Chicago Reader: print issue of April 14, 2016 (Volume 45, Number 27) by Chicago Reader

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY | K I C K I N G A S S S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | A P R I L 1 4 , 2 0 1 6

A cancer diagnosis isn’t a green-card guarantee. 13

Homegrown pot won’t take root in the Prairie State. 14

Pastry chef Mindy Segal gets into the edibles business. 15

Put down the vape and pick up an artisan pipe. 16

Is legal recreational weed a pipe dream? 19

The growing pains of Illinois’s pot pilot program

GOOSE ISLAND BEER CO.

CHICAGO,

SINCE 1988.

2 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

THIS WEEK

C H I C AG O R E A D E R | A P R I L 1 4 , 2 01 6 | VO LU M E 4 5, N U M B E R 2 7

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

IN THIS ISSUE 5 Agenda The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls, MST3K, Duncan Trussell, and more recommendations

CITY LIFE

9 Chicagoans The highs and lows of a marijuana “trimmigrant” 10 Joravsky | Politics The “opt-out” testing movement moves beyond the north side.

ARTS & CULTURE MUSIC 22 Theater The best parts of Tracy Letts’s Mary Page Marlowe may be the ones that aren’t there. 23 Comedy The Comedy Dance Collective incorporate choreography into sketch work. 24 Visual Art Rodrigo Lara Zendejas’s garden of unearthly delights takes over the Hyde Park Art Center. 26 Movies A guide to the sights and sounds of the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival

29 Feature: Evanston rapper and producer Kweku Collins celebrates a great freshman year at Closed Sessions. 34 Record Store Day 2016 This year’s in-store performances make shop hopping worthwhile. 36 Shows of note Freddie Gibbs, Rihanna, Touched by Ghoul, and more

CLASSIFIEDS

45 Jobs 45 Apartments & Spaces 46 Marketplace

FOOD & DRINK

42 Restaurant review: Naoki The Lettuce Entertain You sushi spot helmed by chef Naoki Nakashima is refreshingly gimmick free. 44 Key Ingredient: Pork floss Yum Dum Truck chef Jeff Wang uses “meat wool” to make recipes from his childhood.

48 Straight Dope What would happen if mosquitoes were wiped out? 49 Savage Love Is it legal to buy someone’s sweaty underwear? 50 Early Warnings Mamby on the Beach, Sergio Mendes, North Coast, Patti Smith, and more shows to come 50 Gossip Wolf Metal Haven rises again as restaurant and record shop Metal Haven Grill, and more music news

THE MARIJUANA ISSUE

VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE FABIO CAVALIERI, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654 312-222-6920, CHICAGOREADER.COM ---------------------------------------------------------------THE READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY SUN-TIMES MEDIA, LLC, 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654. © 2016 SUN-TIMES MEDIA, LLC. PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL. POSTMASTER: SEND CHANGE OF ADDRESS TO CHICAGO READER, 350 N. ORLEANS, CHICAGO, IL 60654.

ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY CLAY HICKSON. FOR MORE OF HICKSON’S WORK GO TO CLAYHICKSON.COM

A cancer Growing The edibles Smoke on diagnosis isn’t pains business is the water lawmakers a green-card Pro-pot no cakewalk Put down the and activists say vaporizer and pick homegrown marijuana Famed Hot Chocolate up an artisan pipe. guarantee won’t take root

Doctors have been reluctant to prescribe medical marijuana—even to patients battling serious illnesses.

any time soon in the Prairie State.

pastry chef Mindy Segal finds it’s not easy going green.

Photographs by DAVID SAMPSON

By LEE V. GAINES

By MIKE SULA

Waiting to inhale Is legal recreational weed a pipe dream? By KATIE CAMPBELL 19

By BRIANNA WELLEN 13 APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 3

4 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

AGENDA R READER RECOMMENDED

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of April 14

! Send your events to agenda@chicagoreader.com

b ALL AGES

F in some universe theirs is a love story. —TONY ADLER Through 5/1: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773-871-3000, victorygardens.org, $20-$60. Jabari Dreams of Freedom Nambi R E. Kelley’s didactic but gracefully written play, receiving its world-premiere

The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls ! MARC JAMES

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater The Fairytale Lives of Russian Girls It’s been only six months since Trap Door staged Meg Miroshnik’s unhinged 2012 play about 20-year-old Russian-American naif Annie’s return to her native semi-supernatural Moscow. But given Miroshnik’s metaphysical ingenuity, linguistic dexterity, and theatrical bravado, I’d vote for a new production every three months. While Trap Door presented Annie’s reluctant return to her origins as a swirling phantasmagoria, the Cuckoo’s Theater Project director Sara Carranza stages it as a poker-faced black comedy with folkloric undertones. Both approaches work wonders. And while Carranza’s overly stolid pacing sometimes dampens the humor, it keeps Miroshnik’s hallucinatory images in clear focus. Carranza’s cast are mostly spoton, and the comic frisson between Jillian Leff’s slouchy Annie and Hilary Bernius’s spring-loaded Auntie—who may also be the Baba Yaga—is riotously creepy. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 4/24: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-5397838, thecuckoostheaterproject.com, $20.

Hazel, A Musical Maid in America Remember Hazel? I do. It was a TV sitcom based on cartoons by Ted Key, about a livein maid who runs the suburban family she works for. The show was successful enough to last five seasons, 1961-’66, but couldn’t be called remarkable except as the final humiliation for Shirley Booth, who became a Broadway star and Oscar winner for William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba only to age into Hazel’s apron. What made Ron Abel, Chuck Steffan, and Lissa Levin think it needed to become a musical remains a mystery to me, even now that I’ve seen this world-premiere production. My guess is they got into the retro atmospherics, heavily represented in Abel’s score, Kevin Depinet’s sets, and director-choreographer Joshua Bergasse’s dances—though Levin’s book corrects for 21st-century feminism. The result, like Hazel herself, is overbearing, but also kinda sweet. And several performances render the pointlessness much easier to take: Summer Naomi Smart as the mom, an amazing Casey Lyons as her son,

Rowan Moxley as the son’s pal, Meghan Murphy as a sexed-up military officer, Ed Kross as an eccentric millionaire, and Klea Blackhurst, alternately kibbitzing and belting as Hazel. —TONY ADLER Through 5/29: Wed 1:30 PM, Thu 1:30 and 8 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 5 and 8:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM (except 5/8, 3 and 7 PM), Drury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace, drurylaneoakbrook.com, $40-$60. Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin Irving Berlin has always struck me as the classic striver: an essentially oafish composer and lyricist who succeeded by combining sentiment, optimism, and superhuman productivity with an uncanny nose for the zeitgeist. Hershey Felder’s one-man show hasn’t changed that view. Not that Felder doesn’t put a good face on his subject—Berlin’s seemingly boundless will to ingratiate is spun here as patriotic populism, and the worst you can say about him is that he’s got a cornball singing style. Still, there’s a best you can say, too: going from “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “Blue Skies” is no mean feat. —TONY ADLER Through 5/22: Wed 7:30 PM, Thu 2 and 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Royal George Theatre Center, 1641 N. Halsted, 312-988-9000, theroyalgeorgetheatre.com, $30-$60. Hillary and Clinton Lucas Hnath’s studiously peculiar new piece is less a play than a speculation in script form, exploring one of the great mysteries of our time: What keeps the Clintons together? The rules of Hnath’s thought experiment are stated at the outset, when Hillary informs us that what we’re about to see doesn’t take place in our world but in an alternate reality where it’s 2008 and a female former senator and first lady coincidentally named Hillary Clinton happens to be seeking her party’s nomination for the presidency. The rest of the 90 minutes shows us a sleepless, poorly polling candidate (Cheryl Lynn Bruce, looking not at all like our Hillary) strategizing with her campaign manager, dickering with her rival, and—most particularly—coping with her canny, compulsively underhanded husband. William Boles’s white-on-white set and Chay Yew’s intentionally static staging can become soporific at times, but there’s something weirdly compelling about Hnath’s alien Bill and Hill, something ennobling about his notion that

production from Chicago Children’s Theatre, tells the story of Jabari, your average electronics-obsessed student, who over its course learns to appreciate the importance of figures in black history. Pitched to elementary-school kids ages nine and up, the message of the show doesn’t go much deeper than “Here’s this noteworthy person” (insert Martin Luther King Jr.) and “Here’s this one” (insert President Barack Obama), but the production, directed by Lili-Anne Brown, is lively and entertaining, full of energetic dances and interesting, eye-pleasing costumes (by Mieka van der Ploeg) and sets (by William Boles). Brown’s fine ensemble delivers the kind of tight, polished, committed performances one wishes one saw more often in shows for grown-ups. —JACK HELBIG Through 5/1: Wed-Fri 10 AM; Sat 11 AM, 2, and 6 PM; Sun 11 AM and 2 PM, Tue 10 AM, Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn, 312-337-6543, chicagochildrenstheatre.org, $28-$39. Jensen and Wit The title characters of this clunky comedy by Felicia Basanavicious (who also directs) are a lesbian couple trying to have a baby via artificial insemination. Obstacles include meddlesome relatives, commitment jitters, and the conservative atmosphere of the small Missouri town where the women live. For some reason, Basanavicious also throws in a philosophically minded party animal and his uptight roommate; their odd-couple routine generates few laughs and lacks any significant link to the main plot. In Reutan Collective’s production, Emilie Modaff’s Jensen and Sarah Nutt’s Wit have an easy chemistry with one another, but the effect is undermined by contrived situations and cliched supporting characters. The exception is Wit’s tough-talking, nine-monthspregnant sister, Heather, played with comic ferocity by standout Bethany Elfrink. —ZAC THOMPSON Through 4/28: Thu 8 PM, Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark, 800-6506449, pubhousetheatre.com, $10. A Number On the surface, cloning R is the subject of this gripping 2002 one-act by British playwright Caryl

