Print Issue of March 30, 2017 (Volume 46, Number 25)

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 3 0 , 2 0 1 7

CHRIS HAYES says America’s founders would be offended by policing in cities like Chicago. 22 Chicago’s most popular YOUNG METAL GUITARIST plays on YouTube, not onstage. 27

on the menu jibarito $6 Chicago dog $4 Parking TICKET $1,500

How CHICAGO’S ONCE-PROMISING FOOD TRUCK SCENE has been systematically IMMOBILIZED by legislative opposition, onerous red tape, costly fines, and the pro-restaurant lobby

By JULIA THIEL 13

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The Changing Face of Fulton Market

Where We’ll Live in 2050 (presented by CAF and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency For Planning)

(presented by CAF and The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat)

Thursday, April 13 at 6pm $15 public / $10 members / $7 students

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Once a landscape of butchers and purveyors, Fulton Market is suddenly Chicago’s hottest district for development. Major undertakings by developer Sterling Bay are bringing new dynamism to the area. Join us to review the design of two key projects.

Lathrop Homes Redevelopment Tuesday, May 16 at 6pm $15 public / $10 members / $7 students Learn about the complex restoration and revitalization work underway at Lathrop Homes, a historic Chicago Housing Authority site located between Chicago’s Bucktown and Roscoe Village neighborhoods.

2 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

What does urban living look like in the future?

Join CAF and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning as we host a discussion with experts about the way our city and suburbs might change to become more livable in the coming decades.

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Join us as we bring together experts from architecture, engineering, urban planning and real estate to uncover everything from the physics to the financials of how skyscrapers work.

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FEATURES

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE 4 Agenda The theatrical walking tour The Twink on the Fire Escape, “Zhang Peili: Record. Repeat” at the Art Institute, chef Alice Waters, the documentary Mr. Gaga, and more recommended things to do

FOOD & DRINK

Stalled

CITY LIFE

7 Chicagoans How a dentalphobic dentist helps patients cope with fear of the tooth doctor 9 Joravsky | Politics Congressman Mike Quigley’s big moment on the Russian-hacking stage 11 Transportation Trump’s budget would eliminate funding for the Red Line extension, Metra, and more.

VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT NICKI STANULA VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES FABIO CAVALIERI, ARIANA DIAZ, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654 312-222-6920, CHICAGOREADER.COM

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42 Restaurant review: Temporis The West Town spot’s 11-course tasting menu will leave you wanting more.

45 Booze Chicago Cocktail Summit founder Billy Helmkamp of the Whistler talks about what to expect from this year’s event.

ARTS & CULTURE

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34 In Rotation Current musical obsessions include Yellow Magic Orchestra, Lvnch, and Mica Levi 35 Shows of note Sleaford Mods, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, Pallbearer, Xiu Xiu, and more recommendations 37 The Secret History of Chicago Music Otis “Big Smokey” Smothers recorded with Howlin’ Wolf even before his own first session.

FOOD & DRINK

How Chicago’s once-promising food truck scene has been systematically immobilized by legislative opposition, onerous red tape, costly fines, and the pro-restaurant lobby

BY JULIA THIEL 13

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IN THIS ISSUE

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Chicago’s most popular young metal guitarist plays on YouTube, not onstage

Rob Scallon’s frequently goofy videos—among them a banjo cover of Slayer’s “Raining Blood”—have earned him an audience of millions.

BY LEOR GALIL 27

19 Culture If Trump eliminates the NEA, the money the organization provides won’t be the most important loss.

19 Theater Will Davis and American Theater Company turn William Inge’s classic play Picnic into a fluid—and gender-fluid—ballet.

21 Visual Art The Lavender Menace poster project creates queer visibility in dive-bar bathrooms.

22 Lit In A Colony in a Nation, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes compares current-day policing to British rule just before the American Revolution.

23 Small Screen CBS’s Superior Donuts, based on Tracy Letts’s Steppenwolf stage comedy, is a corn-syrup north-side minstrel show.

25 Movies The Doc10 film festival offers an alternative to alternative facts.

CLASSIFIEDS

46 Jobs 46 Apartments & Spaces 47 Marketplace

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48 Straight Dope Why do films these days have so many producers?

49 Savage Love A second chance for someone who lied about his HIV status? Plus: tips for a sexually frustrated young wife 50 Early Warnings Black Lips, Phoenix, Warped Tour, Windy City Smokeout, and other shows in the weeks to come 50 Gossip Wolf The Vic screens the Wax Trax! Records documentary before it’s even finished, and more music news.

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

Going against tradition isn’t easy with 36 generations of ancestors to please.

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b ALL AGES

F ened once “Joy Ride,” as she’s known to her derby friends, develops eyes for a teammate, the powerhouse jammer Lizzie Lightning (Erica Hernandez). Kenzie Seibert’s authentic concern and hurt as Michelle give this Pride Films and Plays production a groundedness sometimes lacking in the more rah-rah team scenes.

Rachel Edwards Harvith directed. —MAX MALLER Through 4/16: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, the Buena at Pride Arts Center, 4147 N. Broadway, 800-737-0984, pridefilmsandplays.com, $20-$25, $10 students, seniors, or others who can’t afford full price.

In to America The Griffin TheR atre’s theatrical documentary gives voice—or rather, many voices—to

Born Ready o MICHAEL COURIER

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater Born Ready Who’d expect the t trash-championing Factory TheT R ater to mount an unabashedly sent sentimen-

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tal comedy with legit dance numbers, numbe heart-on-the-sleeve romance, and only a couple veiled vagina jokes? Stacie Barra’s charming, well-crafted homag homage to 1950s backstage intrigue films (think (t a kinder, gentler All About Eve) focuses fo on former child film star Marion Kroft’s struggle to restart her aalcohol-steeped career in telev television variety shows. With the unlikely assistanc assistance of enthusias enthusiastic chorus girl Har Harriet, who whose Iowa Iow naivete may mask mas quesque tionable motives, Kroft finds fin legit stardom looming. Like L most of the cast, Eleanor Katz K as Kroft and Clara Byczkowski as Harriet cleverly lampoo lampoon midcentury cinematic acting tropes trope without compromising the script’s sincere emotions. While director Wm. Bullion occasionally struggles to find adequately snappy pacing, his twohour production is graceful and an endearing.

—JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 4/29: 4 Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon M 4/3, 8 PM, the Factory Theater, Theate 1623 W. Howard, thefactorythea thefactorytheater. com, $25, $18 students and sen seniors.

By the Water Sharyn Rothste Rothstein’s 2014 play turns Tolstoy on his head: he it’s unhappyy families who are all alike, al at least when their unhappiness is pressed into a made-for-TV-style dra drama where everything—tax fraud, marital marit problems, a hurricane—is a plot device devi in service of a painfully predictable predictabl story. But it may not be all Rothstein’s Rothste fault. The pace of this Northlight production, directed by Cody Estle, Estl

feels slow, and even the cast of A-list actors, led by Chicago theater stalwarts Francis Guinan and Penny Slusher, seem off their game. It’s hard not to wonder whether this paint-by-numbers script, with its many unsurprising last-act revelations, just benumbed them. —JACK HELBIG Through 4/23: Wed-Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Wed 3/29, 4/12, and 4/19, 1 PM; Sun 4/9, 7:30 PM, Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie, Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$76, $15 students.

Destiny of Desire To introduce Karen Zacarias’s self-described “unapologetic telenovela,” director José Luis Valenzuela’s 11-person cast clump center stage and proclaim, “We are here to change the social order. Deal with it!” But for the ensuring two and a half hours they do little but lampoon the planet’s most popular genre of televised entertainment as cartoonishly bad melodrama fit for ridicule. The occasional direct-address moments when actors step up to a microphone and cite statistics—about things like workplace sexual harassment, Latino buying power, and U.S. incarceration rates—mostly demonstrate how insubstantial everything else in the show is. The game cast clearly enjoy the unrelenting foolishness, including their swooning dance moves as they move scenery about, but Valenzeula encourages such broad, obvious overacting that precious little feels true. Change the social order indeed. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 4/16: Wed 7:30 PM, Thu 2 and 7:30 PM (7:30 PM only 4/13), Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Sun 4/2, 7:30 PM; Tue 4/4, 7:30 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $20-$80.

For the Love of (or, the Roller Derby Play) The Brooklyn Scallywags are the most feared of all women’s roller derby squads in the tristate area. These ladies dominate, and “rambunctious” doesn’t begin to describe them when they’re off the track; if the word “rambunctious” showed up at one of their parties, they’d beat its ass and make it do shots. The team has a new recruit, Joy (Alex Dauphin), whose relationship with her partner, the out-of-work Michelle, is threat-

the migrant experience in America. In a style recalling the work of filmmaker Ken Burns, playwright William Massolia has stitched together selections from letters, diaries, biographies, and oral histories to chronicle the experiences of people who came to this continent over the past 400 years: colonists seeking a fresh start in a new world, slaves brutally brought here in chains, refugees fleeing religious persecution and war. The monologues also chronicle the movement of people across the nation—the westward expansion of white settlers into land taken from native inhabitants by war or trickery, the Great Migration of southern blacks to the urban north in the 1910s. These are stories of hardship and heartbreak, but also of the thrill of discovery and, for some, the exaltation of freedom from oppression. Under Dorothy Milne’s direction, each of the excellent 13 actors plays multiple roles, representing an astonishing range of ethnic backgrounds with emotional authenticity and pinpoint-precise accents. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 4/23: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Sat 4/22, 3:30 PM, Den Theatre, 1329-1333 N. Milwaukee, 773-609-2336, griffintheatre.com, $28-$36, $23-$31 students and seniors.

Mother of Smoke The screams. My God, the screams. This multidisciplinary collaboration between Red Tape Theatre and Walkabout Theater pulverizes

together The Cherry Orchard, The Trojan Woman, Charles Mee excerpts, original monologues about gentrification and Englewood, movement pieces, and an endless playlist of moody music, all to tell a story about crumbling institutions (I think). The result is a dreamlike, thoroughly inexplicable wash of noise.

Is it intended as absurdist comedy or heady performance art or something else entirely? Whatever the case, actors belt at the top of their lungs, speak over dialogue, and at multiple points throatcroak into a microphone for extended periods to produce a grating, godawful sound that merits review by The Hague.

If this is the result, what on earth was the experiment? —DAN JAKES Through 4/15: Thu-Mon 8 PM, the Broadway at Pride Arts Center, 4139 N. Broadway, 800-737-0984, redtapetheatre.org, $20.

Ohio State Murders In Adrienne Kennedy’s 1992 exploration of memory, reading, and racial hatred, successful author Suzanne Alexander (Renee Lockett) returns to her alma mater and in a play-length lecture reveals the backstory behind her career as a novelist: the unpunished Jim Crow-era slaying of her twin daughters by a white man.

Between Suzanne’s lecture, flashbacks to her younger self (Danielle Thorsen) in her blissfully bookish college days, and the ill-fated seductions of a young white professor (Tim Moan), nearly all that happens onstage is the physical act of reading, which makes for a kind of inertia. That plus the long stretches of dense, self-consciously “literary” direct address sap this Dandelion Theatre production of drama, though the unfairness depicted still stirs. —MAX MALLER Through 4/2: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Heartland Studio Theatre, 7016 N. Glenwood, 773-791-2393, dandeliontheatre. com, $20 suggested donation.

Our Christian Nation In an America run by the extreme religious right a young family is forced to go on the run after the husband loses his job, their saga eventually exposing the lizard people who are actually in control of the country. There are a few laughs early

A still from video artist Zhang Peili’s 30x30 (1988), on display as part of “Record. Repeat.” at the Art Institute.

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Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of March 30 For more of the best things to do every day of the week, go to chicagoreader. com/agenda.

in this comedy written by Joe Janes and directed by Andrea J. Dymond, but most have to do with the repeated appearances of an actor in an inflatable T. rex costume. And at nearly two and a half hours, this play is a sprawling and unfocussed slog: its simplistic pitting of Christianity as unalloyed evil against homosexual love as unambiguous good doesn’t work as either satire or polemic, and by taking on half a dozen current political issues all at once, it succeeds at rendering none of them with any conviction and leaves the audience both exhausted and confused. —DMITRY SAMAROV Through 4/29: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Cornservatory, 4210 N. Lincoln, 773-6501331, cornservatory.org, $20.

The Twink on the Fire Escape: R A Walking Tour Storyteller Zach Zimmerman wrote this walking tour/

comedy set as a love letter to Boystown, his home during his formative years as a newly out twentysomething. Under the gaze of passersby and onlookers in alleys and in bars, he escorts a handful-size audience around Lakeview to destinations that played a key role in a raucous date-night vignette, plying them along the way with Ann Sather cinnamon rolls, pickle-back shots, and conversation about the parameters of what qualifies a “twunk.” It’s a heartfelt, authentically Chicago stand-up comedy achievement as brave and bizarre as anything by Maria Bamford or Billy Eichner. When Zimmerman moves to New York soon, he’ll be among worldclass comics who bring innovation to the form. He should feel right at home.

—DAN JAKES Sun 4/2, 2 PM, southwest corner of Clark and Belmont, 3184 N. Clark, tinyurl.com/k7qzvva, $25.

DANCE R

Audience Architects Kick off Chicago Dance Month with performances by Giordano Dance II, Natya Dance Theater, and Culture Shock Chicago. Mon 4/3, 6 PM, Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand, 312-595-7437, seechicagodance. com. F

COMEDY

Brunch So Hard A sketch show R about women’s health care benefiting the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. Sat 4/1, 6:30 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $10.

Billy Crystal The legendary R comedian and actor comes to Chicago on his Spend the Night With

Billy Crystal tour. Sun 4/2, 7 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, 312-462-6300, thechicagotheatre.com, $39.50-$150.

Vertical Gallery “Blek Le Rat: Ratical,” the gallery celebrates its four-year anniversary with work by Blek Le Rat, founder of the international stencil art movement. Opening reception Sat 4/1, 6-10 PM. 4/1-4/29. Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM. 1016 N. Western, 773-697-3846, verticalgallery.com.

Fortune Feimster The comic R known for Chelsea Lately and The Mindy Project performs her stand-up.

3/30-4/1: Thu 8:30 PM, Fri 8:30 and 10:30 PM, Sat 7 and 9 PM, Zanies, 1548 N. Wells, 312-337-4027, zanies.com/chicago, $25 plus two-drink minimum.

Hot Dish Comedy Merrit R Landsteiner hosts this comedy showcase featuring Dan Weber, Megan

Stalter, and Antonio Aguilar. Sat 4/1, 7:30 PM, North Bar, 1637 W. North, 773-6973563, liveatnorthbar.com, $5.

Wham City Comedy The BaltiR more-based comedy and video collective behind IFC’s webseries The

Mirror performs live. Sat 4/1, 7 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433, hideoutchicago.com, $8..

VISUAL ARTS Art Institute of Chicago “Zhang Peili: Record. Repeat.,” a comprehensive look at the work of video artist Zhang Peili, from his first pieces in the 1980s to videos made in the 2000s. 3/30-7/9.

Sun–Wed and Fri-Sat 10:30 AM–5 PM, Thu 10:30 AM–8 PM. 111 S. Michigan, 312443-3600, artic.edu, $25.

Center on Halsted “Transgender Day of Visibility,” this showcase features paintings, clothing, performance art, photography, and more created by local trans artists. Fri 3/31, 6-9 PM. Daily 8 AM-10 PM. 3656 N. Halsted, 773-4726469, centeronhalsted.org.

Galerie F “Girl Pin Gang,” the international collective of female, transgender, and nonbinary enamel pin makers present the work behind the flair. Opening reception Fri 3/31 at 6 PM features a pop-up store. 3/31-4/23. Tue-Sun 11 AM-6 PM. 2415 N. Milwaukee, 773-819-9200, galerief.com.

LIT & LECTURES

Jami Attenberg The author R discusses her novel All Grown Up. Thu 3/30, 7 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-293-2665, bookcellarinc.com.

Kiss & Tell SlutTalk presents R this storytelling show about love, sex, and dating. Thu 3/30, 9:30 PM, the Owl, 2521 N. Milwaukee, 773-235-5300, wearesluttalk.com.

Tuesday Funk This monthly readR ing series features eclectic works by local writers. April’s lineup includes

Felix Jung, Tracy Harford-Porter, Melissa Wiley, Kellye Howard, and Nestor Gomez. Tue 4/4, 7:30 PM, Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark, 773-334-9851, tuesdayfunk.org.

Alice Waters The chef, author, R and food activist discusses her books Fanny in France and The Art of

Simple Food. Mon 4/3, 6 PM, Harold Washington Library Center, 400 S. State, 312-747-4300, bookcellarinc.com.

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened . . . Lonny Price, an original cast member from the 1981 Broadway musical Merrily We Roll Along, remembers the excitement of being chosen—along with about two dozen other teenage actors who answered an open call—for this daring new show by director Harold Prince and composer

Life The crew of the International Space Station receive a space probe carrying a cellular life form it collected from the surface of Mars; the organism grows into a sort of clear jellyfish that they nickname Calvin, but before long Calvin has broken out of quarantine and started eating them. This sci-fi shocker sticks closely to the Alien playbook, down to the intimately acquainted, flatly characterized crew and the scenes of chaos, panic, and overlapping dialogue as one after another of them is captured by the flesh-eating wad of superglue. The entire story takes place in zero gravity, so when one of the astronauts is killed, globules of his own blood float around him; the players (including Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, and Hiroyuki Sanada) spent so much time in harnesses they must have been ready to puke. But I’m glad they didn’t.

Daniel Espinosa directed. —J.R. JONES R, 103 min. Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, 600 N. Michigan

R

Mr. Gaga Shot over eight years, this exuberant documentary traces the career of Israeli dance genius Ohad Naharin from his days W

A Madcap Celebration of Family and Cultural Identity

BY LAUREN

DIRECTED BY JOSHUA

Gene Siskel Film Center “Fierce Tidings: On Rage and Hope,” the Foundation for Asian American Independent Media hosts this group exhibition featuring work by Asian-American and Asian diasporic artists exploring their personal experiences with trauma and injustice. Opening reception Fri 3/31, 6-8 PM. 3/31-5/1. 164 N. State, 312-846-2600, faaim.org.

Patron “Belongings,” paintings by New York-based artist Ryosuke Kumarkura.

Opening reception Fri 4/1, 4-7 PM. 4/15/7. Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM. 673 N. Milwaukee, 312-846-1500, patrongallery.com.

Stephen Sondheim, and the devastation of seeing it flop miserably with critics and close after only 16 performances.

Price’s gaga voice-over narration is hard to take, but his fellow cast members (including Jason Alexander) supply fascinating insights into the troubled production and demanding reverse-chronological book, which follows its characters from disappointed middle age back to hopeful young adulthood. More impressively, Price has incorporated the retrospective theme into his documentary with a second act in which the performers reveal the different directions life has taken them since they appeared in the show. —J.R. JONES 95 min. Fri 3/31, 2 PM; Sat 4/1, 1:30 PM; and Wed 4/5, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

For Lauren Yee, being a modern woman often clashes with her Chinese family’s values. But when her father disappears, she must embrace her heritage for the first time in order to find him.

YEE KAHAN BRODY

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Mr. Gaga

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 5

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AGENDA B as a self-taught artist entertaining the Israeli Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War; to his work in the U.S., where he studied at Juilliard and the School of American Ballet and performed with Martha Graham’s and Maurice Béjart’s companies; to his appointment as artistic director of the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv. Naharin’s style is both idiosyncratic and accessible, his movements both angular and supple, but above all his dances celebrate the body, built for the joy of motion. Filmmaker Tomer Heymann follows Naharin’s maturation into a visionary choreographer who designed a new international language of dance called Gaga, centered not on technique but on body awareness and improvisation. —ANDREA GRONVALL 100 min. Dancer Anna Long performs after the 7:15 PM screening on Friday. Fri 3/31-Thu 4/6, 2:20, 7:15 PM. Music Box The Projects Extraterrestrials, homeopathy, and the afterlife mesh in this oddball Japanese comedy written and directed by Junji Sakamoto. An elderly retired couple (Naomi Fujiyama, Ittoku Kishibe), surrounded by eccentric busybodies in a low-income Osaka apartment complex, return to their herbal medicine trade when a nerdy space alien (Takumi Saito) offers to reunite them with their deceased only son in exchange for huge batches of immune-system enhancers. The movie’s high point is an inventive sequence inside a massive UFO, portrayed as an Edenic savannah where intergalactic travelers might find restorative comfort. The sequence reflects a traditional Japanese reverence for nature, and it helps compensate for the claustrophobic early scenes in which the nosy neighbors trade gossip and innuendo about the couple. In Japanese with subtitles.

—ANDREA GRONVALL 103 min. Wed 4/5, 7 PM. River East 21 Shoes A forgotten master of R the silent era, writer-director Lois Weber was once ranked along-

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side D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. De Mille, but her dramas were radically different from theirs, intimate in scale and focused on progressive social issues. Shoes (1916), inspired

by Jane Addams’s study of urban red-light districts, tells the story of an impoverished shop clerk (Mary MacLaren) so desperate for a new pair of shoes that she sells her body to a customer who’s been pursuing her. The young woman’s drab home life, dominated by her lazy, unemployed father, is authentically staged, and Weber—who, like Griffith, knew how to pull viewers deep inside a character’s emotional vortex—reveals how the chronic envy of these young shopworkers, selling merchandise they can’t afford themselves, sucks them

Shoes into a rapacious economy. —J.R. JONES 52 min. Also on the program: Weber’s 15-minute short The Price (1911). Sat 4/1, 3:30 PM, and Mon 4/3, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center The Tiger Hunter Set in 1979, this wholesome comedy follows its affable hero (Danny Pudi) from his rural Indian village to Chicago, where he arrives on a 30-day work visa expecting to land a permanent position as an engineer. The manufacturing firm he was targeting has been downsized, so he settles for a thankless temp job in the basement and moves into a tiny apartment with several other men from South Asia who work menial jobs below their professional skill sets. The period setting provides some fun costumes, hairstyles, and musical cues, though director Lena Khan, who cowrote this 2016 feature with Sameer Gardezi, shies away from the story’s satirical implications; the humor comes mainly from the protagonist’s interactions with his new friends and the endearing specificity of their situation. —LEAH PICKETT 93 min. Screens as the opening-night program of the Asian American Showcase; for a full schedule visit siskelfilmcenter.org. Fri 3/31, 8 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

REVIVALS The Forbidden Room Guy R Maddin delivers another of his wild and whimsical fantasies,

tinged with camp and couched in the film grammar of silent cinema.

Codirected by Evan Johnson, this is a steamer trunk full of material, running nearly two hours and weaving together the stories of a submarine crew trapped in the briny deep, a strapping woodsman infiltrating a clan of cave-dwelling thieves called the Red Wolves, a motorcycle lover whose crack-up casts her into the arms of an amorous bone specialist, an ingenue whose boyfriends turn into blackened bananas, and more. Along the way

Maddin works his way through his usual bag of tricks—irises, feverish superimpositions, texts introducing the characters, figures wreathed in electronic snow.

Bright reds dominate, no more disturbingly than when Geraldine Chaplin, showing her teeth and cracking a whip, appears as “the Master Passion,” the human personification of a nightclub crooner’s lust for female bottoms.

With Mathieu Amalric, Jacques Nolot, Charlotte Rampling, and Udo Kier. —J.R. JONES 119 min.

Filmmaker Melika Bass lectures at the Tuesday screening. Sat 4/1, 5:30 PM, and Tue 4/4, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center The Pirate A broad and R beautiful Vincente Minnelli musical (1948) with a rich score

by Cole Porter. In a Technicolor Caribbean, traveling player Gene Kelly is in love with demure maiden Judy Garland, but she has lustier fantasies, pining after the magnificent pirate Black Mococo. Lively, colorful, and lyrical—Minnelli was married to Garland at the time, and it shows in some of the most romantic close-ups ever put on film. —DAVE KEHR 102 min. Screens as part of a tenth-anniversary celebration for the local online journal Cine-File. Wed 4/5, 7 PM. Music Box

SPECIAL EVENTS Melika Bass: Devotional Animals Selected short work by the Chicago-based filmmaker and artist. 60 min. Bass attends the screening.

Thu 4/6, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center A Quiet Passion British filmmaker Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives; The Long Day Closes) wrote and directed this biopic of Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon). 126 min.

