and spatial analytics technology firm Esri, more than 90 percent of the properties identified were in majority-nonwhite census tracts. In addition, more than three-quarters were in majority-black census tracts—including 87 percent of properties associated with Battery Point, 76 percent of those associated with Harbour, and 79 percent with Vision.

The distinctly racialized nature of this trend alarms housing advocates, who say that it perpetuates a cycle of predatory lending in communities of color. This is remarkably similar to what happened during the era of redlining, when black migrants from the south were

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left at the mercy of housing speculators, says Odette Williamson, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) and the coauthor of a July 2016 report about contract selling. “Having these big players enter the markets changes the dynamics and makes it more likely that [contract sales] will be more aggressively marketed to folks who have little or no other options,” Williamson says.

One of the biggest problems, say consumer advocates, is that many would-be home buyers, like Smith, don’t realize they’re entering into a type of transaction that carries few protections. In some cases, this may be the result of intentional deception: “Virtually every person I’ve talked with who dealt with Harbour thought they were becoming a home owner with a mortgage like any other mortgage,” says Sarah Bolling Mancini, another NCLC attorney. “All of Harbour’s . . . communications are designed to give that impression.”

Harbour didn’t respond to a list of questions, but in an e-mailed statement a representative said it was the company’s “mission [to] set our customers up for success.”

“We are proud of the role that Harbour has played in rebuilding communities following the 2008 mortgage crisis,” the statement read.

“Harbour provided families with an opportunity to obtain a home, potentially improve their credit and create wealth for themselves and their children. . . . We cannot understand the negative views by certain media outlets when the majority of our buyers have benefited so much more than had they been forced to remain renters for life. We do everything possible to work with our borrowers in the event that they become delinquent on their payments. Moreover, we want to make sure our buyers are afforded every possibility to stay in their homes and whenever possible assist them to obtain conventional credit.”

National Asset Advisors also declined to answer questions, but a company spokesperson provided a statement defending the legality of its agreements for deed. (Sellers may also refer to contracts for deed as “agreements for deed” or “land installment contracts.”)

“Agreements for Deed provide consumers who might not otherwise qualify for a traditional mortgage with the opportunity to purchase a home,” the statement reads. “These lawful transactions have existed for many decades and are regulated by the states.”

Vision Property also declined to answer questions, but in an e-mailed statement defended its practices.

“We are in the business of providing people in the Chicago area and elsewhere with affordable homeownership opportunities,” the statement reads. “Many of our customers

either do not want or do not qualify for a traditional mortgage. There are advantages and risks to a lease agreement, and we fully advise customers of both. When unforeseen circumstances arise and customers find themselves unable to make their lease payments, we make best efforts and work extensively to help keep them in their homes.”

Battery Point Trust president Jeremy Healey says his company’s agreements are “unique in providing the customer with the benefits of homeownership while eliminating a number of the issues associated with more traditional land contracts.” These so-called residential installment contracts, Healy says, may allow customers to recoup their equity in the home in the event of a default.

But these reassurances don’t sway consumer advocates—or regulators. In September 2016, the CFPB launched an ongoing investigation into whether Harbour and National Asset Advisors may have violated federal truth-in-lending laws. Advocates such as Bolling Mancini applaud this move. But it comes at an uncertain time for the consumer watchdog agency, which after years of attacks by the banking industry now finds itself in the crosshairs of the new presidential administration and Republican-controlled Congress.

President Donald Trump has signaled that he may roll back many of the regulations created to protect consumers following the financial crisis, pledging in January that they would be “doing a big number” on the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. In a February 3 executive order, Trump instructed the treasury secretary to review the effectiveness of all banking regulators, including the CFPB. By some accounts, the federal agency’s track record is impressive: since its creation in 2011, the CFPB has cracked down on predatory practices in mortgage, education, and auto lending, among other areas. But on February 14, Texas senator Ted Cruz beat Trump to the punch by co-introducing a bill to abolish the bureau entirely, promising to “free consumers and small businesses from the CFPB’s regulatory blockades and financial activism.” The outcome of this showdown in Washington could have a direct impact on consumers—including Smith.

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hicago’s west side, where Carolyn Smith lives, is quickly becoming a local epicenter of this new wave of contract selling. Fifty years ago, it was also the base of operations for the Contract Buyers League.

Ethel Weatherspoon, 77, is intimately familiar with this history. Since 1957, she’s lived in a two-flat in North Lawndale, just three miles from Smith’s home. Their stories are similar: After trying unsuccessfully to get a bank

Ethel Weatherspoon and her husband acquired their North Lawndale home in a contract-for-deed sale in 1957. Knowing they could lose the house “ate away at us,” she says. o ZAKKIYYAH NAJEEBAH

mortgage in the 1950s, Weatherspoon and her husband, Joseph, bought a home on contract.

Her neighborhood was a frequent target of sellers such as Moe Forman, who sold homes on contract to hundreds of black buyers in the area at an average price markup of 70 percent, according to Family Properties, a 2009 book

by Rutgers University-Newark professor of history Beryl Satter that chronicles the story of the Contract Buyers League. Satter cites a 1973 Chicago Tribune article that characterized Forman and his fellow contract sellers as a force that “moved like a reaper thru north Lawndale . . . leaving behind a wasteland of abandoned buildings, rubble-strewn lots and crushed hopes.”

Beginning in the 1940s, speculators like Forman had found a way to reap immense profits from a then-legal regime of housing discrimination. The recently created Federal Housing Administration explicitly refused to back loans to African-Americans, creating an opening for white middlemen, who would stoke panic about integration among fleeing white home owners, buy their properties cheaply using federally backed mortgages, and then turn around and sell the homes to credit-starved African-Americans at significantly higher prices.

The contract seller would retain the deed to the home until the buyer paid it off—something that almost never occurred, thanks to sky-high monthly payments as well as hidden fees J

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 11

Contract housing continued from 11

and insurance. Most often, the seller would end up repossessing the home after the buyer missed a single monthly payment, and then begin the process again with a new family.

Thus, during a time when the government actively supported white families in building wealth through home ownership, federal housing policy further immiserated black families.

There were in essence “two housing markets— one legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by predators,” wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates in “The Case for Reparations,” the 2014 Atlantic Monthly article in which he names contract selling as one of the practices through which wealth has historically been siphoned out of black communities.

John R. “Jack” Macnamara, a former Jesuit seminarian who moved to Lawndale in 1967 to help launch the Contract Buyers League and amassed a trove of data from African-American home buyers on the south and west sides, estimates that more than $500 million was “legally stolen” in this fashion from Chicago’s black families between 1940 and 1970. (Macnamara says that would be more than $3 billion in today’s dollars.)

Weatherspoon’s contract was typical in this respect. She remembers agreeing to pay $24,000 for the home, or about $205,000 in today’s money. She says she made a modest down payment, followed by monthly installments of $300, the equivalent of $2,500 today.

She and her husband both made decent wages: he worked for the Chicago Transit Authority; she earned $1.25 an hour, or roughly $10.80 in today’s money, working for a mail-order catalog company. But in order to make the monthly payments, “we had to sacrifice a lot,” she says, skimping on groceries and leaving their children with grandparents in order to work long hours. Although other contract buyers at the time didn’t understand that they hadn’t truly purchased their homes until they were on the verge of losing them, Weatherspoon and her husband discovered their predicament early on, and knew that if they fell behind they could lose everything. “It ate away at us,” she says.

One day in the late 60s, Weatherspoon answered a knock at the door and found herself talking with a young organizer who began asking questions about her home—one of “Jack’s scouts” from the Contract Buyers League, she remembers with a chuckle. Weatherspoon was no stranger to social activism; she was the president of her block club and regularly lobbied local aldermen for improved neighborhood services. Some three years earlier, Martin Luther King Jr. had given a speech on her front lawn after one of his landmark fair housing marches—a chance occurrence that

12 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

Four Contract Buyers League families are evicted from their homes on the 9500 block of South Emerald Avenue in March 1970. Members organized a payment strike in an effort to get everyone’s payments reduced. o SUN-TIMES PRINT COLLECTION

left a lasting impression on her. Her husband didn’t want to air their financial troubles, but Weatherspoon went to one of the league’s meetings in spite of his objections. After hearing other home buyers speak, she decided to join then and there.

The Contract Buyers League went on to launch a series of attacks against unscrupulous lenders—most notably, a payment strike joined by hundreds of families. Group members withheld their rent each month, putting it aside in an escrow account until the contract sellers agreed to reduce all their payments at once. When the sellers began evicting home buyers for nonpayment, the group would simply assemble and move them back in the next day, Weatherspoon recalls.

By the summer of 1971, this strategy forced contract sellers to renegotiate 155 contracts, reducing each family’s remaining payments by an average of $14,000. The national headlines and documentation produced by the Contract Buyers League also helped push forward new fair-lending legislation. The 1968 Fair Housing Act had prohibited discrimination in the sale and rental of housing; the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) additionally required that banks meet the credit needs of all com-

munities where they do business, a measure intended to put an end to redlining. Weatherspoon and her husband finally paid off their home after the strikes helped them secure what she estimates was a $10,000 decrease in their remaining payments. Her house has since seen four generations of family come and go—most recently her great-grandchildren, who often spend their days in her living room while their parents are at work.

Unfortunately, the wider story of housing discrimination doesn’t end there. New civil rights legislation made outright discrimination in lending illegal, but it didn’t reset the clock on decades of entrenched segregation or the yawning racial wealth gap. Even absent legalized racial bigotry on the part of lenders or landlords, denying applicants on the basis of collateral or credit history has resulted in higher rates of denial for loans and housing among African-Americans. Thanks to the continued correlation of race and wealth, as well as weak enforcement against intentional racial bias, the CRA and related legislation reduced racial disparities in lending and home ownership during the next two decades, but fell far short of eliminating them altogether. A 1992 study by the Boston Federal Reserve, for example, found

that African-Americans were still roughly 60 percent more likely to be rejected for mortgage loans than other borrowers.

Meanwhile, a spree of financial deregulation pushed by Reagan-era conservatives paved the way for the rise of the subprime loan industry in the 1990s. Freed from interest rate caps and bolstered by the new mortgage-backed securities market, new nonbank lenders began to do brisk business, and the number of subprime loans grew by 900 percent between 1993 and 1999. From the get-go, African-Americans and Latinos were approximately twice as likely as whites to receive subprime loans. Persistent lack of access to credit and continued segregation made their neighborhoods a quick-andeasy target for predatory loans. As Coates put it in the Atlantic, “When subprime lenders went looking for prey, they found black people waiting like ducks in a pen.”

In other words, the fundamental conditions that produced contract selling never changed.

“We never really addressed that there is racially targeted disinvestment,” says Satter, whose 2009 book Coates cites extensively.

“For most of the 20th century, we’ve just had a swing back and forth between no lending and predatory lending.”

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Few places illustrate this better than hypersegregated Chicago, where, again and again, black and Latino neighborhoods have been hit with the full force of this pendulum. In North Lawndale, for example, Satter notes that the Contract Buyers League’s relative success in winning fairer terms for Weatherspoon and her compatriots didn’t stop speculators from preying on the next generation of neighborhood residents. By the early 2000s, subprime lenders such as Bank One, New Century, and Countrywide Financial—the now defunct mortgage giant that settled discrimination suits with both the U.S. Department of Justice and the Illinois attorney general’s office—were among the top lenders in the neighborhood.

Subprime lenders flooded previously credit-starved neighborhoods with junk loans, a process that came to be dubbed “reverse redlining.” By 2006, 37 new mortgages were being initiated for every 100 residential parcels in North Lawndale—the third-highest rate of any neighborhood in the city, according to data from the DePaul University Institute for Housing Studies. Nationwide, more than 20 percent of subprime loans made that year resulted in default, more than five times the rate for prime loans; this resulted in a wave of foreclosures in low-income communities of color. Between 2005 and 2015, nearly 40 percent of the homes in North Lawndale went into foreclosure. In the aftermath of the crisis, the pendulum once again swung back in the other direction and credit dried up almost entirely.

By 2011, new mortgages were being originated in North Lawndale at a rate of just 2.9 per 100 parcels, among the lowest rates in the city.

Enter investment firms like Harbour Portfolio Advisors. The devastation of the foreclosure crisis left in its wake the perfect conditions for the return of contract selling—this time by companies flush with investor cash who could scoop up large numbers of cheap, vacant homes and resell them in communities where credit is once again scarce and residents are desperate for stable, affordable housing.

Contract-for-deed sales also offered an attractive loophole from the growing set of regulations on traditional mortgages following the financial crisis. “In the same way that you saw [subprime lenders like] Countrywide get really big in the late 1990s,” says David Reiss, research director of the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School, “one of the real attractions for the businesses operating in this space is that they are underregulated.”

Between October 2016 and February 2017, the Reader canvassed properties owned by Vision or Harbour. Brief conversations with more than a dozen individuals who iden- J

Scenes from the Contract Buyers League payment strike and subsequent evictions in the winter and spring of 1970. Clockwise from top left: A youth protesting the eviction of CBL families from the 9200 block of South Eggleston Avenue flips a policeman over his back; a cordon of deputy sheriffs surrounds furniture in the front yard of a CBL home on South Prairie Avenue; a sheriff’s deputy guards a home on South Emerald Avenue where police had smashed windows during an eviction and used a chemical spray on eight people who’d barricaded themselves inside the home; sheets and plastic covers protect the furniture of a CBL family evicted from South Union Avenue; CBL supporters carry furniture back into a home, helping thwart an eviction. o SUN-TIMES PRINT COLLECTION

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 13

Contract housing continued from 13

tified themselves as contract buyers suggest that many, like Smith, saw the unconventional process as their best shot at achieving the American dream. Others said they had already owned and then lost a home through foreclosure and felt that wrecked credit left them few other options. Some were also immigrants with limited English proficiency.

In November 2016, a local television station in Green Bay, Wisconsin, aired interviews with two individuals identified as former local employees of Vision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “My big problem with the culture [at the company] was that we knowingly manipulated people’s bad situations for our own gain,” said one individual in the segment.

“We sold a considerable amount of houses to people who were making a $721 [per] month social security check, and with $228 monthly payments, they had no business living in the house. They obviously didn’t have the means to repair it themselves or pay somebody to repair it.” The other individual, identified as a former Vision employee who handled deed records and other paperwork, alleged that the company had instructed her to find loopholes to avoid paying sales taxes.

Satter says she wasn’t surprised to see contract loans reinvented as a tool of Wall Street. While making predatory loans to African-Americans was once the province of “semi-marginal operators” and individual opportunists, she says, “the subprime mortgage crisis was an example of [lenders] learning that there’s an immense amount of money to be made from taking advantage of minority populations. It leaked out into the mainstream.”

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ince 2008, Wall Street has found no shortage of methods to make hay of the housing crisis it helped precipitate.

Hedge funds and private equity firms have bought more than 100,000 distressed mortgages nationwide from banks and federal agencies, often foreclosing on and then renting or reselling the properties, the New York Times has reported. Meanwhile, the affordable housing crunch has led some private equity groups to take a turn as landlords; the largest, the Blackstone Group, reportedly has purchased nearly 50,000 foreclosed single-family homes nationwide.

Harbour and similar operators also saw an opportunity. Banks were retreating from the housing market, leaving an opening for nontraditional actors to fill soaring demand for affordable housing and credit. At the same time, scores of homes were available at a significant discount from banks and federal agencies

14 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

Jesuit seminarian John R. “Jack” Macnamara huddles with college students helping him combat inflated property contracts in North Lawndale in May 1968. o SUN-TIMES PRINT COLLECTION

scrambling to offload foreclosed properties from their books. The February 2016 New York Times article found that, nationwide, Harbour was the largest buyer of homes through Fannie Mae’s bulk sales program between 2010 and 2014, paying an average price of just $8,000 per property. Many need thousands of dollars’ worth of work before they are habitable again, but Harbour’s contract puts this onus on prospective home buyers.

Take Smith’s house, for example. Had she worked with a real estate agent, as most traditional home buyers do, she might have learned that Harbour bought the home from Fannie Mae in 2011 for just $519. But Smith didn’t know this when she signed a contract in December 2011 promising to pay Harbour $34,025 for the house. Nor did she realize— though the details were given in her multipage contract—that at the 10 percent interest rate charged by Harbour, she would pay a total of $107,492.40 for the house over the course of 30 years—if she didn’t default before then.

Smith isn’t alone in facing these kinds of extreme markups. A Vision contract reviewed by the Reader obligates the customer to pay $128,640 over the course of 30 years for a house the company bought the week before for $5,350. Nor is Smith likely the only contract buyer whose home turned out to be in far worse condition than she’d expected. The city has filed dozens of lawsuits against the companies for violations of the municipal housing code, in many cases ultimately ordering the demolition of a property. Housing advocates worry that contract sellers may be creating a public

safety issue by selling dilapidated homes to low-income buyers who may not be able to afford expensive repairs alongside high monthly payments. In 2012, for example, a Minneapolis couple sued Vision, claiming, according to the complaint, that the company had knowingly sold them a home tainted with lead paint and removed a neon-green hazard sticker the city had posted on the front door prior to the purchase.

The company settled the suit for an undisclosed amount, according to the New York Times.

Moreover, many would-be home owners may end up defaulting before this point, the Reader’s investigation suggests. Since 2015, Vision and its related LLCs have filed for eviction against more than 40 individuals.

While it’s not clear how many of the at least 330 properties in Cook County owned by the companies have been sold through contracts for deed, this suggests a default rate of 12 percent at a minimum. The delinquency rate for all residential mortgages, meanwhile, was 4.15 percent as of October 2016. Asked how many contract buyers had successfully completed their payments and obtained the deed to their homes, neither Vision nor Harbour provided the Reader with a response. Battery Point Trust’s Healey said that none of the company’s contracts had been paid off to date, but that he expected to see “a significant delivery of deeds as the portfolio seasons,” as most contracts were “less than a year old.” Healey also said that the company had taken action to recover fewer than 1 percent of properties sold through contracts to date.

But NCLC attorney Bolling Mancini, who

reviewed the company’s contract for the Reader, said that “the additional provisions that are not common to most land contracts still do not alleviate all concerns with regard to these transactions.” In addition, records show that Harbour and Vision have resold dozens of their properties in Cook County to other companies, a practice that can put contract buyers at risk of losing their homes even if they’re current on payments: if no public records of the contract exist, the new company may refuse to honor it. One of the companies that eventually purchased a Harbour home, Z Financial Illinois G Properties, made headlines last year when it unloaded the deeds for several of its properties on a homeless man after the city filed suits seeking to force the firm to rehab or demolish the dilapidated homes.

Public records show that Smith’s home, for example, was sold in 2015 to RockTop Partners, a Texas-based firm whose website says it specializes in “real estate assets with title, documentation, or compliance issues.” While the company that collects her monthly payments has changed three times, sending her into a maze of paperwork, she has narrowly managed to hang on to her home by scrimping and saving. She’s catching up on her monthly payments and no longer receives letters and phone calls threatening eviction.