Churchill. In halting, elliptical dialogue, a father is confronted both by the troubled son he sent away and by the cherished replacement built from the genetic material of the first. But Churchill is less concerned with the mechanics of her sci-fi premise than with examining the longing to fix past misdeeds and the impossibility of do-overs. In Domenica Cameron-Scorsese’s quietly shattering production for Runcible Theatre Company, Stephen Fedo shows how the father is both well-meaning and cruel, while Owen Hickle-Edwards—doing triple duty as the son, the replacement, and one of the extra clones made without the father’s knowledge—is alternately anguished,

menacing, and blithe. —ZAC THOMPSON Through 5/8: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Royal George Theatre Center, 1641 N. Halsted, 312-988-9000, runcibletheatre.org, $26. Photograph 51 Anna Ziegler’s tasty R new play about Rosalind Franklin, the British physicist whose invaluable contribu-

tion to early DNA research has remained largely ignored, is simple in the best ways. It distills complicated science and even more complicate interpersonal politics— Franklin, a Jewish woman, is doubly suspect in the WASP-y all-male halls of the 1950s scientific establishment—into distilled, comprehensible nuggets. But simplicity never diminishes the material’s potency or poignancy; Ziegler’s as fascinated with the forces that kept Franklin relegated to the background as the fateful moments that changed science, and human hearts, forever. Director Elizabeth Lovelady’s agile staging for 20% Theatre Company is sure-footed enough to more than compensate for the rudimentary production values, and the wholly engaging cast make potentially bookish material vibrant and heartfelt. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 5/7: Wed-Sat 8 PM, Berry Memorial United Methodist Church, 4754 N. Leavitt, 773-2759735, twentypercentchicago.com, $20.

The Realization of Emily Linder R Nearing the end of life, Emily Linder (Kathleen Ruhl) has become pushy and bit-

ter. She is convinced she always has been. A retired French professor, she’s had an operation to remove all ten of her toes and needs help getting from the wheelchair to the recliner. Her daughters, Margaret (Debra Rodkin) and Janet (KC Karen Hill), want to make her feel comfortable any way they can, including hiring a caretaker (Stephanie Shum), but Emily has bad news: she’s had a premonition that she is going to die. Not only that, but she knows when it will happen—this Friday—and she wants to help plan the funeral. And she wants her toes back. Richard Strand’s script, here directed for Redtwist Theatre by Hans Fleischmann, treats the agonies of family life with a healthy dose of irony, striking a wonderful balance between sober realism and whimsical lightness. Ruhl’s comedic timing is delightful, as is her winking, pitch-perfect delivery. —MAX MALLER Through 5/8: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-728-7529, redtwist.org, $30-$35, students and seniors $25-$30.

Wilde’s Salome Oddly enough, the tease of this Gorilla Tango burlesque is that there’s no stripping, no veils in the dance of seven veils—not even a severed head when and where it would be apropos. Instead three women dryly and unironically recite excerpts from Oscar Wilde’s 1893 biblical tragedy about King Herod’s seductress-stepdaughter and her role in murdering John the Baptist. Robert Eric Shoemaker and Shelley DeHosse’s “reimagining” for Gorilla Tango Theatre occasionally nods to a variety-show-style adaptation—its cast members sing a few bars, perform tap-dance warm-ups, and cheat out to deliver a few original soliloquies about Etsy and menstrual bloating—but without any humor or commentary to warrant it. Is antiburlesque a genre? —DAN JAKES Through 4/23: Fri-Sat 7 PM, Gorilla Tango Theatre, 1919 N. Milwaukee, 773-598-4549, gorillatango.com, $10. Women of Lockerbie Deborah R Brevoort’s evocative play, about the aftermath of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am

flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, is full of ghosts—the ghosts of innocents (killed both in the air and on the ground) and the ghosts of characters from other, older plays (Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Euripides’s Trojan women). The result is that this drama doubly rich: it’s both about real events and about people and the very human need to grieve before we can move on. Robert Tobin’s fine ensemble brings Brevoort’s words to life with grace and power, and Jeff Brown is moving as a father too busy to grieve. But it’s the actresses portraying the Greek-chorus-like women of Lockerbie (Barbara Button, Lorraine Freund, Morgan Manasa, Hayley Rice) who are particularly glorious. —JACK HELBIG Through 5/8: ThuSat 8 PM, Sun 3:30 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, astonrep.com, $20.

DANCE Ma(s)king Her Honey Pot PerforR mance presents a dance inspired by Afro-surrealism and black feminist thought.

Thu 4/14-Sat 4/16: 7:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph, honeypotperformance.com, $15.

Three Rooms Kristina Isabelle Dance R presents a progressive dance performance that takes place in three different "

Jabari Dreams of Freedom ! CHARLES OSGOOD

APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 5

AGENDA !B rooms. 4/14-4/28: Thu 7:30 PM, High Concept Laboratories, 2233 S. Throop, info@highconceptlaboratories.org, kristinaisabelledance. com, $12.

COMEDY Brian Costello Show Brian R Costello hosts this comedy show all about the female repro-

ductive system. Guests include cofounders of #shoutyourabortion Amelia Bonow and Kimberly Morrison. Fri 4/15, 6:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433, hideoutchicago.com, $7. Pete Holmes The comic R and host of the podcast You Made It Weird records his new

stand-up special. Sat 4/16, 7:30 and 10 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield, 773-472-0449, victheatre.com, $24. MST3K Live movie riff featuring Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff from Mystery Science Theater 3000. Fri 4/15-Sat 4/16: 7 and 10 PM, North Bar, 1637 W. North, 773-123-5678, liveatnorthbar. com, $30.

Welcome to Night Vale R Live recording of the popular podcast that provides community

updates for the fictional town of Night Vale. Thu 4/14, 8 PM, Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777, harristheaterchicago.org, $27.50-$32.50.

VISUAL ARTS Aspect/Ratio “Always Repeating Is All of Living,” artist Sabina Ott presents her latest exhibit, which draws inspiration from human intuition, desire, and temptation. Opening reception Sat 4/16 at 5 PM. 4/16-5/28, 119 N. Peoria, suite 3A, aspectratioprojects.com. Venue One Starving Artist, a silent auction benefiting the Chicago

For more of the best things to do every day of the week, go to chicagoreader. com/agenda.

Artists Coalition, features the work of local artists along with food and refreshments courtesy of Balena, the Radler, Scone City, Garrett Popcorn, and more. Thu 4/14, 7 PM, 1044 W. Randolph, 312-799-3298, $175; $50 artists and arts administrators.

LIT The Dollop Podcast R Comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds record a live

episode of their storytelling podcast. Mon 4/18, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, 773-525-2501, lh-st. com, $20. Josh Rosenthal GramR my-nominated producer and Tompkins Square label founder

Josh Rosenthal reads from his first book, The Record Store of the Mind. The event includes a performance by local musician Michael Vallera. Wed 4/20, 6:30 PM, City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie, 773-235-2523, citylitbooks.com.

Shout Your Abortion SlutR Talk’s Alicia Swiz hosts Amelia Bonow, Lindy West, and Kimberly

Morrison, the founders of Shout Your Abortion, to share their personal stories. Mon 4/18, 8 PM, East Room, 2828 W. Medill, 773-276-9603, eastroomchicago.com, $10.

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/ movies NEW REVIEWS Barbershop: The Next Cut The fourth entry in the Barbershop franchise delivers keen social commentary, bringing back many of the key players from the 2002

CHICAGO FLAGSHIP STORES 56 E A S T WA LT O N S T R E E T 3 1 2 - 2 0 2 -7 9 0 0 SlutTalk host Alicia Swiz ! MISFIT29 STUDIOS

6 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

Brian Costello ! COURTESY BRIAN COSTELLO

and 2004 installments (the 2005 spin-off Beauty Shop is best forgotten). The unisex barbershop of the title is a pillar of its south-side neighborhood, yet owner Ice Cube must contend with gun violence on the streets and fears that his son is being courted by a local street gang. Without shying away from complexity, director Malcolm D. Lee (The Best Man Holiday) shows how strong fatherhood and civic activism can engender social progress. And as always, the barbers and their regulars debate race, gender, and sexuality, their spirited rap sessions smart and nuanced. With Regina Hall, Cedric the Entertainer, Anthony Anderson, Eve, and Common. —LEAH PICKETT Century 12 and CineArts 6, Cicero Showplace 14, New 400, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Showplace ICON Concerto: A Beethoven Journey In this pleasant but lukewarm documentary, celebrated Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes chronicles his “Beethoven journey” of recording and performing in concert the composer’s five concertos, accompanied by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Andsnes states early in the film that the Beethoven project was about searching for his own interpretation of the pieces as much as understanding the man who wrote them, which means that the backstories of the pianist and the composer complement each other. Director Phil Grabsky (In Search of Mozart, In Search of Chopin, et al) brings to the documentary a modest, academic tone and correspondingly dry visuals, yet watching Andsnes both play and feel his hero’s compositions evokes the kind of thrill any artist, but especially a Beethoven buff, will likely recognize and appreciate. —LEAH PICKETT 92 min. Fri 4/15, 2 and 6 PM; Sat 4/16, 5:30 PM; Sun 4/17, 3 PM; Mon 4/18, 6 PM; Tue 4/19, 8:30 PM; Wed 4/20, 6 PM; and Thu 4/21, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center The Dark Horse The plot of this New Zealand feature (2014) sticks to the template for inspirationalcoach dramas, but the genre outlines tend to fade away thanks to the grungy locations, the actors’ evident sincerity, and a magnetic performance from Cliff Curtis !