Davies attends this free screening, copresented by the Poetry Foundation; the film opens at Music Box on May 19. Mon 4/3, 7:30 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center F v

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CITY LIFE

Marianne Schaefer o JIAYUE YU

Chicagoans

The dentalphobic dentist

o ISA GIALORENZO

Marianne Schaefer, 61

Street View

Just dandy “THE UPPER LEFT-HAND quadrant of your torso is your sartorial sandbox,” the fashion editors of Esquire declared in 2014. Standing among the exuberant flora at the Garfield Park Conservatory, Jonathan Cole seems well aware of this rule, accessorizing the lapel of his double-breasted suit with a thrifted rose pendant and a bright, casually placed pocket square for what he describes as “a suited-up unkempt feel.” —ISA GIALLORENZO See more Chicago street style on Giallorenzo’s blog chicagolooks.blogspot.com.

MAYBE 10 PERCENT of people floss. One lady asked me for extra floss one time, and I was all excited that my message got across, and she said, ‘It’s the best thing for hanging pictures.’

“I don’t like flossing myself. I personally like using a toothpick in a more aggressive way, scalloping the base of the teeth. But use a plastic one. You don’t want to use wood, and you don’t want to use paper clips. I did that, and I really injured myself one time; I poked into the tissue and ended up with an abscess of the gum, and then I had to admit to what I did and it was severely embarrassing.

“I do notice people’s teeth, but I don’t say anything if I see things that are unaesthetic. David Bowie’s teeth used to bother me so much that I would stand up and go right up to the television and think, ‘What would I do?’ Somebody ended up doing a symposium about David Bowie’s orthodontia at a conference. I was really glad to have been able to go to that, because it was made clear which teeth had to be removed and what was done to improve the color. My obsession was answered. And after all this, he met Iman and he got the lady of his life, so there you go.

“My BA was in psychology, and I think it was probably the best initial training I could have done. I had a case years ago where a person who had been abused as a child could not speak to a medical professional or a dentist, so she had to use a hand puppet to communicate with me. I think it was supposed to be a turtle.

We established this rapport where I would speak to the puppet and explain things or ask permission to do service. I felt fully engaged with it.

“We finished all the dental work, and I invited the person to join me for dinner to celebrate, and when she came to dinner, she came without the puppet, and I said, ‘I don’t know how I feel about this. I feel odd.’

She said, ‘Well, I don’t need the puppet.’ I said, ‘I’m

“David Bowie’s teeth used to bother me so much that I would stand up and go right up to the television and think, ‘What would I do?’”

glad that you don’t, but I will miss her very much.’

“We get more new patients who are unnerved than people who are calm and composed. At least, our office seems to get them. I tell them ahead of time that if they need to end the appointment prematurely, it’s OK, it’s no problem for me. People who are really fearful, I’ll sometimes say, ‘I’m going to work for the count of ten.

Will you be OK for the count of ten?’ We used to run a program where therapists would bring their [dentalphobic] patients to the office. Some of them were so fearful they couldn’t even sit in the dental chair at first.

“I’m a dentalphobic myself. When I go the dentist, they tell me to sit still. They say, ‘You can stop curling your toes.’ Then they look in my mouth and say, ‘How did this happen?’ And I say, ‘The usual way. I was eating Jolly Ranchers, and I bit down and it pulled the cap off.’ They’re like, ‘Why are you doing this? Why?’”.

—AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 30

FRIDAY 31

SATURDAY 1

SUNDAY 2

MONDAY 3

TUESDAY 4

WEDNESDAY 5

Pop -Up Apothecar y This “book apothecary” features curative reads recommended by more than 50 local authors to aid with existential ailments like absurdity, alienation, politics, and self. A portion of book sales benefit 826Chi. 6-9 PM, City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie, citylitbooks.org.

& B aco nfest Ch icago The fest dedicated entirely to that beloved pork product includes three different sessions to choose from, each one featuring myriad chefs serving up bacon in every way imaginable. 3/31-4/1: Fri 7-10 PM, Sat noon-3 PM and 7-10 PM, UIC Forum, 725 W. Roosevelt, baconfestchicago. com, $60-$100.

· Inte rnati onal To m Hanks Day The celebration of America’s most beloved actor will feature a Tom Hanks movie marathon, T-shirts, and drink specials.

All donations benefit Lifeline Energy. Noon-5 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, thetomhanksday.com, $10 suggested donation.

½ Salonathon This special pop-up version of the performance series features Erin Kilmurray, Quinn Tsan, Lucy Stoole, and more responding to the exhibition “Art AIDS America Chicago,” which closes today. 5:30-8 PM, Alphawood Gallery, 2401 N. Halsted, salonathon. org. F

¸ Ch icago Cockt a il Summit Both casual booze enthusiasts and professional mixologists can enjoy seminars, demos, tastings, and networking with some of Chicago’s most notable cocktail professionals. 4/2-4/3: Sun 10 AM-5 PM, Mon 11 AM-5 PM, Logan, 2646 N. Milwaukee, cocktailsummit.com, $15 per session, $50 for day-pass.

· Wi nged Migrati on This documentary screens as part of the Field Trip series.

Following the film the Field Museum’s curator of birds, John Bates, discusses avian evolutionary patterns. 7 PM, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, musicboxtheatre. com, $11.

p Battlefield Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne present their staged interpretation of the Indian epic poem The Mahabharata.

4/5-4/8: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, mcachicago. org, $40.

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

A clinically proven and patented breakthrough, now available in the U.S. without a prescription…ADVERTISEMENT

New Bladder Control Pill Finally Receives U.S. Patent New Double-Blind Clinical Study Shows UriVarx Can Reduce Urgency, Leakage and Incontinence... It Can Even Reduce Frustrating Middle of the Night Bathroom Trips

NEW YORK, NY – Frequent, uncontrollable urination is no laughing matter. Add it to all of the other stresses in life and it can be nothing short of a nightmare.

That helpless feeling of your bladder bursting and the worry of not making it to the bathroom in time can be absolutely terrifying.

The loss of dignity and the fear and embarrassment of “not making it” creates one of the most difficult health problems, you’ll ever deal with.

But you’re not alone with your bladder issues.

According to The National Institute of Health, as many as 33 million Americans are affected by bladder control problems, exactly like those described above.

Bladder Problems…

The One Secret You’ll Never Tell

According to Dr. Tracey Seipel, a long-time clinician and one of the world’s leading experts in the natural treatment of bladder control issues, “Most people who have overactive bladders choose to keep their problems a secret.”

In fact, she went on to say, “They don’t even tell their spouse or families about it. It affects their lives in every way, influencing where they go, and even what they will wear in case they have an accident.”

And forget about making a fashion statement, according to Dr. Seipel, “Black is the color of choice, as it can hide evidence of public accidents.”

But bladder control issues may now be a thing of the past. That’s because a 100% natural, drug-free aid developed by Dr. Seipel and her team is now available. In the double blind placebo control clinical trials published on www.clinicaltrials.gov, the 150 patients enrolled in this powerful clinical trial and who took UriVarx™ for eight weeks experienced a large and statistically significant reduction in overactive bladder and urinary incontinence symptoms.

The proprietary formulation called UriVarx was clinically tested and proven to reduce incontinence, stress incontinence, urgency, frequency and nocturia (having to go at night). Some participants even reported complete reversal of their nocturia within 2 weeks!

UriVarx… Users Rejoice!

Dr. Seipel’s formula has completely changed the life of Brandy W., a 45 year-old mother of three from Brisbane, CA. Brandy stated, “I had a high bladder frequency as a child, but my frequency really worsened after the birth of my first child.”

After a friend told her about UriVarx, Brandy decided to give it a try. “After 2 weeks, I already

noticed changes” said Brandy.

She went on to say, “I was finding that although I felt I needed to urinate, I wasn’t as desperate to run to the toilet. Now, when I get up in the morning, I’m able to make the coffee and even have a cup before needing to go, which is a great improvement!”

Amazing Clinical Results Patients using UriVarx™ experience all these benefits: • Reduction in Urge Incontinence • Reduction in Stress Incontinence • Reduction in Urinary Urgency • Reduction in Urinary Frequency • Reduction in Nocturia (bedtime episodes) Patients started seeing results in as little as 2 weeks.

How Does It Work?

“UriVarx helps support bladder health by revitalizing bladder tone and function and by helping support kidney health”, says Dr. Seipel.

“The active ingredients promote normal urinary frequency and they reduce urgency, nocturia and those embarrassing accidents,” adds Dr. Seipel.

“The compound invigorates the tone of the bladder wall, assisting a healthy level of firmness by enhancing the bladder’s muscular elasticity. This reduces the frequent urge to urinate,” Dr. Seipel explains.

Positive and Strong Clinical Studies

This natural drug-free blend recently shocked the medical community with its overwhelmingly positive results in a new published clinical study.

Study participants were randomized and assigned to either a treatment group or a placebo group at two separate facilities. Both groups were monitored for a variety of bladder symptoms at week two, four and eight during the 2-month study.

At the end of the study, those receiving UriVarx showed significant improvements in all symptoms, including day frequency, night frequency and urgency.

And what was even more impressive were the quality of life improvements the test subjects experienced.

A full 84% of those taking UriVarx said “Yes!” to the question... “Have you had any benefit from your treat-

ment?” Compared to only 18% of the placebo group.

Results like these are not surprising to Dr. Seipel who single-handedly pioneered the bladder care category in the early 2000’s, receiving an award for her work from the prestigious U.S. Nutrition Business Journal.

The patented formula consists of a proprietary blend of select, synergistically paired botanicals. All chosen because of their ability to support healthy urinary and kidney function, maintain the health of the urinary tract and improve bladder tone. Dr. Seipel searched for over 15 years to find the perfect nutrients for her blend.

International Decrease In Adult Diaper Use

“Over-active bladder syndrome is a widely spread problem,” says Dr. Seipel. Many of the individuals are forced to wear adult diapers. And insiders in the adult diaper market are keeping a close eye on Dr. Seipel’s research. They don’t want to lose their good customers like 78 year-old retired teacher Glenda B. Glenda wore adult diapers every day to guard against accidents. “My bladder capacity was good, but the leakage and the accidents would occur without warning. So I wore them every day,” confessed Glenda.

Since Glenda discovered Dr. Seipel’s Bladder Control formula, you won’t find her shopping in the adult diaper section of the store anymore.

“After only two months on UriVarx, I reduced my need to wear my diapers. Now I manage very well, thank you,” says Glenda. And Glenda’s results are similar to many in a recent study. In fact, of those who reported using adult diapers at the beginning of the study 75% of them no longer needed them after just 8 weeks, compared to only 5% of the placebo group.

Enlarged Prostate or Bladder Issues?

Symptoms of an overactive bladder can mimic those caused by an enlarged prostate, confusing many men.

Dr. Seipel explains, “Prostate enlargement restricts urine flow. The bladder compensates for this by trying harder and harder to push urine out.” As pressure in the bladder increases, so do instances of urinary urgency and frequency. Long after prostate issues are handled, many men still experience the same symptoms, thanks to their now overactive bladder.

Finally a clinically proven pill solution to ease all your bladder problems.

“It’s a his-and-hers formula, “she grins. David M., a 46 year old male can attest to this. “I was having to go to the toilet every hour or so and I had to go to the toilet at least four times per night.”

For weeks after starting UriVarx, David says, “My trips to the toilet have definitely reduced and I’m having much better sleep, getting up maybe once per night.”

If you’re ready to alleviate the uncontrollable urge to urinate, forcing you to make frantic trips to the bathroom, and instead want the confidence and security that a healthier bladder can bring to your life, here’s your risk free opportunity.

Chicago Reader Readers Qualify for a Special Discount

To encourage you to experience the lifechanging effect UriVarx™ can have, Innovus Pharmaceuticals is offering a special discount for Chicago Reader readers – but only for a very limited time. An order Hotline has been set up for local readers. Simply call 1-800-4402641. Supplies are limited, so they will only be taking orders for the next 72 hours. If you miss Great Results Whether this opportunity, you may have to wait until the You’re a Man or a Woman “Because male and female bladders, other than size next production run in a few weeks. We expect are identical,” says D. Seipel, “The formula works phone lines to be busy, so please be patient. equally well for both men and women.”

THESE STATEMENTS HAVE NOT BEEN EVALUATED BY THE FDA. THIS PRODUCT IS NOT INTENDED TO DIAGNOSE, TREAT, CURE, OR PREVENT ANY DISEASE. RESULTS MAY VARY.

8 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

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

CITY LIFE

POLITICS

The collusion question Congressman Mike Quigley’s big moment on the Russian-hacking stage

By BEN JORAVSKY

A

s an obsessed follower of the investigation into President Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, I was glued to my computer watching last Tuesday’s House Intelligence Committee hearings when I was hit with an unexpected jolt of hometown boosterism.

There on the screen—with all the other congressional bigwigs—was Mike Quigley, my very own congressman. Quick, call the Chicago booster club!

Quigley was the one asking FBI director James Comey about the all-important C-word—in this case, collusion. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

Before I got too carried away, I reminded myself that the last time a Chicago-area congressman played a prominent role in a congressional investigation of presidential malfeasance it didn’t work out too well—at least, not for the congressman.

That was back in 1998, when U.S. rep Henry Hyde, a DuPage County Republican, led the charge to impeach President Clinton for, among other things, not telling the truth when he said “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Oh, the world seemed so simple then, didn’t it? Our president was accused of lying about adultery as opposed to lying about—everyfuckingthing.

In the midst of his investigation, word broke that Hyde had had an affair years before with a married mother of four. Hyde brushed it off as “youthful indiscretion.”

Thus, one of my first questions when I called Quigley last week was whether he’d had any indiscretions with President Putin, youthful or otherwise.

“No,” he said. “I’ve never met Putin.”

Phew. Glad we got that out of the way.

Just to remind you, Congress and the FBI are both looking into what Trump and/or his aides knew and when they knew it—just

Illinois congressman Mike Quigley, left, questions FBI director James Comey, right, during a House Intelligence Committee hearing March 21. o ASHLEE REZIN/SUN-TIMES; ZACH GIBSON/GETTY IMAGES

as was asked of the Nixon administration during the congressional investigation into the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate. Only now the question pertains to the computer hacking of the DNC by the Russians.

Well, at least, every U.S. intelligence entity—from the FBI to the CIA—says it was Russian hackers put up by President Putin who favored Trump over Hillary Clinton.

Of course, to this day I know many Bernie bros who insist that Putin had nothing to do with the hacking. Instead, they contend the e-mails were leaked by a heroic anonymous DNC whistle-blower.

You know, I understand the Bernie bros were disappointed by the elections. But fellas, you’re starting to remind me of my friends in the 90s who hated the Los Angeles Police Department so much that they insisted O.J. didn’t commit the Brentwood murders.

Anyway, in July, thousands of private Democratic Party e-mails were published by WikiLeaks just as the party was gathering in Philadelphia for its nominating convention.

So instead of uniting as one to battle the Donald, the Bernie and Hillary factions were at each other’s throats—much to the delight of Trump, who couldn’t stop tweeting about it.

Now we get to the issue of Trump’s involve-

ment. At the moment, much of the evidence linking Trump to the hacking is circumstantial. The president benefited from it, and he cheered it on, and some of his aides have had meetings or business ties with Russians close to Putin. But does it go deeper? Was the president or any of his aides in on the hacking?

Trump says no. But of course, this president’s not known for his truthfulness.

In January, the House Intelligence Committee decided to hold hearings into the affair.

(The Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting its own investigation.)

And so, last Monday, Quigley asked Comey the collusion question. In other words, J

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE continued from 9

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did the Trump campaign collude with the Russians to hack the DNC’s computers? “ ‘Collusion’ is not a term, a legal term of art,” Comey responded. “And it’s one I haven’t used here today, as we’re investigating to see whether there was any coordination between people associated with the campaign [and the Russians].”

Quigley says that going into the hearing he didn’t expect Comey would offer specifics about the investigation. But he feels Comey’s response was significant. At the very least, even in all its vagueness, Comey’s response couldn’t have pleased Trump, as it makes it clear that the collusion or “coordination” issue isn’t going away anytime soon.

“I realize [Comey] can’t divulge the specifics of their investigations, so I have to be a little more theoretical in my questions,” Quigley told me when we spoke last week. “I can’t ask, ‘How did the Russians operate with these guys?’ I have to ask, ‘How do the Russians operate in, say, eastern Europe?’ Or, ‘What is the Kremlin playbook?’”

Quigley’s one of nine Democrats—and the only congressman from Illinois—on the 22-member Intelligence Committee. He was appointed by Democratic congressional leader Nancy Pelosi, who, he jokes, was looking for “policy wonks.”

In Quigley’s case, Pelosi certainly got the wonk thing right. He’s been a geeky, detailoriented guy since I met him back in the 80s, when he was a twentysomething north-sider joining the local fight against lights in Wrigley Field—a long-shot cause if ever there was one.

Over the years, I’ve watched Quigley evolve toward political independence. I remember his first race, in 1991, when, backed by Mayor Daley, he challenged 46th Ward alderman Helen Shiller. She spanked him good. But a few years later Quigley successfully ran for the Cook County Board, where he broke from the mayor’s clutches, irritating Daley by championing TIF reform. (Yes, only I can work TIFs into a column about Russian hacking.) He was elected to Congress in 2009.

Ironically, lately I’ve heard north-side progressives complain that Quigley’s been too tepid on Trump—at least in comparison to Jan Schakowsky and Luis Gutierrez, who represent neighboring congressional districts.

These hearings now give Quigley a chance to demonstrate that he’s not afraid to go after Trump on the Russians as though it were Daley and the TIFs. “This investigation is the most important

“There are some overlaps [between the congressional investigation and] my work in Chicago— there’s a degree of intimidation from the administration.”

—U.S. rep Mike Quigley

thing I’ve ever done in public life,” he says. “But there are some overlaps to my work in Chicago—there’s a degree of intimidation from the administration.” Just as there was with Daley.

In this case, Quigley’s dealing with a committee chair, California Republican Devin Nunes, who seems to be working with the Trump administration to promote a different kind of investigation: not about who hacked the DNC computers, but who’s been leaking embarrassing revelations to the press.

When word broke last week that Nunes had met with Trump to talk about details of the investigation before he’d discussed them with the committee, Quigley issued a statement blasting the chairman.

“Nunes has to decide where his priorities lie,” Quigley said. “He can lead a credible, bipartisan investigation . . . or he can serve as a proxy for the president to create distractions, sow confusion, and advance false narratives.”

Sounds like something I would write. As Quigley knows from experience, resistance doesn’t always work in Chicago. Maybe he’ll have better luck in D.C. v

ß @joravben

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CITY LIFE

The CTA used federal money for the Green Line’s Garfield Park Conservatory station, among other projects. o CHRIS SWEDA/SUN-TIMES MEDIA

WICKER PARK: 1478 N. Milwau Av. (Blue Line @ Damen) • 773-22kee 7-9 558 BUFFALOEXCHANGE.COM •

TRANSPORTATION

Blood on the tracks

Trump’s budget would eliminate funding for the Red Line extension, Metra, and more.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

D

onald Trump’s failure to repeal and replace Obamacare last week represented the first major defeat for his fledgling administration. But obviously there are still many future battles to be fought.

Among the most pressing issues is the proposed budget he released earlier this month, which calls for starving social services and the arts while jacking up the defense budget by 10 percent, funding the border wall with Mexico, and slashing taxes for the superwealthy. In addition, the budget would lay waste to key federal funding sources for public transportation infrastructure, which would have a devastating effect on Chicago-area projects.

We can’t say they didn’t warn us in last year’s Republican Party platform. “We propose to remove from the Highway Trust Fund programs that should not be the business of the federal government,” it stated. The platform listed Amtrak, public transportation,

bike-share programs, trails, and sidewalks as examples of “worthwhile enterprises [that] should be funded through other sources.”

The proposed budget wouldn’t abolish funding for the majority of pedestrian and bike projects, but it would eliminate several grant programs that have been crucial for bankrolling CTA, Metra, and Amtrak infrastructure. Local leaders say many planned improvements would be almost impossible to pay for without help from the feds, so we’re going to have to fight this anti-urban budget with everything we’ve got.

First, let’s survey the potential damage.

Trump’s budget calls for eliminating the Federal Transit Administration’s Capital Investments Program, which includes Core Capacity grants to accommodate more ridership on “legacy” transit systems and the so-called New Starts funding for newer transit lines.

Thankfully, Chicago hustled to nail down $956 million in Core Capacity money for J

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 11

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CITY LIFE Transportation continued from 11 the first phase of the CTA’s Red and Purple Modernization Project, a crucial overhaul of these el lines north of Belmont, before Barack Obama left office. However, Trump’s budget makes this money unavailable to future RPM phases.

New Starts has previously funded overhauls of the Brown and Pink Lines, and has been used to add stations and tracks for Metra’s North Central, Southwest, and Union Pacific-West lines. The CTA is counting on this funding to help pay for the $2 billion planned Red Line extension south to 130th Street. It would also be a likely revenue stream for the proposed Ashland bus rapid transit corridor, although that project is currently back-burnered due to community opposition.

The new budget also calls for scrapping the popular Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery competitive grant program, or TIGER. The CTA has previously used TIGER money for the Green Line’s Garfield Park Conservatory station and various Blue Line work, and it’s currently bankrolling overhauls of the Garfield Green Line stop and the Red Line’s 95th Street terminal.

The Chicago Department of Transportation is also using this funding source for its portion of the CREATE program, meant to unsnarl traffic jams on area freight rail corridors.

CDOT also won TIGER grants for the elegant, serpentine bicycle-pedestrian bridge that opened last fall at 35th Street and the lakefront, as well as a planned bike-ped bridge at 41st. (The latter project was recently stalled after construction bids came in high, but CDOT commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld told the Tribune Monday that the department has found “alternative sources” for that funding.)

So Trump’s plan to slay the TIGER program would impact a wide range of future local rail and bridge projects. It would also take away a major funding source for Amtrak’s longdistance routes, many of which, like the Capitol Limited, City of New Orleans, and Empire Builder, are based in Chicago.

Despite the Republicans’ argument that transit corridors should be funded strictly by city and state dollars (while failing to apply that logic to suburban highways), Chicago leaders say that approach would be disastrous for the local economy, and bad for the nation as a whole.

“Eliminating funding for transit projects, as the president’s budget proposes, would cut jobs, decrease service, make commutes

“We need a federal budget that maintains and grows funding for sustainable transportation options—not decimates it.”

—Active Transportation Alliance director of governmental relations Kyle Whitehead

longer and create significant challenges for both transit agencies across the country and residents that rely on transit to get to work or school every day,” CTA spokesman Jeff Tolman writes in an e-mail.

Metra CEO Don Orseno says that while the proposed budget doesn’t appear to affect any existing Metra projects, the railroad currently needs $12 billion over the next ten years to achieve and maintain a state of good repair on the system, and was expecting to raise about a quarter of that in the upcoming decade, mostly from federal sources. “Cutting federal

capital funding is a serious and short-sighted step in the wrong direction,” he said.

“These programs have been central to our progress as a region in recent decades and we can’t afford to go in reverse,” Active Transportation Alliance director of governmental relations Kyle Whitehead wrote in a recent blog post. “We need a federal budget that maintains and grows funding for sustainable transportation options—not decimates it.”

Active Trans began mobilizing against expected cuts to sustainable transportation shortly after Trump was elected, according to Whitehead. The advocacy organization has met with congressional representatives from around the region, often accompanied by local constituents, urging the politicians to protect and grow funding for transit, walking, and biking. The group also recently launched a letter-writing campaign, asking members to contact their senators and reps and ask them to reject the proposed cuts.

The good news, according to Illinois congressman Mike Quigley—who sits on the House Appropriations Committee—is that many lawmakers have already gotten the message.

“Fortunately, an overwhelming number of members of Congress from both sides of the aisle in both the House and Senate have called the president’s budget ‘Dead on Arrival,’ ” Quigley said in a statement. “People across the country, regardless of party affiliation, benefit massively from federal spending on transportation and infrastructure.”

The congressman noted that Trump himself has called for $1 trillion in additional infrastructure spending to address the massive backlog of pressing transportation needs not currently being addressed.

“I agree with him that we need to invest a lot more in our infrastructure,” Quigley said.

“Which is why it makes no sense to cut crucial programs like TIGER and Core Capacity.”

So the bottom line is, don’t panic, but be sure you make your voice heard on the subject.