Smith has since discovered another problem, however. Under her agreement with Harbour, she had been responsible for property taxes, which the company paid on her behalf out of the monthly sum she sent them.

But at some point the tax payments lagged behind what was owed, possibly when Smith fell behind on her monthly payments to the company. She says she was never notified that taxes weren’t being paid. (The company didn’t answer questions about Smith’s taxes.) In November 2016, Smith received notice from the city that her unpaid taxes had been purchased at a tax auction. That means she could now lose the house to tax foreclosure.

Even if she manages to avoid that, Smith knows she faces an uphill battle to keep her home. She pulls out her most recent statement and laughs. Thanks to the high interest rate and late fees, five years of payments have barely made a dent in her principal balance.

She originally agreed to pay $34,025. She still has $33,000 to go.

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or consumers like Smith, Illinois law offers few remedies. In the event of a default, there’s little to stop contract sellers from pocketing all the money a customer has put into payments and repairs and moving on to the next buyer. The state does extend one concrete protection to contract buyers:

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the CFPB as a cop on the beat to protect consumers.” Harbour has until mid-March to turn over documents to the agency.

But the outcome of CFPB’s investigation of Harbour may not matter much if the Trump administration gets its way. Republicans hope to oust the agency’s current head, Obama appointee Richard Cordray, and replace him with someone the current president deems more business friendly. Reportedly on the short list is Brian Brooks, a former vice chairman and chief legal officer for OneWest, a bank accused of widespread foreclosure abuses. Even short of shutting down the consumer agency, as Ted Cruz hopes to do, another bill recently introduced by Republican lawmakers would hand control of its budget from the Federal Reserve to Congress, allowing lawmakers to dramatically limit its size and scope.

The broader regulatory horizon is just as bleak. New treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin is a former OneWest chairman whom housing advocates have dubbed the “foreclosure king.”

Housing and Urban Development Department secretary Ben Carson has said some fair-housing laws are a failed attempt at “social engineering.” Not only have the lessons of the most recent housing crisis gone unlearned, with these and other potential changes, five decades of civil rights advances, insufficient as they were, could now go up in smoke.

Today, when Weatherspoon walks down her street, she can still point out which houses were sold to neighbors on contract a half century ago. Some of the families were able to keep their homes and still live there today; others have since moved away or are now deceased. She also remembers the homes where, more recently, neighbors fell victim to subprime loans and were forced to move out.

She worries that rising property taxes will eventually force her out too, and shakes her head at the idea of another wave of contract selling ravaging the west side. In December 2016, Jack Macnamara convened a meeting to discuss how the Contract Buyers League could be “revitalized” to help the next generation of contract buyers, but Weatherspoon jokes that this time around, she might have difficulty fending off sheriffs and moving furniture back into homes after an eviction. “The girl’s not what she used to be,” she says.

Most of all, she struggles with how little seems to have changed in the past 50 years.

“Even after you struggle for so long and you win,” she says, “it turns out there are still other ways worked out for you to lose.” v

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Those who are more than five years into a contract and who owe less than 80 percent of the original purchase price can’t be thrown out without a foreclosure process, explains Daniel Lindsey, an attorney with Chicago’s Legal Assistance Foundation who reviewed the three companies’ contracts for the Reader. But anyone who defaults before then—or finds themselves unexpectedly on the hook for thousands of dollars in repairs—is out of luck.

Basic consumer fraud protections do apply—if a company has lied about the condition of a home, for example—but rather than going to court to try to prove this, many contract buyers just walk away.

“It’s so fraudulent, it’s so unfair,” Lindsey says.

“Yet it’s so hard to get a court to rule that way.”

Some other states have marginally stronger laws. An Oklahoma statute, for example, requires that all contracts for deed be treated as mortgages, preventing sellers from declaring forfeiture and evicting residents immediately. But the National Consumer Law Center believes that the “patchwork” of state laws is part of the problem. In its July report, the group outlined a set of recommended requirements, including that inspections and appraisals be conducted independently, that contracts be recorded, and that buyers have the right to be refunded money spent on repairs and property taxes in the event that they default. Other advocates have also called on federal agencies like Fannie Mae to stop selling properties to companies accused of deceptive practices until they clean up their acts.

“These companies could make these transactions into something that really gives people a chance at home ownership if they wanted to— they can afford it,” Satter concludes. Instead, “it’s a totally predetermined situation. . . . It’s the cat saying, ‘I’m giving the mouse a chance.’”

The NCLC says that the best way to protect consumers is with federal-level protections, which the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau currently has the authority to establish.

On February 16, the consumer watchdog won a preliminary battle when a federal judge affirmed its authority to subpoena and investigate Harbour and National Asset Advisors.

Harbour had resisted complying with the CFPB’s November 2016 demand for documents, arguing in its court filings that the bureau lacks authority to investigate the company because it doesn’t offer “credit” as defined under federal law. Instead, the company argued, its arrangement with tenants is more akin to a traditional residential lease. The NCLC’s Bolling Mancini says Harbour’s argument that it doesn’t extend credit “defies plain English,” and calls the bureau’s initial actions against Harbour “a perfect example of why we need

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Rebecca Burns was a winner of the I.F. Stone Award from the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 15

ARTS & CULTURE

The cast of Gender Breakdown o ANNA SODZIAK

THEATER

Yes, women are still getting screwed in Chicago theaters

By DEANNA ISAACS

G

ender Breakdown, Collaboraction’s angry and absorbing ensemble piece about inequity in the theater community, is rooted in something equally dramatic, but a lot drier: a ten-month research project undertaken

by Kay Kron, an actor, writer, and, currently, development associate at Chicago Children’s Theatre, as the “capstone” project for the DePaul University master’s degree in nonprofit management she’ll complete this year.

Kron’s research was inspired by her experience in local theater since graduating from DePaul with a BFA in acting in 2009. As she notes in an FAQ about the project, she decided to conduct the study because “I envy the talent of my female peers, but the careers of my male peers, and I think that’s fucked.”

Conducted with coresearcher (and Collaboraction intern) Mariah Schultz, the study is a look at female representation in various theater-industry job categories at theaters nominated for Jeff Awards for the 2015-2016 season. The data, which does not include musicals, covers 52 theaters and 250 plays.

The results are sobering but not surprising, as show creator Dani Bryant observes in a Gender Breakdown program note. “We had a pretty good collective understanding of what

that data might be . . . because we were living it,” Bryant wrote. The show is made up of “qualitative” material—personal stories informally culled and distilled from more than 200 interviews—but the Kron-Schultz research, represented by a few graphs in the program, puts the numbers to it.

Even allowing for the likely conservative tilt of the Jeff-nomination filter, those numbers are revealing: 75 percent of the plays produced in Chicago in 2015-2016 were written by men.

And 77 percent of those produced by large Equity theaters had majority-male casts.

In all but a single job category the positions that include artistic control were dominated by men. And there’s a pretty good chance you can guess the outlier: yep, 89 percent of costume designers were women.

Otherwise, women were more likely to get hired to carry out administrative duties, whether in the wings or in the office: 75 percent of stage managers were female, and so were 61 percent of managing directors.

Women buy the majority of theater tickets and make up the majority of theater audiences, but they accounted for only 43 percent of the actors hired, 38 percent of artistic directors, 36 percent of directors, 35 percent of lighting designers, 30 percent of scene designers, and

12 percent of sound designers.

Kron, who told me she wishes she had data on the acting pool, which she thinks is much larger for women than for men, says the results for Chicago may be slightly better than those elsewhere. And the trend isn’t necessarily positive: she cites other studies, including one that found that, in 2008-2009, only 12.6 percent of plays on Broadway were authored by women, lower than the 12.8 percent they wrote a century earlier.

Still, Kron’s 38 percent finding for female artistic directors is significantly higher than the 15 percent the League of Chicago Theatres reported among its member organizations in 2010. And it’s hugely higher than recently released figures for the film industry, where, according to a University of Southern California-Annenberg School study, only 4 percent of the 1,000 top-grossing films in the last decade were directed by women. (For more about that, check out this weekend’s Chicago Feminist Film Festival at Columbia College.)

Bryant’s program note—and some of the most memorable stories in Gender Breakdown—attests that the real “gut-punch” situations turn up when another factor besides gender is included. If you’re a woman, you’re underrepresented, but if you’re a woman of

color, you’re barely there. Kron says there’s some guesswork in their data on this, but according to their study, females of color constituted only 5 percent of playwrights, 4 percent of directors, and 2 percent of artistic directors in their pool of Chicago theaters.

And the research doesn’t include data on transgender or gender-nonconforming persons, though the issue is raised in the show. (Kron says they had to limit the number of variables in order to make the study feasible.)

That contributed to what Bryant explains as a shift in her own assumptions about “what’s not working,” from the conviction that “straight white men take up too much space,” to something more personal.

“Yes, straight white men still take up too much space,” Bryant wrote, “but so do cisgendered, heterosexual white women, including myself.”

Kron quotes playwright Marsha Norman in reference to another study that showed only 22 percent of shows produced were written by women: “If life worked like theater, four out of five things you had ever heard would have been said by men.” v

ß @DeannaIsaacs

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16 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

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READER RECOMMENDED

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Caroline Neff and Tim Hopper o LIZ LAUREN

THEATER

Miserable Russians

By TONY ADLER

R

obert Falls marks three decades as artistic director of Goodman Theatre this year. So how does he celebrate? In part by directing Uncle Vanya—Anton Chekhov’s dark comedy about a bunch of miserable Russians, facing mortality with the growing certainty that they’ve wasted their lives.

The choice seems telling, but Falls says, no, he’s not in the throes of an existential crisis. Uncle Vanya, he wrote in response to my e-mailed question, is “one of the greatest (and most deceptively difficult) plays ever written. . . . I like the play. I like all Chekhov plays and this one has become clearer with age. Didn’t think much beyond that. By the way, I don’t think I’ve wasted [my] extraordinarily blessed and happy life.”

It’d be foolish of me to question that last sentence when Falls has so far led one of the most charmed professional lives in Chicago—really, American—theater, jumping from tiny Wisdom Bridge to land prettily in what’s more or less turned out to be a tenured seat at a major regional theater. Falls has done Broadway, opera, and not one but two great stagings of The Iceman Cometh. Even his train wrecks, such as an athletically decadent 2006 King Lear, tend at least to be bold in their awfulness.

Can’t argue with his assessment of Uncle Vanya either. It’s a shaggy, sweet, funny,

painful masterwork. And, with this staging, Falls indeed gives it all the clarity of his years.

Chekhov’s title character is a 47-year-old, unmarried gentleman farmer, living on the family estate he runs with his adult niece, Sonya. We’re told Vanya used to be passionate—“lit from within,” in fact. But he’s long since gone dark, he says, because “nobody wanted any of my light.”

Even so, he might’ve soldiered on, burying his loneliness in ledger entries, except that his former brother-in-law, Sonya’s dad, Serebryakov, has come for a long visit. Vanya and Sonya have grounds enough to hate Serebryakov, if only because they’ve slaved for decades to subsidize his big-city career as a philosophy professor. But gouty old Serebryakov has added romantic insult to injury by having an impossibly young and beautiful second wife, Yelena, who wanders the estate in a coma of uselessness. Smitten, Vanya alternates between frantic wooing and a deep, vodka-fueled lethargy.

Sonya, meanwhile, is all too aware that Yelena has absorbed not only Vanya’s attentions but those of her own secret love, an aging, alcoholic, yet poetic doctor named Astrov. Uncle Vanya can be thought of as a sort of thwarted version of Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde: all yearnings and no orgasms. Nearly everyone we meet exists in a state of suspended adoration.

With an enormous assist from a fluent, gently idiomatic English-language adaptation by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker (based on Margarita Shalina’s literal translation), Falls finds and follows a simple, human arc through Chekhov’s brilliantly deliberate mess. No Lear-like overreaching here. No ostentatious displays. No grand directorial conception, it seems, other than to get at the truth of these particular hearts and the manner of their intertwinings.

Falls’s e-mail comment that the script has “become clearer with age” is proven over and over again throughout—partly in his appreciation for the humor implicit in the characters’ earnest folly, partly in his well-honed storytelling, and equally in his respect for the suffering of people who see their chances dwindling to nil, the consequences of their actions—or lack of same—finally kicking in.

Tim Hopper makes those mortal stakes vivid as Vanya, his angst and foolishness flashing compulsively through him like stroboscopic effects. At the other end of the spectrum, Marton Csonkas plays Astrov close to the vest, disclosing his inner life in small gestures offered apparently in passing. A perfect example: we see him at the beginning of the play, resting, exhausted, on a couch, yet jumping up (no weakness here!) at the sound of approaching footsteps—both his vanity and sense of duty expressed in a single motion. That Caroline Neff is cast against type as ostensibly frumpy Sonya renders her confused sense of self all the more evident, while Kristen Bush shows us how thoroughly Yelena is confined by the projections of the men around her. Marilyn Dodds Frank, Mary Ann Thebus, and Larry Neumann Jr. are all superb as idiosyncratic members of the household who look silly yet have as much to lose as anyone and far less control. Between them, Todd Rosenthal’s set and Keith Parham’s lighting allow the estate to speak eloquently for itself. v R UNCLE VANYA Through 3/19: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Tue 7:30 PM; also Sun 3/5 and 3/19, 7:30 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $20-$62.

ß @taadler

Voices from the Dust Bowl o COURTESY THE ARTIST

THEATER

Eclectic performing-arts series LookOut winds down

IN A CITY THAT PRIDES ITSELF on its inclusive and varied performing-arts scene, Steppenwolf’s eclectic LookOut series, which debuted this past summer at the 1700 Theatre, stands out. The last half of the winter leg, taking place from now until the beginning of April, boasts a diverse sequence of shows ranging from comedy to spoken word to music.

This Sunday, Fifth House Ensemble and the Chicago-based bluegrass band Henhouse Prowlers come together to perform VOICES FROM THE DUST BOWL. During the Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of farmers abandoned their homes on the poor, barren plains and migrated west toward California in hopes of making a decent living, only to find a meager number of jobs that paid next to nothing. Presented in partnership with Interfaith Worker Justice, a nonprofit advocacy group, the show intends to illustrate how this period in American history remains relevant by focusing on debates surrounding minimum wage and the present-day migrant crisis in the Middle East and Africa.

Later this month, on March 22, writer Charles Kouri brings his “equal rights rock musical” 24 WORDS to the stage. The title references the 24 words that make up the Equal Rights Amendment—a proposed addition to the Constitution that would have made it illegal to deny one’s rights “on the account of sex” but was never ratified in a number of states, including Illinois. Inspired by the fact that women still don’t have equal protection under the law across the country, 24 Words takes the audience on a musical trip through the past 200 years spent fighting for gender equality. —ABBEY SCHUBERT LOOKOUT Sun

3/5-Mon 4/4, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1700 Theatre, 1700 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, times and prices vary.

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 17

Dani Tucker o AUSTIN D. OIE

THEATER

When bad things happen to gentle people

By MAX MALLER

A

n adaptation of the Dostoevsky short story variously translated as “A Gentle Creature,” “The Gentle Woman,” and “The Meek One,” Gentle, the latest from TUTA Theatre (the acronym stands for “The Utopian Theatre Asylum”), is an examination of hurt male pride. It concerns a washed-up pawnbroker (Tom Dacey Carr) who, sensing himself a victim in life’s grand scheme, marries a desperate girl with few other options (Dani Tucker). Adapter-director Zeljko Djukic’s version is emotionally canny, with an especially effective performance by Tucker, who can say more with a trembling eyebrow than the depraved pawnbroker ever manages to convey in incessant monologues.

The pawnbroker meets the innocent girl one day in his shop, where she has come in prepared to part with the family icon: a Madonna and child, set against a gilt background in the archaic Byzantine style, whose frame alone is worth good money. The sacred painting’s beauty triggers an urge in the pawnbroker to possess the object for himself in order to defile it somehow. Just this is what he proceeds to do with the girl, first charming her with a few off-the-cuff quotations from Goethe, then all but buying her from her two evil aunts, who’d been planning to marry her off to a truck driver. Once married to the girl, the pawnbroker goes on to ruin her delicate health through icy neglect and silence, shutting her up in the two rooms they share above his barely respectable shop with only a maid, Lukerya (the skillful and moving Lauren Demerath), to keep her company. Throughout,

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the pawnbroker—anticipating and dismissing the audience’s incredulity—insists that it’s the dying girl, not he, who’s the tyrant in their relationship. “Oh, the irony of fate!” he exclaims. Naturally, our sympathies are firmly with the real victim.

But there’s a flaw in the presentation of this harrowing story as a work of theater, one common to many adaptations that strive to be “literary”: the protagonist simply does too much talking. In the short story it’s understood that these diatribes are someone’s thoughts—unspoken and all too often unspeakable. Here large swaths of the pawnbroker’s incessant recrimination and self-analysis are reproduced wholesale, and given voice, they only generate awkwardness, as time and again the pawnbroker interrupts a scene with his young wife to square himself downstage and expound on his philosophy: “We are cursed, we are all cursed (myself especially).”

The melodrama contrasts with the production’s minimalist design: Kurtis Boetcher’s set is almost completely white, with blank cabinet doors along the wall that contain the pawnbroker’s till and his small library. Keith Parham’s lighting design is a tour de force, shrouding the front of Carr’s face in dim rim light so that the fiendish pawnbroker appears most in the dark, most sinister, at the very lip of the stage. v R GENTLE Through 3/26: Wed-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Den Theatre, 13291333 N. Milwaukee, 773-609-2336, tutato.com, $40, $35 students and seniors.

ß @mallerjour

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ARTS & CULTURE LIT

What does it mean to be midwestern?

By DANIEL KAY HERTZ

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he rust belt is getting more attention than it’s had in a long time. Since November an entire subgenre of journalism has been dedicated to understanding the people who elected the new president, many with datelines from Michigan or Ohio or Wisconsin.

On the other hand, as Belt Publishing founder Anne Trubek lamented shortly after the election, writing about the midwest isn’t necessarily writing for midwesterners, much less by them. There’s something anthropological, even “colonial,” as Trubek puts it, in stories that purport to explain former steel towns and lakeside diners. And if you happen to be a schoolteacher or sales rep in a blue midwestern city, or black or Muslim or undocumented, it’s unclear how much of this wave of midwestern journalism sees you as a reader or as a subject.

In this context, a slim pair of new books from Belt Publishing takes on greater heft.

The independent Cleveland-based publishing house has made covering the rust belt for a rust-belt audience with rust-belt writers its unsung and noble task since 2013. But these releases are an ambitious attempt to cover an entire region, authored by its natives and for them as well. One, Edward McClelland’s How to Speak Midwestern, rescues our regional dialects, demolishing the myth that midwestern speech is accentless; the second, Mark Athitakis’s The New Midwest: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction of the Great Lakes, Great Plains, and Rust Belt, profiles dozens of contemporary novelists from the middle of the country. (Athitakis and McClelland are onetime Reader staffers, as is Martha Bayne, Belt’s senior editor.)

