Print Issue of April 5, 2018 (Volume 47, Number 26)

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | A P R I L 5 , 2 0 1 8

Forging bonds of geekdom at C2E2 15

SUPA BWE LAPS THE PACK He brought pop-punk melodies to hip-hop years before anyone else—and he’s still evolving.

BY LEOR GALIL 20

The wall’s gonna fall at the Latino Film Festival 18

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FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE 4 Agenda Stage Left Theatre’s The Luckiest People, Lynn Shelton’s new film Outside In, and more goings-on about town

INTERIM EXECUTIVE EDITOR DAVE NEWBART CREATIVE DIRECTOR VINCE CERASANI DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JAMIE RAMSAY CULTURE EDITOR AIMEE LEVITT FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS STEVE HEISLER, JAMIE LUDWIG, KATE SCHMIDT SENIOR WRITER MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI FILM LISTINGS COORDINATOR PATRICK FRIEL CONTRIBUTORS NOAH BERLATSKY, JORDANNAH ELIZABETH, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, ANDREA GRONVALL, KT HAWBAKER, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, IRENE HSIAO, DAN JAKES, MONICA KENDRICK, H. MELT, BILL MEYER, ANGELA MYERS, MICHAEL MINER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, MARK PETERS, LEAH PICKETT, JANET POTTER, BEN SACHS, DMITRY SAMAROV, KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI, OLIVER SAVA, TIFFANY WALDEN, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERN ASHLEY MIZUO ----------------------------------------------------------------

CITY LIFE

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

6 Chicagoans How do you win contests and raffles? Create dedicated Gmail and Facebook accounts and enter 50 to 100 a day.

8 Transportation Make the CTA free? Why not?

9 Politics After thousands of Chicago voters agreed the state should repeal its ban on rent control, the movement to do so is heating up.

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER BEST SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com

10 Politics Apple CEO Tim Cook’s undercooked plan to help underserved Chicago schools: $300 iPads, app development for all 11 On Culture Lillstreet Art Center filed for bankruptcy, then reached a settlement with its former website developer.

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MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Supa Bwe laps the pack

The Chicago MC brought pop-punk melodies to hip-hop years before the current crop of Soundcloud rappers, and he’s still evolving on the new Finally Dead.

BY LEOR GALIL 20 ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY KEVIN SERNA. FOR MORE OF KEVIN’S WORK, GO TO KEVINSERNA.NET.

23 Jazz The first black head of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, Heather Ireland Robinson, talks segregation and infrastructure.

26 In Rotation Brown Girls writer Fatimah Asghar on Janelle Monae’s utopia for queer women of color, and other current obsessions.

27 Shows of note Lifted Bells, Ty Segall, and more of the week’s best

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16 Comics After artist Ed Siemienkowicz’s death, his friends rally to finish his final project.

17 Visual Art Magnolia Screen Printing wants to provide jobs for the young people of Chicago Lawn.

18 Movies At the Chicago Latino Film Festival, the wall’s gonna fall.

19 Movies Minority actors catch a break at the Asian American Showcase.

ARTS & CULTURE

12 Theater Lydia Diamond’s Smart People offers an advanced degree in race relations.

13 Theater In the Jackie Taylor Drama Series, the Black Ensemble Theater highlights work by three young playwrights.

14 Dance Wendy Clinard and Akito Tsuda team up to create art out of the sights and sounds of Pilsen.

15 Comics At C2E2, comics fans meet their heroes, impress the kids, and form lifelong bonds.

32 Restaurant Review: Bar Biscay MFK vets and chef Johnny Anderes present the Basque bar of the future.

33 Cocktail Challenge Elizabeth Mickiewicz of EZ Inn fashions a michelada with queso dip.

CLASSIFIEDS

34 Jobs 34 Apartments & Spaces 35 Marketplace 36 Straight Dope Is talcum powder really linked to ovarian cancer, and if so, what about babies?

37 Savage Love Burning questions on threesomes, anxiety-induced orgasms, and more 38 Early Warnings Dinosaur Jr., Raekwon, Amen Dunes, and more shows to look for in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf Sunshine Boys pool decades of indie-rock experience on Blue Music, and other music news.

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As You Like It Eclectic Full Contact Theatre’s production of As You Like It makes aesthetic choices that mimic forms of torture: a piercingly bright tree of LEDs serves as the central set piece, deafening crashes like high school lockers slammed inches from your eardrums punctuate the scenes, plastic masks obscure the faces of agents who seem not quite to understand the import of their words and deeds—and that’s just act one. While director Katherine Siegel aims to make a point about gender by casting the gentleman Orlando as a woman (Aja Singletary), thus making her beloved Rosalind’s drag act as a page boy more revelation than disguise, the lightness of the comedy is lost through tiresome adherence to an underdeveloped concept and overwrought, disco-inspired ornamentation. —IRENE HSIAO Through 4/22: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6860, eclectic-theatre.com, $27$32, $17-$22 students and seniors.

Brick Wall It’s one thing for a man to deny his wife affection in a time of personal crisis and go have a nervous breakdown in the stairwell of his apartment building. But to make him out to be the hero in a two-bit episodic melodrama like this one from On the Spot Theatre is ridiculous. “When life kicks you in the teeth, you can’t just wait for the tooth fairy,” quoth Jason Zachman (Danny Glenn), in playwright-director Mike Brayndick’s absolutely brain-dead turn of phrase, and that might as well be the motto for what happens here, which is a whole lot of cliche-ridden nothing over an insufferable hour and a half. Our one respite is Karla A. Renhoffer, who smiles down on Zachman from time to time as his late, lamented mother. The rest is garbage. —MAX MALLER Through 4/28: Thu-Sun 7:30 PM, Berger Park Cultural Center, 6205 N. Sheridan, onthespottheatrecompany.weebly.com, $15.

Hang British playwright Debbie R Tucker Green’s one-act drama gains volumes in its translation to an

American stage. A pair of white bureaucrats (Annabel Armour, Eleni Pappageorge) meet with an unnamed woman of color (Patrese D. McClain) in a corporate-style conference room. Both Keira Fromm’s Remy Bumppo production and Green’s play only hint at the nature of the conversation and the interviewee’s status—victim, witness, or cooperating coconspirator—prompting audiences to interrogate every hollow nicety, leading question, and sympathetic glance.

The result is a seat-gripping, often purposefully frustrating experience that speaks profoundly both to ripped-fromthe-headlines real experiences as well as to the abstract relationship citizens have with their government. The fact that someone else’s dystopian fantasy happens to mirror real life in the United States is downright chilling. —DAN JAKES Through 4/29: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Wed 4/11, 7:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, remybumppo.org, $53.50, $15 students.

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The Luckiest People Meridith Friedman’s smart little drama— whose title is an ironic reference to the Barbra Streisand hit about “people who need people”—concerns a family’s fragmented response to the death of the mother. Grief-stricken father Oscar (Sandy Elias) wants to leave assisted living and move in with his son Richard

Mary’s Wedding é D. RICE

(Nelson Rodriguez), a gay doctor, which may give Richard the excuse he wants to postpone adopting a child with his lover (Christopher W. Jones). And Richard’s sister, Laura (Lisa Herceg), who lives overseas with her husband and child, is toying with rekindling an affair with an old flame. Under Jason A. Fleece’s direction, the play insightfully explores how their mom’s death prompts Laura and Richard to reconsider—and endanger—their own marriages. Stage Left Theatre’s solid production is part of a “rolling world premiere” supported by the National New Play Network.

—ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 4/29: ThuSat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-883-8830, stagelefttheatre.com, $32, $22 students and seniors.

Pygmalion-made-simple story—in which a streetwalker and a billionaire meet cute, fall in love, and learn that money isn’t everything while spending loads of it—just a wee bit idiotic? Of course.

Do the generically competent songs by Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance have a country flavor inappropriate to the Hollywood setting? You noticed that too?

Are the politics—? Yes, they are. For all that, the show is going to give a lot of people a nostalgic thrill. And supporting performers Orfeh and Eric Anderson are nothing short of amazing. —TONY ADLER Through 4/15: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Wed 2 and 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Ford Center for the Performing Arts, Oriental Theatre, 24 W. Randolph, 800-775-2000, broadwayinchicago.com, $37-$122.

Mary’s Wedding First Folio’s production of Canadian playwright Stephen Massicotte’s 2002 two-hander about an English woman on the eve of her wedding dreaming about a Canadian soldier she once knew seems to do everything right under Melanie Keller’s direction. The cast—Heather Chrisler and Debo Balogun—seems to work well together. Angela Weber Miller’s rustic set plays to the strengths of Mayslake Hall’s cavernous performing space. Yet there’s something bloodless and dutiful about all this. Massicotte’s script is well crafted and well researched, but it’s also oddly emotionally distant, even when the play takes us to one of the most horrifying battles of the Great War (Ypres, 1915). The performances also lack passion; Chrisler and Balogun feel more like mere friends than would-be lovers.

—JACK HELBIG Through 4/29: Wed 8 PM, Thu 3 PM (no performance 4/5), Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM (8 PM only 4/7), Sun 3 PM, First Folio Theatre, Mayslake Peabody Estate, 31st and Rt. 83, Oak Brook, firstfolio.org, $34-$44, $29-$39 students and seniors.

We’re Gonna Die Haven Theatre presents Young Jean Lee’s guileless monologue/indie-pop concert about learning a few of life’s lessons. Heartbreak, family illness, and the challenges of fitting in are addressed in an open-hearted if sometimes trite way. It’s hard to fault the performances or the sincere emotions behind these songs and stories, but it’s equally difficult to believe that anyone past middle school would be confronting some of these issues for the very first time. How could the singer/ narrator be old enough to talk about finding her first grey hair and have never thought about death before? The show would be ideal for a school assembly; grown-ups might be better off seeking therapy. Josh Sobel directed. —DMITRY SAMAROV Through 4/16: Mon 8 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1700 Theatre, 1700 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, haventheatrechicago.com, $18.

Pretty Woman There’s really no arguing with this musical version of the hit 1990 movie, getting its shakedown run in Chicago on the way to a Broadway opening next summer. Are the leads less alluring than Julia Roberts and Richard Gere were in the original? Well, duh. Is the

MOVIES More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS Acrimony Taraji P. Henson, who could freeze water with her stare, plays a woman driven to violent extremes by the man in her life, a charming but no-account inventor played by Lyriq Bent. Because the writer-director is Tyler Perry, the romance is treated like a financial ledger, with an onscreen ticker popping up occasionally to record how much money the heroine has spent on her deadbeat lover, and God help him when he winds up with a fortune and another woman. Perry’s dramas typically follow a pattern of mounting anger and frustration, as the heroine suffers endless indignities for love, and explosive rage, when she gets her revenge; men are dirty dogs, sniffing around for money and sex, and must be punished. The movie has enough blinding anger to pull you along, and Perry plays around with one’s sympathies by making Henson’s character increasingly monstrous, but the pallid dialogue is a constant drag on the story. —J.R. JONES R, 120 min.

Century 12 and CineArts 6, City North 14,

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Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of April 5

Chatham 14, Crown Village 18, New 400, Showplace Icon.

REVIVALS The Earrings of Madame R de . . . Certainly one of the crowning achievements in film (1953). Max

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A Fantastic Woman Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio found an international audience with Gloria (2013), which gave Paulina García the role of a lifetime as a tough, impetuous, lonely divorcee; this follow-up (2017), starring Daniela Vega as a trans woman coming out of the shadows, cements Lelio’s reputation as a filmmaker who—like George Cukor or Pedro Almodóvar—knows how to treat a lady.

Vega is mesmerizing as the protagonist, a young nightclub singer having an affair with a married, middle-aged businessman. After he dies of an aneurysm during one of their trysts, she insists on grieving publicly with the family despite their contempt and mounting abuse.

In one frightening scene, a few of the men ambush her and wind plastic tape around her head, pulling her smoky features into an awful mask; their level of hatred is striking, but so is her dignity and proud forbearance. In Spanish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES R, 103 min. Fri 4/6, 3:45 and 8:15 PM; Sat 4/7, 3 and 5 PM; Sun 4/8, 5 PM; Mon 4/9, 8:15 PM; Wed 4/11, 6 PM; and Thu 4/12, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

Finding Your Feet This entry in the growing romantic-comedy subgenre of British old-timers rediscovering their zest for life follows a snobby social climber (Imelda Staunton) who walks in on her husband having an affair with her best friend. The cliches continue as she flees her palatial home in Surrey to crash with her bohemian older sister (Celia Imrie), who lives in a shambolic public housing complex and smokes pot with other aging lefties. When the older sister coaxes the younger to attend her weekly dance class, she begins to unwind and stumbles into a chaste romance with her dance partner (Timothy Spall). The cast is entertaining, if a tad performative, and some shockingly funny moments distract from an otherwise predictable plot. Richard Loncraine directed; with David Hayman and Joanna Lumley. —LEAH PICKETT PG-13, 111 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre.

The Miracle Season You want emotion? See if you can handle this inspirational sports drama, whose every scene is calculated to make young hearts explode. It’s based on the story of Caroline Found, captain of the women’s volleyball team at Iowa City West High School, whose August 2011 death in a moped accident inspired her teammates to win the state finals that year (for the second season in a row, but take your miracles where you find them). Winning one for the Gipper is a long tradition in movies like these, but watching the process stretch out over an entire season can be a strain, partly because Found (Danika Yarosh) is never established onscreen as much more than a sweet girl and a fierce competitor. Sean McNamara (Raise Your Voice) directed; with William Hurt in a measured perfor-

Finding Your Feet mance as Found’s grieving father and Helen Hunt in the thankless role of the team’s leathery, poker-faced coach. —J.R. JONES PG, 90 min. City North 14, Crown Village 18.

1945 Nothing promises intrigue like a passenger train depositing a stranger in a small town, and that’s certainly the case with this black-and-white Hungarian drama, in which a little village shudders collectively with the unexpected arrival, in August 1945, of a mournful Orthodox Jew and his grown son. As these mysterious visitors make their way toward the Jewish cemetery, panic spreads among certain townspeople who have taken advantage of the Holocaust to seize the property of their Jewish neighbors. Writer-director Ferenc Török, adapting a story by Gábor T. Szántó, snakes through a community rife with deals, secrets, and compromises; his film adds to a growing list of Holocaust dramas and documentaries that move past the guilt of Nazi Germany to ponder the complicity of smaller communities in eastern Europe. In Hungarian and Russian with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 91 min. Music Box.

4/6, 1:45 and 6 PM; Sat 4/7, 8 PM; Sun 4/8, 2:45 PM; Mon 4/9, 7:45 PM; Tue 4/10, 6 PM; Wed 4/11, 8 PM; and Thu 4/12, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

The Party Kristin Scott Thomas, R Timothy Spall, Patricia Clarkson, Cillian Murphy, Emily Mortimer—these

are the kind of consummate professionals often called upon to bolster ailing blockbusters, so seeing them all together within the modest confines of this expert drawing room comedy may blow your hair back. Thomas plays a British politician giving a dinner party to celebrate her recent appointment to a ministerial position—she keeps her cell phone tucked under her bra strap so she can catch every congratulatory call—and Spall is her grumpy jazz-buff husband, who insists on spoiling the fun by announcing that he’s got cancer. This initiates various philosophical debates that weave through the sweet jazz LPs playing on the living room stereo, and

Ophuls’s gliding camera follows Danielle Darrieux, Charles Boyer, and Vittorio De Sica through a circle of flirtation, passion, and disappointment, a tour that embraces both sophisticated comedy and high tragedy. Ophuls’s camera style is famous for its physicalization of time, in which every fleeting moment is recorded and made palpable by the ceaseless tracking shots, yet his delineation of space is also sublime and highly charged: no director has better understood the emotional territory that exists offscreen. In French with subtitles. —DAVE KEHR 105 min.

35mm. Fri 4/6, 7 and 9:30 PM; and Sun 4/8, 1:30 PM. Univ. of Chicago Doc Films.

The Man From Planet X Edgar G. Ulmer, the Edgar Allan Poe of B (and C and D) movies, concocted one of the first alien-visitor plots for this low-budget sci-fi film (1951). It isn’t one of his more personal projects, but it’s full of his bleak spirit—the catatonic acting, the breakaway sets, the cramped exteriors, all contributing to Ulmer’s harrowingly consistent vision of a blasted, barren world. You’ll need a microscope to find the art in this film, but it’s there. The no-star cast includes Robert Clarke, Margaret Field, and William Schallert. — DAVE KEHR 71 min. 35mm. Tue 4/10, 7:30 PM. Northeastern Illinois University.

SPECIAL EVENTS Nightingale 10th Anniversary Celebration The local microcinema Nightingale Theater celebrates its first decade with four days of events, including a program of experimental films based on

Sister’s Sister (2011), but her career in features failed to ignite and she crept off into series television. Now she’s back with an engrossing drama about love and circumstance, and there isn’t a false note from start to finish. Jay Duplass, who cowrote the screenplay with Shelton, stars as a 40-year-old man who’s spent half his life in prison, taking a murder rap for his younger brother; paroled through the efforts of a criminal justice advocacy group, he returns home, tries to negotiate life as a convicted felon, and pursues an all-consuming love for the volunteer activist who stuck with him through the appeals process, played by Edie Falco at her most vulnerable. The woman is at least a decade older, with a teenage daughter and a troubled marriage, but she and the protagonist have shared something extraordinary—the only question is whether, in the long run, that will be enough. —J.R. JONES 109 min. Fri

{ { YO U R AD HERE

Outside In Lynn Shelton wrote R and directed two superior indie comedies, Humpday (2009) and Your

REACH OVER

1 MILLION

Outside In secrets emerge as the night wears on.

Writer-director Sally Potter (Ginger & Rosa) ends the film with a shot staring down the barrel of a gun, though in this context the image registers less as a death sentence than as a punch line.

With Cherry Jones and Bruno Ganz.

—J.R. JONES R, 71 min. Fri 4/6-Thu 4/13.

Facets Cinematheque.

measuring methods (Thu 4/5, 7 PM), a live telethon-themed program (Fri 4/6, 7 PM), an open screening of home videos (Sat 4/7, 1 PM), a program of works from other regional microcinemas (Sat 4/7, 7 PM), and a late-night experimental-film program and sleepover (Sat 4/7, 10 PM).

For more information and a complete schedule visit nightingalecinema.org.

Wed 4/4-Sat 4/7. Nightingale. v

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CITY LIFE Chicagoans

Queen of the contest

Cynthia Kendall, 50, enters between 50 and 100 sweepstakes every morning.

I REMEMBER REALLY GETTING into it around 2010. I went to an event at the zoo, and they had a raffle to win this huge cake that had fondant monkeys all over it. I won the cake that night, and my kids were still little; they were so excited. I looked online and found a ton of websites for people who enter contests, and the people on there said, “I win a few big prizes a year,” or “Every couple of years, I might win a car or a vacation.” So I started to get into the habit.