“There will undoubtedly be cuts to programs that many Americans rely on,” Quigley said. “The public should stay engaged and stay informed and keep up the historic levels of advocacy” If the pressure is sustained, the thinking goes, the Donald’s shameless attack on urban transportation could go down in flames—just like Trumpcare did. v

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

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Kyle Kelly chats up potential customers from his Cajun Connoisseur food truck. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

How Chicago’s once-promising food truck scene has been systematically immobilized by legislative opposition, onerous red tape, costly fines, and the pro-restaurant lobby

By JULIA THIEL

C

an I interest you in deliciousness?”

Kyle Kelly calls to the infrequent passersby on the sidewalk next to his food truck, the Cajun Connoisseur. It’s a cold morning in January, and most people appear uninterested in lingering outside any longer than necessary.

Kelly is parked near Polk and Paulina in UIC’s Medical District, in what the city has recently designated one of Chicago’s 37 food truck stands— though it’s not immediately apparent: there are no signs to identify the 40-foot zone, and his is the only truck parked along the stretch.

Those who pause for even a moment are treated to Kelly’s well-practiced spiel, along with free samples of gumbo or lobster mac ’n’ cheese. “I’m in the deliciousness business,” he tells them. “Let me introduce you.” Almost invariably, people try to walk away before tasting their samples. “Don’t go!” Kelly cries.

“I must see your face. This is what inspires me.” J

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 13

Food trucks continued from 13

He and his sister, Deanna Liberty, arrived at 10 AM to finish prepping shrimp and grits, jambalaya, and the fillings for a variety of po’boy sandwiches before lunch begins. Unlike most food trucks, which have only a tiny kitchen onboard, the Cajun Connoisseur is equipped with a full-size stove, refrigerator, and freezer, four sinks, plus a griddle, fryers, microwaves, and panini presses.

Kelly, 48, was born and raised in Englewood and now lives in Hyde Park. Prior to opening the Cajun Connoisseur in 2015, he worked in construction for 23 years. Discussing that career makes his habitual wide smile fade. “I was a laborer,” he says. “My intentions were to make foreman, but they started moving me from one crew to the next to say that they had a minority [crew member] rather than hiring any more African-Americans.” The company he worked for at the time had him training new hires but didn’t want to make him foreman, he says. And Kelly adds that on multiple occasions at three different companies, when it came time for him to be promoted, he’d be let go instead. “They didn’t tell me why. But to this day I know it was because of the color of my skin.”

As for what made him want to have his own business, he doesn’t hesitate. “Racism. I don’t believe in kissing nobody else’s ass.”

What Kelly lacks in formal training as a cook—his mother taught him—he makes up for in confidence. “The only thing the Cordon Bleu [cooking school] can teach you to do is how to make food look good,” he says. “I’m the best cook in the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois. I have stalkers.” Indeed, some of the truck’s visitors on this particular day turn out to be return customers who’ve looked up the truck’s location on Twitter and Facebook or called Kelly’s cell phone to ask where he’ll be.

Just recently, the Cajun Connoisseur placed second nationally in the poll-driven Cajun Food Truck of the Year award on the website mobile-cuisine.com.

Currently, Kelly is in the process of opening a brick-and-mortar version of the Cajun Connoisseur. While he doesn’t yet have a location locked down, he speaks with certainty of its eventual success. “I know that my company will be franchised,” he says. “It’ll hit all the surrounding states and then head west.”

Kelly’s plan to expand well beyond the mobile-food sphere may seem ambitious, but there’s also a practical side to it: he doesn’t believe it’s possible to survive as a food truck in Chicago without also doing catering or operating a storefront restaurant. Winter is a difficult time for the trucks; fewer people on the street means fewer people buying his food.

While Kelly says he can bring in $1,000 an hour at some summer festivals, during the winter

14 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

There are just 70 food trucks in Chicago and another 30 in the rest of Illinois. In LA County there are currently 2,600 permits for food trucks; Minneapolis, where winters are harsher, has 80 to 90 trucks; Washington, D.C., has 100; Austin issued over 1,250 permits in 2016; and Portland has at least 500 trucks available “at any given time.” it’s likely to be closer to $1,500 to $2,000 a day.

When business is good, Kelly needs a total of four people to run the truck and has to bring in $1,500 a day to cover expenses and payroll.

This winter was particularly difficult for Kelly: last fall the city dramatically increased enforcement of the burdensome rules that regulate how Chicago’s 70 licensed food trucks operate. Those regulations, part of a 2012 ordinance that allows food trucks in Chicago to prepare food on board rather than serving only prepackaged items, prohibit the trucks from parking within 200 feet of any business that sells food (including convenience stores and pharmacies), and from remaining in the same spot for more than two hours. Parking violations range from $1,000 to $2,000 per infraction, whereas health code citations start at $200. The ordinance also mandates that trucks carry GPS units that allow the city to track their whereabouts. The time limit, Kelly says, makes it impossible for trucks like his that cook on board to sell food throughout the lunch rush; by the time he gets set up, he has only about an hour before he’s legally required to leave the location. This winter he’s been making $500 to $600 a day, and even after cutting his staff down to himself and his sister (whom he pays $10 an hour), is barely breaking even. Kelly doesn’t pay himself a salary, but is hoping that once he opens a brick-and-mortar location his business will be profitable enough to make that possible.

THE CRACKDOWN ON mobile food purveyors such as Kelly came hard on the heels of a joint investigation in August of last year by the Chicago Sun-Times and ABC-7 News, which reported that food truck owners were routinely violating parking restrictions and staying longer than two hours in one spot, and that they weren’t being ticketed for these offenses.

The Sun-Times followed up a few days later with a report that Mayor Rahm Emanuel had responded to that investigation by promising to “issue a blitzkrieg of citations and fines against food truck owners caught thumbing their noses at the city’s much-ballyhooed ordinance.” The Chicago Department of Transportation and the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection jointly enforce the current laws, but CDOT doesn’t keep track of whether traffic and parking citations are issued to food trucks or other vehicles, it said in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Reader.

BACP, however, does document tickets handed down to food truck operators, and it appears that Emanuel has been keeping his promise. Records show that, while there were

34 such citations issued in 2013, none were issued between October 2013 and August 2016. Between the comparatively short period of August 25, 2016 (the date the Sun-Times/ ABC-7 investigation was published), and January 30, 2017 (the date of the Reader’s FOIA request), 109 citations were issued. A BACP spokesperson wrote in an e-mail that the dates during which no ticketing occurred “reflect the timeframe after the food truck ordinance took effect in 2013 and BACP adopted an enforcement approach that was designed to give the new businesses time to adapt to the rules hence no tickets.” (In fact, the ordinance took effect in July 2012.) The department didn’t respond to an e-mail asking whether enforcement of the rules began again as a direct response to the Sun-Times/ABC-7 report.

The most common reasons for the citations were food truck operators’ failure to display a current mobile food license, being illegally parked (whether in a tow zone, loading zone, or bus stop, too close to a crosswalk, or within 200 feet of restaurant entrance), or operating for more than two hours on the same block.

While chef-driven brick-and-mortar restaurants have turned Chicago into one of the nation’s top dining destinations, food trucks in the area have been in steady decline since the ordinance regulating them went into effect.

In 2012, 130 to 140 trucks were operating in Chicago, estimates Gabriel Wiesen, owner of the Beavers Donuts food trucks and president of the Illinois Food Truck Association, a community of food truck operators. The current numbers are closer to just 70 in the city, plus another 30-odd in the suburbs and the rest of Illinois. Very few of the trucks that were in

Trucks outside the Chicago Smoke Kitchen, the city’s only dedicated food truck commissary, at Cermak and Throop o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

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business five years ago are still around: besides Beavers Donuts, Tamale Spaceship is, as far as Wiesen knows, the only truck from that era that’s still active in the city. Veteran trucks Cupcakes for Courage and Taquero Fusion operate mainly in the suburbs, he says, and the Slide Ride still has a license but is mostly doing catering for the moment.

Stacked up against the food truck scenes in other U.S. cities, Chicago’s appears moribund. In LA County there are currently 2,600 permits for food trucks; Minneapolis, where winters are harsher than they are in Chicago, has 80 to 90 trucks; and Washington, D.C., has 100, according to representatives of those cities’ local food truck associations. Austin Public Health issued just over 1,250 mobile vending permits in Austin, Texas, and the rest of Travis County in 2016, according to a department representative. In Portland, Oregon, food trucks gather by the dozens in lots called “pods” outfitted with picnic tables and covered tents; at some you can even buy beer. The website Food Carts Portland, a guide to the local mobile food scene, estimates that the city has at least 500 trucks available “at any given time”; site founder Brett Burmeister recently said the total number is around 800.

“All those cities have their own issues,” Wiesen says, “but you see stability and growth in the industry.”

So why have food trucks in Chicago hit a wall? All of the operators and experts interviewed for this story cite the adverse effects the city’s onerous regulations have had on current and would-be operators. According to Matt Geller, founder of the National Food Truck Association and CEO of the Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association, no major city but Chicago restricts where food trucks can park and how long they can remain in one place. “That’s the only big city where that’s happening,” he says. “If I was a citizen in Chicago, I’d be appalled.”

CHICAGO HAS A LONG and not-so-proud history of stifling mobile food. The concept predates the invention of automobiles. In the 19th century, chuck wagons used to feed cowboys on cattle drives and pushcarts peddled their wares in cities. “Roach coaches” have been selling cheap food at construction sites since the mid-20th century. The modern food truck phenomenon, though, dates back to 2008, its birth widely credited to LA’s Kogi BBQ truck. By 2010 food trucks were well established in LA and New York and had started spreading to smaller cities. Chicago, though, still held the dubious distinction of being the only major city in the U.S. that didn’t allow trucks to do any food preparation on board, including cutting or cooking ingredients;

Amy Le, founder and former president of the Illinois Food Truck Association and owner of the Loop lunch spots Saucy Porka and Spotted Monkey o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

they could only sell food prepared and packaged in a commercial kitchen.

Two local chefs with separate food truck concepts—Phillip Foss and Matt Maroni— were leading the charge to change the legislation, as Mike Sula detailed in a Reader feature in April 2010. Meanwhile, several other chefs who would’ve liked to open trucks had put their plans on hold because of the existing limitations, they told Sula. Foss and Maroni went ahead with their projects (Meatyballs Mobile and Gaztro-Wagon, respectively) but both shut down before the food truck ordinance allowing trucks to prepare food on board finally passed in July 2012.

That law, while it represented a victory on one front, was widely denounced for the limitations it placed on the operation of food trucks—restrictions that appeared to be designed mainly to protect the interests of traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants.

(Sula wrote a blog post that called the ordinance “shitty,” the libertarian magazine Reason published an article titled “Chicago’s Disgusting New Food Truck Regulations,” and the Chicago Tribune ran a highly critical op-ed piece.) Alderman Tom Tunney of the 44th Ward, a former chairman of the Illinois Restaurant Association and proud owner of Ann Sather Restaurants, was then chairman of the City Council’s Economic Development Committee, the body that reviewed the legislation. As the law was being developed in 2011, Tunney told the Sun-Times that he was determined to forge a compromise that “protects brick-and-mortar restaurants.” With the legislation being shaped in no small part by Tunney—whose campaigns through the years have been consistently backed by donations

from the Illinois Restaurant Association and the Illinois Restaurateurs political action committee, finance records show—it was hardly a surprise when the version of the ordinance that passed included the much-criticized two-hour and 200-foot rules, along with the GPS requirement. Less controversial parts of the law include a ban on parking in vacant lots (even if the landowner grants permission) and a requirement that the trucks operate out of a licensed shared kitchen or commissary.

Less than four months after the ordinance was approved, the nonprofit libertarian law firm Institute for Justice filed suit against the city on behalf of two Chicago food trucks, Schnitzel King (now defunct) and Cupcakes for Courage, arguing that the 200-foot rule and the GPS requirement were unconstitutional. In December of last year, Cook County circuit judge Anna Helen Demacopoulos ruled in favor of the city; the Sun-Times reported that she “agreed the [200-foot] rule rationally balances the needs of restaurants and food trucks,” and stated that “the presence of a GPS device does not violate privacy nor does it amount to an unreasonable search.” The case is currently under appeal in Cook County Circuit Court.

“I think it’s funny that all this [controversy] came back up again years later, because [the city] never really resolved what was the problem to begin with,” says Amy Le, founder and former head of the Illinois Food Truck Association, who operated the Vietnamese-inspired Duck N Roll truck from October 2011 until December 2012. “We told them, ‘You’re going to continue to give out more licenses, there’s going to be nowhere for the trucks to park.’”

When Le got behind the wheel of Duck N

Roll, she estimates that there were only about seven other trucks in Chicago. A journalist by training, she was working in marketing and PR but dreamed of opening her own restaurant.

She didn’t have the money for a brick-andmortar location, but a food truck was doable.

“When I first started there was a lot of energy and curiosity among consumers towards food trucks in Chicago,” she says. “People were superexcited.” But within a week of opening, Le says, she got an $800 ticket for being parked 195 feet from a wine bar that happened to serve food. “Reality set in,” she says.

As the number of food trucks in Chicago increased, Le realized that there wasn’t much communication happening among the owners.

Maroni had started a food truck association when he was operating the Gaztro-Wagon, but after he shut it down, Le says, the association died and nothing took its place. In December 2011, she worked with a representative of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce who’d been trying to do outreach for the food truck community to hold a meeting for owneroperators at the chamber’s offices, she recalls. Two days before the meeting, she says she got a call from the representative saying the Chamber of Commerce wouldn’t host it because the Illinois Restaurant Association was threatening to withdraw its support for the chamber if it did. (The IRA declined to comment on this allegation, and the Chamber of Commerce was not able to respond to a request for comment by press time.)

Le moved the meeting to the offices of Google (where she knew someone), which at that time happened to be located right above the River North steak house Keefer’s. Glenn Keefer had written an op-ed in Crain’s Chicago Business a couple months before the food truck ordinance passed, arguing that “unscrupulous truck operators” must be prevented from “parking in front of the highest-priced real estate in the city to siphon off customers headed to businesses paying property taxes, rent and fees for signs, loading zones, building permits.” Running a food truck, Keefer asserted, amounts to piracy rather than entrepreneurship. He showed up to the meeting and sat in the front row glaring, Le says, but didn’t cause problems.

The public response to Keefer’s op-ed by some local restaurateurs was less than supportive. Nick Kokonas, co-owner of Alinea and Next, tweeted, “The Crain’s op-ed from Keefers regarding Chicago food trucks is terrible and shows a complete lack of understanding.”

Patrick Sheerin, who at the time was about to open Trenchermen (recently renamed Trench) in Wicker Park, tweeted, “Food trucks can & should be part of a vibrant restaurant/culinary scene.” And Kuma’s Corner posted a link on its Facebook page to an Eater Chicago article J

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 15

Food trucks continued from 15

about the response to Keefer’s op-ed with the commentary, “Dear Everyone, Fuck this guy.

Love, Anyone worth a shit in Chicago, the United States, this galaxy, or any other.”

The food truck owners realized, Le says, that to succeed in their fight for legitimacy they needed to get the press involved. “A lot of violence was happening in Chicago,” she says. “We said, ‘Why is the city designating resources to ticketing a cupcake truck when they should be investigating crimes?’ We were constantly out there interviewing and getting our message out to the media, and suddenly [the ticketing] stopped.”

The other concession the city made was to add more downtown food truck stands—the designated areas where trucks are allowed to park. Because the Loop has such a high concentration of restaurants and convenience stores, there are almost no other legal parking spots that comply with the 200-foot rule. The Institute for Justice released a report last October titled “Opportunity Lost: How Chicago’s food truck proximity ban hinders economic opportunity and stifles consumer choice,” which analyzes the downtown parking restrictions that affect the mobile food industry. It shows that after eliminating curbside spots located within 200 feet of businesses that sell food, along with spaces that have other parking restrictions (loading zones, bus stops, et cetera), food trucks are legally allowed to operate on just 3 percent of the Loop’s curbs. “The city’s ban not only throttles this fledgling industry,” the report concludes, “but it also limits the food options for hungry Chicagoans.”

Officially, there are 37 food truck stands in Chicago, ten of them in the Loop; most have room enough for only two trucks to park at a time. Even in 2012, though, Le says, there were enough trucks that competition for those spots was fierce. “You had to get there early,” she says. “The trucks were learning to game the system—they’d show up at 5 AM, park their cars in these spots, and then move their trucks in when it was time to serve.”

While Duck N Roll got some good press, Le says that she wasn’t making money because she couldn’t find places to park that had enough foot traffic for her to turn a profit. Still apprehensive after her first ticket, she didn’t want to risk getting another one. “That’s probably why I went out of business, because I followed the rules,” she says. “I was $20,000 in debt, and it was growing.” But though the business went under, connections Le made while running it led to the opening of the two restaurants that she now owns: Saucy Porka and Spotted Monkey, both Latin-Asian fusion lunch spots in the financial district.

“Two years ago they put a food truck stand

16 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

Lucha libre enthusiast Manny Hernandez serves a customer of his Tamale Spaceship food truck. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

kitty corner to [Saucy Porka],” she says. “I was totally excited about it. It’s kind of like seeing the fruition of your hard work, seeing those stands pop up there.” Other restaurant owners in the area were less excited, though, and Le says that she watched as they started a petition to have the stand removed, which quickly succeeded; the city withdrew the designation after just two weeks. “The irony is that I didn’t see a single sales number drop while the stand was there,” she says.

ANOTHER GREAT IRONY is that Chicago’s restrictions on food trucks have very little to do with food safety. (The minimum fines for violating parking regulations are five times higher than the minimum penalty for a health code violation.) Nonetheless the average food truck gets about 15 inspections a year, Wiesen estimates. Trucks not only have to pay to get licensed for any city or suburb in which they’re going to serve food, but are also required to attain temporary health permits for any special event where they’re serving, each of which involves health and fire inspections. According to Wiesen, it’s not financially feasible for trucks to survive without working events such as street festivals, music festivals,

and sporting events. And despite Chicago’s declining number of food trucks, there remain festivals dedicated to them, including the Pilsen Food Truck Social in June and the Chicago Food Truck Fest in July. The latter is not to be confused with the city’s Food Truck Fest, which runs weekly at Daley Plaza and monthly at Pioneer Court from late March through mid-October, and is organized by the BACP, the very same department that enforces regulation of the trucks.

The laws in the food truck haven of LA, meanwhile, are limited to matters related to food safety—a feat that took some work, along with a series of lawsuits. Starting in 2010, Geller says, he and his association sued 13 cities in LA County over the course of three years, challenging any laws that didn’t apply to public health or safety. They were victorious in each and every case. “You get somebody sick in Chicago, it’s a $200 fine,” Geller says.

“You park too close to a restaurant, it’s $1,000.

Those restaurants’ profits are more important than public health? The city of Chicago has said, ‘We’re going to protect brick-andmortars.’ Why is it that this particular thing needs to be protected? It’s farcical. It’s so outrageous.”

“I think there’s a small minority of restaurants downtown that are complaining [about food trucks],” Wiesen says. “They’re people that are invested in real estate, not just restaurants. And they’re vocal about their concerns.”

Prominent opponents have included Tunney and Loop alderman Brendan Reilly (both declined multiple requests to comment on their opposition), along with Keefer, whose steak house closed in 2014 (if food trucks played a part, Keefer never mentioned it to the press).

But the Illinois Restaurant Association was always the biggest lobbyist against mobile food, according to Wiesen: “The president [Sam Toia] said he’d destroy food trucks, they’d never be allowed in Chicago.” Since the food truck ordinance passed in 2012, the IRA has softened its stance. Toia says that he now supports allowing food trucks to remain parked in the same spot for more than two hours, though he still believes the 200-foot rule should be preserved. And while he says there should be more food truck stands throughout the city, he thinks there are enough downtown and that any additional stands should be placed in other high-density areas. Toia dodged the question of whether restaurant owners have complained to him about food trucks. “The

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restaurant community is very close-knit, and everyone supports each other,” he says. “I think restaurant owners feel that food trucks are part of the culinary scene and they should be part of the culinary scene.”

Despite the softening attitudes of the IRA and other food truck opponents, operators who’ve moved to brick-and-mortar spots say they’ve observed that the landscape isn’t getting any friendlier for mobile food. Last year Dan Salls shut down his roving Mexican street-food wagon the Salsa Truck, the first one licensed in Chicago to prepare food on board. His landlord had declined to renew the lease on the Garage, his West Loop lunch spot, which also served as the commissary for the Salsa Truck and several others. There Salls invited food trucks to park out front every day. “Just to prove a point,” he says, “that it’s stupid” to restrict where trucks can park. Salls recently opened Quiote, a Mexican restaurant and mezcal bar in Logan Square—but he still holds out hope that one day he’ll be able to bring back the Salsa Truck.

“Right now, it’s just too hard,” he says, explaining that the only time a truck can sell enough to make a profit is during lunchtime—a sentiment also expressed by every other food truck owner interviewed. While some trucks serve breakfast and dinner or set up outside bars to lure the late-night crowd, operators say there’s not much money to be made at those times. From “11:30 to 1:30, it’s feast or famine. If you don’t have a good spot, you might as well start burning all the food on your truck, because you’re not going to sell it,” Salls says. “It doesn’t take very long to realize it’s not a sustainable system. The consumer demand is there, but the status quo will kill the industry. The city says they champion small

“We used to joke that it’s less of a risk to sell pot on the street than it is to sell food from a food truck.

If you’re caught with pot here, it’s a couple-hundreddollar fine and you can go on your way.

With a food truck it’s thousands of dollars, having to get an attorney.”

—Gabriel Wiesen, owner of the Beavers Donuts food trucks and president of the Illinois Food Truck Association

business. Food trucks should be a part of that, but they’re just second-class citizens.”

“It’s getting tougher,” says Manny Hernandez, who co-owns the longest-running food truck in the city. He and his business partner, Pepe Balanzar, launched Tamale Spaceship in January 2011 because they wanted a restaurant but couldn’t get a loan. They’ve managed to survive six years, he says, by doing catering on the side and opening a storefront restaurant in Wicker Park in 2014. Because of the income from the restaurant, Hernandez was able to suspend operation of his food truck during the tougher winter months, but when the weather warms up the Tamale Spaceship will hit the streets again. Last fall, he says, the city inspected his truck every single day for a full month; he’s not sure what to expect in the spring.

A native of Mexico City, Hernandez began his career in the industry as a dishwasher at the now defunct 50s-kitsch diner Ed Debevic’s, then decided to focus on Mexican food and moved up to manager at Frontera Grill before starting Tamale Spaceship. He’d like to see more small culinary entrepreneurs follow his path to restaurant ownership, but the current regulations don’t give him a lot of hope. When aspiring food truck owners contact Hernandez for advice, he says he can’t honestly encourage them. “I’m pretty up-front. I let them know, like, ‘If you have a real job, then don’t quit it.’”

He doesn’t understand why Chicago is far less friendly to food trucks than other cities. “It works in New York. It works in LA. It works almost everywhere,” Hernandez says. “Why are we stubborn enough to say no without even listening to each other, without seeing how we can take advantage of the situation and make it profitable for everybody?”

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RELIEF FOR FOOD TRUCK operators could be on the way, in the form of legislative amendments. First Ward alderman Proco Joe Moreno introduced a proposal to the City Council in December that would allow food trucks to remain parked in one spot for up to six hours.

If it passes, he says, aldermen will have control over the regulations in their own wards. Those who oppose food trucks can keep the limit at two hours. Mayor Emanuel, who’s often positioned himself as a small-business advocate, has apparently not yet decided whether to support the proposal; he told the Sun-Times in December that he needs to review it and hear what the “affected parties” have to say. The crackdown on food trucks that he ordered last year doesn’t bode well, though.

Moreno, meanwhile, is wholly supportive of the trucks. To the argument that the presence of mobile food takes business away from traditional restaurants, he says, “It’s a red herring.

I’ve heard that many times, but I have yet to see any evidence, any study from other cities, where a food truck ordinance impacted the brick-and-mortar restaurants.”

Food trucks offer chefs a more accessible entry point to the food industry, Moreno says.

“We’re looking at a national government that’s trying to restrict immigrant rights. A lot of food trucks in Chicago are immigrant families that are starting up, and it’s another way that they can make money and create jobs.”