McClelland’s book, in particular, could’ve been a light romp of references to Bears superfans and Fargo characters. At a glance, that seems to be the approach: the latter half of How to Speak Midwestern is an alphabet-

ical glossary of quirky regionalisms. But that format belies the depth that McClelland brings to his study—between entries for “Flintstone” (a person from Flint, Michigan) and “devil strip” (what Akronites call “the grassy area between the sidewalk and the street”), there’s “ruin porn,” a precis on the debate over turning boarded-up homes and dilapidated factories into art and the ethics of looking at what the midwest has, in places, become.

The first, narrative half of the book is even more direct. “An important part of Midwestern identity is believing you don’t have an accent,” McClelland writes on the first page, that “there’s absolutely nothing exotic about Midwestern speech”—because there’s not supposed to be anything exotic about the midwest at all. How did that happen? McClelland writes that in the years after World War II, massmedia executives settled on a particular strain of native-born white midwestern English as an all-American compromise between the elitist trans-Atlantic accent (think Katharine Hepburn), the various urban working-class ethnic accents (think Bernie Sanders), and the still-stigmatized southern drawls.

But McClelland argues that this decision sidelined nearly as many voices from the midwest as from the rest of the country. The next three chapters document the various ways that midwestern speech deviates from “midwestern speech” as defined by broadcast television in the 20th century: the Minnesotan tendency to drop prepositions (a legacy of Finnish immigrants); the distorting influence of Chicago via Route 66, which affected the accents of Saint Louis residents; and the gendered roles of some industrial neighborhoods, with housewives saying “them” but their steelworker husbands saying “dem.”

Yet over and over, McClelland will summarize a subregional accent before declaring that its future is dim. In Pittsburgh, a woman

tells him, “We don’t say ‘yinz’; our parents say ‘yinz.’” In many places, local dialects are more of an in-joke than an everyday reality. When Michigan ran a “Say Yes to Michigan” tourist campaign, Upper Peninsula residents bought bumper stickers that said, “Say Yah to Da U.P., Eh?” Perhaps it’s no surprise that linguistic distinctiveness depends on social distinctiveness—each way of speaking belongs to a particular way of life, and when that way of life is threatened, so is its speech. Deindustrialization has scattered millions of people and their blue-collar accents to the Sunbelt or college, where McClelland writes that conformity with a more standard middle-class English is rewarded. The end of mass immigration from Scandinavia means each generation of Minnesotans is a generation further removed from the source of their singsongy accent. New waves of immigrants signal that midwestern children growing up today are more likely to pepper their sentences with phrases in Spanish than German or Irish English.

As the title suggests, much of The New Midwest is also concerned with contrasts, but in sometimes counterintuitive ways. “A few years ago I noticed something about my favorite works of contemporary fiction set in the Midwest,” Athitakis writes. “They were all set in the past.” But these settings are a way of grappling with change, he argues, not avoiding it. In particular, contemporary midwestern literature mines “the tension between the region’s old idealism and its present day reality” not by lamenting a long-gone golden age, but by reappraising that “idyllic” past from a modern perspective.

In other words, the region not only no longer resembles its wholesome heartland mythology—it never did. One of the book’s strongest passages considers the domestic, postwar Iowa-set novels of Marilynne Robinson. Interpreted by coastal reviewers as

paeans to “goodness, a property Midwesterners like to think of as a regional birthright,” all-American stories “set in the deepest Midwest . . . driven by hope,” Athitakis scratches their surface and finds “novels [about] the Civil Rights Movement, poverty, violence, prostitution, troubled faith, and failure.” He quotes Robinson herself on her novel Home, whose title is not what it might seem: “If you say about a 45-year-old man that he has gone back home, it tends to mean that the world hasn’t worked out.”

Other novels similarly trouble the midwestern idyll, from Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You, about the intersection of boredom, tragedy, and race in 1970s Ohio, to Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, which Athitakis interprets as a bleak, white-collar commentary on the famous midwestern work ethic.

At times, though, it can seem as if Athitakis’s “new” midwest consists mainly of knocking down old stereotypes. OK, we’re not all simple Nordic farmers—but then what are we?

You might find some kind of answer in Chicago. Long before Trump made the city a go-to reference for the antiheartland, the midwest’s largest city had an often uneasy relationship with the rest of the region, which in turn was, and is, more than a little wary of Chicago as well. Athitakis highlights how novelists have used that tension as a driving force in their stories, presenting the region’s large cities as a more welcoming, cosmopolitan option for J

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 19

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continued from 19

those who don’t find room for themselves in the prairie. In Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names, for example, a Ugandan refugee resettled in downstate Illinois is tormented by the area’s thinly veiled racism but finds an escape hatch in Chicago.

At the same time, the divide isn’t as sharp as it might seem, as the people seeking relief in the city are often looking for the same things as the small-town residents they leave behind. In Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, Detroit is a place where black families struggle against redlining and police violence—but it’s also a place where they can stake a claim to their own version of a homestead.

A reader of McClelland’s and Athitakis’s books who’s searching for a common thread of midwesternness might decide that much of it lives in these tensions themselves. As with midwestern literature, the emergence, standardization, and decline of distinctive midwestern ways of speaking tells stories about the competing identities, livelihoods, and attitudes that have defined belonging in the region.

The poles of ethnic cosmopolitanism and homogeneity; the longing for an industrial past even as other opportunities (often far from home) beckon; the basic split between the urban and the rural—there’s something particularly midwestern about these conflicts.

In interviews, Trubek has said that one of her chief difficulties has been tapping into some sense of regional solidarity: getting, say, Clevelanders to care about what happens in Detroit, and vice versa.

That means these two books are seeking to create an audience, not just find one.

And they’re making an argument many midwestern readers might be skeptical of: that we’re part of a coherent region at all.

That our fates are somehow connected, even if our ideals are not. v R HOW TO SPEAK MIDWESTERN By Edward McClelland (Belt). McClelland will be reading at Tuesday Funk, Tue 3/7, 7:30 PM, Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark, 773-334-9851, hopleaf.com, free. R THE NEW MIDWEST: A GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY FICTION OF THE GREAT LAKES, GREAT PLAINS, AND RUST BELT By Mark Athitakis (Belt).

Athitakis reads from The New Midwest, Wed 3/8, 6:30 PM, City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie, 773-235-2523, citylitbooks.com, free.

ß @DanielKayHertz 20 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

LIT

A Chicago author takes brains to court

By KATHLEEN FERRARO

A

father and husband strangles his wife and drops her out of a window in a staged suicide. Most people would view this act as coldblooded murder—but might it be the tragic result of an untreated brain cyst?

Such a possibility frames The Brain Defense, Chicago author Kevin Davis’s true-crime book, which explores the emerging role of brain science in the criminal justice system.

The above story is that of Herbert Weinstein, a well-to-do retiree with no criminal record who in 1991 admitted to killing his wife.

Expert witnesses claimed that an orange-size subarachnoid cyst (nicknamed Spyder Cystkopf) pressing on Weinstein’s brain’s frontal lobe (the center for judgment and impulse control) motivated his uncharacteristic act of violence. This controversial defense became a hallmark of his trial, which was the first U.S. case where a judge allowed a brain scan to be admitted as exculpatory evidence, ushering in a new precedent for using brain imagery to contextualize criminal behavior.

Weinstein’s case is just the tip of the iceberg. From Phineas Gage—a 19th-century man who suffered personality changes after a rod was driven completely through his head, severing his frontal lobe—to David Alonso—a loving father who anomalously attacked his wife and daughter after a head injury—The Brain Defense probes the sundry crimes, cases, and punishments of brain-injured individuals.

“People who commit crimes need to be held accountable for their actions,” Davis says. “So you get to a crossroads: This person committed a crime. What’s their mental state? I was following my curiosity—the connection between our brains, our behavior, and how that affects personality. I began to question the legal implications of whether or not someone

who’s injured is responsible for what they do.

That’s the driving question behind the book.”

Davis is no stranger to crime writing. As a young newspaper reporter in Florida, he was assigned the crime beat and was immediately attracted to the social undertones and storytelling potential of crime. From there, he wrote his first book, The Wrong Man, published in 1996.

Much like his foray into crime writing, The Brain Defense’s conception was fortuitous.

After Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head during an assassination attempt in 2011, Davis became interested in how someone with an extreme traumatic brain injury could bounce back. He dove into the complex world of neuroscience, its intersection with the law, and the brain’s effect on behavior. The book addresses the relevant ethical considerations that trail neuroscience into the legal sphere: For example, to what degree are offenders with brain damage culpable?

How should treatment be weighed against punishment for such individuals?

The brain defense isn’t without controversy.

While science has proven that certain brain abnormalities link to aberrant behavior, how and to what extent are still up for debate. The value of brain scans in the courtroom is questionable: you can’t point to a machine-made image as incontrovertible justification for criminal acts, Davis says. Instead, brain scans can be used to better understand the mind of the offender.

In The Brain Defense, Davis cites a number of pioneering lawyers and scientists who use neuroscience not to excuse criminal behavior but to help offenders find the right place in criminal justice or rehabilitation systems. Yet some lawyers, scientists, and families of victims find this approach risky—after all, if Weinstein committed one act of unpredictable violence, brain injury-induced or not, isn’t it possible that he might do so again? A PET scan can’t say.

That’s in part why there are contextual factors to consider when evaluating someone’s brain. Take Ronnie Cordell, a young man with a horrifically abusive upbringing who killed a homeless man. One can’t ignore the fact that Cordell clearly never learned right from wrong and bore the emotional damage of lifelong stress and fear, Davis writes. Or consider Kris Parson, a veteran charged with domestic violence who suffered from PTSD, memory loss, and other disabling symptoms as a result of an untreated traumatic brain injury from a blast attack in Iraq. Here, his lawyers argued, was a person who needed treatment, not time in prison.

Davis also uses the cases of psychopaths, football players, alcoholics, and individuals throughout history to illustrate the manifold types and consequences of brain injury, emphasizing that there’s no prototype for brain abnormalities and criminal behavior. Still, neuroscientists have a lot more work to do, and Davis says he’ll continue to explore neuroscience and the law, perhaps in an upcoming book, he hints.

“The key to the brain defense is living in a world where we have compassion for each other,” Davis says. “Right now, I don’t feel that. We need to have people who are making our laws and running our country who have compassion. A system in which we seek to understand and not just blindly punish is going to depend on all of us. Compassion is not incompatible with people taking responsibility. People need to be held accountable for their actions, but to what extent?” v R THE BRAIN DEFENSE By Kevin Davis (Penguin). Davis will appear for a book signing and Q&A Thu 3/2, 6 PM, Barnes & Noble, DePaul Center, 1 E. Jackson, 312-362-8792 depaul-loop.bncollege.com, and Wed 3/8, 7 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773293-2665, bookcellarinc.com. F

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EUROPEAN UNION FILM FESTIVAL

ARTS & CULTURE

Fri 3/3-Thu 3/30, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.

The Country Doctor A graying rural doctor who still makes house calls (François Cluzet of Tell No One) learns that he has cancer and reluctantly agrees to surrender his rounds to another physician while he undergoes chemotherapy; his replacement (Marianne Denicourt) is an attractive middle-aged woman with long experience as a nurse but little regard for her patients as people.

Director-cowriter Thomas Lilti, a doctor himself, brings a store of medical wisdom to the drama (“Ninety percent of the diagnosis is provided by the patient,” the ailing doctor tells his replacement, admonishing her to listen instead of talk). But that professional insight was exploited more profitably in his breakthrough feature, the biting Hippocrates: Diary of a French Doctor (2014), than in this sensitive, faintly smarmy romance. Also known as Irreplaceable. In French with subtitles.

—J.R. JONES 99 min. Fri 3/17, 2 PM, and Wed 3/22, 6 PM.

Personal Shopper

MOVIES

Join the European Union More than 60 new features make their local premieres at the 20th EU Film Festival.

T

his year the Gene Siskel Film Center presents the 20th edition of its annual European Union Film Festival, with Chicago premieres of more than 60 new features. If you’re familiar with the fest, you know it’s one of the most vibrant and eclectic film gatherings the city has to offer, and this year’s edition includes new work by Olivier Assayas, Icíar Bollaín, Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Dorris Dörrie, Bruno Dumont, François Ozon, Carlos Saura, Albert Serra, Lone Scherfig, and Thomas Lilti. Following are reviews of 16 features screening through the end of the month; for a full schedule and more information visit siskelfilmcenter.org. —J.R. JONES

22 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

Dawn Shimmering black-and-white cinematography by Wojciech Staron affords the only pleasure in this grim, unsparing drama about a Soviet collective farm in Latvia in the 1960s. Writer-director Laila Pakalnina riffs on a now-debunked propaganda story about a member of the Young Pioneers (the communist equivalent of the Boy Scouts) who was murdered by his loutish father after denouncing him as an enemy of the state. Aside from the boy, there’s no one in this 2015 feature to root for—not the peasants, who are easily incited to mayhem; nor the bureaucrat sent to evaluate the farm, whose avuncular manner masks his disdain; nor the sleepdeprived head of the collective, who’s struggling to increase production. The utopian goals of the revolution are mocked throughout the film; in the final sequence, the last thing the dying boy hears is a fairy tale about crop yields. In Latvian with subtitles.

—ANDREA GRONVALL 96 min. Fri 3/17 and Tue 3/21, 8 PM. The Fixer Inspired by actual events, this 2016 drama tells the story of a “fixer” (Tudor Istodor) hired by a French television crew to guide them through Romania in search of a young prostitute who’s been repatriated from France. The film unfolds seamlessly, with a brisk tempo and a cool, gray look that match its straightforward depiction of the crew’s wheeling and dealing. Much of the story revolves around ethics and how far the insecure protagonist will go to prove him-

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ARTS & CULTURE self to the others as a journalist. Adrian Sitaru, directing a script by Adrian and Claudia Silisteanu, seems to be building toward some explosive revelation; it never comes, though the climax and conclusion, focusing on the protagonist’s moral and ethical growth, are quietly satisfying. In French and Romanian with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 99 min. Sun 3/5, 5:15 PM, and Wed 3/8, 8 PM. Ethel & Ernest Adapted from a graphic novel by Raymond Briggs, this innocuous but charming UK animation tells the story of the author’s working-class parents from their first meeting in 1928 (when Ethel was a lady’s maid and Ernest a flirtatious milkman) to their deaths in 1971. The artwork is straightforward, the characters archetypal (Ethel is a Tory, Ernest votes for Labour), and their history fondly remembered, as if it’s been polished smooth by years of repetition. At times the movie threatens to melt into a pool of bulldog nostalgia, but it’s rescued by a wealth of authentic social detail, especially as the young couple keep a stiff upper lip during World War II (in the darkest days of the Blitz, they

sleep in a bed-size metal cage to shield themselves from falling debris). Their boy Raymond comes of age in the swinging 60s, takes up art, and marries a woman with schizophrenia, developments that prompt Ethel and Ernest to wonder what it’s all about before they disappear into the past they’ve so lovingly tended. Roger Mainwood directed from his own screenplay. —J.R. JONES 94 min. Fri 3/17 and Sat 3/18, 2 PM. A German Youth Jean-Gabriel Périot, a French filmmaker preoccupied with found footage and archival material, makes his feature debut with this history of the left-wing Red Army Faction—more commonly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang—that terrorized Germany throughout the 1970s. The documentary draws heavily on the RAF’s own agitprop films, created by radical students from the German film and TV academy in Berlin, and on news footage from West German media, much of it focused on the glamorous journalist-turned-radical Ulrike Meinhof. With no commentary of any kind, the movie lacks any controlling political consciousness and

soon becomes a struggle between two counternarratives, one underground and the other mainstream. That’s an appropriately radical approach to the story, though viewers unfamiliar with the RAF’s complicated history may be in for a bumpy ride. In German and French with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 93 min. Sun 3/5, 3:15 PM, and Tue 3/7, 6:15 PM. Godless Set in a remote Bulgarian town, this 2016 debut feature by writer-director Ralitza Petrova follows a morphine-addicted nurse (Irena Ivanova) who steals ID cards from her elderly patients and sells them on the black market. The woman seems stifled—she provides for her unemployed mother but they barely speak, and she and her boyfriend seem to share nothing except their addiction—yet Petrova is less concerned with the reasons for her behavior than with the consequences of her actions. Ivanova is a fine actor, but her character lacks dimension; the nurse’s sordid environment and the abasement she endures to the point of numbness make her feel like a personification of the country’s political corruption and social unrest. In Bulgarian with

subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 99 min. Sun 3/19, 5:15 PM, and Thu 3/23, 8:15 PM.

Just Drop Dead! As source material, the communist era is a gold mine for national cinemas of the former Soviet bloc, and this Hungarian caper movie offers a light interpretation of those dark years. A childless, middle-aged widow (Adél Kováts) tracks down the bimbo mistress (Eszter Ónodi) of her recently deceased husband and meets their surly teenage daughter (Virág Alma Pájer). The mutual antipathy is instantaneous, but the three women soon become allies when they’re targeted by the dead man’s hitherto unknown criminal associates, intent on reclaiming valuables he stole. As the bewildered widow unravels her spouse’s past, she’s haunted by memories of totalitarianism and her zealous apparatchik mother-in-law, and faces her own possible complicity in her husband’s undoing.

This was the final film of writer-director Zoltán Kamondi, who died a few months before its 2016 release. In Hungarian with subtitles.

—ANDREA GRONVALL 105 min. Sat 3/4, 4 PM, and Tue 3/7, 8:15 PM. J

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 23

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EUFF continued from 23 Losers High school misfits in a sleepy Bulgarian town await the arrival of a touring punk band they hope will set the place on fire. Writer-director Ivaylo Hristov aims for social realism, shooting in black and white to heighten the sense of gray industrial boredom, but his romance between nerdy Koko, whose parents have parked him with his mentally disabled grandmother, and rebellious Elena, whose mother drinks and sleeps around, comes across like “Nick and Norah’s Eastern European Playlist.” As in American teenpics (not least the movies of Richard Linklater), there’s the sense of a hermetically sealed adolescent world: in the opening sequence, the heroine marches all her friends out of school to an abandoned office space for a communal groove to a music track that has just dropped. Intercut with the high school story are scenes of the approaching punk band, whose leaden comedy suggests hokey music videos from the 80s. In Bulgarian with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 97 min. Sat 3/4 and Wed 3/8, 8 PM. The Olive Tree As a girl, Alma climbs into a giant olive tree, loved by her grandfather, to protect it from being uprooted from the family farm and sold for a handsome sum; grown to adulthood, this determined young punk (Anna Castillo) sees the grandfather slowly dying and resolves to bring the tree back and revive him. British screenwriter Paul Laverty is best known for his long collaboration with

director Ken Loach, and to judge from this Spanish drama, his second script for director Icíar Bollaín, he needs Loach’s steadying social-realist hand as much as Loach needs his sense of fancy. Bollaín is a strong director, and Castillo gives her plenty of juice as the heroine, who tears around on a motorcycle and won’t take no for an answer, but their best efforts fall victim to Laverty’s moony premise and increasingly contrived plot developments. In Spanish with subtitles.

