Chicago Reader: print issue of March 31, 2016 (Volume 45, 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 1 , 2 0 1 6

Forget the Hancock: The overlooked jewels of Chicago’s skyline have one man in common. By TAL ROSENBERG 12 POLITICS Mayor Rahm wants to turn Lathrop Homes into his next TIF slush fund. 9 FOOD & DRINK Iliana Regan makes more magic at Lakeview’s Bunny, the Micro Bakery. 31

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2 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

THIS WEEK

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE SCRUGGS FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN SENIOR WRITERS STEVE BOGIRA, MICHAEL MINER, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI EDITORIAL ASSISTANT CASSIDY RYAN CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, DERRICK CLIFTON, MATT DE LA PEÑA, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, DMITRY SAMAROV, KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI, ZAC THOMPSON, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS CHRIS RIHA, SOPHIA TU

IN THIS ISSUE 4 Agenda Fooling Buddha, Andy Kindler, “Chernobyl 30 Years Later,” the film Krisha, and more recommendations

CITY LIFE

8 Street View Sex Kiki host Coriama Couture wears liberated femininity on her sleeve.

8 Chicagoans Comedian Peter Alexander Bresnan documents his stand-up struggles in the podcast Tell Me I’m Funny.

9 Joravsky | Politics Mayor Rahm wants to turn Lathrop Homes into his next TIF slush fund.

10 Transportation Residents of struggling communities may not see biking as a priority, but black advocates say it can be part of the solution.

20

MUSIC ARTS & CULTURE

17 Theater Writers Theatre christens a new space with Tom Stoppard’s giddily smart Arcadia.

17 Comedy Baltimore trio Wham City present their absurdist multimedia live show.

18 Visual Art Intuit highlights the self-portraits Lee Godie took at bus stations throughout the city.

19 Theater Why read Moby-Dick when you can go see the puppet play at the MCA? 20 Movies With Lo and Behold, Werner Herzog ponders the heaven and hell of digital technology.

21 Movies The melting pot heats up in this year’s Asian American Showcase.

23 In Rotation Current musical obsessions of the Reader’s Peter Margasak, the Pillowhammer’s Jim Dorling, and the Father Costume’s Sam Wagster 23 Gossip Wolf GlitterGuts celebrate Wesley Willis at Beauty Bar, and more music news 25 Shows of note Lucinda Williams, Sheer Mag, Hide, Mamiffer, Thao & the Get Down Stay Down, Eartheater, and more 26 The Secret History of Chicago Music Blues guitarist Andrew Brown died just as his fame began to catch up with his importance.

FOOD & DRINK

31 Review: Bunny, the Micro Bakery Iliana Regan makes more magic at a petite Lakeview patisserie.

32 Cocktail Challenge: Seaweed Roger Landes of Mfk pairs the marine algae with bourbon.

CLASSIFIEDS

33 Jobs 33 Apartments & Spaces 35 Marketplace 36 Straight Dope What causes the condition known as sanpaku eyes?

37 Savage Love Semen from a spoon, an effluence named for Donald Trump, and more 38 Early Warnings Rakim, Rocket From the Crypt, Eagles of Death Metal, and more shows you should know about in the weeks to come

31

FEATURES

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ON THE COVER: PHOTO OF 1150 N. LAKE SHORE DRIVE BY DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE SCRUGGS.

ARCHITECTURE

John Macsai’s architecture by accident

THEATER

How Silk Road Rising’s Mosque Alert became alarmingly current

The overlooked jewels of Chicago’s skyline have one man in common.

After five years of development, Jamil Khoury’s play about xenophobia opens in an ever-more-xenophobic political moment.

BY TAL ROSENBERG 12

BY DEANNA ISAACS 16 MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 3

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David Kovac in Fooling Buddha ! D. RICE

THEATER

delightful puppet interludes. —MAX MALLER Through 4/10: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 6:30 PM, Cornservatory, 4210 N. Lincoln, 773-650-1331, twentypercentchicago.com, $20.

Cocksucker Jeff Blim’s off-color musical comedy loosely parodies Richard Kelly’s 2009 thriller The Box, only instead of killing strangers in exchange for supernatural good fortune, the characters here need to . . . well, you know. Two liberal straight guys, played

by Blim and Jon Matteson, get a visit from a mysterious guest out to prove that “everyone has a price” (though for some in the audience, we’re told, it’s much lower than for others). What starts out as a fairly benign gay-panic joke evolves into remarkably straight-faced Annoyance-level absurdity as the bros grapple with hyperbolic sexual identity crises. Both Blim’s tunes and the vocal abilities of the cast are hit-and-miss, but Eric Schinzer’s wry Frank Langella send-up had me giggling in the back of the house just about every second he’s onstage. —DAN JAKES Through 4/30: Sat 8 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance. com, $20, $15 students.

The Edge of Our Bodies The taste for “ironic” art that winkingly/mockingly adopts the form and content of other works or genres has become widespread. Take Adam Rapp’s The Edge of Our Bodies at TUTA (the Utopian Theatre Asylum). The roughly 75-minute one-act is a lengthy “dear diary” monologue by Bernie, a Lolita-like 16-year-old girl (Carolyn Molloy). Bernie addresses us in the coat and plaid green miniskirt of her boarding school. She explains that she is pregnant and, bouncing off the walls, narrates her trip to New York to give her boyfriend the news and a subsequent pickup involving a much older man at a bar. Everything about this, including its tone, is meant to feel vaguely repulsive. But all the intended irony in the world will not save Edge from being the very thing that it hopes to demean and satirize: goopy, melodramatic kitsch about an ultrasexualized teenager. —MAX MALLER Through 4/17: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun3 PM, TUTA Theatre, 4670 N. Manor, 312-945-6398, tutato.com, $27.

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater

Cry Baby Meets Audrey Hepburn The adjectives “charming” and “confessional” may seem like an odd pairing, but somehow they both apply to Cry Baby Meets Audrey Hepburn at the Cornservatory. As narrator and protagonist Olya (Shaina Schrooten) recounts her Russian-Jewish upbringing, we see the birth of an inferiority complex. She’s never good enough for her merciless Russian immigrant mother, Lena (Kristina Guzikova). She keeps falling in and out of love at the wrong times with various men. In a very real-seeming meeting at the so-called “University of Greatness” (a nice whimsical touch), her idealism withers before a bloodless sociology professor—played by Matthew Lunt, who is fabulous and ironic in a range of clueless male roles. A victim of consumer culture’s misleading fairy tales about love and happiness, Olya is permanently infantilized in a world that moves too fast around her. Special mention must go to Archer Curry for designing some

4 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

Fooling Buddha Milwaukee-born magician and monologist David Kovac weaves together autobiography and prestidigitation in this sweet, unpretentious coming-of-age story. The child of hippie parents who converted to Buddhism, Kovac amuses us with his tales of being a double outsider—a non-Christian nerd boy in love with doing magic—growing up in the 1970s.

Kovac is a likable and engaging storyteller, and his magic is impressive (and always supports the narrative). The show has one, very midwestern flaw, however: Kovac holds back emotionally, never allowing himself to appear too vulnerable, and avoids discussing anything that might make anyone—himself or others— uncomfortable, with the result that while often amused and even delighted by his work, we’re never deeply moved. Still, the show’s a nice evening of theater and magic. —JACK HELBIG Through 4/24:

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Thu 3 PM, Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Sat 4/16 and 4/23, 4 PM, First Folio Theatre, Mayslake Peabody Estate, 31st and Rt. 83, Oak Brook, firstfolio.org, $29-$39, $25-$35 students and seniors.

and sidestep. It’s good fun. —SUZANNE SCANLON Open run: Sun 2 PM, Mon 8 PM, Neo-Futurarium, 5153 N. Ashland, 773-275-5255, barrelofmonkeys.org, $12, $6 kids.

Matilda: The Musical This musical version of Roald Dahl’s dark children’s tale (book by Dennis Kelly, music and lyrics by Tim Minchin) is packed with spectacle: wall-to-wall singing and dancing, acrobatics and loud music, colorful costumes, clever set pieces, cartoonishly over-the-top acting. That would be great if the show were the length of a music video rather than a production that’s two and a half hours long. After a while, I found myself yourself yearning for some of the other things I go to theater for—like witty, well-delivered dialogue, nuanced character development, audible lyrics, and a story that moves me, or at least makes sense. Audiences familiar with Dahl’s popular 1988 book (or the 1996 movie) may be less bothered by the show’s awkward storytelling—they’ll know the plot already. But for the uninitiated, it’s noisy, baffling, and very, very long. —JACK HELBIG Through 4/10: Wed 2 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Oriental Theatre, 24 W. Randolph, 800-775-2000, broadwayinchicago.com, $40-$270.

35 MM: A Musical Exhibition Ryan Scott Oliver based each of the 21 tuneful, insubstantial numbers in this 2012 song cycle on a Matthew Murphy photograph. Those marginally interesting images, projected upstage in Circle Theatre’s intimate production, have little to do with one another, making for an evening of songs about, um, stuff: a happy couple, a lousy date, an abused wife, a vengeful prom queen. Director Cameron Turner attempts to unify the material by staging almost every number as if it were the show’s emotional climax, all scrunchy-faced exuberance or tearyeyed anguish. The five cast members have fine voices, and musical director Ryan Brewster’s six-piece band delivers the goods. But incessant emoting turns middling lyrics into insupportable melodrama and by the time it’s over, it all feels a bit silly. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 4/10: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Flat Iron Arts Building, 1579 N. Milwaukee, 312-335-3000, flatironartists.org, $35.

That’s Weird, Grandma: The Musical What’s genius in That’s Weird Grandma: The Musical is how Barrel of Monkeys takes the various stories written by CPS students and creates silly, campy, yet often profound theater without altering or expanding much at all. It reveals what we already know: children have easy access to the weird, unexpected, and revelatory—as in Untitled, a playlet that links three basketball players wearing hats to a guest appearance by Michael Jordan to a dog having puppies in the basement.

Ionesco has nothing on this theater of the absurd, and the musical format allows for drama even where the story is simple, as in a moving ballad in praise of and longing for “That Waterpark.”

Though some members of the large cast are clearly more vocally skilled than others, everyone knows how to belt, emote,

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DANCE Flash A theater-dance hybrid R choreographed and performed

by Rennie Harris and Michael Sakamoto.

Thu 3/31-Sat 4/1: 7:30 PM, Dance Center of Columbia College, 1306 S. Michigan, 312-369-6600, colum.edu/dance_center, $30, $24 seniors.

Imagine the Celebration The Mark Morris Dance Group and Music Ensemble perform Dido and Aeneas in celebration of the Harris Theater’s expansion. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres will be served before the performance, which is followed by an afterparty. Tue 4/5, 8 PM, Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777, harristheaterchicago.org, $42-$250.

Spring Series Giordano Dance R Chicago premieres its spring

Rennie Harris and Michael Sakomoto in Flash ! JANELLE TRAYLOR

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of March 31

series, choreographed by the award-winning Brock Clawson. Fri 4/1-Sat 4/2, 7:30 PM, Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777, harristheaterchicago.org, $15-$75.

COMEDY The Five Shades of Cool Issue R EbonyEssenceJet bring back their sketch revue examining identity

and acceptance. Through 4/2: Sat 9 PM, Second City, 1616 N. Wells, 312-337-3992, secondcity.com, $13.

Andy Kindler The comedian R known for his roles on Maron and Bob’s Burgers performs stand-up.

Tue 4/5, 8 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago, Evanston, 847-492-8860, evanstonspace. com, $12-$18.

United We Fall A sketch show directed by Charna Halpern about navigating the confusing virtual world of millennials. 3/30-4/27: Wed 8:30 PM, iO Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov.com/chicago, $12.

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Wham City Comedy Baltimore-based comedy group known for their bizarre viral videos and performances. See page 17 for more. Sat 4/2, 7 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433, hideoutchicago.com, $8.

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VISUAL ARTS Spudnik Press “Spatial Collage,” artist Julia Arredondo created “Spatial Collage: Getting Wacky Wit It” as an experiment in self-expression through the collage medium. The opening reception features a gallery talk with Arredondo beginning at 6 PM. Fri 4/1, 6 PM. Mon, Thu 6:30-11 PM, Sat 12:30-5 PM. 1821 W. Hubbard, suite 308, 312-532-0304, spudnikpress.com.

Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art “Chernobyl 30 Years Later,” multiple exhibits by local and international artists addressing the aftermath of the nuclear power plant disaster. Opening reception on Fri 4/1 at 6 PM. 4/1-5/29. Wed-Sun noon-4 PM. 2320 W. Chicago, 773-2275522, uima-chicago.org, $5 suggested donation.

Children First, 5233 N. Clark, 773-7699299, womenandchildrenfirst.com.

Alison Stewart The author and journalist presents her latest book, Junk: Digging Through America’s Love Affair With Stuff. Sat 4/2, 6 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-2932665, bookcellarinc.com.

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MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/ movies Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice Not as bad as Bush v. Gore, but close.

Director Zack Snyder, having revived the Superman franchise with Man of Steel (2013), tosses in the Caped Crusader (Ben Affleck), rehashes his origin story yet again (his parents being gunned down in Gotham, his mother’s pearls scattering), and sets him up as Superman’s antagonist. Affleck makes a pretty good Batman (he’s got great teeth), though his insight into the character consists mainly of having him hit the streets in a one-day stubble and a crabby mood. Jesse Eisenberg contributes arch line readings as Lex Luthor, and Jeremy Irons adds the requisite touch of fake class as Alfred the butler. This is being billed as the second installment in a DC Comics “extended universe” fran-

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charms the actress playing his ex-wife (Carmen Ejogo of Selma). But when Baker loses his front teeth in a brawl with drug dealers, the injury destroys his embouchure and threatens to ruin his career. Hawke channels Baker’s real-life eccentricities, and Ejogo brings warmth and levity to her role. Long takes, naturalistic dialogue, and a loose narrative structure make for a film that feels as improvised and authentic as its music.

—ADAM MORGAN R, 97 min. Landmark’s Century Centre

6am to 3pm *Closed Early for the Day: 5/1, 7/10 & 9/4.

Closed for the Day: 6/12

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Open Sats. & Suns. 8am to 4pm 4/17 Vinyl Spectacular 847-524-9590 or wolffs.com

Everybody Wants Some!! After the critically acclaimed Boyhood, Richard Linklater takes a giant step backward, to the party-hearty laughs of his early cult favorite Dazed and Confused (1993).

The teenage hero (Blake Jenner) arrives at Southeast Texas College in 1980 on a baseball scholarship and takes up residence in a campus house with his new teammates. Linklater follows their sexual and alcohol-related adventures during the three-day weekend before classes start—like so many of his movies, this one is ruled by the clock—and the result is similar to his Before Sunrise

Vertical Gallery “Three-Year Anniversary,” the street-art gallery celebrates its three-year anniversary with a trinity of art duos, TATIC, Jana & JS, and Expanded Eye. Opening reception on Sat 4/2 at 6 PM. 4/2-4/30. 1016 N. Western, verticalgallery.com.

Andy Kindler ! SUSAN MALJAN/OMNIPOP

LIT

Laugh Out Loud Improv Chicago’s bustling improv scene got a new neighbor this week when Laugh Out Loud, a suburban comedy staple, opened a charming double-storefront space in North Center. Short, self-described Whose Line Is It Anyway?-style games form the basis both a family-friendly early show and a later “anything goes” set; at the children’s show I attended, an able cast of company members and alumni kept the attention of young kids with the sort of quick, silly punch lines the games’ premises begged for. I’d be curious to see whether these rudimentary setups—rap battles, atypical sports commentary, gibberish guessing games, audience members’ day reenactments— mature along with the material later in the night. —DAN JAKES Open run: FriSat 7:30 and 9:30 PM, Laugh Out Loud, 3851 N. Lincoln, 773-857-6000, laughoutloudtheater.com, $20, $14 kids.

Lisa Beazley The author reads from and discusses her debut novel Keep Me Posted. Wed 4/6, 7:30 PM, Women &

Scantron Improv inspired by dysfunctional relationships. Ongoing: Thu 10 PM, Crowd Theater, 3935 N. Broadway, thecrowdtheater.com, $5.

Krisha chise, with two more sequels to follow and also spin-off features for Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and the Flash (all of whom appear here). When the DC Universe goes to war with the Marvel Universe, we’ll know the end times have arrived. With Amy Adams and Diane Lane. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 151 min. City North 14, Navy Pier IMAX, 600 N. Michigan, Webster Place

Alison Stewart ! KAREN CUNNINGHAM

Born to Be Blue Ethan Hawke delivers the performance of his career in Robert Budreau’s melancholy but fascinating biopic about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker.

Sprung from an Italian prison in the 1960s by a Hollywood filmmaker, Baker stars in a movie-within-the-movie that’s based on his own past as a womanizer and heroin addict, and in the process he

but with nine arrogant jocks instead of an attractive, introspective couple. I kept pulling away from the whole thing, admiring as always Linklater’s skilled direction of the ongoing bull session but concluding soon enough that bull was all the movie had to offer. The winning cast includes Zoey Deutch, Glen Powell, Tyler Hoechlin, and Ryan Guzman. —J.R. JONES R, 116 min. Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21 I Saw the Light Casting a Brit as Hank Williams may seem like the ultimate bad call, and as the legendary country singer, Tom Hiddleston doesn’t speak like any Alabamian I’ve ever met. But the real problem with this musical biopic is Marc Abraham’s script, which offers so little insight into its central character !

MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 5

AGENDA of Documentary Gems.” For Dmitry Samarov’s review of Werner Herzog’s Lo and Behold, also screening in the series, see page 20; for a full schedule visit musicboxtheatre.com.

Fri 4/1, 7 PM. Music Box

Miss Sharon Jones!

!B that he comes across as nothing but an ornery cuss. Elizabeth Olsen runs with the more vividly written role of Audrey Sheppard, Williams’s blowsy wife, who helped keep him together for eight years but ultimately walked out on him, fed up with his philandering and substance abuse. Movies about musicians inevitably boil down to one question: what interior drama might have generated those wondrous sounds? Hiddleston invests his thinly conceived character with a gritty magnetism, and his singing passes muster, but the man portrayed here seems incapable of feeling personally the gut-bucket heartache he pours out in his own songs. Abraham directed; with Bradley Whitford and Cherry Jones. —J.R. JONES R, 123 min.

Landmark’s Century Centre Krisha This startling debut R feature by writer-director Trey Edward Shults finds horror

CHICAGO FLAGSHIP STORES 5 6 E A S T WA LT O N S T R E E T 3 1 2 - 2 0 2 -7 9 0 0

in the mundane and despair in the bosom of a loving family. The title character (Krisha Fairchild), an older woman whose lapdog is her only friend, arrives at her sister’s house to celebrate Thanksgiving with their extended clan, and the supremely awkward embrace she shares with her estranged college-age son (Shults) communicates a history of savage resentments. Shults permits an avant-garde score of blips and bleeps to dominate the soundtrack during the routine family activities— cooking, chatting, word games, horseplay—and his bold foregrounding of the music at certain points in the action may strike you as either expressive or excessive.

I’m inclined toward the latter, but only because the story is so surely unfolded, and its denouement so brutally heartbreaking, that the movie would have connected with no music at all. —J.R. JONES R, 82 min. 600 N. Michigan Midnight Special Riffing on John Carpenter’s Starman (1984), writer-director Jeff Nichols has crafted a sci-fi chase film whose gravely

6 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

naturalistic style adds to its sense of portent. A father (Michael Shannon) has kidnapped his young son (Jaeden Lieberher) from an apocalyptic Christian sect that wants to exploit the boy’s telekinetic powers; tearing across the interstate, father and son are pursued by two thugs answering to the sect’s ruthless spiritual leader (Sam Shepard) and by an NSA brainiac (Adam Driver) who wants to study the boy. Nichols plunges right into the story, which is delectably murky at first, but this is one of those movies that seems more pedestrian the more you figure out what’s going on. Given the diminishing pace of the last hour, I couldn’t help but wonder why Nichols didn’t do more with the religious angle, though a head-tilting celestial finale adds some last-minute grandeur. With Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, and Bill Camp. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 102 min. Landmark’s Century Centre Miss Sharon Jones! Put your R hands together for Miss Sharon Jones, the New York soul diva

who fronts the 60s revivalists the Dap-Kings and whose battle with Stage II pancreatic cancer is chronicled in this spirited documentary by veteran filmmaker Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, U.S.A.).

As the singer’s manager reveals, Jones wants to keep her musical career and her cancer treatment separate, but Kopple is under no such obligation, and as she cuts between chilly scenes of Jones undergoing chemotherapy in late 2013 and hard-grooving concert footage from a few years earlier, you realize that the grit the singer pumps into her songs is the same thing that’s getting her through her medical ordeal. The movie paints a lovely portrait of the people who became Jones’s support group, from the young, white hipsters in her band to an old friend in South Carolina who took her in during her treatment. But the life force of the film is the music, a periodic challenge to keep on keeping on.

—J.R. JONES 95 min. Screens as part of the series “Doc10: A Festival

Next Time I’ll Aim for the Heart Though not a horror film in the gory or jumpy sense, this 2014 portrait of a serial killer is chilling in its intimacy. Based on the true story of a murderer who terrorized northern France in the late 1970s, shooting women or mowing them down in stolen cars and then sending derisive letters to the gendarmerie, the film follows one timorous officer (Guillaume Canet) who begins to unravel as the case unfolds. Director Cédric Anger uses contrast brilliantly—in one shot the camera pulls out from a poster of a half-naked woman to a rotten, half-eaten banana with a bullet lodged inside—and the choral passages of Grégoire Hetze’s symphonic score summon an eerie religiosity, particularly when paired with the killer’s self-flagellation. However, the film is more suggestive than illuminating; Anger magnifies the killer’s quotidian life but leaves his motive and backstory frustratingly blank. In French with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 111 min.

Fri 4/1, 7 and 9 PM; Sat 4/2, 5, 7, and 9 PM; Sun 4/3, 5 and 7 PM; and Mon–Thu 4/4–4/7, 7 and 9 PM. Facets Cinematheque Tyrus: The Tyrus Wong Story Hollywood lore and insights into Asian-American life during the FDR years distinguish this low-key documentary portrait of Tyrus Wong, a Chinese-American artist best known for his work at the Walt Disney Studios. Born in 1910, Wong emigrated to the U.S. with his father, grew up in the Chinatown district of Los Angeles, and managed to crash the white boys’ club at Disney in the late 30s. His soft, suggestive background paintings, inspired by the ethereal landscapes of the Song dynasty, helped conjure the childlike emotions that power the classic Bambi (1942).