Some 80 percent of local food trucks are owned by minorities, Wiesen of the Illinois Food Truck Association estimates. But while mobile food represents a good opportunity to start a business without a lot of capital, he adds, it can be high risk as well. “The most vulnerable people in the industry are the ones that really bootstrapped, cashed in their J

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Food trucks continued from 17 life savings, and went all in. Those are the ones that are suffering the most. The city is telling them, this is a viable business for you. They’re holding workshops and licensing more trucks.

But they’re not fulfilling their own obligations. There are supposed to be [at least] 32 designated food truck stands throughout the city, ten of them downtown. At my last count, there’s six downtown, and [the other] four don’t have signs or are completely inaccessible.” (BACP didn’t respond to a request for comment on Wiesen’s critiques.)

Lack of available parking hurts Denita Tittle’s food truck business on a daily basis. “If I get a good parking space, I can make $300 or $400 in a couple hours,” says the proprietor of Ms. Tittle’s Cupcakes. “If it’s not good, I might not even make $50.” She started out taking online orders for cupcakes from friends and acquaintances in 2011, after she retired from her job as a customer service supervisor, then launched her food truck in 2013. If she had to go back in time and do things over, though, Tittle says that she would never have started her truck. It’s still not profitable, but she hasn’t yet gotten back the investment she made in the truck itself, so she’s still trying to make things work.

“It wears on you,” Tittle says. “If it were more feasible, I would keep going. We are a business, we pay taxes, we hire people that pay taxes. The people that set up the rules and regulations, I think they did it not really knowing what it entails. It needs to be revisited.”

Moreno has a similar view. “Anytime you have new legislation, it’s probably going to need to be revised,” he says. “There’s unforeseen circumstances. At that time [when the food truck ordinance was passed], I don’t believe that the [Illinois] Restaurant Association leadership was as amicable in working with it, more so was working against it. On their end it got better.”

The city slapped Wiesen with more than $10,000 in tickets in 2016, and he saw the revenue of his Beavers Donuts trucks drop 30 to 40 percent, he says. “We used to joke that it’s less of a risk to sell pot on the street than it is to sell food from a food truck. If you’re caught with pot here, it’s a couple-hundred-dollar fine and you can go on your way. With a food truck it’s thousands of dollars, having to get an attorney.”

(In Chicago, being caught with up to ten grams of marijuana carries a fine of $100 to $200.)

John Levy, a board member of the National Food Truck Association and the founder and president of the Minnesota Food Truck Association, has plenty to say about restrictions on food trucks, in Chicago and beyond. His assessments frequently include such choice words as “stupid” and “ridiculous.” “There is absolutely no basis in health or welfare to

18 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

Denita Tittle, owner of Ms. Tittle’s Cupcakes, says that if she had to do things over she would never have launched her food truck. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

justify those kinds of restrictions,” he says of Chicago’s 200-foot and two-hour rules.

“That’s all ridiculous. What ends up happening is that city council people who are completely beholden to their local restaurants, because that’s their tax-paying base, will attempt to disguise the ordinances they propose or oppose for competitive reasons as doing it for another reason, like general health and welfare and safety. It’s a bunch of bullshit, the way they go about restricting what is obviously a service that consumers want. The constituencies of these city councils, we love the concept of food trucks—eating delicious, safe food for an inexpensive price. The only reason we’re not able to do it more than we do is because of these stupid restrictions that are basically designed to be anticompetitive.”

Levy, a lawyer by trade, started a food truck with celebrity chef Andrew Zimmern in Minneapolis in 2012; he closed it in 2015 but remains head of the Minnesota Food Truck Association.

Minneapolis is somewhat unusual, he says, because the city’s harsh winters led to the creation of the skyway—an eight-mile system of enclosed pedestrian bridges connecting the second and third floors of downtown buildings, making it possible to walk around without

ever going outside. Among the businesses that have set up shop in the skyway are restaurants, bars, and fast-food joints, which tend to object to having their customers lured away by food trucks operating on the streets outside during the summer, Levy says. “They formed their own trade association called the Skyway Restaurant Group, organized specifically to mount a campaign to try to do something about the food trucks. Because they would be off 20 percent in gross revenues during the summer months to the food trucks. To which our response was, ‘Well, step up your game, dude.’”

Levy believes that the skyway restaurants had become complacent in their food offerings because of a lack of competition. “The good chef-driven restaurants have never been against us,” he says. “They don’t feel threatened because they know they’re good enough to hold their own regardless.”

Free-market principles, not government regulation, make for a stronger food economy, says Geller of the National Food Truck Association. “I have seen food trucks put restaurants out of business—bad restaurants,” he says.

“They were replaced by better restaurants that drove the food trucks a few blocks away.

Who wins? Consumers.”

Despite the sudden increase in fines in the wake of the Sun-Times/ABC-7 investigation, Wiesen says he sees the crackdown as the start of a discussion that he hopes will lead to a change in Chicago’s strict laws. “The SunTimes piece, I’m 100 percent confident that it was a calculated maneuver by some group or political force,” he says. “The ironic thing is that it started the conversation. We were struggling to get by even with the city’s lax enforcement [before the investigation]. That opened up the dialogue and motivated people within our community to work with our city officials to change those rules. A lot of positive is coming out of this.”

Levy, for one, isn’t particularly sympathetic to the establishment forces trying to fend off a perceived threat. “What it all comes down to is, it’s Blockbuster whining about Netflix,” he says. “The food trucks see themselves as the next logical wave, and I think they’re right. It’s an amazing opportunity with a low barrier to entry to start a small business. You can create your restaurant on wheels for $50,000 to $60,000. You get a little slice of the American dream, pretty inexpensively.” v

@juliathiel

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ARTS & CULTURE Claudio Roncoli, a recipient of an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, works in his studio space at the Bakehouse Art Complex in Miami, Florida. President Donald Trump has proposed eliminating the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities. o JOE RAEDLE

CULTURE

What’s really important about the NEA

By DEANNA ISAACS

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s you’ve no doubt heard, Donald Trump wants to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts.

It’s a move that’ll play well to his supposed base—those red-state good old boys who detest every flaky, degenerate, elitist, and east-coasty thing they think the NEA, and the arts it supports, stands for.

(Trump himself is totally east-coasty, but never mind that.)

This may or may not be what Trump thinks too. The only art we know he really likes is huge portraits of himself, like the six-footer his foundation paid $20,000 for at a charity auction.

But it’s not a distaste for art that’s driving him. And it’s not the money that axing the NEA would save. Its current annual budget of just shy of $150 million is chump change to Trump—less than taxpayers will likely spend on his weekend trips to Mar-A-Lago—for a program that supports projects in nearly every congressional district in the country. It’s a mere speck in the spending landscape: about .004 percent of the total federal budget, to nurture an arts and culture industry that generates a $26 billion annual U.S. trade surplus.

Ironically, Trump is cutting the arts because it’s great theater. It’s such an easy target: low-hanging fruit that’s also high visibility.

The artists know how to put up a fuss that’ll get noticed, and he’ll look like a hero to that supposed rust-and-Bible-belt antiart constituency. A statement will have been made about what America does and doesn’t value.

If it doesn’t actually happen—if the NEA survives—it won’t matter. Trump’s base will have already seen the show.

The demise of the NEA is unlikely because, as the old saw has it, all politics is local. Politicians, even Republicans, have to answer to the voters in their districts, and local artists will rally those folks—the people who, after all, like to come out for the music festival and bring their kid to the art class. They’ll be dialing up the congressional offices and signing petitions.

Of course Trump wasn’t likely to win the presidency either. So let’s consider the slim possibility that, along with gutting the EPA and NIH, and cutting Meals on Wheels—turning a blind eye to global warming and disease and letting grandpa starve—he might actually kill the federal government’s already frugal support for the arts.

Would that be devastating to the arts in America? Or would it mostly be damaging to America, a blow to the conception of this “great again” country as a civilized nation?

I think the latter, because despite all the fuss,

the federal contribution to arts organizations is, on average, too small a part of their funding for its withdrawal to deal a death blow (except, perhaps, for some programs in rural areas where private donors tend to be scarce). According to a 2012 study it came in at just 1.2 percent.

No organization wants to lose that funding.

Chicago groups I’ve talked with said they’d have to scramble and perhaps make compromises to counteract the loss. But none of them said they’d be shutting down, and it’s not the actual dollars that they’d miss most.

The bigger loss would be the recognition and financial leverage that come with an NEA grant—highly coveted because it functions as an endorsement, inspiring support from others. The NEA says every dollar it gives out generates up to nine dollars from other sources.

So here’s a question: If we had to, could we retain that function without the NEA? Could we create a nongovernmental national body that—during the NEA’s eclipse, which wouldn’t need to be longer than the blip of this presidency—would honor worthy arts organizations, not necessarily with money, but by providing the endorsements that would guide donors? Could the art world, its apron strings cut, then give the blowhard that sacked the NEA the finger? And be spared sucking up to his administration?

Meanwhile, more serious damage could come from something else Trump is working on: tax reform. Lawrence Rothfield, cofounder of the University of Chicago’s Cultural Policy Center, says “the thing to really worry about is if they go after the charitable deduction. The way we fund the arts in this country is mainly indirectly. And all the signaling in the world won’t matter if there’s not a tax incentive to encourage people to give to the arts. That’s what really keeps the nonprofit sector afloat.”

Trump has proposed two tax changes that would impact donors, especially large donors: he wants to lower the income tax rate for the wealthy and, at the same time, put a cap on itemized deductions. Each of these changes would reduce the incentive to redirect Trump’s kind of private wealth to the arts. v

ß @DeannaIsaacs

THEATER

Picnic: The Ballet

It’s isn’t the meat but the motion that makes this nontraditionally cast American Theater Company revival.

By TONY ADLER

Behavior lawless as snow-flakes, words simple as grass, uncomb’d head, laughter, and naivetè . . .

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—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

merican Theater Company artistic director Will Davis stood up and gave a speech on opening night before letting us see his staging of Picnic, the 1953 drama by William Inge. Davis called his production a “gift” to the playwright’s “ghost,” said it’d been seven years in the making, and worried out loud that “it perhaps is a gift that Inge does not want.” He related Picnic to Inge’s life as a closeted gay man, and to his own experience (recently chronicled in the Reader) of living “at the periphery of my desire.” He even advised us on how to watch the show, saying “it’s built to wash over you.”

Now, it’s true we’re living in a cultural moment when theater makers don’t necessarily trust audiences to draw the right conclusions from their shows. Some politicized artists in particular try to control the message by writing scripts that effectively supply their own talkbacks. (One case in point is Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, a very fine piece of work that nevertheless features a framing device designed to save us from our presumed backwardness regarding gender.) Davis’s talk may’ve had a touch of that condescension to it. But it also looked to me like something more basic: the final plea of a director going through separation anxiety. Davis was acting like the classic parent at the schoolroom J

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 19

ARTS & CULTURE Molly Brennan and Malic White o MICHAEL BROSILOW

continued from 19 door, trying to prolong the moment before he has to surrender his child to life.

He needn’t have worried, and he needn’t have coached us quite so hard either. His production succeeds charmingly, gracefully on its own terms.

I tend to think of Picnic as the play we might’ve got had there been a sequel to Death of a Salesman centered on Willy Loman’s firstborn son, Biff. Like Biff, Inge’s hero, Hal Carter, is a good-natured, troubled galoot: a football star at school who’s fallen to drifting over the years, partly due to oedipal trauma but also because the business world he’s expected to join—expects himself to join—is all wrong for him. Hal’s intelligence isn’t in his brains; it’s in his hands, legs, belly, and groin, in his thoughtless genius for lifting stuff and dancing.

Exhausted by serial failures (including a stint in Hollywood that foundered, he claims, when he refused to get his teeth fixed), Hal shows up in the little Kansas town where his old frat brother Alan is a member of the local aristocracy and a possible source of employment. He does chores for Helen Potts, a middle-aged woman chained to her invalid mother. Helen is beguiled by Hal’s sheer man-nature. One of her neighbors, Rosemary, hates it for reminding her of her lost youth, while another, Flo Owens, whose husband deserted her, is mightily suspicious of it. But it’s Flo’s 18-year-old daughter, Madge, who picks up on it profoundly. Universally described and dismissed as pretty, Madge sees into Hal’s suffering and responds in a language they both understand. Their relationship is

20 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

both muscular and delicate.

And Davis treats it in a manner both muscular and delicate. Presented on a set (by Joe Schermoly) whose raked floor resembles the oilcloth spread you might find on a picnic table, this stylized Picnic opens with very cool music played on a prepared piano by Laura McKenzie (who also acts Helen and others), then moves into a kind of choral recitative performed by the whole company. Now and then it breaks into passages of dance (choreographed by Davis and Evvie Allison) that are not only articulate in expressing character but so appropriate to Hal and Madge that I was amazed, when I looked it up, to find no record of Picnic: The Ballet.

Davis has cast some roles nontraditionally, most notably the leads: a woman, Molly Brennan, plays Hal (comically, powerfully) opposite gender-fluid Malic White as Madge.

I know that makes a useful point about the fluidity of lots of things, not least of all love.

Yet what’s striking in performance is how little difference such permutations make to the essential dynamic of two people who live through their bodies. The fact that Brennan and White are creative and life partners adds a certain frisson to things; it made me wonder, though, why White has chosen to give us a Madge whose reticence runs to almost catatonia at times. The last time I saw White onstage with Brennan, the work was fierce. v R PICNIC Through 4/23: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, American Theater Company, 1909 W. Byron, 773-409-4125, atcweb.org, $38.

ß @taadler

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ARTS & CULTURE

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VISUAL ART

The Lavender Menace poster project creates queer visibility in dive-bar bathrooms

By BRIANNA WELLEN Lavender Menace at the Empty Bottle on March 26 o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

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rtist Angela Davis Fegan debuted her Lavender Menace poster project during the 2015 Dyke March. She created jumpsuits covered with words like “butch” and “womyn,” and she designed and distributed letterpress-printed signs with slogans such as we want agency beyond the dance floor and we are the queers you fear, the ones who riot, fuck, and vote.”

Fegan came up with Lavender Menace while finishing up her MFA in book and paper arts at Columbia College Chicago. The idea was to address queer-visibility politics while producing art objects that are easily

distributed. Fegan planned to place the posters in bar bathrooms and encourage others to tag their response to a specific question on the walls—that way, their thoughts and experiences could be shared with the masses.

Through a grant from the Propeller Fund, she expanded Lavender Menace this year, using the money toward creating more posters for each event and produce an eventual publication documenting the project.

“I always thought that bars and bar bathrooms are interesting spaces because queer people are always relegated to nighttime, or places where they can kill themselves

through alcoholism or unite over a dance f loor,” Fegan says. “So all the places I’ve picked have history to dance-floor or music performance, but also are dive bars.”

She adopted the name Lavender Menace for the project as a reference to the phrase that Betty Friedan, the president of the National Organization for Women, used in 1969 to describe the threat of lesbianism to the feminist movement. The handle has become a sort of rallying cry and now a social media hashtag within the queer and intersectional feminist community.

So far Fegan’s brought the concept to Cole’s

and Danny’s Tavern. On March 26, the project took over the bathrooms at the Empty Bottle. Along with covering the walls with her woodtype-printed posters, Fegan stenciled the question how can music amplify resistance? on the wall and encouraged others to answer in permanent marker. Responses ranged from “speak for the silent” to “question everything” to “making public space for different voices.”

“I’ve been here and seen Carrie Brownstein perform and JD Samson and all these other queer acts, so the idea that there are nights where it is very queer and I could stack the room and get that perspective on the wall in permanent marker,” Fegan says, “then it’s going to totally affect people I don’t know how to access because it’s a music venue and so many other people come here all the time.”

The next poster distribution and bathroom takeover will take place at Beauty Bar on April 24 during a Salonathon performance.

Fegan has documented the successes of and responses to Lavender Menace along the way.

The goal is to create a publication that summarizes the project so others can take what she’s started and devise their own mixedmedia programs.

“I started writing in this collective voice when it was just me, not knowing how it would be received, knowing that if I was speaking in a collective then I could grow one,” Fegan says. “That has panned out.” v

ß @BriannaWellen

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE In A Colony in a Nation you draw a comparison between colo colonial America and today’s police state.

Centennial Brooks

April 6–8, 2017 / Free

A tribute gathering of scholars, writers, musicians, and fans of Gwendolyn Brooks Featuring Nora Brooks Blakely, Robin Coste Lewis, Ishion Hutchinson, Haki Madhubuti, Ed Roberson, Sonia Sanchez, and Evie Shockley, with a performance of music and poetry by Jamila Woods, and the premiere of a commission by Nicole Mitchell and the Black Earth Ensemble. arts.uchicago.edu/brooks100 Thursday, April 6 / 7–9 pm DuSable Museum of African American History Friday, April 7 / 9 am–7 pm Saturday, April 8 / 9 am–9:30 pm Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts

Centennial Brooks is presented by the University of Chicago in partnership with the DuSable Museum of African American History and the Poetry Foundation, and in collaboration with Our Miss Brooks 100 and Brooks Permissions.

Photo © Howard D. Simmons

please recycle this paper 22 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

LIT

America’s founders would be offended by the modern police state In his new book A Colony in a Nation, journalist and MSNBC host Chris Hayes compares current-day policing in cities like Chicago to British rule just before the American Revolution.

By RYAN SMITH

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hile reporting on the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, Chris Hayes was struck by the sight of police teargassing unarmed residents in their own backyards. It sparked the most provocative argument behind his new book A Colony in a Nation, which equates the way most modern police departments operate in oppressed communities like Ferguson to the British under King George III in the years just before the American Revolution. Nearly 250 years after the revolution, according to Hayes, we live in two Americas whose defining contrast is the way they are policed—a “Nation” made up of mostly white people who look to police to create order and a “Colony” of black, brown, and poor folks policed as if they’re living in an occupied land.

Over the phone in the midst of a book tour that will bring him to Chicago on March 31, Hayes discussed how Nixon’s spiritual successor, Donald Trump, is trying to further the divide between the Colony and the Nation, and how the Chicago of today reflects these warped values.

After [repor [reporting in Ferguson, Missouri], I started reading the history of the American Revolution. W We think about the revolution being fought over ove taxation, but in many ways it was fought ove over policing, because taxes were collected thr through customs officers who essentially acted like cops. What happens in the lead up to the revolution is that after the Seven Year Years’ War, the Crown decides they need more revenue and start policing smuggling much more. Smuggling was the lifeblood of the bl t colonies, and the crackdown on smug sm uggling in the colonies was humiliating and ug smuggling enraging enough that it really helped spark the revolu revolution.

I never knew that John Hancock was a massive smuggler smuggler. Am America is arguably the most successful criminal syndicate ever.

Dude, I quote British customs officials who were like, “These colonists are an unlawful people who won’t snitch and who basically punish snitches.” People that testified got beat down.

You make a great case for conservatives to fight the police state. Real patriots in the classic sense would side with the communities of color and other people being oppressed by the police.

We have a tendency to celebrate and even fetishize our founders. If we were true to that, the way huge swaths of our country are being policed would be really offensive to us.

It also shows how hollow our conception of tyranny is. For many Republicans, a state-regulated health care system is perceived as tyranny, but if there’s an agent of the state with a badge that tells you to do something—anything—you do it.

That’s why I say in the book there’s a reason why we use the term “police state.” It’s because we recognize that policing is a necessary function of government but also the most explosively dangerous. As opposed to health care regulation, right? If you’re going to choose one of those two to be out of control and run a free society, you’d definitely pick the health care regulation.

Cops, like teachers, are made to play many different roles in our society: social workers, agents of conflict resolution, therapists.

Especially in neighborhoods with lots of poverty. Both teachers and police are asked to do

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a tremendous amount. There’s a huge fight over a trauma center on the south side— imagine a real commitment to as many trauma workers as police. It’s impossible to conceive of that, but why not?

What you’d label the Colony in Chicago—the south and west sides—were mostly ignored for a lot of years. But that changed over the last decade as the mainstream media started reporting the homicide numbers, spawning the idea of “ChiRaq,” and the Laquan McDonald video made a certain perception of Chicago take hold in the national consciousness.

The politics and the conversation around homicides in Chicago has a kind of colonial freight that’s been so destructive. To call a place Chi-Raq—what does that conjure? A war zone and the idea that the place is foreign and needs to be occupied and subdued. The conversation about crime in Chicago exemplifies the national conversation.

It’s a symbol of all the worst impulses around law and order. And it’s done in this incredibly ghastly and disingenuous way that people pretend that the object of their concern is Chicagoans when the genuine horror and trauma of real people are being used as a cheap method of scoring political points.

Donald Trump has frequently invoked Chicago for political gain.

It comes as second nature to him, and I think partly because of the fact that his worldview was formed in New York City at precisely the time when New York was the murder capital of the country and was seen as lawless and unruly and disordered.

The title of your book comes from a Nixon quote. He talked about criminal justice issues in a more coded way. Trump has a clumsy way of speaking that exposes the racism and xenophobia at the heart of some of the conservative platform.

It’s so funny if you compare Nixon’s 1968 law-and-order speech to the Trump 2016 version. Nixon’s was way more deftly done, with a lot more faux equanimity, like “Let us have order, but let us also acknowledge the necessity of progress.” Donald Trump is just like, “I am the law-and-order president. We will bring back law and order.”

The way Trump talks about ISIS and people of color in Chicago—there’s not much difference.

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Judd Hirsch and Jermaine Fowler in CBS’s Superior Donuts o CBS

It’s all these undifferentiated threats. The impulse originates from the same political space: white fear. This paranoia that besets the mind of the conqueror that, even though you’ve won and you’re holding your ground, at any moment it will be taken by the forces of darkness and disorder—whether that’s a slave revolt or attack by indigenous people.

That’s a really deep American inheritance in our political psyche.

Are Democrats really that much better than Republicans on criminal justice issues? Chicago has been a Democratic regime as these problems have gotten worse.

At a local level there’s very little difference.

The politics which are operating aren’t really partisan—they’re the politics of white fear, the politics of order and control.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s response to the increasing crime rate and the Laquan McDonald controversy was to fire the police superintendent and move to hire some 1,000 new cops.

He is very much playing from the old playbook, because what works and what doesn’t remains so unclear. There’s also the question of the politics of this, which remain very complex and dicey: Is he doing this to unsully the reputation of the city or to actually address the real human crisis going on in these neighborhoods? And there’s no real linear relationship between adding cops and reducing crime. There’s something maddening about the fact that they close schools, cut mental health services, and now there’s money for a thousand new cops.

What’s the solution to bridging the divide between the Colony and the Nation?

The brute fact is that we democratically erected this system and we’re going to have to democratically unmake it. There has to be a shift in how people think about law and order and race and crime, and how folks react when they feel threatened.

That’s the project of the book, to get people thinking about the necessary precondition of shifting the politics. vR A COLONY IN A NATION By Chris Hayes (W. W. Norton & Company) Discussion Fri 3/31, 11:30 AM, Union League Club, 65 W. Jackson, 847-446-8880, ulcc.org, $42.

ß @RyanSmithWriter

SMALL SCREEN

Superior Donuts serves up nothing but holes

By CHRISTOPHER PIATT

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n Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player, a satirical noir thriller about a Hollywood movie studio exec who literally gets away with murder, a minor subplot involves two hustling screenwriters pitching a darkspirited “independent” picture called Habeas Corpus. It’s a gritty drama about a woman wrongly accused of murder who still fries in the gas chamber, but only after falling in love with her prosecuting attorney, who tragically then manages to produce evidence of her innocence moments after her death. The writers are dreadfully serious about the intended integrity of the project, including the depressing, justiceless ending in which our innocent heroine dies and the most important hallmark of anti-Tinsel Town authenticity, on which they insist: “No stars on this project,” one of them asserts.

The other interrupts him. “Like unknown stage actors . . . Or maybe somebody English, like what’s-his-name.”

By the end of The Player we see how their gritty little opus has finally panned out as a small audience watches the final scene of the finished film in a private screening room.

Strapped to a chair in a dowdy prison gown, breathless, about-to-die Julia Roberts gasps and quivers as poison clouds fill the air. Just then, the prosecuting attorney—a casually rugged Bruce Willis—shoots the glass of the chamber with a rifle, rips off Julia’s restraints, pulls her from the chair, and carries her limp body to safety. After a moment, she revives in his embrace and they kiss. Fin.