—J.R. JONES 99 min. Sun 3/19, 5:15 PM, and Mon 3/20, 8 PM.

R

On the Other Side A middle-aged nurse (Ksenija Marinkovic) in Zagreb, Croatia, receives a phone call from her estranged husband, who betrayed his family and his country by fighting for the Serbs during the Croatian War of Independence 20 years earlier and now wants to see her and his children again. This 2016 drama from director Zrinko Ogresta is understated but packs an emotional wallop nonetheless.

Ogresta uses long, unobtrusive takes to capture the family’s interactions and reactions to the patriarch’s reemergence; Marinkovic, in particular, expresses more with a twitch of her cheek than with most of the character’s dialogue. The subtle script, cowritten by Ogresta and composer Mate Matišić, challenges one to fill in the blanks of the spouses’ decades-long relationship, which makes the film more mentally exacting but also more rewarding once the final twist is revealed. In Croatian with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 81

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The Sense of an Ending

min. Sat 3/25, 6 PM, and Mon 3/27, 6:15 PM.

R

Personal Shopper Thematically this is Olivier Assayas’s darkest feature since Boarding Gate (2007), though it’s much better, owing largely to Kristen Stewart’s mesmeric performance as a young Parisian who works as personal shopper to a jet-set model and, in her spare time, communicates with the dead. Her twin brother, also a spiritual medium, has recently succumbed to a heart condition that she shares, and each promised the other that the first to die would try to make contact. Assayas stages numerous scenes in near darkness as the heroine prowls around seeking her late sibling, and an inordinate number of scenes fade to black, suggesting (intentionally or not) the boundaries of consciousness. What gives the story its spooky resonance, however, is a confluence between the unmoored exploration of the protagonist’s spiritualism and the international rootlessness of the model’s world. In French with subtitles. —J.R. JONES R, 105 min. Sat 3/4, 4 PM, and Wed 3/8, 6 PM.

R

The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes’s engrossing novel about an old, divorced Londoner radically reassessing his past gets a conventional but effective treatment from director Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox) and the perfectly cast Jim Broadbent and Charlotte Rampling. The protagonist (Broadbent), owner of a vintage camera shop, lives in peaceful coexistence with his ex-wife (Harriet Walter) and pregnant lesbi-

an daughter (Michelle Dockery), but then an unexpected bequest from a will forces him to reconsider the suicide of an old college pal four decades earlier and to make contact again with the lover they shared (Rampling). Screenwriter Nick Payne has a hard time objectifying Barnes’s sustained musing over the intricacies of time and memory, but the melodrama alone conveys the writer’s conviction that even in old age one’s understanding of life can be swept away in an instant. With Emily Mortimer. —J.R. JONES 109 min. Batra attends the Thursday screening. Fri 3/3, 2 PM, and Thu 3/9, 7:45 PM. Shelley A young Romanian housekeeper (Cosmina Stratan) agrees to become a su r ro g ate m othe r fo r h e r e m p loyers, a Danish married couple with infert i l i t y i s s u e s ( El l e n D o r r i t Pe te r s e n , Peter Christoffersen), in this creepy but unfocused horror film of the demon baby variety (2016). The couple eschew modern technology and live off the grid; why they do this is never explained, though placing the characters in an antiquated cabin in the woods allows director Ali Abbasi (who cowrote the script with Maren Louise Käehne) to milk the atmospherics of their isolation and show how their shrinking world contrasts with the fetus expanding too fast inside the young woman’s belly. The film appears to be about the fear and uncertainty involved in carrying someone else’s child, but viewers hoping for an exciting or even thought-provoking payoff will have to settle for a steady

thrum of prenatal anxiety. In English and subtitled Danish and Romanian. —LEAH PICKETT 92 min. Mon 3/27 and Wed 3/29, 8 PM. Slack Bay Cannibalism may not be everyone’s idea of funny, but French director Bruno Dumont (L’Humanité, Hadewijch) elevates it to ghoulish camp in this slapstick skewering of the French bourgeoisie. Fabrice Luchini and Valeria Bruni Tedeschi play fatuous aristocratic wannabes summering on the Channel coast in 1910; they enjoy the “beauty” of the local fisherfolk, who in turn view tourists as their next plat du jour. Adding a surrealistic dimension are Didier Després as a rotund detective and Cyril Rigaux as his shrimpy sidekick—clad in black suits and bowlers, they’re Laurel and Hardy by way of Magritte.

Dumont tips his hat to Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but this fanciful satire lacks Buñuel’s bite. With Juliette Binoche, hamming it up as the Luchini character’s imperious sister. In French with subtitles.

—ANDREA GRONVALL 122 min. Sat 3/11, 4 PM, and Thu 3/16, 6 PM.

R

Truman Truman is a slobbering mastiff owned by an earnest movie star with terminal cancer (Ricardo Darín of The Secret in Their Eyes), and parting with the dog is one of the tasks the man must complete now that he’s decided to discontinue his treatment and die with dignity. You’re probably gagging already, but this Spanish-Argentine drama (2015), set in Madrid and framed by a four-day visit from the actor’s witty old friend

(Javier Cámara), is pitch-perfect, its comic drollery rooted in character and its awkward, poignant good-byes credibly staged. Director Cesc Gay, who cowrote the screenplay with Tomàs Aragay, understands what each of his characters needs from those goodbyes and takes careful note of the pas de deux we all perform out of respect when someone is not long for this world. In Spanish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 108 min. Fri 3/24, 2 PM, and Sun 3/26, 5:15 PM.

Two Lottery Tickets This enjoyably deadpan Romanian comedy follows three village barflies—a bumbling auto mechanic (Dorian Boguta), a compulsive gambler (Dragoş Bucur), and a conspiracy theorist (Alexandru Papadopol)—as they scramble to recover a winning lottery ticket that’s been stolen from them. The laughs build as the buddies search every floor of the mechanic’s apartment building for witnesses to the robbery, grilling a trio of stoners, some gypsy fortune tellers, a bespectacled dominatrix, and a self-composed little girl (whom Papadopol’s character insists “knows something”). A road trip to Bucharest to corner the thieves sets up even more daft encounters, though humor gives way to pathos en route. Director Paul Negoescu has created a good ensemble, integrating the finely tuned performances of his three professional leads with amusing walk-ons by amateur supporting players. In Romanian with subtitles.

—ANDREA GRONVALL 86 min. Sat 3/18, 2:15 PM, and Mon 3/20, 6:15 PM v

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 25

PRIVATE STOCK IS A ONE-STOP HIP-HOP SHOP This fast-growing Chicago collective puts relationships first—and provides its rappers with beats, studio space, management, and more.

By LEOR GALIL

o BRYAN ALLEN LAMB

I

n the wee hours of August 9, 2016, beat maker and engineer Ivan “Ikon” Pryor left Fort Knox, a huge Old Irving Park building that houses a labyrinth of rehearsal spaces and recording studios, to buy Red Bull with a friend at a nearby gas station. He’d been hanging out at Fort Knox’s suite 42, home to local hip-hop collective and indie label Private Stock, and his friend had woken him from a nap to work on music. As they drove back, they saw fire leaping from the building’s roof—and though Ikon knew how close he’d come to dying in his sleep on a studio couch, his first thought was for the recording gear.

26 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

“I’m like, ‘Bro, we gotta get the computers, and our keyboards, and everything,’” he says.

“We were running into the hallway—the fire hadn’t went through yet, so we had a little time. We opened the door real quick, grabbing our computers and whatever we could get that wasn’t stuck to the ground. We were running out, and we just start throwing everything on the ground and running back in again.”

Private Stock co-owner Herson Escobar, who’d left the building just before the fire, says suite 42 suffered more damage than any other space in Fort Knox—he guesses Private Stock lost more than $40,000 in equipment. “The fire was literally on top of our room,” he says.

The collective could still use its second studio, which had opened a few months earlier elsewhere in Fort Knox, but losing its first home was a huge blow, both financially and psychologically. It also put a lot of strain on the new facility, which couldn’t do the work of two. “At that point it was like, ‘We can either stop or we can keep going,’” Ikon says. “We didn’t stop.”

Launched in 2013, Private Stock had become more than just a business for its principals— who include Escobar, co-owner Richard Molina, founder Jason Valcarcel, and more than a dozen others. And they’d come to see their coworkers as friends—at least three of the people I talked to at Private Stock called

it a “dream team.” Few were close before they started working together, and several of Valcarcel’s recruits had yet to realize their potential when they came aboard, but each turned out to be a puzzle piece that helped complete the others. The chemistry among Private Stock’s personnel has helped them find new motivation and inspiration, in some cases reenergizing careers. “We wanted to build this incubator, and we wanted to have a positive vibe when people walked in,” says Valcarcel.

“It felt like the right bunch of people coming together to do that.”

Private Stock consists of four studios (three built since the fire), a record label, and, to

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use a vague term that industry people love, a “brand.” It provides musicians signed to the label a vertically integrated cluster of services, including recording space, in-house beat production, engineering and mixing, management, and publicity. Valcarcel had started working with Escobar and Ikon years earlier, while running GoodLife Music Group, an indie label that he says “tanked.” And Private Stock’s studios weren’t the first he’d opened— they’re just the only ones he still has a stake in. Now that he’s found his dream team, he’s not about to let a fire destroy his ambitions.

“We’ve always leveled up,” he says. “We don’t look backwards—ever.”

Private Stock immediately began rebuilding and expanding—not just its physical space but also its roster. In August 2016 the team signed local group Chinza Fly, who’d been nominated for a Grammy for their production work on “Shanghai,” a bonus cut from Nicki Minaj’s The Pinkprint. That summer they’d been introduced to Private Stock by freelance journalist Tara Mahadevan.

“My interview here was the day after the fire happened,” says Chinza Fly engineer Joe Rico. “I saw 42 once, I think, and I was like, ‘This place is awesome.’ Then I came back for my interview and they’re like, ‘Hey, we got some bad news—the place burned down.’

Opposite page: Private Stock founder and co-owner Jason Valcarcel This page, clockwise from top left: Jason Valcarcel, Alex “Papi Beatz” Baez with Private Stock co-owner Herson Escobar, Chinza Fly engineer Joe Rico, and Ivan “Ikon” Pryor with Chinza Fly producer Rob Lyrical

And I went in and there’s nothing but water damage everywhere.”

Rico introduced the Private Stock team to his longtime friend Eugene Julio Perez, a carpenter who was willing to help build its three new Fort Knox studios at a deep discount. Chinza Fly joined existing Private Stock artists such as Vic Mensa’s right-hand man, Papi Beatz, who coproduced the 2016 EP There’s Alot Going On; beat maker Flex Lennon, who’s made a few big tracks with Saba, including 2013’s “Gurlfran” and the Comfort Zone single “401K”; and rapper-singer L.A. VanGogh, one of the most talented young musicians to emerge from the local hip-hop scene in the past couple years. J

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 27

Private Stock continued from 27 In November, L.A. dropped the EP Friends First, the third Private Stock release since the fire. In January he released the suave, R&B-inflected “Changed My Number Pt. 2,” whose Valentine’s Day video nudged it onto Billboard’s Spotify Viral 50 chart, where it debuted at number eight for the week of February 25. Private Stock has more music coming from VanGogh as well as new releases from Ikon, local pop-rap group the A.S.A. Project, and Chinza Fly rapper Jofred.

Artists don’t have to be on Private Stock’s label to rent its studios, of course. This winter several members of Save Money have booked time there, including Towkio and Joey Purp.

The week after the Grammys, Private Stock uploaded a slightly blurry Instagram photo from a session with Joey, Kami, and Chance the Rapper. “I think 2017 is a big year for us,” Escobar says. “We know what we have, but a lot of people still are asking, ‘What’s Private Stock?’

This is the year where we actually make a statement and show everyone what we really do. We finally got all the pieces plugged in.”

P

rivate Stock started with an inside joke.

“I used to tell the guys, if you post on social media with a consistent hashtag and you talk about something several times, it’ll pick up,” Valcarcel says. Months before the collective existed, he attached #PVTSTK to every Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter post he could. “I started hashtagging pictures— maybe thousands.”

Valcarcel, 32, has been in music all his life.

He grew up in Chicago with a mother who sang in a salsa band and a father who worked as the group’s sound man. His dad also worked as an engineer for Latin label RMM, and Valcarcel often visited the studio. “They inspired me as a kid to want to have a studio ’cause I was in it all the time,” he says. “I was chasing that dream ever since.”

As an adult, Valcarcel went to work in telecommunications, but in 2009, while hanging on to his day job, he took his first big step toward a career in music: he launched GoodLife, and his northwest-side house became its headquarters. “I used my entire floor as a label,” he says. “The front bedroom,

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the graphic designer lived there. The middle bedroom, that was one of the artists who also seconded as the social media/marketing partner. My dining room had five or six computers I had built, and we used that for social media/marketing—whether that was Twitter, MySpace at the time, Facebook, and YouTube.” He turned the back porch into a small recording studio, and people slept wherever they could find a spot—Valcarcel says photographers and videographers sometimes crashed on the floor.

“We called it a frat house for a while,” says Private Stock co-owner Jon Cuevas, who’s kept his day job but also does A&R for the collective. “It was so many people coming through and stuff happening and being made.”

Cuevas was a couple grades below Valcarcel at Lane Tech College Prep: “I knew Papi Beatz back then as well,” he says. “I knew him as the weird kid with the spiky pink hair.”

Papi Beatz decided to get into music after seeing Wayne’s World 2, and he spent high school playing what he calls “Blink-182 ripoff stuff” as a pop-punk guitarist. By necessity, he also learned about studio engineering. “No one in the band wanted to record us,” he says.

“The drummer and the bassist already suck, and the singer’s too much of an egomaniac to do stuff like that, so I was like, ‘I’ll just do it.’”

Valcarcel recruited Papi to do engineering work by offering him a place to crash at the GoodLife house. “I was like, ‘I’ll handle the bills right now—hone in your skill,’” he says. “‘I know you want to do rock, but I’m heavily in the rap scene right now—I know that you can take it to the next level, and you can do whatever you want, so just stay with me.’ ” Among the first projects Papi mixed for Valcarcel was the 2011 album Astonishingly Odd by future Private Stock rapper Astonish.

In 2012 Valcarcel opened a basement studio, also called GoodLife. “It’s a factory that had a bottom floor that we were able to rent, and we remodeled it and made it into a studio,” he says. It wasn’t much, but it beat a repurposed back porch. At that studio, about five years ago, Valcarcel met another future member of the Private Stock crew: producer Flex Lennon, who at the time went by Born Ready.

“He was terrible at making beats,” Valcarcel says. “But this guy was so damn serious. He was there every day—I had to see him every day. Motherfucker would show up with an entire computer. Not a laptop—his tower.

I was like, ‘Why do you keep coming with that? Don’t you have a laptop?’ ‘It’s broken.’ It wasn’t broken—it had a couple viruses.” But within seven months, Valcarcel says, Flex had

Rapper-singer L.A. VanGogh (above) and engineer Steve Anderson

transformed himself utterly: “Everything he was making was hot.”

Flex is still grateful that Valcarcel gave him a chance. “He trusted me and he saw potential in me before a lot of other people did,” he says.

“When you’re starting out, you don’t have a lot of people in your corner. So to see him show belief early, that meant a lot to me.”

Shortly before he met Flex, Valcarcel had bought an interest in Heart of the City, a videoproduction company founded by Jon Cuevas and his brother Jacob, aka video director Jay Caves. Escobar, who’d been part of GoodLife since 2010, became a co-owner of Heart of the City alongside Valcarcel.

The video company began sharing the GoodLife house with the label, and when Heart of the City scheduled an interview with

fast-rising rapper Saba in 2012, Valcarcel invited Flex to drop by. “I was like, ‘Man, it’d be hot if maybe Flex and him did something,” he says. “They did ‘Gurlfran’ and it was a breakout song for Saba, before his Comfort Zone tape.” Jon Cuevas also ended up managing Saba for a few years.

Valcarcel’s magnet of a house likewise attracted Ikon, who’d met him by chance at Chicago Recording Company in 2011. “I told him what I did, and I couldn’t get rid of him,” Valcarcel says. “He started showing up at my house every day, knockin’, and I had to let him in, otherwise he’d keep ringing the doorbell.

And he turned out to be great—he’s been with me ever since.”

Valcarcel was keeping a lot of plates in the air, and in July 2012, exhausted by the effort of

running GoodLife, he folded the label. “I took on ten artists at a time, and it was too much work,” he says. It also frustrated him that he couldn’t help everyone he’d signed grow as he’d envisioned. “I kinda went through a depression, ’cause I needed to figure out how to take it to the next level,” he says. “It was hard letting go of my friends and taking this to a professional level.” In May 2013, Valcarcel quit his telecommunications job.

That was when he started using the “Private Stock” hashtag, though it’d take him nearly a year to get things rolling in suite 42. Even before quitting his day job, he’d helped open LPZ Studios in the Fulton River District, which launched in November 2012. “That being my more serious studio to put Alex [Papi Beatz] in, in front of the right people—which is the Save Money cats, Chano, Rockie Fresh, and whoever mattered in the city at the time,” Valcarcel says. In January 2014, LPZ hired recording engineer Steve Anderson, a future Private Stock employee, who was coming off a decade at Chicago’s famous Studio 11 (which describes itself as a leading hub for “urban music”).

Anderson had gotten into hip-hop more or less by accident—at Studio 11, he’d worked with the likes of Rockie Fresh and King Louie.

“I didn’t know what kind of music I was gonna be working on when I first started my career. I listened to everything. But I was given a handful of rappers and happened to do a good job, and my clientele snowballed from there,” he says. “That’s when I met Bump J and started doing all the Goon Squad stuff.”

While LPZ began to grow, Valcarcel was trying to make Private Stock something more than a hashtag. “I used to call it Private Ops,” Papi Beatz says. “I was at LPZ all the time.

Then I heard about Private Stock—I’m like, ‘What’s this?’”

Valcarcel decided on a modest approach for Private Stock, because he didn’t want to get overwhelmed again. “I wanted us to be an incubator, initially,” he says. “I wanted to work with very few artists, because when we were running out of the back porch, I didn’t know how big it was gonna grow.”

Veteran Chicago rapper Astonish, one of the first to join Private Stock’s label, liked the idea of a small operation that could serve all its artists’ needs. (In October 2016, he’d release To Whom It May Concern on Private Stock.)