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AGENDA !B (Whale Rider) as the troubled hero. A chess champion recovering from bipolar disorder, he volunteers to coach a chess club for underprivileged Maori kids and immediately announces they’re going to compete in the National Chess Championships six weeks hence. Their seemingly impossible mission is complicated further by the coach’s fragile mental health and by a violent conflict between a star player (James Rolleston) and his father (Wayne Hapi), a biker who wants the boy to drop the chess and join his motorcycle gang. James Napier Robertson directed his own script, which was inspired by Jim Marbrook’s 2012 documentary Mental Notes. —J.R. JONES R, 124 min. Landmark’s Century Centre The First Monday in May R Director Andrew Rossi (Page One: Inside the New York Times)

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focuses on one of the hottest events on Manhattan’s social calendar—the annual fund-raiser for the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—in this gorgeous, gossipy, yet penetrating documentary about the marriage of culture and commerce. The movie teems with celebrities, but the real stars are Andrew Bolton, curator of the Met’s blockbuster 2015 fashion exhibit “China: Through the Looking Glass,” who negotiates ground rules with the museum’s Asian arts curator and secures loans of Chinese-inspired Parisian couture, and Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, who cochairs the gala opening, overseeing everything from the color palettes to the seating plan. Together they reassure Beijing that the show will not devolve into kitsch or Orientalism; keeping them to their word is celebrated filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, the exhibition’s watchful artistic director. In English and subtitled Mandarin. —ANDREA GRONVALL 91 min. Thu 4/21, 8 PM. Music Box Hostile Border Written by Kaitlin McLaughlin, this novel thriller follows the predicament of a young Mexican woman (Veronica Sixtos), raised as an undocumented immigrant in the U.S. and speaking no Spanish, who’s busted for credit card fraud and deported to her native (but foreign) land. Shunned by Spanish speakers as a pocho (literally, “rotten fruit”), she bumps around on the cattle ranch of her Mexican father (Julio César Cedillo) and soon falls in with a vicious smuggler (Roberto Urbina) who corrupts her with easy money and hot sex. In a director’s statement, Michael Dwyer recalls developing the script with McLaughlin as a critique of the American dream, but any kind of political statement is eventually submerged in the unfolding crime drama. In English and subtitled Spanish. —J.R. JONES R, 88 min. Fri 4/15, 2 and 6 PM; Sat

The First Monday in May 4/16, 7:45 PM; Mon 4/18, 6 and 8 PM; Wed 4/20, 6 PM; and Thu 4/21, 8:30 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Mountains May Depart The R real departure here is for Jia Zhang-ke, whose earlier films

(The World, Still Life, 24 City, A Touch of Sin) have considered the pressures of globalization in a changing China but whose latest drama pushes both across the world and into the future. The story is positively ancient—a local beauty (Tao Zhao) must choose between a poor suitor (Jing Dong Liang) and a rich one (Yi Zhang)—but Jia radicalizes it by dividing the narrative into three sections that begin in 1999 (on the eve of the new millennium), in 2014, and finally in 2025, when the woman and her wealthy husband have split up and their college-age son (Zijian Dong) visits his exiled father in Australia. Through it all, Jia tracks the characters’ disintegrating connections to each other, to China, and to the past, as the century accelerates into white noise. In English and subtitled Mandarin and Cantonese. —J.R. JONES 126 min. Fri 4/15, 7:45 PM; Sat, 4/16, 3 PM; Sun 4/17, 5 PM; Mon 4/18, 7:45 PM; Tue 4/19, 6 PM; Wed 4/20, 7:45 PM; and Thu 4/21, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

REVIVALS Blazing Saddles With this 1974 western spoof, Mel Brooks abandoned the sweetly sentimental tone of his first two movies, The Producers and The Twelve Chairs, for the manic vulgarity that would become his cinematic calling card. Cleavon Little stars as the black sheriff of a frontier town (Brooks couldn’t sell the studio on Richard Pryor, still relatively unknown at the time), and Gene Wilder is his ally, the Waco Kid. With Madeline Kahn, Harvey Korman, Dom DeLuise, and Alex Karras. —J.R. JONES R, 93 min. Chicago Tribune writer Mark Caro introduces the screening. Tue 4/19, 7 PM. Music Box Heights In JackR InsonJackson Heights is the most joyful

feature by master documentary maker Frederick Wiseman, celebrating not only the title neighborhood in Queens but American life in all its diversity. The film’s design evokes that of a sprawling patchwork quilt, with scenes focusing on the immigrant experience, LGBT activism, municipal governance, the serenity of old age, working life, and more. Wiseman touches on such dark topics as police brutality and the exploitation of migrants, yet he manages to put a positive spin on them, recording citizens’ groups as they look for constructive solutions. Rarely do movies present the democratic process with such warmth and optimism. Wiseman inspires affection for many of his subjects, and this generous feeling gains in intensity as the community portrait grows richer. These people are interdependent, gaining from their diversity. —BEN SACHS 189 min. Wiseman attends the screening. Mon 4/18, 3 PM. Northwestern University Block Museum of Art F

SPECIAL EVENTS Chicago International Movies & Music Festival The eighth edition of the annual festival runs through Sunday, April 17, at venues across town. For our critical roundup see page 26; for a full schedule visit cimmfest.org. Chicago Latino Film Festival The festival continues through Thursday, April 21, at venues across town. For our critical roundup visit chicagoreader.com/movies; for a full festival schedule visit chicagolatinofilmfestival.org. Chicago Palestine Film Festival The 15th annual festival runs Friday, April 15, through Thursday, May 5. For Fred Camper’s critical roundup see page 28; for a full festival schedule visit siskelfilmcenter.org. Gene Siskel Film Center Sound of Silent Film Festival Contemporary silent films, scored and accompanied by local musicians. Sat 4/16, 7:30 PM. Music Box v

CITY LIFE

“It’s tedious, and it’s hard, but it’s also fun caring for a plant and making a living,” Gina Monique says of working as a marijuana trimmer. # MYKAEL LEIGH

Chicagoans

The trimmigrant Gina Monique, 22 I STARTED SMOKING WEED when I was a sophomore in high school. It made the day go by in a really interesting way. Then I started watching documentaries on the pot industry and learning about legal pot in California and Colorado, and I started to develop an interest in medical marijuana. When I graduated, I decided to go to Naropa University in Boulder. I learned a lot about holistic ways of living. I was hanging out with people who were pretty much their own doctors. They’d make little potions and elixirs and say, “Take this.” Whenever I got sick, I’d go out into the mountains and find fresh sage and mullein and different things. I ended up getting a job as a trimmer for the first time out there. A trimmer is someone who manicures freshly harvested marijuana. You have this rea lly huge stem w ith buds hanging off, and it develops big leaves in between the flowers. All of that needs to be cut off. Otherwise, in your final product, you’ll have a really smoky burn. The work was casual, just in this local grower’s house. It was all legal. We had these things called trim trays that have a screen in them to collect all the keef, all the crystals that fall off the plant as you’re handling it. That

can be used for other things, so it’s important to collect it. The work can get really boring, so we’d play a movie or listen to music. I was there for two years, and then I’m like, “Man, I kind of need some support and stability.” So I came back to Chicago for a little bit, until I got invited to trim again, at an outdoor

harvest in Colorado. I went out there and lived the outdoor trimmer’s life. It was like a campsite, pretty much. You’re in the woods. We brought our tents, and we would have bonfires at night, and during the day, we sat in a tent and trimmed. It’s tedious, and it’s hard, but it’s also fun caring for a plant and making a living. There were maybe 12 of us, each making like $250 a pound. That’s radical, because in a capitalist society, you’re

not supposed to make your money that easily. The owners of the grow operation were supercool and wanted us to be happy. So yeah, we’d roll blunts and roll joints and hit the bong and work all day. I wore gloves while we worked, but some people collected the pollen off their fingers and turned that into a hash and smoked it. I got pretty interested in learning more about growing marijuana, so I stayed for a while and learned how to do what the owners were doing. You have to have a mind for the science of it. I was like, “I want to pursue this industry.” I moved to Michigan, and I got legal there as a caregiver, to grow my own weed. The first patients I served were two alcoholics who were also addicted to pain meds, and one of them was my friend, and he was in the hospital with stomach ulcers. I was like, “Yo, I want you to be my patient. You like to smoke joints with me. This is what you need to get on.” So we did that, and it was cool. One of them was a really skilled mechanic, and we got him working again. Smoking my first legal joint was awesome. I got my medical card, and all my patients had their medical cards, and we all made a bonfire and celebrated. As a kid, you feel so persecuted for smoking pot, so doing it freely is really awesome. It’s important to me to do everything legally, because I have a lot invested in my reputation, in my family and friends. Imagine if my mom ever had to come visit me in a courthouse or something—it would be terrible.