I get up before the kids and spend half an hour or an hour each morning. I created a separate Gmail account for contesting and a separate Facebook account for contesting, and I just go to these contest sites and put in my information. I enter between 50 and 100 a day.

But it’s autofill, so it’s just hitting my e-mail address and saying “send.” None of them costs money to enter. I have them categorized by day, by what’s new, by the ones you can enter every day until they expire. It’s a bit like exercise: I enjoy it, but sometimes I’d rather skip it, but I do it anyway.

My biggest win was the DIY Network Kitchen and Bath contest in 2012, and that was $100,000. They called me on my cell phone. I remember asking lots of questions, because I thought it was suspicious. They said, “In two days you’re going to get a FedEx package, and it’s going to have paperwork for you to fill out.” So when the FedEx came, I was like, “This is real, this is real!” They sent me an actual check for $100,000 in the mail.

I put most of the money in the bank, and it has been helping me cover all sorts of things

6 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

“It’s a bit like exercise: I enjoy it, but sometimes I’d rather skip it, but I do it anyway,” says Kendall. é TOM MICHAS; ASSISTANT: TAYLOR CAIRNS

for the past couple of years. Right around that time my kids and I had planned a trip to Universal Studios in Florida. For the first time ever I was like, “Yeah! We can get something from the gift shop!” Not like I am usually, like, “How much is it?” I was like, “Yeah, let’s get the deluxe wand at Harry Potter World! We can get sweatshirts, that’s fine!”

A few months after that, I won a contest to go to New York. There was this great party I got to go to where there were five finalists,

and they put our names into this bowl with car keys, and the person whose key turned the ignition in a vintage BMW would win the car. I did not win the car. In retrospect, that was kind of good, because you had to take ownership of the car that night, and it was a stick shift.

I’m not superstitious, but I think that luck breeds luck. When you’re feeling good and you’ve got a lot of positive energy, it keeps going. But if you’re in a slump, that can create a negative energy. I have not had a winning

streak for a while, but I think it’s coming.

Even when you’re not winning the big stuff, there’s lots of little things that come in the mail all the time. Two days ago, I got coupons for Skittles and Snickers as a prize. Lots of $25 gift cards for Target, $100 for Hasbro Toys, $50 for Groupon. When people find out I do this, most of them are just like, “Oh, I’ve never won anything.” And I just want to say, “Well, how many things have you entered?”

—AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE Ventra cards wouldn’t be needed if public transit was free. é MICHAEL JARECKI

TRANSPORTATION

Make the CTA free? Why not?

Easy access to jobs, schools, and health care could save a ton of money.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

L

ast month, community organizer Jahmal Cole floated a bold proposal: eliminate all fares for riding the CTA. As the founder of the My Block, My Hood, My City nonprofit, he often leads underprivileged youth on transit field trips to different neighborhoods.

“I think [the CTA] should be free,” Cole said during a during a Metropolitan Planning Council discussion of Chicago segregation, to applause from the crowd, according to Streetsblog Chicago. “I used to ride the Red Line every day. . . . It’s like the aorta of Chicago. I would definitely make it extended farther than 95th Street, and I would make it cheaper to ride.” He argued that providing public transportation at no cost to riders would help more Chicagoans access cultural, educational, and career opportunities.

Some Streetsblog commenters scoffed at the idea. “‘I think it should be free,’ means he thinks someone else should pay for his transportation, as nothing in this world is free,” one reader wrote.

8 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

But is it really such a crazy idea from an economic point of view? Transit helps people get to schools, jobs, and preventive health care, and if a higher percentage of current Chicago residents were well educated, employed, and healthy, that could save a lot of money for society. And coaxing more people out of cars and onto buses and el trains would mean less congestion, pollution, and crashes, which would lead to less lost productivity and property damage, lower bills for public health and first responder services, and less wear and tear on roads.

For example, a 2014 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that U.S. traffic crashes cost $871 billion a year in economic and societal costs. Since the city of Chicago represents about 1/120th of the nation’s population, our share of that loss could be roughly $7.3 billion.

The seemingly utopian concept of free transit isn’t so foreign in Europe. Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, population 450,000, was a pioneer in this area, rolling out free transit

service for residents in 2013. City officials there say that the program is financially sustainable, since it has encouraged more people who live in the region to establish residency in the city. They say the resulting $25 million-plus gain in income tax has more than covered the $15 million in lost fare-box receipts, allowing the city to continually increase transit service to meet demand.

But could complimentary public transportation work in a metropolis as large as Chicago? We may soon find out, since in March Paris’s Socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo, announced plans to study the feasibility of making transit free across the city of 2.2 million in an effort to boost mobility and fight pollution.

Still, when I asked the CTA about Cole’s proposal, spokesman Steve Mayberry indicated that the agency doesn’t consider the concept worthy of serious consideration. He noted that state legislation that has been in place for 70 years requires the transit system to recoup half of its annual operating budget ($1.51 billion in 2018) from fare-box revenue. “This kind of idea has zero successful precedent among U.S. transit agencies,” Mayberry added.

It’s true that Seattle ended its 40-year-old policy of free downtown transit service in 2012 as a cost-cutting measure. On the other hand, the regional transit system in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that state’s second largest, is still free to ride thanks to funding from local municipalities and the University of North Carolina, and there are plans for a future service expansion.

Chicago transit experts and advocates were also skeptical about whether totally free transit could work here. “Due to our city and state budget problems, we are probably the last metropolitan region in the country that should be considering this,” said DePaul transportation professor Joe Schwieterman.

Even staff from the progressive Active Transportation Alliance expressed doubt that free rides for all Chicagoans could be feasible under the current fiscal climate.

The need is real. Matt Wilson, an economic development planner with the Great Cities Institute, told me the think tank’s research for Active Trans found that in lower-income communities on the south and west sides, the annual cost of buying CTA monthly passes

($1,260) is more than 5 percent of the per capita income for the total employed population.

In Little Village the figure is 11.6 percent, and in the Altgeld Gardens area the number is 15.1 percent—a major financial burden. But as for an economic argument, “I would imagine that if CTA or the city was to subsidize fares, it would be more of an investment for the social benefit of Chicagoans, not something where cost is intended to be recovered,” he said.

Audrey Wennink, a director with the Metropolitan Planning Council, acknowledged that offering free transit for all Chicagoans would be an uphill battle. However, Wennink said that if there is political will in Illinois to address climate change and economic inequality—she noted that about 71.5 percent of CTA riders are people of color and 29 percent are low-income—it might be possible to overcome the financial barrier through creative revenue strategies.

For example, Wennink said, more of the state transportation budget could be shifted from roadways to transit, or tolls could be added to all the highways in the region to fund public transportation. Another idea would be to create a new tax on employers that would be earmarked for transit. About 42 percent of the $12.3 billion annual operating budget for the Paris regional transit authority comes from a tax on firms with ten or more employees.

But if those progressive ideas are nonstarters in a broke, tax-fatigued state like Illinois, Wennink had a couple more modest proposals. The Seattle-area transit authority currently offers the Orca Lift program, with $1.50 fares for residents earning less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level, similar to Chicago’s Divvy for Everyone discounted bike-share program. Wennink added that cities like Portland, Oregon, have implemented fare capping, which means that riders who pay as they go for multiple rides during a given time period never spend more than the price of the equivalent transit pass.

While free CTA for everybody might not be in the cards in the foreseeable future, making public transportation more affordable for low-income residents is a no-brainer. “Making [transit] even more accessible to riders could be great for our region and really distinguish Chicago as a place with high quality of life,” Wennink noted. v

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

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CITY LIFE The results of March’s advisory referendum on whether the state should lift its ban on rent control show strong support for the measure. é TANVEER ALI

POLITICS

What’s next for Lift the Ban

After thousands of Chicago voters agreed the state should repeal its prohibition on rent control, the movement to do so is heating up.

By MAYA DUKMASOVA

I

f you’re reading this and you’re against rent control, don’t worry: it’s not coming to Chicago . . . yet. But in the March primary elections, thousands of Chicago voters agreed the state should repeal its ban on rent control in response to a nonbinding referendum on the ballot.

About 75 percent of the 16,000 voters in 77

precincts across the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Seventh, 12th, 22nd, 25th, 33rd, and 36th Wards that participated in the advisory initiative voted in favor of it. They were asked either “Should the State of Illinois lift the ban on rent control to address rising rents, unjust evictions, and gentrification in our community?” or “To stop gentrification and rapidly

increasing rents in Chicago, do you support the State of Illinois repealing the Rent Control Preemption Act?” They’re loaded questions, but that’s how advisory referendums typically are: they make it on the ballot due to petition signature collection by advocates seeking to change something.

The 1997 Rent Control Preemption Act—a state law pushed by the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) not just in Illinois but in dozens of other states—prohibits municipalities from passing any kind of laws that regulate rent. Last year, state rep Will Guzzardi introduced a bill to repeal the law. If it passes, it can open the way for Chicago to craft its own ordinance regulating how much and how fast rent prices can increase. The Chicago Rehab Network estimates that half of the city’s renters are

burdened, which means they pay more than 30 percent of their income toward housing costs. The DePaul Institute for Housing Studies reports that low-income areas have the largest gaps between the supply and demand of affordable housing.

Over the last two years, a citywide coalition of community groups has mobilized a Lift the Ban campaign, and since Guzzardi introduced his bill, seven other state legislators have signed on as cosponsors. Democratic gubernatorial nominee J.B. Pritzker has said that he also supports the repeal measure.

Guzzardi says the results of the referendum will help convince others in Springfield that repealing the law is a good idea. “This is a very important step in legislative progress on this issue,” he says. “The real estate lobby is very powerful in Springfield, and in order to overcome that power we need to demonstrate to my colleagues that there’s broad popular support for this issue. I think the 16,000 people who voted on this question is a big step in that direction.”

Guzzardi’s bill is still stuck in the Rules Committee for now, but he will be pushing for a hearing this session.

The agitation around repealing the Rent Control Preemption Act has stimulated unprecedented discussion around the idea of rent regulation in recent months. Advocates argue that rent control would slow gentrification and displacement, while opponents say it would lead to the deterioration of the city’s housing stock and limit the supply of available apartments. A discussion of what local regulations of rent prices might look like is moot while the 1997 state law stays in place.

Last year, in “The secret history of Illinois’s rent control prohibition,” the Reader took a deep dive into rent control and discovered that the state law was championed by real estate industry lobbyists and passed by the Republican-controlled statehouse at a time when there had been no movement for rent control anywhere in the state. v

m @mdoukmas APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE presents

POLITICS

Pie in the sky

Apple CEO Tim Cook’s undercooked plan to help underserved Chicago schools: $300 iPads, app development for all

By RYAN SMITH

APRIL 9, 2018

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10 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

H

ow would Apple ensure it was helping underserved communities and schools in Chicago and not just the best and brightest?

Tim Cook hesitated slightly before answering.

This was quite possibly the most challenging moment of the Apple CEO’s Chicago exhibition last week.

Cook’s education-themed product launch had been framed as a heroic one, and he arrived at Lane Tech College Prep in appropriately conquering fashion. Attendees waiting in line under a slight drizzle held Apple-issued umbrellas as they walked past Apple Store-like structures erected on the school’s front lawn, and hey—wasn’t that a statue of Al Gore? Nope, it was the former vice president in the flesh, just another audience member who—along with a worldwide audience via livestream—watched as Cook announced the release of a new iPad and the citywide expansion of Apple’s “Everyone Can Code” program.

The tech giant’s top executive returned for an hour-long MSNBC interview special with anchor Chris Hayes and Recode tech reporter Kara Swisher—a show that had been branded “Revolution: Apple Changing the World.” Cook sat comfortably in the center of a gymnasium turned television studio on the second floor of the selective enrollment high school as several hundred students, faculty, press, and ticketed members of the public showered him with applause every few minutes.

But then Hayes asked Cook a tough question. He wanted Apple’s top executive to respond to a clip from an interview with a young African-American man from Chicago who expressed frustration with the way the public and private sector kept investing millions of dollars in projects like the DePaul basketball stadium while neglecting the needs of the south and west sides.

“That’s a good question. We’ve priced this iPad as low as we can,” Cook told Hayes.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, right, listens to Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel at last week’s Apple educational event at Lane Tech. é CHARLES REX ARBOGAST

Because the company’s devices are built to last three to four years, $300 becomes “a very reasonable expenditure,” Cook said. Also, he added, Apple is ready and willing to teach students all over Chicago how to code and develop apps.

That’s right, on the same day that a group of Chicago youth from the #NoCopAcademy movement staged a “die-in” at City Hall to demand that the city defund a $95 million police academy to fund education, one of the richest men in America was here to tell Chicagoans that even if they’re stuck in underfunded, failing, or closing schools—hey, our tablet is a pretty good value, and did you hear about our cool new computer club coming to your classroom?

Rather than pushing revolution, the CEO’s message reinforced the dominant economic ideology—an extreme form of meritocracy and market supremacy—held by America’s elites.

That ideology seems to see no problem with the fact that Cook earned $102 million in 2017 (enough to purchase iPads for nearly all of CPS’s 371,000 students), while 34 percent of African-Americans in the city lived in relative poverty, earning less than half the minimum wage.

Extreme inequality is fine, in other words, if everyone is perceived as having been granted a fair shot at gunning for the top. “Our desire as a nation is to offer equal opportunities, and we haven’t succeeded at that,” Cook noted.

“We’ve got to reach out to women and underrepresented minorities.”

His solution is a technocratic twist on the old conservative axiom: Teach a man to code and he’ll eat for life.

That’s basically the concept behind Apple’s partnership with the city of Chicago.

Lane Tech will serve as a central hub to train local high school teachers in the company’s Everyone Can Code curriculum. The idea is that the teachers will learn to use Swift—a

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CITY LIFE simplified programming language used to develop iOS apps—and teach it to Chicago’s students. Then, as the logic goes, students will be prepared for an employment marketplace increasingly dominated by computer science fields and those who know how to code.

“We have to get used to the idea of continuously retraining ourselves for the jobs of the future,” Cook said. Not surprisingly, many of these said jobs will be in service of his company.

Because suddenly Apple is hiring in America. The company, based in Cupertino, California, has long been criticized for outsourcing jobs and manufacturing to China while stashing more than $250 billion in cash overseas to dodge paying into what Cook called a “crazy” tax system. It had a change of heart with the passage of Trump’s tax overhaul, the one that lowers the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent in 2018 (Cook praised the Trump plan multiple times as “good for America”).

The company opted to shift its mountain of offshore cash from a tax haven in the English Channel back here with a onetime tax of $38 billion. That means Apple essentially avoided $40 billion of taxes.

Meanwhile, it also announced a plan to invest $30 billion in capital spending here over the next five years—creating 20,000 new jobs and a new campus somewhere in America. Call it Apple HQ2, though Cook bristles at the idea of holding a Hunger Games-like competition for it similar to the way Amazon is doing with its second headquarters (“We’re not doing a beauty contest thing, that’s not Apple,” he said).

It’s possible, then, that Cook and Apple have long-term plans to bring their next headquarters to Chicago, and that the Everyone Can Code initiative is little more than a way to turn CPS into a kind of Apple internship program.

If that happens, the kids best equipped to succeed in Apple’s brave new world still won’t be the ones living in segregated and poverty-stricken neighborhoods. It will be the kind of high-achieving students who’ve scratched and climbed their way up America’s increasingly precarious meritocratic ladder to schools like Lane Tech and have the time, energy, and resources to thrive in a coding club. It will likely be the students for those whom buying a $300 iPad every few years really is “a very reasonable expenditure.”

For everyone else in Chicago’s marginalized communities and schools? Good question. v

m @ryansmithwriter

ARTS & CULTURE Summer Kidstreet programming at Lillstreet Art Center . é CHRISTOPHER SCHNEBERGER

ON CULTURE

Lillstreet Art Center survives a scare

The studio and school’s troubles fire up the arts community, but its bankruptcy ends up half-baked.

By DEANNA ISAACS

L

ike so much else in the Trump era, declaring bankruptcy has come to seem like business as usual. After all, Trump’s companies have done it numerous times.

Still, it was a shocker to hear that Lillstreet Art Center, the venerable north-side school, studio, and gallery hub, filed for Chapter 11 last month—especially since the apparent cause of its financial trouble was a dispute with a Web designer.

Last week, both the dispute and the bankruptcy were resolved. But in the interim, there was plenty of angst.

Lillstreet, founded in 1975 in a onetime stable in Lincoln Park, now occupies a massive former factory at 4401 N. Ravenswood. In addition to the administrative offices, the building houses 48 artists in studios, 25 classrooms, three galleries, a gift shop, and a restaurant, the nonprofit First Slice Pie Cafe. A nationally recognized urban ceramics center, and one of very few large art centers run as a business rather than a nonprofit, it’s a hub for thousands of students and art makers of all kinds.

So a tiff over Web design brings elephant and flea jokes to mind.

But it was no joke. On March 5, Bruce Robbins, founder and president of Lill Street Inc.

signed the bankruptcy paperwork. The news was first reported by Crain’s Chicago Business.

That sent a scare through the Lillstreet community. The center’s communications director, Kate Bek, says she and her colleagues were hearing from so many people afraid that Lillstreet would close that she posted a statement on the center’s Facebook page to reassure them: “[W]e want our community to know that Lillstreet Art Center is not going out of business,” the statement said. “In fact, spring session enrollment is strong. . . .[O]ur directors are already busy planning our fall session and beyond. . . . As we undergo a carefully planned business re-organization, there will be no changes in our operations. We expect to emerge stronger and better than ever!”

Basically, she said, “business is good, and there won’t be any changes you’ll notice.”

So what made a reorganization necessary?

Enter the website redesign.

According to the bankruptcy documents, Lillstreet contracted in 2015 with Trilogy Interactive, a national firm with a Ravenswood office, to redevelop its website. The cost was to be no more than $137,050 and work was to be completed by September 5, 2015. By January 15, 2016, Lillstreet had paid Trilogy a total of

$110,746, including a retainer fee. Then, according to the documents, “[a] dispute arose between the parties and Trilogy did not complete the new website.” Lillstreet officials declined to comment on the nature of the dispute.

In July 2016, Trilogy sued Lillstreet in Cook County circuit court, seeking an additional $125,000 plus costs and attorneys’ fees. Lillstreet countersued, trying to recover what it had already paid. The case went to a jury trial, and in November 2017, the jury found in favor of Trilogy, awarding it $105,000.

After the verdict, Trilogy filed to recover attorneys’ fees and costs in a notably larger amount: $762,317. Lillstreet asked for a new trial. Then, because of the bankruptcy filing, hearings on the posttrial motions were delayed.

(Trilogy’s attorney, Saint Charles-based Jotham Stein, declined to comment on the case.)