He had plenty of experience in the local scene, and in the late aughts he’d signed with the label run by venerable underground hip-hop group Molemen. “Private Stock, it was something that a lot of us that had known each other for the longest of times pulled together and J

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 29

®

Private Stock continued from 29

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created,” Astonish says. “The industry, it can be a really shady place to be in. With Private Stock, we tried to make it something where we didn’t have to have the stress of trying to fit into the business aspect of it, and just be creative.”

Valcarcel brought Escobar into the Private Stock fold early, having collaborated with him on GoodLife and Heart of the City. Escobar had been working behind the scenes in the local hip-hop community since he was 16 (the same year he met Astonish), but at 26 he’s about five years younger than Valcarcel. “I needed to be more in tune with the youth, ’cause I was getting older,” Valcarcel says. “So I got Herson— who used to go to school with my sister—and I partnered up with him.”

Escobar recruited a couple friends from high school, Luis Arroyo and Luis Reyes, to work for Private Stock. Valcarcel took them under his wing. “I started training them on how to manage artists, how to do marketing plans, and how to manage social media—everything from top to bottom. Whatever it took,” he says. “I let them make a lot of mistakes so that they could learn from them.”

In 2012 Heart of the City cofounder Jacob Cuevas had moved that operation into suite 42 in Fort Knox. Private Stock took over the space in 2013 and got its recording studio up and running by March 2014. (Jon Cuevas, Valcarcel, and Escobar are no longer involved in Heart of the City.) Ikon soon followed Valcarcel’s lead and focused his energy on Private Stock—within a year, he’d quit the FedEx job he’d worked since graduating from Columbia College in 2013. “I just couldn’t do the winters no more,” he says. “I felt like I was suffocating, and I felt like, ‘I’m not supposed to be here.’”

Private Stock’s first release was Ikon’s 2015 EP Private Stock, which features appearances by buzzy locals such as Malcolm London, Noname, and all of Pivot Gang. “Opportunities just started opening up,” Ikon says. “We went to New York the year after, then we went to LA. It’s like, ‘Man, if I was at FedEx, I wouldn’t be able to do that—I’d be too tired.’”

By the end of 2015, Private Stock had started wooing L.A. VanGogh, thanks to a chance meeting the previous August between the rappersinger and Escobar’s old friend Luis Arroyo at a radio interview for Windy City Underground.

L.A. liked what he heard from the Private Stock crew, and Arroyo would become his manager.

“We had a lot of conversations about where we want to go, careerwise, what their passions were, music, and how that was gonna affect me as a creative,” L.A. says. “I didn’t meet one person that gave me a bad vibe. Everybody was

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Part of the Private Stock extended family: from left to right, Papi Beatz, L.A. VanGogh (behind Papi), carpenter Eugene Julio Perez, Jon Cuevas, Ikon, Herson Escobar (in light blue shirt), Joe Rico, Astonish, Jason Valcarcel (behind Astonish), freelance writer Tara Mahadevan, Flex Lennon (in gold cap), Rob Lyrical, graphic and Web designer Brenda Zapata (facing away), Luis Reyes, and Richard Molina

really helpful, and the most important thing about it was that I trusted them.”

In March 2016, when Valcarcel left LPZ Studios, Anderson and fellow LPZ engineer Drew Leal moved to Private Stock. “The other partners, they just didn’t line up with my vision,” Valcarcel says. “So I decided to call it quits.”

(LPZ folded within a month.) Anderson says he’d burned out working 12-hour days at Studio 11, but joining Private Stock reenergized him. “These guys breathed a new life into me just by making it more of a team effort, more of a community feel,” he says. “It made me excited about music again, so I decided to give it one more go—and I’m happy I did.” He also liked that Private Stock wanted to give more attention to fewer artists. After coming aboard, he cut his client list by half.

The transition wasn’t smooth for the engineers, but they both liked Private Stock enough to stick it out—Leal describes the move from LPZ as disruptively sudden, and their new home had only one studio. “I was getting the work, but I didn’t have the space to work in,” Drew says. Private Stock completed its second studio in late spring 2016, which

alleviated that pressure. “We start picking up here, and then all of the sudden the fire happens—we’re only down to one room,” Leal says. “I remember having a conversation with Jason, and he told me the day that it happened, ‘Maybe this was the time to start new, or to actually be the fire under our ass that we need to expand.’”

Chinza Fly helped with that expansion, and not just by bringing in a carpenter to help build out new studios—Eugene Julio Perez finished the fourth (and so far final) earlier this year. By all accounts, the group has turned out to be the missing piece whose arrival would complete Private Stock. Chinza Fly producer Rob Lyrical says he felt camaraderie immediately at their interview, which was basically six hours of sharing beats and smoking weed.

“Once I met these guys, everyone just gave me good energy—everybody was working towards the same goal,” he says. “After that, pretty much every day, we were up here,” Rob says. “It got to the point where it was like, ‘Who are these kids?’ And now they see us like they see, like, an Ikon or a Herson or a Jon—or even Jason, even Papi.”

Private Stock is hardly huge now, but it’s grown to where a little more than 20 people are involved. Its label is gearing up for a big 2017—which might make the same sort of impression that Closed Sessions did in 2016. And its studio is attracting more artists—not just Save Money rappers but also Sasha Go Hard, Rhymefest, and Rockie Fresh, as well as outof-towners such as Canadian up-and-comer John River, Rochester MC Ishmael Raps, and Los Angeles veteran Xzibit. But what makes Private Stock special isn’t who books time in its studios—it’s the personalities who’ve come together to make the collective work and the inspiration they get from one another. Anderson says he learns constantly from his colleagues. “I’m hearing different techniques that the engineers use that up my game,” he explains. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve never heard that before, that’s something I want to try to emulate.’ It works both ways—you can pass down experience, but you can also learn from newer punk-rock methods. It’s a cool back-and-forth.” v

ß @imLeor MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

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32 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

CHICAGO RAPPERS G Herbo and Lil Bibby have collaborated for as long as local rap fans have been sifting through the dregs of the Internet looking for their material, for as long as Drake has been using their names as chess pieces to further his own credibility, and for as long as it’s taken the first wave of drill think pieces to evaporate (and with it the ability to grasp the idea that drill is more than a vehicle for samples of gunshots). As teenagers on the come up, Bibby and Herbo (then known as Lil Herb) proved to be two of the best rappers to emerge from drill. Now as young adults, aged 22 and 21 respectively, they’ve individually carved out impressive careers by approaching drill’s blood fetish with empathy—Herbo in particular has become one of Chicago’s best

songwriters. Late last year Bibby let it slip that he and Herbo are working on a full-length collaborative release, No Limitations, which should drop later this year. A couple tracks have leaked so far, and the coiled bounce of “Blackin Out” showcases the ability of both MCs to balance street-rap intensity with something approaching clean pop hooks. If you’re looking to explore Bibby and Herbo’s past collaborations, start with Heir Apparents, a lengthy 2013 compilation mixtape assembled by DJ L and Fake Shore Drive, the latter of which presents tonight’s show as part of its ongoing series with Red Bull Sound Select. (Full disclosure: until last month I hosted a Chicago-centric show for Red Bull Music Academy’s international radio station.) —LEOR GALIL

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Hollow Earth o MIKE MOYNIHAN

THURSDAY2 Hollow Earth Greg Bennick, Great Reversals, Thieves, and Burdened open. 7:30 PM, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, $12, $10 in advance. 17+ Detroit quintet Hollow Earth started their half-life as a metal-inflected hardcore band—or perhaps it was a hardcore-inflected metal band—and with each release they’ve grown in complexity and stretched out farther and farther into the cold reaches of space. They really started to take on interstellar dimensions around the time of 2012’s We Are Not Humanity, but on last fall’s Dead Planet (Good Fight), guitarist-songwriter Mike Moynihan and vocalist Steve Muczynski craft an especially rich and pummelling apocalypse with the twin-guitar power of Sean Reed and the nimble, deep-rooted midtempo rhythms of drummer Mike Walsh and bassist Dennis Tuohey. Featuring a guest appearance

by Tad Doyle (Tad, Brothers of the Sonic Cloth), “Reflections in Refracted Light” sounds like a dissonant eulogy for an extinction, while the shrill, shivering guitar tones on “The Harbinger of Existence” lay out a psychedelic sort of star map, blinking and twinkling while the spaceship falls apart. This is an album that rewards multiple listenings, and Hollow Earth is a band that should not be missed on tour.

—MONICA KENDRICK

Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra See also Saturday and Tuesday. 8 PM, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, $36-$218. b During this visit to lead the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen presents two proven ticket sellers in Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, but the program’s real draw is the local premiere of Scheherazade.2 by John Adams (in honor of the composer’s recent 70th birthday).

In his program notes for conductor David Robertson’s performance of the piece with the Saint Louis Symphony—released last year by Nonesuch—Adams says that his “dramatic sympho- J

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ny” was inspired by an art exhibition he attended at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris. The exhibit traced the long history of the Arabian Nights, in particular the wily, resourceful female protagonist, Scheherazade, who represents a woman fighting back against the endless subjection, oppression, and abuse of her sex throughout history. Adams uses the violin as the stand-in for the character, and the recording features the fiery, virtuosic playing of Leila Josefowicz, who’ll also perform tonight.

Her defiant, endlessly muscular lines stand up to lush, powerhouse orchestrations that unfold in four movements over the course of 50 extroverted minutes riddled with biting cimbalom accents.

—PETER MARGASAK

FRIDAY3

Brokeback Mind Over Mirrors headline.

8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15. 18+

Since Douglas McCombs’s long-running project Brokeback evolved from a solo endeavor into a quartet lineup seven years ago, he and his cohorts have engaged in an exquisitely patient act of retrenchment and refinement. The striking new Illinois River Valley Blues (Thrill Jockey) is the first

“Spanish Venus,” a lush ballad by cornetist Rob Mazurek that teeters on a nifty stuttering bassline.

—PETER MARGASAK

Durand Jones & the Indications Divino Nino and Fat Night open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 3111 N. Western. $5

Brokeback o JOHN STURDY record from the group in four years, during which Jim Elkington transferred from drums to the role of second guitarist and Areif Sless-Kitain (Eternals) took over the drum throne. Even as its instrumentals remain dominated by a moody, twangy atmosphere, Brokeback continues to wean itself off the heavy Ennio Morricone vibe that marked its early years in favor of a more rock-soaked attack that prizes the tonal richness of Tom Verlaine’s solo work. Sless-Kitain and bassist Pete Croke hold down slow-moving grooves that provide McCombs and Elkington ballast for their layered chords and extended lines that both lacerate and glow. The

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entwined patterns are bittersweet in their melodic content, steeped in a sadness that can impel the listener to shed a few tears if the mood hits right.

While a couple of songs feature lovely wordless vocals from Amalea Tshilds, a complement to the gentle cooing Stereolab’s Mary Hansen brought to early Brokeback records, there’s no question the record is all about the guitars. Most of the tunes embrace a measured, midtempo motion, but “On the Move and Vanishing” salutes vintage Television with a telltale lick borrowed from the classic “See No Evil” and interplay worthy of Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. All of the tracks are originals save

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34 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

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It wasn’t too long ago that the core members of midwestern revivalist act Durand Jones & the Indications met at Indiana University through gigs with the IU Soul Revue, the college’s tip-top throwback ensemble that performs black popular music from the 1960s. As the story often goes, front man Jones grew up in a church choir, belting out gospel in rural Louisiana. His music-school-educated bandmates were professional appreciators of southern soul, the subgenre most often associated with Memphis giants like Stax and Hi. Despite these different backgrounds, the group’s songwriting effortlessly coalesces on its 2016 self-titled debut, out via Colemine Records, which manages to avoid being too encyclopedic and cliche. Instead, the charming DIY effort demonstrates stylistic knowledge of soul instrumentation even as Jones’s voice is left plenty of room to roam. His singing is a rare combination of purity and power—unlike his Daptone forefathers, Jones hasn’t endured decades of smoky bars and tough breaks. Though sonic comparisons

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MUSIC

Bishop Bullwinkle o YOUTUBE/BLAZE MEDIA GROUP STUDIOS to Charles Bradley and Lee Fields are unavoidable, Jones’s youth and DIY ambition make him stand out against the overarching narrative of rediscovery that has become all too familiar. These aren’t middle-aged session guys in fedoras propping up an aged belter long since fossilized on a dusty 45. It’s a band that writes compelling original material and turns out ultrafun, dance-filled performances at the club. If, like many folks, you’re missing the panache and energy of the late Sharon Jones, this Jones will definitely fill the void. —ERIN OSMON

Stile Antico 7:30 PM, Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago, 5850 S. Woodlawn, $35, $5 students. b I won’t pretend to know much about Renaissance vocal music, but I will say that encountering Divine Theatre: Sacred Motets by Giaches de Wert (Harmonia Mundi), the new album by veteran British vocal ensemble Stile Antico, certainly has me challenging my ignorance. The recording features the group bringing its polyphonic precision to the sacred motets of Flemish composer Giaches de Wert, who spent most of his life living in Italy and whose fame stems primarily from his madrigals.

The 12-person ensemble sings the pieces with overwhelming beauty and exactitude, forming rich, ethereal harmonies and fluid counterpoint that pull me in every time. The new album led me to the 2015 record Sing With the Voice of Melody, a madrigal collection of some of the ensemble’s favorite pieces from its first decade together—including two compositions by William Byrd, one of the composers featured in tonight’s concert. The program for Stile Antico’s Chicago debut is titled “In a Strange Land: Elizabethan Composers in Exile” and focuses on Byrd, John Dowland, Peter Phillips, and Richard Dering, all Brits who spent significant time living and composing in countries other than their homeland. I can only imagine how the ensemble’s voices will fill the upper recesses of Hyde Park’s gorgeous Rockefeller Chapel. —PETER MARGASAK

SATURDAY4 Bishop Bullwinkle Part of the Chi-Town Blues Festival; Sir Charles Jones, Willie Clayton,

Clarence Carter, Theodis Ealey, and Denise LaSalle also perform. 7 PM, Star Plaza Theatre, I-65 & U.S. 30, Merrillville, Indiana, $60.50$105. b Bishop Bullwinkle’s profanity-laced takedowns of roguish churchmen and their hypocritical flocks on “Hell 2 Da Naw Naw” and “Some Preachers [Ain’t Shit]” have made him a cult, meme-ready YouTube celebrity quite apart from the praise and condemnation he’s received from modern-day southern-soul aficionados. And his shows go even further: they’re basically an unexpurgated barrage of toasts, dozens-style insult routines, and sexual throwdowns. Seemingly designed to both amuse and offend as wide a spectrum of listeners as possible, Bullwinkle’s act represents a long-standing “underground” strain of black folk humor, similar to what Rudy Ray Moore did with Dolemite—though Bullwinkle’s “Bishop” gimmick adds a new layer of transgressiveness. He provides a glimpse at one of the vernacular roots of hip-hop, a living history so to speak, while simultaneously pushing the envelope and being riotously funny (at least to those who aren’t easily offended). None of this is to mention that both “Hell 2 Da Naw Naw” and “Some Preachers” also ignited a little controversy: the former lifted the backing track from singer Bigg Robb’s “Looking For a Country Girl,” while “Some Preachers” appropriated elements of Sheba PottsWright’s “The Real Deal.” Still, Bullwinkle doesn’t edit either of those songs when he performs them live. —DAVID WHITEIS

Four Letter Words 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10. 18+ Last fall I wrote about the vitality of Chicago’s jazz and improvised music scene after discovering the playing of pianist Matt Piet, who’s part of a new wave of players melding the rigor of free improvisation with the oblique rhythms and harmony of 60s postbop. That soon led me to other locals on the rise, like tenor saxophonist Jake Wark and drummer Bill Harris, who work with Piet in a trio called Four Letter Words. On the group’s strong new album Radio Silence (Amalgam Music)—which the performance tonight celebrates—mournful, bittersweet melodies float over roiling, thrumming grooves in a manner that reminds me of the David S. Ware J

!

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Quartet at its best. Wark wields a rich, full-bodied tone marbled by biting vibrato, his sobs punctuated by lower-register honks as he unfurls epic improvisations. And where Piet’s playing in his own trio relies on spry, fractured lines, he here favors slowly cycling lyric chording and sorrowful filigree. Harris makes a simpatico fit, maintaining a firm pulse while jabbing his partners with sputtering lines that suggest he could keep time even as he and his kit tumbled down a flight of stairs. Three short improvisations titled “Expletive” are scattered among the album’s ten tracks, demonstrating a sharp rapport, but the trio still sounds best during the sturdy themes each member contributes in writing (also included is a soaring interpretation of the John Dowland madrigal “Come Again”). During certain moments the players are somewhat subsumed by their influences (Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Matthew Shipp), but I have no doubt that they’re well on their way to standing out on their own merits. —PETER MARGASAK

Ibn Inglor Telana opens and DJ OGWebbie spins. 8:30 PM, 1st Ward, 2033 W. North, $15. 18+ It takes a certain brazenness to attempt maximalist rap as an underdog, and Chicago rapper-producer Ibn Inglor has it in spades. Last year’s self-released Honegloria is painted from the same palette Kanye’s been using for his recent work: spartan synths play yawning melodies as big as canyons, horn samples sound like they’re calling gladiators to battle, and booming percussion makes as much of an indent when the drums go quiet as when they’re at full tilt. Ibn approaches his music with patience and demands the same from his listeners: the cathartic releases on Honegloria are stretched out across several tracks, allowing the rapping to augment an atmosphere that already has a theatrical flair. Considering tonight is Ibn’s first hometown headlining show, I imagine he’s cooking up something for the stage to match his music’s aura.

—LEOR GALIL

FIND HUNDREDS OF

Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra See Thursday. 8 PM, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, $36-$218. b

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Devendra Banhart 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, sold out. 17+ For quite a few years I’ve been going against the grain when it comes to Devendra Banhart. As he’s curbed the quirky excesses that helped enamor press and fans alike—the overwrought falsetto, the nonstop hippie affectations, the self-indulgent lyrics emphasizing rejection of social mores—I’ve appreciated his work more. He hasn’t become normal, exactly, but the handful of records he’s made over the last decade or so have focused more on songcraft and atmosphere than attitude. He’s settled down and found a strong group of collaborators, including producer Noah Georgeson, percussionist Gregory Rogove, and Brazilian guitarist Rodri-

go Amarante, all of whom are featured prominently on last year’s Ape in Park Marble (Nonesuch). The album rates as Banhart’s most subdued and intimate work to date, awash in quietly gurgling guitars, rhythms with the feather-stroke touch of bossa nova, and softly cooed melodies that caress and insinuate rather than punch and assert. He leans so strongly toward sleepy grooves and restrained delivery that he’s almost tentative at times. There are a few songs, however, that ratchet up the energy. “Fancy Man” is a humid, lilting bit of hot-tub funk, while “Fig in Leather” features a slinking soul groove and Banhart engaging in some annoying character voices. Still, most of the tracks are wispy ballads on which the singer seems to be aping Chet Baker, and while the record is lovely and marked by a chill ambience, I fear that Banhart is running out of things to say. —PETER MARGASAK

TUESDAY7 Esa-Pekka Salonen with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra See Thursday.