Consulting various film scholars, director Pamela Tom makes an interesting case for Wong as an overlooked auteur of sorts, whose later storyboard illustrations set the tone for films ranging from Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) to Rebel Without a Cause (1955) to The Wild Bunch (1969). Wong, now well into his second century, offers candid reminiscences of the movie colony’s casual racism, providing an outsider’s perspective on a business that shunned Asians and thrived on stereotypes. —J.R. JONES Screens as part of the Asian American Showcase. For J.R. Jones’s review of the opening- and closing-night films, see page 21; for a full schedule visit siskelfilmcenter. org. Sat 4/2, 8 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center v

wed · april 13 · 6-9pm AT OLD TOWN SCHOOL OF FOLK MUSIC · 4545 N LINCOLN · SZOLD HALL

Live music from Old Town School Performers Free Reader tote bag for the first 100 swappers!

Intolerance.

Discrimination.

Injustice.

You can change that.

BRING BOOKS! TAKE BOOKS! Bring and take as many as 15 books, but nothing musty, dirty, torn, or in poor condition, and no encyclopedias, periodicals, or technical, legal or medical information books.

For more information, contact bburda@chicagoreader.com@chicagoreader.com

GRADUATE DEGREES FOR SOCIAL CHANGE At Adler University, you’ll gain the knowledge and skills to transform injustice. Challenge existing systems, connect with people who share your values, and turn passion into action.

Apply today and start creating the world you know is possible.

FACULTY MEET & GREET Tues., April 12 3 - 4:30 p.m.

RSVP at adler.edu/chi

adler.edu 312.662.4100 17 North Dearborn Street, Chicago, IL 60602

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MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE !

OUR MOST READ ARTICLES LAST WEEK ON CHICAGOREADER.COM IN ASCENDING ORDER: How Chicago theater artists are diversifying the city’s stages —ZAC THOMPSON

! ISA GIALLORENZO

Developers try to hide giant Chicago Spire hole and other news —KATE SHEPHERD

Street View

Oh, Couture CORIAMA COUTURE IS a triple threat—or should I say a triple A? The artist, aesthetician, and activist is writing and hosting a soon-to-debut webseries about nonconforming identities and queerness in Chicago, and helming the monthly discussion series and podcast Sex KiKi, which she created to celebrate liberated femininity. And she has designs to open a shop inspired by gender and sexual fluidity. When it comes to shaping her style, which is informed by the local “Afro-surrealistic” collective Zo//Ra Multiverse, Couture draws upon what she calls “the ABCS”—art, beauty, culture, and sexuality. Keep up with her many projects at coriamacouture.com. —ISA GIALLORENZO

Progressives join forces with the Machine to realign Chicago’s Democratic Party —BEN JORAVSKY

Democratic primary shows a gulf remains between Chicago’s black and Latino voters —STEVE BOGIRA

Time traveling with Martin Sorrondeguy of Los Crudos —LEOR GALIL

Diameters ers of circles are proportional to the number of pag page views received.

Chicagoans

Peter Alexander Bresnan, stand-up comic and podcaster BEFORE I MOVED HERE, I had been to Chicago only once, when I was in high school. I had a big crush on one of my friends who went to school here, and as a result the whole city of Chicago took on this romantic air for me, even though this guy was not into me at all. So when I graduated from college and could move anywhere, I said, “Why don’t I go to this city that, in my head at least, is romantic?”

I had worked really hard for a very expensive degree, and I was desperate for something to do. I very much wanted a quote-unquote “serious job.” I wanted to make documentaries. But I was working at a restaurant, and that was all I was doing—going to work, coming home, watching Food Network. I remembered that once somebody told me that I was funny and I should do stand-up. I said, “Maybe I can,” and I just started doing open mikes.

The very first time I got onstage I did a joke about how sexy I thought yarmulkes were. The audience was very kind to me, given the maturity of my material and my ability. I recorded it, and I listened to it on my way home and heard giggles here and there, and in my head, that was huge, like I might as well have been

“The very first time I got onstage I did a joke about how sexy I thought yarmulkes were,” Bresnan says. ! MYKAEL LEIGH

in the Chicago Theatre hearing belly laughs. The more distance I got from it, the more I was like, “Wait. Those are just polite giggles.” So my ego died that day, and I got into the real work of actually trying to be funny.

When you start out in comedy, there’s so much failure. It’s just part of the work. But I’m pretty sensitive, and I take criticism personally. So I had the idea for my podcast, Tell Me I’m Funny, which is a serialized audio journal. The podcast lets me turn that inevitable failure into something productive, so I don’t have to go to an open mike and bomb hard and go home and be sad about it and eat tuna from the can. I can take that failure and make it into something valuable for me and, I hope, for other people.

I’m very tired. All the time. It

never stops. I do shows almost every Monday night at CSz Theater Chicago. Then I try to do at least two to three open mikes a week, and then I’ll generally do two to three other showcases in a month, so I guess that’s about six shows and 12 open mikes a month.

Any success that I feel, I feel so briefly. I can work hard at my day job and then go to a show and do well, but the next morning I need to be revising material, networking, trying to get booked, submitting to comedy festivals. I recently submitted a comedy festival application that asked what you’d put on your tombstone, and I think I put, “Didn’t sleep eight hours a day in his life, and that’s the way he wanted it.”

The fact that I’m 22 certainly helps.

—AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 31

FRIDAY 1

SATURDAY 2

SUNDAY 3

MONDAY 4

TUESDAY 5

WEDNESDAY 6

" Kath erine Don Author Katherine Don reads from her latest biography, Real Courage: The Story of Harper Lee. A Q&A follows. 7:30 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, womenandchildrenfirst.com. F

! The Inte r view Show Fundraiser A fund-raiser for the monthly event features a screening of episode one of The Interview Show on WTTW (premiering Fri 4/8), food, and a silent auction, with proceeds benefiting the upcoming TV series. 6 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, hideoutchicago.com, $15.

# To m Hanks Day The celebration of America’s most beloved actor will feature a Tom Hanks movie marathon, T-shirts, and drink specials, with all donations benefiting Lifeline Energy. Noon, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, lh-st. com, $10 donation.

" Ch icago Pizza Summit Sessions will feature 12 of Chicago’s favorite pizza joints and a keynote speech from the king of partying himself, Andrew W.K. Admission includes all-you-can-eat pizza and drink tickets. 2 PM, Chop Shop, 2033 W. North, chopshopchi.com, $35.

$ Sto m ping Grounds The Chicago Human Rhythm Project presents five local dance companies discussing, performing, and celebrating the rhythmic arts. 6 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, chicagoculturalcenter.org. F

% Ba co n Bocce Beat s Booze Vegetarians beware: Baconfest Chicago kicks off its self-declared bacon month at this meat-centric event with creative bacon dishes, beer, cocktails, and an indoor bocce ball tournament. 7 PM, Chop Shop, 2033 W. North, chopshopchi.com, $30.

& Nati onal Poetr y Mo nth Launch Celebrate National Poetry Month with the release of Action Books’ Cheer Up, Femme Fatale and Co•im•press’s I Am a Face Sympathizing With Your Grief: Seven Younger Iranian Poets.

6:30 PM, City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie, citylitbooks. com. F

8 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

CITY LIFE

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

Lathrop Homes, shown here under construction in 1937, was once considered a model public housing complex. ! SUN-TIMES PRINT COLLECTION

POLITICS

Public housing or piggy bank?

Mayor Rahm wants to turn Lathrop Homes into his next TIF slush fund.

By BEN JORAVSKY

F

or the last few months, I’ve been watching the twists and turns of the ongoing Lathrop Homes saga, waiting for the TIF shoe to drop.

And last week it fell, with a resounding thud.

Actually, it was more like a muffled shuffle.

In typical city fashion—perhaps hoping no one was paying attention—Mayor Emanuel quietly moved to create a new tax increment financing district for Lathrop Homes.

If existing TIF districts are any indication, this new one, located on some of the most valuable riverfront property in the city, would undoubtedly collect tens of millions of dollars in what would have been tax revenue to subsidize—well, the mayor hasn’t told us where the money’s going to go.

This being a TIF, the mayor generally lets us know how he’s spending the money only after he’s already spent it.

On April 5, the city will hold a public hearing to discuss the proposed TIF. I’ll get to that— and what we need to look out for at that meeting. But first, here’s a brief explainer about Lathrop—and about why this new TIF district is particularly galling.

Built in 1938 by the federal government, Lathrop Homes is a low-density public housing complex of 925 apartment units sitting on about 35 acres of prized north-side real estate, along Clybourn near Diversey, just east of the Chicago River.

For years, Lathrop was regarded as one of the Chicago Housing Authority’s more successful developments. It’s also listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But by the 1990s, Lathrop had fallen into disrepair thanks to underfunding and weak management from CHA and the feds.

By 2000 the CHA had stopped filling vacant apartments; currently only about 140 units are inhabited.

In 2011, the CHA authorized a development group called Lathrop Community Partners to redevelop the property as a mixed-use facility, with a blend of low-income and market-rate rental housing. (Partners is a collaboration of Related Midwest, a for-profit developer, and two nonprofit developers, Bickerdike Redevelopment and Heartland Housing.)

In February, the developers unveiled the latest version of their Lathrop plan, which calls for about 1,200 housing units, of which

roughly 400 will be public, 222 affordable, and the rest market rate. They also plan to build 50,000 square feet of retail and a revamped river walk, including a kayak dock.

After the plan was announced, Lathrop Homes residents and low-income housing activists pointed out that the plan cuts about 500 public housing units from the city’s total stock at a time when there’s a citywide waiting list of reportedly more than 125,000 people for such units.

First Ward alderman Proco Joe Moreno, the plan’s chief backer, pressured Eugene Jones Jr., CEO of the CHA, to provide a letter committing to replace the 500 units lost at Lathrop with other affordable units somewhere else in Chicago.

But the activists don’t trust the CHA to make good on that promise, and say they won’t sign on to any deal until the agency provides specific, legally binding plans, with funding, to replace the housing.

Despite these objections, the city’s Plan Commission approved the project in February, and the City Council’s zoning committee OK’d it March 14.

It was only after these meetings that the city acknowledged the project would include a new TIF district.

On March 18, planning commissioner David Reifman sent a letter to residents saying, “Good news, you’re about to get fucked. . .”

Oh, wait. I guess that’s how I’d phrase the letter if Mayor Emanuel put me in charge of planning.

Instead, Reifman wrote of “a proposed designation or amendment of a Tax Increment Financing district in which your property or residence is located.”

As you may know from my many previous columns, when the city creates a TIF district, it essentially freezes the amount of tax dollars that the city—and its schools and other taxing bodies—get from property in that district, for up to 24 years.

Instead, the extra property tax money that’s generated in the new TIF district goes to a TIF fund, which the mayor’s free to spend as he wants. (Sometimes some of that money is spent on redevelopment projects in the TIF district, sometimes not.)

But here’s the thing: Because Lathrop Homes is currently owned by the CHA, the land in the proposed TIF district is currently tax exempt.

That means it pays no property taxes.

That will change once the property is controlled by the developers. The land will stop being tax exempt, and they’ll start paying property taxes.

Without a TIF district, that money would go to the city, and the schools. But if the city creates a TIF district, all the taxes the developers pay—every nickel and dime—will go to the newly created TIF fund.

The schools would get nothing. Hear that, teachers and parents fighting for scraps? Your schools get nothing!

The city’s calling it the Diversey/Chicago River TIF district, but they might as well call it Mayor Rahm’s piggy bank.

Now we’re getting to the big question: How much slush money would the new TIF gather over the next 24 years? The city hasn’t said.

When I called Alderman Moreno, he said he didn’t even know—because the city hadn’t told him either.

Hey, Proco Joe—when are you going to stop trusting these guys?

One thing Moreno and I agree on: as I mentioned, the TIF could gather tens of millions of property tax dollars over the next two decades, because it’s prime land right on the riverfront.

That brings us to that April 5 meeting, which takes place at 6 PM at the New Life Community Church, 2958 N. Damen.

If this meeting goes like most of these informational hearings, you’ll hear a whole lot of gobbledygook about TIFs—some of which may even be true.

But here’s the A, B, and C that you need to know about this TIF: A is how much the TIF will gather in property taxes over the course of the next 24 years.

B is how much of that money the city plans to spend on the Lathrop project.

And C is A minus B—or, the leftover slush for the mayor.

I wouldn’t sign on to this deal until the mayor guarantees to disband the TIF district as soon as he’s used it to pay off whatever project he swears he needs to fund with the money.

My guess is the administration—slicksters that they are—will try to woo us with talk of a near north side river walk while telling us that that they can’t build low-income housing on the site without a TIF handout. ’Cause, you know, it wouldn’t be a TIF project if they weren’t pretending it was for poor people. v

! @joravben MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE Housepainter James Woods rides in the Lake Street protected bike lane on the west side in September 2014. ! JOHN GREENFIELD

TRANSPORTATION

West side, represent?

There was an absence of locals at the city’s west-side bikeway hearings.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

H

istorically, residents and aldermen in wealthier north- and northwest-side wards have been more vocal about pushing for bike lanes and racks than their south- and west-side counterparts. That’s one reason why the lion’s share of cycling infrastructure has been concentrated north of Madison.

After Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011, that equation changed somewhat. According to the Chicago Department of Transportation, 60 percent of the roughly 100 miles of buffered and protected bike lanes installed during the mayor’s first term went to south- and westside neighborhoods, as defined by the city’s official community areas.

Still, when Divvy was rolled out in 2013, the bulk of the docking stations went to dense downtown and north-lakefront areas.

In December 2014, a group of African-American bike advocates pushed CDOT to do better, publishing an open letter to the mayor’s office requesting a more equitable distribution of resources.

10 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

“In the past, the city’s philosophy has been that the communities that already bike the most deserve the most resources,” Slow Roll Chicago cofounder Oboi Reed (now a Streetsblog board member) told me at the time.

“That just perpetuates a vicious cycle where cycling grows fast in some neighborhood and not others.”

The city seemed to get the message. When the next 176 bike-share stations were installed in 2015, all new areas received the same station density, and several more African-American and Latino neighborhoods got access.

That July the Divvy for Everyone program debuted, offering onetime $5 annual memberships to low-income Chicagoans. More than 1,100 people have signed up so far.

In September, CDOT announced a plan to further level the playing field by doing indepth outreach on the south and west sides, asking residents where the next round of bike lanes and traffic-calmed side streets should go.

Last week the department held the two west-side brainstorming sessions. Unfortu-

nately, you could count the total number of locals who showed up on one hand.

This may indicate that bikeways aren’t a burning issue for residents who grapple with problems like rampant unemployment and gun violence. But cyclists of color say biking can actually help address these challenges, and CDOT is describing its west-side outreach as a success.

Streetsblog’s Steven Vance reported that there were only three civilians at a March 21 event at the Austin library. And when I asked for a show of hands at a March 23 meeting at East Garfield Park’s Legler Library, only two people indicated they live in the west-side bikeway’s planning area, bounded by Austin, Roosevelt, California, and North.

At the latter meeting CDOT planner Mike Amsden discussed how the department met with the six alderman in the west-side study area last summer to get their opinions on which routes from the city’s Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 should be prioritized. In November they conferred with community organizations like the West Side Health Authority, the Latin American Chamber of Commerce, and West Town Bikes.

Each 2020 route was given a low-, medium-, or high-priority ranking, indicated by different shades of pink on a map. At the end of Wednesday’s session, attendees were given green dot stickers to identify the routes they felt should get bikeways next.

There were more than a dozen people at that meeting, but most of them were on the clock as representatives of the city or the Active Transportation Alliance. And while the west-side study area is overwhelmingly black and Latino, there appeared to be only two African-Americans present.

One of them was Mark Yalverton, 60, a retired police officer who lives in Englewood. He helped start a bike-cop unit in South Shore, and also did a stint patrolling the lakefront on two wheels. “I loved every second of that,” he recalled.

Ken Mick, who’s white, is a 57-year-old clothing salesman and Web designer who lives in an artists’ loft in East Garfield Park and bikes for transportation. He has a dim view of the Lake Street protected bike lanes, which run below the CTA Green Line tracks from Damen all the way to Oak Park. “It noisy under the trains, and there’s often busted glass in the lanes,” he noted.

The other west-sider was Jerome Montgomery, 65, a navy vet and retired hospital worker who’s a pastor at a local church. Montgomery, who’s black, grew up in the area and enjoyed riding bikes as a kid. “I stopped biking once I got my driver’s license,” he said. “You can’t chase women on no bike, not in my neighborhood.”

Montgomery got back into cycling after a coworker egged him on, and he’s been trying to get his childhood friends to take it up. “It’s fun, healthy, something we could do together,” he said.

While Montgomery doesn’t believe the west side has gotten its fair share of bike lanes and Divvy stations—West Garfield and Austin will get the blue bikes when the system expands again this spring—he doesn’t think there’s much demand for them yet. That, plus the cold, spitting rain outside, explained why the meetings turnout was so low, he said.

“Most people on the west side are more con-

“Most people on the west side are more concerned with jobs and violence prevention than where the bike lanes should go.”

—West Garfield Park resident Jerome Montgomery

cerned with jobs and violence prevention than where the bike lanes should go,” he said.

However, Slow Roll’s Reed argues that more cycling in underserved neighborhoods could be part of the solution by helping residents access employment centers, and putting more eyes on the street.

CDOT’s Amsden said he’s hoping for better attendance at the south-side meetings next month in the East Side and Pullman neighborhoods, but doesn’t believe the west-side outreach has been a wash. He argues that in addition to touching base with the aldermen and the community groups, talking with residents—whether it’s five people or 50—helps the department gather info and build a political base for street redesigns.

“We’re creating a web of supporters,” Amsden said, “and that’s really important.” v

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

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please recycle this paper MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 11

Architecture by accident

W

Forget the Hancock: The overlooked jewels of Chicago’s skyline have one man in common.

By TAL ROSENBERG

The Malibu East on Sheridan: what a Jeanne Gang building might look like if it were designed by a TI-83 graphing calculator ! DANIELLE SCRUGGS

12 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

hen I think back on my childhood, what f irst comes to mind are buildings that no one seems to care about. My mom would drive up and down Lake Shore Drive, ferrying me to the few places I went when I wasn’t home. She’d get off at the Belmont exit and I’d fixate on the kooky tapioca-colored high-rise on the corner of Belmont and Lake Shore Drive; she would coast on Marine Drive, two blocks north of Irving Park, and I’d consider the strangely narrow apartment building with a disproportionately large white stone awning; she’d take LSD all the way up to Hollywood, turn right on Sheridan, and glide past the shoreline towers with their ostensibly gauche, outdated designs, and ridiculous, escapist names—the Tiara, El Lago—then turn onto Devon and proceed right into the heart of the assembly-line two-flats where my Orthodox Jewish psychologist still lives.

I would sit in the backseat of the station wagon, resting the curve of my head on the window, and gaze out at the buildings we passed. At first it was just scenery, the quotidian backdrop of the city. But over time, the architecture was subtly grafted onto my memory.

I moved to New York in 2001, then returned to Chicago eight years later. When I came back, I spent a lot of time driving around, this time on my own. As I drove, I found myself admiring not Chicago’s most famous architectural landmarks—the Sears Tower, the John Hancock, Marina City—but the buildings that never seem to attain any recognition. I became curious about their provenance. Who made those weird midcentury-modernist high-rises on Lake Shore Drive?

What about the Tudor homes in West Rogers Park and Lincoln Square, Jefferson Park and Old Irving? And all the elegant apartment buildings in the Gold Coast—who built their knockoffs on Sheridan Road?

Chicago is known for its architecture, but I’ve come to believe that the buildings that define the city and give it its unique character are not the iconic skyscrapers we all know, or even Cloud Gate or some other foofaraw; it’s the clunky high-rises along Lake Shore Drive, painted salmon or chartreuse or burgundy; the “tacky” outer-city hotels with their old signs and rusting metal; the restaurants that look like hideous collisions of insurance offices and burger stands. I’ve found some of these structures to be not just alluring in their strangeness but legitimate architectural marvels. And I discovered that the ones I

John Macsai circa 1972

! SUN-TIMES ARCHIVE

loved most of all had one thing in common: a man named John Macsai.

M

acsai is most famous, or perhaps infamous, for a hotel—a purple one.

And not indigo or plush, wine-colored purple—it was lavender. A lavender hotel. Michael Jordan stayed there, in the lavender hotel, his first night in Chicago. Because when a future megastar athlete arrives in Chicago for the first time, he has to stay in the best place the city has to offer. In 1984, that was a lavender hotel.

I saw the lavender hotel. It was on Touhy Avenue in Lincolnwood, right near the very northwest boundary of Chicago. My mom or dad would drive by it on the way to New York Bagel & Bialy, which was a little bit farther west, near the expressway. Even then, the building struck me as odd but engrossing.

It was rectangular and long, with thin white support beams that held it off the ground, like the pasty toothpick legs of a cartoon hippo. With mind-shattering transparency, it was called . . . the Purple Hotel. I’d often wonder—before I knew about its celebrity guests—who stays at this hotel? Why would anyone stay at the Purple Hotel? Because it’s purple? Because it’s in Lincolnwood? Because life is a comedy?

The Purple Hotel was never meant to be purple. Macsai initially set out to construct it in a midcentury-modern design that was, in fact, fairly innovative: the Purple Hotel had big windows, which let a ton of light into the rooms, and as the architecture critic Lee Bey has pointed out, Macsai put the structural supports on the outside of the building,

which allowed for fat, open spaces on the inside; in between the windows was brick, which, like the structural beams at the base, was an outward expression of the construction process.

In its earliest incarnation the building was a Hyatt Hotel—the first one in the midwest. The person who commissioned it, A.N. Pritzker, of the incomprehensibly wealthy family of entrepreneurs, was based in Chicago and wanted to make a splashy local debut for the family’s new national hotel chain. Macsai intended for the brick on the “Hyatt House” to be gray, but Pritzker dismissed it as “dull.” As Macsai would recall later on the design-focused podcast 99% Invisible, he made the mistake of showing Pritzker 35 or 40 color samples.