The joke, of course, is that a self-serious artist who truly believes that his tough, virtuous, complicated vision could emerge unscathed and uncorrupted from the Hollywood machine is more likely than not to end up with a silly Julia Roberts tearjerker on his hands. For fans of the original Steppenwolf and Broadway productions of Tracy Letts’s play August: Osage County, and specifically fans of the nationally “unknown stage actors” who were supplanted by Julia Roberts and her celebrity friends in the maudlin, middling 2013 movie version of A:OC, this once seemingly generic joke was suddenly very specifically on all of us.

That said, I’d easily still take half a dozen Meryl Streeps in fright wigs over the latest stage-to-screen monstrosity Letts and Steppenwolf hath inadvertently wrought, namely CBS’s 22-minute midseason replacement situation comedy Superior Donuts, which finished its eight-episode first-season run on March 20 and will return for a second season. Just as the Pulitzer-winning script of A:OC is now taught in college playwriting classes, so, I’d argue, should Letts’s 2008 stage play Superior Donuts and a few episodes of the wretched network afterbirth it spawned. This would impress the archetype of the sellout even on young minds, and could be a thing of legitimate value.

Were Superior Donuts not set in an actual neighborhood of Chicago, filmed on a soundstage in southern California, and projected onto TV screens throughout Trump country, the situation at hand might be slightly J

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 23

164 North State Street

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YOU’RE KILLING ME SUSANA

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Starring Gael García Bernal!

ARTS & CULTURE Superior Donuts continued from 23

Oscar Nominee

I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO

March 31 - April 12

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A behind-the-scenes look at Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along” — original cast member Marc Moritz in person April 5!

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less infuriating. But this corn-syrup northside minstrel show is so simpleminded and crude in its representation of Chicago that, at the risk of excessive cruelty, President Trump might very well enjoy it. After all, he could probably follow the dopey story lines, the hot mom from Married . . . With Children is surprisingly still a 9, and, of course, it would reinforce his single-minded view of the city as, in a word, BAD! In fact, this series is so directly (if accidentally) aimed at the president’s line of vision and diminished attention span that I surmise the only reason Trump hasn’t already tweeted about it is that he only watches channels he suspects he’ll be on.

TV’s Superior Donuts still takes place in a rapidly gentrifying Uptown, though the use of exterior shots of the #50 bus in Wicker Park and green screens of phony storefronts help Chicago-savvy viewers calculate precisely how few fucks the producers have to give. Just as in Letts’s stage comedy, the central protagonist is an aging boomer cracker hippie and doughnut shop proprietor (Judd Hirsch) who slowly learns to get hip to the times when he hires a black millennial (Jermaine Fowler) to work in his store. Around them spin a handful of colorful neighborhood characters, including some mouthy cops and other regular customers who teach us weekly, digestible lessons about urban coexistence.

Superior Donuts, you’ll remember, is a sitcom, and here’s a little sample of the humorous writing: “It’s so weird the Cubs are so great now, huh? . . . Thank God for the Bulls, the Bears, and Rahm Emanuel.” If reading this knee-slapping zinger didn’t make you LOL, don’t sweat it. Superior Donuts has a laugh track to do all the laughing for you! This sound effect will go a long way to making the series seem more like a comedy if, like I did, you find yourself watching it in stony, stoic silence.

The above rip-snorting, razor-sharp Rahmbo jab kicked off a recent episode called “The Amazing Racists,” the plot of which involved the millennial clerk getting stopped and frisked by an Uptown cop who’s friendly with the fuzz who hang in the doughnut shop. The shop then hosts a town hall dialogue for harassed citizens and harried police to air their mutual grievances, arbitrated by a cloying white-girl undergrad snowflake who seems to represent both Uptown gentrifiers and anyone who might be watching this show in Nebraska.

This is followed by a second stop-and-frisk mistaken identity incident involving the same kid, which results in the hippie proprietor

telling his cool young employee not to wear a hoodie if he wants to avoid cops. Needless to say, though, by the end literally everything is resolved. There’s even an apology and promise from the bad-apple cop to stop harassing the jokingly proclaimed “Black Bart Simpson.”

And here are the actual, honest-to-Christ final lines of the episode.

Hippie doughnut guy: You know I’m actually glad this happened, because I think I learned a lot today.

Cool millennial employee: Yeah, I think we all did. A’ight, bring it in.

[They hug.]

Zany dry cleaning proprietor from next door, observing two men in an embrace: Gay! At this point it bears noting that though the opening credits proclaim this slow-drip flaming Malort enema to be “based on the play by Tracy Letts,” the Tony winner himself has nothing to do with the series. So if after several episodes of seeing the nerdy black cop—whose other character trait is that he’s a corrupt Chicagoan—taking bribes and playing loose with the law, the President tweets “Superior Donuts, even though it’s on failing CBS, totally proves that I am RIGHT about Chicago being corrupt and bad. Gay!” don’t bark up Letts’s tree, I guess.

And in consolation to the many Chicago actors who performed in the original productions of this play: while it sucks that you never had a shot at playing these characters for real money, at least you also won’t forever be associated with this wholesale betrayal of northside culture. (As for the local publications who took the targeted PR bait and mentioned the authentic Chicago stage roots of exactly one of the cast members in preview coverage of Donuts, y’all failed to mention that David Koechner last appeared regularly on a Second City stage in 1994, the same year Hootie & the Blowfish debuted Cracked Rear View.)

Letts has a new work beginning previews at Steppenwolf this week, Linda Vista, that, at least for now, seems to star only members of the ensemble and Chicago-based actors, including Letts himself, and with an excellent cast and the fine director Dexter Bullard at the helm, there’s no reason not to look forward to it. But in the meantime, hopefully Letts’s Superior Donuts will eventually get the authentic Chicago enshrinement it richly deserves: a dessert item named after it at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company on Navy Pier. v

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ARTS & CULTURE DOC10 R Thu 3/30Sun 4/2, Davis, 4614 N. Lincoln, 773-784-0893, doc10.org, $10

Casting JonBenet

MOVIES

An alternative to alternative facts

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lder readers might remember that, in 2003, the Society for Arts launched the hugely ambitious Chicago International Doc Film Festival, whose first edition ran for ten days and included 29 shorts programs and 45 features (among them Bus 174, The Murder of Emmett Till, The Same River Twice, and OT: Our Town). “Holy mackerel,” I thought at the time, “how are they gonna keep this thing going?” Well, they couldn’t. The festival was missing in action for 2004, ’05, and ’06, then returned with a second and final edition in 2007.

Doc10, organized by Chicago Media Project, takes a more measured approach: ten documentaries, all receiving their Chicago premieres, over the course of four days at the Music Box and the Davis Theater.

In the age of fake news and alternative facts, a festival like this is more consequential than ever, not least because the same qualities that can make a documentary come alive—creativity, subjectivity, personality—are the very qualities that invite charges of bias. How are they gonna keep this thing going? I don’t know, but I hope they do. —J.R. JONES Casting JonBenet The unsolved 1996 murder of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey generated a tidal wave of tabloid garbage; this documentary by Kitty Green surfs atop it, exploiting the crime no less but giving it an art-film respectability. Two decades after the little girl was killed in Boulder, Colorado, Green shows up to audition local actors for a dramatization of the story, having them read as JonBenet’s mother, father, and older brother (all of whom were paraded as suspects by the media) and others involved in the case. These amateur and lightly credentialed performers act

out key moments, their work presented in montage, and in interviews with Green they open up about their own memories of the crime and their theories about the family members. One reveals that he’s had the experience of finding a person dead, another lets slip that she’s lost three children, and another confesses that he once protected his guilty son from the police. This has been described as a hybrid documentary, but the other component appears to be an audience discussion from an afternoon talk show. —J.R. JONES 80 min.

Sat 4/1, 7 PM. Davis

R

The Cinema Travelers Director-editors Shirley Abraham and Amit Madheshiya document a hardscrabble company in Maharashtra, India, that goes from one small town to another screening movies from beat-up 35-millimeter projectors. The filmmakers show great affection for the projectionists (some of whom have been with the business for decades) as well as the equipment, with loving close-ups of the men maintaining their machines with monkish devotion. This effectively channels their joy in sharing movies and their spectators’ joy in experiencing them; like an Indian counterpart to the wonderful Uruguayan comedy A Useful Life (2010), the movie celebrates the everyday people who thanklessly keep film culture alive. A subtle sense of mortality enters in the final third, when several of the men decide to replace one of their 35-millimeter machines with a digital one and another projectionist discusses his retirement, but on the whole this is lively and life-affirming. In Hindi and Marathi with subtitles. —BEN SACHS 96 min. Sat 4/1, 4 PM. Davis

R

Death in the Terminal This horrifying Israeli documentary reconstructs the 18 minutes of chaos that ensued in October 2015 after a Bedouin gunman attacked a bus station in Beersheba; security

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 25

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forces shot the man dead but also fatally wounded a young Eritrean immigrant they mistook for his accomplice, whom bystanders then kicked and bludgeoned as he lay on the floor bleeding. Directors Tali Shemesh and Asaf Sudry anchor their story with security video from inside the station, which shows the brutality against the immigrant unfold, and turn from one witness to the next as they piece together what happened. When the filmmakers conclude by running the video backward, you may be stunned at how quickly a public place can become a war zone and how easily victims can become victimizers. In Hebrew and Tigrinya with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 53 min. Sat 4/1, 9:15 PM. Davis

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Obit Patrick Creadon’s documentary Wordplay (2005) looked at Will Shortz, creator of the New York Times crossword puzzle, and Andrew Rossi’s Page One (2011) focused on reporter David Carr and the paper’s media desk; now director Vanessa Gould introduces viewers to Times obituaries editor William McDonald and the handful of writers responsible for summarizing some of the greatest lives ever lived. As reporter Bruce Weber explains, the criterion for inclusion is impact, which is how Leonid Brezhnev might share column space with the inventor of the Slinky, but as the rest of the documentary shows, arriving at a precise statement of that impact can be the hardest part of the job (especially on deadline).

Gould secures plenty of nuts-and-bolts detail about the reporting and writing process, which can range from novelistic use of detail to the prosaic but no less critical matter of confirming the death itself. There’s also a fascinating tour of the paper’s morgue, a vast treasure trove of obscure photographs, articles, and other ephemera that even its owners can no longer fully grasp. —J.R. JONES 93 min. Sun 4/2, 4 PM. Davis Rat Film With this debut feature, documentary maker Theo Anthony crafts a convincing analogy between the rat infestation of Baltimore and the issues of race and class that also afflict the city. The movie begins with a dry observation of a rat stuck inside a trash can—rats can jump an average of 32 inches, the monotonous female narrator explains, and Baltimore trash cans are 34 inches high—and the image neatly introduces Anthony’s theme: how the structure of a place can stack the odds against those living inside. The metaphor may seem obvi-

ous, but Anthony’s blend of well-researched scientific and historical background with deep existential questioning recalls Werner Herzog’s best work, presenting a fresh take on a centuries-old subject with poetry and urgency. —LEAH PICKETT 82 min. Fri 3/31, 9:15 PM. Davis Sweet Dillard James Virga directed this profile of Christopher Dorsey, who leads the jazz ensemble at the Dillard Center School for the Arts in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 57 min. Screens as part of the opening-night program; tickets are $15. Thu 3/30, 7:30 PM, Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com.

Trophy Documentary makers Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau attack the hunting of big game in Africa, identify foreign industries that have profited from it, and profile individuals who try to save hunted animals from extinction. The directors make little attempt to hide their antihunting bias; indeed the movie sometimes feels smug. Schwarz and Clusiau also come across as glib storytellers, cutting impatiently between several different stories and presenting them in bite-size chunks, as in a TV news broadcast. The flashy visual techniques (overhead shots, slow motion) prove distracting more often than not, though the film does share many useful statistics about the rates at which big game animals have disappeared. In English and subtitled Afrikaans. —BEN SACHS 109 min. Sat 4/1, 1:30 PM. Davis Whose Streets? Documentary makers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis spent two years following the civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after a white police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man in 2014. Their movie focuses less on the conflicting details of the shooting or on the global movement it inspired than on the waves of protests and the struggles of local community organizers. But even through this more personal lens, Folayan and Davis take an evenhanded approach: civilians loot stores and burn police cars, whereas police officers fire tear gas and aim rifles at peacefully protesting crowds.

The five “chapters” of the film seem arbitrary, though the passage of time allows for some searing moments, like the locals’ fight to keep the city from cleaning up a memorial to the victim, Michael Brown Jr., in the street where he died. 104 min. —LEAH PICKETT 104 min. Fri 3/31, 6:45 PM. Davis v

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Rob Scallon demonstrates an impractical way to hold his Chapman Guitars signature model eightstring. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

Chicago’s most popular young metal guitarist plays on YouTube, not onstage

Rob Scallon’s frequently goofy videos— among them a banjo cover of Slayer’s ‘Raining Blood’—have earned him an audience of millions.

By LEOR GALIL

R

ob Scallon doesn’t know how many musical instruments he owns. He has to walk around the Roscoe Village apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Tamara Chambers, to count them. They line the walls of his living room and fill part of his adjacent office: a double-neck guitar, a purple cello, a white upright bass, a theremin, an electronic drum kit, a guitalele, a sitar, a berimbau, a rusty shovel outfitted with a single string and wired to play like an electric guitar. “I think I have 36,” he finally says.

Scallon recently bought the berimbau, a bowshaped single-string percussion instrument from Brazil, from Andy’s Music in Avondale. But he doesn’t often have to pay for new toys these days—nearly every new noisemaker arrives for free via an endorsement deal. Manufacturers compete to get their products into Scallon’s hands—including Kala, which specializes in ukuleles, and Cecilio, which makes woodwind, brass, and stringed instruments. Chapman Guitars, a young UK-based company, has collaborated with Scallon on two signature guitars since 2016. J

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 27

MUSIC Rob Scallon continued from 27

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The reason for this is simple: Scallon is one of the most successful young rockers to emerge from Chicago in the past decade. He’s not famous because of a band, though every now and then he drums in a couple. He hardly ever plays live, and his most recent local show was almost two years ago. He rarely appears in mainstream music publications, and he’s not on a major label—in fact he’s not on a traditional label at all, instead working with a company called DFTBA (“Don’t Forget to Be Awesome”) that mostly sells merchandise for vlogging stars. But Scallon has hundreds of thousands of fans, and he makes a living playing music. The one-sentence biography on his main YouTube channel says it all: “My name is Rob and I play guitar for the internet.”

Scallon, 26, began uploading videos to YouTube in February 2007, and it’s still his principal outlet. His main channel has almost 900,000 subscribers, some of whom no doubt also follow his second channel, RobScallon2 (which has more than 150,000 subscribers).

He sometimes makes conventional music videos—for “We’ll Be Fine,” which has accumulated more than 330,000 views since he uploaded it on March 17, 2014, he was filmed on the lakefront playing a woebegone original instrumental tune on a 12-string guitar. But he also produces instructional clips, such as “Slap Guitar 101,” which has racked up more than half a million views in less than three weeks. And some of his videos combine music and comedy: The tune on “Musical Mad Libs” is full of goofy non sequiturs that his fans supplied via YouTube comments when he asked for lyrics. As he and Chambers sing them, a screenshot of each comment appears in the corner of the frame—and when Scallon makes it to the lines “I lost my freaking cat / But then I found her eating pancakes,” the couple’s cat, Wendy, nibbles on a short stack.

Scallon’s most popular videos have one thing in common: metal. At the top of the heap, with more than seven million views since May 2014, is his banjo cover of Slayer’s 1986 thrash classic “Raining Blood.” It’s an instrumental version, with banjo tracks replacing the guitars; Scallon bangs his head and clowns around in the tall grass next to a boarded-up house, wearing denim overalls without a shirt. His cover of Metallica’s “One” performed on a single guitar has reached almost four and a half million views since May 2016, despite its relatively austere visuals: the video is a simple static shot of a Scallon signature Chapman eight-string against a

black background, with as many as five anonymous hands picking and fretting it. “Metal in Inappropriate Places,” which has accumulated more than four million views since September 2014, shows Scallon tearing through acrobatic riffs while standing fully clothed in the shower, scooching awkwardly down playground slides, head-banging between bookcases at a library, and getting what looks like some serious dental work.

Scallon’s viral success has attracted the attention of major music outlets that don’t usually pay much attention to YouTubers. Billboard has written about him a few times, and even interviewed him in conjunction with the May 2014 premiere of his banjo cover of Slayer’s “Angel of Death.” (It’s his fifth most popular video, with more than three million views.)

He’s also attracted the attention of a few metal sites, the largest of which is probably MetalSucks. It’s covered his metal-related work pretty consistently, despite the occasionally salty reactions of commenters who think he’s making fun of the music.

The silly grimaces Scallon makes in some of his metal videos—self-conscious parodies of “guitar face”—probably don’t endear him to loyalists either. But he might win over a few skeptical metalheads with his newest solo album, The Scene Is Dead. Written and recorded over the past three years, it collects Scallon’s explorations of “djent,” a young subgenre whose onomatopoeic name comes from the distinctive guitar attack of progressive Swedish death-metal band Meshuggah. It’s a technique-heavy style that relies heavily on drop-tuned guitars, tricky time signatures, and riffs that feel like they’ve been mapped out on a grid—just the thing for a musician who’s already learned how to get paid for his chops.

Scallon’s Bandcamp page includes three dozen releases, including a raft of singles sourced from his YouTube videos and six previous albums that date back to 2008. Those records are mostly emo or instrumental postrock, though—The Scene Is Dead isn’t his first rodeo, but it’s his first metal album.

S

callon genuinely loves metal, notwithstanding all the Internet blowhards who question his sincerity. Like many fans, though, he doesn’t telegraph it in his appearance: he has no visible tattoos, his shaggy hair isn’t long enough to make even a tiny ponytail, and he’s more scruffy than actually bearded. In his videos, he’s recently taken to wearing plain button-down shirts.

In a pattern familiar to metalheads, Scallon

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MUSIC Scallon experiments with his new berimbau, one of three dozen musical instruments he owns. o DANIELLE

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play live, it was kind of a mess usually. But we had a lot of fun.”

Even in his early teens, Scallon suspected that physical stages wouldn’t be as important to him as Web platforms. “I knew that there was a tremendous amount of potential with doing music for the Internet, but I didn’t quite know what it was yet,” he says. He was inspired by the website Songs to Wear Pants To, founded in 2004 by musician and future Scallon collaborator Andrew Huang—for a small fee, users could commission Huang to write a song. “Being an Internet musician at the time, you needed to be making cool stuff all the time and have some savvy, innovative business sense to turn it into money,” Scallon says. “I just really wanted to grow an audience and figure out ways to do it, but I didn’t really know what that meant.”

The first platform Scallon tried was MySpace—the remnants of his page still indicate that he had more than 22,000 connections.

“In the MySpace days, I think the first regular revenue stream I had was iTunes sales— J

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seems to change personalities entirely when he isn’t stomping and thrashing around: he’s gentle, affable, and quick to smile. For his Reader photo shoot, he puts on his signature gray beanie and cocks the brim to the right.

He began wearing beanies in his videos more than four years ago, for a cover of Hanson’s “MmmBop” that he performed on a recorder.

(He’d asked his fans on Facebook how he could make the “worst thing ever.”) “My hair was kind of a mess, and it was an easy way to solve that problem,” he says. “I have less hair than I used to, so it helps out there. And then it just kind of became a thing.”

Metal has been part of Scallon’s life for ages.

“I was really inspired by Metallica when I was young, and I just loved playing metal guitar,” he says. As a musician, he started on drums— he got a kit for Christmas in elementary school, and while at Arlington Heights High in 2008 he began drumming for a death-metal group called Gas Mask Catalogue. “We actually had some pretty great songs, but we really weren’t practiced,” he says. “When we would

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Scallon and his sitar. It’s less satisfying but by no means impossible to bang your head while seated. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

Mark Eitzel & Howe Gelb In Szold Hall

Rob Scallon continued from 29 which is kinda weird, looking back now, that that was the only way that that MySpace page made money,” he says.

Scallon moved to YouTube in 2007 after hearing that musicians could make a living there, but his first steps were wobbly. “I wrongly just went after numbers at that time—I just figured the bigger the audience I have, the better it will work,” he says. “I was contacting everyone with a popular YouTube channel and saying, ‘Hey, I’ll make music for you, just shout out my channel.’ I think that grew the channel a little bit, but I wasn’t reaching people who were particularly interested in my stuff.”

Scallon eventually discovered that building his own audience, though a much slower process, worked better than throwing himself in front of other YouTubers’ fans. “It’s really a long-tail business,” he says. “You don’t really look for the thing that’s gonna make you 2,000 dollars in a day. You look for the thing that’s gonna make you one dollar today and one dol-

lar every other day for the foreseeable future.”

After graduating from high school in 2009, Scallon held down a series of odd jobs and pursued his music career in his spare time. But in June 2013, while working as a digital-services assistant at Arlington Heights Memorial Library, he came to a crossroads.

“I was in a position where I either needed to say ‘no’ to some big opportunities that were coming my way or quit the job,” Scallon says.

“I ended up quitting the job and really going for it.” He had about 35,000 subscribers at the time, and he’d been saving money for a few years, which helped ease the transition. While his channel grew, he kept himself afloat by landing freelance gigs with other YouTubers— including Craig Benzine, better known as singer and guitarist Wheezy Waiter, who lived in Chicago at the time. “For the first six months or so, I was definitely making a little bit less than what I needed to pay my bills,” he says.

“But I had that savings.”

Focusing on music full-time allowed Scallon to travel more and find like-minded collab-

orators. He’s not particularly active as a live musician, but in 2013 he started filling in on drums with Driftless Pony Club, an indie-rock band fronted by Wheezy Waiter, who now lives in Austin. That same year he also took a spot behind the kit for Hank Green & the Perfect Strangers, an intermittently active supergroup of YouTubers led by vlogger and DFTBA cofounder Hank Green, who lives in Missoula, Montana. (Hank is the younger brother of YA novelist and Internet celebrity John Green.)

“We’re all pretty busy, so we don’t get together very often,” Scallon says. “If I’m not playing with Hank Green & the Perfect Strangers, then I generally just don’t play live.” His most recent local solo set was at Metro two years ago: he was an opening act on a CIMMfest showcase that included Driftless Pony Club and Hank Green & the Perfect Strangers. Scallon also travels to make appearances at conventions, including two big events in the Los Angeles area: VidCon, a gathering of Web creators organized by the Green brothers, and the National Association of J

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4/5 Düm Rhythm Celebration 4/12 Gullibanque

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

MUSIC Rob Scallon continued from 31 Music Merchants Show, a music-gear convention that draws roughly 100,000 participants.

The NAMM Show is only open to industry people, but Scallon didn’t have to wonder if he counted as one—he was invited. After discovering Scallon’s YouTube channel, NAMM director of professional development Zach Phillips reached out. “We knew Rob had a style that would be appealing to many NAMM Show attendees—he’s a strong, charismatic player,” Phillips says. “Plus he has an interesting story, being such a savvy marketer of his music.”

Scallon has been attending NAMM since 2014. In 2016 he debuted his first signature guitar for Chapman, and a couple years before that he met Ryan “Fluff” Bruce from Puyallup, Washington, who’d become a consistent collaborator. Bruce runs a YouTube channel called Riffs & Beards, and he convinced Scallon to hire him as a mixing and mastering engineer, even though Scallon had no money for it at first. “I was a bit uncomfortable with hiring him for free, but I think we only did three videos where he did it for

free—then the channel was at a point where I could pay him,” Scallon says. “He’s been my sound guy ever since.”

Scallon has since assembled a small team, including a few videographers, a manageragent, and a video editor. The editor, Jake Jarvi, also performs in Scallon’s satirical videos as Rick Riffson, the click-hungry CEO of “Super Metal Records,” who has a penchant for djent. Riffson made his first appearance in November 2014, at which point Scallon had been making metal-centric videos for roughly a year—he’d started slowly, with cello covers of System of a Down, then rolled out ukulele versions of Slayer and Cannibal Corpse.

“I wrongly assumed that there wasn’t a market for metal on YouTube,” Scallon says. “I held on to that for too long. But then I started doing more metal stuff, particularly in the last four years, just ’cause I’m into it. I’m fortunate enough [that] my audience who is there for guitar stuff were also into metal stuff.”

Of course, not everyone who’s into metal finds Scallon’s take on the music worthwhile.

MetalSucks published “The 25 Most Import-

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these great videos and now making this amazing album, and doing it all DIY—which is very important in the metal community—that kind of work ethic, it’s mind-blowing,” he says. “He really represents a culmination of metal history and technological history up to this point.”