7:30 PM, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, $36$218. b

WEDNESDAY8 John Bender Champagne Mirrors, Carol Genetti, and Beau Wanzer open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $10.

Leading the minimal-electronics vanguard of the early 80s would have required quite the under-

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MUSIC Ballake Sissoko & Vincent Segal o CLAUDE GASSIAN

KING CRIMSON AN EVENING WITH

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taking for Cincinnati’s John Bender had he not instead opted to totally retreat into the recesses of obscurity (read: conventional life) following the release of the three now-mythical LPs on his own Record Sluts imprint. For years he stayed well out past the fringes, not much bothering with the notoriety those records received from the niche community he helped inspire. Eventually, however, he wore down, and in 2010 he gave permission to Superior Viaduct to reissue his first record, 1980’s I Don’t Remember Now / I Don’t Want to Talk About It. Then, just last year, he performed for the first time in more than 30 years—or let’s just say for the first time practically ever—as part of the Queen City’s inaugural experimental-music-heavy No Response Festival.

The aforementioned I Don’t Remember remains not only a chilling, dystopian environment of layered glitches, gurgles, and buzzes but also once seemingly acted as a kind of side hustle by the curious Bender, meant both to explore his synthesizers’ capabilities and to develop his own fledgling capacities as a songwriter (as evidenced by his interpretation of Faust’s “It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl”). His pensive, often monotone vocals slowly twirl around rhythms as his lyrics dissect and pontificate on the human condition. It’s an eerie, heady record that marked the beginning of a fertile few years for Bender as he continued releasing the music he recorded in the late 70s. And today it sounds as modern and forward-thinking as it did decades ago.

For geeks fascinated by the historical lineage of lo-fi synth music, this show is not to be missed.

—KEVIN WARWICK

G Herbo & Lil Bibby (As No Limitations) See Pick of the Week (page 32). Trill Sammy

and Drayco McCoy open. 9:30 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $15, $5 with RSVP. 18+

Enter for a chance to Win a pair of tickets

Ballake Sissoko & Vincent Segal 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, $25, $23 members. b As heard on the stunning 2013 solo album At Peace (Six Degrees), the playing of Malian kora virtuoso Ballake Sissoko is rooted in traditional Mande modes, but over his career he’s distinguished himself by making efforts to bridge cultural divides through thoughtful collaboration. He’s worked with American bluesman Taj Mahal, Chinese pipa master Liu Fang, Italian contemporary classical pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi, and Moroccan oud player Driss El Maloumi. But no partnership has proven as fruitful as his duo with French cellist Vincent Segal, a musician who’s long shared Sissoko’s knack for cross-cultural exchange. Two years ago the duo dropped Musique de Nuit (Six Degrees), their second album of sparkling, meditative duets that delve into the delicate side of each instrument. While Sissoko cleaves to his native tradition, unleashing hypnotic arpeggios and glittery, cascading downward runs, Segal adapts his techniques to imitate various African instruments, sometimes in a single track—on “Balazando,” for example, he plucks his cello in a way that evokes the Gnawan guembri before unspooling unhurried bowed lines that suggest the nasal twang of the Malian fiddle known as the njarka. “Super Etoile,” named after the pioneering Senegalese mbalax band that launched the career of Youssou N’Dour, rides a loping kora groove, allowing Segal to run free as he moves from bowed to plucked lines, conveying a dance-worthy drive without a single bit of percussion.

—PETER MARGASAK v

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FOOD & DRINK

R THE GUNDIS | $$$

2909 N. Clark 773-904-8120 thegundis.com

Shrimp in garliclemon-butter sauce o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Chicago finally gets its first Kurdish restaurant

The proprietors hail from a province on Turkey’s southern border with Syria, but the Gundis is no Turkish joint.

By MIKE SULA

G

undis is a Kurdish word for “villagers” that, when spoken in the direction of someone of good humor, is taken as a playful jab at his country roots. Mehmet Duzgun and Mehmet Yavuz are the two villagers behind the Gundis in Lakeview, the city’s sole Kurdish restaurant. The “village” they come from is really a small city called Nusaybin within the province of Mardin on Turkey’s southern border with Syria, but they didn’t meet until five years ago, after they’d arrived in Chicago independently.

Both know what it’s like to work in restaurants, here and back in Turkey. Yavuz, in fact, married into a restaurant family, and consequently his father-in-law is the new restaurant’s

executive chef. Juan Gonzalez isn’t Kurdish, obviously—and neither is his daughter, general manager Denisse Gonzalez-Yavuz—but he’s worked in kitchens in southern California and Mexico for nearly 30 years, and while he directs that experience toward getting his son-in-law’s restaurant off the ground, he has a handful of capable Kurdish-Syrians helping him in his kitchen, people who happen to have escaped the most horrifying world conflict of the decade.

Apart from its singular position in the city’s restaurant scene, the Gundis is a cross-cultural family business that wouldn’t have launched without the benefit of relatively welcoming immigration policies.

I asked Duzgun if the food at the Gundis was similar to Turkish food, and if Kurdish food was different in Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

(It is.) Actually, what a lot of people think of as Turkish food, he told me, is really Kurdish food in origin. I don’t have the scholarly boots on the ground to affirm that, and while the food at the Gundis is familiar, it’s unlike what you’re probably used to from your average Turkish restaurant.

The restaurant itself doesn’t look like what you’d expect from a Turkish spot either.

Sun-brightened at lunchtime, candlelit at dinner, it’s a modern-looking dining space that betrays no folkloric hints of its origins, save for a few simple black-and-white renderings of Mardin.

But some of the food is familiar in form and practice. You can start meals off (or linger indefinitely) with a basket of puffy Kurdish flatbread baked in the kitchen that morning.

Dredge it through a sampling of conventional mezes: hummus; grilled calamari; chewy, salty slabs of blistering grilled halloumi; or a deposit of ezme, the tomato-and-pepper mince shot through with isot, aka Urfa biber. That’s the crushed, raisiny, crimson pepper that’s the power behind the slow-building sweet heat that characterizes much of this food, from the lentil soup to the fried potatoes.

You’ll taste it in the light, tomatoey broth that bathes a brimming bowl of mussels. It’s impossible to miss in the garlic-lemon-butter sauce that drenches a pile of snappy crustaceans, a lip-smacking preparation that seems like a lost cousin to New Orleans-style barbecue shrimp. For a cuisine that has its origins in landlocked regions, Kurdish food seems to have a way with seafood.

But not as much as it does with lamb, which appears among the main courses a half-dozen times, including a few visually striking preparations like the sac tawa, a sizzling circular steel plate piled with stir-fried meat, peppers, and tomatoes, a presentation much smaller than the traditional version, which can be large enough to accommodate nine or ten eaters. Lamb crowns the Mesopotamia, a monolithic mound of meat and rice doused with gravy. And it’s also at the core of the Mardin special, a signature dish of the region, featuring tender braised meat that forms the core of a fried-eggplantwrapped sphere surrounded by oppositional deposits of tomato sauce, yogurt, parsley, and pickled cabbage. It’s a dramatic dish almost as sumptuous as a tomato-based stew, also named for the regional capital, J

MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 39

FOOD & DRINK

The Mardin special; the flanlike caramelized milk pudding kazandibi; the bright, modern space betrays no folkloric hints of its origins. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

continued from 39 that rests on a pile of what appears to be a thick, chunky baba ghanoush. In Mardin the eggplant element is called bajane brasti and (both here and there) it’s spiked with kaşar cheese (what some of us might recognize as kasseri), which lends a surprising and delicious sharpness to this old standby.

Meaty dishes abound on the Gundis’s menu— kebabs, steak, cheese-stuffed chicken breast— but a handful of vegetable-based mains are just as substantially satisfying. There’s a slick stew of eggplant, banana peppers, tomato, and onions on a raft of mashed potatoes. Similarly, tirsik features eggplant, carrots, bell peppers, and rice spiked with more isot.

Desserts include assorted Kurdish cookies, the flanlike caramelized milk pudding known in Turkish as kazandibi, and a Western innovation: thin crepes, stuffed with goat cheese and drizzled with syrup, that the kitchen has dubbed “Kurdish baklava.”

40 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

The latter all figure into weekend brunch, which is something of a production at the Gundis, with florid pancakes and scrambles and a showstopping spread meant for two, featuring feta and kaşar cheese, olives, fruit jams, honey, butter, sesame butter, fried cheese rolls, eggs, french fries, and bread.

A liquor license enables the restaurant to serve a few basic beers and wines (something not frequently encountered in Kurdistan), but Kurdish and Turkish teas and coffees should be axiomatic with any sit-down at the Gundis.

If by chance you’re nursing a hangover, a tall, bracing glass of purple şalgam, made from salted red carrots and accented with fermented turnip, will hit the spot.

The Gundis is a small door in Lakeview opening onto a part of the world where most of us have never been. The food that’s come through it is something to embrace. v

ß @Mike Sula

l

l

R THE BACKROOM

Hundreds of bar suggestions are available at chicagoreader.com/ barguide. Bottoms up!

Through 3/25: Fri and Sat, 5 PM-midnight, Chicago Athletic Association, 12 S. Michigan, 312-940-3552; workshops 5-8 PM

BARS

Science and industry Field Museum pop-up bar the Backroom has turned part of the Chicago Athletic Association into a scientist’s office from the 1970s.

By JULIA THIEL

A

The Backroom inside the Chicago Athletic Association o ZACHARY JAMES JOHNSTON

giant wild turkey greets visitors to the Backroom, a pop-up bar located in the former pool of the Chicago Athletic Association. Long since deceased, the bird spreads its tail feathers from behind glass, looking like it belongs in a museum rather than a bar. Indeed, it does. The Backroom is a collaboration between the Field Museum, Johalla Projects, Land and Sea Dept., and the CAA, presented in conjunction with the Field’s exhibit “Specimens: Unlocking the Secrets of Life,” opening March 10. To highlight the 30 million specimens housed in the museum—less than 1 percent of which are usually on display—the exhibit will present a selection of some that are usually kept in storage, including an extinct minnow that’s the last remaining one of its kind. The exhibit aims to tell the stories behind those specimens and explore how scientists use the museum’s collections in their daily work. Noah Cruickshank, the adult engagement manager at the Field Museum, says that the collection also includes plants from 1776 and a beetle that Darwin collected.

The specimens on display at the Backroom are not quite so rare. It is, however, the first time the Field has released most of them for viewing outside the museum. The space, designed by art collective Johalla Projects, is set up to evoke a scientist’s office in the 1970s. There’s an enormous taxidermied beaver behind the bar, ficus plants in the corners, and display cases containing drawers of birds, moths, beetles, and other formerly living creatures.

The bar is open only on Friday and Saturday nights through March 25, and every evening a Field Museum scientist w ill present a workshop, demo, or discussion:

for example, attendees might learn how to press plants or mount butterflies. “It’s an opportunity to talk with scientists in a relaxed atmosphere,” Cruickshank says. “No one’s lecturing. We wanted people to be able to ask questions.” Once the scientists depart each night, programming will include DJs, karaoke, and trivia.

And, of course, drinks will be served throughout the evening. Mixologist Paul McGee (Lost Lake, CAA’s Milk Room) is responsible for the extremely brief menu: three beers, three wines, and two mixed drinks. Both cocktails are simple twists on classics—the Negroni substitutes Gran Classico Bitter for Campari, and the Amaro Mule has two types of amaro in place of vodka. They’re just as well balanced as you’d expect McGee creations to be, but the connection to the space feels tenuous at best (although since all alcohol comes from some type of plant, one could argue it relates to botany).

It’s possible that the drinks will become a little bolder in the weeks to come, though.

At the opening-night event on February 25, I talked to Nandini Khaund, the “spirit guide” upstairs at Cindy’s, who said she’d just been chatting with Cruickshank about the possibility of creating cocktails for a few nights of the pop-up. She hadn’t settled on anything specific, but was thinking along the lines of insects: spiders encased in ice cubes, drinks rimmed with worm salt, or something involving crickets or possibly stinkbugs. If the pig’s blood cocktail she made for the Reader’s Cocktail Challenge is any indication, Khaund has the creativity and flair for the dramatic to pull it off. v

ß @juliathiel MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 41

JOBS SALES & MARKETING AMAZON EXPERT/GURU IN

SELLING ON AMAZON. SEO AND SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERT. E-COMMERCE EXPERT FOR ZUBELS.COM CHILDRENS WEAR COMPANY EMAIL RSTONE@ZUBELS.US (MUST BE IN CHICAGO OR SUBURBS OF CHICAGO) Telephone Sales Experienced/aggressive telephone closers needed now to sell ad space for Chicago’s oldest and largest newspaper rep firm.

Immediate openings in Loop office. Salary + commission.

312-368-4884.

HOME REMODELING COMPANY seeks enthusiastic telemarketers. $10/hour plus 1% commission. Must have good phone skills. Bonuses for top producers. Call Jim after 2:30pm, 773-227-2255.

tomation tools; undrstndg of Agile/ SCRUM SDLC methodlgy; exp writing automation scripts & sftware to test apps. Go to “JOIN OUR TEAM” at htt p://craftjack.com/About to apply.

schedule since many tasks require completion in the late evening hours.

Mail resume to Nanci Koller, Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, 550 W Adams, Ste. 300, Chicago, IL 60661.

THE NORTHERN TRUST COMPANY is seeking a Sr. Consultant,

AVP, SALES & PRINCIPAL SOLUTION ARCHITECT

Data Analytics in Chicago, IL w/ the following reqts: BS degree in Business Administration and/or Computer Science, Engineering or related field or any equivalent combination of foreign academic degrees. 5 yrs of related experience. Use SWOT Analysis, MOST Tools, to identify business needs and determine the solutions by applying software lifecycle development process and ensure uniformity across platforms/projects (3 yrs); analyze, document and validate the requirements in specific templates using Use Cases, Functional Specifications (To-Be & As Is), and Gap Analysis (5 yrs); apply Agile / Scrum Methodologies with multiple sprints to Identify, Plan, Design, Develop, Implement, Test, Fix Issues to deliver a working project and track in JIRA (2 yrs); process and extract raw data into warehouse models and data marts using SQL and ALM to create business intelligence reports and track defects (2 yrs). Please apply on-line at www.northerntrustcareers. com and search for Req. #17022

Zensar Technologies, Inc. has openings opening in Oak Brook, IL. All positions may be assigned to various, unanticipated sites throughout the US. Job Code: US-OBIL126 AVP, Sales: new business, solutions, vision/planning & proposals. Job Code: US-OBIL128 Principal Solution Architect (Computer Systems): design/ develop solutions. Mail resume to: Prasun Maharatna, 2107 North First Street, Suite 100, San Jose, CA 95131.

Include job code & full job title/s of interest + recruitment source in cover letter. EOE

TELE-FUNDRAISING: SPRING CASH! American Veterans helping Veterans. Felons need not apply per Illinois Attorney General regulations. Start ASAP, Call 312256-5035

General

Sales Representative Built on family values and a mission TO CARE, TO CONTRIBUTE, TO SOLVE; while living out a vision to create industry-leading solutions for water quality & preservation, agricultural efficiency & production, and sustainable systems & products. Prinsco Inc. has an opening for a full-time Sales Representative.

This position is responsible for calling on existing customers, cultivating new accounts, quoting projects, maintaining pricing and credit terms, following up on new leads and referrals, attending trade shows/promotional events, and identifying and resolving customer concerns.

Must have a Bachelor’s Degree in business, marketing, or a related field. Five years sales experience in the construction industry. Must be self-motivated and have excellent communication, presentation and time management skills.

Must be willing to travel overnight to promote our high-growth product lines, with the ability to work in a high pressure, constantly changing environment. Home office location in the Chicagoland area.

Prinsco acknowledges the importance of balance between our work lives, our personal lives, and our spiritual growth. Prinsco offers competitive compensation and a generous benefit package including: Health, Vision, Dental, Life Insurance, flexible spending plan, 7 Paid Holidays, PTO, 401K Retirement Plan, and an innovative Wellness Plan. Contribute to a greater cause and apply online at www.prinsco.com/Careers.

Equal Opportunity Employer

CRAFTJACK, INC. SKS 1 FT Sr QA Analyst in Evanston, IL to conduct sftware dvlpmnt testing. Resplb for ensuring the intgrity & qual of CRM & suppting sys by creating user stories. Reqd: Bachelor’s in Comp Sci or rel; 4+ yrs exp as QA Analyst or rel. Exp, in aggregate, must incld: 4+ yrs manual sftware testing, incl indepth, broad exp in SDLC, Agile methodolgies & theories, test plan dvlpmnt, reqmnts anlysis, test case design, test exection practices, defect detection, logging & tracking; 2+ yrs automated sftwre testing, incld in depth knwldge code dvlpment, debug skills, writing Selenium tests, & blding testing frameworks that can be incorporatd into builds; 2+ yrs testing backend systems that incld APIs, Web Services, XML and JSON; SOA testing, gray & white box testing, database testing using SQL to view data to vrify test results & ensure that appropriate data cnditions exist; proven exp w/bug tracking sftware, test case documntion, & au-

42 CHICAGO READER | MARCH 2, 2017

TECHNOLOGY ANALYTICS AND MODEL RISK MANAGEMENT MANAGER (MULT. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Lead & supervise prof. teams focused on executing Data Analytics projects within the Fin. Svcs. sector, incl. the banking, consulting or govt. regulatory sectors. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Engg, Elect Engg, Comp Sci, Stats, Econ or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s prog. rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Engg, Elect Engg, Comp Sci, Stats, Econ or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1158, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

COMPUTER SYSTEMS ANALYSTS Zensar Technologies, Inc. has openings opening in Oak Brook, IL. All positions may be assigned to various, unanticipated sites throughout the US. Job Code: US-OBIL127 Computer Systems Analyst (Business/Process Design): author documents & testing.

Job Code: US-OBIL129 Computer Systems Analyst (Product/Service): study/analyze systems, processes & procedures. Job Code: US-OBIL130 Computer Systems Analyst (Testing/ Execution): prepare BRDs & FSD reviews + test cases. Mail resume to: Prasun Maharatna, 2107 North First Street, Suite 100, San Jose, CA 95131.

Include job code & full job title/s of interest + recruitment source in cover letter. EOE

(Hoffman Estates, IL) Tate & Lyle Ingredients Americas LLC seeks Food Scientist, Technical Service-SFI NOAM with Bach or for equiv deg in Food Science, Chem, Engin or rel fld & 5 yrs progressive exp in job offered or in food indus, incl exp w/ food indus, incl insights & trends drvng consumer demand; ingred functionality & processing across broad range of food applic incl sweetener formulation in beverage applic; food sci, food chem, food microbiology & food process; communicating customer needs & mrkt insights to internal depts; & navigating highly matrixed envir. Domes & intl trvl (Canada) reqd up to 25% of time.