Pritzker picked purple, “And you don’t argue with A.N. Pritzker . . . , ” Macsai said.

It turns out that Macsai had made a similar error not too long before. In the 1950s he also designed a rather famous high-rise apartment building, 1150 N. Lake Shore Drive. The tower is elegantly arched around the corner of Lake Shore Drive and Division, in the tony Gold Coast neighborhood. Today, the high-rise is cream-colored, but when it was completed it was blue. “What a terrible mistake,” Macsai told Betty J. Blum in a lengthy 2003 interview for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project. “Thank God they painted it. The owner wanted the building to stand out, OK? And wanted to see some brick samples. And like an idiot . . . we brought along a catalog of glazed brick samples. And the owner loved it. And that was it.”

That wasn’t the only blunder. The building has been commended for its elegant curved shape, but in fact the project was only half completed. The client, John Mack of Lakeshore Management, wanted to buy the north corner of Division as well—he intended to have two curved buildings that mirrored each other. The walls of this concrete-and-glass vagina would serve as a gateway into East Division Street’s birth canal of old money and mansions. But Mack couldn’t seal the deal on that north corner, so while 1150 W. North seems like a quirky, innovative fixture of Lake Shore Drive’s gallery wall of apartment buildings, it’s actually the unfinished result of an architect’s vision.

How must that feel to an architect, to have an incomplete project be perceived as your original intention?

Or to be thought of as the person who foisted a purple monster on the benighted populace of Lincolnwood?

For that matter, who is John Macsai?

M

acsai was born John Lusztig in Budapest, Hungary, on May 20, 1926. As a child he enjoyed going to museums and, taking after his mother, who painted, loved to draw. His drawings impressed people, which encouraged him to enroll in the Atelier Art School, now the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. He graduated in 1944 and was primed to become a successful illustrator or designer.

But then the Germans came to Hungary, and Lusztig had to put down his pencils so he could work in a labor camp and be shot at by Nazis. In 1945 Lusztig was liberated by the American army. He enrolled at the Polytechnic University in Budapest to study engineering, which included architecture as a discipline. But anti-Semitism was still prevalent in Hungary, and after his experiences during the Holocaust, Lusztig no longer wanted a German name. So he changed his surname to Macsai (pronounced MAX-eye), a rough approximation of “Macsa,” the Transylvanian town of his ancestry.

Right out of college, Macsai got a job at Holabird & Root, the Chicago architecture firm known for the kind of simultaneously classy and colossal buildings you see in old movies, like the Board of Trade and the original Soldier Field. He then quickly jumped ship to Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Macsai told Blum that, at the time, “the younger crowd . . . really wanted to be part of the zeitgeist, the modern architecture, which SOM was doing . . . ” He stayed for four years, then worked short stints at various other firms, doing renderings and side projects all the while.

In 1955, the architect Ray Stuermer offered Macsai a 20 percent partnership in a new firm he was starting, and Macsai accepted. When he walked into the office, he saw “Stuermer, Hausner and Macsai” written on the glass.

When Macsai asked who Hausner was, Stuermer replied, “I decided we need him, too.”

“Him” was Bob Hausner, and by the end of the year there’d be no Stuermer. “He liked me, I liked him,” Macsai told Blum. “After a while, we realized that we don’t like Ray anymore.”

A postcard for the Purple Hotel, printed around the time the hotel opened in 1960 ! SUN-TIMES ARCHIVE

The architect Bob Diamant, then a classmate of Macsai’s, told him about the Hillel Foundation, which offered scholarships for Jewish-European students to finish their higher education in the U.S. Macsai applied and was eventually accepted; seeing the specter of communism slowly overtaking Hungary, he decided to make the journey west. He went to Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, an institution that, as Macsai pointed out to Blum, is a “double lie,” because “it’s not Miami, Florida, and it’s not Oxford, England.”

From 1955 until 1970, the firm of Hausner & Macsai was responsible for many buildings all over the Chicago area. In fact, it’s Hausner’s design that currently wraps around 1150 N. Lake Shore Drive. Even though it’s only half of their intended project, the tower won the duo an award from the American Institute of Architects. Nevertheless, Macsai said that whenever someone would point out a screwup, “My standard answer was ‘I didn’t design it, it was my partner’s design.’ That’s what you need partners for . . . to take the blame.”

J

MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 13

mean for a contemporary architectural masterpiece, like, say, Jeanne Gang’s Aqua? Were there similar mistakes, accidents, or bureaucratic chicanery that helped form a building like that? If there were no calamities or oversights, and the process was faultless from design to completion, then that would constitute something beyond a miracle. It would be downright supernatural.

But then, isn’t it even more miraculous when everything goes awry and the resulting building is somehow still a beloved landmark?

Maybe that’s what distinguishes the architecture I’m drawn to: it’s the by-product of caprice and unpredictability. As with an independent film or a great lo-fi album, it’s the blemishes and malformations that give these buildings their singular identities.

Macsai continued from 13

There were quite a few boo-boos in the history of Hausner & Macsai, but many of them ended up being the chief reasons the buildings stand out today. Take Harbor House, that funky tapioca-colored high-rise on Belmont and Lake Shore Drive that I loved as a kid. It has three narrow towers that are all connected to each other by a lobby and three elevators, and the rooms have windows with protruding, rounded-square borders, which gives the facade a warped, bulbous appearance.

On the second floor, the frames on the windows stretch even farther out. It seems like an eccentric filigree, but the design is quite deliberate.

Hausner and Macsai initially thought they’d be allowed to build all the way to the property line on the back side of the lot to the west.

However, the surveyors had messed up: they didn’t account for a ten-foot easement on the west side of the property, which had to be left in place so that residents in the adjacent building could get out. Unfortunately, that meant businesses on the second floor of Harbor House would lose ten feet of the space they’d been promised. “In order to squeeze in the beauty shop and whatever was on the second floor,” Macsai told Blum, “we had to jut out.”

The second-floor “shadowboxes,” as Blum calls them, the ones that give Harbor House its unique visual character, are the result of a bunch of fuckups.

This scenario made me wonder: Would things have been different if the Purple Hotel hadn’t been purple? If a different decision had been made about the color of the brick, could the oddball block on Touhy have been viewed as a modernist masterpiece, the toast of Lincolnwood? This thought occurred to me after reading about another Macsai building, a high-rise that I’d always found appealing and offbeat: the Waterford Condominiums, on Marine Drive just west of Montrose Harbor.

The tower is narrow but stretches out pretty far west; from the front, it’s a slim brown-andwhite rectangle extending upward, with two distinctive rectangular white-stone canopies on the front entrance.

And this is yet another example of a building that didn’t turn out the way that Macsai initially intended. In her oral history interview, Blum asks if the redbrick is a reference back to Macsai’s Miami University days. He replies, “Whatever,” then explains that the black handrails and the light-pink balcony edging were supposed to be white. “When it was freshly repainted,” he said, “it reminded me of a high-rise bordello.”

14 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

A

The boxes that jut out of the second floor of Harbor House, on Belmont and Lake Shore Drive, were added to correct a surveying oversight. ! DANIELLE SCRUGGS

“It’s changed totally in character,” Macsai told Blum. “The concrete was not painted originally; it was just exposed concrete. The stupid manager . . . Had they called us, we could have prepared a color scheme and would not have charged them.”

It’s easy to overlook how many players shape a building beyond the architect: there are contractors, developers, construction workers, and especially residents, who frequently make adjustments without consulting any of the people who created the structure in the first place.

And architecture here has an additional, quintessentially Chicago wrinkle: aldermen.

In Blum’s interview, Macsai rants about his clients and “their swindling, their charms,

their ability to work with the Daley machine, the payoffs, all that.” But his diatribe was not rooted in personal enmity—rather, it stemmed from his own deep-seated and crystallized views on architecture. “The issue is that decisions in architecture are not made on a rational basis,” Macsai tells Blum, “which would be the best for the neighborhood, for the community, and including the developer too, but they are made on bases which would make your hair stand up . . . The alderman, who usually is paid off—every alderman is a crook in the city of Chicago.”

“It’s almost a miracle when it all works out,” he said.

If the construction of a random lakeside high-rise is miraculous, then what does that

nother implicit virtue of Macsai’s architecture is its relationship to the past—it’s a relic of another era. My favorite Macsai building isn’t particularly well-known or well regarded—at first glance, it seems pretty mundane. At 6033 N. Sheridan there’s a condominium tower called Malibu East, which is conjoined with a separate highrise on Sheridan simply named the Malibu.

The two structures are bridged by a groundfloor crosswalk commercial area known as the Captain’s Walk. Like the Waterford, the Malibu and its Malibu East cousin have a brown brick exterior flanked by two white-walled columns on the street-side facade. White balconies line the sidewalls, and the way the bannisters are constructed gives the illusion that the apartments tilt diagonally upward. It kind of looks like a Studio Gang Architects building as designed by a TI-83 graphing calculator.

Macsai made sure the Malibu East had no windows on the west side of the building— that way every single apartment has a lakeside view, whether it’s from the north, south, or east. In that respect the complex is somewhat unique among northeast-side high-rises, many of which contain multiple apartments with west-side views. But everyone at the Malibu East gets to live on the water.

I adore this building not just because of its design, but because of its concept. The condo tower has a recreation center, an outdoor tennis court and swimming pools, plus a number of bonus features in the Captain’s Walk: a dry cleaner, a salon, a convenience store, and even a dentist’s office. None of these are very up-todate—they all look like relics of the 1960s and ’70s. I’m amused by the notion of this residential building as a self-contained but outdated community, with amenities so old that they

would hardly strike most people as “amenities” at all—it seems they exist merely to keep a group of people connected to another time, in a retro cocoon that shields them from the contemporary world.

Robert Powers, who runs the blog A Chicago Sojourn, has somewhat mockingly and somewhat affectionately labeled this stretch of Sheridan between Hollywood and Devon the “Cubic Zirconium Coast,” wherein the owners of these apartments try to re-create the posh lifestyle of the Gold Coast on a much smaller budget. But the buildings are in keeping with the spirit of a lot of Chicago’s far north side, much of which is relatively untouched and charmingly bizarre. Like the Lighthouse Tavern, a waterside Rogers Park dive bar with a vaguely nautical theme (much of the farnorth lakefront seems to bear this fake-naval aesthetic), or Moody’s Pub, which looks mock medieval, with its castle-tower imagery and dim, innlike wooden interior.

Looking up these buildings, and discovering Macsai, answered my original set of queries about the creators of these strange but crucial pieces of Chicago’s architectural landscape.

But when I found out that Macsai was still alive, I decided I had to talk to him. For some reason I felt like he might have answers to questions I didn’t even know to ask.

S

o on a recent Monday morning I traveled to Macsai’s apartment, near downtown Evanston. He’ll be 90 soon, and I was warned in advance that his health had declined, and that I might not be able to get the answers I sought. I went anyway.

Of course, the building where Macsai lives is outlandish. It looks like a turn-of-the century mansion was converted into condos, with a random section in the middle that’s almost faux Tudor. There are weird midcentury flourishes, most notably random patches of white stone that stretch up the side of the brown brick walls, which taken together resemble a misshapen and incomplete chimney. The complex overlooks a small park and has a heavy wooden door that Macsai’s wife, Gerry, jokes, “is there to keep out ISIS.” It also has a bronze plaque in front that indicates the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. What makes it so important? Gerry says the structure was an early co-op, and is more than 100 years old—which explains why the bricks on the eighth floor of the south facade fell off last June.

The Macsais’ apartment is bright and long, and the walls are filled with John’s paintings.

They’re expressionistic, colorful, and tend to depict natural settings: tree-filled landscapes;

The elegant curve of 1150 N. Lake Shore Drive was supposed be replicated in another building across the street, but the owner couldn’t secure the lot for purchase. ! DANIELLE SCRUGGS

lakefronts with sailboats and rowboats; the view from a window in what looks like a French or Italian village; there’s even an aerial view of the park that the Macsais’ residence overlooks, with a compass rose and the surrounding buildings viewed from the front rather than from above. My favorite painting was an arrangement of geometric shapes—intersecting horizontal bars of various colors with some orange half circles, a fractured sunset that channels the same quirky warmth found in Macsai’s designs.

“If you would know how to make accidents work, you would know how to put buildings together.”

—John Macsai

In his interview with Blum, Macsai sounds wily and feisty, with a quick wit, a silver tongue, and a tendency to swear. When I met him, he was gentle and still, dwarfed by his wheelchair. He was neatly dressed in black pants, a clean blue-and-red plaid button-down shirt, and a zip-up black sweatshirt.

As soon as I sat down he said, slowly, “Life is not easy as an architect.”

Why not easy?

“Because it’s a field where everybody talks into,” he said. “In this building [that he lives in], we have the biannual meeting of this organization, and I used to be the president, and now I’m just an onlooker. I’m just amazed at how ignorant people are about buildings and, more importantly, how active they’re involved in making decisions about something [for which] they have very little knowledge.”

It took him a while to get this answer out, then there was a long pause. He said, “What can you do? That’s the way life is.”

I tried to ask him questions, but didn’t get very far. Sometimes he would trail off and the answer would be incomplete; other times he’d reply with one or two words, and if I tried to get more details he’d ask a question: What did you study? What do you do at work? Prior to answering, he’d sit silently and glance to the side, out the window that looks on to the sunny park. Before I could finish inquiring about a quote I’d read in the interview with Blum, he jokingly interjected, “I lied!”

He said that Harbor House is his favorite work. When I mentioned the mistakes that led to its ultimate design, he said, “If you would know how to make accidents work, you would know how to put buildings together.”

I asked him if he thought anything got lost between the time he and his peers were designing buildings and the architecture of today.

“What was good, that never got lost.”

What never got lost?

“Basic building design and the response to needs,” he said, “human needs, functions, never really changed.”

He looked out the window, his gemlike blue eyes lit up by the daylight. I recognized that look—I had seen it before. It reminded me of my grandfather. I visited him not long after he had a stroke, and he had the same soft stare. It wasn’t vacant or sad; it was fragile. It was the delicate, liquid glare of wisdom.

I chatted with Gerry for a bit and then started getting ready to leave. As I was packing my bag, Macsai said, totally unprompted, “Your living space is not defined by your real needs.

It is defined by your economic situation.” And that was the last thing he said to me.

At the time, I thought this statement was pretty depressing: where you live and what your home looks like is defined by what you can afford. But later on I came up with another take: Architecture is complicated. It’s a series of decisions and mishaps and arguments made not in the interest of aesthetics, but of necessity. People need homes, or parks, or offices. The spaces we inhabit are confluences of negotiation and concession, which are the nuts and bolts of human drama.

Before I left I searched the walls and mantels and saw pictures of Macsai and his family, children and grandchildren, everyone laughing and smiling. And I realized that what I treasure about Macsai’s buildings, and screwy north-side architecture in general, is that they remind me of my family. They’re the Chicago I know because I associate them with the people who mean the most to me. I love these buildings because in an ineffable, metaphysical way, they are my family.

I took the el downtown, in a bit of a daze.

The Purple Line train snaked through Evanston and eventually past the wonky apartment buildings in Rogers Park. We whizzed alongside the graveyard in Uptown, on to the east side of Wrigley Field, then proceeded around the cozy homes of Lincoln Park before launching straight through River North. As I looked out the train-car window, staring at these various high-rises, I thought about a verse from one of my favorite albums: Van Morrison’s 1974 LP Veedon Fleece, produced not long after a trip that Morrison took to Ireland, his homeland, right after his divorce.

It’s the first verse of the first song, “Fair Play”: Fair play to you Killarney’s lakes are so blue And the architecture I’m taking in with my mind So fine. v

! @talrosenberg MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 15

ARTS & CULTURE

Sahar Dika, left, and Frank Sawa, right, in Silk Road Rising’s Mosque Alert. ! AIRAN WRIGHT

THEATER

How Silk Road Rising’s Mosque Alert became alarmingly current

By DEANNA ISAACS

I

s this a great time for a new play about how Americans go all NIMBY if someone wants to build a mosque in their neighborhood?

Unfortunately, yes, says Jamil Khoury, whose drama Mosque Alert opens April 2 at Silk Road Rising, where he’s also the artistic director.

Khoury thought things were bad back in 2010, when Cordoba House, a proposed mosque and community center two blocks from Ground Zero in Manhattan, set off a national uproar that ultimately sank the project.

According to Khoury, “Cordoba would have been so much more than a mosque. It would have been a place of interfaith dialogue and learning and art, like the Jewish Community Center on Amsterdam Avenue.” Its defeat was the catalyst for Mosque Alert.

But Khoury didn’t anticipate that by the time his play opened the likely Republican presidential nominee would be announcing that “Islam hates us.”

16 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

Cordoba, which had the support of President Obama and then-New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, was the subject of a right-wing fear-mongering campaign by the likes of Newt Gingrich, Bill O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh, Khoury says.

And now?

“The vulgar discourse, the scapegoating of Muslims and immigrants, and the conflation of Islam with ISIS—all of these things are contributing to a significantly worse climate than existed in 2010. And worse than what existed shortly after 9/11,” Khoury says. “Donald Trump has made this play more relevant.”

The Ground Zero mosque fiasco was the highest-profile instance of something xenophobic that was going on all over the country, Khoury says, including suburban Chicago.

When in the spring of 2011 he was invited to write a piece for American Theater Company’s annual Ten by Ten festival, which features ten-minute plays by ten playwrights, he didn’t have to search for a subject.

J

R READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

F

THEATER

Fun with Fermat

By TONY ADLER

H

aving just built themselves a stately home, the folks at Writers Theatre are christening it with a play set in one. Tom Stoppard’s 1993 Arcadia takes place in a study at Sidley Park, an English estate that’s housed members, guests, and servants of the Coverly clan for at least 200 years. Michael Halberstam’s staging of Arcadia, meanwhile, unfolds at the new Writers Theater complex in downtown Glencoe, designed on a multimillion-dollar budget by Jeanne Gang’s Studio Gang Architects.

Each venue is worth visiting, though one of them isn’t quite plumb.

The building feels open and light, with a rooftop courtyard, a wraparound balcony, and a two-story lobby that lacks only philosophers in togas to feel like some airy plaza in ancient Athens. The 250-seat main theater is a steep-sided bowl that keeps even audience members in the upper rows close, and the two people I glimpsed through the glass walls of the patrons’ lounge seemed to be having a lovely intermission.

The show inside the building has the advantage of having been constructed around a masterpiece. Stoppard’s career can look at

times like a lonely attempt to update Restoration-style wit for the modern theater, and Arcadia is his greatest success in that regard.

It starts in 1809, with precocious 13-year-old Thomasina Coverly working alongside her tutor, Septimus Hodges. He hopes to keep her puzzling over Fermat’s last theorem (“When x, y, and z are whole numbers each raised to the power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when n is greater than 2”) while he reads something by Ezra Chater, the bad poet he’s just cuckolded. But Thomasina isn’t precocious for nothing. She’s aware of the sexual busyness going on around her and presses Septimus for a definition of “carnal embrace.” (“The practice of throwing ones arms around a side of beef,” he parries, feebly, at first.)

Everything Thomasina is so curious about becomes history in the very next scene, when a couple of modern-day literary researchers invade the same room she sat in so many years earlier. Hannah Jarvis is occupied with landscaping changes that took place at Sidley Park during Thomasina’s adolescence, believing that the transition from ordered gardens to a Gothic faux wildness reflects the decline of Enlightenment rationality into Romantic

fuzzy-mindedness. She’s particularly interested in the identity of a hermit who’s said to have lived in a faux hermitage amid the faux wildness, with only a tortoise for company.

Alcoholic, egotistical Sussex don Bernard Nightingale shows up looking for proof—or, failing that, a gut feeling—that Lord Byron spent time on the estate, and may even have fought a duel there.

Stoppard has a way of making me feel very smart and very stupid at the same time: Smart when I catch on to the occasionally miraculous things he’s saying and doing, stupid because I realize that I wouldn’t say or do them in a million years. In Arcadia, that conflict can get positively giddy. This is a very funny play about epistemology. About reason and intuition, investigation and luck, learning and knowing, academics and autodidacts, horses and carts, empathy and the nature of facts. About chaos theory, Newton’s universe, and the possibility of a cosmic determinism, or what Walt Whitman was getting at when he wrote that “all truths wait in all things.”

But it’s also a romance, both comic and tragic—with the added complication that certain relationships are inseparable from Stoppard’s larger subject. Halberstam and his cast of 12 have a strong, clear command of the scholarly and fleshly issues in Arcadia, yet they fail to make sense of its central connections: between Hannah and Bernard, and Septimus and Thomasina. Scott Parkinson pushes Bernard’s excesses so far that it’s hard to believe that Kate Fry’s Hannah—equally extreme in her reserve—would find him engaging, even as a phenomenon. Something like the acid banter between Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday is called for but never attained. And though Greg Matthew Anderson embodies a suave, enjoyable Septimus, he never crosses over into realms that would explain the influence Elizabeth Stenholt’s Thomasina exerts over him. On the other hand, Rod Thomas and Chaon Cross are each a hoot in supporting roles. v ARCADIA Through 5/1: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe, 847-242-6000, writerstheatre.org, $60-$80.

! @taadler

! TRAVIS MARSHALL

Chaon Cross, Elizabeth Stenholt, and Gabriel Ruiz ! MICHAEL BROSILOW

COMEDY

Wham City meets Windy City

THE LATEST VIRAL VIDEO to take over Adult Swim’s 2 AM slot (home of such disturbing classics as The Salad Mixxxer and Too Many Cooks) is This House Has People in It, an 11-minute horror-comedy short shot on surveillance video cameras. It’s the work of Wham City Comedy, a three-man Baltimore group who create nonsensical multimedia anticomedy with a dark twist.

Ben O’Brien, Robby Rackleff, and Alan Resnick specialize in the type of content that is meant to be paired with a marijuana haze and a bag of Cheetos—it’s impossible to look away from a video like Unedited Footage of a Bear at 4 AM after a round of bong hits.

That particular short combines Shyamalan-esque horror tropes with the ridiculous narratives of commercials for allergy medication: as a woman chases a bloody clone of herself through empty suburban streets, soft music plays and medical side effects scroll across the bottom of the screen.