In a situation like this, bankruptcy can be a protective strategy, allowing a business to continue operating while it pays off or settles its debts over time. (According to the filing, Lillstreet’s assets are between $100,000 and $500,000 and its liabilities are between $500,000 and $1 million.) It’s also worth noting that, according to the filing, Lillstreet’s largest creditor is its landlord, Robbins Management, which is owed $234,000 in past-due rent. Robbins Management is owned by Bruce Robbins and other investors.

A constrained Robbins said he couldn’t comment on any of this except to say, “We’ve been in business 43 years, and our mission has been pretty much remained the same. We’ve grown, but we’re still a community place, and I think we’ve been pretty successful at it.

“We’re a third place in the lives of a lot of people,” he added. “There’s home, there’s work, and there’s the community at Lillstreet.”

But on March 27, Robbins was breathing easier. In the words of Lillstreet’s bankruptcy lawyer, Jeffrey M. Schwartz, reached by phone that morning: “We’ve reached a settlement with Trilogy that will allow us to dismiss the bankruptcy case and continue focusing on our business and operating in the ordinary course of business.”

In the end, Lillstreet agreed to pay $195,000 to Trilogy.

Translation: This bankruptcy’s not going to get baked. v

m @DeannaIsaacs APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 11

ARTS & CULTURE

R

Julian Parker, Kayla Carter, Deanna Myers, and Erik Hellman é MICHAEL BROSILOW

THEATER

Privilege and its discontents

Lydia Diamond’s Smart People offers an advanced degree in race relations.

By TONY ADLER

L

ast week I opened a review by calling An Enemy of the People the current Ibsen of choice, given the number of productions and adaptations it’s fostered in Chicago over the last few months. I had no idea how right I was. You know what Lydia R. Diamond’s latest, Smart People, turns out to be? That’s correct.

Diamond has updated the material to the late aughts (specifically 2007-’09, the two years leading up to Barack Obama’s inauguration) and turned it to her own trenchant uses—uses made vivid in Hallie Gordon’s staging for Writers Theatre. But An Enemy of the People is down there beneath the changes, all right. And the playwright lets us know the resemblance is intentional by putting one of her characters in an (offstage) mounting of the 1883 original.

If you were paying attention last week you

12 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

know that Enemy concerns a middle-aged Norwegian physician named Thomas Stockmann, who discovers that toxins from upstream factories have leached into the water feeding the mineral baths crucial to his hometown’s lucrative tourist trade. Stockmann starts crusading to get the baths shut down, cleaned up, and rebuilt with safety in mind. Spooked by the expense involved, the powers that be would rather shut down Stockmann. Fortunately for them, they’ve got a valuable ally in Stockmann himself. The doctor’s arrogance and naivete, his stridency and inability to maintain a tactical silence guarantee that his causes will forever be lost.

The Stockmann figure in Smart People is the all too aptly surnamed Brian White (Erik Hellman), a “golden boy” Harvard neuroscientist whose research has led him to the conclusion that white folks have a literal hate center in

their brains that, like it or not, makes them racist down to their DNA. He hasn’t kept a tactical silence about these findings. In fact, we’re told he put them into an op-ed that ignited a “race firestorm,” made him an anti-celebrity, and pissed off his department chair, with the consequence that he’s now a former golden boy teaching 100-level courses. Needless to say, his once generous funding has gone away.

Still, none of that has sobered him. Au contraire: opprobrium just makes him double down. Stockmann arrogant and Stockmann strident (Stockmann naive too, really, though he talks like he’s been wised up), Professor White doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and it appears to him that Harvard harbors a surprisingly high number of fools for such a prestigious institution. He scorns his students and talks, shall we say, impudently to the department chair, all the while wondering why

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they can’t comprehend his genius. Along with everything else, he’s Stockmann blind.

Not that he’s completely isolated. True to her title, Diamond surrounds White with a few smart people. His basketball buddy is Jackson Moore (Julian Parker), a black, Harvard-trained medical doctor currently serving his surgical internship and stoking his own prodigious resentments. White’s girlfriend, Ginny Yang (the fearless Deanna Myers), is an Asian-American, tenured psychology professor at Harvard who knows she’s got to run twice as fast to stay ahead of her Caucasian colleagues and has therefore turned herself into a zeitgeist-catching machine at the expense of anything resembling a human affect.

Ginny keeps her ever-mounting stress at bay through sex and clothes buying. (Some of the sharpest scenes in this sharp piece of work show her verbally annihilating sales clerks.)

Finally, there’s Valerie Johnston (Kayla Carter), a black actress with an MFA from Harvard’s American Repertory Theatre, supporting herself by sorting index cards for White.

As thoroughly acculturated as any Ivy League great-grandchild of European immigrants, Valerie nevertheless finds herself having to act black—or, more accurately, a conception of black—at depressingly funny auditions.

Best known as the author of Stick Fly, which centers on a family of affluent African-Americans, Diamond knows her way around the preoccupations of elites and the anxieties of minorities, and how distorted life can become for those with a foot in both worlds. Jackson, Ginny, and Valerie speak the language of privilege without the sense of security privilege is supposed to afford them—though, interestingly, considering the political history of the last nine years, Diamond allows them (and us) a glimpse of something better just as Obama is being sworn in.

Brian, meanwhile, is fighting his way off the mountaintop, one self-destructive, suspect thesis at a time. The particular form his rebellion takes says a lot about his own demons, at which Diamond, Gordon, and Hellman give us a long, hard, humiliating look late in the play.

Smart People ends with an image as, well, powerfully abject as any I’ve seen in years. v R SMART PEOPLE Through 6/10: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, 847242-6000, writerstheatre.org, $60-$80.

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ARTS & CULTURE

Caren Blackmore in The Plea é COURTESY BLACK ENSEMBLE THEATER

THEATER

In the Jackie Taylor Drama Series, the Black Ensemble Theater gets serious THE BLACK ENSEMBLE THEATER has long been a reliable destination for original, larger-than-life biographical musicals about larger-than-life artistic icons. Next year, upon the completion of a 150-seat studio theater space in its building in Uptown, members of the company’s Black Playwrights Initiative will have a new outlet for experimental and dramatic works intended to resonate on a more intimate and more personal scale.

In the meantime, as a preview, BET is partnering with the DuSable Museum of African American History for the Jackie Taylor Drama Series, a nine-performance presentation of three new plays by BPI members Ervin Gardner, Reginald Williams, and L. Maceo Ferris.

“I have a wealth of plays that have been written by BPI in preparation for the studio theater,” says company founder and CEO Jackie Taylor, “and [DuSable Museum president Perri Irmer] and I thought that it would be good to produce a series there to get people used to the fact that they’re going to see dramas by the Black Ensemble Theater.” The

collaboration is also designed to make the theater’s audience base more aware of the Hyde Park museum.

“The selections this year speak to the issues that are in the forefront in the African-American community,” says Taylor. These include police brutality, the right to protest, and the city’s epidemic of violence.

“It’s going to be hot,” she says with a laugh.

“We want for people to come from all over the city of Chicago, break down these barriers that we have about the north side and the south side, and come out and join in and participate and learn and understand so that we can grow together as human beings and get out of this concept of inequity.” —DAN JAKES THE JACKIE TAYLOR DRAMA SERIES National Anthem by Ervin Gardner, Sat 4/7-Sun 4/8. The Plea by Reginald Williams, Sat 4/14-Sun 4/15. In the Shadow of Justice by L. Maceo Ferris, Sat 4/21-Sun 4/22. All performances Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th, 773-769-4451, blackensembletheater.org, $35.

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APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 13

ARTS & CULTURE DANCE

A painting made from the human body Wendy Clinard and Akito Tsuda create art out of daily life in Pilsen.

By DMITRY SAMAROV

I

n early 2016, when Wendy Clinard first saw an article in the now-defunct magazine Chicago Voz about the Japanese photographer Akito Tsuda’s photographs of Pilsen in the early 90s when he was a student at Columbia College, she felt an immediate spark of recognition. As a creative person who has raised a family and developed her art in the neighborhood—she founded her company, Clinard Dance, there in 1999—Clinard saw Tsuda’s Pilsen pictures as documenting her own life as much as those of the people who posed for him. She reached out to Tsuda—who hadn’t been back to Chicago in about 25 years—and they decided to collaborate on a multimedia project.

Last fall Tsuda returned to Chicago, sponsored by Cultura in Pilsen, a coalition of organizations that foster creative exploration in the neighborhood. There was an exhibition of his photos at La Catrina Cafe and a performance by Clinard Dance. Cultura has also put the handsome limited-edition monograph Tsuda made of his Pilsen pictures back in print. Many of those who had posed for photos in the 90s (as well as surviving relatives) came to see their younger selves on the walls.

It was a moment of celebration for the whole community.

Tsuda will come back to town this week in order to keep developing his collaboration with Clinard. On Thursday, April 5, they will lead a workshop at the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago. Then, on Sunday, April 8, there will be a one-day exhibit of Tsuda’s photos at the National Museum of Mexican Fine Arts, followed by a performance featuring flamenco dancers Clinard and

14 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

Marisela Raymi Dalila Tapia, hip-hop dancer Christopher Courtney, beatboxer Yuri Lane, violinist Steve Gibons, guitarist Marija Temo, and photo projection and lighting by Christine Shallenberg, along with street sounds and audio captured in laundromats, city buses, and the like.

Clinard’s working title for this piece is Everyday People/Everyday Action. She thinks that she will need at least another year of workshopping, rehearsals, and brainstorming before this new production is fully built.

I’ve known Clinard since 1990, when we were both painting students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. We renewed our acquaintance in the early aughts when I randomly picked her up in my cab. I was still painting, but she had shifted her focus to flamenco dance and choreographing and creating pieces that incorporate visual art, poetry, and a variety of musical instrumentation.

She was first drawn to flamenco after seeing a friend perform. She tried to draw the dancers but found the drawings corny and unsatisfying, so she started taking flamenco classes herself. Now Clinard bristles at being categorized as a dancer; she still thinks of herself as a painter, one who composes with movements, beats, and the human body rather than brush strokes, canvas, or line.

In her restless search for authentic gesture and expression, Clinard has told me, one of the biggest challenges is not to fall back on learned skills. This is why, although her work is rooted in flamenco, she’s just as likely to find new moves watching a bus driver steer his or her vehicle down Halsted as in a performance hall or theater. She finds the repetitive gestures of

everyday working people a fruitful source for generating choreography. Mastering her art involves constantly pushing herself and her collaborators out of their comfort zones.

Around 2012, Clinard asked if I wanted to work on something with her. Two years later, Chicago’s Watershed—A 156-Mile Choreography premiered at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts. The piece incorporated Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, my video-projected ink paintings, and the movement of three dancers to poetically evoke life on the Chicago River. As with much of Clinard’s work, it’s a difficult piece to summarize. Her method is to incorporate many disparate elements—be it a passage from a book, a favorite drawing, or some unassuming gesture of some passerby on the street—into productions that, at their best, have their own internal logic.

The challenge of cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration consists not only in bridging the gap in differing working methods but also in contrasting modes of communication. During Watershed, it took some time for Clinard and me to understand one another enough to form an effective working relationship. Clinard tends to speak in metaphors that often left me scratching my head. But the more time we spent together, the closer I got to picking up what she was putting down.

Clinard is looking forward to Tsuda’s Chicago visit so that through face-to-face time they can refine the way they communicate with each other creatively.

Flipping through Tsuda’s book, Pilsen Days, last week at Pleasant House Pub on Halsted, Clinard pointed excitedly to a picture and described it as “so hydrating for your eyes.”

Akito Tsuda (center) with his photos of Pilsen; Wendy Clinard é CAROLINA SANCHEZ ; JOHN BOEHM

She often makes a sound or hand gesture, dispensing with words altogether, to get at what she wants to say. I’m still puzzling over what she meant when she said that another of Tsuda’s photos was “like a carrot for habituating desire.” I think it was that she found the image inspirational, but don’t quote me on that.

As this new piece continues to evolve, Clinard will keep returning to stacks of color-coded index cards on which she keeps her manifold ideas and inspirations. Tsuda’s scenes of Mexican-American life in a Chicago neighborhood in the early 90s have served as the springboard for a poetic meditation on life and labor in the city. It can’t be a coincidence that these photographs date back to the time and place that Clinard herself was just beginning to find herself creatively.

Attendees on April 8 can expect a searching, ambitious melding of sounds and images. Familiar forms such as photography, flamenco, and hip-hop will clash and cohere with car horns and spoken-word poetry to evoke Clinard’s vision. If it’s anything like her previous shows, it will be, by turns, beautiful and puzzling, but always engaging. Or, to paraphrase Clinard, it will be hydrating to your eyes, your ears, and your mind v CLINARD DANCE Thu 4/5, 5:30-8 PM, Regenstein Library, 1100 E. 57th, and Sun 4/8, 2-5 PM, National Museum of Mexican Fine Arts, 1852 W. 19th, 312-399-1984, clinarddance.org. F

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ARTS & CULTURE A pair of fellow cosplayers help Brian Beech (center) prepare his costume, Atlas from the video game Portal 2, for the Crown Championships of Cosplay during C2E2 2014. é CHANDLER WEST

COMICS

Bonds of geekdom

C2E2 is the ideal environment for comic book lovers.

By MARK PETERS

T

he Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) is Chicago’s biggest and most comics-focused comic con—much larger than the wonderful CAKE and much less celebrity-centric than Wizard World.

It’s easy to see C2E2 purely through the lens of capitalism run amok. No question it’s a wallet drainer, with endless opportunities to spend money—you’ll find everything from old Jack Kirby comics to that rare Transformers action figure your parents never got you.

But C2E2, for a lot of us, is more than just an excuse to geek out and spend money: it’s a chance to make connections that are difficult or impossible to re-create during the rest of the year. “The energy is crazy,” says comics fan Jimmy Taylor, who has attended multiple times, “and I felt like I was home with all my fellow nerds.”

I’m no chemist, but with the help of some fellow C2E2 veterans I’ve identified at least five types of C2E2 bonds that are built to last.

Bonding with fellow cosplayers

Selene Idell—co-owner of Alleycat Comics in Andersonville—loves cosplaying at C2E2: “It makes you feel like a celebrity for the day.” But C2E2 doesn’t just give ordinary civilians the chance to be Batman or Harley Quinn (or Elvira, one of Idell’s go-to costumes). The community of cosplayers becomes a massive team-up that could rival the cast of Avengers: Infinity War. Thanks to the cosplay area, which provides glue guns and other materials to repair costumes, cosplayers get to hang out and help out each other with broken straps and other costume snafus. Idell described “a community of cosplay,” much like the back stage of a play, where strangers becomes fellow cast members encouraging each other to shine on the “stage,” the main C2E2 floor.

The C2E2 Crown Championships of Cosplay,

billed as “the largest and most prestigious cosplay competition in the world,” will be held Saturday.

Connecting with the next generation of nerds

Cosplayer Sarah Lane dressed up as Ahsoka Tano from Star Wars: The Clone Wars last year. “The response and the amount of attention I got was completely unlike anything I’d received from any cosplay before. However, the best part was on Sunday, the children’s day. There were a ton of kids that were so excited to see my cosplay, and there was even a young girl who was also Ahsoka! I think I was more excited than she was, honestly! I felt like a Disneyland character, getting to see kids react to something they love coming to life in front of them.”

Special kid-friendly events include “Acrobatica Infiniti: The Nerdy Circus” on all three days.

Sharing a moment with a comic creator that has nothing to do with comics

Last year I got to hear writer Jason Aaron and artist Jason Latour talk on Saturday about their crime comic Southern Bastards, which had been quite delayed. Latour explained that part of the delay was because he’d been mourning his father’s death. On Sunday, I bumped into Latour and told him how sorry I was and that his loss had hit me hard because my own dad had been having some health

problems. He nodded in sympathy, and we both got a little choked up before my friend and fellow fan Ben lightened the mood with a football joke. That moment made me like Latour’s comics more than ever.

This year I’m most looking forward to seeing writer Christopher Priest, whose Black Panther comics are considered classics. He’ll appear on a panel on Saturday and have a table in Artist’s Alley.

Making the long hours of creating comics worthwhile

Tula Lotay, the brilliant artist behind Supreme Blue Rose and many striking comic covers, will be taking her first trip to C2E2 this year.

She said, “Conventions are a fantastic way to get inspired. I see friends and they talk about projects and show art, and I always come away feeling great about being able to work in such a wonderful industry. It’s so nice when you meet people who enjoy your art too, makes you feel like it’s all worthwhile. The comic book profession can be a solitary one, so it’s always good to get out of the studio/house.”

Two of the most successful comics writers of the past 20 years, Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar, will have a one-on-one conversation about their lives and work on Saturday.

Solidifying a lifelong bond forged in geek heaven

Plenty of people have found some special-edition comic or had a memorable encounter with

a creator at C2E2. I’m still giddy at finding a copy of Archie Meets the Punisher minutes after learning the absurd crossover existed.

But I can’t say that my life actually changed the way Jimmy Taylor’s did in 2016.

With the assistance of artist Locoduck—aka Michael Duron, caricaturist and creator of the comics Big Bad and Cupid Corps—Taylor used classic misdirection to surprise his girlfriend, Amy, with a marriage proposal. Taylor recalls, “The day started off with a lot of running around, finishing up my Dr. Mario cosplay, which I was debuting. So we are now running late, frustrating my [not-quite-yet] fiancee.

We met with Locoduck, and he snaps some fake pictures and tells us to come back. We then hustle to the photo area for my fiancee’s birthday present to me, a photo with Stan Lee. We run back to Locoduck afterwards.”

The artist showed her a cartoon of Williams dressed as Han Solo asking Amy, dressed as Princess Leia, to marry him Taylor then got down on one knee and proposed; Amy accepted.

Taylor says, “I couldn’t have done it without the help of C2E2.”

All marriage proposals and other life-changing moments from this year’s event were unknown at press time. v C2E2 4/6-4/8: Fri-Sat 10 AM-10 PM, Sun 10 AM-5 PM, McCormick Place, 2301 S. Lake Shore, c2e2.com, $30-$40 one day, $75-$500 three days, $10-$20 kids.

m @wordlust APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 15

Temperance Beer Co June 21

Shovels & Rope

ARTS & CULTURE

June 22

The New Pornographers June 23

Rebirth Brass Band July 19

Dinosaur Jr. July 20

The Lone Bellow July 21

Slick Rick w/ The Cool Kids

Canal Shores Golf Course July 27

Mavis Staples w/ Marc Broussard

A SPACE 10th Anniversary Celebration

COMICS

Bad year.

Good friends.

After artist Ed Siemienkowicz’s death, the comics community rallies to finish his final project, (Fucking) Forty.

By KT HAWBAKER

July 28

TBA

spacepresents.com

Big Evanston Block Party Aug 25–26

16 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

Ed Siemienkowicz by Ed Siemienkowicz é COURTESY THE ARTIST

H

e had Jedi robes and a Force FX lightsaber, and he wanted to be cremated with both of those,” laughs Vanessa Walilko as she recalls her late boyfriend, artist Ed Siemienkowicz. “If he could have been on a funeral pyre, that’s what he would have done.”