Scallon’s approach may be alien to fans weaned on stories of bands in vans, but he’s willing to speak freely about how he’s made it work. His major revenue streams are YouTube ads, licensing deals, and Patreon, a subscription service for Web creators that Scallon began using shortly after its launch in May 2013. Right now he has 899 subscribers, who receive different perks based on what they pay per month.

Each of Scallon’s video descriptions also includes information on his gear and where to buy it. If he collaborated with another YouTuber, he adds details about their work as well. Bob Clagett of the channel I Like to Make Stuff built Scallon his one-string shovel guitar, and Scallon gave him a shout-out in the “Shovel Metal” video (which has more than 1.7 million views since February 2016).

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ant People in Metal” in installments throughout November, and the list placed Scallon at number 23—a choice the site must have known would provoke its readers. Some of the criticism in the comments section was polite (“His output doesn’t really reflect that he’s all that prolific with regards to metal”), some of it less so (“He makes videos making stupid faces while covering 20-year-old metal songs on shovels. This man could not possibly be less important in metal”).

MetalSucks cofounder and editor in chief Axl Rosenberg hasn’t let the backlash change his mind. “I do think that there are a lot of metalheads who are humorless—or at least don’t think it’s OK to have a sense of humor about metal, and so they take anything that’s funny as an affront,” he says. “I also think that these so-called bedroom producers piss off a lot of traditionalists, most of whom are of a certain age.”

Rosenberg likes Scallon’s jokey metal videos, but he also sees the YouTuber as extending some of the genre’s traditions toward the future. “For there to be this guy who is making

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MUSIC Scallon’s approach to collaboration, which often looks like simply trading favors, has helped him out in other contexts too: because he needed access to a dentist’s office for the “Metal in Inappropriate Places” video, he recorded a free jingle for Lincoln Park Smiles.

“The owner let me shoot and have staff there to make it look like I was actually getting a filling or something,” he says. “He gave me a free cleaning before I left.”

Scallon’s affability and approachability manifest themselves in the descriptions he writes for his YouTube videos. He likes people to feel included in his process, and he’s transparent about how he does things. He might add an inside joke, but he’ll also probably explain it. In the November video “Most Brutal Breakdown Ever,” which he made with Dave Brown of the channel Boy in a Band, Brown says “get rowdy” and “get pissed.” In the description, Scallon explains that those phrases are homages to north-suburban deathcore group Oceano, who came from the same scene he did—their singer would shout them before a breakdown.

Chicago artists have influenced Scallon’s music in other directions as well. On his Bandcamp page, he’s posted a couple covers of Mike Kinsella’s solo project, Owen. “You can probably say that my first four albums are just a bad Owen impression,” he says. Kinsella’s influence remains strong on Scallon’s later material too: his most popular song for solo guitar, 2013’s “Anchor,” uses the same tuning as “Never Meant,” by Kinsella’s 90s emo band American Football.

The Scene Is Dead, on the other hand, pays tribute to the metal community he grew up in.

“All those songs are named after bands from the Chicagoland area that I would see in high school,” Scallon says. The album opens with “Gas Mask Catalogue,” and though Scallon insists his old group was a mess, the track is clean, complex, and efficient in its aggression.

He uses extended-range guitars, with seven strings or more, on the whole record—the nervy “Envy” arose from his desire to write a metal song for nine-string guitar and use all the strings in “a creative way.” Scallon is a gifted player, but he never disrupts the flow

of his songs with showboating. That’s obvious in his videos too, and it’s helped make fans of metal musicians with much higher profiles on traditional stages: The Scene Is Dead includes two guitar solos from Jeff Loomis, formerly of long-running Seattle group Nevermore and now a member of Swedish melodeath band Arch Enemy.

Since its digital release in January, The Scene Is Dead has remained among the best-selling Chicago albums available on Bandcamp, occasionally outperforming critics’ darlings such as Whitney and Russian Circles—but Scallon has barely had time to notice. “Working on so many videos all the time, I haven’t given this album that much thought since it came out,” he says. “Something comes out, and then you’re on to the next thing right away. All your focus is on the next video.”

Right now he and fellow YouTuber Sarah Longfield are finishing a pilot for MTV that repackages their online content into a 30-minute show—the channel reached out to him about six months ago. “I was like, ‘I would love to have the experience of even just filming a pilot

for MTV,’” he says.

But Scallon’s focus remains on the Internet. In February, ten years to the day after he launched his YouTube page, he published a video in which he re-creates a snippet of the best-trafficked clip from each year. Its 11 segments include two takes on Metallica—“One” on a single guitar and “Enter Sandman” played backward and then reversed to sound “normal” (posted in 2015, it’s accumulated more than 3.8 million views). About a month later, Mexican YouTuber Luisito Rey uploaded a video where he interviews Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett, asking him to watch 11 covers of his band’s songs and rate them from one to five. Up first: Scallon’s 2016 banjo cover of “Master of Puppets” (more than 2.5 million views), where he’s joined by a buddy wielding an upright bass. With an amused smile, Hammett says, “I have to give them credit, because they put a lot of work into it—a lot of effort.

And you know what, they’re playing it right.”

He gives Scallon a five. v

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Mica Levi at the Oscars in February 2017

MUSIC IN ROTATION

o FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY

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

Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Technodelic delic

Maarja Nuut o RENEE ALTROVÖ

PETER MARGASAK Reader music critic

Artist and musician

NICK BUTCHER

ALEX VALENTINE

Maarja Nuut, Une Meeles The second album from remarkable Estonian violinist and singer Maarja Nuut is a thrilling journey in sound, moving effortlessly between striated string etudes, folk-derived dance pieces, and minimalist marvels. Nuut’s music draws upon folk, classical, and pop, and though she uses nothing but overdubbed violin and voice, it isn’t merely a glib loop-station confection—her commanding grasp of the violin’s possibilities ensures that her pedals remain accessories.

Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa, Absolutely on Music I’m a huge fan of Haruki Murakami, even though all the fiction I’ve read of his feels basically the same. This book is totally different, though. It’s a series of interviews between Murakami and Seiji Ozawa, a famous Japanese conductor with whom I’m not familiar at all. I know very little about classical music, but their exchanges are totally fun to read. It’s enthralling to hear two masters of their disciplines discuss a mutual passion with lighthearted precision. I often find classical music impenetrable or even dull, but their words make it sound accessible and rich.

The Knobs YouTube channel I was originally going to suggest the amazing Organelle

by Critter & Guitari, an inexhaustibly useful fusion of miniature piano and computer, but I thought it’d be better to mention where I first heard it. The Knobs YouTube channel is the future of online demo videos (which might not sound like much, but it is!), and it posts some of the best music I’ve heard in a while. The golden age of effect pedals and sonic manipulation is now.

Jürg Frey, String Quartet No. 3/Unhörbare Zeit In his liner notes to this beautiful recording by Montreal’s Quatuor Bozzini, Swiss composer Jürg Frey writes, “The music is silent architecture.” String Quartet No. 3 isn’t literally silent, but its glacially drifting, luminescent harmonies are exquisitely quiet; long tones seesaw in pitch, seeming to extend to the horizon. On Unhörbare Zeit, where two percussionists augment the quartet, the melodies are broken by silences, percussive rumbles, and passages of static discord.

Neuköllner Modelle, Sektion 1-2 This multigenerational free-jazz unit takes a familiar approach—an ad hoc sax trio improvises with no preset material. Drummer Sven-Åke Johansson has called its music “constructive free jazz,” a fair way to describe the limber, obliquely melodic, pulse-driven sound he creates with bassist Joel Grip and saxophonist Bertrand Denzler. The group explores within a comforting form, especially Johansson—his drumming clenches and loosens in a contemporary take on the free jazz of the past.

34 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

Lvnch Lvnch is the solo electronic-music project of Chicago-based sculptor Scott Carter.

Scott is a super humble artist with a huge skill set. He’s extremely active with his fine art work but keeps pretty quiet about his music.

I love the attention to detail, and his sense of melody is fantastic. His sculpture background comes through in the shapes of his songs.

Yellow Magic Orchestra, Technodelic I only recently learned about Yellow Magic Orchestra. I was peripherally familiar with cofounder Ryuichi Sakamoto, but not with this seminal group. They have a huge discography, and this 1981 album is my favorite that I’ve heard by far. It reminds me of a streamlined This Heat, though YMO is usually compared to Kraftwerk. I dig the surprising harmonies and melodies atop the tight electronic rhythms. This album was also one of the very first to use the legendary Roland TR-808 drum machine.

Visual artist, always listening

The 90 Day Men’s Peel session Brian Case’s newest band, FACS, is just starting out, and Cayce Key and Robert A.A. Lowe have continued to release great music with Bloodiest and Lichens, respectively, but it’s never a bad idea to revisit the band where all this goodness started. The 90 Day Men’s Peel session, from 2001, is a great example of how complementary and dynamic these musicians were together. This needs a proper release.

Mica Levi’s film music If you know Mica Levi only from her band Micachu & the Shapes, you should definitely check out her work for film. I was sure her music for Jackie would win the Oscar for best original score. I never get these things right.

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Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of March 30 b

THURSDAY30

PICK OF THE WEEK

Jenny Hval Matchess opens. 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $15. 18+

Bizarre minimalist duo Sleaford Mods add melody to their verbal assault

After exploring her experimental side with the strong 2015 album Apocalypse, Girl, Norwegian singer Jenny Hval made another artistic turn with last year’s Blood Bitch (Sacred Bones), her prettiest and most accessible effort to date. But with Hval nothing is quite as it seems—her philosophical probing routinely undercuts song conventions.

In interviews she’s spoken of Blood Bitch’s twin motifs, menstrual blood and vampirism, but on the album itself she goes much deeper: in “Female Vampire,” for example, she protests her subjugation to male scrutiny (“I must justify my presence by losing it / Must not keep a steady gaze”), and as the album unfolds she embraces menstruation as a form of power. Songs are rarely direct and usually loaded with theoretical and literary references; the poppiest and most irresistible track, “Conceptual Romance,” is a hat tip to the experimental Chris Kraus novel I Love Dick, and “Period Piece” quotes a Caroline Bergvall performance piece and plays with its own title (“Failed every period / Did baroque badly / Afraid of blood”). I won’t pretend to get all that Hval is presenting here, but at the album’s core there seems to be an open dialogue questioning binary divisions—in the spheres of gender, morality, and politics in particular. She communicates as effectively as she ever has thanks to the record’s pop savvy; Norwegian noise artist Lasse Marhaug coproduced. And Hval’s performances, which often feature her collaborators dancing and dressed in a series of perverse costumes, raise even more questions. —PETER MARGASAK

o SIMON PARFREMENT

SLEAFORD MODS, NEGATIVE SCANNER

Mon 4/3, 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $20. 18+

IF NOTTINGHAM’S SLEAFORD MODS have anything that might be considered a breakout single it’s “Jobseeker,” a track that landed them on the BBC’s Later . . . With Jools Holland in 2015. The hyperagressive and starkly minimal duo were a sight never before seen on the late-night circuit, right away making them something of a black sheep for the mainstream variety show. Foregrounded by an old busted laptop resting on a keg, beatmaker Andrew Fearn slammed a plastic cup of beer while awkwardly bobbing to a simple, driving beat that sounded like a gloomy Casio keyboard demo. In control of the mike, vocalist Jason Williamson frothed at the mouth as he delivered a profanity-ridden performance that landed somewhere between rapping and unhinged ranting and raving. Finding the middle ground between the Fall and Wu-Tang Clan—or U.K. anarcho-punk and east-coast boom bap—Sleaford Mods have been using this basic formula to work up a racket since 2007.

On the brand-new English Tapas, their first full-length for Rough Trade, they’ve taken a deep breath of sorts: tempos groove a little more, and Williamson’s verbal assault is more paced and deliberate, at times even forming into catchy, melodic choruses. But don’t get it twisted, this is by no means a pop record—Sleaford Mods are as intense and bizarre as ever. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

Kurt Rosenwinkel Through Sunday. 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, $25-$45.

Among the characteristics that have made Kurt Rosenwinkel one of the most influential jazz guitarists of his generation is the way he traces his limpid, harmonically sophisticated playing with a dreamy layer of wordless singing, a kind of sonic shadow that enriches the timbre of his bands. On his new solo album Caipi (Heartcore/Razdaz) the voice is no longer a complement but a key ingredient. A collection of original pieces steeped in the breezy lyric glow of Brazilian pop music, the recording features Rosenwinkel playing nearly every instrument— guitar, piano, drums, bass, and synthesizer—joined on some tracks by guests. On most tunes Brazilian jazz-pop singer and guitarist Pedro Martins contributes airy vocals that add a melodic luminescence, soothing an occasionally stiff rhythmic attack.

Rosenwinkel himself steps to the mike to sing lead here and there, like on the moody English-language tune “Summer Song,” where he collides the influence of Pat Metheny with the falsetto grace of Milton Nascimento, and “Hold On,” which summons vintage Steely Dan. And a couple of high-profile guest musicians turn in solos both trenchant (Mark Turner’s sinewy improvisation on “Ezra”) and flaccid (Eric Clapton’s snoozy turn on “Little Dream”).

It’s encouraging that the guitarist has assembled a sextet to play the music live, including some of the

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folks who helped out on the recording: Martins and singer-percussionist Antonio Loureiro, along with drummer Bill Campbell, bassist Frederico Heliodoro, and keyboardist Olivia Trummer. I hope Rosenwinkel returns to his more jazz-driven instrumental side, but Caipi—which showcases his curiosity and sharp pop instincts—has grown on me.

—PETER MARGASAK Rock, Pop, Etc Richard Ashcroft 9 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Chris Dertz & the River, Arizona Landmine, Vaya, Retirement Party, Coaster 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Devilish Winks, Old Grand Dad, Elijah Berlow 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Fauvely, Predictions, Born Days 9 PM, Empty Bottle Ghost-Note 8 PM, the Promontory b Kolars 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Never Shout Never, Me Like Bees 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, sold out Agnes Obel, Ethan Gruska 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Shades, Brendan Fletcher 8 PM, City Winery b Tijuana Hercules, Wet Wallet, Velcro Lewis Group 8 PM, Township Voodoo Glow Skulls, Pilfers, Mights, Evil Empire 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Dance Eris Drew, Rose E Kross, MX Silkman, Kae Nastiii Part of Daphne 2017. 10 PM, Smart Bar FKJ, Cezaire, Dabeull 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Gladiator 10 PM, the Mid Peggy Gou, Trentino, Gordo 10 PM, Primary Nightclub Folk & Country Devil in a Woodpile 6 PM, Hideout Jazz Evil Genius, Hanami 9 PM, Elastic b Makaya McCraven 9 PM, Hideout Clark Sommers’s Lens 9:30 PM, California Clipper

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A Boogie Wit da Hoodie o DIWANG VALDEZ PHOTOGRAPHY LLC

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 35

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

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Experimental Coupler Our Heavenly Bodies live score. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Deadbeat, Rami Atassi & Tatsu Aoki 7:30 PM, Comfort Station b Classical Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Sarah Connolly and Stephen Gould James Conlon, conductor (Schubert, Mahler). 8 PM, also Fri 3/31 and Sat 4/1, 8 PM, Symphony Center Rachel Kudo Piano. 7 PM, PianoForte Studios b

FRIDAY31 A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie 7 PM, Portage Theater, 40450 N. Milwaukee, $25-$70. 17+ Bronx rapper Artist Dubose, better known as A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, became one of the biggest acts to emerge from NYC last year in part because he was willing to shrug off the city’s imposing hiphop canon. The hits off his debut 2016 mixtape, Artist, and his October EP, TBA (Highbridge/Atlantic), feel hardwired for the present-day Top 40, which owing to radio almost demands that crossover acts sing as much as they rap. As Drake appears content to wallow and wither away in the mellow dancehall of his inescapable 2016 hit “One Dance,” A Boogie shows he’s primed to grab the reins of pop-rap on the TBA single “Timeless,” where he wavers between loose Auto-Tune warbles and hardedged ad-libs that underscore the track’s haunting dancehall production. A Boogie’s instrumentals often outshine his emotive inflections, and his eagerness to match their ebb and flow on, e.g., his recent single “Drowning” feels especially apparent when Florida sensation Kodak Black’s unpredictable, mush-mouthed performance takes over.

—LEOR GALIL

Gabriella Cohen Foxygen headline. 8 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield, $22. 18+ The first time I listened to Australian singer-guitarist Gabriella Cohen’s Full Closure and No Details (Captured Tracks), I was drawn in by the nonchalance of her performance, but as the songs rolled on I came

to realize I was overlooking their concision and tart bite. Now that’s all I can focus on. Cohen, who was previously one-half of a garage-rock duo called the Furrs, reflects some clear influences: the strummy hypnosis of the Velvet Underground, the hazy euphoria of Phil Spector-produced girl groups, and the bacchanalia of 60s psychedelia, which manifests itself during reverb-drenched tracks such as “Beaches” and the needling “Yesterday.” Full Closure is a breakup album filled with resentment that surfaces even in a cliched line like “No one there will love you like I do.” But those moments are tempered by a narcotic glaze and leavened by Cohen’s bittersweet jadedness (“When they sit on their chairs and they got an approach that doesn’t really take into consideration of other people”).

—PETER MARGASAK

DakhaBrakha 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, sold out. b Since forming more than a decade ago, this energetic, highly theatrical combo from Ukraine have focused on translating the traditional polyphonic vocal tradition of their homeland for a global audience. Impressively, DakhaBrakha have done so without sacrificing their native essence—not even when trafficking in dub and electronic effects or borrowing rhythms from around the world. The four members contribute cello, jaw harp, accordion, and percussion, but the focal point remains the keening Balkan-style vocal harmonies of Iryna Kovalenko, Olena Tsybulska, and Nina Garenetska. The group’s latest album, The Road, doesn’t veer from their previous work, but it does make room for moody explorations like “Chorna Khmarma,” where the group’s sole male member, Marko Halanevych, sings with tender vulnerability over sound samples of wind that are slowly subsumed by droning cello, plangent piano chords, and a funereal beat.

—PETER MARGASAK

K-Hand DJ Heather and MTZ open. 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $12 in advance, $15 before midnight.

If the brass behind the Grammys really wanted their Bee Gees tribute to be an uproarious sensation rather than a limp nonstory, they should have

DakhaBrakha o KULIKOV

36 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

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MUSIC ditched Little Big Town for Detroit DJ and producer Kelli Hand, aka K-Hand. The B side of her newest 12-inch, Project 6 EP (released on her long-running Acacia Records), kicks off with an edit of Melba Moore’s version of the Bee Gees’ “You Stepped Into My Life.” Hand strips Moore’s version of some of its gaudiness, instead infusing it with enlivened percussion and an alert melodic pulse that together work to yank people toward the dance floor much like the Bee Gees did in their heyday. And she knows a thing or two about getting people moving. Spinning since the 80s, Hand draws upon a deep well of inspiration and experience, from partying to legendary DJ Larry Levan at New York’s Paradise Garage to kicking it with Detroit techno heavy hitters Underground Resistance. Her deep catalog flits between techno and house, and generally she appears more driven by a response to a mood or atmosphere than by a desire to stick to a strict genre. Perhaps that’s why she hasn’t always been given as much credit as her peers who’ve helped build Detroit’s storied techno scene and sound—though the city has taken corrective measures. Last year Detroit’s city council presented Hand and some other techno legends— the Belleville Three, Jeff Mills, Eddie Fowlkes, and Carl Craig—with the Spirit of Detroit Award, which honors those who have served the city and citizens of Detroit. Hand has most certainly done that.

—LEOR GALIL

Pallbearer Marissa Nadler and Kayo Dot open. 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $19$24, $16 in advance. 17+ The consensus on Pallbearer’s new third album, Heartless (Profound Lore), seems to be that the Arkansas doom-metal quartet have finally unmasked themselves as a prog band. But even if you’re one of those benighted souls for whom “prog” is a four-letter word, you needn’t be alarmed—the shift is more of degree than of kind. After all, on Pallbearer’s debut, 2012’s Sorrow and Extinction, the stately riffs follow long, serpentine paths, weaving together melody and countermelody in a complicated dance.

The occasional airy synths on Heartless aren’t a new development either—keyboards make similar cameos on 2014’s Foundations of Burden. This isn’t to say that nothing important has changed: Pallbearer’s music has always evoked desolation, J

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MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 37

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solitude, and grief, but now its tone is as heroic as it is melancholy, as towering and radiant as it is bleak and cavernous. Much of this has to do with the bright, relatively conventional mix by Joe Barresi (Tool, Queens of the Stone Age), which frequently backgrounds the band’s grainy bedrock of colossal drop-tuned guitars in favor of steely lead lines or multiple tracks of Brett Campbell’s clean, mournful singing. The songwriting on Heartless has evolved too, relying less on the glacial patience of funeral doom and more on the familiar gratifications of rock ’n’ roll. The operative word here is more: more athletic bustle, more nimble counterpoint, more up-tempo riffing, more shouted vocals, more overripe harmonies. “Dancing in Madness” and “Cruel Road” even include what might be the group’s meanest-sounding unison chugging, while Campbell manages a convincingly contemptuous snarl. Maybe you can’t reconcile the Pallbearer sound you fell for with this much studio polish or this many notes—in that case, you can take solace in their increasingly impressive live shows, where they play material from across their career at roughly the volume of Mount St. Helens. You’ll never feel so good while a band asks you to mourn the onrushing collapse of your civilization. Prior to tonight’s show Reckless Records in Wicker Park (1379 N. Milwaukee) will host a meet and greet with the band beginning at 6 PM. —PHILIP MONTORO

THURSDAY, MARCH 30 .........SJB FRIDAY, MARCH 31 ...............BROTHER K BAND SATURDAY, APRIL 1 ...............LOST IN THOUGHT SUNDAY, APRIL 2 ..................TOM MATECKI TRIO MONDAY, APRIL 3 .................HENRY SMITH QUINTET WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5 ...........JAMIE WAGNER SHOW THURSDAY, APRIL 6 ..............SMILING BOBBY AND THE CLEMTONES FRIDAY, APRIL 7 ....................SKIPPIN ROCK SATURDAY, APRIL 8 ...............CHYOMIN AND THE FLAT RATS SUNDAY, APRIL 9 ..................HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PLAYERS 8PM EVERY MONDAY AT 9PM ANDREW JANAK QUARTET EVERY TUESDAY AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMI JON AMERICA

3855 N. LINCOLN

martyrslive.com

THU, 3/30

MY DOUBLE LIFE, KEROSENE STARS, BUZZ CUT TIGER

Kurt Rosenwinkel See Thursday. 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, $25-$45.

FRI, 3/31

THE MAGIC BEANS, LOW SPARK, DIGITAL GNOSIS

Xiu Xiu Facs and TALsounds open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15, $13 in advance.

SAT, 4/1 - 7PM

THE STRAY BIRDS

SAT, 4/1 - 9PM

MANNY TORRES, WILLY DYNOMITE, TWO FILIPINOS

MON, 4/3 - ALL AGES

KILGUBBIN BROTHERS

TUE, 4/4

CAUTION

WED, 4/5

TRIBUTOSAURUS BECOMES… PINK FLOYD THU, 4/6

BIG C JAMBOREE… THE DEACONS FRI, 4/7 & SAT 4/8 - TWO NIGHTS!

START MAKING SENSE

38 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

EARLY WARNINGS NEVER MISS A SHOW AGAIN

CHICAGOREADER.COM/EARLY

Xiu Xiu have never and are not going to make a pop album. Despite developing a four-on-the-floor rhythmic backbone for their recent Forget (Polyvinyl), these monarchs of bloodletting through experimental music leave no reason to believe they’ll pivot into the warm embrace of synthpop. Rather, Forget is another genre exercise in a career that’s seen many: “What would Jamie Stewart’s self-flagellation scan like if you could also bob your head to it?” The answer is basically early-80s the Cure, or a more emotionally scarred Public Image Ltd—melodic, structured, and cathartic, but still confrontational and icy. Some tracks don’t have enough structural support to hold their own weight, serving mostly as a reminder of the perks of gaudy orchestration to augment gaudy emotionalism. But others, like the sinister, restrained title track, manage to confine Stewart to the thrust of those postpunk icons while allowing him the latitude to excoriate the subject of his choosing. It’s still not pop, but it is death disco of a sort—and it sounds good on them.