Sometimes you get that feeling that you have to come home, you know? So I did. I’m really inspired to be part of the movement here in Chicago. There are a couple labs and cultivation centers outside of Chicago that need skilled growers. I’m looking into working with them. I would like to eventually open up a holistic center,

either to help patients get their paperwork processed and have them as customers, or with time, as we make the laws better, have it be a medicinal factory: “You need a lotion, you want a shampoo, you want some candy, you want an extract? Here’s your medicine. Here’s why it’s good for you.” —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 14

FRIDAY 15

SATURDAY 16

SUNDAY 17

MONDAY 18

TUESDAY 19

WEDNESDAY 20

! Ch icago Homegrown dinner Abra Berens, executive chef at Stock Cafe, hosts a dinner celebrating the release of The Chicago Homegrown Cookbook, which features favorite dishes from some of Chicago’s most popular restaurants. This event is BYOB. 6:30 PM, Read It and Eat, 2142 N. Halsted, readitandeatstore.com, $55.

Spaghetti Wrestl ing Chicago Outfit Roller Derby presents its annual benefit, featuring members of the team wrestling each other in kiddie pools full of noodles. 8 PM, Double Door, 1572 N. Milwaukee, chicagooutfitrollerderby.com, $15.

! Re co rd Sto re Pop Up Feeltrip Records is opening a one-day-only record shop at Boiler Room, featuring performances by Molehill, Model Stranger, A Friend Called Fire, and a DJ set by Alex White of White Mystery. Noon, Boiler Room, 2210 N. California, feeltrip. co. F

" Vint age Garage Sale More than 100 vintage retailers gather for the largest garage sale in Chicago. 10 AM, Vintage Garage Chicago, 5051 N. Broadway, vintagegaragechicago.com, $5.

! Ch icago Chef Week More than 100 Chicago and Chicago-area restaurants— including Blackbird, Duck Inn, and Lula Cafe—offer prix fixe menus for both lunch and dinner. Make reservations early, as spots fill up quickly. Through 4/22, various locations, chicagochefweek.com, $22-$44.

# Is It Still Fu nny? The Chicago Tribune’s Mark Caro reexamines some of the most-beloved comedies in the genre—Animal House, Duck Soup, and Blazing Saddles among them—and asks the big question:“Is it still funny?” 7 PM, Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, musicboxtheatre. com, $12.

$ Whistl er Co ckt a il Ch allenge The Whistler is allowing you, the patron, to get creative with cocktails. Guest cocktails will be on the menu for one night; $1 from each drink bought will be donated to the charity of the drink creator’s choosing. 6 PM, Whistler, 2421 N. Milwaukee, whistlerchicago.com. F

APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE

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

Monique Redeaux-Smith wants her students to think twice about standardized testing. ! SUNSHINE TUCKER

POLITICS

Test-ban treatise By BEN JORAVSKY

f Chicago Public Schools gave a medal for these things, the winner for most creative defiance of the system’s dumb-ass obsession with high-stakes standardized testing would go to Monique RedeauxSmith, a seventh- and eighth-grade social studies teacher at southwest-side Morrill Math & Science School. This year, more than half of her 66 students opted not to take the PARCC exam—one of several standardized tests CPS crams down the throats of students. Moreover, Redeaux-Smith put to good use the extra time freed up from the PARCC, leading class discussions about the origins and impacts of high-stakes testing—where the results are potentially punitive to students, teachers, or schools. The interesting twist is that Redeaux-Smith teaches in a school that’s majority black and Latino. In her own way, the Bronzeville activist— she was also one of the Dyett High School hunger strikers—is disproving the notion that the movement to cut back on standardized tests is only for white north-side moms.

10 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

Or at least that’s how former CPS superintendent and U.S. Department of Education secretary Arne Duncan infamously put it when claiming that opposition to Common Core curriculum and high-stakes testing comes mainly from “white suburban moms who, all of a sudden, [realize] their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were.” You know, I wish Arne had been as outspoken when his former boss, Mayor Daley, was diverting all that TIF money from CPS. Redeaux-Smith believes it’s important for all students—especially low-income black and Latino ones—to at least think about the impact of standardized tests. “People consider this to be a white, suburban movement—I don’t buy into that,” she says. “If you can’t tell me how this will improve the academic opportunity for my students, don’t waste my time. I’d feel like a hypocrite giving them a test that has nothing to do with learning anything.” At the moment, CPS requires all kids to take at least three high-stakes standardized tests every year. There’s the REACH—given twice a year to

help evaluate a teacher’s job performance. There’s the NWEA—used to determine, among other things, whether a student will be eligible for a selective enrollment high school. That’s not to be confused with NWA, which is not a test—it’s the name of a rap group I’ve been obsessing over since I saw the biopic Straight Outta Compton. Sorry, couldn’t resist that joke—though a standardized test written by Ice Cube might be worth taking. Anyway, then there’s the PARCC—or, Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers. This one is supposed to make sure students are keeping pace with their peers in other school districts in learning the Common Core curriculum. But it doesn’t play a direct role in who gets into selective enrollment schools. And since it comes right before the NWEA—which parents and students take very seriously—the question is: Why burden students with a meaningless test right before they have to take a meaningful one? The answer from the mayor and his school appointees seems to be, ’Cause we said so, damn it! Last month, Janice Jackson, the chief education officer for CPS, sent a warning letter to parents and students. “PARCC testing is mandatory,” she wrote. “If less than 95 percent of CPS students take the exam, [the state and feds] can withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.” Yeah, right. It’s doubtful the Obama administration’s going to snatch money from the president’s hometown. And as much as Governor Rauner may want CPS to go bankrupt, he can’t make a big deal about boycotting the PARCC when so many suburban parents are opting out. Instead of blindly following central-office dictates, Redeaux-Smith thinks Chicagoans should ask this age-old question: How can you expect parity in test scores if you don’t demand parity in funding? “This idea of accountability with no resources is a setup,” she says. “You don’t standardize the economy so all schools have the same budget. You don’t make sure that all students have an art teacher—you don’t standardize that. It boggles my mind that they want to standardize everything except for the stuff that matters.”

So while other kids were taking the PARCC, Redeaux-Smith had her students read and analyze such essays as “Six Reasons Why the Revolt Against Standardized Testing Is Good for Students and Parents of Color” by Jesse Hagopian, a public high school teacher in Seattle. Her students also read Nikhil Goyal’s recent article in the Nation pointing out that Duncan, Obama, and Emanuel all send their children to progressive private schools that don’t force kids to take the PARCC. And, they studied Jackson’s letter to parents and students. That last one is an especially good idea. I’ve long advocated using city documents in classroom discussion. For instance, teachers could use the city’s fact sheet about the tax increment financing program in creative writing classes, filled as the document is with fabrications and fantastical distortions.

“THIS IDEA OF ACCOUNTABILITY WITH NO RESOURCES IS A SETUP.” —Monique Redeaux-Smith Ultimately, Redeaux-Smith leaves it up to her students whether they’ll take the PARCC. “I don’t tell them what to do,” she says. “I give them the information and we look at both sides of the argument. But I tell them—I support what you do.” It’s hard to predict how Mayor Emanuel will treat teachers and principals who don’t follow the company line on standardized tests. In 2014 the mayor threw a hissy fit over the opt-out movement, dispatching central-office lawyers to investigate whether teachers were encouraging students to boycott tests. Last year he chilled out and looked the other way as the PARCC opt-out movement grew. Of course, that was an election year, and the mayor probably didn’t want to alienate voters more than he already had. Now that voters, in their infinite wisdom, have given him four more years, it’s anyone’s guess as to what he’s going to do. My advice, Mr. Mayor, is to keep looking the other way. Too much time’s already been wasted just giving these tests. v

! @joravben

50 TH BIRTHDAY BASH SA TUR DAY , AP R IL 16, 10AM–4P M Celebrate CAF’s 50th anniversary with a FREE day of fun and surprises for all ages, including hands-on activities, lectures, film screenings and $1 walking tours! architecture.org

CAF IS A N ONP RO FI T ORGANI ZATI ON DEDIC ATED TO IN SP IRI NG PE OP LE TO DI SCOVE R W HY DESIG N M ATT E RS APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 11

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12 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

5,600 Illinois patients approved for medical marijuana cards as of April 6

THE MARIJUANA ISSUE

A cancer diagnosis isn’t a green-card guarantee Doctors have been reluctant to prescribe medical marijuana— even to patients battling serious illnesses. By Brianna Wellen