But, ultimately, Siemienkowicz is getting a Return of the Jedi treatment, as the spirit of his comics practice continues after his 2017 death from pancreatic cancer. More than 130 artists have gathered to finish Siemienkowicz’s last graphic novel, (Fucking) Forty, an account of 2014, the worst year of his life. A Kickstarter to fund the project’s production will launch on April 26.

Walilko provides a brief summary: “He broke up with his long-term girlfriend, he was fired, he tried to get a new relationship started with somebody he really liked, and every creative project that he invested in didn’t come to fruition.” And, at the end of that year, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

A freelance illustrator and independent comic artist without insurance, Siemienkowicz was slammed with medical bills—just one hit after another.

“But the artist community in Chicago is incredibly generous,” says Walilko. “They rallied around him and did a whole bunch of fund-raisers for him to cover the medical expenses.” Siemienkowicz underwent chemo and radiation, and the cancer went into remission in 2015. After this successful treatment, he started working on Forty. In 2016, he met and fell in love with Walilko.

But in early 2017, doctors diagnosed him with stage-four pancreatic cancer. Though he fought back and underwent surgery in hopes of hitting the cancer’s brakes, Siemienkowicz died on July 30, 2017, at the age of 43. After his passing, his loved ones discovered the 246page manuscript for Forty. Siemienkowicz had inked the very first page. Stories about the unfinished work began to swirl at a vigil in his friend and fellow artist Darick Maasen’s backyard.

After Maasen posted an ad on Facebook asking for help completing the novel, more than 100 artists committed to illustrating a portion of the manuscript. Walilko and Maasen were overjoyed, but they set some rules.

“There needs to be a cohesiveness,” says Maasen. “So no matter how the rest of the scene is drawn or who is drawing it, we’ll all draw Ed the way he drew himself. This way we feel his presence.” Walilko says that Ed’s brother, Bob, and sister, Renee, were also instrumental in gathering photos to help fill in background information and provide context for the artists.

Forty has a busy calendar ahead of it. Siemienkowicz’s loved ones will showcase his work at the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo this weekend: they’ll tell his story, raise money for the book’s production, take preorders, and show previews of the artwork. You can follow the project’s progress on Instagram @fckingforty. v

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ARTS & CULTURE Omar Kamran, Justin Clemons, and shop dog Toph in front of Clemons’s magnolia blossom mural é JAMIE RAMSAY

VISUAL ART

Career opportunities

Magnolia Screen Printing wants to provide jobs for the young people of Chicago Lawn.

By KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

A

large, stylized tricolored painting of a magnolia blossom extends across the interior front wall of Magnolia Screen Printing, a yearold business located in the heart of Chicago Lawn’s 63rd Street corridor. The mural, painted by artist Justin Clemons, spells out the flower’s Nahuatl name, “yoloxochitl,” which translates to “flower of the heart.” To Clemons and his business partner, Omar Kamran, the magnolia symbolizes the beauty and resilience they’ve found in Chicago Lawn.

Neither Clemons nor Kamran had previous experience working with screen printing when they opened Magnolia a year ago. Despite this, both knew they wanted to start a business that would provide sustainable jobs for young people in Chicago Lawn while also giving them the knowledge and practical skills that could be applied to future jobs.

“The reality is there are a lot of young peo-

ple that need job opportunities,” says Kamran.

“The more contracts we bring in, the more orders we are able to fulfill, the more part-time jobs we are able to create for the community.

There are a lot of young people that need this opportunity. Our goal is to be that really good first job that young people can have.”

Kamran, 30, was born in Rogers Park and grew up in Mount Prospect but has worked with various nonprofits in Chicago Lawn for nearly a decade; he moved to the neighborhood four years ago. Clemons, 25, grew up in Chicago Lawn and now works at the same After School Matters program where he learned to paint as a teenager. Working closely with young people on the south side has shown Clemons and Kamran the dismal reality of employment opportunities for young people in the area, who typically commute downtown or to the south suburbs to find jobs.

Close by, work is limited to fast-food chains,

most commonly McDonald’s or Little Caesars.

Just beyond the storefront space and its inviting mural lies the print shop, a windowless room with enough equipment that workers can use up to eight different screens at a time.

This is the domain of 18-year-old CJ Ferguson, a senior at the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences in Mount Greenwood. Before starting at Magnolia two months ago, Ferguson worked at a nearby Little Caesars. He wasn’t thrilled with his boss or the conditions at the restaurant; just before he quit, he’d injured his arm while washing dishes. Ferguson was excited to be offered a job at Magnolia, especially knowing he would be working with Clemons and Kamran.

“I feel like I got lucky—or blessed, I would say—to be where I am and doing something that I wouldn’t mind doing,” says Ferguson.

“Working with [Justin and Omar] doesn’t feel like work.”

“Sometimes I wish it would feel like work,” jokes Clemons.

Clemons, Kamran, and Ferguson all met at nearby Morrill Elementary five years ago.

Ferguson was in seventh grade. Clemons and Kamran were working with Teen Reach, a statewide mentorship initiative that Kamran’s wife, Andrea Ortez, had brought to the school in 2010. Clemons and Kamran wanted to open Magnolia Screen Printing in the neighborhood so they could build on the relationships they have with young people like Ferguson.

“Omar and Justin care about the work that is being done and how it is being done, but they also care about how my day is going outside of work,” says Ferguson. “I feel like [at Magnolia] they not only want me to be good inside the space but outside as well. For me that means a lot, knowing these people care about what I am doing outside of school. A lot of people just won’t ask you about that.”

Currently Ferguson is Magnolia’s only employee. Although Kamran and Clemons are eager to provide more jobs for other young people in the community, they want to focus on making the business sustainable before they increase their staff.

“We wanted to offer young people something that wasn’t bound to a grant or a foundation, but something that was financially independent and we could set the parameters

with how we engage with young people,” says Kamran.

The shop’s name may not be unique, something both founders understood when they named it. But the symbol of the magnolia represents their own desire to cultivate something dynamic and long-lasting in the neighborhood.

“It is an honor to be a part of Chicago Lawn, and we hope to bring more positive attention to the neighborhood,” says Kamran. “Unfortunately, when you think of the south side of Chicago, you think of Hyde Park, Englewood, or Midway Airport. Chicago Lawn is often overlooked or unheard of. We want Chicago Lawn to be known for the strength and courage of its young people. We want Magnolia Screen Printing to be a reflection of that strength and courage.” v MAGNOLIA SCREEN PRINTING 2440 W. 63rd, 773-245-6168, magnoliascreenprint.com.

m @KateSierz

Justin Clemons applies paint to a screen for a T-shirt he’s designed. é JAMIE RAMSAY

APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 17

ARTS & CULTURE father was a werewolf. Things get even stranger from there, but the tone grows increasingly delicate and sweet; in fact the film ends up feeling like a fairy tale.

In Portuguese with subtitles. —BEN SACHS Sat 4/7, 8:30 PM, and Sun 4/15, 8:15 PM.

MOVIES

The wall’s gonna fall at the Chicago Latino Film Festival Marjorie Estiano and Isabél Zuaa in Good Manners

T

he provocative poster art for this year’s Chicago Latino Film Festival shows a border wall with a couple of sections that have been flattened by an advancing path of celluloid film. The image might seem particularly timely this year, given the steady progress of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, but cinema has always provided a gateway between the U.S. and its southern neighbors. Politics takes front and center on opening night as well, when the festival presents the Puerto Rican comedy Broche de Oro: Beginnings (reviewed below).

Released in September 2017, as the island was being hammered by Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria, this lightweight comedy reminds us of the emotional buoyancy of our beleaguered fellow citizens—many of whom still lack the electricity needed to watch it.

This year’s festival runs April 5 through 19 at River East 21, with more than 60 new features from Spain, the U.S., and Central and South America making their Chicago premieres. We’ve reviewed nine of them below. —J.R. JONES

Another Story of the World In this appealing satire from Uruguay, a history teacher challenges the authority of his small town’s mendacious and despotic military governor by teaching alternative facts. After the teacher and his drinking buddy pull pranks on the governor, the friend is caught, arrested, and removed to an undisclosed location, so the teacher convinces an adult study group, led by the governor’s wife, that his friend’s ancestors were crucial figures in the country’s history.

The question of who controls the historical, and thus political, narrative is one that Latin Americans have been grappling with for decades; for Americans, this comedy may have a new relevance. Guillermo Casanova directed. In Spanish with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 105 min. Sat 4/14, 9:15 PM, and Mon 4/16, 6 PM. Broche de Oro: Beginnings The Puerto Rican geezer comedy Broche de Oro (2012) has never gotten a U.S.

ssss EXCELLENT

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release, but this second installment is a prequel, so no advance study is required. Rafael, once a physician, moves into a Catholic retirement community following his wife’s death and gains two sidekicks: the former soap opera heartthrob Pablo and the spastic, stridently wacky Anselmo. Coveting the doctor romantically, and joining the trio in a series of escapades, are three women residents who maintain the local gossip pool.

In Hollywood geezer comedies, aging characters are often thrown into hectic physical activities such as skydiving or robbing a bank; by contrast, director Raúl Marchand Sánchez manages to score laughs here from the overwhelming danger and excitement of a field trip to the local shopping mall. In Spanish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 87 min. Screens as part of the opening-night program on Thursday, April 5; tickets for this event are $60 and include a postscreening reception. Thu 4/5 and Sat 4/7, 6 PM.

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Dear Mom In this Brazilian melodrama, an uptight doctor leaves her husband for a female painter, further straining her contentious relationships with her mother and teenage daughter. Director Jeremias Moreira seems less concerned with the doctor’s sexual awakening than with her family ties, devoting much of the running time to dialogue-driven scenes in which the heroine and her mother ruminate on the past and dig up buried resentments. This is based on a play (by Maria Adelaida Amaral), and the stage origins show in all the worst ways: the performances are overstated, and the action feels cramped (even though the movie was shot in wide-screen). Still, the movie is fitfully insightful in depicting relationships between parents and children, showing how people carry issues from their formative years into adulthood. In Portuguese with subtitles. —BEN SACHS 95 min. Sun 4/15, 6:45 PM, and Tue 4/17, 8:45 PM.

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Good Manners This unpredictable horror fantasy is the most exciting Brazilian feature I’ve seen since Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds (2012). It begins as a naturalistic drama about a black, working-class woman from the outskirts of São Paolo (Isabél Zuaa) who becomes personal assistant to a rich, white, pregnant woman in the city center (Marjorie Estiano). Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra, directing their own script, use the women’s relationship to explore racial and class-bound tensions in contemporary Brazil before taking the story in surprising directions: first the women enter into a sexual relationship, then the employer reveals that her unborn baby’s

Help Me Make It Through the Night This Mexican drama observes a middle-class family in crisis: the mother is a gambling addict, the father locks her out of their house, and their two sons, one a child and the other a young adult, struggle to cope. The narrative shifts among these four perspectives with soothing fluidity, rendering the film a more pleasant experience than perhaps it should be. Confrontations between the mother and father aim for dark comedy but lack the requisite bite; conversely, some of the more dramatic moments feel stunted, resulting in an unconvincing emotional payoff. Still, José Ramón Chávez Delgado, making his feature directing debut, and screenwriter Claudia Sainte-Luce are unmerciful in exploring the mother’s addiction, and actress Elena de Haro sells it—especially when her scene partner is a slots machine at the local casino. In Spanish with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 94 min. Tue 4/10 and Thu 4/12, 6 PM. El Inca Venezuelan boxer Edwin Valero held two world titles and never lost a fight, but his private life was a shambles: in April 2010, at age 28, he was arrested for the murder of his wife and hanged himself in his jail cell. His professional rise and personal fall recall those of Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), and this 2016 biopic, which represented Venezuela in the Academy Awards, draws heavily on the earlier movie in its flashback structure, its narrative development, and the editing of its fight sequences (the slow-motion shot ending in a smash cut to an explosion of violence in normal time, etc). Alexander Leterni drives the film as Valero, whose total belief in himself enables him to overcome numerous career setbacks even as his private rages engulf his marriage. Ignacio Castillo Cottin directed a script he cowrote with Ada Hernández. In Spanish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 128 min. Fri 4/6, 8:45 PM, and Sun 4/8, 8:15 PM. Spider Thieves This Chilean drama centers on a giant shantytown erected on the outskirts of Santiago in 1999, where some 1,750 families set up their own water, electricity, and policing while the government dithered over what to do about them. Seven years later, three 13-year-old girls from this rough community venture into the city and burglarize wealthy apartments, boldly scaling high-rise buildings and winning TV news coverage as the “Spider Thieves.” Screenwriters Daniela Aguayo, Guillermo Helo, and Ticoy Rodriguez

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Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE Tom Huang in Find Me

note with great poignance how deprived the girls are: when they arrive at an upscale shopping mall, one asks timidly, “Can we just go in?,” and later, after they’ve been jailed, another of them is content just to be sleeping in a bed with sheets. The movie begins to lose steam once the girls get caught, after which they try to deal with their newfound notoriety and resolve their problems at home. The cards are stacked against them; when one girl invokes Spider-Man, another replies, “He wouldn’t last a day here.” Helo directed.

In Spanish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 94 min. Fri 4/6, 6:15 PM, and Sun 4/8, 3:15 PM. The Summit Fleeing a scandal, the president of Argentina (Ricardo Darín) travels to the mountains of Chile to attend a conference and gets embroiled in a geopolitical power struggle. This Argentine political drama is straightforward and dry for its first act, then cowriter-director Santiago Mitre introduces a plot twist in which the president’s grown daughter finds herself able to recall events from before her birth while under hypnosis. This swerve into supernatural mystery turns out to be a mere detour, though, as the president returns to the conference and navigates his way out of an international conflict. Mitre, following up his Brechtian drama Paulina (2015), maintains that movie’s even-handed tone, presenting different sides to various arguments and making viewers decide where they stand, but the rhetoric is less compelling and the characters are less interesting. In English and subtitled Portuguese and Spanish. —BEN SACHS 114 min. Screens as part of the closing-night program; tickets are $60 and include a postscreening reception.

Thu 4/19, 6 PM.

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Tigers Are Not Afraid In this topical horror-fantasy from Mexican writer-director Issa López, a ten-year-old girl whose mother has been murdered by a local drug cartel joins a street gang of similarly orphaned kids; they launch a resistance campaign, and much to the cartel’s disadvantage, their Mexican village teems with as many specters as sicarios. The ghosts in this story, all victims of the drug war, oscillate between frightening and comforting; they appear as bloody lines crossing rooms or as childlike drawings that leap out of city walls, and though they support the kids against the cartel, they also symbolize the grief and trauma the kids may never shake (the spirit of the girl’s slain mother is a doleful presence throughout).

López’s fable has already drawn comparisons to Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) but has a phantasmagoric energy and modern urgency all its own. In Spanish with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 83 min. Fri 4/6, 9:15 PM, and Sun 4/8, 8:30 PM. v CHICAGO LATINO

FILM FESTIVAL Thu 4/5-Thu 4/19. River East 21, 322 E. Illinois, 312-431-1330, chicagolatinofilmfestival. org, $13, 12-screening pass $110.

MOVIES

Minority actors catch a break at the Asian American Showcase Six new features, and one silent relic, screen at this year’s festival.

By ANDREA GRONVALL

A

ctors of Asian descent have long been underrepresented in mainstream American movies, but indies help pick up the slack, as evidenced by the Gene Siskel Film Center’s long-running Asian American Showcase. Opening the festival, the formally ambitious FISH BONES (Fri 4/6, 8 PM) stars model Joony Kim as a lovely but vacant Korean student who tends her family’s New York restaurant when she’s not landing fashion photo shoots and attracts the romantic attentions of a Latina music producer. Writer-director Joanne Mony Park favors static long takes to recount the affair in reverse chronological order, but she doesn’t yet have the skill to pull off what Harold Pinter did with Betrayal.

In Aram Collier’s STAND UP MAN (Fri 4/13, 8 PM) a Korean-Canadian newlywed’s parents head overseas as missionaries, leaving him to mind their Windsor restaurant. Fatherhood and an unwanted, extended visit from a teenage cousin follow, as the movie charts the embittered protagonist’s transition from aspiring stand-up comedian to stand-up guy.

This emotional development is just as well, because there are few genuine laughs.

Race initially posed few career limits for Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa. Remembered primarily for David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Hayakawa (a University of Chicago graduate) was one of Hollywood’s

biggest and richest stars during the silent era, becoming an international sex symbol after his breakthrough in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915). Hayakawa leveraged his success to create his own production company and make films with a more nuanced depiction of what was then called the Orient. In the 1919 drama THE DRAGON PAINTER (Sat 4/7, 5:15 PM), directed by William Worthington, Hayakawa plays an obsessive artist who’s convinced his fiancee has been changed into a dragon; a master painter looking for an apprentice offers him a path back to sanity. Contemporary viewers may balk at the “yellowface” casting of Edward Peil Sr. as the mentor and the shots of Yosemite Valley standing in for rural Japan, but the film is compelling for its mythic underpinnings and Hayakawa’s sensitive performance.

Yosemite also figures in the strikingly original road movie FIND ME (Wed 4/11, 8 PM), from Chinese-American writer-director Tom Huang. He stars as a divorced accountant in LA who’s forced out of his comfort zone as he tracks a missing coworker through three southwest national parks. The stunning landscapes and Huang’s low-key persona are enchanting, as are the ethnically diverse free spirits he encounters during his quest. v ASIAN AMERICAN SHOWCASE Fri 4/6-Wed 4/18.

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Supa Bwe outside the studio of photographer Kevin Serna on the Lower West Side é KEVIN SERNA

SUPA BWE LAPS 20 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

The Chicago MC brought pop-punk melodies to hip-hop years before the current crop of Soundcloud rappers, and he’s still evolving on the new Finally Dead.

By LEOR GALIL

THE PACK

W

hen I walk into Supa Bwe’s two-story Humboldt Park apartment, his big-screen TV is displaying a pause screen from the postapocalyptic shooter Fortnite—already hugely popular, it got another bump last month when Drake streamed it on Twitch with local gamer Ninja.

The 28-year-old Chicago rapper (his stage name is pronounced “Supa Boy”) likes to spend as much time at home as possible, and when he’s not working on music in his base-

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ment studio he often burns hours gaming.

“I’m a hermit,” Supa says. “I just be in my crib.

It’s hard to be a successful socialite hermit.

You can’t do it.” But playing video games doesn’t cut him off from the world entirely— in online multiplayer games, he can talk to other gamers who are also using mikes. Several times he’s encountered fans of his music in a game, and one story especially sticks with him. “He joined me on a party and was like, ‘I can’t believe I’m playing with you,’” Supa says. “He’s like, ‘This is my brother’s gamer

tag. He’s not here—he died, he committed suicide. That’s how I got into your music. He listened to your music all the time.’”