Aside from their absurdist video work, the group have collaborated with semifamous figures such as musician Dan Deacon and artist Dina Kelberman for live multimedia performances that feature a blend of stand-up, solo character sketches, and pretaped interactive video segments. Fittingly, Wham City Comedy will be joined by some of the strangest, most hilarious local talent for their Chicago show, including Clickhole’s Fran Hoepfner and comic Goodrich Gevaart. —BRIANNA WELLEN R WHAM CITY COMEDY Sat 4/2, 7:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, whamcitycomedy.com, 21+, $8.

MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 17

Lee Godie, Untitled, gelatin silver print and ink

ARTS & CULTURE

! COURTESY THE ARTIST

VISUAL ART

Behind the photo-booth curtain

By KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

F

rom the late 1960s until the very end of the ’80s, the artist Lee Godie staked her claim on the Art Institute’s steps. She hawked her paintings, drawings, and photographs to museum patrons, students, and passersby on Michigan Avenue. Living on the street by choice, Godie, who passed away in 1994, kept her wardrobe and art supplies in department-store lockers and frequented bus-station photo booths to take self-portraits—an idiosyncratic aspect of her diverse and public practice. “Lee Godie: Portraits,” at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, is an exhibition exclusively focused on more than 50 of these automated self-portraits.

“More than her drawings or other objects she made, the photo-booth self-portraits reflect that eccentric personality that so many

18 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

of us remember about her,” said Michael Bonesteel, adjunct assistant professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Bonesteel (who wrote “The Mysterious Master of Michigan Ave.,” a lengthy story about Godie that ran in the January 8, 1982, issue of the Reader) curated the artist’s 20-year retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center in 1993. “The experience of interacting with her,” he said, “participating in her strange social rituals, and ultimately purchasing a work of art were all part of what might be termed ‘the Lee Godie experience.’”

For her bus-station self-portraits Godie would elaborately set up each shot: she included costumes, makeup, and props, and sometimes she’d tint her skin with instant-tea crystals to create a more dramatic image. She

would also incorporate rolled-up canvases, art-supply-store bags, or money in her portraits, a sly way of alluding to her practice. In Untitled (photo booth self-portrait) she shows off a brand-new set of watercolors, with several canvases lodged underneath her right arm.

Godie didn’t manipulate the print, but in other instances she would draw on the photograph after it developed; she’d highlight her eyelashes, lips, and clothing with thick marks of color.

The exhibition was originally curated for the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, by Karen Patterson, who learned about Godie’s work as a curatorial assistant at the SAIC’s Roger Brown Study Collection.

“The photo booth was a world in which she could see herself,” Patterson said. “She was out there without a barrier, and didn’t have a studio or home to go back to in many cases. I see the photo booth as a private moment where she could both see and embolden herself as an artist in Chicago.”

“Lee Godie: Portraits” reinforces Godie’s significant role in the Chicago art world. But it also highlights the intimate moments she experienced when she was face to face with herself, momentarily secluded from her public life on the city’s streets. v R “LEE GODIE: PORTRAITS” Through 7/5, opening reception Fri 4/8, 5:30-8:30 PM, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, 756 N. Milwaukee, 312-2439088, art.org. $5 suggested donation, free for members.

! @KateSierz

“Each playwright got the same photo as a starting point,” says Khoury, who’s Syrian on his father’s side and Slovak-Polish on his mother’s. “That year it was a Caucasian family—father, mother, son, daughter, and dog sitting around a pool. The dog didn’t make it into my script, but that was the genesis for the Bakers.”

The Bakers are one of three families (two of them Muslim) that now inhabit Mosque Alert, which is set in Naperville. Khoury, an Antiochian Orthodox Christian who grew up in Mount Prospect, picked this setting because two real-life mosque construction battles were playing out in unincorporated Naperville at the time. (Both mosques, the Irshad Learning Center and the Islamic Center of Naperville, prevailed and are now moving forward with their building plans.) The opening scene of the finished play is a presentation to the Naperville planning and zoning commission that features drawings for the plan to renovate an actual Naperville landmark, the old Nichols Library, and turn it into a mosque and community center. A real-life mosque architect, Kentucky-based Christopher McCoy, drew actual plans for the fictional renovation pro bono.

Mosque Alert’s five-year development process included residencies and student productions at Knox College and Valparaiso University, numerous community events (in Naperville and elsewhere), and an innovative online workshop that introduced characters and conflicts in short video scenes and invited the public to weigh in.

The online experiment, which I wrote about three years ago, seemed to offer an exciting way to extend the reach of a theater company beyond its immediate geographic area to a potentially unlimited global audience. Now that

“Donald Trump has made this play more relevant.”

—Playwright Jamil Khoury

the play’s opening and most of the videos have been taken down, I wondered how that worked out. Did an audience of millions turn up?

No, says Malik Gillani, Silk Road’s executive director and Khoury’s husband. (They cofounded the company, housed in the Loop’s historic Chicago Temple, in 2002.) But the videos did attract 25,000 viewers from all over the world, including from countries where—if authorities had been aware of them—the subject matter might have been censored. About 200 of those viewers interacted with Khoury through e-mails or online comments.

Between the virtual and live events, Khoury says, more people than he can count “have their fingerprints on this play.” In such circumstances it wouldn’t have been surprising if that mission-driven, workshopped-by-committee process led to an overly politically correct and/or fatally didactic outcome.

Khoury says it didn’t: “It’s always a challenge when you start with an idea or political message and try to craft drama. But I want people to find themselves in this story. I think they’ll have some perspectives and ideas challenged. This is a window into a number of intra-Muslim conversations that a lot of people may not be privy to.”

And we’re not talking about monolithic communities or one-dimensional characters, he says. “I’m interested in how we all embody contradictions, and we all fail to live up to our ideals.”

Silk Road has invested as much as $250,000 in this project, Gillani says, and already counts it as a “community engagement” success.

We’re about to find out if it’ll also be a success on stage: in a more ominously xenophobic moment than anticipated, it’s finally showtime. v

! @DeannaIsaacs

! KIPLING SWEHLA

Mosque Alert continued from 16

THEATER

Why read the book when you can go see the puppet play?

THESE ARE GOOD DAYS for those who happen to have overlapping interests in theater, American literature, and 19th-century cetology. Lookingglass Theatre Company recently announced plans for a remount in summer 2017 of David Catlin’s Moby-Dick adaptation (first staged last year), in which gravity-defying acrobatics turn the air into a substitute for the sea. And in the meantime, puppeteer Blair Thomas presents an even sparer and more abstract distillation of Herman Melville’s shaggy masterpiece, retold in Thomas’s version by “a monastic order of ancient mariners” reconstructing Ishmael’s tale as if from memory. Only scraps of the original text remain, replaced by the bass drumming of percussionist Michael Zerang and new compo-

sitions performed by folksinger Michael Smith (his previous experience scoring a watery tragedy was Lookingglass’s haunting 2012 musical about the Eastland disaster). The mariner monks also have at their disposal the expressive creations of Thomas and fellow puppeteer Michael Montenegro, who has an uncanny ability to make the plainest materials speak volumes. Here, those objects include a table, tiny rod puppets, oversize masks with stony expressions, and a big, translucent, papery blimp that could be the whale, the night sky, the sea, or any other immense unknowable.

—ZAC THOMPSON R MOBY DICK

3/31-4/3: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org, $30, $10 students.

MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 19

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE MOVIES

Machine heads

By DMITRY SAMAROV

Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World

I

n the Greek myth of Pandora’s box, a curious woman opens a box and releases all manner of evil into the world. Once the box is open, there’s no closing it, and only hope is left at the bottom.

This story came back to me as I watched Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World, Werner Herzog’s rumination on the range of digital systems and devices that govern our world. Divided into ten chapters—each featuring people who are furthering the technology or pushing back against it—the film explores the horrors and the wonders of our current way of life. The inventors of self-driving automobiles speak glowingly of the machines’ ability to learn and adapt, opining that it far outstrips that of humans, while victims of online bullying and addiction call the Internet the work of the devil. These views may seem irreconcilable, but Herzog arrives at a single conclusion: no matter how much technology evolves, it’s still up to us to steer it in the right direction.

Some of Herzog’s subjects are so damaged they’ve abandoned civilization altogether.

A chapter dedicated to technology’s losers introduces us to people who have moved into the woods to escape the radiation of microssss EXCELLENT

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waves, computers, cell phones, and a host of other commonplace conveniences. One woman has developed such an acute sensitivity to this radiation that she spent a year lying in a Faraday cage, her husband passing meals in through a slot. Another woman is driven to tears detailing how her illness has prevented her from functioning in everyday society.

Other subjects have no one but themselves to blame. In a different wooded area, teenagers at an “Internet recovery center” describe becoming so engulfed in online gaming that reality became unreal to them. One young woman, asked about her identification with an online avatar, refuses to answer because she doesn’t feel recovered enough to comment without causing herself further mental damage. Herzog cites a story about kids in South Korea who stayed glued to their game screens so long that their legs developed thrombosis and had to be amputated. Unlike the radiation victims, these kids have been scarred by abusing the technology rather than just trying to coexist with it, but in both cases the way people respond to science varies more than anything inherent in the science itself.

Herzog’s most extreme example of online evil involves the grieving family of a mentally

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disturbed woman who died in a car crash. A first responder snapped a photo of her nearly decapitated body and e-mailed it to all his friends, turning the family’s tragedy into a meme. The mother is convinced that the Internet is the work of the Antichrist. But even in this case the culprit was a person pressing a couple buttons, not the buttons themselves.

Kevin Mitnick, one of the world’s most famous hackers, tells Herzog that, for better or worse, humans are the weak link. When the FBI was after him, he explains, he evaded capture by hacking into the bureau’s cell phones, which he accomplished by sweet-talking people at Motorola. There will always be security breaches, he argues, because there’s no end to our fallibility. Nothing we make will ever completely cover up our flaws, but developments like the Internet at least make it possible to dream of being better than we were yesterday. To counterbalance the dystopian misery described by some of the subjects, Herzog marshals a parade of technology’s greatest hopers and strivers, all of whom believe machines will be our salvation.

The most striking of them is engineer and inventor Elon Musk, currently at work on a project to build rockets so we can colonize

Mars. Musk figures that if we destroy the earth, there should be a plan B. In a way his project is both hopeful and fatalistic—it’s based on the dual assumptions that we deserve to survive but also need to be rescued from ourselves. When Herzog asks him about his dreams, Musk admits that they’re mostly nightmares. What he worries about most is not that his machines will fail but that people will use them for evil rather than good. This is true of most of the scientists interviewed; they seem to locate almost all the pitfalls in human rather than technological failure.

Self-driving automobiles, soccer-playing robots, communication devices hooked up directly to our brain waves, and many other unfathomable advances are developed to ease our way through life. All new technology is now interconnected, every device linked to every other device in order to function. We have become dependent on these networks to such an extent that even a short service disruption sends our lives into chaos. In Lo and Behold, footage of a pitch-black New York City after Hurricane Sandy and descriptions of how solar flares affect our electrical grids hint at the apocalyptic future possible because of this reliance. But there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Grappling with the miracles and the tragedies we have wrought, Herzog always returns to the idea that, no matter how far into science fiction we venture, our participation is still what matters most. Like the mysterious ocean in Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic Solaris (1972), technology can seemingly become whatever the user wants or needs it to be. When Herzog asks one scientist whether machines will ever have minds of their own, the man laughs and counters with his own question: Would he want his dishwasher to refuse to function because it didn’t feel like working? Whether hiding in the woods or flying to other planets, we still must account for our actions. No matter what good or ill may escape from the boxes we open, we will always be responsible for dealing with the consequences. v LO AND BEHOLD, REVERIES OF THE CONNECTED WORLD sss Directed by Werner Herzog.

108 min. Screens as part of the series “Doc10: A Festival of Documentary Gems” at Music Box; for more information and a full schedule visit musicboxtheatre.com. Sat 4/2, 1 PM, Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxthreatre. com, $12.

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Disoriented

By J.R. JONES

A

merica is a large, ethnically diverse region, and so is Asia, a fact that has always made the long-running Asian American Showcase an amorphous player among Chicago’s film festivals. The Showcase covers so many ethnicities that the only commonality is the friction between those cultures and the American melting pot, which gives the festival a thematic consistency many of its peers lack. Much of this year’s schedule, screening at Gene Siskel Film Center, consists of serious documentaries: Right Footed, about an armless Filipino-American who becomes a disability advocate; People Are the Sky, about a U.S. filmmaker returning to her native North Korea after 70 years; Tyrus: The Tyrus Wong Story, about the Chinese-American artist who crashed the white boys’ club at the Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s and became a key creative force on the classic Bambi. But opening and closing the festival are two crowdpleasing comedies—Seoul Searching and Good Ol’ Boy—that throw into high relief the culture clash between East and West that propels the Showcase year after year.

In SEOUL SEARCHING (Fri 4/1, 7:45 PM), writer-director Benson Lee revisits his experience

in the mid-1980s when, as a Korean-American teenager, he was sent to an annual summer camp in the title city to reconnect with his roots. Sort of a reverse melting pot, the camp pulls in second-generation expatriate kids from not only the U.S. but also Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the UK. Lee (who will attend the screening) has hit on a witty conceit for this cross-cultural gathering of kids: John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club. All the social types are here—a sultry Madonna clone, a rebellious punk rocker, a rigid ROTC cadet, a scowling tomboy—and for the most part the action consists of the boys trying to score with the girls and everyone trying to score liquor. (“While the intentions of the program were honorable, the activities of the teens were not,” Lee notes drily in his IMDb summary of the movie.) Accompanying all this is a selection of 80s pop tunes from some forgotten Time Life collection (“Should I Stay or Should I Go,” “I Want Candy,” “I Melt With You,” etc).

All this may sound unbearable, but the dialogue is clever and the movie’s premise allows for some eccentric and thought-provoking laughs. The ROTC kid, who lives in Virginia, drums up a feud with a trio of LA hip-hoppers, and given their shared racial heritage, the J

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MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE

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MADDIE HASSON

WRENN SCHMIDT

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“SEE IT FOR THE MAGNIFICENT TOM HIDDLESTON, WHO HONORS HANK WILLIAMS’ GREATNESS.” -Stephanie Zacharek, TIME

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Good Ol’ Boy

continued from 21

epithets he hurls at them—“porch monkeys,” “jigaboos”—seem less vile than ridiculous.

In classic Hughes fashion, the serious plotlines tend toward the mawkish, especially one in which a down-to-earth American girl (Rosalina Leigh), adopted as a child by German-American parents, tries to reconnect with the biological mother who gave her up.

But the teens’ cultural confusion dovetails nicely with the sort of identity crises that have made the Hughes movie an adolescent touchstone for years. The Breakfast Club kids can’t figure out who they are, but the Seoul Searching kids can’t even figure out where they’re from.

Nostalgia also figures heavily in Frank Lotito’s GOOD OL’ BOY (Thu 4/14, 8:15 PM), which takes place in 1979 in a suburb of Seattle. This time the hero is Indian-American, a small, bespectacled grade-schooler trying to survive in an era when his classmates still think Indians were made to get killed by cowboys. Like the teens in Seoul Searching, young Smith Bhatnagar (Roni Akurati) is besotted with American culture: Star Wars, Happy Days, Saturday Night Fever. Menaced on the street by a trio of bullies, he hurls a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken at them and takes off on his bike, which has a banana seat and streamers on the handlebars and a bullhorn that Smith often uses to call out “How are you doing?”

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to his neighbors (his father has told him that Americans like to be asked this). Perpetually the outsider, Smith pines for Amy (Brighton Sharbino), a blond classmate who lives across the street from him, and admires her good ol’ boy father, Butch (Jason Lee in a solid dramatic performance).

Smith can’t assimilate fast enough, but his father (Anjul Nigam, who will take questions

by Skype at the screening) has already betrothed him to a girl back in India and struggles to keep his son connected to their native culture. “Today it’s the apple pie, tomorrow it’s the Jesus!” he exclaims when the boy and his mother prevail upon him to invite the family across the street over for a barbecue.

The conflict between American and Indian culture generates plenty of laughs, not least when Smith’s mother presents him with the Halloween costume she’s been promising him for weeks and it’s the elephant-headed Ganesha; neighbors welcoming trick-or-treaters ask Smith why Dumbo has four arms, and one evangelical couple, informed that Ganesha is one of the Hindu gods, coldly reply, “There’s only one God.” Ganesh is Ganesh and Dumbo is Dumbo, and never the twain shall meet. v ASIAN AMERICAN SHOWCASE Fri 4/1–Thu 4/14, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-8462800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.

! @JR_Jones

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IN ROTATION

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

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

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

The cover of the Tigue album Peaks

This isn’t Jim Dorling’s Echoplex EP-2, but it is an Echoplex EP-2. ! COURTESY SOUNDGAS

PETER MARGASAK

JIM DORLING

SAM WAGSTER

Bobby Bradford & John Carter Quintet, No U Turn This fiery 1975 live set captures one of jazz’s greatest bands in a rarely documented period in its history. Its sound emerged from Ornette Coleman’s approach (cornetist Bobby Bradford sometimes worked with him), but by the mid-70s the group was on its own path, with John Carter moving from saxophone to clarinet. Together the horn men, drummer William Jeffrey, and the roiling basses of Roberto Miranda and Stanley Carter portend the structural ingenuity of Carter’s five-album landmark Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music.

This Heat, “Not Waving” I think there’s a kinder, gentler variation on the earworm— that catchy Top 40 hit that torments us when we just can’t stop replaying it in our heads— and the bass clarinet part in this song, from This Heat’s self-titled 1979 debut album, is the perfect example. Every now and then, in the years since I bought the first reissue of this classic avant-postpunk record, I’ll notice this song’s pulse playing in my head, and I’ll think, “How nice—I wonder what it’s called.”

So I recently went back and put it on, and it turns out it’s a totally immersive meditation on drowning.

Tigue, Peaks Lots of percussion groups are pushing the boundaries of new music, including New York trio Tigue, but they still really like to bang on things. Peaks is a visceral eight-movement work that Matt Evans, Amy Garapic, and Carson Moody have written more like a band than like ivory-tower composers. It progresses seamlessly through punishing backbeats, hovering drones, and spiky tuned percussion, and it’s always electric.

Echoplex EP-2 I got a deal on this vintage tape-echo pedal last summer at a flea market and then paid twice as much to get it repaired. Owning this high-maintenance effect makes me think of keeping a Tamagotchi, those Japanese electronic pets you have to feed or they die: tons of splicing, carefully feeding the tape into the transport, then praying it won’t jam during a show. But the payoff is worth it—this is the most musical “pedal” I own, not so much an effect as an instrument in its own right.

Alice Coltrane, Infinite Chants On this later Alice Coltrane record from 1990, she’s completely transformed—since her late-60s jazz records, she’d converted to Hinduism, changed her name to Turiyasangitananda, and traveled far from that musical territory. Using her voice and synth against the backdrop of an Indian choir and percussion ensemble, she sets up a devotional, meditative trance plateau, then ascends or descends to another using the modulation wheel of the synth.

There’s still a lot of gospel and blues (especially in her deep, rich singing), and she blends it seamlessly with the new Eastern presentation.

The traditional chanting has an earthbound quality that makes the astral synth and tonal moves that much more compelling. There’s no way to finish this record in a bad mood.

Reader music critic

International Contemporary Ensemble, On the Nature of Thingness: Music by Phyllis Chen and Nathan Davis Keyboardist Phyllis Chen and percussionist Nathan Davis are terrific composers and key members of New York’s International Contemporary Ensemble. This 2016 release collects ICE commissions from both, including toy-piano works

by Chen (such as “Chimers”) and Davis’s fourmovement title piece, a tour de force for soprano Tony Arnold and a large ensemble.

Singer for the Pillowhammer

Big Youth, “Hotter Fire” This 1976 tune uses classic everything-and-the–kitchen-sink dub reggae production: In addition to the usual echo and a few totally saturated thunder samples, a siren keeps cycling through to suck all the air out of the mix. It’s a jarring effect, reminiscent of the inept stereo panning at end of Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive.” Only he keeps doing it, and it’s a goddamn siren.

The cover of Infinite Chants by Alice Coltrane, also known as Turiyasangitananda

Guitarist for the Father Costume

Billy Strayhorn, Piano Passion Part of what made Duke Ellington’s 25-year collaboration with composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn so great was hearing Strayhorn’s introverted, lyrical tunes projected through Ellington’s large ensemble and persona. This rare collection of Strayhorn playing his own songs on piano (mostly solo, with occasional strings and wordless vocal harmonies) lets you hear Strayhorn’s inventive voice leadings and tense harmonies closer to their origin.

Cameo live in 1980 on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert Cameo before the codpiece-andflattop era is unbelievable: every member dancing, playing, and singing with energy and precision in matching onesies. This will get you stoked on the F-word.

LAST YEAR, GOSSIP WOLF was stoked to report that one-man electro army Jim Magas was launching a label called Midwich—and this week the Bleader premieres tracks from new Midwich releases

by Hide and Alex Barnett! Reader music editor Philip Montoro compares Hide’s “muscular, minimalist tracks” to “something you’d hear at a gas-powered vampire disco in a Mad Max movie”—check out the local industrial duo’s Flesh for the Living 12-inch and tell us they don’t run Bartertown! Barnett has filled his Midwich LP, Chew From the Mind, with creepy drones and claustrophobic electronics that could soundtrack a slow-build horror film—“Slapwalk,” for instance, weaves together twitchy synths and disembodied rhythms. Hide and Barnett play a release party at the Empty Bottle on Sat 4/2.

When the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture opens in September, it’ll contain a piece of midwest music history: the original 1976 seven-inch of Death’s “Politicians in My Eyes” b/w “Keep on Knockin” that Moniker Records founder Robert Manis bought on eBay in 2007. Manis eventually connected the surviving members of the Detroit protopunk group to Drag City, which has released a whole slew of Death recordings. Manis says he donated the seven-inch to the Smithsonian in October and finished the paperwork last month.

“It’s meant to be on display, not stored in a box on my shelf,” he explains.