 CLAY HICKSON

hen medical cannabis was legalized in Illinois last November, I thought I was a shoo-in for the program. I’d been undergoing treatment for stage-three Hodgkin’s lymphoma for six months, and had already been offered a prescription for the THC supplement Marinol by my physician. I also had symptoms that were supposed to be helped by medical marijuana use: nausea, loss of appetite, and neuropathy. But it wasn’t so simple; my quest for the elu-

sive green card has so far taken three physicians, five months, and $450. And I still don’t have one. It turns out I’m not alone. According to the Illinois Department of Public Health, only 16.7 percent of patients, or 5,000 out of the nearly 30,000 who have started an application for the medical cannabis pilot program, have been approved. Physician approval is a common hurdle. The Healing Clinic, a full-service advocacy center for medical marijuana patients with loca-

tions in Chicago and Highland Park, surveyed 400 Illinois doctors and found that 82 percent of them are not approving patients. The main reason doctors cited was a lack of research in support of the treatment, but some also expressed fear of repercussions from the medical board regarding their medical licenses. When I approached my own doctors (two separate oncologists at Northwestern Memorial Hospital) asking for certification, the response was simply: “We are not certifying patients for

medical cannabis at this time.” The hospital’s official policy allows doctors to make their own decisions when it comes to qualifying patients, but they must first “provide informational materials and discuss the facts and uncertainty around medical marijuana.” Medical marijuana is also prohibited at Northwestern facilities, and “cannot be obtained, consumed, stored, or administered in our hospitals.” I asked UIC Medical Center and Thorek Memorial Hospital in Buena Park about their stances regarding medical cannabis, and the question was met with confusion about whether an official policy was even in place; representatives from both responded by saying they weren’t certain their hospital gives cards out. A spokesperson from Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center responded with a vague official statement: “Our goal is to assist patients on their path back to health. Physicians work with each patient to determine the best treatment plan in order to achieve this.” Nancy Chacon was also denied certification by her doctor at Northwestern, despite having two qualifying ailments: fibromyalgia and Crohn’s disease. “Pretty much from the first appointment, [my physician] was suggesting that I try cannabis because I was on Percocet,” Chacon says. “She said, ‘You should take medical cannabis, but I won’t be prescribing it for you. Yes, this would be good for you, get it from anyone else.’ ” So at age 38, Chacon found herself trying street drugs for the first time, literally meeting strangers in alleys to buy weed to try to ease her pain. “All this is doing is encouraging patients to be criminals,” she says. “I don’t want to start doing criminal activities at 38, 39.” Illegal cannabis was just a supplement to the opiates and steroids prescribed by Chacon’s doctors until November 2015, when she experienced a complete adrenal shutdown—the condition causes low blood pressure, fatigue, loss of appetite, vomiting, and sharp muscle and joint pain— and had to come off steroids. Her pain was worse than it had ever been, and still her doctor wouldn’t approve her for medical cannabis; she says those were days that she was closest to having suicidal thoughts, contemplating whether it was even worth continuing a life of such pain. But in the throes of crisis, she discovered Good Intentions, a registration service for medical marijuana cards that led her to the physicians at the Healing Clinic. Wesley Tyler was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2014, and has regularly experienced numbness and tingling in his hands and feet as well as trouble with his vision because of an inflammation in his brain that pushes on

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THE MARIJUANA ISSUE

58 percent of Americans favor legalizing marijuana, according to a 2015 Gallup poll

Growing pains Pro-pot lawmakers and activists say homegrown marijuana won’t take root any time soon in the Prairie State.

ndrea, a single mother of two diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia more than a decade ago, plans to sell her home in the Chicago suburbs and move to Michigan, where she can grow her own medical marijuana free from fear of any legal repercussions. Andrea (who asked to be identified by only her first name) also suffers from depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, osteoarthritis, and alcoholism. She spent the decade following her leukemia diagnosis in 2004 on a slew of different pharmaceutical medications, including oral chemotherapy.

By Lee V. Gaines

 CLAY HICKSON

“I felt like shit for ten years,” the 49-year-old says. That is, until she began using cannabis to manage the side effects of the medication. About two years ago she switched over to a pot-only regimen. Since then, Andrea says, she’s “been able to establish remission without any medication in my system whatsoever.” Andrea received a medical marijuana card from Illinois last fall, but says she doesn’t purchase medical marijuana from a dispensary— currently the only legal method of obtaining the drug—because it’s too expensive. She survives on a fixed income made up of disability and child-support payments.

“When you are a disabled patient you cannot afford cannabis, whether it’s on the black market or a dispensary,” she says. “You can’t afford anything, for that matter.” Growing the drug herself, Andrea says, is the cheapest way to get the cannabis she needs. Andrea has a secret garden on her property where she grows her own marijuana. But as long as she lives in Illinois, she fears the potential consequences. “I risk my children being taken away from me,” she says of her ten-year-old daughter and 16-yearold son. “That’s fucking scary. And it’s wrong.” Between 2009 and 2011, the Illinois legislature came the closest it ever has to passing a bill that would allow qualified patients to grow their own medical marijuana. The majority of the 23 states with some type of medical marijuana legislation on the books allow patients to grow their own, according to the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), a nonprofit group that opposes pot prohibition. “However, no state has legislatively permitted this option since New Jersey eliminated this provision as a last-minute legislative compromise in 2009,” says the organization’s deputy director, Paul Armentano. A bill that passed the Illinois senate in May 2009 included an amendment permitting patients to possess up to six plants, though no more than three mature, over the course of 60 days. But the bill failed to get approval in the house in January 2011. Three years later, Illinois’s Medical Cannabis Pilot Program took effect. While the program allows approved patients to purchase medical marijuana at state-licensed dispensaries, it doesn’t grant them the right to grow their own pot. “I would give you very good odds we will never see a medical marijuana program in Illinois that allows patients or caregivers to grow their own medicine—and that’s coming from somebody who has spent a lot of time working in the political trenches,” says Dan Linn, executive director of NORML’s Illinois chapter. Linn worked with advocates and lawmakers for more than a decade to pass medical marijuana legislation in Illinois. The effort was “grassroots oriented” for the most part, he says, but after the bill passed the senate in 2009, Linn recalls, “a good amount of money” was poured into the effort by businesses looking to profit off legal weed—especially as cultivators. “All of a sudden there were a bunch of paid lobbyists there with access to capital,” Linn says. The businesses invested in the effort didn’t adamantly oppose home cultivation, Linn explains, but they weren’t in favor of it either. “The cultivators would tell you it’s extremely dangerous to allow patients or caregivers to grow their own, that there could be pesticides,

harmful chemicals, mold, or bugs in plant material,” Linn explains. Even some supporters express concerns about in-home weed cultivation. Joe Friedman, a pharmacist who owns and operates PDI Medical, a medical marijuana dispensary in Buffalo Grove, argues that patients growing their own pot severely limits their ability to know exactly what they’re inhaling or ingesting. Illinois cultivators “are mandated by law to send batches of their product to the lab for analysis, and when the lab analysis comes back, we know exactly if it’s a sativa or an indica, and we know the percentages of the cannabis component in the product we get,” he explains. But patients like Sara Hawkinson feel they’d know more about their weed if they grew it themselves. The 23-year-old uses cannabis to treat pain from scoliosis, and says she’s pleased with the product she receives from her dispensary in Peoria. But she wishes she had the option to grow her own, or procure pot from a more familiar source, so she could know exactly how the drug was cultivated. “I don’t talk to these growers one-on-one,” she says, referring to the state’s licensed cultivators. “I can’t go in and see how it’s being made. I can look stuff up online, and whatever they tell me they tell me, but I don’t really know.” In the negotiations that led to today’s pilot program, scrapping home cultivation was an easy compromise for lobbyists working on behalf of business interests, Linn says. Still, law enforcement opposition proved to be the primary reason a home cultivation provision was dropped, according to Linn and others. “They felt it was an uncontrolled situation for them and left open the possibility of abuse, and they weren’t going to be moved off of that position,” remembers state rep Lou Lang, a sponsor of the pilot program and a key player in the fight to legalize medicinal pot in Illinois. Jim Gierach, a former Cook County assistant state’s attorney, remembers law enforcement agencies giving those working to pass a medical marijuana bill “a hard time.” Gierach serves as the executive board vice chairman of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), an international nonprofit made up of former criminal justice officials who oppose the socalled war on drugs. Gierach was only indirectly involved in legislative negotiations, but considers Illinois’s pilot program to be “one of the strictest and tightest of any state.” Gierach, who also advocates drug legalization, says “there’s absolutely no justification in preventing someone from growing their own [marijuana], particularly patients who need medicine because of some physical condition.”