Supa may need lots of alone time, but he’s nonetheless worked himself into an enviable spot in the Chicago hip-hop scene—insofar as it’s possible to tell who’ll break out next, he’s at the head of the line. He’s been making music for nearly a decade, and over the past four years he’s been steadily building momentum: in that time he’s collaborated with a top-tier roster of emerging locals and established

veterans, among them Twista, Mick Jenkins, Chance the Rapper, and Saba, who appears on Supa’s debut album.

Supa self-released that album, Finally Dead, in early December, and it peaked at number three on the iTunes store’s Hip-Hop/ Rap chart, beneath Jay-Z’s 4:44 and Fabolous and Jadakiss’s collaborative Friday on Elm Street. On the Lollapalooza lineup for 2018, Supa is one of the highest billed among the roughly dozen locals, below drill king G Herbo, rap prodigy Taylor Bennett, and indie-pop magician Knox Fortune. And on Friday, April 6, Supa will belatedly celebrate his album with a headlining set at Metro.

Supa calls Finally Dead his debut, and that’s true if you consider only full-length albums—he’s been releasing singles, EPs, and full-length mixtapes under his own name since 2012, and from 2014 till 2016 he performed and recorded as part of the stylistically fluid hip-hop trio Hurt Everybody. That group was how he first caught the ear of Fake Shore Drive founder and editor Andrew Barber: “I saw them perform, and I was like, ‘Man, these guys are really unique,’” Barber says. “Each of them were all really striking, and they had something special.”

At that point in his career, Supa indulged his love of huge, glossy vocal melodies even more often than he does now. He’d belt them out like a pop star singing a gut-wrenching ballad, or he’d scream like a punk front man—though he usually softened those feral lunges with digital processing. “For so long everybody was just like, ‘Why are you screaming? Stop yelling into Auto-Tune,’” he says. “And now Tekashi, Trippie—you know what I’m saying?”

Supa sounded outre in 2014, but by bringing the cathartic melodies and sugary hooks of Warped Tour to hip-hop, he inadvertently provided a blueprint for present-day Soundcloud rap—a stylistically mixed crop of underground MCs whose major influences include 2000s pop-punk and emo. Supa’s vocal style was so particular that I almost didn’t know what to make of Trippie Redd when I first heard him last year—the 18-year-old from Ohio was doing almost exactly the same thing Supa had done in Hurt Everybody.

“His style has been very influential,” Barber says of Supa. “He should be getting more credit for what he brings to the game, as far as his delivery, how he kind of yell-sings on the track.

I think a lot of artists are doing that now, and he was the first I heard using that style.”

But Supa is moving away from the sound that made him a phenomenon—and that other rappers have since rode to fame (or in the case of Tekashi, aka 6ix9ine, to infamy). “It’s crazy that, like, that’s an accepted medium now, and

SUPA BWE, KAMI, JOSEPH CHILLIAMS, DUFFLE BAG BURU, SEB TORGUS, ADOT

Fri 4/6, 7:30 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $21, $16 in advance, all-ages

it’s sad ’cause I’m past that,” he says. “Well, not sad—it’s just one of those things where it’s like, ‘Damn, if this happened two years ago . . . ’ But I’m just past that medium, and I’m trying to figure out what it is now.”

S

upa B we, re al n ame Frederic k McCulloch-Burton, grew up on the west side in Austin, where he was raised by a British mother and a Chicagoan father. His dad was also an aspiring MC. “One of my earliest memories is my dad being on a treadmill, writing raps,” Supa says. “I remember the cadence of it—and I remember him saying, ‘Once again in the fin,’ ’cause he was a Vice Lord. And it was raw as hell.” (“Fin” is a sort of shorthand for the five-pointed star that People Nation gangs, the Vice Lords included, often use to identify themselves.)

At an early age, Supa took after his dad. “Me and my little sister used to rap—freestyle,” he says. “[We] used to beat on pots and pans and rap for hours, till our parents would beat us ’cause we were too loud.” But rap didn’t take over his life till much later. As a kid, he favored rock.

“I thought rock stars were really the true geniuses,” Supa says. “As a kid I was sad, and rappers weren’t saying shit that I could relate to—I didn’t have no cars, grills, chains, all that shit. Like, ‘What the fuck you talking ’bout?

I’m sad.’”

That feeling got worse after his family moved to Oak Park when he was 14. Supa felt ostracized and often got into fights. “People would just do slick shit, and if you check them just like you do in the hood, then everybody’s ‘Whoa, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?’” he says. “I had to just be like, ‘OK, let me contain this part of myself that I learned to survive for fucking 14 years. I guess that’s wrong.’”

Spending his teen years in a largely white and relatively affluent suburb also had more insidious long-term effects on Supa. “When I lived in the hood, I was carefree as shit—I didn’t know I was black, I didn’t know I was J

APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 21

Supa did spend some time inside Serna’s studio too.

continued from 21

poor, I didn’t know I was anything. I was just outside, rolling in dirt—I didn’t give a fuck,” he says. “Then when I moved to the suburbs, different standards, beauty standards, and all that shit started coming around. You start to care about different shit that you never really cared about before. It kind of chips away at who you are on the inside—I feel like I’m one of the people who came out of that shit weird as hell. I have the voice in the back of my head that’s like, an adolescent, white suburban kid that’s just like, ‘Those are dirty-ass shoes, eww. Why do you fight so much? Eww.’ Just calling me ghetto and shit like that.”

Toward the end of his time at Oak Park and River Forest High School (he graduated in 2008), Supa tried to start a couple different rock bands, but each time the difficulty of getting everybody to come to rehearsal ended up scuttling the project in a few weeks. He was already working on his own music at home, and that impulse caught fire in 2010, when he met Jungle Audio Engineering co-owner Excel Cruz. Supa’s confidence impressed him, and he began to mentor the young rapper. “He knew exactly what he wanted and the sounds that he wanted,” Cruz says. “It was easy for me as an engineer to work with him.”

“I was listening to screamo,” Supa says. “I was hearing someone, like, [growling] ‘Yeah yeah yeah yeah,’ then [high-pitched singing] ‘Yeeeaah!’ So I was making that shit, and it was cool.” He dropped his first mixtape, New America, on July 4, 2012—and he’s released music nearly every Independence Day since.

After New America came out, though, Supa disappeared from the Jungle for a few months.

“I was off a whole bunch of drugs and shit, and I tried to jump on the train tracks,” he says.

“My dad grabbed me and called my mentor.

We were all on the phone, and my mentor was like, ‘Just come to the studio and record.’”

Supa hadn’t wanted to avoid the Jungle, but he felt sheepish about reaching out—in part because he owed Cruz money for studio time. Cruz was more concerned about Supa’s well-being than about any outstanding charges, though, and he let Supa spend as much time in Jungle’s second studio as he needed—he even let Supa sleep there when he needed a place to crash. The karma Cruz earned with that kindness came back to him when Supa bought some of the Jungle’s equipment a couple years later. “He actually ended up saving my company,” Cruz says. “We were going through tough times, and we needed some extra cash. We ended up selling him our second-room equipment; with that extra cash we were able to stay afloat.”

With equipment of his own, Supa could assemble his own recording setup in the Music Garage, a complex of rehearsal spaces, studios,

22 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

é KEVIN SERNA

and shops in Fulton Market. When he bought the gear in 2014, he’d already started bonding with a couple members of local hip-hop group Supreme Regime: rapper Qari and producer Mulatto Beats. “Qari’s very mature for his age, and I’m immature, so I feel like we were all 23 at the same time,” Supa says. “We were all on the same shit—all that mattered was the music.” The three of them had officially formed Hurt Everybody on New Year’s Day 2014.

Qari’s refined, nonchalant cool, Supa’s cathartic melodies, and Mulatto Beats’ electric menagerie of unconventional instrumentals soon made Hurt Everybody one of the most exciting new acts in the city. When the trio broke up two years later, in January 2016, it wasn’t because they weren’t succeeding musically.

“I was just being a bad friend—we were

just all bad friends. Young people don’t know what we’re doing,” Supa says. In the past few months, he’s started working on repairing those relationships. “I saw Qari the other day at Soho House. Gave me a hug and shit. We talked—he was supposed to come over here before South By, eat pizza, play video games, but he was busy,” Supa says. “We trying to, like, not get the band back together or no shit like that, but just be OK with each other.”

The time apart has helped everyone grow, Supa says. It’s also possible that any lingering resentments Qari and Mulatto Beats may have had about the breakup have been eased by the successes they’ve enjoyed on their own.

Mulatto’s solo debut, last year’s .22 Summers, features guest spots from local heavies such as Mick Jenkins and King Louie. And Qari’s im-

minent solo EP, No Time to Explain, includes a single produced by Mulatto called “Pants From Japan” whose video racked up more than half a million YouTube views in less than two weeks after it came out in mid-March.

Supa says he hit rock bottom after Hurt Everybody broke up, but that helped motivate him. “I learn from my lows,” he says. The process of working on Finally Dead, which he began in late 2016, helped him find his emotional balance. “By the time I finished Finally Dead, I actually felt happy,” he says. “I still struggle with things, I still am sad, but I don’t feel so alone and I don’t feel so inadequate.”

Last summer Supa was kicked into high gear by a distribution deal he signed with Empire, which has built partnerships with several hip-hop heavyweights, most notably Top Dawg Entertainment (home of Kendrick Lamar, SZA, and Schoolboy Q). He spent a large chunk of his advance on new equipment for his home studio, and he delayed Finally Dead for four months so he could rerecord most of the album.

In the process of finalizing Finally Dead, Supa shed some of its material. “I quit cigarettes at a point—it’s like, ‘This song about cigarettes don’t even matter no more, ’cause I don’t even fuckin’ feel this way about cigarettes no more,’” he says. “I met a woman I really love and just stopped doing all that shit and really cleaned myself up. I don’t want my music to necessarily be clean, but I just don’t feel that way, when I was out in the streets feeling that way.”

Finally Dead reflects Supa’s maturing worldview and the breadth of his musical palette. There’s less screaming into Auto-Tune (though hardly none) and more relatively clean crooning and straightforward rapping, all atop instrumentals that draw from R&B ballads, horn-heavy neosoul, and arty electropop. On the upbeat autobiographical number “Down Comes the Spaceman,” he raps about his strained relationship with the suburbs, but his light-footed delivery suggests that he’s no longer so weighed down by past troubles.

And Supa says he’s already moving in new directions, citing Erykah Badu and Michael Jackson as inspirations. He knows he’ll ruffle the feathers of entitled fans who feel a sense of ownership over his music, but he’d prefer to evolve. “You can’t just make the same shit—you’ll be Nickelback,” Supa says. “We all remember Nickelback. Fuck Nickelback. They were the greatest for, like, two months. Everybody hates them now for a reason—because they’re repetitive droning assholes. You can be an asshole, you can drone, but you can’t be repetitive.” v

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MUSIC Heather Ireland Robinson é LAUREN DEUTSCH

The most important jazz fan in Chicago Heather Ireland Robinson, who just became the first black leader of the Jazz Institute of Chicago, talks segregation and infrastructure.

By JORDANNAH ELIZABETH

H

eather Ireland Robinson has been executive director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago for a little more than a month, having officially replaced the long-serving Lauren Deutsch on March 1. But she’s been working as an arts administrator for 20 years, most recently lending her expertise to the Beverly Arts Center, where she served as executive director from 2014 to 2017. She previously worked for the South Side Community Art Center, Marwen, After School Matters, and

Gallery 37, among other institutions—and from 2002 to 2004, she was the Jazz Institute’s education and community coordinator, helping lay the foundation for its Jazz Links program. Ireland Robinson has now become the first black person (and thus first black woman) to lead the JIC. Ireland Robinson doesn’t characterize her new position at the Jazz Institute as a bigger challenge than her previous jobs but rather as a new opportunity. When we spoke on the phone, I got the impression that the JIC

was a natural fit for her: she talked about her personal connection with jazz music, about gender imbalance in the jazz community, and about MKH Arts Management, the consulting firm she cofounded last year to help black arts and community organizations find their voices and places within the Chicago arts ecosystem.

Before we began our interview, I let Ireland Robinson know that as a black woman, my questions might come from a different perspective than those of many other writers. And she was very kind and excited to hear

from me. Though she’s new to her position, she comes across as wise and comfortable within herself, as well as sensitive to the race and gender divides in her professional environment—which gave us plenty to talk about.

The Beverly Arts Center puts on diverse events and films, in regards to genre. Now you’re doing this very specific, niche senior executive position. What’s your personal connection to jazz?

In 1969—the late 60s, early 70s—there was no way around [jazz]. I mean, it’s the soundtrack of my childhood because of my father. It was always in the house. We used to play a game, where when we were out and we’d hear a song, [my father] would say, “I’ll give you a dollar if you can name the musician!” And it just became a fun thing—a part of our lives.

The very nature of jazz brings people together—the whole idea of improvisation. I also J

APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 23

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MUSIC continued from 23 have a theater background, so I tell stories based on bringing groups of people together.

That’s what theater is. You need your costume designer, you need your actors, you need all that. So it’s always about collaboration, on a functional and technical level. That’s what I love about jazz music and performance too.

What was it in your professional resumé that got you the position?

This year marks my 20th year in arts administration. I started in 1998 at the Chicago Park District in the cultural programs department.

That was one or two years out of graduate school for theater. At graduate school at DePaul, I taught a theater class to bilingual first-graders—and to me, it instantly became my mission. I loved being onstage, would have loved to be in commercials at some point, but I really wanted to give people the opportunity to learn and do what I did. I wanted to give young people and artists a chance, and so that really set me forward in working with After School Matters. It was about creating the structure and the vision—that needed spreadsheets or whatever it may be—so that artists could shine.

It was also finding the money for them to do so. So my passion became creating a community through the arts, but also helping artists do their art and bringing art to the people. So I’ve got this passion for administration, if that’s possible—but it is.

So you make sure that the infrastructure in these organizations is streamlined?

You can’t have children learning dance, or murals being painted, or whatever the art and theater programs have going on if there isn’t some kind of structure behind it. An artist shouldn’t have to always be the one to do it. They should be able to say, “I want to take an art class. I want to teach a theater class. I want to do this, I want to do that,” and there are people behind the scenes that are making that happen for them.

You’ve also been appointed to the mayor’s Cultural Advisory Council and the board of directors of Arts Alliance Illinois. How do you balance your connection to the mayor and your political responsibility with your grassroots community work?

It’s all there to give the creative community a voice. Arts Alliance Illinois is about policy: How are people in Washington hearing what artists really need? Arts Alliance Illinois

is all over the state—rural communities as well as urban communities. As far as the mayor’s connection is concerned, it’s not just politics, but it’s what kind of creative things are happening in the city and how can we inform people of those things. The other thing Arts Alliance Illinois does is on education policy and what’s happening for our youth. We’ve been able to really structure arts guidelines for schools and make arts a required part of the curriculum. So again, it’s kind of that view from above, so that at the grassroots level, on the ground, young people and teachers are getting what they need for the arts and their voices are being heard.

The guidelines ask if we are all speaking the same language of the arts, and is it being standardized through the level of learning, and if the level of excellence is happening everywhere.

Looking back on what you learned from working at the South Side Community Art Center, is the jazz community in Chicago segregated?

I hate to say it, but it can be segregated.

We’ve got a lot of jazz music on the south side and there’s music on the north side, and so I would love to see more people kind of crossing boundaries and traveling to see music on both sides of Chicago. We are traveling north or downtown for the arts, whether it’s museums, whether it’s theater or anything. A lot of that is happening on the south side too: We’ve got the DuSable Museum, we’ve got Room43 and other places that have jazz music, but in general we’re kind of going downtown for the bigger names. I’d like to see that migration flow happen the other way—people from the north side going beyond the University of Chicago to see and hear music, and to really find out where these things are happening.

I do want to say that Hyde Park has a jazz fest. There’s the South Side Jazz Coalition and Room43 and Norman’s Bistro that has jazz, and the Hyde Park Jazz Society. So there is a lot going on. It’s just that people have to be ready to find it and ready to go to it.

As a black woman senior arts executive, do you find yourself personally without representation surrounding you?

On [the Jazz Institute’s] board—and to their own admission, it’s not as diverse as we would like. It is male heavy. It’s somewhat racially diverse, but not as much as we’d like it to be.

They are a passionate group of jazz lovers and executives who are very good at being board

members. They are very dedicated—they make a lot happen from time, talent, and treasure. But I do think one of the things I’d like to do, and they’re ready to do too, is add some more diversity and add some artists and some arts administrators.

As diverse as the Chicago arts scene can be, I have often looked up and been one of the only black people or black women in the room when representing arts organizations. The other thing that happens is, a lot of times black arts organizations are not in those rooms as much as they should be.

I started an arts consulting firm, MKH [Arts Management], with two of my former colleagues and very good friends to do just that—to help black arts organizations build capacity. Whether it’s marketing, grant writing, whether they’re going to be at the table, create our table, or inform the table that this is not how things are done at every arts organization—that’s really been our mission over the last year.

The Women’s Jazz Leadership Initiative meets at the Jazz Institute one to two times a month, which is an amazing thing. Do you think that women’s jazz events help inclusiveness, or would you like to see women being added to general jazz bills more frequently in the future?

I think we need both. But I think right now, and I would say the same for black people, sometimes we need our own. Sometimes we need our own unique voices to be heard, because you can find those all-male or male-driven revues or events more easily. And there are differences.

The women that have formed [the Women’s Jazz Leadership Initiative] are young women that work here at the Jazz Institute—high school students, college students. They came up with this idea. So they’ve got unique voices and unique needs that they’d like to be heard, and [their concert on March 9 was] a tribute to Von Freeman, who is a male. And this is their choice. I think that’s wonderful. It’s the ladies’ turn to talk about, you know, what he meant to Chicago jazz, what he meant to the world of jazz. So I think it’s both/and. We need opportunities for the individual unique voices of women to be heard and the individual unique needs of women to be served, as well as us doing this all together. It’s everyone’s responsibility to work on this kind of inclusion and diversity. v

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MUSIC IN ROTATION

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

A still from Janelle Monae’s video for “Make Me Feel”

Derek label just reissued er.

The Honest Jon’s ing ns Ho n sta Tri th wi Bailey’s 1976 duo

EVERY TUESDAY (EXCEPT 2ND) AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMIJON AMERICA

Lom the new band fronted by Emily Loma, Cro Cross of Cross Record é BRYAN C. PARKER

PETER MARGASAK

MACIE STEWART

FATIMAH ASGHAR Poet and writer of

Derek Bailey reissues London label Honest Jon’s has been reissuing albums from Incus, the imprint run by pioneering guitar improviser Derek Bailey. The first three of these vinyl-only reissues—a solo session and duos with saxophonist Anthony Braxton and drummer Han Bennink—each include a bonus LP of previously unreleased material. The second batch doesn’t come with extra music, but I can finally hear Bailey’s brilliantly charged 1976 duo with cellist Tristan Honsinger.