GlitterGuts run Gossip Wolf’s favorite party photo booths, but they’re also nightlife impresarios. They’re part of the team behind sexy R&B dance monthly Bump & Grindcore, and now they’ve put together an event that’s got this Wolf digging through the memory Dumpster for old stories: a tribute to Wesley Willis! Expect lots of classic Wesley Willis Fiasco tracks, fan art, and a live band. The fun goes down Wed 4/6 at Beauty Bar, and it’s free!

—J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 23

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4/10: GEOGRAPHER, 4/11: FLESH PANTHERS (FREE!), 4/12: TAMAR APHEK, 4/13: TIM HECKER, 4/16: OBN IIIs, 4/17: BULL TO BEAR MARKET + FUNDRRAISER FOR EL RESCATE (12PM-FREE!), 4/17: CLOROX GIRLS, 4/18: TOUCHED BY GHOUL (RECORD RELEASE), 4/19: GO COZY, 4/20: GLITTER CREEPS PRESENTS MTVGHOSTS, 4/21: ACID DAD, 4/22: BLEACHED, 4/23: WINDY CITY SOUL CLUB, 4/24: BLOODYMINDED, 4/25: GEL SET (FREE!), 4/26: KLAUS JOHANN GROBE, 4/27: FAT WHITE FAMILY • DILLY DALLY, 4/28: LORD MANTIS (RECORD RELEASE), 4/29: NATURAL CHILD NEW ON SALE: 5/10: CHAIN & THE GANG, 5/19: BEN FROST, 6/2: PEANUT BUTTER WOLF, 6/19: CHASTITY BELT, 6/24: WUSSY

Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of March 31

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F

Lucinda Williams ! PAUL MORIGI/GETTY

THURSDAY31

Chris Spencer DJ Charlie Coffeen spins.

9:30 PM, Whistler, 2421 N. Milwaukee. F

Sheer Mag See Pick of the Week. Laffing Gas, Mama, and the Bug open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10.

Chicago rappers Chris Crack and Vic Spencer will gladly point out that their shared affection for 90s hip-hop and religious devotion to lyricism drove them to work together. But their biggest commonality is that they both paved their own paths, undeterred by the thicket covering the trail ahead or the well-documented routes of people in and around their spheres. On their debut as Chris Spencer, January’s Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer? (Perpetual Rebel), the irascible, growling Spencer and the whimsical, piercing Crack circle one another, volleying verses dense with acerbic one-liners that pop like a string of firecrackers. The pair’s wordplay often takes center stage, but things really light up when they vigorously throw words against instrumentals—with its bumping, mutated horn sample and stomach-churning bass, the sauntering “No Biggie” slays. —LEOR GALIL

Chris Pitsiokos 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10 sugested donation. b

PICK OF THE WEEK

Sheer Mag move their dusty-lick classic rock out of the basement ! COURTESY THE ARTIST

SHEER MAG, LAFFING GAS, MAMA, THE BUG

Thu 3/31, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10

MAYBE PHILLY’S SHEER MAG had planned on paying dues in the gauntlet of DIY-punk basements a while longer, but fact is that their style of hook-loaded, dusty-lick classic rock just ain’t abrasive enough to keep ’em in the trenches (take note of their upcoming getaway to Coachella). Now, only three four-song EPs in—the brand new III dropped earlier this month on Static Shock—the fivesome sound like they’ve further honed their din down to a Phil Lynott-approved superscience: keep the drumming airtight, the guitar playing hot-to-trot, and the strut tough as nails. This is the hard 70s-rock sound you want to imagine your dad was boss enough to be into—without having to also imagine him sporting a feathered cut and a pair of leather pants. Sheer Mag are led by the cutting wail of front woman Tina Halladay, which is blown out and lo-fi enough on the record to shoot right through the warm riffs from the dueling guitars of Kyle Seely and Matt Palmer. The aforementioned EP’s opener, “Can’t Stop Fighting,” is a top-down jam pulled gently along by a breezy but triumphant attitude, while “Worth the Tears” is a more solemn track built around Halladay’s sincere vocal melodies. And both sound so vintage cool—like they were recorded to analog tape by a dude in a denim vest with a Marlboro Red hanging out of his mouth—that you can’t believe they’re the product of a posse of mostly twentysomethings.

—KEVIN WARWICK

A year ago I had never heard of 25-year-old New York saxophonist and composer Chris Pitsiokos, and now it seems like I see his name everywhere.

He’s turned up on four albums I’ve acquired since last summer, and his fiery presence dominates each—not because he showboats, but because his intense focus and energy are impossible to ignore.

His music is rooted in free improvisation, and he’s one of a growing number of musicians influenced by the unchecked aggression of onetime Chicagoan Weasel Walter (with whom he’s regularly played), melding the fury of death metal and hardcore with extended techniques. Pitsiokos pushes his music to extremes: on last year’s relentless, well-titled Paroxysm (Carrier) his upper-register screams and serrated tone wed brutally with the lacerating electronics of Philip White, dissolving boundaries between noise and free jazz with a flailing blast. The pair are less strident but no less ferocious on the superb new Collective Effervescence (Clean Feed), an improvised quintet session organized by rising Slovenian drummer Dre Hocevar. His trio with bassist Max Johnson and drummer Kevin Shea nominally pushes closer into jazz territory on last year’s Gordian Twine (New Atlantis), with bebop-fast phrasing veering into gnarled, knotted passages, though the ballad “Lachesis” proves the group can be tender too. His new trio’s eponymous debut, Protean Reality (Clean Feed), also deploys jazz phrasing, but the muscular electric-bass abstractions of Noah Punkt and the post-Weasel Walter spasms of drummer Philipp Scholz carve out yet another space for the saxophonist to play within. In his Chicago debut Pitsiokos leads a quartet with drummer Jason Nazary, guitarist Andrew Smiley, and electric bassist Henry Fraser that plays compositions whose taut, polymetric grooves suggest the influence of Steve Coleman. He’ll kick off the evening with a solo set.

—PETER MARGASAK

FRIDAY1 Aoife O’Donovan Mark Erelli opens. 9 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago, Evanston, $17.50-$30. b

With her complex second solo album, In the Magic Hour (Yep Roc), conservatory-trained singer Aoife O’Donovan consolidates her strengths. Similar to her strong 2013 debut, Fossils, the record is rooted in a kind of rootsy folk-pop, and it freely dips into a variety of specific traditions, like the bluegrass from her old band Crooked Still or the Irish folk that lives in her blood. The Bostonian’s lyrics were largely composed in the wake of her Irish grandfather’s death at 93, and she doesn’t sugarcoat subjects like loneliness, mortality, or flight, but the peerless production of Tucker Martine and the richly textured arrangements—performed by an allstar cast that includes Chris Thile, Sarah Jarosz, and Eyvind Kang—help it all go down smoothly (as does her clarion voice, which manages to sound ethereal without floating away). One of O’Donovan’s numerous songs using bird imagery, opener “Stanley Park” confronts debilitating sadness, while a take on the traditional Irish song “Donal Og”—which incorporates the voice of her grandfather—rhapso- J

MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 25

bottom lounge ®

ONSALE NOW

MUSIC

delta rae / chris bathgate

w / daniel wade

03.31 WE THE KINGS

AJR / SHE IS WE / ELENA COATS & BROTHERS JAMES

04.01 SLAVES

CAPTURE THE CROWN / MYKA, RELOCATE / OUTLINE IN COLOR / CONQUER DIVIDE

SUNDAY, APRIL 10 PARK WEST

8:00pm • 18 & Over Tickets Purchased for The Vic honored

04.02 DELTA RAE

CHRIS BATHGATE

SILVER WRAPPER PRESENTS

04.07 TURBOSUIT / ZOOGMA TREES

04.08 THE EXPENDABLES

PETE HOLMES

JON WAYNE & THE PAYNE / TUNNEL VISION

04.09 PORCHES / ALEX G YOUR FRIEND

WKQX WELCOMES

04.12 ATLAS GENIUS

SKYLAR GREY / SECRET WEAPONS

04.15 THE WILD FEATHERS THE SHELTERS

SILVER WRAPPER PRESENTS

04.16 RANDOM RAB

04.17 THE SPILL CANVAS DANIEL WADE

04.20 THE WHITE BUFFALO ALICE DRINKS THE KOOL AID

SATURDAY APRIL 16 VIC THEATRE

04.23 KVELERTAK

TORCHE / WILD THRONE

04.24 THE SUMMER SET

HANDSOME GHOST / CALL ME KARIZMA

05.07 POINT BREAK LIVE!

SPECIAL TAPING

2 SHOWS 7:30 & 10PM 18 & OVER

PETE DAVIDSON The Prehab Tour

05.15 ENTER SHIKARI

HANDS LIKE HOUSES / THE WHITE NOISE

05.16 BEACH SLANG

POTTY MOUTH / DYKE DRAMA / TURNSPIT

05.17 BLAQK AUDIO NIGHT RIOTS

05.28 WELSHLY ARMS

continued from 25

WILD ADRIATIC

dizes a life of misery within a shimmering, haunting drone that features elaborate overdubbed vocals. Rarely has devastation sounded so beautiful.

—PETER MARGASAK

06.09 LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES 06.18 ANDY BLACK- THE HOMECOMING TOUR 06.24 WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS 07.09 PITY SEX www.bottomlounge.com 1375 w lake st 312.666.6775

26 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

THURSDAY, JUNE 23 VIC THEATRE 7:30pm • 18 & Over ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM! BUY TICKETS AT

Thao & the Get Down Stay Down Saintseneca open. 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $22-$25, $20 in advance. b I’d notice the sly, intuitive, and infectious phrasing of Thao Nguyen in about any setting, and for her terrific new album A Man Alive (Ribbon Music), she

worked with Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards to radically reconfigure her approach. The record is credited to Nguyen’s long-running band the Get Down Stay Down, but she and Garbus use that group’s output more as digital building blocks, carving out a wonderfully angular, rhythmically enhanced sound world that allows for the terse delivery of cryptic lyrics and puts her curved, sensual melodic shapes into greater relief. Pulsing synthetic bass and piles of drum samples are bifurcated by guitar licks that appear as suddenly as they disappear, giving the music a dry funk. “The Evening” sounds like Liquid Liquid trying to play a Marvin Gaye jam, and a stuttering groove on “Departure” sounds like a mashup

Where are the rest of the music listings?

Find them at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

between a martial snare-drum roll and a misguided Autechre homage—and still the rhythmic schemes never overshadow the melodies. Nguyen’s lyrics are abstract, but as the album progresses they coalesce into an essay on the father who left her as a child.

She lashes out with anger on “Nobody Dies” as she sings, “You made a cruel kid,” while on “Guts” she vulnerably pleads, “You know I’m so easy to find.”

Despite the record’s sliced-and-diced production, Nguyen hasn’t stopped writing great tunes—and I have no doubt that her band will bring something new to this material live. —PETER MARGASAK

Lucinda Williams See also Saturday and Sunday. Buick 6 open. 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, sold out. b Lucinda Williams is in the midst of one of the most prolific periods in a storied career that’s been distinguished in part by a sometimes-paralyzing meticulousness—she did, after all, spend three years recording, dumping, and rerecording her 1998 masterpiece Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (Mercury). A couple of years ago she formed the label Highway 20 to release the powerful two-CD set Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, a richly varied collection that finds her working at the highest level of quality, and now she’s back with another double-CD opus, The Ghosts of Highway 20, this one fueled by memories of living in locales connected by the titular route. The dark reveries are marked by emotional bruises and close brushes with death, and nearly all of the 14 extended tracks crawl at leisurely tempos as they’re given languid voice by the singer’s singular drawl. Despite the often relentless gloom that’s painted over harrowing blues and drones, there’s a sense of survival sweetened by the gorgeous lead guitar work from Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz, and Williams allows her extraordinary voice to wear various burrs, scratches, and rasps like badges of honor.

—PETER MARGASAK

SATURDAY2 Hide Alex Barnett, Magas, and Viki Viktoria open; DJ Mike Broers spins. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $5.

I’ve known Seth Sher since the early 2000s, when he still played in Coughs, and I liked his drumming in Ga’an enough that I tried to start a double-trapkit band with him several years back. So when I learned two summers ago that he and artist Heather Gabel had started a gothic electronic duo called Hide, I thought I’d miss the live drums—until I saw the band onstage. Sinister synths throb urgently or twist in drifting sheets, and the frequent use of four-on-the-floor kick makes the muscular, minimalist tracks feel like something you’d hear at a gas-powered vampire disco in a Mad Max movie.

The creepy textures in Sher’s percussion—tapping, chuffing, scraping, chattering—sound like being trapped in a pitch-black cave, surrounded by terrifyingly agile creatures you can’t see. Hide heighten this effect live by performing without stage lighting—just a smoke machine and a battery of seizure-inducing strobes synced to the kick drums.

Almost everything is saturated in reverb and delay,

especially Gabel’s foggy vocals—she favors haunted incantations over sung melodies, and sometimes climbs from a numb monotone to a ragged holler.

Hide have put out three cassette EPs, most recently in March 2015, and they make their vinyl debut on April 1 with the Midwich 12-inch Flesh for the Living (this show is a double Midwich release party for Hide and opener Alex Barnett, who’s in Oakeater with Sher). The new record’s primitive riffs and melodies stay drawn-out and deliberate, no matter how frantic the rhythms get: the 16th-note pulse of “Flesh for the Living,” which sounds like the score of an eight-bit racing game, changes pitch only once briefly each bar, and the plodding, pitch-bent basssynth lick in “Limb From Limb” blows out a sawtooth waveform so insanely you can practically hear the speaker cones flapping. —PHILIP MONTORO

Mamiffer Cleared, Jon Mueller, and Andy Ortmann open. 8 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $12.

Never stroll into a saga from Faith Coloccia (Everloving Lightningheart) and her husband, Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, Sumac), expecting to find cleanly paved roads cut by steadfast rhythms and direct vocals. Their newest, The World Unseen (Sige), features horizon after horizon after horizon of coalescing drones created by bass synthesizer, organ, and guitar—undoubtedly strung through a gaggle of effects pedals (one of Turner’s specialties). Prolonged, forlorn string arrangements dictated by hired hand Eyvind Kang—one of several contributors to the record—accompany the pair’s sinister but blindingly gorgeous soundscapes in such a way that you only notice them once you begin peeling away the layers of each mammoth track. Coloccia has described the album as “imperfect,” going on to say “It has within its heart an incompleteness, a stillness containing the presence of absence and loss.” While that’s certainly true of the fragmented and noisy three-part subset of tracks “Domestication of the Ewe,” the album’s most complete song, “Mara,” is also its most striking. Girded by a gentle ascending-descending piano line and low-lying strings, Coloccia’s wispy vocals are spiritual in construct, and the way they cascade, one line gently sliding over another, is downright uplifting.

—KEVIN WARWICK

Of the Wand and the Moon Die Weisse Rose, Blood & Sun, and Vril Jager open. 9 PM, Burlington, 3425 W. Fullerton, $15 suggested donation.

There’s long been a rich tradition of acoustic guitars in goth music, with the black-clad crowd revering bands like Death in June and Current 93 for their folk-noir approach in what’s perhaps a welcome respite from the gnashing, industrial body music of moldy goth bars. Having previously recorded with doom band Saturnus, Kim Larsen has spent the last 15 years strumming his guitar and penning lyrics about Satan, the nihilism of romantic love, and fields of dying flowers for the project :Of the Wand and the Moon: (colons intentional). Larsen delights in crafting bummer fairy tales, and the chasm of his heartbreaking lyrics runs so deep and dark that it could only J

MARCH 31ST

FLATBUSH ZOMBIES

W/ A$AP 12VY & REMY BANKS

APRIL 1ST

BOOMBOX (NIGHT ONE)

APRIL 2ND

BOOMBOX (NIGHT TWO)

FRIDAY, APRIL 1 CUBBY BEAR 1059 W. Addison - Chicago, IL 773-327-1662 9 p.m. - Ages 21+ - $10 www.gratefuldeadtribute.com

APRIL 8TH JAUZ

W/ ARYAY *SOLD OUT*

APRIL 9TH

JUSTIN QUILES

APRIL 16TH

TWIDDLE W/SOAP

APRIL 17TH

SANTIGOLD

W/ DONMONIQUE *SOLD OUT*

APRIL 19TH

FEAR FACTORY W/ SOILWORK

APRIL 22ND

RECESS

W/ SNBRN & SUPERDUPERKYLE

APRIL 23RD

TKA

W/ CORO & SWEET SENSATION

WWW.CONCORDMUSICHALL.COM 2047 N. MILWAUKEE | 773.570.4000

3855 N. LINCOLN

martyrslive.com

THU, 3/31

MAURICE, ED QUARTET, OUTERTOWN FRI, 4/1

CROSSTOWN, MAWCREST, POST ANIMAL SAT 4/2

HONEY & THE 45’S, MURLEY, BETA DOGS MON, 4/4

KILGUBBIN BROTHERS TUE, 4/5

THE HURTIN KIND, THE CUBES WED, 4/6

BRONTE FALL, BERNIE & THE WOLF, WALCOT THU, 4/7 - 7PM

DAPHNE WILLIS, DAN RODRIGUEZ THU, 4/7 - 9:30PM- NO COVER

BIG C JAMBOREE… POSSUM HOLLOW BOYS FRI, 4/8

ZACH DEPUTY, SON OF ABBEY SAT, 4/9 - JAM PRESENTS...

SONGHOY BLUES

MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 27

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

MUSIC

Where are the rest of the music listings?

Find them at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Heather Gabel of Hide

JUST ADDED • ON SALE THIS FRIDAY! 6/12 6/26

Richard Shindell Dry Branch Fire Squad

! AUTUMN SPADARO

VISIT OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG TO BUY TICKETS! SATURDAY, APRIL 2 8PM

The Nields

In Szold Hall

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6 7PM

Habib Koité & Vusi Mahlasela Acoustic Africa THURSDAY, APRIL 7 7 & 10PM

Deer Tick “Acoustic” with special guest Ryley Walker FRIDAY, APRIL 8 8PM

Chris Hillman & Herb Pedersen SATURDAY, APRIL 9 7 & 10PM

Marshall Crenshaw & The Bottle Rockets SATURDAY, APRIL 9 8PM

SERDAR ILHAN PRESENTS

Erkan Ogur & Ismail Hakki Demircioglu with special guest Michael J. Miles with David Jennings • In Szold Hall

SUNDAY, APRIL 10 7PM

April Verch

In Szold Hall

THURSDAY, APRIL 14 7 & 9:30PM

Taj Mahal Trio SUNDAY, APRIL 17 11AM & 7PM

Lisa Loeb Kids concert at 11am! All ages at 7pm ACROSS THE STREET IN SZOLD HALL 4545 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL

4/8

Global Dance Party: Bollywood Masala 4/14 Inside/Out with Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre 4/15 Global Dance Party: Dabkeh: Palestinian Folk Dance

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE

4/6 Warrior King (In Szold Hall) 4/13 Paula Monsalve

OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG 28 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

continued from 27

come from fiction—but he’s a bard only in the storyteller sense. The torment he describes is frightfully real, though we’re never likely to find a dead lover within a ghostly cathedral ruin. It’s romance from the most orthodox end: there’s a yearning for the mystical realm to open up and swallow our existence whole, and a suffering that comes with realizing it’s impossible. Larsen’s world of demonic butterflies and fiery seraphim may never overtake our own, but his carpeting voice acts as a gentle enough guide. Tonight’s highly anticipated show is sure to turn out the city’s most refined goths, trailing their incense auras behind them.

—MEAGAN FREDETTE

Lucinda Williams See Friday. Buick 6 open.

8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, sold out. b

the lyrics are hopelessly convoluted and confused, but the honesty they strive for together with the group’s unfussy music make the album as special and appealing as anything I’ve heard this year.

Scottish guitar whiz Cian Nugent turns singer-songwriter on his new album Night Fiction (Woodist).

Over the course of three previous records he’s expanded his solo fingerstyle roots into a rich fantasia of group-oriented jazz, rock, and even ragtime.

Unfortunately his singing ability is no match for his guitar playing and in fact detracts from the more interesting things surrounding it, whether it’s the surprising soul modes on “First Run” or the crystalline, post-Tom Verlaine tones he plays on “Nightlife.”

When he keeps his mouth shut, as he does during most of the chugging Motorik frenzy of “Year of the Snake,” there’s nothing to get in the way of his guitar mastery. —PETER MARGASAK

SUNDAY3

Lucinda Williams See Friday. Buick 6 open.

7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, sold out. b

Nap Eyes, Cian Nugent Nap Eyes headline; Cian Nugent and Matchess open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10.

TUESDAY5

On their strong new album Thought Rock Fish Scale (Paradise of Bachelors) Halifax quartet Nap Eyes trim an already lean sound as a pair of scrappy strummed guitars carve out tentative spaces for singer Nigel Chapman’s quasi-poetic ramblings, done in his best bored Lou Reed persona. But that description doesn’t do justice to the combo’s infectious, homespun sound, which conveys a special kind of intimacy that invites you in. The songs seem to grapple with being stuck in the town where you grew up, and the narrators yearn for something they don’t have the wherewithal to go after. Some of

G Herbo Pusha T headlines; Lil Bibby and G Herbo open. 8 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield, $38, $35 in advance. 18+ When teenager Fazon Robinson, known to his friends as Fazo, was shot and killed in April 2010 on 79th Street a few blocks west of the lake, the website Chicago Breaking News published a short report misnaming him “Fasion.” Three years later Jacobi D. Herring, better known as Kobe, was murdered on 79th Street a handful of blocks west from where Robinson was slain—and the Sun- J

APRIL 15-17, 2016 • THE WESTIN O’HARE ROSEMONT • Hi-Fi Audio Demonstrations in Living Room style environments.

• Expos with Vinyl, Headphones, CDs, Turntables and accessories!

• Show Specials, Live Music and More!

Friday Night Concert:

Akiko Tsuruga Jazz Trio

Saturday Night is Blues Night!

Lurrie Bell’s Chicago Blues Band Plus Noah Wotherspoon

Lots more live music every day of the show ... jazz, blues, classical!