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THE MARIJUANA ISSUE

The edibles business is no cakewalk Famed Hot Chocolate pastry chef Mindy Segal finds it’s not easy going green. By Mike Sula

indy Segal stands before four small piles of chocolate brittle in the lobby of Greenhouse Medical Cannabis Dispensary, in north-suburban Deerfield. One of 31 licensed marijuana dispensaries in Illinois, Greenhouse is situated near the rear of a sprawling but otherwise unremarkable one-story industrial building wedged between Lake Cook Road and the Edens Spur. The place isn’t easy to find even with a GPS, but a few of the dispensary’s patients have stopped by this March afternoon to chat with the celebrated pastry chef behind Mindy’s Hot Chocolate and sample her candy on their way in or out of the restricted showroom in the back of the lobby, where state-approved marijuana trafficking occurs. If all goes according to plan, within a month or two the brittle will be dosed with ten milligrams of THC and sold at dispensaries across the state. For now, she’s just giving them a taste of what a James Beard Award winner could accomplish in the frequently skunky universe of marijuana edibles. Earlier in the day at Greenhouse’s Mokena dispensary southwest of the city, Segal had talked with a man who had stage-three colorectal cancer, now in remission, who’d replaced all his pain meds with cannabis. She also spoke to patients with Tourette’s syndrome, Crohn’s disease, fibromyalgia, and multiple sclerosis, all qualifying conditions approved for treatment under the state’s Compassionate Use of Medical Cannabis Pilot Program Act, which went into effect at the start of 2014. One middle-aged woman who suffers from fibromyalgia points out to Segal that the candied grapefruit in the white-chocolate brittle with pistachios might cause negative interactions for patients taking antidepressants. “I did not know that,” Segal says. “Duly noted.” The encounter underscored the fact that Segal’s partnership with Cresco Labs, Illinois’s largest cannabis cultivator, with three growing facilities across the state and an office in a River North loft, is still in the developmental phase despite the goal of rolling out her first edibles statewide in April. That Segal wasn’t legally allowed to test the medicated recipes herself in Illinois didn’t help. And because she doesn’t possess a medical cannabis card herself—back pain and migraines, which the 48-year-old suffers, aren’t among the state’s 39 approved conditions—she wouldn’t be permitted to try them once she’s cleared to get in the kitchen and start cooking. To get around these restrictions, in mid-February Segal traveled to Denver, where medical and recreational use of marijuana is legal. In a In partnership with Cresco Labs, Illinois’s largest cannabis cultivator, Mindy Segal is the first name-brand chef to put her imprimatur on a line of edibles.  JENNIFER OLSON

private kitchen, she experimented with toffeeand-smoked-almond brittle and peanut butter-peanut brittle, applying a low dosage (two to 2.5 milligrams) of THC-infused oil to her recipes. “I got high,” she says. “But then we went out for dinner and I ate and had a drink and it kind of mellowed out.”

SEGAL’S INFAMOUS INTENSITY apparently has also mellowed. Her scarlet hair is still ablaze, her arms covered in ink. But the chef exudes calm since delegating kitchen work at Hot Chocolate to her staff and teaming up with Cresco. She’s played around with marijuana edibles for recreational purposes in the past, usually by sauteing the plant’s flowers in butter. Certainly that method can result in baked goods that have potent, if unpredictable, psychoactive effects. The downside is that the butter carries with it the unmistakable odor and flavor of the plant. In Segal’s work with Cresco, the focus is on taste— specifically the absence of the pungent essence of cannabis. Celebrity-branded marijuana products have already entered the market, the Leafs by Snoop label being one prominent and slickly marketed example. Wiz Khalifa is releasing his own line of regulated pot products on April 20 (aka 4/20 or National Weed Day), and Waka Flocka Flame is planning to put out a variety of vegan weed treats. But until now no name-brand chef has put her imprimatur on anything in the wild world of edibles. Cresco hopes to get Segal’s brittles and granola in dispensaries across the country, hopscotching complicated and varying laws by partnering with manufacturers already established in the 23 states that along with the District of Columbia allow medical marijuana use, or even by setting up their own localized operations. Segal had already been working on rolling out a line of branded—but not medicated—brittles and granolas when she was first contacted last summer by David Ellis, Cresco’s executive vice president for operations, who formerly coowned an aquaponics farm inside the Plant in Back of the Yards. “I thought, ‘These guys are going to take me to the next level,’ “ Segal says. “This all started because I started thinking Why am I in this industry? Why am I in the food industry and the restaurant industry to begin with? Why am I a chef? I look at this whole thing as I’m a chef because I like making people happy.”

THE VIABILITY OF ADAPTING Segal’s pastry recipes to the medical marijuana market was never in question. “I can make anything,” she says. “The recipes were already there.” For the chef, the key to developing the edibles has been getting precise dosages of cannabinoids into the

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THE MARIJUANA ISSUE

22 marijuana cultivation sites in Illinois, one for each state police district

Growing pains continued from 14

The Illinois Sheriffs Association, one of the most vocal law enforcement organizations to oppose the medical pot movement, did not return multiple requests for comment. The argument shouldn’t boil down to an either/or situation between home-grown pot and marijuana purchased at a dispensary, says NORML’s Armentano. “An ideal situation allows for both,” he says. Many qualified patients are too sick or lack the green thumb required to grow pot, he says, and it’s important they have access to “safe, aboveground facilities that can provide this product for them.” On the other hand, he says, the law should allow patients the option to cultivate their own medication, especially because it’s not clear every dispensary will have the strain in stock that works best for their condition. But home cultivation is somewhere closer to the bottom of Linn’s list of priorities. His top priority, he says, is making Illinois’s pilot program permanent. It’s set to expire at the end of 2017, and with a Republican governor in office—one who has vetoed bills to expand the program and decriminalize pot in general—the future of medical marijuana here remains uncertain. Lang says it’s possible that medical marijuana patients in Illinois may one day be able to grow their own weed. But “it is a heavy lift,” the Skokie Democrat says. For the next piece of medical marijuana legislation to pass, he’ll need to get a veto-proof majority in the house and senate to approve it. “It’s a balancing act for me, the patients, and the state government,” Lang explains. “I think I could make an argument that home cultivation is a good idea, but my goal is to keep the program alive, and I’ll do what I have to do during negotiations to make that happen.” The political wrangling over the issue bears personal consequences for patients like Andrea. It’s particularly devastating, she argues, for the patients too poor to afford dispensary prices and unwilling to take the risks she has to obtain the drug. Patients growing their own marijuana or procuring it from a caregiver who has grown it on their behalf “would be a viable option for so many people,” she argues. “We are not criminals—we’re cancer patients and patients trying to survive,” Andrea says. “And if any one of those people who make these decisions could walk around in my shoes even for a day, they’d get a good dose of what it would be like.”

 @LeeVGaines

Smoke on the water Photographs by David Sampson | Styling by Mary Eleanor Wallace and Kate Sierzputowski

From left: Tripod Chillum by Joey Watson, joeywatsonspecialartcrafts.cool, $115; Peanut by Double Bonus, noelmorical.com, $60; Marbled Half-Circle Pipe by Leah Ball, leah-ball.com, $105; Nose by Double Bonus, noelmorical.com, $75; Lasagna Cat Pipe by Manal Kara, manalkara.com, $120; Tall Gold and Copper Hot Mess Water Pipe by Tanner Bowman, tannerbowman.com, $120

Black and White Hot Mess Water Pipe by Tanner Bowman, tannerbowman.com, $120

Marbled Semi Pipe by Leah Ball, leah-ball.com, $95

THE MARIJUANA ISSUE Green card continued from 13 SHOP FOR THESE PIPES and more paraphernalia (goodie bags, clothing, pins, posters, et cetera) during a Reader-hosted marketplace curated by Mary Eleanor Wallace and Kate Sierzputowski of Pot Shop on April 23, 11 AM-5 PM, at Emporium in Logan Square (2363 N. Milwaukee). Danny Marks, owner of the Logan Square dispensary Modern Cannabis, hosts a marijuana industry panel discussion at 3 PM. DJ Brian Chankin of Odd Obsession Video and Deadly Prey Gallery spins.

Tripod Chillum by Joey Watson, joeywatsonspecialartcrafts.cool, $115

Sneak-A-Toke by Joey Watson, joeywatsonspecialartcrafts.cool, $50

Pink Hot Mess Water Pipe by Tanner Bowman, TannerBowman.com, $120

his optical nerve. Through his own research, he decided to seek out medical marijuana to ease his pain. “My physician is very old-fashioned, and I actually dreaded the thought of asking him,” Tyler says. “Doing Internet searches, I found many places around Chicago claiming to assist in getting through the application process. Most of them turned out to be extremely expensive just to get in the door.” He eventually attended an open house at the Healing Clinic with his family, the first place he found with actual physicians instead of just advocates approving patients. So far the Healing Clinic has assisted more than 1,000 qualifying patients in Illinois who were turned away by their primary care physicians, according to the center’s principal advocate Feliza Castro. Patients must have one of the qualifying conditions and provide their medical records, then schedule both a physical exam and cannabis certification appointment with one of the facility’s parttime physicians. But this resource comes with its own hurdles. It can still take three to six months to receive a card, and because most insurance doesn’t cover any charges at the clinic, the patient is responsible for all fees. Cachon spent three months completely off medication while waiting for her card, a period she describes as the hardest and most painful time of her life. She spent nearly $500 on the entire process, not to mention the added $400 to $500 the medication costs her monthly. For others, the journey to a card has been even more difficult. Mike Mortensen’s fiveyear-old daughter, Chloe, was born with chromosomal deletion syndrome—a loss of parts of chromosomes in the copying of DNA that causes severe birth defects and significant intellectual and physical disability. As a result she was unable to walk or talk, suffered from seizures, and had self-destructive tendencies. Multiple doctors, including specialists at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, denied Chloe approval because of a lack of research regarding the effectiveness of such treatment for the condition. The Mortensen family was about to pick up and move to California, where it’s easier to obtain medical marijuana. But once they discovered the Healing Clinic, Chloe became one of 33 patients in Illinois under the age of 18 to receive a card, with her father acting as her caregiver. At the clinic, minors have to attend four doctors visits (an added $150 each), and there’s an added $250 required for a caregiver to be approved.