Loma, Loma (Sub Pop) Emily Cross, formerly of Cross Record, left Chicago for Texas in 2013 with her husband, Dan Duszynski. Now they both live in Dripping Springs and play in the band Loma, whose self-titled debut album came out in February. I’ve listened to it three times in one day. Cross writes such beautiful songs, and they’re expertly arranged. Loma’s album is so beautiful and epic, so that you really feel like you’re surrounded by the sonic world it creates.

Arditti Quartet, Hans Abrahamsen: String Quartets no. 1-4 Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen emerged in the early 70s as an adherent of “new simplicity,” bucking the increasing complexity in European contemporary classical music. He’s explored myriad instrumental combinations, but he’s returned many times to the string quartet. The Arditti Quartet brings an exquisite touch to all four, especially the fourth, which it premiered in 2012—its spectral harmonics slowly yield a stunning melodic clarity.

Nnamdi Ogbonnaya’s live show I saw Nnamdi play in Dallas the other night, and I was absolutely floored. I hadn’t seen him in more than a year, and his current band lineup is so good.

I couldn’t stop jumping up and down. Go see him if you get the chance!

Vince Staples, “Party People” I’m obsessed with the whole album, but this song is my favorite on Vince Staples’s Big Fish Theory.

With lines like “Please don’t look at me in my face / Everybody might see my pain” and its bustling, relentlessly syncopated electronic beat, “Party People” creates a complicated mix of vulnerability and movement. Vince teeters on the edge of so many emotions in this song, which is an incredible feat. In general, that’s how I feel about his music: he refuses to be flattened and instead really rises to the challenge of making his sounds and lyrics complex.

Reader music critic

Mica Levi, Delete Beach Mica Levi (Micachu & the Shapes) has written tension-filled film scores for Under the Skin and Jackie, and within that practice she shifts gears for this sci-fi anime by British experimental filmmaker Phil Collins. Her 29-minute soundtrack combines electronics, guitar noise, queasy washes of strings, and environmental elements (rain, a barking dog). Two of the three versions of the title theme include spoken text, one in Japanese and one in English. I’m still grappling with the music, and it keeps pulling me back.

26 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

Half of Ohmme, member of the Few

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The best DJs! Affordable drinks! Dancing! All that, and it’s even at the Hungry Brain. Really, what more could you want? It’s always the first thing I go to when I get back from tour.

the Brown Girls webseries

Janelle Monae’s video for “Make Me Feel” As a queer woman of color, this is my anthem.

I want to live in this world: its color, its fluidity, its fashion, its badassery. I think the combination of visuals and sounds in this video is really pushing toward a powerful articulation of freedom and sexuality. I love seeing an artist grow in how she expresses herself, and this definitely feels like an amazing evolution for Janelle.

Joseph Chilliams, “Fergie” Joseph Chilliams is a Chicago treasure. Listening to his music expands my ideas of what is possible in art.

He occupies a magnificent terrain of humor, joy, lyricism, and wildness. He’s also amazing to see perform—as an artist he truly doesn’t give a fuck about anyone else. Also “Be careful how you clean your pussy, raising the pH” is one of the best lines I’ve ever heard in a song.

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Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of April 5

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b ALL AGES F

THURSDAY5 Xylouris White See Pick of the Week.

8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $17, $15 in advance. 18+

PICK OF THE WEEK

Xylouris White expands its collision of Cretan traditional music and rock on Mother

FRIDAY6 Diego El Cigala 8 PM, Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan, $25-$70. b

é ANDREA LEARDI

XYLOURIS WHITE

Thu 4/5, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $17, $15 in advance. 18+

ON ITS FANTASTIC fourth album, Mother (Bella Union), stirring Cretan-Australian duo Xylouris Whitemasterfully expands its reach without surrendering the essential intimacy and bruising power that’s made it more than the sum of its parts. Cretan singer and lyre player George Xylouris and drummer Jim White are expansive players who together produce a bigger sound than one might expect from such a stark lineup. This time out they introduce additional instrumentation in the form of rustic viola and violin bowing from guest Anna Roberts-Gevalt of the superb Kentucky folk duo Anna & Elizabeth. On “In Medias Res” the three musicians deftly connect Appalachian tones to Mediterranean ones while White brings his jazzlike command of his kit to the foreground, playing mostly cymbals and pieces of metal (though he beats the hell out of his instru-

Over the last several decades few figures in traditional flamenco have matched the power of native Madrileño Jiménez Salazar (better known as Diego el Cigala), whose appealingly gruff timbre, deep emotional reserves, and effortless range can compare with legendary antecedents such as Camarón de la Isla and Enrique Morente. Though he hasn’t achieved their stature, his deep curiosity and natural versatility make it apparent that he’s on his way to doing so. Early in his career el Cigala began stretching tradition through beautifully measured collaborations with veteran Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés, locating the Spanish heart of Cuban son. He later found similar connections with Argentine tango. In both cases he retained the purity of his flamenco roots while extending them. On his 2016 album Indestructible (Sony Music Latin) he pulled them into another new direction, diving straight into vintage salsa with an emphasis on the classic sounds propagated by Fania Records in New York during the 60s and 70s; on a cover of Cheo Feliciano’s great “El Ratón,” Fania producer and pianist Larry Harlow and percussionist Roberto Roena play in the high-powered band behind him.

Elsewhere Cuban jazz polymath pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba joins in on some contemporary arrangements that prove the singer isn’t merely interested in a nostalgia trip. On “El Paso de Encarnación,” one of numerous tracks cut in Colombia with the Cali Salsa Big Band, Venezuelan salsero great Oscar D’León sings a chorus while syncopating handclaps underline the ever-lasting heat of flamenco. El Cigala fronts a ten-member band in his first Chicago date since 2011. —PETER MARGASAK J

ment throughout most of the record). The stomping “Only Love” features Xylouris alternating between his usual over-the-top strumming and nimble single-note runs on his twangy lyre before it’s suddenly punctuated by judiciously deployed syncopated handclaps.

As a mewling overtone drone oozes from wailing lyre chords on “Motorcycle Kondilies,” Xylouris unleashes an unexpectedly soulful falsetto that balances the raw, often howling Cretan folk style that marks his earlier work with a newly refined melodic side. When the duo takes on traditional tunes such as “Woman From Anogeia,” White’s intuitive cymbal play and scratching snare patter leave a clear, modern, and thrilling mark on the performance. Sure, their outfit is stripped down, but rather than exhausting possibilities, they constantly open up new ones. —PETER MARGASAK Diego el Cigala é ANYA BARTELS-SUERMONDT

APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

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4/6 Global Dance Party: Swing Brasileiro 4/13 Global Dance Party: ¡ESSO! Afrojam Funkbeat 4/19 Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre: Company Showcase & Preview 4/21 Pavithra Chari & Anindo Bose: Contemporary classical music from India 4/22 John Doyle, Cathy Jordan & Eamon O'Leary performing as The Alt

continued from 27 Integrity, Temple of Void Integrity headlines; Temple of Void, the Ox King, and Sarin open. 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $25. 18+ Dwid Hellion, founder and core member of Integrity, sure can be intimidating, what with his burly stage presence, fierce intelligence, and dogged devotion to unblinking study of the darkest sides of the psyche, but his real superpower is his work ethic.

Throughout Integrity’s two-decade career with constant personnel changes (including periods that included stars from bands such as Hatebreed and Sepultura), the iconic metalcore band have maintained a steady maelstrom of releases, including singles and EPs in between albums—and each one has been fiercer than the last. The band rose out of the Cleveland scene in the late 80s and quickly became extremely influential for their marriage of metal’s scope and ambition with hardcore’s directness and aggression. Hellion has lived in Belgium for more than a decade now, but the fromage hasn’t mellowed him much. On last year’s Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume (Relapse), Integrity perfect their blackened, nihilist-occult-themed metalcore sound with surprising moments of hookiness and lurching stop-and-start dynamics that sound deceptively playful for music that’s so evil. Also on tonight’s bill is Detroit’s Temple of Void. On their second full-length, Lords of Death, which came out last summer, they generate a thick, dense roil of boiling death/doom riffery and roaring that’s like being punched in the gut in slow motion. —MONICA KENDRICK

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4/11 Ian Maksin & Friends: Zaria, one year later 4/18 Alash

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Lifted Bells Felix Culpa, Monobody, and Bloodsport: the Movie, the Band open. 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $10. 17+ Lifted Bells couldn’t have picked a better time to release their first EP than 2013, when “emo revival”

had become an indie-rock buzzword. Now the local underground supergroup—made up of exacting musicians from sprightly fourth-wave emo acts (including Options, Stay Ahead of the Weather, and Their/They’re/There) and second-wave heartthrob Bob Nanna (of Braid and Hey Mercedes)—have finally polished off their debut album, Minor Tantrums (Run for Cover), which they celebrate tonight.

Though emo revival appears to have waned, Lifted Bells demonstrate that the best time to strike is when it feels right—regardless of whether the outside world takes note. As always, the five-piece’s ricocheting guitars and complex, interwoven instrumentals are the key to their success, but on this album Lifted Bells show they know just when and how much they can dial things back for the sake of the mood. The acoustic ballad “Miss Pedestria” sparkles with an evolving melody spiked with stinging percussion, a nimble guitar loop, and a soothing, wordless vocal melody; those magic-in-the-bottle moments can reignite entire scenes—or at least fuel one knockout band. —LEOR GALIL

SATURDAY7 Jana Winderen 8 PM, Stage Lab, Reynolds Club, 5706 S. University. Free with RSVP at eventbrite.com/e/performance-jana-winderenregistration-44041785165. b Ever since John Cage popularized the idea in the 1950s, musicians have worked to find music in the everyday noises of nature and the human-built world. Many composers have sought to transcribe such sounds, as Olivier Messiaen did with the songs of birds and John Luther Adams has attempted in his evocations of Alaska’s great outdoors. Other artists—among them Chris Watson, Annea Lockwood, and Christina Kubisch—use field recordings to create immersive compositions, sometimes complementing the tapes with musicians on conventional instruments. Over the past decade, Norwegian artist Jana Winderen has emerged as one of the

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Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

most exciting active field recordists, able to locate exquisite harmonies and melodic shapes in natural sounds. For the gorgeously meditative album Cloître (Touch), a 2017 release in collaboration with German sound artist Thomas Köner, she played back field recordings of unspecified origin in the cloisters of the Évreux Cathedral in Normandy, France, so that they would spill out, resonate, and intermingle with long swells of the church’s organ.

Elsewhere Winderen draws exclusively on sources from nature, such as the hydrophone recordings that constitute her 2016 piece The Wanderer, a 31-minute investigation of zooplankton and phytoplankton. These microscopic aquatic animals and plants form the basis of the marine food chain (phytoplankton also produce half the world’s oxygen through photosynthesis), and Winderen has deftly edited together a rich sprawl of insectlike sounds that pulse, drone, and squiggle below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. In her Chicago debut she presents a recent work called Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone, whose eight-channel mix combines sounds collected from the Barents Sea, in the liminal region where open water meets sea ice.

—PETER MARGASAK

Nellie “Tiger” Travis, Pokey Bear Both artists perform as part of the Chi-Town Blues Festival, which also includes Willie Clayton, Calvin Richardson, Latimore, and Bobby Rush.

7 PM, Arie Crown Theater, 2301 S. Lake Shore, $59-$99. b Chicagoan Nellie “Tiger” Travis’s 2013 song “Mr. Sexy Man” has become a modern-day soul-blues classic with its earworm guitar pattern, propulsive beat, and vernacular chorus (“What yo’ name is? What yo’ name is?”), but despite its good-timey vibe, Travis shouldn’t be typecast as merely a party girl. As evidenced by outings like the searing “Don’t Talk to Me” from 2008’s I’m a Woman (CDS) and the soul-baring “Walking in the Rain in

MUSIC

Memphis” on last year’s independently released Mr. Sexy Man: The Album, she’s also a spellbinding storyteller—the same voice that can kick your ass on a dance floor can break your heart with a ballad. Baton Rouge vocalist Pokey Bear created his own firestorm in 2016 with “My Side Piece,” the gristly, testosterone-filled ode to infidelity he rode to notoriety as the lead singer of the Louisiana Blues Brothas—a group of three relatively young African-American artists, performing on a primarily African-American circuit and proudly billing their music as “blues” and themselves as bluesmen.

Though they should have been welcomed by blues lovers of all stripes as the long-awaited Second Coming of their beloved genre, they’ve made virtually no impact outside of southern soul audiences. It’s evidence (as if more was needed) that most pure-minded white blues aficionados remain oblivious to what the folks who invented the blues celebrate as its living legacy. —DAVID WHITEIS

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SUNDAY8 Ty Segall Axis:Sova and Bed Band open. 8 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield, $27.50. 18+ LA rocker Ty Segall has made a name for himself partly through his prolificacy; over the last decade he’s churned out records in a slew of different contexts. He’s actually slowed down a bit, releasing only one album annually over the last few years (not counting his work as a drummer in Fuzz), and while recently there’s been some backlash about his need to self-edit his output, I don’t buy any of it. When one takes in the glorious sprawl of this latest album, Freedom’s Goblin (Drag City), it’s clear that his sweeping vision is as integral to his work as one of his perfect songs. Listening to the album during a recent road trip was exhilarating—the numerous shifts from song to song made it zip by.

Segall’s adoration for John Lennon continues

J

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Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

WEDNESDAY11

continued from 29

to resonate in his falsetto and surprising melodic shapes, and his musical curiosity regularly takes him beyond his garage-rock roots into sounds that might seem like unnatural fits but succeed because he presents them in a voice of his own. His Technicolor cover of the Hot Chocolate funk jam “Every 1’s a Winner” layers irresistible glammed-out guitar fuzz over nasty, slashing riffs and hand percussion courtesy of special guest Fred Armisen. “Despoiler of Cadaver” cradles a bumping electro-funk groove with a wash of lowrider psychedelia. The epic closing track, “And, Goodnight,” toggles between postCrazy Horse plodding and an infectious psych-pop chorus, while others, such as the furiously charging “When Mommy Kills You,” retain his classic all-out fury. At the same time, his pop instincts, apparent in the irresistible strum of “My Lady’s on Fire” and the Beatlesque ballad “Cry Cry Cry,” have never been sharper. —PETER MARGASAK

TUESDAY10

Ravyn Lenae Jean Deaux opens. 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, sold out. b

At 19, Chicago R&B singer and Zero Fatigue member Ravyn Lenae has proven herself a master at crafting odes to love. That’s partially because

Rafiq Bhatia Ian Chang opens with a solo set. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $14, $12 in advance. 18+ Guitarist Rafiq Bhatia has always been something of a polymath. After graduating from Oberlin—with a degree not in music but in economics and neuroscience—he moved to New York in 2010 and his interests gravitated toward modern jazz. Within two years he dropped Yes It Will (Rest Assured), a record built around a limber fusion of sound featuring extended improvisation—his impressive cast of collaborators includes excellent players from both jazz and classical music such as trumpeter Peter Evans, pianist Vijay Iyer, drummer Billy Hart, and flutist Claire Chase. The recording was well done, but Bhatia didn’t display much of his own musical identity. In 2014 he became a member of Son Lux, a New York trio that moves fluidly between contemporary classical (Eighth Blackbird has commissioned work from the group), pop, and electronic music—he performed with that group at Lincoln Hall last month. Based on his stunning new solo album, Breaking English (Anti-), Bhatia’s participation in Son Lux seems to have focused his vision.

He improvises here and there, but his biggest accomplishment is building a vibrant instrumental sound world where crushing beats, nimble guitar

Ravyn Lenae é JINGYU LIN she’s open about the peculiar perplexities of being enamored with someone. On “Sticky,” the lead single from February’s Crush (Atlantic/ Three Twenty Three), she sings about the cognitive dissonance brought on by loving an idealized version of a partner whose actions are out of sync with her expectations. As she confronts the confusion and anxiety of such a relationship, she addresses how pangs of romance further complicate matters by convincing people to stay togeth-

er longer than they should—or otherwise would.

Though Lenae couches her work in reality, her music feels unreal; her voice seems to emanate from the heavens, or at least contain the gleaming qualities that have long informed humanity’s visions of celestial bodies. LA producer Steven Lacy (of Odd Future-affiliated R&B group the Internet) lends an earthy quality to the EP, a contrast that serves to highlight Lenae’s beautiful, unearthly sounds. —LEOR GALIL

L I V E

M U S I C !

Friday, April 13, 8:00 PM - 10:30 PM

An Evening With(out) David Bowie Presented and directed by Thomas Mulready...

Featuring a Live Music Set

by Vanity Crash

APRIL 13-15, 2018

Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center SCHAUMBURG, IL

LISTENING ROOMS

WHERE MUSIC MATTERS MOST!

Hear your music the way the artist intended!

EXPO HALL

Highlights • Over 160 Hi-Fi Audio Demonstrations

• The AXPONA Expo Hall with headphones, turntables, cables and more!

• Seminars with Special Guests • Plus, shop AXPONA’s Record Fair with new and vintage vinyl and attend evening concerts all with one ticket!

VINYL

Saturday, April 14, 8:00 PM - 9:30 PM

Blues Revue with Corey Dennison Band and special guests Demetria Taylor and Jimmy Johnson

S P E C I A L

E V E N T !

Sunday, April 15, 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Classic Album Sundays presents Daft Punk Discovery

Tickets are on sale now! www.axpona.com FREE PARKING!

30 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

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Chinmaya Mission Chicago

MUSIC

The Ravi Shankar Quartet A journey into the realm of Ravi Shankar’s music by his senior disciples

a trio featuring bassist Jackson Hill and Son Lux drummer Ian Chang—both of whom play on the new album. —PETER MARGASAK

Featuring

Gaurav Mazumdar - Sitar Barry Phillips - Cello Ashwini Shankar - Shehnai Arup Chattopadhyay - Tabla

Turnstile Touche Amore, Culture Abuse, Razorbumps, and Bib open. 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 1375 W. Lake. $18 b

Rafiq Bhatia é ZENITH RICHARDS

licks, and shifting electronic textures coalesce with a visceral bite. From track to track Bhatia finesses a kind of modern prog rock informed by styles as disparate as contemporary soul and Indian classical music (violinist Anjna Swaminathan plays granular lines that swerve with an emotional heft reminiscent of L. Subramaniam). There’s more than a touch of Radiohead’s cinematic grandeur on “Before Our Eyes,” while the title track is a sensual, contemporary slow jam a la recent Dirty Projectors, with the wordless cooing of Nina Moffitt reinforcing the guitarist’s seductive, clear-toned lines. Bhatia leads

Saturday, April 21, 2018 at 6:00pm (seating begins at 5:30pm) Yellow Box Theater 1635 Emerson Ln, Naperville, IL 60540

Online booking @ www.myChinmaya.org/ravishankar

It’s been several decades since punk first mutated into hardcore, and many of its young acolytes still prefer to let it fester in the world’s dingiest basements and DIY spaces. But since 2010 Baltimorearea five-piece Turnstile have been streamlining hardcore’s abrasive attack into huge, brightly colored anthems that seem to zoom forward without friction, or much concern for friction in either their music or among ortho punks who easily upset at nontraditional hardcore sounds. They took that mind-set to the next level on their major-label debut, February’s Time & Space, (released on Warner imprint Roadrunner); along with other musical flare it features a warbling, ascending synth line

by EDM poster boy Diplo. On the album, Turnstile churn hardcore into adrenalized euphoria, veering from slow, swinging numbers that move with the might and weight of a stampeding elephant to the efficient fast-and-furious tracks you’d expect to find on a home-dubbed demo made by the kind of bands fuming in DIY venues everywhere. Time & Space clocks in at 25 minutes; Turnstile waste no time showing they know how to have fun while figuring out new ways hardcore bands can seriously rip. —LEOR GALIL v

3855 n lincoln ave.

chicago

THE RIGHT NOW 10TH ANNIVERSARY!