Buy Tickets Today! www.axpona.com

LEARN THE SONGS YOU LOVE. LOVE THE SONGS YOU LEARN. Sign up for classes at oldtownschool.org

LINCOLN SQUARE • LINCOLN PARK

MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 29

“A Musical Gem” - NY Times 1800 W. DIVISION

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

(773) 486-9862

6615 W. ROOSEVELT RD., BERWYN FRI

1

FRED EAGLESMITH’S

TRAVELING STEAM SHOW

w/special guest TIF GINN In The SideBar -- POLYRHYTHMIC SAT

2

LAUREN ANDERSON BAND

plus JOHN DEL TORO RICHARDSON

SUN

THE LEGENDARY

COUNT BASIE ORCHESTRA 3 with vocalist CARMEN BRADFORD 2 SHOWS - 4pm & 7pm

TUE

5

WDCB & Lagunitas Present BLUESDAY TUESDAY Blues & BBQ hosted by Tom Marker

6pm - BBQ by Autre Monde 7pm - JOHN PRIMER BAND WED

6

THU

7

10 STRING SYMPHONY w/special guest DICKIE

MIKE TANGORRA’S ALL-STAR JAM

SAT

RONNIE BAKER BROOKS

9

Quilt ! DANIEL DORSA

FRIDAY, APRIL 1......................SKIPPIN ROCK SUNDAY, APRIL 3....................BRIAN HOYT MIKE FELTON WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6 .............ANDREW HUBER SUSIE CHAY THURSDAY, APRIL 7 ...............SMILING BOBBY FRIDAY APRIL 8 ......................PETE BERWICK SUNDAY, APRIL 10..................HEISENBERG UNCERTAINTY PLAYERS MONDAY, APRIL 11.................RC BIG BAND TUESDAY, APRIL 12.................THE FLABBY HOFFMAN SHOW WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13...........ELIZABETH HARPER’S LITTLE THING THURSDAY, APRIL 14 ..............THE FLABBY HOFFMAN SHOW FT. NATALIE NIMERALA SATURDAY, APRIL 16...............FROZEN BLUES BAND EVERY MONDAY AT 9PM CHRIS SHUTTLEWORTH QUINTET EVERY TUESDAY AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMI JON AMERICA

SideBar Sessions Jazz- NEW STANDARD QUINTET

FRI

8

Come enjoy one of Chicago’s finest beer gardens!

MUSIC

Where are the rest of the music listings?

Find them at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

4/15 - Special Consensus / Henhouse Prowlers 4/16 - Tommy Castro & The Painkillers 4/17 - Stan Kenton Legacy Orchestra 4/20 - Jarod Bufe Quartet (SideBar) 4/20 - Graham Parker / Brinsley Schwarz 4/21 - Morry Sochat & the Special 20’s 4/22 - Little Charlie, Anson Funderbugh, Mark Hummel Golden State Revue 4/22 - Rented Mules (SideBar) 4/23 - Sarah Borges / Amazing Heebie Jeebies 4/23 - Ralph Covert’s Acoustic Army (SideBar)

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continued from 28

Times’s Homicide Watch scraped together two paragraphs about “Jacoby Herron.” The botched names suggest that to many Chicagoans—news outlets included—those kids represented nothing more than single digits added to a list of hundreds murdered in the city each year. But they were friends of southeast-side rapper G Herbo, formerly known as Lil Herb. “I’m world-wide but lost my niggas on the same street,” he raps with grit and force on “Bricks & Mansions,” one of the early tracks from last year’s Ballin Like I’m Kobe (Cinematic Music Group), which is named after Herring.

In the broader pop world Herbo’s still an unknown with something to prove, but among hip-hop heads he’s been a star on the rise since his breakthrough 2014 mixtape, Welcome to Fazoland (yes, named after Robinson). Herbo can easily tap into the intensity that made drill a phenomenon while instilling an affecting pathos with acerbic storytelling and rapid-fire rapping. On Ballin he augments his dark, heartfelt raps with sweet soul samples, which creates an air of invitation even as he spills his guts about the dozens of friends he still mourns—in his hands those friends are much more than digits. —LEOR GALIL

Eartheater Sarah Neufeld’s the Ridge headline. 8 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago, Evanston, $15-$25. b As Eartheater, Alexandra Drewchin bends experimental and folk music toward pop’s fringes. On last year’s Metalepsis and RIP Chrysalis, both of which came out on excellent Chicago label Hausu Mountain, Drewchin’s unearthly vocals rocket her material toward a low orbit as she weaves featherweight sheets of burbling electronics to nimble acoustic instrumentation (plucked guitars, pitter-patter

percussion, etc). You often have to strain to pick up the finer details, but that’s not a hard-and-fast rule—“Youniverse” is stoked with a gnarly guitar melody that sounds seconds away from exploding—and whatever volume Drewchin selects usually helps her work stick at an unexpected angle, like a wad of gum clinging to the sole of your shoe. On “Mask Therapy” she takes a sparse melody populated by low-humming guitars, muted dance beats, and what sounds like field recordings of a bat and elevates it with an overdubbed chorus of sirenlike warbles—the song radiates even as its quiet pulse echoes to a close. —LEOR GALIL

Quilt Vast Canvas open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $12. 18+ Quilt are a compulsively referential band, but on a track like “Roller,” the chiming guitars, infectious bass line, and coy vocals of Anna Fox Rochinskialmost uncannily recall one group in particular: the Bangles. That might sound like a dis, since the Bangles are mostly seen as an 80s curiosity rather than a critical touchstone. But they happen to be one of my favorite bands, and Quilt’s third album, February’s Plaza (Mexican Summer), is a retro take on their sugary, hyperpolished 60s pop. “Searching For” includes Bangles-y harmonies between Shane Butler and Rochinski and a chiming, sitarlike guitar that echoes the Monkees-do-the-Beatles spirit.

With its loping pace and guitars that imitate pedal steel, “Padova” sounds like the Byrds’ countrified version of the Brit invasion. The songs’ familiarity isn’t irritating or disappointing—just as with Susanna Hoffs and company, it’s the point. Quilts are beautiful because you take old bits and pieces and patch them together in a new familiar form. “My love, my friend, will I see you again?” Butler sings on “Own Ways,” a sepia-toned sentiment couched in the phrases of sepia-toned sentiments past. Like the Bangles, Quilt are great because they love the same music you love. —NOAH BERLATSKY v

FOOD & DRINK

R BUNNY, THE MICRO BAKERY | $$ 2928 N. Broadway bunnythemicrobakery.com

Clockwise from left: foie gras toast, coffee, toad in the hole, and mushroom tea at Bunny, the Micro Bakery ! DANIELLE SCRUGGS

NEW REVIEW

Iliana Regan makes more magic at Bunny, the Micro Bakery At her pygmy patisserie in Lakeview, the Elizabeth chef does wonders with toast and some startlingly refined specials.

By MIKE SULA

L

ast summer the food world was freaking out over “artisanal toast,” pricey butter-and-jam-smeared slices from high-grade wholegrain loaves, like something your weather-beaten ancestors might have kneaded out of einkorn, oats, and prairie dust. Many laughed at the presumption of this latest outrage of food-hipster pretension, but nobody’s laughing at Bunny, Elizabeth chef Iliana Regan’s latest effort, a bakery in a Lakeview shoebox of such modest dimensions she dubs it “the Micro Bakery.” Hundreds of its artfully framed toasts populate Instagram, all taken by the gentle light of the front window on a single wooden bench table seating 12—tops. The space is compact, but not so Lilliputian that it can’t serve as a bread-baking classroom or as the scene of Regan’s periodic Wunder Pop dinner series.

Behold the toast. There’s the glistening salmon poke crowned with a golden egg yolk, shimmering on a slice of deep green seaweed sourdough.

There’s the toad in the hole—mineral-rich grass-fed beef tartare, capers, and garlic aioli concealing a dripping egg. And there’s the lightly pickled mackerel with herb-infused butter on seeded rye.

But no slice—probably no single dish in Chicago currently—has been so relentlessly documented as Bunny’s foie gras toast. It’s a buttery slice of brioche (or sturdier nut-berry), smeared with raspberry jam and topped with a tiny molded owl figurine made from foie gras mousse— so cute you’ll evacuate rainbows.

It’s a breakfast made more for social media than for eating (which might be why no one complains that the heavy smear of preserves overwhelms the rich, creamy bird liver). But Regan is Chicago’s only magical-realist chef, and it’s a beacon of the whimsical style on display at her flagship restaurant. Pair the toast with a cup of her beefy mushroom tea with chamomile buds and cocoa nibs and you’re breakfasting

through the Looking Glass.

Thick crusty bread is also the vehicle for rotating specials that highlight the sort of ingenuity you could previously experience only by paying hundreds of dollars at Elizabeth. You may find Sichuan peppercorn-spiked dulce de leche and chile de arbol whipped cream one day. Or scrambled eggs, house-made kimchi, and wood ear mushrooms marinated in sweet soy sauce on another. These special toasts aren’t cheap, ranging from $9-$12 each, but more modest toppings (bread, jam, yogurt, honey, ricotta) at $2-$4 per slice can lower the bill and help you save room for lunch specials like a cheeseburger on a caraway brioche bun or a shredded kale salad with shaved sheep’s milk cheese.

There’s also a “Dutch oven of the day,” always some sort of soupy/ stewy brew poured over chunks of buttery toasted sourdough, such as a French onion soup built on a powerfully umamic vegan stock made with charred onions. Specials of startling refinement include a bowl of chewy house-made spaghetti in a tart cream sauce made from nutty Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese, garnished with nasturtium flowers and shaved cured egg yolk—something that wouldn’t be out of place on the table at Elizabeth.

Airy, cheesy gougeres, towering buttermilk biscuits, crumbly blueberry thumbprint cookies made with acorn flour, whiskey-glazed doughnuts, and spongy but crisp-edged canele are the sort of treasures that fill up the modest pastry case. But Bunny’s all about the bread. Hearty, crusty boules with an open, pillowy crumb are sold for takeaway, including varieties made with kamut and flaxseed, oat porridge, and whole wheat. Bunny’s black boule, colored with squid ink and ensanguined with pork blood, is a tribute to Tyrion Lannister’s visit to Castle Black, created for a Game of Thrones dinner at Elizabeth, proving that even in a bakery Regan’s dark sense of humor translates. v

! @MikeSula

MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 31

Low Brow Aloha ArtShow april 2, 2016

12-5pm

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○ Watch a video of Mfk’s Roger Landes making this cocktail—and get the recipe— at chicagoreader.com/food.

FOOD & DRINK COCKTAIL CHALLENGE

The seaweed inside

By JULIA THIEL

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$1.25 TACOS TUESDAYS (CHICKEN, GROUND BEEF, CHORIZO OR CARNITAS)

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Prospero’s Manhattan by Mfk bartender Roger Landes ! CORY POPP

I

have a very short list of things I don’t eat,” ROGER LANDES says. “SEAWEED is nearly at the top of that list.”

So the MFK bartender had some research to do after CALVIN MARTY of BEST INTENTIONS challenged him to create a cocktail with the marine algae. “I unfortunately had to taste a lot of different seaweed, in a Sisyphean act of valor,” he says. “I realized how many different kinds of seaweed there were—a lot of different textures, flavor profiles.”

Overall, Landes says, “[seaweed] has this really unique salinity, this salty, vegetal sea quality.”

For his cocktail, he settled on toasted nori, most commonly used in sushi, and higiki seaweed, which “expands about ten times its size when put in water,” he says. He soaked both in simple syrup for a few days, until the syrup took on some of the seaweed’s salinity.

(Seaweed is often used as a gelling agent, and he says it added a little extra viscosity to the syrup.)

As for what to mix with the syrup, Landes says, “we tried a lot of stuff and failed miserably.” Either the flavor of the seaweed was too strong or it clashed with the spirits he was using. Landes thought gin would be a good pairing. Instead, he stuck with the idea of a savory drink, but turned to bourbon rather than gin.

Landes ended up making a black manhattan, the name traditionally given to Manhattans made with the Sicilian liqueur Averna—but, according to Landes, now used to describe ver-

sions made with either two kinds of vermouth or a mix of amaro and vermouth. For his cocktail, which he called Prospero’s Manhattan (in honor of the Shakespeare character left at sea to die), Landes used Punt e Mes vermouth, the anise-flavored liqueur Anisette, and Wild Turkey 101, which he describes as “extremely spicy with a lot of really cool herbal qualities.”

Finishing the drink were “kookabamba” bitters, which are made in-house with scorched pineapple, dried strawberry, and chamomile tea—among other ingredients—and, of course, the seaweed simple syrup. The syrup, Landes says, adds salt and “a really cool toasty quality, like vegetal baked bread.”

As for the cocktail’s taste? “As much as I don’t like seaweed,” Landes says, “I really do like it.”

RECIPE

2 DASHES “KOOKABAMBA” BITTERS .25 OZ MERETTI ANISETTE STAR ANISE LIQUEUR .75 OZ PUNT E MES 2 OZ WILD TURKEY 101 BOURBON SCANT 1⁄2 OZ SEAWEED SYRUP Stir all ingredients with ice, strain into a glass garnished with nori strips stuck to the side

WHO’S NEXT:

Landes has challenged MICHAEL TSIRTSIS of OAK + CHAR to create a cocktail with Big League Chew BUBBLE GUM. v

# @juliathiel

l

JOBS

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The candidate is required to have a Bachelor’s degree and five years experience in human resources. The salary is $70,000.

The Village of of Maywood will accept applications and resumes for Human Resources Coordinator position until April 5, 2016. Visit the Village of Maywood Website under Reference Desk in order to find the Employment Application Form and job description.

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TEMP FT JOBS: 44 Travelling Carnival Workers 4/3/16-11/5/16.

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Hours, schedule & days vary. No educ or exp reqd. Will train. Must be avail all season. Must commute to and from work site. Drug test, pre-hire crim backgrd check pd by us. Must sign empl contract.

Grooming & dress code req’s. Must follow rules. Must meet job perf stds. Discharge for cause. This job offer is based on U.S. law & DOL &

conduct bioengineering research on cardiovascular biomechanics as it relates to pulmonary vascular disease and right ventricular dysfunction; publish research findings using biomathematics principles; develop and maintain an externally funded research program; and perform administrative duties and University service as assigned. Requirements are a PhD degree or its foreign equivalent in Bioengineering, Bio-mathematics or a related field of study, plus 2 years of postdoctoral scientific research training. Some travel is required. For fullest consideration, please submit a CV, cover letter, and 3 references to the attention of the Search Coordinator via email at bioejobs@uic.edu, or via mail at UIC, Dept of Bioengineering, 851 S. Morgan St., Chicago, IL 60607. UIC is AA/ EOE/M/F/Disabled/Veteran.

TRANSUNION, LLC SEEKS Sr.

Analysts, Analytics for Chicago, IL loc. to conduct annual statistical model validation as the project leader, design full process, manage timeline, validate & review risk/fraud predictive models for validation projects. Master’s in Statistics or applied mathematics or Operations Research or Quantitative Analysis or related quantitative field plus 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Statistics or applied

mathematics or Operations Research or Quantitative Analysis or related quantitative field plus 5yrs exp. req’d.

Must be proficient w/ SAS, SAS admin skills, Xeno, R, MS SQL Server, Netezza, Hadoop, Hive, Unix, Tableau, Machine learning, Pig, data mining (logistic/linear regression, CHAID, CART, neural network), predictive modeling (risk scorecard, propensity models), segmentation, statistical experimental design, model validation & monitoring. Send resume to: E. Munoz, REF: YN, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

SOCIAL SERVICES Licensing Resources Specialist Seeking an energetic person to join our Resource Team to provide and coordinate a continuum of casework services at all levels of the child welfare system. Must demonstrate ability to communicate in a clear, comprehensible manner, both verbally and in writing. Valid Illinois driver’s license and proof of automobile liability insurance required.

State licensing/certification as required by the State of Illinois Department of Children. Must be certified CWEL, CCA, CERAP & 402 exams. Fax or email resumes to: Showanda.dixon@lssi.org or fax (312)243-1866. EOE.

ARCHITECT STEWARTNOSKY ARCHITECTS, LTD.

seeks Project Architects for Lisle, IL to plan & design detailed drawings for mixed-use, commercial dev, athletic facility & supermarket projects. Master’s in Arch +2yrs exp or Bachelor’s in Arch + 5yrs of exp req’d. Exp must incl mixed-use commercial projects, construction admin, exterior façade inspections, coordinating w/ MEP & structural engineers, Chicago building code, IBC, AutoCAD, Adobe Creative Suite, 3D renderings. Send resume to: snarch57@gmail.com, Ref:VM

BI SYSTEMS ANALYST, Naperville, IL: Limited domestic travel an d/or occasional relocation to client locations to provide Business Intelligence services including testing and validation of business calculations used in TSQL code for populating data mart. Assist in migration of DTS packages; create SSIS package run in SSMS. Optimize indices, SQL queries. Create tables, views and stored procedures using SQL Server, T-SQL. Reply to: Candor Group, Inc., 2272 95th St, Ste 200, Naperville, IL 60564

IOS ENGINEER – Chicago - Design, develop, test, deploy iOS solutions. MS in CS, EE or related, 3 yrs. exp. incl. iOS toolkit, custom animations, ecommerce apps; res., cover letter to hr@raise.com, ref. job IE32016 CHICAGO PREMIER RESTAURANT delivery service now hiring

reliable PT Customer Service Reps.

Apply in person Monday-Saturday, 3:30pm-5:30pm, 2602 S. Wallace, Chicago. 312-733-5019.

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $600-$699 EDGEWATER!

1061 W. Rosemont. Studios starting at $625 to $675, All Utilities included! Elevator building! Close to CTA red line train, restaurants, shopping, blocks to the lakefront, beaches and bike trails, laundry onsite, remodeled, etc. For a showing please contact Jay 773835-1864 Hunter Properties, Inc. 773-477-7070 www.hunterprop.com

STUDIO APARTMENT NEAR

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY seeks Developers for Chicago, IL loc to dev., code, test & debug sw or enhancements. Bachelor’s in Biomedical Engineering, Medicine/ Medical Cybernetics or Computer Science plus 2yrs exp. req’d. Exp. must incl: iOS, Android, embedded sw dev., PHP Web/server dev., C, Java, SQL, biosignal processing via Matlab, data modeling, Linux Server Configuration, Git. Criminal background check req’d. Send resume to: Marie Lee, Business Coordinator, REF: GI, 680 N. Lake Shore Drive, Suite 1400, Chicago, IL 60611

HVAC TECHNICIAN, FULLTIME. We require 3-5 years of HVAC experience, EPA certification. Must possess the ability to troubleshoot and repair AHU’s, RTU’s, and VAV systems. Building automation experience preferred.

Applicants must be able to speak and comprehend English and pass a criminal background check.

Email resume to Travis.Rice@ Sodexo.com or fax resume to 847634-6485.

GENERAL OFFICE CLERK NORRIDGE 708-305-5040 2034 SUPERIOR LLC- must have a least 2yrs exp. Duties incl. use of computers, database mgmt., answer phones, project work scheduling & coordinating. Full time, M-F. Fax resume 708-305-5040

IOWA INTERSTATE RAILROAD (Blue Island, IL) is currently looking for RAILROAD CONDUCTORS. $25.24/hr after probationary period. Varied Hours. Drug screen & background check. For a complete job description or to apply visit www.iaisrr.com. IAIS is an EOE.

Loyola Park. 1335 W Estes. Hardwood floors,. Cats OK. Heat included.

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STUDIO APARTMENT NEAR

Red Line. 6824 N Wayne. Hardwood floors. Pets OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. $695/ month. Available 5/1.

773-761-4318, www. lakefrontmgt.com

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

Call 773-374-7777 for details.

CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms

Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone, cable ready, fridge, private facilities, laundry avail. $160/wk Call 773-4933500

CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms

Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone, cable ready, fridge, private facilities, laundry avail. $160/wk Call 773-4933500

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CAMPAIGN JOBS

12.25/HR FOR 90 DAYS THEN 15.00/HR

A P P LY N O W 8 7 2 . 2 0 3 . 9 3 0 3

1 BR, $695 FREE Credit Check, No Application Fee. Newly decorated, carpeted, stove, fridge. FREE heat & cooking gas. Elevator & laundry room 773-919-7102 or 312-8027301

BIG ROOM WITH stove, fridge, bath & new floor. N. Side, by transp/ shop. Clean w/elevator. $116/wk + up. 773-561-4970

8324 S INGLESIDE 2BR, newly remodled, lndry, hrdwd flrs, cable, Sec 8 welc. $780mo 708-3081509, 773-493-3500

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

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Chicago. 82nd & Justine. 1bdrm. near transportation. $675/mo. 1 month rent + 1 month Security.

Heat included. 773-873-1591

142/Lasalle 3/1,ss, app. $1095.

75th Hoyne 4/1.5 lrg yrd$1375.

142 Lowe 4/2 $1400.

773.619.4395 Charlie 818.679.1175 Newly Decor 3rms, 1BR $550, 5800 Block S Wabash Lambert Realty 773-287-3380

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

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

Laundry & Security on Premises.

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

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

773-221-7490, 773-221-7493

AUBURN GRESHAM. 8105 S. PAULINA ST. 1 & 2BR APTS, CREDIT CHECK, SECTION 8 WELCOME. $650-$750/MO. TOM 708205-1448

WINTER SPECIAL $500 To-

ward Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. 773-287-4500 www. wjmngmt.com

79TH & WOODLAWN 1BR $650-$700, 2BR $775-$800; 76th & Phillips: 2BR $775-$800. Remodeled, appls avail. FREE HEAT. Sec 8 welc. 312-286-5678

CO-OP APARTMENTS AFFORDABLE LIVING, Chat-

ham, 83rd & Langley. Dep. Req, Pymt Plns Avail. heat incl, no appliances.

Credit chk fee $50. Call 773-723-1374

STUDIO OTHER Operating Cost Clerk. Follow accounting procedures. Compute financial records. Prepare payroll.

40 hrs./wk. DesPlaines, IL Requ.: AD (Business Account.), Resume: Safeway Solutions, Inc. 1784 E. Oakton, DesPlaines, 60018 (Mr. Sowa)

1 BR UNDER $700

CHICAGO, BEVERLY / Cal Park / Blue Island Studio $530 & up, 1BR $650 & up, 2BR $875 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Prkg. 708-388-0170

6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $560-$850, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

EXCHANGE EAST APTS 1 Brdm $575 w/Free Parking,Appl, AC,Free heat. Near trans. laundry rm. Elec.not incl. Kalabich Mgmt (708) 424-4216 8001 S. DREXEL – 1BR $750; Stove and fridge, Heat Incl. Section 8 welcome 312.208.1771 or 708 .890.1694 CHATHAM - 7105 S. Champlain, 1BR, $640/mo. Sec 8 OK. Call Office: 773-966-5275 or Steve: 773-936-4749

73RD AND JEFFERY Blvd. Large 1BRs, heated, hardwood flrs, laundry room, appls, near trans. $675 and up. 773-881-3573 CHICAGO - HYDE PARK 5401 S. Ellis.