continued on 20

THE MARIJUANA ISSUE

7,000 pounds of marijuana estimated to be grown by Revolution Enterprises in downstate Delavan annually

Mindy Segal continued from 15

brittles and granola without patients tasting or smelling them. The two prevalent cannabinoids in the “first generation” of Segal’s edibles will primarily be tetrahydrocannabinol, aka THC—the component that produces the characteristic euphoric high and alleviates nausea and pain—and cannabidiol, or CBD, a non-psychoactive substance that can relieve seizures and anxiety. Cresco has three main cultivation centers in Illinois, where the company grows and processes marijuana. The largest facility, in Joliet, is capable of producing up to 200 pounds of usable marijuana flower (aka bud) per month, according to Cresco CEO Charlie Bachtell. That’s where Segal’s kitchen is, though as of mid-March she still hadn’t been cleared by the state to go inside. Segal won’t be working with buds, however. Cresco has invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in pharmaceutical-grade extraction equipment, which will distill the medicine she applies to her edibles into an odorless, tasteless, honey-blond-colored oil. The company employs what’s known as a closed-loop extraction process, using solvents like butane or agents like CO2 to separate the plant from its trichomes, small resin glands that manufacture cannabinoids and terpenes, the chemicals that give marijuana its pungent aroma, said to have their own therapeutic benefits. Closed-loop extraction leaves negligible amounts of residual solvent behind, which is important to patients with serious medical problems in the market for all-natural products. Segal’s edibles will not have terpenes, at least not at first. “The primary driver is having products that do not taste like cannabis,” says Bachtell, who added that he doesn’t partake himself. “I don’t know anybody that really likes the taste of cannabis.” For her part, Segal dreamed of leaving in the myrcene, a common terpene in cannabis, in her white-chocolate brittle, because she thinks its hoppiness would’ve complemented the grapefruit in the recipe. That was until her encounter with the woman at Greenhouse, after which she decided to substitute candied orange. THAT SORT OF PRECISELY directed chemical profile may happen with successive generations of edibles, Bachtell says. The company has the ability to target specific conditions with extracted cannabis, much in the way that Cresco’s line of flower products, divided among indica, sativa, and hybrid strains, are good for relaxation, activity, or somewhere in the middle, respectively. Another key for Cresco is consistency, adding to each product just the right number of milligrams of cannabinoids per unit to achieve what the company refers to as “controlled dosage

A selection of Segal’s edibles  JENNIFER OLSON

events,” meaning each product contains the same levels of cannabinoids for predictable effects. “Traditionally edibles haven’t been that consistent,” Bachtell says. “That’s because it stems from people doing it at home—sauteing it in butter, adding the butter into the brownie mix. We want to make sure that the piece that you get, whether it is the top piece or the bottom piece in the pack of five, has exactly ten milligrams of THC in it. To get that precise is expensive, it’s time-consuming, and it’s a new approach to edibles.” Cresco will be using both butane and CO2 extraction for various products, but Segal’s edibles will be produced using strictly the latter method. “The conventional wisdom is that CO2 is looked on as more medicinal,” Bachtell says. “You’re not using a lighter fluid, you’re just using pressure.” The end product also has the benefit of having a better odor than a solvent-extracted concentrate. “There’s an art to knowing how to get the end product that you want,” Bachtell says. “Especially with the techniques that we are using, you really are getting down to the cannabinoid profile. It’s less about the strains that we put into it as much as the cannabinoid profile you want to extract from it. So it gives you a little more flexibility to not be tied to what just went into it, but what you want to use and what you don’t want to use. You can really isolate specific things.” He’s open to entertaining the idea of directing successive generations of Segal’s edibles toward specific health and environmental con-

ditions. “For example, I like the idea of having a daytime-use product that will have coffee beans in it, and sativa, and cannabinoids that will be more body [high] and less heavy.” IN THE MEANTIME Segal has been working out the kinks in her granola recipe. On a Monday afternoon in early March, Segal, Cresco’s Ellis, and Segal’s business partner, Carol Griseto, were in the kitchen at Hot Chocolate in Wicker Park, testing unbaked matrices of grains and nuts in preparation for rolling out their first edibles to dispensaries around the state as a sort of pop-up to introduce the product and get feedback. They’d already figured out how to infuse cannabis oil into the brittles—dispersing a uniform dose through the chocolate in the treats would be easy. But the granola bites were another matter. Ellis worried that the cannabis oil wouldn’t distribute evenly in the granola bars’ liquid binder. Segal wanted to solve the problem by adding a layer of medicated caramel. “I kind of equate this whole thing to opening up a restaurant,” Segal said. “You think you know a lot, and then you open up a restaurant and you realize how little you do know. And I think it’s the same thing with this. I know how to make brittle. I know how to make toffee. I know how to make granola. I’ve been playing around with edibles on the recreational side my entire adult life. But to get in here, to do this as a business, it’s completely different for me. I’m learning how

to work with ten people. I never had to work with ten people before. Either telling me what to do, telling me what they think about what I’m doing, or asking me questions.” “The next step,” Ellis said, “is getting it into the kitchen in Joliet so we can start making it and sending it off to our lab for analysis so we can be sure it is actually where it should be.” “And once into the kitchen, I can’t taste it anymore,” Segal continued. “Unless I get a medical marijuana card. And unless they approve more conditions, I won’t get one.” “Even then you couldn’t,” Ellis said. “Yeah, but I can bring it home.” “Uh, not true. You’d have to purchase it.” Segal was incredulous. “I’d have to buy it. You fucking believe this bullshit? Well, unless I do it illegally.” “Which you won’t be.” “I’m not going to. I would if it was just Mindy Segal, but I am not going to jeopardize Cresco’s reputation.” “Yeah, so the answer to that is ‘correct.’ ” “Is that the dumbest thing you ever heard of?” Segal said. “Listen,” Ellis said. “To be fair, it’s going to change. It’s a matter of time.” Segal nodded and turned her attention back to the recipes. The April deadline was quickly approaching, and she needed them to be perfect.

 @MikeSula

THE MARIJUANA ISSUE

Waiting to inhale Is legal weed in Illinois a pipe dream? By Katie Campbell

 CLAY HICKSON

hris Lindsey has paid a heavy price for his role in the fight to reform marijuana laws. He’s a convicted felon. He served five years probation. And his career as a criminal defense attorney was halted temporarily. But

that hasn’t kept the 48-year-old away from what he calls the “noble work” of advocating for full legalization. Lindsey’s story starts in 2007, when he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease—a chronic condition that causes inflammation in the digestive

tract. He found great relief in medical marijuana; when he didn’t consume it, the debilitating abdominal pain caused by swelling in his gut would send him to the hospital. Luckily Lindsey lived in Montana, a state that legalized medical use in 2004. But as he became more familiar with the

law’s limitations and the beneficial effects of pot on patients like him, Lindsey thought existing dispensaries were doing a poor job of supplying customers. So in 2009, he and several partners established Montana Cannabis, a company that would become one of the largest medical marijuana growers and sellers in the state. It would also be one of dozens of marijuana-related businesses across Montana raided by federal authorities in March 2011. Lindsey had left the company about a year and a half prior, but that didn’t protect him. “Because I had not taken any steps to try to end that ‘illegal’ activity, I was charged as a coconspirator,” he says today. “Truly, I really had grown marijuana and provided it to people, so there wasn’t exactly much of an argument there. And in the wake of that, I became a felon.” The story of Montana Cannabis made national headlines (in part because one employee was involved in the highly publicized 1984 abduction of biathlete Keri Swenson). Based on the minimum sentences for the five felonies he was initially charged with, Lindsey faced up to 85 years in prison. A plea deal saved him time, but the damage was done; his license to practice law was suspended, he was prohibited from using marijuana despite its beneficial effects on his condition, and the story of his days as a “drug dealer” was everywhere. “As I started to look at the situation—not only related to medical marijuana but with respect to how marijuana is treated in our society and how we treat people who consume it for any reason—it became clear that things really needed to change,” he says. Lindsey eventually found a new place in the movement as a senior legislative analyst for the Marijuana Policy Project, a group that has invested heavily in pro-marijuana legislation across the country. And today’s battleground extends beyond Montana, where Lindsey is still based, into other states where advocates are trying to gain momentum—including Illinois. Four states—Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Alaska—and Washington, D.C., have already legalized recreational marijuana. Together, they have registered more than 325,000 medical marijuana patients, more than a quarter of the nation’s total. The move has been extremely lucrative. In Colorado alone, the total revenue from marijuana taxes, licenses, and fees reached more than $102 million in the 2014-2015 fiscal year, according to the Colorado Department of Revenue; this fiscal year is on track to surpass that total, with nearly $98 million brought in during the first eight months. Lindsey is certain that more states will follow. So what about Illinois, with its massive debt crisis and millions already invested in its Medical Marijuana Pilot Program? What’s to stop J