—AUSTIN BROWN Rock, Pop, Etc Bleep Bloop 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Bowling for Soup, Runaway Kids, Direct Hit 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Bumpus, Sam Trump 8 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar F Candlebox 8 and 10:30 PM, City Winery, sold out b Allison Crutchfield & the Fizz, Vagabon, Pretty Pretty 7:30 PM, Schubas b

Dickies, Rumjacks, Headspins, Dead Freddie 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Dowsing, Joie De Vivre, Annabel, Mother Evergreen Punk Talks benefit. 8 PM, Auxiliary Arts Center, 17+ Aretha Franklin 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Kawehi 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen 17+ Lawsuits, Luke Henry, Thin Cherries 10 PM, Hideout Le Butcherettes 7 PM, Cobra Lounge b Magic Beans, Low Spark, Digital Gnosis 9 PM, Martyrs’ Mothership, Black Pussy, Speedfreak, Bad Mother 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Nonagon, T-Tops, High Priests, Lasers and Fast and Shit 10 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Powers & James Hersey, Nick Leng 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b Red Elvises 9 PM, FitzGerald’s Simple Plan, Set It Off 5 PM, also Sat 4/1, 5 PM, House of Blues, sold out Sophagus, Drool 10 PM, Cole’s F Winger 8:30 PM, Joe’s Live, Rosemont Hip-Hop Big Sean, MadeinTYO 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom Austin Fillmore, Said the Heart, Curt Cohiba, Clowder 7:30 PM, Cubby Bear Alex Wiley, No Society, Trapo, Qari, Mulatto, UG Vavy 8 PM, the Promontory b Dance Bear Grillz, Terravita, P0gman, Wooli 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Jello Biafra’s Incredibly Strange Dance Party 9 PM, Liar’s Club Dangerwayne, Richie Olivo, Lucas Fris, Noj 10 PM, Primary Nightclub Maher Daniel, Amir Javasoul 10 PM, Spy Bar Gene Hunt, Mike Dunn, Kevin McSwain, Rick Lenoir 11 PM, the Promontory David J (DJ set), Carrie Monster, Lisa Marchese 8 PM, Late Bar Ummet Ozcan 10 PM, Sound-Bar Stefan Ponce 9 PM, East Room Toro Y Moi (DJ set) 10 PM, the Mid Richard 23 & Patrick Codenys, Greg Haus, Jenamax 10 PM, Berlin Folk & Country Keola Beamer & Jeff Peterson 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Blues, Gospel, and R&B Shawn Holt & the Teardrops 9 PM, also Sat 4/1, 9 PM, B.L.U.E.S. Vance Kelly & the Backstreet Blues Band, Joanna Connor Band 9 PM, also Sat 4/1, 9 PM, Kingston Mines Eddie Shaw, Zach Day 9 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Dave Specter Band with Jimmy Johnson 9:30 PM, Rosa’s Lounge Demetria Taylor, John Primer Blues Band 9 PM, also Sat 4/1, 9 PM, Blue Chicago Jazz Chris Botti 8 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Skokie Lowdown Brass Band with MC Billa Camp 9:30 PM, also Sat 4/1, 9:30 PM, Andy’s Jazz Club Modern Sounds with Oscar Wilson 10:30 PM, California Clipper Stephane Wrembel 9 PM, also Sat 4/1, 8 PM, Green Mill Experimental Stephan Moore & Ed Osborn, Radio Trio, Normal W. Long 9 PM, Elastic b

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Arnold Dreyblatt o PEDRO FIGUEIREDO

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International Anthem 9 PM, also Sat 4/1, 9 PM, Wild Hare Classical Bernadette Peters with the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra 7:30 PM, Auditorium Theatre In-Stores Oozing Wound, Platinum Boys 7 PM, Permanent Records F b

SATURDAY1 Kurt Rosenwinkel See Thursday. 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, $25-$45.

Son Volt Anders Parker opens. 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $27-$37, $25 in advance. b Jay Farrar titled the first new Son Volt studio album in four years Notes of Blue (Thirty Tigers), and he’s explained that the record was inspired by the spirit of the blues, with certain songs employing tunings used by the likes of Skip James and Mississippi Fred McDowell. But it only takes a few seconds of the opening track, “Promise the World,” with its oozing pedal-steel washes from Jason Kardong undergirding Farrar’s plaintive moan, to hear that Son Volt haven’t changed direction. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to tell how this record is appreciably different from the stuff they churned out two decades ago: it purveys the same sort of twangy country rock that made them alt-country icons, showing at least that there’s comfort in consistency. A song like the bruising “Static” certainly embraces blueslike themes in its meditation on suffering and mortality, while “Cairo and Southern”—referring to the downstate Illinois town—embraces a sense of home that acts as a balm, Farrar singing, “I’ll drink shine in Cairo / To ease the trouble in my mind.” Kindred spirit Anders Parker of Varnaline—formerly half of a duo with Farrar called Gob Iron—opens, reinforcing Son Volt’s stylistic single-mindedness. —PETER MARGASAK Rock, Pop, Etc Kurt Baker Combo, Indonesian Junk, Mono in Stereo, Soraia 8 PM, Township Adrian Belew Power Trio, Saul Zonana 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Days N Daze, Hang Union, Badwater Sound, Won’t

Stay Dead 5 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b The Dig, McFabulous 10 PM, Schubas Dude York, Paws 6 PM, Cobra Lounge Emblems, As Giants, Faux Furrs 10:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Fishbone, Downtown Brown, Skapone, DJ Chuck Wren 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Peter Frampton 8 PM, Centre East, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Skokie Home Burial, Victor Shores, Pierre, Affogato, Boss Fight 6:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Jain, Two Feet 8 PM, Subterranean, sold out, 17+ Hayley Kiyoko, Flor 6:30 PM, Park West b Memories, Lemons 10 PM, Cole’s F Dalton Rapattoni 1 PM, SPACE b Stray Birds 7 PM, Martyrs’ Manny Torres Band, Willy Dynomite, Two Filipinos 9 PM, Martyrs’ Hip-Hop Boo Seeka 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b Desi Glow, Zack Knight, DJ Sohbash, Ace Boogie, Sabih Nawab 8 PM, Logan Square Auditorium, 18+ Phenom, Gemstones, Huey Gang 7 PM, the Promontory b Dance Jax Jones 10 PM, the Mid Orchard Lounge, Adam_DTH 10 PM, Primary Nightclub Papalu, Dusty Carter, Ali Khalili, Inphinity & Dustin Sheridan 10 PM, Spy Bar Soul Clap 10 PM, Smart Bar Thriftworks, Edamame 10 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Folk & Country Nana Grizol, Al Scorch, Toby Foster 9 PM, Empty Bottle Mipso, Tyler Childers 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Special Consensus, Chris Jones & the Night Riders 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s Loudon Wainwright III, Surviving Twin 8 PM, also Sun 4/2, 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, sold out b Blues, Gospel, and R&B Big James & the Chicago Playboys 10 PM, Rosa’s Lounge Shemekia Copeland 8 PM, SPACE b Coco Montoya 9:30 PM, Buddy Guy’s Legends Jazz James Falzone’s Allos Musica 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Shawn Maxwell’s New Tomorrow Quintet, William Kurk 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Erthe St. James 10:30 PM, California Clipper

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C O N C O R D M U S I C H A L L . C O M Mar 30

the birthday massacre

FKJ

army of the universe / ludovico technique

Cézaire, Dabeull

UPCOMING SHOWS Mar 31

03.31 BOWLING FOR SOUP

Bear Grillz

RUNAWAY KIDS / DIRECT HIT

Terravita, P0gman, Wooli

Apr 01

RIOT FEST PRESENTS

04.01 FISHBONE

DOWNTOWN BROWN / SKAPONE / DJ CHUCK WREN

“La Gran Batalla” Banda vs. Bachata

AMERICAN GOTHIC PRODUCTIONS

04.01 BACK TO THE GRAVE 04.02 PARTY APPLE PEEL

WHITE SIBERIAN TIGERS / FREQUILIBRIUM / THE METRO PROJECT / WILDE

Apr 02

Crystal Fighters Machineheart

04.05 CHELSEA GRIN

ICE NINE KILLS / GIDEON / ENTERPRISE EARTH FREELANCE WRESTLING

04.07 SNAKES? WHY’D IT HAVE TO BE SNAKES?

Apr 07

SILVER WRAPPER PRESENTS

04.08 SPAFFORD

Big Wild

MUNGION

PHANTOMS, iHF

04.14 THE EXPENDABLES

RDGLDGRN / TRIBAL THEORY

Apr 08

Apr 09

SOLD OUT

Freestyle Forever: The Diva Edition

State Champs Against The Current, With Confidence, Don Broco

SOLD OUT

Apr 13

Me First And The Gimme Gimmies

04.19 THE OBSESSED

KARMA TO BURN / FATSO JETSON

REACT PRESENTS

04.25 NO CEILINGS FEATURING BOOGIE KAIYDO / KEMBA / MICHAEL CHRISTMAS REACT & 1833 PRESENT ZERO FATIGUE PRESENTS

04.26 SWEANITA TOUR FEATURING SMINO BARI / JAY2

04.29 FRANK IERO AND THE PATIENCE DAVE HAUSE AND THE MERMAID RIOT FEST PRESENTS

05.01 BALANCE AND COMPOSURE FROM INDIAN LAKES / QUEEN OF JEANS RIOT FEST PRESENTS

05.11 SORORITY NOISE

MAT KEREKES / THE OBSESSIVES THE YMF TOUR

Apr 14

Twiddle

Midnight North

05.12 AB-SOUL 05.14 EVERY TIME I DIE

WAGE WAR / ‘68 / GOD ALONE RIOT FEST PRESENTS

05.18 THE STORY SO FAR TURNSTILE / DRUG CHURCH

Apr 15

Break Science Marvel Years

05.19 TALL HEIGHTS HENRY JAMISON 1833 PRESENTS

05.21 JMSN

ALCORDO

05.23 WAVVES

Apr 20

Betty Who VÉRITÉ

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40 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

www.bottomlounge.com 1375 w lake st 312.666.6775

continued from 39 Daniel Weatherspoon 8 PM, Elbo Room International Kantadora, Banda Devastadora, Grupo Bajo Llave, Fuerza y Poder, Brigada Nortena, Sangre Nortena 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Classical Jorge Federico Osorio Piano. 7:30 PM, Galvin Recital Hall, Northwestern University Richard Scofano & Alfredo Minetti 7:30 PM, PianoForte Studios b Fairs & Festivals Frontwoman Fest: Axons, Pixel Grip, Red’s Garden, Bow & Spear, Spaces of Disappearance, Blacker Face, Cell Phones, Radiant Devices, Tee Spirit, Pussy Foot, Sandra Antongiorgi, No Men, Sports Boyfriend, Jovan, So Pretty, Impulsive Hearts Noon, Burlington

SUNDAY2 Arnold Dreyblatt Tim Kinsella and Jeremy Lemos open. 8 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12.

Maybe the collaboration between minimalist composer Arnold Dreyblatt and trio Megafaun on 2013’s Appalachian Excitation (Northern Spy) seemed odd at first: the former came up in the fertile underground experimental NYC scene of the 1970s, while the latter keep to the hills of Durham, North Carolina, propagating an off-kilter brand of psych-touched folk. But Dreyblatt, who’s been based in Berlin since the 80s, is both an innovative and an adaptable avant-garde composer, unreluctant to build rhythms upon which to elaborate. Founded in 1979, his ever-morphing Orchestra of Excited Strings—which released the triumphant Propellers in Love in 1986 and the tick-tocking The Adding Machine in 2002, among many other records—stretches and bends the sounds of orchestral instruments through idiosyncratic tuning to create whirling rhythms and textures that could easily provide groundwork for an art-rock project. Plucked violin pirouettes alongside slow dances between double bass and piano, mimicking, for instance, the steady churning of an antique music box. Tones swell within each cyclical rhythm to the point that you become convinced a grand gesture is afoot, only to realize a minute later that the piece has subtly sidestepped rather than shifted into an entirely different beast. It’s spellbinding.

Tonight’s performance coincides with the reissue of Propellers that Superior Viaduct is dropping in early April, but be ready for anything.

—KEVIN WARWICK

Kurt Rosenwinkel See Thursday. 4, 8, and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, $25-$45.

Rock, Pop, Etc Archspire, Arkaik, Nucleus, God Dementia 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Aseeth & Bereft, Sough, Snow Burial 6:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Beyond This Point with Matthew Duvall 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+

Bury Your Dead, Counterweight, Endmember 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Crystal Fighters, Machineheart 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Party Apple Peel, White Siberian Tigers, Frequilibrium, Metro Project, Wilde 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Regrettes, Active Bird Community 7 PM, Schubas b Maggie Rogers, Jil 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, sold out b Slapshot, Fear City, Decline, Turbovamp 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club Dance Derrick Carter, Michael Serafini 10 PM, Smart Bar Folk & Country Kris Kristofferson 8 PM, City Winery, sold out b Eric Lugosch & Michael Miles 1 PM, SPACE b Deb Talan, Carsie Blanton 7 PM, SPACE b Jazz Josh Berman & Joshua Abrams, Wayfaring 9 PM, Hungry Brain Chicago Jamaican Jazz Ensemble 9 PM, Whistler F Greg Ward Quintet, Caleb Willitz Band 9 PM, Hideout Classical Trio Calico Greenstein, Bach. 3 PM, Kenwood Academy F b

MONDAY3 MusicNow: Illuminating Boulez 7 PM, Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph, $27. A Masterful composer, conductor, and thinker Pierre Boulez died in January 2016 at the age of 91 after decades of revolutionizing classical music and propelling it to radical new extremes. As a conductor he had a long, fruitful relationship with Chicago, beginning with a two-week subscription series leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1969, during which his piece Livre Pour Cordes received its U.S. premiere. Nineteen years passed before he conducted the CSO again, but beginning in 1993 Boulez began making annual visits that continued until 2010, displaying his sophisticated aesthetic with programs that balanced new work with 19th- and 20th-century staples. It’s fitting that this homage to his genius as part of the MusicNow series includes two later works, both of which used materials from earlier compositions. Derived from Répons (1981) and Messagesquisse (1976-77), Dérive 1 (1984) is a short sextet piece with an opening six-note chord that serves as a kernel for several ravishing minutes of fluttering piano, flute, clarinet, violin, vibraphone, and cello. Mémoriale (1985) expands a passage from his 1972 trio work . . .

Explosante-Fixe . . . into a haunting, tension-riddled octet marked by impressionistic flute. The solo piano work 12 Notations (1945) is a rigorous study that draws upon serialism and demands a vibrant percussive touch. The program is rounded out by two world-premiere commissions: For Two or Three Instruments, one of the last works from the brilliant Pauline Oliveros—who died last November—and Shadows of Listening, a piece by former Chicagoan Marcos Balter that serves as an homage to both Boulez and Oliveros. —PETER MARGASAK

Sleaford Mods See Pick of the Week (page 35). Negative Scanner open. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $20. 18+

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Oathbreaker o JEROEN MYLLE

Rock, Pop, Etc Bastille, Mondo Cozmo 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom Cosmonauts, Molochs, La Cosa 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Deap Vally, Crosstown 8 PM, Schubas Bridget Kearney, Fit Club 8 PM, SPACE b Lisa Prank, Dogbreth, Richard Album, Pledge Drive 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Shaun Peace, Kahrion, Delron Hubbard 9 PM, Burlington Staring Problem, Decorum, Wingtips, Split Tongue 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Kate Tempest 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Folk & Country Joshua James, Timmy the Teeth 8 PM, City Winery b Kilgubbin Brothers 7 and 8 PM, Martyrs’ Jazz De Paises Project 9:30 PM, Whistler F Extraordinary Popular Delusions 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen F Dan Thatcher’s Storytime, Stu Mindeman Trio, Drovers Unlimited Orchestra 8 PM, Elastic b Experimental Rob Mazurek 7:30 PM, Experimental Sound Studio

TUESDAY4 Rock, Pop, Etc Thao Nguyen, Yowler 7 PM, Lincoln Hall UK Subs, Scene of Irony, Top Shelf Lickers, Assassination Squad 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Hip-Hop Charlie Curtis-Beard, King of Mars, Fanaticus, Ajani Jones 7:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Folk & Country Jeff Austin Band, Donnie Biggins 8 PM, SPACE b Moon Bros. with Whitney Johnson 9 PM, Hideout Jazz Dan Blacksberg, Jeff Kimmel, Paul Giallorenzo, and Peter Maunu 9 PM, Elastic b Erwin Helfer 7:30 PM, Hungry Brain F Jeff Swanson’s Case-Fitter 9:30 PM, Whistler F Greg Ward 9 PM, Hungry Brain F

WEDNESDAY5 Oathbreaker Khemmis and Jaye Jayle open.

8:30 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $14, $12 in advance. 17+ Belgian quartet Oathbreaker have dribbled all over the metallic map in their three full-length

MUSIC

albums, the most recent of which, Rheia, came out last fall on Deathwish. There’s something for everyone in their rapid-shifting mixture of shoegaze dreaminess, black-metal vitriol, and postpunk abstraction—which means that there’s sure to be something for everyone to dislike. But like Chicago weather, give it a few minutes and it’ll pass. This is a very versatile crew, and they have an uncanny ability to make albums hang together as a whole despite the eclectic nature of their tones and textures. Vocalist Caro Tanghe is a key factor in that—skilled in both clean vocals and decidedly unclean screaming, she’s excellent at the lull-then-crush method, perfectly executed every time thanks to her band’s flexibility.

Rheia is largely plaintive and understated in its sound, making the heavy moments hit extra hard.

—MONICA KENDRICK Rock, Pop, Etc Animal Years 8 PM, SPACE b Biffy Clyro, O’Brother 6:30 PM, House of Blues Big Night In, Goddamnit, Blood People 8 PM, Burlington Ruth Carp & the Fishheads, Coins, Ex-Okays 8 PM, Township Chelsea Grin, Ice Nine Kills, Gideon, Enterprise Earth 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Matt Hires, Kyle Cox, Phillip-Michael Scales 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Jounce, More Gorgeous, Earth Program 7 PM, Subterranean Jack Klatt, Jess McIntosh 9 PM, Hideout Shawn Mullins, Rick Brantley 8 PM, City Winery b Omni, Clearance, Melkbelly 9 PM, Empty Bottle Dance Kaseal, Paul Freedom 9 PM, Whistler F Jazz Bossa Blue 6 PM, Hideout Hamid Drake & Mako Sica; Douglas McCombs, Bill MacKay, and Charles Rumback 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Greg Murphy 7 PM, the Promontory b Experimental Matt Piet, Charlie Kirchen, Bill Harris, Aaron Zarzutzki, and Peter Maunu 9 PM, Beat Kitchen F International Raquy Danziger Dum Rhythm Celebration.

8:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music F b Classical Civic Orchestra of Chicago Erina Yashima, conductor (Mozart, Stravinsky). 8 PM, Symphony Center Eunae Lee Piano. 12:15 PM, Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center F b v

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 41

FOOD & DRINK

TEMPORIS | $$$$ R 933 N. Ashland 773-697-4961 temporischicago.com

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Temporis will leave you wanting more

The West Town spot’s 11-course tasting menu is delightful—emphasis on “light.”

By JULIA THIEL Sunflower; rabbit o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

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t’s not just farm to table, it’s farm in the table,” I overheard a waitress tell a nearby party midway through my visit to Temporis. She was referring to the small raft of nine-day-old microgreens, grown hydroponically in the restaurant’s basement garden, that was placed inside a special compartment in the middle of each table at the beginning of the meal. Diners contemplate the centerpiece during the first half of the 11-course tasting menu ($110 per person) until, finally, a rabbit dish arrives and a server snips off bits of the young plants to use as a garnish.

After all that buildup, I’d expected something a little more dramatic. But Temporis, the new West Town restaurant from Les Nomades vets Evan Fullerton and Sam Plotnick, is nothing if not restrained. The tiny space—20 seats in all—is composed almost entirely of right angles in neutral tones, resembling a contemporary art museum as much as a restaurant.

Custom LED lighting is set to gradually dim at sunset so that diners won’t even notice the change. Every detail is considered so carefully that nothing stands out; a striking mosaic in the bathroom made up of rectangular pieces of mirror is probably the flashiest design element in the whole place.

The museumlike quality extends to dish presentation. The first course, silky Dungeness crab accented by briny trout roe and creamy yet sharp parsnip puree, perches on the end of a graceful oblong porcelain piece that dou-

42 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

bles as a spoon—and, viewed from the right angle, is as suggestive as a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. It’s followed by a volcano-shaped charcoal-gray platter with a tiny fish course nestled in the center. Tart yuzu “snow” cuts through the oiliness of hamachi tartare and rich, nutty dehydrated hazelnut oil, but the ginger sugar-cookie crumble is an odd addition. It was one of the few dishes of the night that didn’t leave me wanting more.

Sunflower in Five Forms—vegetal and light, with beautifully contrasting textures and complementary flavors—doubled as a botany lesson. We learned from the server that each element (glazed sunchoke, sunflower seeds and sprouts, salsify, sunchoke and salsify chips, watercress puree, endive salad with grapefruit dressing, and chamomile gelee) is part of the sunflower family.

We accompanied the first several courses with a couple of cocktails from the brief menu of classics, having opted against the wine pairings (five glasses for $95). The Corpse Reviver No. 2 delivers a hit of orange aroma to the nose that somehow manages not to overwhelm the flavor of the gin and Lillet Blanc, while in the Last Word, mezcal takes the place of gin to create a savory, slightly smoky drink. A knowledgeable waiter then helped us identify a versatile white wine—Eladio Piñeiro Frore de Carme Albariño—that would take us through the umami bomb of wild mushroom consomme with port-glazed black trumpet

mushrooms, pickled onions, shaved black truffle, and micro scallions, and on to the fifth course, rich rabbit rillettes on a socca chip balanced by the fruitiness of a pear gelee topping.

Then finally, halfway through the meal, we were allowed to try the radish, mustard, and kogane (aka Chinese cabbage) microgreens we’d been staring at for the last hour. After delivering little roasting pans containing rabbit prepared three ways, our server cut

short the young lives of a few of the greens and sprinkled them on top, explaining that their flavor would be especially intense. She was right, and the same seemed to apply to other elements of the dish: carrot puree was extra carroty, and a paper-thin strip of celery tasted like the essence of the vegetable. With the exception of a somewhat dry boneless leg, the meat—tandoori loin and roasted rack with the tiniest ribs I’ve ever seen—was J

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

C O N T E N T

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

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SNARF’S // 6 0 0 W C H I C AG O // E AT S NA R F S .C O M In 1996, “Snarf” Jimmy Seidel opened the very first Snarf’s in Boulder, Colorado. Now, the family-owned business has grown to nearly 20 restaurants in Colorado, Chicago, St. Louis and Austin, Texas. Snarf’s award-winning sandwiches are made-to-order using only the finest ingredients including premium meats and cheeses, crisp veggies, their own blend of giardiniera peppers and homemade, oven-toasted bread. They also offer fresh salads with homemade dressings, soups, vegetarian options, desserts and a full catering menu. Free delivery is available.

“Great alternative for sandwiches! Their variety is what I enjoy the most.”

— AUGUST A / YELP

MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 43

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CHICAGO COCKTAIL SUMMIT

Sun 4/2-Mon 4/3, 10 AM-5 PM, Logan Theatre, 2646 N. Milwaukee, cocktailsummit.com, $50 per day for an allaccess pass, $15 for individual sessions.

continued from 42 perfectly cooked, accented by a small pile of cranberry bean ragu over cooked mustard greens. Equally well prepared were the venison shank braised in milk stout and the roasted loin, their deep flavor highlighted by a thick, sweet pomegranate reduction artistically drizzled on the plate and a nutty sprinkle of granola.

The arrival of a blood-orange granita with candied ginger—a palate cleanser—signaled the start of the dessert courses. Still hungry, I was dismayed that the meal was nearing its end, but it turned out that the last three courses were, as a whole, the best of the evening. A warm rooibos custard was topped with candied blood-orange peel and kumquat along with blood-orange puree and lavender honey.

The citrus peel’s bitterness offset the sweetness of the honey and custard, and between the aromatics of the honey and the blood orange you could practically float away on the dessert.