Apply online at: http://www. t a t e a n d l y l e . c o m / careers/Pages/Careers.aspx

VIRTUAL COMMUNICATIONS ASSISTANT (Chicago, IL), Seeking candidate w/ min 2 yrs educational or career related concentration in IT business analytics to assist in the consolidation of server infrastructure for national law firm. Candidate must be able to assist w/ implementation & process management as well as have basic familiarity w/ business continuity & disaster recovery concepts. Bach’s Degr in Comp Sci or related field req’d. Knowledge of VMware platform req’d. Candidate must show willingness to work flex

TECHNOLOGY MICROSOFT DYNAMICS MANAGER (MULT. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Help clients solve bus. challenges leveraging the latest industry apps.

Req. Bach’s deg. or foreign equiv. in IT, Engg or rel. + 5 yrs postbach’s, progress. rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg. or foreign equiv. in IT, Engg or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1160, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 West Boy Scout Boulevard, Tampa, FL 33607.

TekInvaderZ LLC, seeks Programmer Analysts for various and unanticipated worksites throughout the US (HQ: Arlington Heights, IL) to install, configure, test & upgrade systems. Masters in Comp Sci +2yrs exp OR Bachelors in Comp Sci +5 yrs exp req’d. Exp must incl. SharePoint admin, C#.NET dev, troubleshooting issues w/ IIS & servers, mainframe, COBOL, SQL Server, SSIS, ASP.NET, AD O.NET, JavaScript, AngularJS, ArcGIS, CSS, HTML5. 20% travel req’d. Background Check req’d.

May telecommute. Send resume to resume@tekinvaderz.com Ref. GR

EJM ENGINEERING, INC. seeks Electrical Engineer in Chicago, IL. Under sup., plan, design, draw & provide install support of electrical equip for highway, rail & transit projects. Review & modify elec. eng. plans; review specs for lighting, telephone & fire systems. Reqs.

Bachelor’s in Elec. Eng. or rltd.

Mail CV to J. Berry, EJM, 411 S. Wells St., Ste. 1000, Chicago, IL 60607 EOE

SINAI MEDICAL GROUP seeks Endocrinologist, Chicago, IL: Diagnose & treat disorders & diseases of endocrine system.

Reqs. medical degree, IL physician lic. & completion of 1 yr endocrinology fellowship. Send CV to D. Berkey, Sinai Medical Group, 1500 S. Fairfield Ave., Chicago, IL 60608

KIDNEY CARE CENTER Olympia Fields LLC seeks Nephrologist, Olympia Fields, IL: Diagnose & treat diseases & disorders of kidneys. Reqs med. degree, IL med. lic. & completion of 1 yr. nephrology fellowship training. Send CV to J Macias, KCCOF, 3322 Vollmer Rd., Olympia Fields, IL 60461

INTEGRATION CONSULTANT: Identify and analyze requirements and business needs to implement Workday software. Build system integrations. to clients’ specifications.

Mail resume: DayNine Consulting, job #J038, 111 W. Jackson Blvd, Ste 2200, Chicago, IL 60604

BON APPETIT (FOOD Service

company at the University of Chicago) Now hiring for Cooks, Utility Workers, Catering Attendants, Drivers and Bakers Apply online www.compassgroupcareers.com

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

708-388-0170

STUDIO $600-$699 LARGE STUDIO NEAR Loyola Park. 1341 W Estes. Hardwood floors.

Cats OK. Laundry in building. $695$715/ month. Heat included. Available 4/1.

773-761-4318, www. lakefrontmgt.com CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone, cable ready, fridge, private facilities, laundry avail. Switchboard. Start at $ 160/wk Call 773-493-3500

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

Call 773-374-7777 for details.

STUDIO 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 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.

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

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

1 BR $900-$1099 BUCKTOWN/ WICKER PARK. Milwaukee/ Ashland/ Division. Four rooms, one bedroom plus extra room for office, etc. Two blocks Blue Line.

One block expressway. $970. 773710-3634.

6829 S. Perry.

Studio/1BR. $465-$520/mo.

1431 W. 78th St. 2BR. $605/mo.

HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

CHICAGO, WEST SIDE 1501 S KILBOURN, 1BR, APPLS, COOKING GAS & HEAT INCL, SECTION 8 WELCOME. $900 + SEC. 773-522-4024

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

LINCOLN SQUARE Beautiful

û NO SEC DEP û

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 SECTION 8 WELCOME, 7334 S. Jeffery Blvd. New remodeled 1 Bedrooms, heat/appl incl. Dan 312-493-5544 CALUMET CITY - Comfortable 1 bedroom, heat, A/C, appliances & carpet included, $670/month + security, 708-957-2043 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $130/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970 CHICAGO 70th & King Dr, 1BR, clean, quiet, well maintained bldg, Lndry + Heat. Section 8 ok. $680/ mo. 773-510-9290.

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

1 BR $1100 AND OVER unit in nice neighborhood, owner occupied, 1 bedroom, 2nd floor, central air & heat, private deck, total rehab, great neighborhood, washer/ dryer in unit. Modern kitchen & bath in old Victorian home. Close to Andersonville & Lincoln Square. $1500 + utilities. 773-506-1125

1 BR OTHER APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. THE HAWK HAS ARRIVED!!!

OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG PLENTY OF PARKING 1BDR FROM $750.00 2BDR FROM $895.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000***

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. OLD MAN WINTER IS HERE!!!

MOST UNITS INCLUDE..

HEAT & HOT WTR STUDIOS FROM $475.00 1BDR FROM $495.00 2BDR FROM $745.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**

ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled.

Rent is based on 30% of annual income. For details, call us at 847-546-1899 ∫

CHATHAM CHARM , Vintage, newly rehab, 1 BR, h/w flrs, sec alarm, heat & hot water incl, laundry, Sec 8 & Seniors Welc. Call for appt (773)418-9908

CHICAGO, 2750 E. 83RD ST. 1BR, $525 - $550.

Ask about our Move In Special!

630-835-1365 Discount RE

Chicago - Beverly, large 2 room Studio & 1BR Apts. Carpet, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $650-$770/mo. Call 773-2334939

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

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

Chicago, Room for Rent in

quiet home, older adult female preferred, $450/month. 84th & Pulaski. Call 773-767-8678

CHICAGO, $450 MONTH, 2 references.

Call 872-803-7838

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

Best Price, Best Location.

Jackson Highland. Studio, $590.

1BR, $690. 2BR, $790.

Call 312-443-2300

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

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

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

CHICAGO - 1214 W 91st St, 1BR, 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

heated, appliances, ceiling fans, laundry room, $670 + security deposit, Call 312-296-0411

1 BR $700-$799

1BR. 7726 S. Jeffery Ave. $750 1BR. 1645 E. 85th Pl. $750 1BR. 8443 S. Blackstone. $750.

1BR. 6822 S. Michigan. $700.

Heat and appliances Included.

Shown by Appt. 773-874-2556 www.archerinvestmentco.com

HUMBOLDT PARK. ONE 7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impeccably Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park.

Laundry & Security on Premises.

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

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)

7143 S WASHTENAW AVE. 1BR, large living/family room space, kitchen, bath, heat included. $500/mo + 1 mo sec. 708-7438204 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 CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up.

773-637-5957 8200 S. DREXEL XL 1BR $665/ MO.HEAT & APPLS INCL. LR, DR, NEWLY REMODELED. NO SEC DEP. SECTION 8 OK. CALL 312915-0100.

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

4200 BLOCK OF W. Grenshaw, newly decor bsmt studio apt, kit appls, heat & elec incl. $700/mo + 1 mo. sec. dep. Senior pref 773-785-5174 71 E 72ND - unit 3, 4 room, 1BR 1BA, hardwood floors throughout, Free heat, sunny 3rd floor unit. $700/month. Call 312-208-1771

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.

EXTRA, EXTRA LARGE 4.5 rooms. 1-2 bedrooms, hwfl. Near North Park College, Northeastern University. Two blocks Brown Line.

Near Kennedy Expressway. $850 includes heat. 773-710-3634.

OAK LAWN, SPACIOUS 1BR, appliances, heat incl, close to Christ Hospital, $800/mo.

708-422-8801

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

2 BR UNDER $900 69TH/CALIFORNIA 4rms, 2BR ($820/mo) & 3rms, 1BR ($710/mo) owner heated, coin laundry, off str pkng, nr Holy Cross Hospital.1.5 mo sec dep.

O’Brien Family Realty 773-5817883 Agent owned

CHICAGO, NEWLY DECORATED 2BR Apt, near 87th & Exchange, $700 /mo. Tenant pays utils. Section 8 accepted. 773-928-3922

CHICAGO 5246 S. HERMITAGE: 2BR bsmt $400. 2BR 1st floor, $525. 3BR, 2nd floor, $625.

1.5 mo sec req’d. 708-574-4085.

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

CHICAGO - 78TH & Loomis, large newly rehab 1BR garden apt.

Clean/quiet/well maint bldg. $850 /mo, heat & all utils incl. Sec 8 ok 773-510-9290

CHICAGO, NEAR CHICAGO STATE, furnished room available, $475-$500/mo.

Shared kitchen & bath. Call 773-7157508

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

HYDE PARK, 5035 S. Drexel, $ 1000/mo+utils.+ 1 mo sec. Sec 8 welc. 2BR on 2nd floor, 1.5BA, bsmt, assigned parking. 312-5044260

7000 S. Merrill 2BR, hdwd flrs, lrg FR/sunrm, new remod., cable ready, lndry, O’keefe Elem, $800/ mo. Section 8 welcome. 708-3081509, 773-493-3500

l

l

SOUTH EASTSIDE 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, newly remodeled, heat & appls included. $600/month.

Section 8 OK. 773-544-1520

CHICAGO, PRINCETON PARK HOMES. Spacious 2-3 BR Townhomes, Inclu: Prvt entry, full bsmt, lndry hook-ups. Ample prkg. Close to trans & schls. Starts at $844/ CHICAGO SW 1516 W. 58th St. mo.

Rehabbed 2BR, 1st flr, ceramic, quiet, w w w . p p k h o m e s . intercom, enclosed porch/yard, close com;773-264-3005 to trans. $750. 312-719-3733

CHICAGO

7600 S Essex 2BR

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

HARVEY - 183 W. 154th St. 2BR apts, Newly renovated, tenant must pay elec & heat. No Pets. $725 + 1 mo sec. 708-899-2097

2 BR $900-$1099 LOVELY 2 bedroom in Austin Area, 5237 West Hirsch, 1st floor, hardwood floors, C/A, $950/mo + 1 month security, utilities not incl. No pets/no smoking. 773-501-5799

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

2 BR $1100-$1299

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

SOUTH SHORE, newly decorated, 1st floor, 2 & 3BR Apts, hdwd floors, heat included.

Section 8 Welcome. Call 708743-8118 CHICAGO, 5015-25 W. Iowa Ave. Augusta & Cicero. Newly Rehab, 2 & 3BR, $1000+/mo.

Section 8 OK. David, 773-6639488

CHICAGO, 7636 S. YATES, 3BR, BR OR MORE shiny hdwd flrs, driveway, fenced yrd, near beach, se- OTHER curity system, good nbrhd.

Beautifully renovated 3-5BR $1400. 773-606-5688 Single Family Homes, new kit, fridge & stove incl, hdwd flrs, 5939 W. RICE, Newly Remod cash & Sec 8 Wel 708-557-0644 3BR, tile kit & jacuzzi tub, SS appls incl., new hdwd flrs, c-fans, CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent. $1200+. S ection 8 Welc.

Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift

3

773-474-3266

E. GARFIELD PK Adams/ California 3BR, 2BA + Den, A/C, tenant pays heat. garage avail.

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

847-951-2515 ROSELAND, SINGLE FAMILY Home, 3BR, 1.5BA, C/A, newly renov. 9600 Blk Wentworth, $1400. Sect 8 ok. Call Mr. Johnson, 630-424-1403 SOUTHSIDE: 6BR 2BA 68TH & PAULINA $1400/MONTH plus utilities plus security deposit. Ready April 5th 708-921-7810

7939 S. EBERHART. 3BR, 1.5BA, ALL NEW APTS, 5 BR, 2BA, 1st fl & 3BR, 1BA, 2nd fl, hdwd flrs, granite countertops, Section 8 Welcome 773-616-3615 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

hdwd flrs, new kitchen and bath, spacious nice block in Chatham. $1200/mo. 773-375-3323

HARVEY Sec 8 Welcome $500 cash back . $0 Security for Sec 8. 3BR, $1300/mo. Fine condition. ADT Alarm. 708-715-0034

certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail.

312-446-3333 or 708-752-3812

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

CHICAGO - South Side 54th & May & Racine, 3BR, stove, fridge incl, sec 8 wel Tess 773925-1188 or Judy 773-206-9269

SOUTHSIDE - 55TH & Ashland, Clean Rooms, use of kitchen and bath. Available Now. Call 773-434-4046

MARKETPLACE GOODS MOVING SALE: LARGE wall unit, teak wood 3 draws cabinets and display cabinets, $250.00.

1960’s bedroom set with newer queen size mattress and box spring no spots or stains rarely used. Nine drawer dresser five drawer chest two drawer night stand. Executive desk with peninsula two file drawers, pencil draw, keyboard pullout and hutch with three guests chairs $500.00 desk and chairs can be sold separately.

Kroeler innerspring full size sofa bed with Sealy posturepedic mattress, slight ware on left arm. One Lazy Boy rocker recliner and one Lazy Boy swivel rocker recliner $8 0.00 for the pair. Amish upholstered glider perfect condition $40 0.00. 1950’s rattan furniture set

with table’s chairs and lamps.

Good condition, removable cushions of which some may have to be replaced $200.00. Early 1940’s wooden kitchen set with four chairs, frost white finish with light blue detailing $50.00. Pet and smoke free home. Call 630-9041990 leave a message for more details, will text or e-mail photos.

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 MASSAGE TABLES, NEW and used. Large selection of professional high quality massage equipment at a very low price. Visit us at www. bestmassage.com or call us, 773764-6542.

SERVICES HIDDEN CAMS & Surveillance

Monitor employee’s, children’s phones Fleet vehicle/asset/property tracking Suspect Infidelity? Child/Elderly care?

Contact Mr. Smith at 312**768**0523

FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

EXPEDIENT CREDIT RESTORATION

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

Credit Sweep w/ TRANSUNION/EXPERIAN/EQUIFAX New Credit Files Trade-Lines Inquiry Deletion Judgements Medical Bills I can have you Mortgage Ready in 30-60 days Money Back Guarantee Get Started Today : 773-770-6944

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

HEALTH & WELLNESS

ing for a healthy newborn to love, tell stories to, be silly with, and explore all life’s offerings. Heidi & Jay Call Toll-free 1-855-643-3822 www.heidiandjayadopt.com

CNA CAREGIVER Certified Nurse Assistant, Excellent Care.

Reasonable Rates. 4 Yrs Caring for Senior Men. Experience with Dementia, Alzheimer’s, Diabetes, Double Prosthesis, Congestive Heart Failure. Hospice Care, etc.

Resume, Certifications, Experience, References: curranhomecare.com. jamesmcurran1@gmail.com Call/ text: 773.761.5413

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

MESSAGES AN AFFECTIONATE, PROTECTIVE, fun married couple look-

SPIRITUAL PSYCHIC READER TELLS you past, present and future, helps with all problems, could do where others have failed. Call now for FREE consultation 630-408-4789

FOR SALE

CHATHAM: ALL new rehabbed 3BR 2BA home w/fin bsmt and all new appls. 92nd Place. $1350/mo 312-631-5382

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799

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

FOR SALE

* * * ArtHouse Chicago Niche Realty 773-320-9234 nicherealty.net 2 9-UNIT BLDGS, near Mid-way,

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

2BDRM/BATH CONDO. SEC 8 wel 24hr security. 773-405-1250

MAYWOOD - 2BR APT WITH enclosed sun porch, carpet A/C. No pets. Ten pays electric & gas.

Avail now. $900. David Miller, 708259-9219

LYNWOOD, 2BR, 1BA, c-fans, heat, appls, A/C, new cabs. cer flrs, new crpt, balc. $1200.

Credit check, sec dep, no pets.

773-721-6086

2 BR OTHER

CHATHAM 8817 S. Cottage Grove Nice 3BR, 1st flr, Ten. Pays Utils., $1,100/mo. Section 8 Welcome No Sec. Dep! Call 773-844-1216 4010 S. KING DR. 3BR, heat incl, $1025. 1535 W. 79th St. 4BR, 1.5BA Apt ($925) & resturant for rent, 708-421-7630 / 773-899-9529 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 ,

LINCOLN 2600W/5224N 2

SQUARE

BR/1 BTH. Apartment in quiet owner occupied building. $1600/month, includes heat, water. Hardwood floors, minblinds, new kitchen, laundry in building, easy street parking laundry. $2000 security deposit. Please see our online ad for more info. Call Joe 773-339-4673 only after checking out the online ad.

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

garden apartment, 2BR, 1BA. No gas or electric bill. $800/mo.

Call 773-285-3206

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

CHICAGO, DELUXE, NEWLY DECORATED 2 & 3 BR, BY 71ST & UNION. FREE HEAT. $740-$840/MO. SECTION 8 WELC. MR. WILSON, 773491-6580

ALSIP: Large 3BR , 1.5BA $1075/mo. Balcony, appliances, laundry, parking & storage.

Call 708-268-3762 CHICAGO 6405 S Wolcott. 3BR, 1BA, newly remodeled, tenant pays utilities, $750/month + $450 Move-In Fee. Call 773-494-9727

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

û16880 S. ANTHONY- 3BR, wall to wall carpet. $1175/mo.

Section 8 Welcome. 773-285-3206 CHICAGO - 7112 S. EUCLID

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 CHATHAM BEAUTIFULLY REMODELED 6BR Home, custom cabinets, hdwd flrs, granite countertops. $1800/mo. Sec 8 OK. 773-9058487

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

3 BR OR MORE $2500 AND OVER

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

GARY NSA ACCEPTING applications for studio, 1 & 2 bedroom SUBSIDIZED apartments. Apply Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9am to 1pm ONLY at 1735 W 5th Ave. Applications are to be filled out on site. Adult applicants must provide a current picture ID and SS card.

AFFORDABLE 2 & 3BRS FROM $575.

Newly decorated, heated/ unheated. 1 Month Free for

SEC 8 WELCOME Newly Updated 3BR House, 1BA, 11734 S. Prairie.

Appls incl. $1250/mo. Tenant pays

qualified tenants.

CRS (312) 782-4041

own utils.

Garage. Near public transp. 708-408-7075

$600,000 each; 1 2-sty bldg w/2 apts & 2 store fronts, W. 71st St.; $125,000; Lansing 24-unit bldng, $1.2 million 773-925-0065 or c.sassoc@ att.net

non-residential SELF-STORAGE

CENTERS.

T W O locations to serve you. All units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue.

773-685-6868.