1BR. $600/mo Call 773-955-5106 NO SEC DEP 6829 S. Perry.

Studio $460. 1BR. $515.

HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

HYDE PARK -SGL.FURN.RMS. With Refrig & Microwave, Utils. Inc. Close to Lake and Trans.$515-$550.

Ldry&24hr sec. 773-577-9361

1 BR $700-$799 PLAZA ON THE PARK 608 East 51st Street. Very spacious renovated apartments. 1BR $722 - $801, 2BR $837 - $1,009, 3BR $1,082- $1,199, 4-5BR $1,273 - $1,405. Visit or call (773)548-9300, M-F 9am-5pm or apply online at www.plazaonthepark apts.com Managed by Metroplex, Inc

CHATHAM - 1BR 89TH/ Dauphin. $700-$750. 2BR. 73rd/ Indiana. $775-$875. Spac, laundry rm, sec camera, good trans.

312-341-1950

CALUMET CITY, Huge 1BR, 1BA. Newly rehabbed, appliances included. $700/month.

Section 8 ok. Call 510-7357171

1BR BASEMENT APARTMENT Near North & Cicero, A/C, $715/mo + utilities. No Security Deposit. $300 Move in Fee. 877-350-5055

CALUMET PARK- 1BD/1BA,

spacious. Looking for sublease. Move in ASAP. No sec dep. $705/mo.

Assigned prkg. 773-513-9139

1 BR $800-$899 ROGERS PARK/ EVANSTON!

7665-7703 N. Sheridan Rd. 1 bedrooms starting at $875 to $925, includes heat and cooking gas! Hardwood floors, free WiFi. Vintage courtyard building, by Evanston Northwestern University, long-term private ownership, cats ok, dogs upon approval. For a showing please contact Samir 773-627-4894. Hunter Properties 773-477-7070 www. hunterprop.com

LAKESIDE TOWER, 910 W Lawrence. 1 bedrooms starting at $825-$895 include heat and gas, laundry in building. Great view! Close to CTA Red Line, bus, stores, restaurants, lake, etc. To schedule a showing please contact Celio 773-3961575, Hunter Properties 773-4777070, www.hunterprop.com

ONE

BEDROOM

GARDEN

apartment near Warren Park and Metra. 6802 N Wolcott. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. $800/ month. Available 5/1.

773-761-4318, www. lakefrontmgt.com

4350 NORTH ASHLAND. Studio $825. Hardwood floors, ceiling fans, new windows. Cooking gas, heat included. Laundry in building. Close to transportation. Available now. Cat OK. Contact 773-472-8469 or luckym ip22@gmail.com

ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT

near Red Line. 6824 N Wayne. Hardwood floors. Pets OK. Heat included.

Laundry in building. $850/ month.

Available 5/1. 773-761-4318, www. lakefrontmgt.com

3705 W. ADDISON 1 Bdrm $890.

Heat included. Call Daniel 773-8758085 or Paul J. Quetschke & Co., 773-281-8400 (Mon-Fri. 9-5).

MARCH 31, 2016 | CHICAGO READER 33

2204 W. IRVING PARK, 1 Bdrm

$850. Water included. Call Daniel 773-875-8085 or Paul J. Quetschke & Co., 773-281-8400 (Mon-Fri. 9-5).

1 BR $900-$1099 Hyde Park West Apts., 5325 S. Cottage Grove Ave., Renovated spacious apartments in landscaped gated community. Off street parking available. 1BR $1195 - Free Heat, 2BR $1400 - Free heat, 4BR Townhome $2200. Visit or call 773-324-0280, M-F: 9am-5pm or apply online- ww w.hydepark west.com. Managed

by Metroplex, Inc

RAVENSWOOD 4883 N Paulina, 1BR, remodeled kitchen & bath, separate DR, hardwood floors, heat included. Ample closets, additional storage locker. Cable, laundry, smoke-free building.

Available 4/1/16. $900. 773-4779251, 773-230-3116 LOYOLA 7000N GND 2BR: new constr. 1400sf, SS appl, oak flrs, CAC, on-site lndy. $1250/ heated 773-743-4141 urbanequiti es.com RAVENSWOOD 1BR: 850SF, great kit, DW, oak flrs, near Brown line, on-site lndy/storage, $975/ heated 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com EDGEWATER STUDIO: 2 1/2 rms; full kit, oak flrs, on-site lndry, $795/incls ht, water & cooking gas.

773-743-4141 www.urbanequities. com

W. Edgewater 1BR: Stunning 900sf vintage, great kit, new appl, oak flrs, on-site lndy $935$1050/incl ht. 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com HOMEWOOD- SUNNY 900SF

1BR Great Kitc, New Appls, Oak Flrs, A/C, Lndry & Storage, $950/mo Incls heat & prkg. 773.743.4141

1 BR $1100 AND OVER LOGAN

SQUARE Boulevard Coach House, 2-story LR with fireplace, loft, bedroom & sitting room, modern kitchen & bath, utilities included. $1500/mo. 773-235-1066

BEAUTIFUL RAVENSWOOD

VICTORIAN 1 bdrm! Avail May 1!

Lovely hdwd flrs, great closet space, onsite lndry/storage. Close to Metra, Mariano’s grocery, Damen "EL" and fantastic Winnemac Park!

5032 North Winchester. $1110.00, heat incl. No Sec. Dep. (773) 381-0150. www.theschirmfirm.com GORGEOUS ENGLISH TUDOR style building! Amazing archi-

tecture!! Built-in bookshelves/china cabinet! Lovely hdwd flrs, loads of windows/light Onsite-lndry/ storage. 4237 North Hermitage: $1290.00 heat incl. www.theschirmfirm.com (773) 381-0150.

TERRIFIC RAVENSWOOD 1

bdrm! Beautiful victorian building!

One block from fantastic Winnemac Park! Lovely hded flrs, great closet space! On-site lndry/ storage. 1946 West Argyle: May 1. $1110.00, heat incl.

(773) 381-0150. www.theschirmfirm.com

AVAIL APRIL 1! Gorgeous Eng-

lish Tudor courtyard building! 4235 1/2 North Hermitage. Beautiful hdwd flrs, built-in book-shelves, onsite lndry/storage. Only 2 blks to Irving Park "EL"! $1160.00 ht incl.

(773)381-0150. www.theschirmfirm.com

1748 W. WABANSIA 1 bdrm

$1150. Water included. Call Daniel 773-875-8085 or Paul J. Quetschke & Co., 773-281-8400 (Mon-Fri. 9-5).

1 BR OTHER APTS. FOR RENT PARK MANAGEMENT & INVESTMENT LTD. UNSATISFIED WITH YOUR LIVING CONDITIONS??

Spring is early LET’S GET MOVING!!

OUR COMMUNITY OFFERS...

HEAT, HW & CG Patio & Mini Blinds Plenty of parking on

a 37 acre site 1Bdr From $745.00 2Bdr From $925.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** CALL FOR DETAILS! APTS. FOR RENT PARK MANAGEMENT & Investment Ltd. SPRING IS HERE...

IT’S MOVING TIME!! Most Include HEAT & HOT WTR Studios From $525.00 1Bdr From $645.00 2Bdr From $795.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** CALL FOR DETAILS CALUMET CITY 158TH & PAXTON SANDRIDGE APTS 1 & 2 BEDROOM UNITS MODELS OPEN M-F, 9AM-5:30PM *** 708-841-5450 ***

WAITING LIST OPEN Drexel Square Senior Apts. 810 E. 51st.

Chicago, IL. 60615 for Qualified Seniors 62+ Beautiful park like setting, Hyde park area, rent based on 30% of monthly income (sec.

8), A/C, heat, lndry., rec. rooms, storage space in apt, cable ready, intercom entrance system, 24 hours front desk customer service.

Applications will be accepted immediately between the hours of 11:00am-3:00pm at the above address. 773-268-2120 SECTION 8 AFFORDABLE Housing Waiting List is now open!!

1, 2, & 3 Bdrms 2443 W. Dugdale Rd Waukegan, IL 60085

APPLY NOW!!! You must apply in person & all adults must be present.

ID, Social Security Card & Birth Certificate REQUIRED Contact: Management Office 847-336-4400

Large Sunny Room w/fridge & microwave. Nr. Oak Park, Green Line, bus. 24 hour desk, parking lot. $101/week & Up. 773-3788888

COLLEGE GIRL BODY RUBS $40 w/AD 24/7

CHICAGO, 7727 S. Colfax, ground flr Apt., ideal for senior citizens. Secure bldng. Modern 1BR $595. Lrg 2BR, $800. Free cooking & heating gas. Free parking. 312613-4427 RHEABBED STUDIOS, A v a ilable Today. Hdwd floors, heat & appliances included. 1957 E. 73rd Place, 7450 S. Luella.

Call 773-888-3413 8053 S. SHORE DRIVE, 3.5 Room Basement Apartment for Rent. Appliances incl. $525/mo + sec Call 773-221-4547 for more information.

SUBURBS, RENT TO O W N !

Buy with No closing costs and get help with your credit.

Call 708-868-2422 or visit w ww.nhba.com CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708-868-2422 or visit www. nhba.com CHICAGO - BEVERLY, LARGE 2 room Studio & 1BR, Carpet, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $640-$750/mo.

Call 773-233-4939

NO MOVE-IN FEE! No Dep! Sec 8 ok. 1, 2 & 3 Bdrms. Elev bldg, laundry, pkg. 6531 S. Lowe.

Call Moni 773-874-0100

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

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

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200 SOUTHSIDE LOVELY 1 & 2 Bedroom, Available Now, Call 773-264-6711

ROYALTON HOTEL, Kitchen-

East Chicago, IN, 2BR $675 Ht. Incl., 1 mo. free rent w/ lease. Call MIKE 773-577-9361

2 BR $900-$1099 113TH & CALUMET : Newly decorated apt, 2BR, hdwd, lr, dr, secure bldg, $900/mo, utils incl., 1 month sec dep/credit chk req’d.

708-250-6005.

EAST VILLAGE TWO bedroom

BEAUTIFUL

3232 N LEAVITT, 2 bdrm $1100.

Electricity included. Call Daniel, 773875-8085 or Paul J. Quetschke & Co. 773-281-8400 (Mon.-Fri 9-5) 4153 N. LINCOLN 2 bdrm $1200.

Water included.

Quetschke & Co. (Mon.-Fri 9-5)

Call Paul J. 773-281-8400

one bath. Hardwood floors, kitchen appliances, dishwasher, AC/Heating Systems. $975 (773)278-1978 leave a message.

3752 N. SOUTHPORT 2 Bdrm $1100. Water included. Call Daniel, 773-875-8085 or Paul J. Quetschke & Co. 773-281-8400 (Mon.-Fri 9-5)

2 BR UNDER $900

75th/S. E. Yates - 2 BR, Fam Rm, 1.5BA, LR, DR, Eat in Kit, 2nd flr apt in 3 flat. Ten. pays heat. $925 No Increase. 773375-8068

LINCOLN PARK. 510 West Addi-

7701 S. South Shore Dr. 2 BDs with 1.5 Baths, Large Combo Living-Dining Rm, FREE Heat & cking gas. Prkng extra. $785-$800, Kalabich Mgmt (708)424-4216

GLENWOOD - Large 1BR Condo, H/F High School. Balc, C/ A, appls, heat, water incl. 2 parking, lndry. $760/mo. Call 708-268-3762

58TH AND UNION. Available

RENOVATED 2 BDRM units w/ hdwd flrs modern kit and bths! Appls incld Ouiet block( 78th/ Cornell) $1025 Sec 8 OK 773-619-1717

ette $135 & up wk. 1810 W. Jackson 312-226-4678

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

Now. 2BR+, newly decorated, hdwd flrs, fenced-in yard, appls incl. $740/mo. 847-993-3010

SOUTHSIDE - REALLY nice studio, 1BR & 2BR apts for rent. From $400-$625/month. Call 773-6172909

CHICAGO SW 1516 W. 58th St. Rehabbed 2BR, 1st flr, ceramic, quiet, intercom, enclosed porch/yard, close to trans. $725. 312-719-3733

77TH/LOWE 2BR. 101ST/MAY

AVAIL IMMED 2 & 3BR, Loc Nr

2 BR $1100-$1299 BUCKTOWN/ WICKER PARK.

Milwaukee/ Ashland/ Division. Large four rooms, two bedrooms, hwfl, all remodeled. Victorian building, first floor front. Two blocks Blue Line. $1190. 773-710-3634.

1 & 2BR, 69th/Dante, 3BR. 71st/ Bennett 2 & 3BR. 77th/Essex. 3BR. New renov. Sec 8 ok. 708-503-1366

Augusta and Laverne, tenant pays utils. $850 & $900 /mo.

847-720-9010

MOVE IN SPECIAL!!!

B4 the N of this MO. & MOVE IN 4 $99.00 (773) 874-1122

CHICAGO 92nd and Marquette, 2BR, 3rd floor, quiet bldg, carpet, heat included, $725, Nice!

1 mo rent, 1 mo sec. 773-505-1853

1447 W. MORSE 2 Bdrm $1100.

CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE Beauti-

CHICAGO 7600 S Essex 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! 773287-9999 /312-446-3333

4014 N. HOYNE, 2 bdrm $1100.

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

CHATHAM

REMOD 2 & 3BR, hdwd flrs, custom cabinets, avail now. $1100-$1200/mo + sec. 773-905-8487 Sec 8 Ok

Heat included. Call Daniel, 773-8758085 or Paul J. Quetschke & Co. 773281-8400 (Mon.-Fri 9-5)

Water included. Call Daniel, 773875-8085 or Paul J. Quetschke & Co. 773-281-8400 (Mon.-Fri 9-5)

2 BR $1300-$1499 son #118. Available now-4/30, option to renew. Magnificent apartments, super light and airy, set off by a beautiful courtyard. Laundry room, storage lockers. Steps from the lake, steps from transportation and steps from shopping and recreation. Resident engineer. 5/2 bedrooms, $1465 - 5/1 $1595. Heat and appliances included. To see call 312-822-1037 weekdays until 5:30pm, Saturdays to 3pm.

ROGERS PARK. 7535 N. Hoyne.

Must see large 2 bedroom unit $1395 HEAT INCLUDED! Hardwood floors, dishwasher and microwave included.

Close to transportation and shopping. For a showing please contact Fatima 773-732-8436 Hunter Properties, Inc. 773-477-7070 www. hunterprop.com EAST L A K E V I E W / WRIGLEYVILLE Newly renovated, sunny, 2 bedroom apartment in elegant vintage greystone building w/hardwood floors, dishwasher, air-conditioning, backyard patio, washer/dryer on premises. $1350/month. Call Nat 773-8802414.

224-223-7787

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ROGERS PK: STUNNING 2BR: 1400sf, new kit, SS appl, FDR, oak flrs, on-site lndy. $1295$1350/heated 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com

2 BR $1500 AND OVER LARGE BRIGHT LINCOLN PK

2Bd, 1Bth, In Unit W/D, Roof Deck, Back Porch, HVAC, Fireplace, DW, Hardwood Flrs, Available Immediately. $2000-$2500 Call: 773 472 5944

2 BR OTHER CHICAGO, PRINCETON PARK

HOMES. Spac 2 - 3 BR Townhomes, Inclu: Prvt entry, full bsmt, lndry hook-ups. Ample prkg. Close to trans & schls. Starts at $816/mo. www. ppkhomes.com;773-264-3005

7359 S. DORCHESTER, 7804 S. Maryland. 2BR Apts, brand new, heat & appliances incl. Section 8 OK. Call Miro, 708-4737129

HARVEY- 3BR, 1BA, driveway, newly rehabbed, no pets. Section 8 Welcome. Contact Lou Davis, 708-275-5471

SEC 8 WELCOME, no security dep., 6717 S Rhodes, 3-level, 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl, $1300/mo.

708-288-4510

6723 EAST END Ave. 6rm, 3BR, 2BA. 2nd flr, no appls, heat incl, no pets. $1025/mo. Avail Now! 773-493-6634

CHICAGO, WEST SIDE, Newly

8001 S. DOBSON: 1 month free, 3BR $850, H/W flrs. stove, fridge, heat incl. 1 mo. free, Sec. 8 Welcome 312.208.1771, 708.890.1694

MAPLE PARK NR 116th/S. Laflin.

EAST GARFIELD PARK, West Side -Newly Rehab 3BR Apts. $1095 - $1195 / month 773-230-6132 or 773-931-6108

SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 1701 W 59th, 4BR, 2BA house, appliances included, $1200/mo. 708-288-4510

CALUMET CITY, 3BR, 1.5BA, 2 car gar, fully rehab w/gorgeous finishes w/ hdwd flrs. Sec 8 OK. $1125/mo Call 510-735-7171

NEAR 83RD & Yates. 5BR, 2BA, hdwd flrs, fin basement, stove & fridge furn. Heat incl. $1600 + 1 mo sec. Sect 8 ok. 773-978-6134

61/RHODES New Decor 3BR formal dining room $875 Heat included 773-874-9637 / 773-493-5359

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

LOOKING FOR A WELL KEPT PLACE TO LIVE? 8340 Maryland, 2BR Apt, FREE heat, near good transportation & shopping.

773-301-5063

1 MNTH FREE RENT! 75th & Essex.

MATTESON, 2BR, $990$1050; 3BR, $1250-$1400.

Move In Special is 1 Month’s Rent & $99 Sec Dep. Sect 8 Welc. 708-748-4169

COUNTRY CLUB HILLS vic of 183RD/Cicero.

4BR, 1.5BA $1400 & 3BR/2BA. $1450.

Ranch Style, 2 car gar. 708369-5187

74TH & ARTESIAN, Section 8 Welcome. Newly remodeled, huge 2BD, 1BA, hdwd flrs, separate utils.

Sec dep req’d. 773-908-1080

DELUXE 4BRS ($1300) & 1BRs ($800). Hardwood flrs and appls incl, close to trans, schools.

Sec 8 Welcome. 773-443-3200

BURNHAM - 14500 S. Torrence Beautiful 2 BR in a class of it’s own, tile floors, appls, lndry room, a/c, heat incl. 773-731-5010 SECTION 8 WELCOME 7620 S. Colfax New remodel, 2 Bedrooms, he at/appl incl. 312-493-5544

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 68th/Rockwell. Newly decorated 3BR, LR, DR, kit, bonus rm, heat incl. nr schools & trans. $1100/ mo. $700 1st mo rent. 773-8512232 BLUE ISLAND, 2423 W. 123rd St, 3BR, 1.5BA, freshly decor, modern BA & kitch, A/C, heat incl. $1050/mo+1 mo sec.

Larry, 708-529-3836 NORTH LAWNDALE, 3BR, 1.5BA Remod Garden Unit, hardwood floors, $1100/mo, no security, leave message, 773-203-0288 6343 S. ROCKWELL - 3BR, incl heat. hdwd flrs, lndry facility, fenced in bldg, fireplace, appiances

$995/mo. Sec 8 ok. 773-791-1920

$1200/mo. Rehabbed 3bdrm, 1bth apt. Hrdwd flrs, w/d hook-ups, kitchen appliances, free heat, & intercom security system. 773-263-3922.

CHICAGO- 3 BR, 2 car gar, finished bsmt, hrdwd flrs, c/a, sect 8 wel. $1575/m, 2 BR apts also avail. for $1100-1200/m 708-800-2562 SOUTH SIDE 753816 Winchester St. 4BR, 2BA, double car garage. $1,365/mo. plus utilities.

773-218-7520

HARVEY Sec 8 Welcome $0 Security for Section 8. $500 cash back. 3BR, $1300/mo. Fine condition. ADT Alarm. 708-715-0034 SOUTHSIDE: 6BR 2BA 68TH & PAULINA $1400/MONTH plus utilit-

ies plus security deposit. Ready April 5th 708-921-7810

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799 3BR, 2BA HOUSE FOR RENT with bsmnt, appls incl. $1500/mo + security deposit. All utilities paid by landlord. No Pets. 708-9864400 CHATHAM 7900 BLOCK of Langley. 3BR 1.5BA, renov kit & BA. Appls & heat incl, lndry. Sec 8 Ok. $1500. Mr. Johnson 630-4241403

decorated 5BR house, nr Harrison & Pulaski, $1550/mo. Tenant pays utils. 847.720.9010 4BR, 2BA House, 2 car gar w/patio, encl yard. $1500 + sec.

Call C. Johnson 773-865-4741.

SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 314 W 106th Place, 3BR house, appls included $1250/mo. Call 708-288-4510

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

RENT TO OWN! 18 E. 99TH PL. REHABBED 4BR/3BA, STAINLESS STL APPLS., D/W, MICRO, HDWD FLRS. $1525. 312.451.3420

BANK OWNED ON-SITE REAL ESTATE AUCTION FLOSSMOOR

SERVICES

legal notices

LEGAL SERVICES- Need A

227 Shea Drive 2BR, 2.5BA, 2492 Sq. Ft. Single Family Home.

Sale Date, Sat 5/7, 12noon Free Color Brochure 1-800-260-5846

Lawyer? For as low as $19.95 CONSULTATIONS: Credit Repair, Bankruptcy, Divorce, Foreclosure, Evictions, Contract Review, Traffic T ickets/DUI, Expungement, Criminal Defense & more. Call Theresa 312806-0646

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-

auctionservicesintl.com 5% Buyers Premium Josh Orland, Auctioneer WI. 471.006701 ASI-FM. 444000425

WE BUY HOUSES CASH Apts & Commercial foreclosures, any area, price or condition. We close fast! 708-506-2997

non-residential SELF-STORAGE

CENTERS.

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

773-685-6868.

South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

3743 W. MONTROSE Store 555

4BR, 2BA, 2 STORY HOME

Sq Ft. Water included. Call Paul J. Quetschke & Co., 773-281-8400 (Mon-Fri 9-5).