Physical Graffiti

+ 56 HOPE ROAD 20TH ANNIVERSARY!

FRI APRIL 27

for complete listings, tickets, and social updates...

martyrslive.com

facebook.com/martyrslive

@martyrslive

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

Turnstile é JIMMY FONTAINE

APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 31

FOOD & DRINK

BAR BISCAY | $$$ R 1450 W. Chicago 312-455-8900 barbiscay.com

Spring peas with squid and piperade toast é GALDONES PHOTOGRAPHY

Bar Biscay is a trippy vision of a land far away

MFK vets and chef Johnny Anderes present the Basque bar of the future.

By MIKE SULA

I

t feels like I just licked a toad.” That was the observation of a friend a few minutes after he sat down at Bar Biscay. He didn’t mean the food. He was referring to the oscillating lysergic energy of the room, in which different colored LED strips and floating tubes imperceptibly pulse from the ceiling and walls, and then somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly. A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.

That’s how it is at Bar Biscay, from an all-star cast of Chicago restaurant veterans including, among others, Sari Zernich Worsham and Scott Worsham, owners of the tiny, magnificent, somewhat Spanish MFK, and chef Johnny

32 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

Anderes, late of Honey’s, Reno, Telegraph Wine Bar, and most importantly, Avec.

They’re not just serving flashbacks at Bar Biscay, named for the Bay of Biscay, which washes the shores of northern Spain and southwestern France. That’s a place of pilgrimage for food lovers, and not just where the two countries meet in French and Spanish Basque country. There’s Asturias. Galicia.

Bordeaux. Gascony. Places where the spicing is restrained in service to the purity and simplicity of some of the best meat, fish, and vegetables in the world.

If food means a lot to you, it’s the kind of territory you’ll make sacrifices to visit if you

have to. If you’re a chef, it’s the kind of food you might decide to tackle if you spent four years on the line at Avec, a restaurant that at the very least successfully evokes the joyfulness of what it’s like to eat in a place like that.

Still, adopting that concept is an audacious mission to take on when your restaurant is in the landlocked midwest. Anderes came to the project after two different chefs were announced to lead the kitchen, then suddenly, and for unspecified reasons, weren’t leading the kitchen anymore, including Jeremy Leven, MFK’s opening chef.

Maybe the sense of fluctuation contributes to the hallucinogenic qualities of Bar Biscay,

which in some ways attempts to replicate a chic San Sebastián bar where everybody’s drinking red wine and Coke, snacking on pinxtos, and rolling on molly. For the record, the Worshams do not advocate a BYOM policy, but from 3 to 5 PM Tuesday through Saturday you can pretend you’ve made a stop on the txikiteo, the paradigmatic pinxto bar crawl, when the chef serves off-menu toothpick-speared bites—say crab croquettes, or squid tentacle and guindilla peppers, or duck rillettes with cornichon. These are eaten mano a boca, “hand to mouth,” leaving your free digits to pinch your wine stem or grip your kalimotxo, the cola-and-wine cocktail that all the cool Spaniards drink.

There’s a cocktail on the menu that riffs on that dubious duo: a syrupy, too-flat, but more complex concoction called the Wrath of Kalimotxo, featuring amari, Atxa vermouth, and Angostura bitters all standing in for the soft drink. It’s herbal and nuanced in all the ways Coke isn’t, a drink that grows on you.

There are other signifiers of the Spanish/ Basque way of drinking, like house-barreled vermouth and crisp, citrusy gin and tonics on tap, though the inclusion of just one Basque cider is a bummer.

On the other hand, there’s an Ameztoi Rubentis rosé txakolina that’s as fresh and nostril tickling as any sparkler, along with a delightfully funky unfiltered Cauhapé Quest Gros Manseng from Jurançon in southwest France. And don’t be fooled by the Fief au Dames 2014 Muscadet Sèvre et Maine: it’s an inexpensive, infinitely drinkable, dry—not sweet—white available along with nearly 40 other interesting Spanish and French bottles. They’ve got the drinking game down at Bar Biscay.

But only teenagers drink without eating.

The menu is far more codified than that at a lot of Basque bars, where it’s often not even written down. Among eight pinxtos, nibble hot and fluffy fried manchego gougeres and white anchovies threaded among grilled asparagus and green beans. Small slices of bread are schmeared with a dense whitebean puree crowned with piquillo pepper and olive or salt cod brandade with a topknot of orange salmon roe.

A long w ith appropriate cheeses and

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APRIL 17 | 11:30am – 1:30pm doors open at 11:15am

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

CHICAGO SINAI CONGREGATION | 15 W DELAWARE, CHICAGO Manchego gougeres é GALDONES PHOTOGRAPHY

cured meats and a few canned conservas, say, high-quality Spanish sardines dressed with pickled fennel and red onion, or briny cockles washed in tart sherry butter, these are among the simplest and most resolutely regional bites on the menu. Anderes also offers fresh oysters, a scallop crudo, and fresh prawns, headless (perhaps these are being served at MFK?) and served curling over avocado halves sprinkled with a paprika-espelette pepper blend and drizzled with apple balsamic vinegar.

Vegetables get more complicated and meatier when ground squid mingles with green spring peas in a vivid plate topped with roasted red pepper toast, in homage to the Basque piperade. Meaty royal trumpet, oyster, and shimeji mushrooms sprout under a poached egg ready to erupt and mellow the intensely acidic sherry jus that bathes the plate. Sturdy greens hide soft gigante beans, fat clams, and an equal parts bracing and briny sherry vinaigrette integrated with minced serrano ham. Classic grilled green onions with thick and nutty tomato salbitxada sauce are strictly by the book, while Anderes can’t resist hiding melted leeks under a cheesy potato puree with crushed hazelnuts and sage.

With larger plates the chef really starts to go off script, but not without good results. Sausage-stuffed piquillo peppers are drenched in a rich and sharp manchego-suffused Mornay sauce (it’s usually made with Gruyere), and steak frites (unevenly cooked on one occasion) are smothered in a heavy sauce gribiche that performs as an extrachunky egg salad.

There are some extraordinarily hearty and heavily sauced dishes here. A mountain of jiggling, gloriously fatty and cartilaginous oxtail meat, its richness pierced with crisp watercress and herbaceous gremolata suffused with orange zest. A pot of braised boar shoulder with ham-bone-cooked black beans, wilted

kale, and clams will have you bench-pressing your date, while a relatively delicate white, flaky hake fillet lurks under a bright, thick tomato sauce with green olives and fried ground and crisped serrano. One evening’s special featured slices of braised and tempura-battered tongue with pickled chicory.

Respite from the roller-coastering peaks and valleys of fat and flavor across Anderes’s menu may come with a delicate strawberry crepe with lemon Neufchatel cheese or various flavored cream puffs, though at the unhappy moment I tried the latter they were stiff as stone.

As good as we have it here in the midwest, our standards of perfection in product are generally nowhere nearly as good as it gets in the lands that meet the Bay of Biscay. As Americans, we compensate with in-your-face flavors, extra please, with extra sauce. Anderes delivers that, and delivers it well. In those terms it’s almost more of an American menu than a European one.

One of my favorite things about Bar Biscay is just how weird it is. Worsham told me the design was largely influenced by 50s and 60s minimalism as practiced by artists like Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. Due to the aforementioned lighting scheme, all the white people in the restaurant take on the mauve complexion of an ancient but doomed alien race from a lost episode of Star Trek. Meanwhile the servers themselves are all adorned in Hawaiian shirts like an overcaffeinated Magnum P.I. fan club. Everybody else looks fine.

I’ve looked forward to Bar Biscay more than most recent openings, not only because of the track records of its protagonists, but for the very chimerical concept that seems so hard to pull off in Chicago (RIP Bom Bolla). It’s a fun riff on a magical part of the world, but it wasn’t what I was expecting in a lot of ways. v

Meet Mohammed Al Samawi, author of The Fox Hunt and Justin Hefter Learn about a young man’s moving story of war, friendship, and hope in which he recounts his harrowing escape from brutal civil war in Yemen with the help of a daring plan engineered on social media by four interfaith activists.

$45 book and lunch $65 VIP seating, book and lunch

(includes meet & greet and photo opportunity)

FOR MORE DETAILS AND TO PURCHASE TICKETS

SUNTIMES.COM/FOXHUNT

m @MikeSula APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 33

FOOD & DRINK

○ Watch a video of Elizabeth Mickiewicz working with Lonesome Rose queso dip in the kitchen— and get the recipe—at chicagoreader.com/food.

COCKTAIL CHALLENGE

Queso makes everything better Even a michelada

Stoner Michelada cocktail by Elizabeth Mickiewicz of EZ Inn

By JULIA THIEL

é CHRIS BUDDY

W

hen bartenders ADRIENNE STONER (LOST LAKE) and ELIZABETH MICKIEWICZ (EZ INN) meet up to chat, it’s usually over queso dip at Lonesome Rose in Logan Square. So when Stoner decided to challenge her friend as the next participant in the Reader’s Cocktail Challenge series, she had no trouble picking the ingredient: Mickiewicz would have to make a cocktail with LONESOME ROSE QUESO DIP. Procuring the dip was the easy part. Mickiewicz stopped by the restaurant and got two orders of queso dip to go—one to experiment with and one to eat. “It comes with cilantro and tomato,” she says. “You can add black beans and chorizo, but I opted out for this challenge.”

Then came the hard part. “Cheese isn’t an easy ingredient to work into a cocktail,” Mickiewicz says. She knew the drink needed to be savory and found the answer at Lonesome Rose: “I generally drink a michelada when we eat the queso dip, so it made sense to merge the two.” She used mezcal for its smoky, savory qualities, combining it with Bloody Mary mix, hot sauce, lime juice, and Tecate. (She’d also planned to fat-wash the mezcal with chorizo, but ran out of time.) To incorporate the queso, she says she first tried shaking it into the michelada, even though she knew it wouldn’t work. “It tasted all right, didn’t look great.”

34 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

Instead, Mickiewicz dehydrated the queso, then ground it up and mixed it with fleur de sel, cracked black pepper, and Aleppo pepper to rim the glass. “I’m going to try dehydrating everything now,” she says. “It was like cheese paper before I ground it up. It was really cool.”

She named the drink in honor of her friend: the Stoner Michelada.

STONER MICHELADA

1.5 OZ MEZCAL 1.5 OZ BLOODY MARY MIX .25 OZ LIME JUICE SEVERAL DASHES OF HOT SAUCE TECATE DEHYDRATED QUESO DIP Rim a pint glass with lime juice and dehydrated queso. In a shaker, combine mezcal, Bloody Mary mix, lime juice, and hot sauce. Add ice and shake, then pour into the pint glass. Top with Tecate, stir, and garnish with a sprig of cilantro and a lime wedge.

WHO’S NEXT:

Mickiewicz has challenged LAURA KELTON of SPORTSMAN’S CLUB to create a cocktail with SWEET-AND-SOUR SAUCE. v

m @juliathiel

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

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

6748 CRANDON & 7727 COLFAX MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENTS! 1 & 2BR, $625 & UP. OFF STREET PARKING. 773-947-8572 / 312-613-4424 6748 CRANDON & 7727 COLFAX MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENTS! 1 & 2BR, $625 & UP. OFF STREET PARKING. 773-947-8572 / 312-613-4424 CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/ C, laundry, near transportation, $680-$1020/mo. Call 773-2334939

BRONZEVILLE SEC 8 OK! 4950 S. Prairie. Remod 1BR. $700+.

Heat, cooking gas & appls inc, lndry on site. Z. 773.406.4841

SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 718 W 81st St, 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl., $1300/mo. 708-288-4510

Townhouse, newly decorated. $950/mo. plus security.

Please call 773-852-9425

2BR, 5 Rms, 2nd flr, appls, parking, storage & closet space, near shops/ trans. $950 + sec. 708-335-0786

2 BR $900-$1099 7011-13 S. UNION, 2BR, 2nd flr, large LR & DR, C/A, $875/mo + $425 fee. 1BR bsmt, newly remod, $650 /mo + $325 fee. 708-9216354

2 BR $1300-$1499

FREE HEAT

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

newly decorated, 2BR & $3BR, $850/mo, heat incl, lndry on site.

Contact Frank, 708-205-4311

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

2 BR UNDER $900 SECTION 8 WELCOME 74TH/East End 2BR. $775. 80th/St. Lawrence. 2BR, $725. Newly Decor.

Hdwd flrs, Heat Incl.

773-874-9637 or 773-493-5359

ADULT SERVICES

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

$900/mo + 1 mo sec. Clean & Quiet.

No Pets. 773-930-6045

CHICAGO, 1945 S. Drake, 3rd floor, 2BR, 2BA, newly renovated, hardwood floors, storage, no dogs, $1050/mo.

Call 773-4853042

2 BR $1100-$1299 2111

WESLEY,

2BR, NEAR NORTHWESTERN, PARKING, STORAGE, ALL UTILITIES. A/C, LAUNDRY INCL. ALL WOOD FLRS, 2-FLAT. $125 0/MO. AVAILABLE NOW. 847424-1885 OR ALANBIRMAN@ HOTMAIL.COM

BEAUTIFUL REMOD 1, 2 & 3BR Apts, hdwd flrs, custom cabinets, granite cntrs, avail now. $1000$1200 /mo + sec. 773-905-8487.

Section 8 Ok

ADULT SERVICES

BLUE ISLAND, Beautiful townhome, 2BR, 2.5BA, hdwd floors, appls, garage, overlooking golfcourse. Section 8 ok. Call 773344-4050

2 & 3BR Houses & T.H. Sec 8 OK. Call 708-625-7355

CHATHAM AREA, Gorgeous, 2BR, 1st flr, updated kit & bath.

EVANSTON:

4716 WEST END, newly renovated 2.5BR, 1st floor, all appliances + dishwasher included, rear deck, $1000/mo.

Call 773-301-8959

MATTESON, RICHTON PARK, HAZEL CREST & UNIV PARK.

SECT 8 WELC, 71st & Wentworth,

CALUMET CITY SFH, 3BR, $130

0/mo. Voucher welc. Also avail: Apt in 4 flat. $1100/mo. Voucher Welc. Call Harold 312-456-1840

ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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

UNIVERSITY PARK, 2 bedroom

CHICAGO 94-3739 S. Bishop.

2 BR OTHER

SUNNY AND SPACIOUS two bedroom, seven rooms in an owner occupied 3-flat. Sun Rm, formal Dining Rm, Living Rm, remodeled bath and kitchen with pantry, hardwood floors. If you see this apartment, you will agree it is beautiful. 3rd floor walkup, close to transportation and huge city Park. $1450 per month includes heat, security deposit required.

Montrose/California.

Available May 1st (312) 339-8211

ADULT SERVICES

CHATHAM LRG 3RD flr, 7 rms,

CHATHAM AREA 8235 S. Langley. Luxurious 3BR, 1 full BA, Avail. immed., Section 8 welcome.

773-220-8803 and 773-881-1416 95TH AND THE DAN RYAN

3BR, very clean, newly decorated, near train. $800/mo + 1 month sec.

773-218-2758

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499 OLYMPIA FIELDS Newly remodeled 4 bedroom, 2.5 bath house, full basement. Beautiful area. 708-935-7557.

FOR SALE

ADULT SERVICES

OLDER GENTLEMEN LOOKING for a young lady that knows how to relieve stress! Rob (312) 271-0009 leave message.

SECT 8 READY, 3430 Walnut,

3BR, 7 RM, Brick, 2ndfloor, All new bath, kitchen, and remodel, Nice, Clean, $1050 Mo. 773-405-9361 Gina

55TH & S. PERRY.

Newly renovated 3BR, 1BA. $1197/mo. Section 8 Welcome.

Ask for Ronnie. 773-544-2114

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

708-288-4510

3BR 1 BA, cooking gas & heat no appliances incl, hdwd flrs, near transp, $1150+ sec dep Sec 8 ok, no pets. 773-406-7891

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

3 BDRMS/2BATHS WITHOUT

appliances. $1,250. Section 8 welcome NO Sec. Dep. _ $600 non-refundable move in fee. 708-214-3674 CHICAGO, 6018 S. Vernon. Large 3BR, 2BA, gleaming hardwood floors, appliances incl. Section 8 Welcome. $1350/mo. 773-343-7865

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799

3BR, nr 83rd/Langley, new decor, crpt, heat incl. Appls not incl. $950/ mo + 2 mos sec. Avail 5/1.

BUDLONG WOODS, 5500N/ 708-748-4310 2600W. Three bedrooms, full dining room, spacious living room, 1.5 baths, many closets, near transSECTION 8 WELCOME portation, $1500 includes heat. AvailDOLTON -14545 Chicago Rd. able May 1. Marty 773-784-0763.

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

SAUK VILLAGE - Quiet 3BR, 2BA, extra BR in bsmt, stove & fridge incl. $1350/mo. 1.5 month’s sec dep.

Sect 8 pref 708-307-5003 5828 S. MICHIGAN - 2BR $1140 & 3BR $1350 w/ 2BA, LR, DR, kitchen, sun and back porches.

2BR Grdn, $750. 773-370-1952

Austin Area, 5BR, 2BA, newly remod. BA & kitchen, hdwd flrs, resp for lawn maint. No pets $1650+ utils & sec. 708-265-3611 8037 S. HOUSTON, 4BR, hrdwd flrs, lndry. 2nd flr, Sec. 8 ok. 3 or 2 BR Voucher ok. Call 847-312-5643.

ily home for sale. 3 beds, 1 bath, one level,1050sqft, new carpet, new furnace, new hotwater heater, $72,000, phone 630-621-7142

102ND & VERNON: 3BR, 2.5BA, 1 car gar., fin bsmt, lrg rms, All appls. Priced to sell fast! Brokers Welc. $159,900. State Wood Realty, 773-684-1166

GOODS

CLASSICS WANTED ANY CLASSIC CARS IN ANY CONDITION. ’20S, ’30S, ’40S, ’50S, ’60S & ’70S. HOTRODS & EXOTICS! TOP DOLLAR PAID! COLLECTOR. CALL JAMES, 630-201-8122

121ST & PARNELL: SEC. 8 WEL. $500 Cash Back! $0 Security for Sec 8. 3BR, $1500/mo. Fine condition.