South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

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 - 4928 WEST Gladys. Room for rent. Basement, $400, furnished, free internet/ cable, util incl. No dep. 773-2871270 AVAILABLE NOW! S p a c i o u s Rooms for rent. $400/mo.

Utilities and bed incl. Seniors Welcome.

No Sec Dep. 312-973-2793

WASHINGTON PARK 5636 King Dr. Single Rooms for rent from $390, $450, to $510 a month.

Call 773-359-7744

1 WEEK FREE. 96th & Halsted & other locations. Large Rooms, shared kitchen & bath. $100/week and up.

Call 773-848-4020 SOUTH SUBURBS NICE room.

Seniors Welcome, share kitchen and bath or private bath, $400-$475. Call 708-803-0720 CHICAGO 67TH AND Emerald furn. rooms, 45 + pref, share kitchen and bath, util. included, cable ready.

From $350. 773-358-2570

MARCH 2, 2017 | CHICAGO READER 43

Never miss a show again.

STRAIGHT DOPE

By Cecil Adams Q : How did the Romans actually do any

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EARLY WARNINGS

mathematical calculations with Roman numerals? Without the concept of places (units, tens, etc) how did they add, subtract, multiply, divide, sell slaves, and build aqueducts? —LEONARD FRANKFORD,

A : Let me toss that question right back at

you, Leonard: How do you solve complex math problems? You’re probably not working through them in your head, or even on paper. If you need to figure something unwieldy or tricky—say, the square root of 41,786—you reach for a calculator. And so did the ancient Romans. Their counting devices weren’t electronic, of course, but the tech was high enough for them to establish and administer an empire of nearly two million square miles without even coming up with a notation for zero.

The Romans’ contributions to the arena of mathematics weren’t exactly mind-blowing, especially compared to their cultural forebears across the sea in Greece—the Pythagorean theorem is a hard act to follow.

When it came to manipulating numbers, the Romans were pragmatists, not theoreticians.

As you suggest, conquest, commerce, and engineering were their domains, all fields that do require a certain computational acumen. But the average Roman citizen learned only basic arithmetic in school, under the tutelage of a calculator, as math instructors were often called, unless he or she (but almost always he) needed greater knowledge for professional purposes.

And basic Roman arithmetic is largely rather simple. Addition is no sweat, because complex Roman numbers already use what math pros call additive notation, with numerals set beside one another to create a larger number. VI is just V plus I, after all. To add large numbers, simply pile all the letters together, arrange them in descending order, and there’s your sum. CLXVI plus CLXVI? CCLLXXVVII, or CCCXXXII. And one of the advantages of the Roman system is that you don’t need to memorize multiplication tables. What’s VI times VI? Six Vs and six Is, which converts to three Xs, a V, and an I: XXXVI. You can do all this because of the limitation Leonard pointed out above. Roman numerals don’t have what’s called place value, or positional value, the way digits in our system do.

The value represented by the Arabic numeral 5 changes depending on its placement with-

in a figure: it can mean five units, or five tens, or five hundreds. To a Roman, V always meant just plain five, regardless of position.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned long division—that’s where positional value really pays off. What’s CCXVII divided by CLI? The pileand-sort method isn’t going to work here. For this one, as well as for the multiplication of larger numbers, you need an abacus. Not too much physical evidence survives, but judging from references in poems by Catullus, Juvenal, and others, and from contemporary devices found in Greece, the standard Roman abacus used glass, ivory, or bronze counters placed on a board marked off into rows and columns. A later, more portable version (and this one we’ve got examples of) consisted of a metal plate with beads that slid back and forth in slots.

In either case, the columns or slots were labeled I, X, C, etc, corresponding to the ones column, the tens column, the hundreds, and so on up to millions; the counters or beads kept track of how many you had of each. Essentially, abacuses allowed you to convert Roman figures into a place-based system, do your calculations, then convert back. Some, at least, could even handle fractions, using other specialized slots; for smaller values the Romans had a separate base-12 system, making it easier to work with thirds and quarters.

These devices remained in use for centuries after Rome fell. Then, after arriving on the Iberian peninsula in the eighth century, the Arabs introduced their own snazzy notation system (more accurately referred to as Hindu-Arabic), which made its written debut in Christian Europe courtesy of some Spanish monks in 976. Resistance to these foreign ciphers was fierce until the 15th century, when the invention of the printing press spread them widely enough that their utility could no longer be denied, sparking a mathematical revolution. And that’s why I’m able to tell you today that the square root of 41,786 is 204.41624201613725978. 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

Damned if he doesn’t, damned if she doesn’t

Advice to a guy with self-admitted issues. Plus: spanking convos, and more Q : Fortyish straight white dude here. I have this weird (possibly misogynistic) belief that, when it comes to sex, I can’t win. Actually, I think men in general can’t win.

Thoughtful, well-meaning men at least. It comes down to this: During sex, if the man doesn’t come, it’s the man’s fault, because he clearly has problems with his dick and is barely even a man and should be ashamed of himself. If the woman doesn’t come, it’s also the man’s fault, because he’s clearly bad at sex and doesn’t even care and is barely even a man and should be ashamed of himself. So am I a misogynist or just a guy with issues?

Any advice for me moving forward? —YEAH, I GOT ISSUES

A : If you’ve been with women who blamed you when you didn’t come, YIGI, and then turned around and blamed you when they didn’t come, well, that had to be annoying. Or maybe you’re referring to something in the ether and not to any inability-to-climax/inabilityto-induce-climax shaming you’ve actually come in for.

(Have you been with women who shamed you like this?

If so, and again, that had to be annoying. Have you been with any women at all? If not, it’s possible your letter is an men’s rights activist setup and/or you’re a misogynist with issues.)

If this has actually happened to you, YIGI, chalk it up to “some people are awful, women are people, some women are awful” and let it go. And remember this about men: sometimes we come during sex, sometimes we don’t, and the number of times we don’t increases with age. Focus more on intimacy, connection, and mutual pleasure, YIGI, and

less on spooging all over everything—and seek partners with the same focus.

As for women: You do know that dick alone isn’t gonna do it for most women, right? Only a small percentage of women can come from PIV intercourse alone. (If you didn’t know, you know now, and you’re welcome.) And you’re familiar with the clitoris, right? (If you weren’t, google it, and you’re welcome.) But if you find yourself in bed with a woman and you’re having difficultly helping her come (you’re there to help not make), ask her if she can make herself come. If she can’t, odds are you won’t be able to help her come, either—not you, not anyone else. If she can make herself come, ask her to masturbate to climax while you watch.

Make a close study of what works for her. If she touches herself in a certain way, learn to touch her in that way. If she busts out a vibrator, use that vibrator before, during, and after PIV or instead of PIV. Good luck.

Q : I’m a fan from way back.

A therapist told me to go out and have some fun— I’m a married woman with teen boys and feeling a bit lonely—but I’m not looking to have an affair. I just want a spanking now and then.

I found the one kink club I visited in New York to be kind of depressing, and my spanking friends are more of a social group who hang out on the weekends. I just need a little recreation—some good, clean spanking fun.

Would love your advice.

—SEEKS PADDLING AND NEEDS KNOW-HOW

A : Kink enthusiasts, like

dentists and accountants and troglodytes (hey there, CPAC), have conventions,

SPANK, where like-minded/ employed/aroused folks meet and socialize before heading up to their hotel rooms for some good, clean kinky fun. I think you should get your ass to one of the many spanking conventions out there—and so does Jillian Keenan, journalist and author of Sex With Shakespeare, a funny, moving memoir about your shared kink (spanking) and how Shakespeare’s plays helped Keenan discover and accept herself, as a human being and as a kinkster.

“National parties are a great way to get safe, fun, no-sex spankings and meet other people in the scene in a low-pressure environment,” said Keenan, who sent along a list of events all over the country, among them Shadow Lane (Las Vegas), Crimson Moon (Chicago), and the Lone Star Spanking Party (Houston).

“There are some parties I’ve chosen not to attend for political reasons,” Keenan said. “The spanking community isn’t immune to heteronormative bullshit, unfortunately, and some parties explicitly prohibit M/m play. Any party for sexual minorities that prohibits expressions of other minority sexual identities doesn’t deserve our time or our money!”

Q : Someone asked me to

pee on them and offered to pay me. I didn’t know what to do. They weren’t unattractive. Would you pee on someone for money?

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v

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

please recycle this paper MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 45

b Vita & the Woolf 4/27, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Susan Werner 4/22, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM b Wrekmeister Harmonies 5/8, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F

UPDATED Chairlift 4/14, 8 PM, Park West, moved from Double Door Despised Icon 3/22, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, moved from Double Door b Mako 3/17, 6 PM, Subterranean, moved from Double Door b

UPCOMING A Tribe Called Quest o COURTESY PITCH PERFECT PR

NEW

All Time Low, Swmrs 7/21, 6 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM b Allie X 4/27, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 3/3, noon, 18+ Astronoid 4/11, 7 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Fri 3/3, 11 AM, 17+ At the Drive-In, Le Butcherettes 6/18, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM b Big Boi (DJ set) 4/22, 10 PM, the Mid Brant Bjork 4/18, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Boogie, Kaiydo 4/25, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Chastity 5/12, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Cheetah Chrome & Johnny Blitz 4/23, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Stanley Clarke 4/12, 7 and 9:30 PM, the Promontory b Elvis Costello & the Imposters, Dawes 6/12, 7:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM Allison Crutchfield & the Fizz 3/31, 7:30 PM, Schubas b Dada Life 3/25-26, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 3/3, noon, 17+ Dick Dale 8/9, 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Micky Dolenz 6/13-14, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/2, noon b Donna the Bufffalo 5/19, 8 PM, City Winery b 888, Coast Modern, Sundara Karma 4/18, 6:30 PM, Subterranean b Elliotts 3/29, 9 PM, Burlington Emel 5/9, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM b Samantha Fish 5/11, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/2, noon b

Flat Five 6/9, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM Peter Frampton 4/1, 8 PM, Centre East, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Skokie Froth 5/6, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Fruit Bats 5/11, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 3/3, noon Generationals, Psychic Twin 4/19, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM Goo Goo Dolls, Phillip Phillips 7/24, 7:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM Greeting Committee 4/26, 6 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM b Amy Helm & the Handsome Strangers 5/14, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/2, noon b High Plains, Anjou 5/20, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Hypnotic Brass Ensemble 4/23, 7 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/2, noon b The Jesus and Mary Chain 5/10, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM, 18+ Kantadora, Banda Devastadora, Grupo Bajo Llave, Fuerza y Poder 4/1, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Kaskade 6/16, 9 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM, 18+ Paul Kelly & Charlie Owen 5/6, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 3/3, 8 AM b King Crimson 6/28, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM KR 3/24, 8:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Denny Laine 5/8, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/2, noon b Land of Talk 6/18, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM

46 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 2, 2017

Le Butcherettes 3/31, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge b Macabre, Brain Tentacles 4/16, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Barry Manilow 5/17, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Fri 3/3, noon John Mayer 9/2, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Sat 3/4, 10 AM Natalie Merchant 7/9, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM Mono, Holy Sons 4/22, 9 PM, Subterranean John Moreland 6/14, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 3/3, 11 AM, 17+ Murs 5/5, 8 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM Bryant Myers 5/13, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM Nightbringer 5/30, 8:30 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Northbound 4/26, 7 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Pharoahe Monch 3/17, 10:30 PM, Subterranean Pitchfork Music Festival with LCD Soundsystem, A Tribe Called Quest, Solange, and more 7/14-16, noon, Union Park b Portugal. The Man 6/14, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM, 18+ Prince Royce, Luis Coronel 7/22, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM, 17+ Ratt 6/2, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM, 17+ River Oaks, JT Woodruff 5/10, 7 PM, Beat Kitchen b Secret Sisters 6/25, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM b Joss Stone 6/28, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 3/3, 10 AM, 17+ Tiles 4/28, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint

Archspire, Arkaik 4/2, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Richard Ashcroft 3/30, 9 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Jeff Austin Band 4/4, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Martin Barre Band 4/28-29, 8 PM, Martyrs’ Bastille 4/3, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom Besnard Lakes 5/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Black Angels, A Place to Bury Strangers 5/11, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 18+ Bongripper, Harm’s Way 5/26, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Sarah Cahill 3/12, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Kasey Chambers 3/19, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Clean Bandit 5/2, 7:30 PM, House of Blues b Cold as Life 3/17, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Descendents 10/7, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Desiigner 5/2, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Neil Diamond 5/28, 8 PM, United Center Dwarves 6/2, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ English Beat 3/19, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Expendables 4/14, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Fishbone 4/1, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Flaming Lips 4/17, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Future 6/2, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Great Lake Swimmers 4/22, 9 PM, Hideout Ha Ha Tonka 5/20, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Hammerfall, Delain 4/28, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Griffin House 4/23, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Sam Hunt, Maren Morris 7/8, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Jose James 3/26, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Juicy J, Belly, Project Pat 3/17, 8 PM, House of Blues, 18+ K-Ci & JoJo, Monica, Jagged Edge 4/21, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Gladys Knight, Jeffrey Osborne 3/17, 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino, Hammond Dave Mason 4/10-11, 8 PM, City Winery b Mastodon, Eagles of Death Metal, Russian Circles 5/13, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold 6/18, 6 PM, Soldier Field New Bomb Turks 4/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle New Pornographers, Waxahatchee 4/19, 8 PM and 4/21, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Nordic Effect 4/9, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Nouvelle Vague 3/27, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Of Montreal 4/22, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Pallbearer 3/31, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Phantogram 3/11, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Pixies, Mitski 10/8, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Six Organs of Admittance 4/9, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Sleaford Mods 4/3, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Tash Sultana 10/9, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Sunsquabi 3/25, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Super Duper Kyle 4/14, 7 PM, Metro b Gloria Trevi, Alejandra Guzman 6/17, 8:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont 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+ Vader, Internal Bleeding, Sacrificial Slaughter 6/14, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Matthew Logan Vasquez 5/4, 8 PM, Subterranean Carlos Vives 4/16, 7 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont The Weeknd 5/23, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Max Weinberg & the Weeklings 4/7, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Betty Who, Verite 4/20, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Winger 3/31, 8:30 PM, Joe’s Live, Rosemont Zombies 4/13-14, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene UNHERALDED CHICAGO music-biz veteran Willie Barney died of heart failure on Monday, February 20, at age 89. Born in Arkansas in 1927, he’s best known as the founder of west-side institution Barney’s One Stop and Record Shop, which he opened in 1953 as Barney’s Swing Shop.

His career in music began rather modestly, according to his son, Ray: “He borrowed $300 from his family and started selling records out of the trunk of his car.”

In the 60s, Barney expanded into distribution and launched a couple short-lived labels, Four Brothers and Bright Star.

Barney’s One Stop eventually became a hub for house music, and in the mid-80s Ray (who’d joined his father’s business in 1980, shortly after graduating from Bradley University) began running influential ghetto-house label Dance Mania out of the shop. Both Dance Mania and Barney’s One Stop wound down in 2001.

Gossip Wolf isn’t exactly sure whether the folks at the Empty Bottle are gluttons for punishment. After all, every year they throw a daytime outdoor winter block party called Music Frozen Dancing—but every year it’s so well attended that it looks like maybe the audiences are the ones with issues! This year’s party, held on Saturday, March 4, at the usual spot (on Cortez just east of Western), features beer vendors, chili from the winner of last year’s Chili-Synth Cook-Off, and a typically sterling lineup that includes Metz, Screaming Females, and punky synth-pop siren Sneaks. The Bottle folks tell Gossip Wolf that there’s a surprise guest lined up too—a “kool” rapper whose surreal 80s and 90s material is totally ultramagnetic, if not straight-up octagonal!

On Tuesday, February 21, after Chicago blackened-death-metal band Immortal Bird played at Saint Vitus in Brooklyn, someone stole their van. The group launched a GoFundMe to help replace the gear inside, and it hit its $10,000 goal in a day—but you can still donate at bit.ly/ immbird. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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ROBERT RANDOLPH AND THE FAMILY BAND THE NEW RESPECTS

MAR 17

MIPSO

APR 01

JOE HERTLER & THE RAINBOW SEEKERS

APR 06

MAD DOGS & ENGLISHMEN

APR 20

THE WEDDING PRESENT

APR 21

THE CERNY BROTHERS

THE GIVING TREE BAND

MAY 12

MILD HIGH CLUB

MAY 16

MEAT PUPPETS & mike watt + the jom and terry show

MAY 19

THE NORTH 41 + CHURCH BOOTY

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

NEW

COLLEEN GREEN BAND

Chicago forever.

TICKETS AT WWW.LH-ST.COM

NEW

NEW

Celebrating 60 Years of Making Music!

ALEX DEZEN OF THE DAMNWELLS

MIKE DUNN

MAR 14

AIRPARK

MAR 21

ACID DAD AND HONDURAS

APR 09

NIGHTLY

APR 12

WELSHLY ARMS

APR 17

MOTEL RADIO

SWEET CRUDE

APR 22

LYDIA AINSWORTH

APR 28

FRUIT BATS [SOLO]

MAY 11

MICHAEL NAU (OF COTTON JONES)

Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been singing and strumming with Chicago since 1957!

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

New adult group classes start next week!

Celebrate with us and learn more at

oldtownschool.org MARCH 2, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 47

2016/17 chicago symphony orchestra world premieres

HEAR IT FIRST In the 2016/17 season, the CSO will premiere works by some of the world’s leading contemporary composers.

March 9–11 LIMITED AVAILABILITY Esa-Pekka Salonen Cello Concerto [WORLD PREMIERE, CSO COMMISSION] featuring Yo-Yo Ma Esa-Pekka Salonen joins forces with Yo-Yo Ma for an electrifying premiere presentation of Salonen’s Cello Concerto, the latest in the award-winning composer/conductor’s impressive output.

COMMISSIONED BY THE MRS. HAROLD C. SMITH FUND.

March 16–21 Samuel Adams many words of love [WORLD PREMIERE, CSO COMMISSION] Riccardo Muti conducts a premiere by CSO Mead Composerin-Residence Samuel Adams, whose works have been described as “wondrously alluring” (The San Francisco Chronicle) and “thoroughly ingenious” (The San Francisco Examiner). cOMMISSIONED BY THE LOUISE DURHAM MEAD FUND.

celebrating john adams March 2–7 John Adams Scheherazade.2 featuring violinist Leila Josefowicz John Adams, one of the most pivotal figures in 20th-century classical music, celebrates his 70th birthday on February 15, 2017. In honor of this great American composer, Esa-Pekka Salonen presents two weeks of concerts pairing works by Adams with Stravinsky, Debussy and Salonen himself.

CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

RICCARDO MUTI

CSO.ORG • 312-294-3000 • GROUP SERVICES 312-294-3040 CSO Tuesdays sponsor:

ZELL MUSIC DIRECTOR

Artists, prices and programs subject to change.

CSO Tuesdays media sponsor:

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