The real showstopper, though, is the cheese course, served under a dome filled with applewood smoke that slowly dissipates after the cover is lifted. A seven-year-old cave-aged white cheddar is accompanied by a single roasted grape, a candied walnut, miniscule cubes of quince paste, and a gastrique made from Vander Mill cider in one of the loveliest sweet-savory contrasts I’ve had in a while.

There’s also a tiny, perfect gougere made with Iberico cheese; I could have eaten another dozen or so.

Last is foie gras ice cream, rich and savory with no hint of liveriness. Port-poached cherries and frozen huckleberries add muchneeded tartness, black sesame tuile contributes crunch, and a passion-fruit sauternes reduction and a mini cannele bring everything together. I also ordered a beautifully balanced old-fashioned that turned out to be one of the best I’ve ever had. As we sipped our drinks and reflected on the meal, my friend and I agreed that almost all the food had been memorably excellent. The service was impeccable. But we were both still hungry.

I found myself wistfully eyeing the food arriving at other tables. Those diners might not be willing to give up any of their tiny bites of rabbit, but surely they could spare a few microgreens. It didn’t seem like the type of thing one could ask, though. Instead, we went to a bar a few miles away for a nightcap of potato chips and pork rinds. v

ß @juliathiel

FOOD & DRINK Nandini Khaund of Cindy’s at last year’s inaugural Chicago Cocktail Summit o CHRISTOPHER DILTS

BOOZE

A shot of the Chicago Cocktail Summit

By JULIA THIEL

O

n April 2 and 3, the second Chicago Cocktail Summit returns to the Logan Theatre for two full days of seminars, panel discussions, and interactive workshops with local bartenders and a few guests from out of town, most notably author and historian David Wondrich. The first day is aimed at “consumers and home enthusiasts,” the second at industry professionals, though both are open to anyone who wants to pony up the $50 per day or $15 per session. The Whistler’s Billy Helmkamp, who founded the summit with event producer Erik Westra, recently talked with the Reader about the goings-on this year, including seminars on beer cocktails and how to run a beverage program.

What originally made you want to start the Chicago Cocktail Summit?

It’s something I’ve been talking about with friends in the industry for years. The consensus was always that it sounded like a great idea, but when it came time to actually make it happen, that’s where things generally came to a stop. An event like this has a lot of moving parts. But a friend of mine [Erik Westra] is an event producer. Once he and I

got to talking, we realized that if we joined forces we could make this happen.

How did you come up with the lineup for the first summit, and did you change anything this year?

What we wanted to do is reach out to people from all these bars across town, figuring out, what are they known for, what’s their niche?

Last year Danny Shapiro [of Scofflaw] did

something on gin. Charlie Schott from Parson’s did a real hands-on workshop on how to work with slushy machines. That was on our industry day. We also brought in a handful of people from out of town: Paul Clarke, Robert Simonson, Camper English. We’re taking the same approach this year.

We don’t want to repeat programming from one year to the next, so we have a handful of people making a return but covering different topics. Will Duncan [of Punch House, Dusek’s, the Promontory, Moneygun] is coming back. Last year he did a workshop on force carbonation and kegged cocktails.

This year on the industry day he’s doing one focusing on beer cocktails. Danny Shapiro, instead of leading his own seminar, he’s going to sit on a panel that explores the ins and outs of running a beverage program.

We’re staying at the same venue, which is very nontraditional for an event like this. We felt there was a certain charm that [being in a historic movie theater] lends the event.

We’re not trying to be like Tales of the Cocktail or any of those big cocktail weeks.

The ticket prices dropped dramatically for this year’s event, from $125 to $50 per day.

What was the reasoning behind that?

Last year our approach was looking at the ticketing structure and pricing for other cocktail events we’ve attended and basically offering tickets for half of that. This year we wanted to take it a step further. Our main concern is making this something that people can attend.

Is there a t asting element to the presentations?

We include a sample-size tasting component in each seminar, really as a means of illustrating a point that’s being made. A good example of that is David Wondrich’s seminar “Chicago Cocktails and Bars of Old.” There’s a little-known drink called the Cohasset Punch that was unique to Chicago, and we’ll be serving small samples of that drink to attendees. Part of what he wants to do is take you back to that time and place, and the tasting element helps do that. v

ß @juliathiel MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 45

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46 CHICAGO READER | MARCH 30, 2017

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l

l

7220-22 S YATES Boulevard, Chicago IL - 60649 - 2 Bed, 1 Bath Apt $1,225/Month, Large Newly Renovated Apartment, Accent Brick Wall New Kitchen, New Bath and New Floor, Stainless Steel Appliances, Heat & Hot Water included. Tenant Pays Cooking Gas and Electric Sec. 8 - 2 BR voucher welcome . Call or text Elliot 917-902-7605 or Alfredo 713291-6180 for showings EAST ROGERS PARK, steps to the beach at 1240 West Jarvis, five rooms, two bedrooms, two baths, dishwasher, ac, heat and gas included. Carpeted, cable, laundry facility, elevator building, parking available, and no pets. Non-smoking. Price is $1200/mo. Call 773-764-9824.

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SEC 8 WELCOME 7523 S. NORMAL - 3BR, 1st flr, tenant heated, new appliances. $890/mo + move-in fee.

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Chicago 1646 W. Garfield.

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3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 Stunning 5BR Masterpiece , Brick home, rent to own. $1200/mo + 2 mo sec dep, new kitchen, vaulted ceilings, 2 marble baths, marble fireplace w/TV, new hdwd flrs throughout, finished walk-out bsmt, new appls, concrete side drive, XL yard, quiet Morgan Park/ Beverly area, 600 minimum credit.

2 BR OTHER

Call 630-709-00780

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11740 S. LASALLE, 2nd floor of 2 flat bldng. 4BR, hdwd flrs, stove, refrigerator. Newly remod., $1200/mo. No Security Deposit.

Tenant Pays utils. Sect 8 welc.

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AFFORDABLE 2 & 3BRS FROM $575.

Newly decorated, heated/ unheated. 1 Month Free for

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qualified tenants.

CRS (312) 782-4041

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CHICAGO Clean, quiet ROOM

curity deposit. 7047 S. Aberdeen, 4BR, 2BA house, appls incl, $1300/ mo. 708-288-4510

112th & State, verify income, $450/mo. $500 move in.

Cable/wi-fi/laundry. Smokers Ok. 773-454-2893

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499 CHICAGO- 9446 S. WABASH. 7BR, 3BA House, tenant pays utils., very close to CTA train, Sect. 8 Welc, $1,700/mo., 773-221-0061

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

SPACIOUS 3BR, 1.5BA.

3

BEDROOM

TOWNHOME,

Great Neighborhood. Tier 1 School, Section 8 ok. Call 312-501-0509

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799

ENGLEWOOD 2-4BR unit apts in 2 unit gated bldgs, hdwd flrs, pets OK, no sec dep, W/D & appls incl, tenant pays own utils

SHARED APT, private bedroom, Mature adult pref, No drugs or alcohol, 7300 block of S. Vernon, Chicago, IL, 60619. 773-580-4141

CHICAGO 118TH SANGAMON ($396), Quiet, Furnished Rooms, Share Kit & Ba, Call 773-895-5454

B R I D G E P O R T 48/Halsted.

Spacious, 3BR/1BA on 2nd flo or/2 unit. Newly rehabbed. W /D & appls. incl. Central heat/ AC. $1050/mo.

Sec 8 ok.

708-362-3117 or 708-7850167 SECTION 8 WELCOME Markham- 3 BR, 2 full bath, Central air, near shopping & trans! No pets!

Deposit req’d. Nice neighborhood!

Available Now! Call 708-906-6122

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MUSIC & ARTS

legal notices

GUNS ’N ROSES rocks BonJovi, Aerosmith, M Crue, B Sabbath, AC/ DC. Fun with J Bieber, Britney S. Metallica, M Trainer, Gwen. Love, Tracy Guns, 773-481-7429.

COPY OF LEGAL NOTICE TO BE PUBLISHED - ADDITION OF PARTNER(S) Notice is hereby given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D01069875 on March 15, 2017 Under the Assumed Business Name of CIRCA CERAMICS with the business located at: 3759 N RAVENSWOOD AVE STE 134, CHICAGO, IL 60613. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/partner(s) is: NANCY PIZARRO, 3950 N LINCOLN AVE APT 2N, CHICAGO, IL 60613, USA

NOTICES

HEALTH & WELLNESS FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90 special. Russian, Polish, Ukrainain girls. Northbrook and Schaumburg locations. 10% discount for new customers. Please call 773-407-7025

UKRAINIAN MASSAGE. CALLS in/ out. Chicago and suburbs. Hotels. 1250 S Michigan Avenue. Appointments. 773-616-6969.

CERTIFIED TEACHER HIR-

ING Fair on Saturday April 1, 2017 from 9am to 1pm at CICS Longwood - 1309 W. 95th Street, Chicago.

Complete online application at www.charterschoolsusa.com or call Janice Lopez at 954.202.3500.

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MARCH 30, 2017 | CHICAGO READER 47

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EARLY WARNINGS

chicagoreader.com/early 48 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

STRAIGHT DOPE

By Cecil Adams Q : Not so many years ago, when you

went to the movies, the opening credits just concluded with “produced by,” then “directed by.” Now you’ll see three or four different company logos, two or three executive producers, a batch of regular producers, and maybe even some coexecutive producers or coproducers.

What do they all do? —CRAIG BLOUIN

A : You’re right, of course: production credits

on a typical film have ballooned in the past quarter century, as filmmaking has gotten ever pricier. Between 1994 and 2013, according to film-industry data analyst Stephen Follows, the average number of producers per movie climbed from 5.8 to 10.1—though the 2013 figure was surely skewed by Lee Daniels’ The Butler, which made movie-biz headlines with its whopping 41 producers. But who exactly are all these cooks stirring the broth we gulp down at the multiplex each summer?

Let’s start with that barrage of preliminary logos. The first belongs to the distributor who got the film into theaters. Next comes the production company, the entity that sees to it that a film gets made—or, quite possibly, a series of production companies, listed in order of size or degree of involvement in the project. Among the smaller fish may be one of the many boutique agencies formed by top actors or directors, who seek scripts that interest them and then market the projects to larger companies or studios. Following these corporate names come those of the individual producers, in all their glorious variety.

That stock mental image you have of an oldschool movie executive—colossal desk, cigar, multiple phone lines? That was supposed to be a producer, the figure who essentially runs the whole production. The producer (no modifiers, just plain “producer”) disburses money, supervises the artistic calls (which may include hiring a director and securing a script), and has ultimate control over the day-to-day administrative operations that go into making a movie. Theoretically, the producer also has final say over what we see on the screen, to many a director’s chagrin. But, again, today a film rarely has just one producer, meaning these responsibilities have to get divvied up somehow.

And the producers have someone impatiently peering over their shoulders too. The executive producer supervises their work on behalf of the folks ponying up funds for the film, which could mean a studio, a production company, independent financiers of various sorts, or some combination. Someone with this title might also be the person

SLUG SIGNORINO

FIND HUNDREDS OF

who secured the rights to a film’s underlying source material. But it’s mainly about keeping the machine running smoothly and thus protecting investor cash.

Financing a modern big-budget picture requires multiple revenue sources, though, and investors love public recognition. That, my child, is where coexecutive producers come from. They may poke their noses in periodically to see how their money’s being spent, or maybe they just want to see their names up there at the premiere. These folks are not to be confused with coproducers, who do take an active role in the production.

In fact, while many of these titles are doled out at the whim of the film’s powers that be, it’s the Writers Guild of America that makes the call about who can be billed as coproducer. And after struggling for years to set criteria for earning a producer credit, in 2012 the Producers Guild of America convinced most major industry players to accept the idea of a “producer’s mark.” Industry professionals who want the lower-case letters “p.g.a.” after their name in the credits must in fact handle production duties as spelled out by the guild: they have to play a role in script selection and casting, e.g., and spend significant time on set.

The big push to establish this mark began after Shakespeare in Love won Best Picture in 1995 and five whole people showed up onstage to collect their trophies—a skeleton crew by today’s standards. You don’t need the PGA’s nod to produce a film; the carrot the guild dangles in front of producers and studios is that you can’t qualify for the major awards, including the Best Picture Oscar, without its stamp of approval. Last October, studio head Dana Brunetti complained on Facebook that he’d been denied a producer’s mark for his role in making the sequel to Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker.

Which might smart, but let’s face it: he wasn’t exactly bound for the Dolby Theatre stage anyway. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

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SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

A second chance for someone who lied about his HIV status?

Dan weighs in. Plus: tips for a sexually frustrated young wife

Q : Gay guy here. Met a

guy online. He came over.

We had incredible sex and then a great conversation lasting several hours. But— and you knew there was one coming—he told me that he lied about his HIV status. (I asked him before meeting him, like I do with anyone.)

He is undetectable, but he told me initially he was “HIV/ STD negative.” I got very upset—more from the lie than his status. (I know that undetectable is practically the same as negative.) I really like him, but that was a big lie. Should I swear him off for it? Or is the fact he did tell me and our connection enough to give him a second chance? I hadn’t been that happy up till the reveal in, well, maybe ever. But I want to be wise. —DID ASK, DIDN’T TELL

A : Why would he lie? To

avoid rejection. Obviously.

Guys often refuse to hook up with guys who are honest about being HIV-positive even though a positive guy with an undetectable viral load is less of a risk—at least where HIV transmission is concerned—than a guy who believes himself to be negative because he was the last time he got tested or because he doesn’t think he could ever get infected and so has never been tested.

Sometimes positive guys get sick of being punished for being honest, and so they lie—and it’s particularly tempting to lie to someone you don’t expect to see again, i.e., a quick hookup.

HIV-positive people shouldn’t lie to their sex partners.

Obviously. People should be honest, informed consent is consent, and lying about your HIV status can be risky for people with HIV. Thanks to stupid laws passed by ill-informed idiots, failing to

inform a sex partner you’re HIV-positive is a crime in many areas. These disclosure laws incentivize not knowing your status—you can’t be punished for not disclosing what you don’t know—putting everyone at higher risk.

Why would he tell the truth? It’s possible he lied to you about his status—a lie he regarded as harmless thanks to his undetectable viral load—because he assumed this would be a hookup and nothing more. He wasn’t going to infect you and he wasn’t going to see you again.

But after you two hit it off, DADT, he decided to tell you the truth right away instead of waiting weeks or months.

The connection you describe is hard to find—this could be the start of something great—and the lie he told was big, yes, but understandable. I think he deserves credit for coming clean right away—and a second chance.

Q : I want to fuck my 31-year-

old husband more often than he wants to fuck me, his 27-year-old wife. We’ve been married for three years and together for four. My question is twofold. One, how do I gracefully accept his “no”? We have sex usually two times a week—I wish it was more like five—which means he turns me down two or three times a week. I want to be better at hearing “no” from him without getting upset. The more I freak out, the less likely he is to fuck me the next time I ask. It’s a bad cycle. Two, he watches porn every day. I love porn and I watch a lot of it myself.

But it doesn’t replace sex for me. Is there a conversation to be had about this?

Should I just keep my mouth shut? I love him but I am so frustrated. —SINCERELY PERPLEXED OVER UNWANTED SEXUAL ENERGY

REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN.

A : You want to have sex

five times a week, SPOUSE, you watch a lot of porn, and porn doesn’t replace sex for you. Isn’t it possible that it works the same way for your husband? He wants to have sex twice a week, he watches a lot of porn, porn doesn’t replace sex for him.

(Don’t assume your husband is having a wank every time he visits a porn site—lots of people like to take a quick peek at porn sites, get a little erotic charge, and then get on with whatever they’re doing.)

That said, SPOUSE, I can certainly understand why you’re frustrated—you’re having a lot less sex than you’d like and you’re constantly feeling rejected—but blowing up about porn isn’t going to help anything. So what do you do with your feelings of frustration? Regarding frequency, SPOUSE, you directly address the issue with your husband and propose a low-stakes, low-pressure compromise. Tell him you’d like to aim for three times a week, but put mutual masturbation on the table for that third time and/or the husband giving you a masturbatory assist. He may not be up for PIV more than twice a week, but he may be up for crawling into bed with you and either having a wank with you or holding you and talking porny while you have a wank.

As for your frustration around always initiating, well, sometimes we have to accept the shit we cannot change.

As the person with the higher libido in your relationship, SPOUSE, you may be stuck being the initiator. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. ß @fakedansavage

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b Windy City Smokeout with Jake Owen, Kip Moore, Lee Brice, Randy Rogers Band, and more 7/14-16, 560 W. Grand

UPDATED Wanda Jackson 5/17, 8 PM, City Winery, rescheduled from 4/1 b Modern English 4/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, canceled Okkervil River 7/21, 7 and 10 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, late show added b

UPCOMING Pissed Jeans o EBRU YILDIZ

NEW

Apocalyptica 9/16, 7:30 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM, 18+ Arbouretum, Brokeback 5/27, 9 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 3/31, noon Ruth B 5/17, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM b Bag Raiders 6/17, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM b Behexen 6/4, 8:30 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Big Freedia 5/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM Birthday Massacre, Army of the Universe 5/20, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 3/31, noon, 17+ Black Lips 5/13-14, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM Bodeans 5/20, 6 and 10 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM b Marc Broussard 6/28, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM b Reeve Carney 5/24, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM b Kasey Chambers 6/22, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM, 17+ Choking Victim 5/16, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Thu 3/30, noon b Cold Waves VI with Front 242, KMFDM, Stabbing Westward, Cold Cave, OHGR, Severed Heads, Pankow, and more 9/29-10/1, 6:30 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM, 18+ Copyrights 6/23, 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Dirty Dozen Brass Band 6/22, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/30, noon b

Disaster Strikes 6/3, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Adam Ezra Group 7/12, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 3/31, noon, 18+ Michael Franti & Spearhead 8/11, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Tue 4/4, noon, 18+ Hail the Sun 6/14, 6:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM, 17+ Aldous Harding 6/14, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Indigenous 6/14, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM b Gavin James 5/9, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b Jeff the Brotherhood 7/29, 10 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM, 17+ Juiceboxxx 6/22, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM Kem 5/26, 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino, Hammond, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM Marcus King Band 6/27, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM b Lizzo 6/9, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM, 18+ Matchbox Twenty, Counting Crows 9/17, 6:45 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 3/31, noon Metal Threat Fest: Profanatica, Antichrist, Demona, Perversion, Abysmal Lord, and more 7/14-15, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Mustard Plug, Mephiskapheles 6/9, 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Phoenix, Lemon Twigs 6/5, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM b Pissed Jeans, Stnnng 4/28, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM Pomo 5/16, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 3/31, noon

50 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

Raleigh Ritchie 5/4, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 3/31, noon, 18+ Rodrigo y Gabriela 6/3-4, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM, 18+ Shining 5/11, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Skepta 4/24, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Slightly Stoopid 7/9, 5:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Thu 3/30, 10 AM Slim Cessna’s Auto Club 7/31, 9 PM, Subterranean Slow Dancer 6/15, 9 PM, Hideout, on sale Fri 3/31, noon, and 6/16, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM b Trey Songz 5/4, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM, 17+ Southern Avenue 6/22, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Taste of Randolph Street with Dawes, Eden, Emancipator Ensemble, Here Come the Mummies, and more 6/16-18, Randolph and Halsted Toad the Wet Sprocket, Beta Play 7/14, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM, 18+ Tower of Power 8/11-12, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/30, noon b V103 Summer Block Party with Jill Scott, Bell Biv Devoe, SWV, Kelly Rowland, and more 7/22, 6 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM Vancouver Sleep Clinic 5/19, 8:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Warped Tour with Attila, CKY, Futuristic, Hawthorne Heights, I Prevail, Jule Vera, and more 7/22, 11 AM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park b Ann Wilson 6/16, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 3/31, 10 AM, 17+

Anjunabeats 4/29, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Anvil, Night Demon 4/8, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ At the Drive-In, Le Butcherettes 6/18, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Belle & Sebastian, Julien Baker 8/16, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Black Angels, A Place to Bury Strangers 5/11, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 18+ Bongripper, Harm’s Way 5/26, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Cactus Blossoms 5/31, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Chairlift 4/14, 8 PM, Park West Chameleons Vox 9/14, 8:30 PM, 1st Ward, 18+ Coheed & Cambria, Dear Hunter 5/19, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Depeche Mode 8/30, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Descendents 10/7, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Desiigner 5/2, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Evergrey 5/26, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Every Time I Die, Wage War 5/14, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge b Flaming Lips 4/17, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Future 6/2, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Diamanda Galas 4/17, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Gorguts, Defeated Sanity 6/7, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Great Lake Swimmers 4/22, 9 PM, Hideout Sam Hunt, Maren Morris 7/8, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Ian Hunter & the Rant Band 5/13, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Iron Maiden, Ghost 6/15, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Ampitheatre, Tinley Park b The Jesus and Mary Chain 5/10, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Jethro Tull 8/19, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

F

Never miss a show again.

Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Tim Kasher 6/8, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ King Crimson 6/28, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre David Lindley 4/11, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Loudness 4/19, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ The Maine, Mowgli’s 5/6, 7 PM, House of Blues b 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 New Bomb Turks 4/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Obsessed 4/19, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Of Montreal 4/22, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Pixies, Mitski 10/8, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Protomartyr, Melkbelly 6/3, 10 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Record Company 5/24, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ San Fermin, Low Furs 4/12, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Ed Sheeran 9/15, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Slowdive 5/3, 8 PM, the Vic Smino, Monte Booker, Jay2, Bari 4/26, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Taake 6/1, 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Paul Thorn Band 5/7, 8 PM, City Winery b Tool 6/8, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Ugly God 5/20, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall b Roger Waters 7/22, 8 PM, United Center Sara Watkins 5/30, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b The Weeknd 5/23, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont White Reaper 5/5, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Betty Who, Verite 4/20, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Wild Belle 5/12, 7 PM, Metro b The Wind & the Wave 5/26, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Windhand, Satan’s Satyrs 5/21, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Wrekmeister Harmonies 5/8, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Ray Wylie Hubbard 5/6, 8 PM, City Winery b The XX 5/1, 6:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom Zakk Sabbath, Beastmaker 6/2, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Dweezil Zappa 7/7, 8 PM, City Winery b Zombies 4/13-14, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene GOSSIP WOLF HAS been impatiently waiting for the release of the full-length Wax Trax! Records documentary since first hearing in 2015 that it was in the works. On Saturday, April 1, the Vic presents two screenings of a rough cut of the flick—these days bearing the title Industrial Accident: The Story of Wax Trax!

Records. Each screening will be followed by a Q&A with a different panel of label luminaries, including Dead Kennedys front man Jello Biafra, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult singer Groovie Mann, Paul Barker of Lead Into Gold, and Barker’s Ministry and Revolting Cocks bandmate Chris Connelly. Plus the previous Friday night, three gothy clubs host DJ nights featuring Wax Trax! associates: Bauhaus and Love & Rockets bassist David J at Late Bar, Richard 23 and Patrick Codenys of Front 242 at Berlin, and Biafra at Liar’s Club.

If you’ve got a thing for lithe dream-pop that’s heavy on easygoing hooks, then this wolf suggests a listen to Watch Me Overcomplicate This, the debut EP by Fauvely, aka the solo project of singer-guitarist Sophie Leigh Nagelberg (she usually drops her last name). Midwest Action released the EP on cassette, and Fauvely celebrates its arrival with a show at the Empty Bottle on Thursday, March 30.

Prolific rapper Alex Wiley calls Los Angeles home these days, but he’s been good about swinging back through Chicago for a visit and a show. On Friday, March 31, he returns to his native Hyde Park to headline the Promontory in support of Village Party III: Stoner Symphony, which he self-released in January. The album is chock-full of guests, many from the local scene—among them love evangelist Mick Jenkins, Saba’s new right-hand man, Phoelix, and Wiley’s pals Kembe X and Jean Deaux from defunct collective the Village. Friday’s six-act bill includes Chicago up-and-comers Qari, Mulatto, and UG Vavy. Tickets are $12, or $25 with admission to a meet and greet; the show kicks off at 8 PM. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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BRIAN REGAN FRIDAY, APRIL 7

ALI WONG

SATURDAY, APRIL 8 - 7PM & 10PM

THE LAST WALTZ 40 TOUR FEATURING WARREN HAYNES, DR. JOHN, JAMEY JOHNSON AND MANY MORE! SUNDAY, APRIL 9

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NORAH JONES MAY 20 & 21

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MARCH 30, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 51

52 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 30, 2017

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