ADT alarm. 708-715-0034

PERFECT ARRANGEMENT BY

Topher Payne, Directed by Margaret Knapp - Open Call Auditions - Seeking people of all ages and ethnicities.

Please prepare a one minute monologue. No Appointment Necessary.

April 9 & 10, 6 – 9 p.m. Oakton Community College, 1600 East Golf Road, Des Plaines. (Park in lot A) For more info, call 847.635.1897

SOUTH SHORE, Senior Discount. Male preferred.

Furnished rooms, shared kitchen & bath, $495/mo. & up. Utilities included. 773-710-5431

MARKETPLACE

sec dep req. No pets/smoking, Sec 8 Mobility 3BR Voucher Pref.

708-647-9737

KILL TEED!

ROACHES-GUARAN-

FORT DEARBORN-CHICAGO PHOTO FORUM - Celebrating

131 Years +1 Exhibition, a reprise of its 2017 exhibit in Chicago, will be held at Noyes Cultural Arts Center at 927 Noyes Street in Evanston from April 6 through May 18, 2018. There will be a reception on April 6, 2018, 5-7pm. All events are free and open to the public. Featured are current members’ works and a timeline of the Forum’s significant role in the history of photography.

For more information please email fortdinfo@gmail.com or visit www.chicagophotoforum.org.

Buy Harris Roach Tablets or Spray.

Odorless, Long Lasting Available: Hardware Stores, The Home Depot, homedepot.com

SECT 8 WELCOME OR SHARE Refurb 5BR, Appl incl, laundry rm, C/A. 1132 E. 81st Pl. $1700/mo neg.

NO Dep Req. 800-566-2642

KILL BED BUGS!

TWO AND THREE Bedrooms

ADULT SERVICES

CALUMET CITY, SINGLE fam-

roommates GENERAL

BEVERLY/MORGAN PARK. 3BR ranch. C/A, $1,500/ mo + 1.5 mo

SPACIOUS & BRIGHT 3BR, 5614 W. Division, 2nd flr, new decor, 1BA, gracious Liv & din rm. $1595 +sec. Sec 8 OK. 708-369-6791

MUSIC & ARTS

Austin Area, 2, 3 & 4BR apts avail close to trans, updated kit & BA, w/d hookup, no pets, $875-$1550+ util. & sec. 708265-3611

3BR, $1100-$1300/mo + sec.

On-site laundry, pkng, appl.

Tenant pays utils. 708-372-4392

ADULT SERVICES

CHICAGO SOUTH - You’ve tried the rest, we are the best.

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

773-253-2132 or 773-253-2137

Apartments Available. Open House on April 7th at 9am and on April 21st at 9am. Meet at Park Apartments at 220 E. Garfield Boulevard. #773268-1960.

ADULT SERVICES

Buy Harris Bed Bug Killers/KIT Complete Treatment System Available: Hardware Stores, The Home Depot, homedepot.com

WANTED: R12 FREON. Certi-

fied buyer will PAY CASH for cylinders of R12. 312-291-9169; RefrigerantFinders.com

ADULT SERVICES

TRACY GUNS & Britney Beach

rocks Lady Ga, - L.G loves Drags & Top Model. Beautiful - Channel 29 & 30. Popstar Love Punk, Bieber, Spears, Ramones, Misfits, Pink, Cure & Nirvana, Guns’ N Roses. Love Aerosmith. Dominick Defanso 312206-0867

ADULT SERVICES

APRIL 5, 2018 | CHICAGO READER 35

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By Cecil Adams Q: This is about the use of talcum powder

and the risk for ovarian cancer. If there is in fact a link between the two, since it’s regularly used on babies, wouldn’t there be an increased number of females contracting cancer at a younger age? —H. GEARHART

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A : You’ve found a rare bird indeed, H.:

a question about the whole talcum-powder-and-cancer debate for which there’s an actual answer. If talc is related to ovarian cancer at all, which is still a big if, the disease doesn’t result from use in infancy, for the simple reason that when babies are exposed to it, it’s for only a short time—the diaper years.

The alleged cancer association, on the other hand, pertains to long-term use, over decades and decades, by adult women looking to keep things clean and dry.

That was the setup in one recent high-profile lawsuit against the company that’s taken most of the anti-talc heat, Johnson & Johnson. The plaintiff, a medical receptionist from Los Angeles named Eva Echeverria, started using J&J baby powder on her genital area daily once she began menstruating, around 1965, and kept at it until 2016, some nine years after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Thousands of women have filed similar lawsuits, and a number have won in court; what made Echeverria’s suit special was that last summer a jury awarded her a massive $417 million judgment. The justice system has spoken, right? Well, the story keeps going.

But let’s pause and freshen up everyone’s memory. Talcum powder comes from talc, a mineral comprising mostly magnesium, silicon, and oxygen. (In its natural state, talc can contain a little asbestos too, though commercial talc products have been free of that carcinogen since the 1970s.) Here the theory is that when sprinkled on the perineal area, talc particles move up the genitourinary tract and lodge themselves in the ovaries, where subsequent inflammation leads over time to cancer. Concerns along these lines have been around for nearly 50 years; I fielded a question on the topic back in 1990. Some doctors continue to insist there must be a connection, but information gathered in a few big studies since 2000 has tended to point the other way.

The most substantial recent data comes from a 2014 paper in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, which followed more than 60,000 postmenopausal women for about 12 years. A little more than half the subjects

reported using talcum powder; researchers weren’t able to establish that it made a difference one way or another vis-a-vis incidence of ovarian cancer.

Still, the American Cancer Society continues to hedge its bets, acknowledging there’s always a chance; the International Agency for Research on Cancer says the genital application of talc is “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”

So what we’re looking at is disturbing anecdotal information piled up over decades, but no preponderance of evidence to back it up.

That’s a messy status quo, and helps explain what’s happened in the Echeverria case. The jurors heard enough to assess record damages for a talc-cancer suit, but the judge, Maren Nelson, concluded they didn’t get it. In October she overturned their verdict, ruling that (among other problems) Echeverria had failed to establish “specific causation” between her baby powder use and her cancer. To argue that talc “more probably than not” causes ovarian cancer, Nelson wrote, Echeverria’s key expert (her doctor) had to demonstrate that women who used it had a 50 percent greater incidence risk than women who didn’t, and the risk numbers in the studies submitted as evidence couldn’t meet that standard. (Grimly enough, Echeverria lived to hear the jury’s verdict, but not Nelson’s subsequent ruling.)

The proceedings also saw some Big Tobacco-esque intrigue over internal Johnson & Johnson memos alleged to reveal the company’s knowledge that their product was harmful—but their language, the judge found, didn’t clearly say what Echeverria said it did.

The initial read on Nelson’s ruling is that it’s great news for J&J, given that she’s also presiding over some 800 other talc lawsuits against the company in California. Anyone following the talc-cancer issue should keep their powder dry, though; we won’t see the end of this one anytime soon. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 30 N. Racine, suite 300, Chicago 60607.

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SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Read what hundreds skipped Stormy Daniels to hear live!

Dan Savage answers questions on anxiety-induced orgasms, and more.

I visited Royal Oak, Michigan, for Savage Love Live at the Royal Oak Music Theatre. I didn’t get to all of the questions submitted by the large and tipsy crowd—a crowd that skipped the Stormy Daniels interview on 60 Minutes to spend the evening with me (so honored, you guys!)—so I’m going to race through as many of the unanswered questions as I can in this week’s column. Here we go . . .

Q : Is there a way of breaking my cycle of being totally sexual and into someone for the first six months and then shutting down to the point that I don’t want to be sexual with them at all? What’s wrong with me?

A : Breaking a long-

established pattern may require the aid of a therapist who can help you unpack your damage—if, indeed, this is about damage. Because it’s possible this could be the way your libido works; you could be wired for a lifetime of loving, shortterm relationships. While our culture reserves its praise for successful longterm relationships (think of those anniversary gifts that increase in value with each passing year), a short-term relationship can be a success.

Everyone get out alive? No one traumatized? Were you able to pivot to friendship?

Then you can regard that relationship as a success— or all those relationships as successes.

Q : How common a kink

and-vixen play—and an entire porn genre dedicated to it.

Q : Cis, female, 33, poly, bi. I

bruise easily, am into BDSM, and love to swim in my condo’s shared pool, where there are many seniors.

Any advice for hiding bruises or getting over the embarrassment?

A : Don’t assume the senior

citizens in the pool are as naive and/or easily shocked as our ageist assumptions would prompt us to believe.

Someone who became a senior citizen today—who just turned 65 years old—was 35 in 1988. I happen to know for a fact that people were doing BDSM way, way back in 1988.

Q : When you are entering

into something new, how do you differentiate between infatuation and real feelings?

A : Infatuation is a real

feeling. Only time will tell if other real but more lasting feelings—like, like like, love, lasting love—will surface when those feelings of infatuation inevitably fade.

Q : I can easily have an

orgasm with toys, but I can’t have one with my boyfriend.

What gives?

A : Your boyfriend could give you orgasms if you handed him one of those toys, showed him how you use it on yourself, and then guided his hands the first few times he used it on you.

Q : Donald Trump has been

is it to enjoy seeing your significant other having sex with someone else?

impeached, and you get to decide the punishment. So what sex toy gets used on him, and who gets to use it?

A : Common enough to have

A : Trump doesn’t deserve a

numerous different ways of manifesting itself—swinging, hot wifing, cuckolding, stag-

sex toy. Sex toys are for good boys and girls. All Trump deserves is a lump of the coal

he loves so much shoved far enough up his ass to serve as a gag.

Q : I’m married and finishing

my PhD while working fulltime. As a result, I don’t get to spend as much time as I would like with my wonderful husband. I know you’re a workaholic as well. How do you manage to make your husband feel he is getting the attention/time he deserves?

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A : When I’m totally stressed

out and don’t have the bandwidth to give my husband the attention/ time he deserves, I take a moment now and then to reassure him that things will settle down soon. I’ve found he’s most receptive to this message when it’s delivered immediately after I’ve taken a few minutes to blow him.

Q : How do you approach people about a three-way without ruining friendships?

A : I think close sexy friends

and the-sex-was-great-buteverything-else-sucked exes make the best “very special guest stars.” But if you’re worried about ruining friendships, well, don’t hit on friends. Hit on strangers.

(And remember: A stranger is just a friend you haven’t had a three-way with yet. Or something.)

Q : Are anxiety-induced

orgasms a thing? They must be, because I have them.

A : I’m glad there’s at least

one person out there who’s managing to enjoy the Trump era. v

Never miss a show again.

Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net.

Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast.com. m @fakedansavage

chicagoreader.com/early

EARLY WARNINGS APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 37

Amen Dunes é MICHAEL SCHMELLING

NEW

101 WKQX Piqniq with Awolnation, Dashboard Confessional, Bush, Greta Van Fleet, Front Bottoms, and more 6/30, 1 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Aces, New Respects 6/21, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Amen Dunes 8/21, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 18+ Antibalas 6/2, 10 PM, Subterranean Asleep at the Wheel 6/16, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 4/6, 8 AM b Bad Bad Hats 6/2, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 17+ Bahamas 8/6, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Bambara 6/26, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle The Body, Big Brave 6/29, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Burna Boy 6/8, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge b Ryan Cabrera 5/23, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Cannabis Corpse, Elbow Deep 5/24, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Chaos Chaos 5/25, 7 PM, Schubas, 18+ Cold Waves VII with Meat Beat Manifesto, OHGR, Frontline Assembly, C-Tec, Lead Into Gold, and more 9/21-23, 6:30 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 18+ Willie Colón, Canalon de Timbiqui 7/23, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb

Coma Cinema 5/9, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Counting Crows, Live 9/8, 6:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Dimmu Borgir 8/21, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 18+ Dinosaur Jr. 7/19, 7:30 PM, Temperance Beer Company, Evanston, part of Out of Space, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Evidence 5/25, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Rachelle Ferrell 8/24-25, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 4/5, noon b Mick Flannery 7/3, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 18+ Chris Forsyth & the Solar Motel Bands, Sunwatchers, Olden Yolk 5/4, 9 PM, Hideout Glassjaw, Quicksand 7/8, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 17+ A Hawk and a Handsaw 5/30, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Hockey Dad 6/6, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Hot Tuna Acoustic 12/7, 7 and 9:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 4/6, 8 AM b Griffin House 6/23, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 4/5, noon b Jose James, Kahil El’Zabar Ethnic Heritage Ensemble 6/18, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Jaws of Love. 6/27, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Jayhawks 7/13, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 17+ Joseph 6/28, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Killy 5/20, 7:30 PM, Subterranean b

38 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 5, 2018

Kingston All Stars with Sister Nancy 7/26, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Lake Street Dive 10/27, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 18+ Charlotte Lawrence 6/17, 7 PM, Beat Kitchen b Lit 6/27, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 4/5, noon b Lone Bellow 7/20, 7:30 PM, Temperance Beer Company, Evanston, part of Out of Space, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Los Cojolites 6/1, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 17+ Lillie Mae 6/7, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 4/6, 8 AM b Aimee Mann, This Is the Kit 7/30, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb MC50 10/24, 7 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 18+ Mighty Mighty Bosstones 8/22, 7:30 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 17+ Ian Moore 6/13, 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 4/6, 11 AM Mustard Plug, J. Navarro & the Traitors 5/19, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Eric Nam, Loote 6/14, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM b New Pornographers 6/22, 7:30 PM, Temperance Beer Company, Evanston, part of Out of Space, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Protoje & the Indignation 5/24, 8 PM, Subterranean Raekwon 5/18, 9 PM, the Promontory, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM David Ramirez 6/21, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 4/5, noon b

b Rascal Flatts 8/10, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Rebirth Brass Band 6/23, 7:30 PM, Temperance Beer Company, Evanston, part of Out of Space, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Red Elvises 6/8, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 4/6, 11 AM Saint Jhn 5/3, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 18+ Sales 9/7, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall b The Sea & Cake, Moonrise Nation 8/16, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Anoushka Shankar, Hollie Cook 7/19, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Shovels & Rope 6/21, 7:30 PM, Temperance Beer Company, Evanston, part of Out of Space, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Sidekicks, Swim Team 5/18, 6:30 PM, Subterranean b Slick Rick 7/21, 7:30 PM, Temperance Beer Company, Evanston, part of Out of Space, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Sofi Tukker 5/2, 7 PM, Metro b Sonido Gallo Negro, Kiko Villamizar 5/27, 9 PM, Thalia Hall Sons of Kemet, Melissa Laveaux 6/28, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Soul Clap 5/19, 10 PM, Smart Bar Spirit Adrift 8/9, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Mavis Staples 7/27, 7:30 PM, Canal Shore Golf Club, Evanston, part of Out of Space, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM Ringo Starr & His All Starr Band 9/22, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM The The 9/22, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 4/6, noon, 18+ Thirty Seconds to Mars 6/15, 6 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Toad the Wet Sprocket 8/18, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM, 18+ Tory Lanez 7/1, 7 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 4/6, 10 AM b Whitney, Ne-Hi 8/12, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Dar Williams 9/16, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 4/5, noon b Wovenhand 9/5, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, on sale Fri 4/6, 11 AM, 17+ Young Widows, Emma Ruth Rundle 6/8, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Yuridia 8/4, 8 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont, on sale Sat 4/7, 10 AM

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

F

Never miss a show again.

Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

UPDATED Fever Ray 5/18, 6:30 and 9 PM, Metro, early show added, on sale Fri 4/6, noon, 18+

UPCOMING Animal Collective, Lonnie Holley 7/27, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Bing & Ruth 5/11, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Brandi Carlile 6/15, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Deerhoof 6/3, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Escape-ism 4/22, 9 PM, Hideout Fortunate Youth, Tatanka 4/21, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Geographer 4/14, 10 PM, SPACE, Evanston b H2O 5/5, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge b Iamx 4/28, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Juanes 5/1, 7:30 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont King Krule 4/27, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Natalia Lafourcade 5/3, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Melvins 7/31, 7:30 PM, Park West b No Age 5/10, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Obituary, Pallbearer, Skeletonwitch 5/13, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Alan Parsons Project 6/5, 7:30 PM, Copernicus Center b Primus, Mastodon 6/6, 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Martin Rev, Wolf Eyes 6/1, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Shabazz Palaces 5/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Paul Simon 6/6, 8 PM, United Center Sleep 8/1, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b Tauk 4/13, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Tinariwen 8/13, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Ufomammut 5/27, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Vance Joy 5/25, 7:30 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont Hannah Wants 4/28, 10 PM, the Mid Weezer, Pixies, Wombats 7/7, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Yob, Bell Witch 7/8, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Yonatan Gat 5/14, 9 PM, Hideout v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene MAYBE YOU CAN’T teach old dogs new tricks, but you can usually depend on old indie rockers for sparkling tunes! One case in point is new local trio Sunshine Boys, aka drummer Freda Love Smith (Blake Babies, Antenna), guitarist Dag Juhlin (Poi Dog Pondering, Slugs), and bassist Jackie Schimmel (Big Hello), who also performs with kids’ musician Justin Roberts. Last month these veterans digitally released their first album, Blue Music, and it shines with jangly hooks and soaring backup vocals—this wolf especially digs “Questions,” an ode to old-fashioned letter writing. On Saturday, April 28, Sunshine Boys play Martyrs’ with power-pop wizards Frisbie (celebrating 20 years) and Plutonians, who love instrumental surf and Sun Ra and whose lineup includes guitarists Nathaniel Braddock (Occidental Brothers) and Steve Doyle (Hoyle Brothers).

The best festivals are those that lift up a community, and they don’t get much better than Frontwoman Fest! This year’s fourth (and sadly final) annual celebration of local female and female-identifying musicians brings more than a dozen acts to the Burlington for a daylong bash that starts at 2 PM on Saturday, April 7.

The lineup is killer, and this wolf is extra psyched for dream-pop band Fauvely, rapper Freddie Old Soul, and R&B singer Jordanna. Everyone on the bill appears on Impossible Colors’ new Frontwoman Fest mixtape; proceeds from downloads and fest tickets benefit Girls Rock! Chicago.

Local synth-pop maestro Richard Album dropped Another Album on Lost Sound Tapes just before daylight savings began, and “Spring Forward” is one peppy reminder for timely alarm-clock adjustment! The whole tape is transfixing, on any date. On Tuesday, April 10, Album plays Cafe Mustache with the Curls, Matthew Danger Lippman, and Sonny Falls; he’s also got a gig on Sunday, May 6, downstairs at Subterranean with Coping Skills, Joey Nebulous, and Judge Judy & Executioner. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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APRIL 5, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 39

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