10934 S. MICHIGAN. Very Clean

roommates

BEVERLY, avail imm. $1500/mo + Deposit. Street parking. Elton (312) 841-6798. W/D hook-up. No pets.

4BR apt, near bus line, appls and utils not incl. Section 8 Welcome.

773-797-3979

ALL NEW

Hdwd, granite and Stainless Steel appls 2 & 3BRs, across from school Sec 8 Welc. 312-882-9674

MATTESON, SAUK VILLAGE &

UNIVERSITY PARK. 4, 3 & 2BR, House/Condo, Section 8 ok.

For information: 708-625-7355

CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent.

Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail.

312-446-3333 or 708-752-3812

GENERAL 7338 S. PAULINA, totally re-

modeled building, 2BR 1st flr, 2BR 2nd flr, $850/mo + move in fees; 1 BR garden apt. $700/mo all util. incl. Launry room on site. 773-8037235

CHICAGO, SINGLE ROOM in 4BR home, 6541 S. Hermitage, lrg living & dining rm, full bsmt.

Call 708-333-9490

FOR SALE PARK FOREST, Owner Financing newly remodeled 3BR Townhouse, hardwood floors, $950/mo Call 708527-2147.

CHICAGO, NICE ROOM near 80th & Ash, working & references. $435 & 1/2 security.

Lady preferred. Call 773-5305298

FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90 special.

Russian, Polish, Ukrainian girls.

Northbrook and Schaumburg locations. 10% discount for new customers. Please call 773-407-7025

HEALTH & WELLNESS UKRAINIAN MASSAGE. CALLS in/ out. Chicago and sub-

urbs. Hotels. 1234 S Michigan Avenue. Appointments. 773-616-6969.

ADULT SERVICES DANIELLE’S LIP SERVICE.

773-935-4995 Adult Phone Sex and Web Cam Provider. Ebony Beauty.

All Cred-it/Debit Cards accepted.

Must be 21+.

MUSIC & ARTS MALE LEAD VOCALIST -

Reggae looking for a band in Chicago. I’m currently agreeable to payto-play. FaYaLinks1@gmail.com

ROSELAND/PULLMAN AREA

NEAR 99th and Dan Ryan.

Senior pref, furn room. $125/week.

Includes utilities. 773-264-0745

ROOM FOR RENT- (Unfurnished) Chicago Southside Location.

All utilities included. Cable. $400/mo. Call 773-842-7307

NOTICES ADOPT - LOVING, FINANCIALLY SECURE Home & Family

Awaits Your Baby To Provide A Lifetime Of Love Tina & Steve 1-800-4181595 Expenses Paid

suant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16145829 on March 9, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of PERSEPHONE FLORAL ATELIER with the business located at: 2006 W GIDDINGS ST 3W, CHICAGO, IL 60625.

The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/ partner(s) is: MARY BURCH 2006 W GIDDINGS ST 3W, CHICAGO, IL 60625, USA, MARY SIMMONS 1307 E 60TH ST 241, CHICAGO, IL 60647, USA

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: D16146015 on March 23, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of LOVE AND CARE NANNIES with the business located at: 4452 N DOVER ST UNIT 3S, CHICAGO, IL 60640. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: KELLY M COLEMAN, 4452 N DOVER ST UNIT 3S, CHICAGO, IL 60640, USA

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: D16146027 on March 23, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of EJ WATSON’S SWEET TREATS with the business located at: 2638 W FARGO AVE, CHICAGO, IL 60645. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/ partner(s) is: QUINCY MATHIS 2638 W FARGO AVE, CHICAGO, IL 60645, USA

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: D16145863 on March 10, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of SUMMIT INSIGHTS with the business located at: 1628 N PAULINA ST, CHICAGO, IL 60622. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/partner(s) is: BELINDA BRENNAN, 1628 N

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: D16145753 on March 2 , 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of JUST F’N RELAX with the business located at: 1735 N. PAULINA #415, CHICAGO, IL 60622. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: DANA M. HORTICK, 1735 N. PAULINA #415, CHICAGO, IL 60622, USA

PAULINA ST., CHICAGO, IL 60622, USA

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: D16145887 on March 11, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of GRAND PAINTING & WALL COVERING with the business located at: 3842 S. EVANS, CHICAGO, IL 60653. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: REMINGTON HENDERSON, 3842 S. EVANS, CHICAGO, IL 60653,

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: D16146085 on March 25, 2016, under the Assumed Business Name of Mila Rose Boutique with the business located at 5461 N East River Rd #510, Chicago, IL 60656. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/ partner(s) is: Maria Silva Young, 5461 N East River Rd #510, Chicago, IL 60656, USA.

USA

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: D16145946 on March 18, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of JELLIGUN with the business located at: 5207 NORTH ASHLAND AVE #1, CHICAGO, IL 60640. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: JESSICA GUNDERSON, 5207 NORTH ASHLAND AVE #1, CHICAGO, IL 60640, USA

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: D16145956 on March 18, 2016, under the Assumed Business Name of Ever Fluent with the business located at 2535 W Cortland St Apt 2W, Chicago, IL 60647. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/ partner(s) is: Elisa Plaza, 2535 W Cortland St Apt 2W, Chicago, IL 60647, USA.

CHICAGO 118TH SANGAMON

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36 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

SOUTH LOOP

SLUG SIGNORINO

LINCOLN PARK

sanpaku eyes? As a skeptic I place no credence in the notion that those with sanpaku are doomed to die a tragic death while young, but I do wonder about the condition. Is it indicative of any physical or mental health issues?

PHOTO: ALEXEY LYSENKO/ GETTY IMAGES

A : First off, Bill, “sanpaku eyes” isn’t exactly a

medical term. It’s like you’re wondering about the condition known as dimples.

The average reader will now be thinking: What the hell are we even talking about? Well you might ask. Sanpaku describes eyes in which the sclera—the white part—can be seen above or (usually) below the iris. The word is Japanese, from elements meaning “three” and “white,” the idea being that the iris is bounded by sclera on three sides rather than the usual two.

Whatever dent the sanpaku concept has made in the Western consciousness is largely the doing of George Ohsawa, a Japanese thinker who helped bring to the wider world the dietary philosophy called macrobiotics, which emphasizes maintaining one’s yin-yang balance via intake of various whole foods. Ohsawa poached the concept of sanpaku from old Asian diagnostic traditions of facial reading, in which different features were thought to reflect aspects of your physical or spiritual health. In his writings Ohsawa claimed that three-whites was a particularly nasty characteristic, indicative of someone “suspicious, fearful, insecure, quick to misunderstand, and passive.” Furthermore, “his heart, sexual organs, liver, kidney, and lungs are very sick,” and so forth, and the condition can only be treated with a macrobiotic diet.

Ohsawa came armed with examples too: his list of prominent people with sanpaku included John F. and Robert Kennedy, Hitler, Abraham Lincoln, and Marilyn Monroe. Then there’s Charles Manson, who had the dreaded “upper sanpaku,” in which the white is visible above the iris—thought to indicate a dangerous psychopath. Clearly this group had its share of high-profile troubles, one concedes, but not ones that could have been foretold from the visibility of their sclera.

Or could they? Several sources on sanpaku point to an August 1963 interview (by Tom Wolfe, no less) of George Ohsawa in the New York Herald Tribune, in which he’s said to have predicted JFK’s death. Online Herald Tribune archives, though, stop in the year 1962, leading one to wonder: Just how high up does this thing go, anyway? What are they hiding?

Obviously you’re not buying this theory, Bill, and I have to say I find it a bit wild-eyed

myself. Is there anything to sanpaku eyes medically, though? Not really. But they’re sometimes seen as a sort of benign effect of certain other conditions:

• Ectropion, or eyelid droop, occurs in aging peo-

ple as their faces lose muscle tone. Possible medical complication: increased irritation due to greater exposed area of the eyeball.

• Retraction of the lower lid, giving the eye a dis-

tinctive rounded shape, is a common complication following cosmetic surgery—specifically lower-lid blepharoplasty, which removes lines and tightens the skin. Fear not, though: plastic surgeons have developed a second cosmetic procedure to remedy the effects of procedure numero uno, basically by raising the whole cheek below, thus creating enough slack to restore the shape of the eye and cover up that extra sclera.

• Exophthalmos, or proptosis, is a bulging of the

eyeball; among the underlying causes can be Graves’ disease (an immune disorder that leads to hyperthyroidism), or eye injury or cancer, etc.

This might cause a sanpaku look, but here the most striking aspect isn’t really exposed sclera qua exposed sclera; it’s that your eyes are popping out of your head a la Barbara Bush.

Anyways, the sanpaku crowd isn’t just swimming against the tide of good science—if we follow one credible theory, they’re up against the whole of evolution. Recall that, among species, humans possess notably visible and well-demarcated sclera. (The sclera of our closest relatives, apes, are either colored or otherwise obscured.) According to what’s called the cooperative eye hypothesis, that’s by design. It’s thought that our eyes evolved to look this way so we’d be better able to communicate—by reading one another’s eyes and tracking each other’s gazes.

So more may be better when it comes to the sclera, though I hope this doesn’t mean Charles Manson is the next step in human development. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

An effluence named for Donald Trump And more uninhibited Uncle Dan, live from San Francisco!

I WAS HONORED to speak at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco last week as a part of its “Uninhibited: About Sex” lecture series. The audience submitted questions on note cards, which were ably put to me

by Jourdan Abel (who was wearing a wonderful uterus-themed sweater). Here are some of those submitted by the uninhibited JCCSF audience that we didn’t manage to get to.

A : The boundary between

Q : I had the best sex of my

name? It’s mine too! Could you say hi to my mom, sex therapist Dr. Linda Savage?

We’re huge fans, and she’ll die!

life with my ex. He fucked me hard, had a huge cock, and made me eat his come with a spoon. I loved it.

Needless to say, we were incompatible in other ways.

My current BF is vanilla. Very.

Vanilla. When I masturbate, I think about my ex and can’t help but wish my current guy would make me slurp his come up from a utensil. We are very compatible in other (nonsex) ways. Am I doomed to fantasize about my ex?

A : You are—unless you open

up to your current BF about what’s missing in your sex life and/or get his permission to get your hard-fucking/ spoon-feeding needs met elsewhere.

Q : How do you combat

homophobic remarks in a culture that condones and promotes homophobic tendencies?

A : You combat homophobia— and misogyny, its big sister— one terrified middle-schooler at a time. Bearing in mind, of course, that “terrified middleschooler” is a state of mind, not an age bracket.

Q : In gay male relationships, what can you say about the psychological boundary between being alpha in the world and beta in bed?

you can’t make your partner come?

out to the great state of Utah, which has the nation’s highest porn-consumption rates per capita!), and how long they’re lingering over it (long enough to finish themselves off).

One negative effect: The ubiquity of porn coupled with the general lousiness of sex education in the U.S. and Canada has resulted in porn doing something it isn’t designed to do and consequently does not do well.

And that of course would be educating young people about sex. If we don’t want porn doing that (and we don’t) we need to create comprehensive sex-ed programs that cover everything— hetero sex, queer sex, partnered sex, solo sex, gender identity, consent, kinks— and down to being a thoughtful informed, and critical consumer of porn.

A : Me? I hand him back his

Q : What kind of sexual fluid

alpha in world/beta in bed is pretty fucking porous—it’s not studded with guard towers, barbed wire, and death strips, a la the erstwhile Berlin Wall. (Google it, kids.)

That boundary only exists in our heads. And once we realize that, we may not only discover that the alpha/ beta boundary is easily crossed but that crossing it repeatedly is a total blast.

Q : Is “Savage” your real last

A : Hi, Dr. Linda Savage!

Please don’t die.

Q : What do you do when

dick and go get myself some ice cream—but you shouldn’t do what I do. Here’s what you should do: Keep trying.

If need be, encourage him or her to “finish off” (without pouting and without laying on a guilt trip about how you feel inadequate). Cheerfully offer to hold ’em or play with their tits or eat their ass while they finish themselves off—or hell, offer to go get ’em ice cream. Whatever works.

Q : Porn is so accessible

today. How has it affected society?

A : One positive effect:

Porn’s wider accessibility has forced us to stop pretending there’s one kind of sex— heterosexual, man-on-top— that absolutely everyone is interested in. Thanks to the Interwebs, we can track what people are actually searching for, where they’re searching for it (a shout-

or act would you name after Donald Trump?

A : “Trump” already has an

alternate/more accurate meaning. There is no authority higher than the Oxford English Dictionary, and here’s what you’ll find under “trump” at oed.com: “in reference to a sound like a trumpet . . . the act of breaking wind audibly.” So remember, kids, when you see Donald Trump standing in front of a microphone, Trump isn’t talking. He’s trumping.

THE LATEST ON YOUR FAVORITE RESTAURANTS AND BARS

FOOD & DRINK WEEKLY E-BLAST GET UP TO DATE. SIGN UP NOW.

Q : What was your favorite

aspect of the orgy held in honor of your 50th birthday?

A :The fact that I wasn’t

invited. #NotAnOrgyFan.

v

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

CHICAGOREADER.COM MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 37

EARLY WARNINGS

Eagles of Death Metal ! COURTESY DOWNTOWN RECORDS

NEW Aesop Rock, Rob Sonic 6/3, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Art Alexakis 5/10, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/31, noon b AWOLNATION 7/20, 7:30 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM B96 Summer Bash with Ariana Grande, Meghan Trainor, Calvin Harris, Iggy Azalea, and others 6/26, 6:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Sat 4/2, 10 AM b Balkan Beat Box 6/22, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 4/1, noon, 18+ Julianna Barwick 6/18, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ David Bazan 6/30, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM, 18+ Black Pistol Fire 6/18, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 4/1, noon, 18+ Blasters 6/9, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 4/1, 11 AM Bonnie “Prince” Billy with Bitchin Bajas 6/16-17, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Luke Bryan, Little Big Town 8/27, 7 PM, Wrigley Field, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM b Celtic Thunder 9/24, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Mon 4/4, 10 AM b Chain & the Gang 5/10, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Cold Waves V with Meat Beat Manifesto, Cocks, Clock Diva, Pig, Black Queen, Vampyre Anvil, Chant, and others 9/23-24, 6:30 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM, 18+ Cults 6/10, 9 PM, Cubby Bear Davina & the Vagabonds 6/3, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM b Raheem DeVaughn & Wes Felton 5/13, 8 PM, the Promontory, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM John Doe 6/5, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/31, noon b

Eagles of Death Metal 5/25, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ El Vy 4/17, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Michael Glabicki 6/3, 10 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM b Steve Gunn 6/23, 9 PM, Schubas Hillbenders 6/3, 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Gregory Alan Isakov & the Ghost Orchestra 6/13-14, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM b Booker T. Jones 7/25, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/31, noon b Kidz Bop Kids 8/7, 3 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion Kindred the Family Soul 8/4-5, 8 PM, the Promontory, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM Carolyn Malachi 5/20, 8 PM, the Promontory b Rhett Miller 6/19, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/31, noon b Mouths of Babes 5/15, 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Natural Child, Aquarian Blood 4/29, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F The Obsessed 5/22, 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Old Crow Medicine Show 7/18, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM b Peanut Butter Wolf, J. Rocc, 6/2, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM John Prine 11/4, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM Pvris 6/2, 6 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM b Rakim 5/26, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM, 18+ Haley Reinhart 6/14, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 4/1, 11 AM, 18+ Rocket From the Crypt 7/23, 10 PM, Subterranean, on sal Fri 4/1, 10 AM Cecile McLorin Salvant 6/8, 7 and 9:30 PM, the Promontory b Shannon & the Clams 6/11, 9 PM, Logan Square Auditorium, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM, 17+

38 CHICAGO READER - MARCH 31, 2016

Matthew Shipp & Michael Bisio, Available Jelly 4/15, 7:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Sioux Falls 5/4, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Alex Skolnick Trio 9/11, 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Al Stewart 7/19, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 3/31, noon b C.W. Stoneking 6/4, 7 PM, Beat Kitchen Teyana Taylor 5/2, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM, 17+ Warped Tour with Falling in Reverse, Every Time I Die, New Found Glory, and others 7/23, 11 AM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Wye Oak 8/3, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 4/1, 10 AM, 17+

UPCOMING Abbath, High on Fire, Skeletonwitch 4/8, 6:45 PM, Metro, 18+ Amon Amarth, Entombed A.D. 5/5, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Atlas Genius, Skylar Grey 4/12, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Autolux 4/9, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Bad Bad Not Good 6/4, 10:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Beach Slang 5/16, 5 PM, Bottom Lounge b Birdy 6/17, 8 PM, Park West b Bleached 4/22, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Brand New, Modest Mouse 7/2, 7:15 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion Jimmy Buffett & the Coral Reefer Band, Huey Lewis & the News 6/25, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Caravan Palace 6/18, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ John Carpenter 7/16, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Clocks in Motion 5/22, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Coasts 4/28, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b Dick Dale 8/13, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

b Dangerkids 4/27, 6 PM, Subterranean b Dark Star Orchestra 6/25, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ The Darkness 4/27, 8 PM, House of Blues b Darlingside, David Wax Museum 5/6, 8 PM, Schubas Dashboard Confessional, Taking Back Sunday 6/3, 6:30 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion Dawn 4/22, 6:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b Dawn of Midi 4/7, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Eliane Elias 4/23, 7 PM, City Winery b Kurt Elling 5/15, 5 and 8 PM; 5/16, 6 and 8:30 PM, City Winery b Emblem3 5/19, 6:30 PM, House of Blues b Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) 4/24, 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ English Beat 5/10-11, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Klaus Johann Grobe 4/26, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Noah Gundersen 4/21, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Haelos, Twin Limb 4/7, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Hall & Oates, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings 7/22, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park b Anthony Hamilton, Fantasia 4/23, 8 PM, Arie Crown Theater Col. Bruce Hampton 8/20, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Hapa 5/20, 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Hard Working Americans 5/14, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Hatebreed, Devildriver 5/14, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Lalah Hathaway 6/26, 6 and 9 PM, City Winery b Martin Hayes & Dennis Cahill 5/28, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Leo Kottke 4/8-9, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Robby Krieger 6/3, 7:30 PM, City Winery b Kvelertak, Torche 4/23, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ La Luz 5/20, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ La Sera 5/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle L.A. Witch 5/8, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Laid Back Festival with Gregg Allman 7/16, 4 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion b Ray LaMontagne 8/6, 8 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion Nikki Lane 6/4, 10:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Jonny Lang 5/20, 9 PM, House of Blues Lapsley 5/1, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Amel Larrieux 5/20, 7:30 and 10 PM, City Winery b Las Cafeteras 4/9, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Cyndi Lauper 5/16, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre b Cate Le Bon 5/9, 8 PM, Schubas SG Lewis 4/19, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 18+

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The Life & Times 5/28, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Lil Uzi Vert, Martin Sky 4/28, 6:45 PM, Metro b David Lindley 4/27, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Lissie, Skrizzly Adams 4/22, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Little Green Cars 5/5, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Local H 4/15, 9 PM, Metro Lisa Loeb 4/17, 11 AM and 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Nils Lofgren 5/20, 7:30 PM, City Winery b Lollapalooza 7/28-31, Grant Park, four-day passes sold out London Souls 4/15, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Los Amigos Invisibles 6/9, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Demi Lovato, Nick Jonas 8/2, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont b Mike Love 5/14, 10 PM, Schubas, 18+ Lumineers, Soak 6/19, 7 PM, Chicago Theatre b Polica 4/16, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Possessed by Paul James 4/23, 10:30 PM, Subterranean Prince Rama 4/8, 10 PM, Schubas Protomen 4/30, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b Psychic TV 7/22, 9 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Punch Brothers 5/13-14, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Chris Pureka 4/30, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b R. Kelly 5/7, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Ra Ra Riot 4/8-9, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Rad Trads 6/26, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Radical Face 5/22-23, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Joshua Radin 5/2, 7:30 PM; 5/4, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, 5/2 sold out b Radioactivity, Bad Sports 6/18, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Spose 4/19, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Staves 6/6, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Steely Dan, Steve Winwood 6/11, 7:15 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion Steep Canyon Rangers 4/15, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Laura Stevenson 4/7, 9 PM, Cobra Lounge Stick Men 5/4-6, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Sticky Fingers 4/27, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Sting, Peter Gabriel 7/9, 8 PM, United Center Angie Stone 6/17, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Allen Stone 5/14, 7 PM, House of Blues b

ALL AGES

F

Streetlight Manifesto 5/15, 5 PM, Concord Music Hall b Subhuman 6/2, 7 PM, Double Door Sublime With Rome, Dirty Heads 7/17, 6:30 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion Subways 4/22, 9 PM, Schubas Summer Set 4/24, 5 PM, Bottom Lounge b Sunn O))), Big Brave 6/7, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Swim Deep 6/10, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Tacocat 4/8, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Weedeater, Author & Punisher 5/15, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Weezer, Panic! At the Disco, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park The Weight 6/10, 7:30 and 10 PM, City Winery b Welshy Arms 5/28, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b White Denim 4/30, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Whitehorse 5/13, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 18+ Gin Wigmore 4/13, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Young Thug 5/25, 8 PM, the Vic b Yuna 5/6, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Zhu 5/8, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+

SOLD OUT Alabama Shakes 7/19, 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House and 7/20, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, sold out b American Authors 5/14, 7:30 PM, Subterranean b At the Drive-In 5/19-20, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Courtney Barnett 4/28, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Basement, Defeater, Turnstile 4/19, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge b Borns 7/21-22, 7:30 PM, Metro b The Cure, Twilight Sad 6/10-11, 7:30 PM, UIC Pavilion b Dawes 4/27, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Father John Misty, Tess & Dave 4/14-15, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ David Gilmour 4/4 and 4/8, 8 PM, United Center b Ben Harper & the Innocent Criminals 4/16, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre b Michael Kiwanuka 4/9, 8 PM, Double Door b Lukas Graham 4/21, 7:30 PM, Double Door b Bob Mould 5/6, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Pearl Jam 8/20 and 8/22, 7:30 PM, Wrigley Field Rufus Du Sol 4/9, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Savages 4/7, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Sturgill Simpson 6/3, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Thrice 6/23, 6:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Underoath 4/7, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b The Used 5/17-18, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Widespread Panic 5/5, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre v

MARCH 31, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 39

l