THE MARIJUANA ISSUE

$4.4 million amount Illinois consumers spent on medical marijuana from November 9, 2015, to February 29, 2016

Still, the results seem worth it even to those who’ve had to wait. Chloe “was a child who didn’t play with toys,” Mortensen says. “Now that she’s on [medical cannabis], she actually sits down, plays with toys, sits and watches movies. Her seizures have pretty much stopped.” Chloe’s dispensary, Greenhouse, in Deerfield, has even reached out to cultivators to create a special cannabis gummy bear just for Chloe. “I remember doing guided meditation [before starting medical cannabis] and doing a body check, and it was to the point where I was like, ‘Everything hurts,’ ” Chacon says. “I did the same body check after entering the program, and I had this lightbulb moment: ‘I’m not in pain.’ I started crying. It was honest-to-god the first time for me in 20 years that I can say that I have moments where I don’t have pain.” And the benefits go beyond the physical. Tyler says he’s been dealing with mental and emotional issues since receiving his diagnosis; medical cannabis has helped him there too. “Not only does it relieve me of my pain, but it also lifts my mood and helps me escape the tunnel vision that is depression,” Tyler says. As a prospective patient myself, those outcomes seem worth all the time and money that go into the process of getting a card. But I’m facing my own set of psychological hurdles. For me, doctors offices have become traumatizing places; after receiving so much bad news from past medical tests, merely entering another medical facility is emotionally draining. And the application for a place like the Healing Clinic forces patients to dive deep into their medical histories, listing every hospitalization and verifying every test result; let me tell you, it’s not pleasant to relive the worst days of your life. Then, of course, there’s the fear that, if I am approved and hopefully start seeing improvements in my health, it could all be taken away. Because Illinois’s is just a pilot program, it’s possible that, when the advisory board next meets, it could deem the test unsuccessful and amend the status of legal medical marijuana in the state—it seems especially possible with the current low rate of patient approval. But it’s a risk that I and other Illinois residents suffering from cancer, multiple sclerosis, or one of the other 37 state-approved qualifying conditions are willing to take. Whether Illinois doctors will be willing to take that same risk is another story.

 @BriannaWellen

 CLAY HICKSON

Green card continued from 17

Recreational weed continued from 19

the Prairie State from joining the ranks of pot pioneers on the west coast? A lot, as it turns out. Persisting concerns from the medical establishment, voter apathy, complicated economic questions, and the still-real threat of the federal government’s marijuana prohibition all stand in the way, making even staunch advocates like Lindsey pessimistic about weed’s immediate future in Illinois. Given all the apparent hurdles, legalized recreational use can seem like little more than a pipe dream.

Joint consideration The chance for recreational weed in Illinois starts with the success or failure of the state’s medical pilot program. And right now, supporters say that program is in trouble, starting with the current low rates of participation. Illinois currently recognizes 39 qualifying conditions for medical use, but attempts to add to that list have been thwarted, denying access to thousands more potential patients. In addition, doctors have been shy to prescribe medical weed. So far, only around 5,000 patients have become medical marijuana cardholders. (See “A cancer diagnosis isn’t a green-card guarantee,” page 13.) This number worries Lindsey. “If you treat marijuana like plutonium, you’re creating this artificially high standard,”

he says. “We just don’t see the regulatory bar as high in most states as Illinois, and does that really make the Illinois system better? I’m not sure that it does.” Bob Morgan, the pilot program’s former coordinator, now president of the Illinois Cannabis Bar Association and special counsel to the marijuana industry with the Chicago law firm Much Shelist, says the system was designed to be restrictive “because that’s what it took to pass in the legislature.” But even legislators involved in the effort are unsatisfied with current participation rates. Illinois state rep Kelly Cassidy was a chief cosponsor on the bill that created the pilot program; it was one of the first bills that got her attention when she took office in 2011. Still, she rattles off a series of complaints about how it’s going. In addition to the failure to expand the program and the rejection of additional qualifying conditions there was the delay in implementation—nearly two years between when the law was passed and when it took effect. She worries about the patients who have begun treatment, as well as the industry leaders who’ve invested millions in a market that is perhaps less stable than they would have hoped. “We’re on a when, not if, trajectory as a country and a state,” Cassidy says about legal recreational weed. But for now, she’d rather concentrate on stabilizing the current medical pilot program, then on decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana for nonviolent offenders, before she moves on to recreational use. “Right now, I’m just trying to keep people from going to jail,” she says. Dina Rollman agrees that conversations about recreational weed are premature in Illinois. A partner with Chicago law firm Rollman & Dahlin and a founding member of the Illinois Cannabis Bar Association, Rollman has taken a keen interest in the medical marijuana industry. Still, she agrees that legalized recreational use isn’t realistic anytime soon. “It’s too early to have that discussion,” she says. “We’re in the process of demonstrating that the industry can operate medical marijuana responsibly and overcome a lot of people’s fears . . . That’s proving to be a big job, and the industry is right to focus on that right now in order to make medical marijuana a success before the conversation moves to anything else.” The time to prove the medical program’s worth is dwindling, though; it will expire on January 1, 2018.

High hopes Even consumers who want to smoke weed legally may not be willing to say so publicly.

Last year, a Gallup poll revealed that 58 percent of Americans favor legalized marijuana, continuing a trend of growing support since Gallup first posed the question in 1969; that year, only 12 percent of Americans thought marijuana should be legal. People between the ages of 18 and 34 have historically shown greater support than other groups, and in 2015, 71 percent of people in that age bracket favored legalization—hardly a surprise. Unfortunately, those same young people can’t be counted on to voice their support where it matters most: the voting booth. The demographic that most commonly expresses enthusiasm for legalization has been white males under 40, according to Dan Linn, executive director of the Illinois chapter of NORML, the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws. The problem, Linn says, is those men “just don’t vote, or just don’t engage in the political process as much as they should to represent their interests.” According to a report by the U.S. Census Bureau published in July, only 23 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 34 reported voting, and less than half of male voters of all ages—just 40.8 percent—were active. “That’s the real sleeping giant that we need to awaken,” Linn says, because “even if we have legalization in the next five years, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be friendly toward cannabis users.” For example, under the current pilot program it’s not legal for cardholders to grow their own weed. (See “Growing pains,” page 14.) Linn says home cultivation is “precious” to consumers in Illinois, but that doesn’t mean it will be included in a revamped pilot program or a legalization bill, especially if voters don’t speak up. “Given the track record of cannabis consumers in Illinois—as well as underground, illegal cannabis growers,” he says, “I don’t anticipate them showing up anytime soon to make their demands.” Unlike the states to have legalized pot through voter-driven ballot initiatives, Illinois doesn’t have that option. But supporters can exercise their power by calling state legislators and expressing their opinions, Linn says. He believes that if consumers would answer NORML’s rallying cry, Illinois could see legalized recreational use as soon as 2018. Yet supporters, including white males in the age group Linn previously mentioned, don’t seem interested. They’re jaded, he says, or they fear their own political representatives will brand them “potheads” and sic the Drug Enforcement Administration on them for merely expressing their opinions—a concern Linn has heard on numerous occasions

THE MARIJUANA ISSUE and sees as strange. “We don’t live in Nazi Germany, where the Gestapo is going to come at night because of your political views,” he says . “We live in America. You’re allowed to voice your political views without repercussions, and I think that’s where cannabis consumers and supporters of legalization need to get with the program and start making their voices heard.” But Morgan believes Linn’s two-year estimate is ambitious whether or not supporters rally. “I just don’t think that’s reflective of our political situation in the state legislature,” he says. “There are those in the community right now who would like to see a recreational program in Illinois, but when it comes to the legislature, that discussion is many years off.” Cassidy agrees. “People evolve much more quickly than politicians do,” she says. In that case, Linn has another solution: Get the medical industry behind the recreational effort. Morgan has a polite rebuttal for that suggestion too: “I just don’t think that necessarily reflects what the medical cannabis industry is looking for right now.”

legalize, he says, legislators will have far more information than states like Colorado did at the beginning. “As more states adopt these laws, we’ll have more models to draw from,” Lindsey says. And regardless of the taxation model and its benefits for the state, Linn argues that legalization would make the whole industry more profitable by expanding its user base. “If these investors for the medical program wanted to make a return on their investment as quickly as possible, they should’ve embraced legalization for all adults,” he says. Morgan says Illinois investors don’t see it that way. Rather, they equate recreational use with more competition—more potential customers means more businesses looking to get in on the action. “If you’re looking for recreational, you can go out west,” Morgan says. “These businesses sought out the medical marijuana program in Illinois, and business licenses in Illinois, and they knew what they were getting themselves into.” It seems investors would rather stay with the system they know than take risks on the one that they don’t.

Pot of gold

Buzz kills

Even if politicians did somehow evolve past their current stances, there are information gaps to overcome. Legalization advocates often point to economic gains from recreational marijuana sales in other states, arguing that prohibition is funneling money away from the state and into the hands of criminals. But the states that have gone legal so far have taken a trial-and-error approach to taxation. For example, Washington State taxed marijuana sales at a rate as high as 50 percent last year. To compete with nearby Oregon, which taxed at a lower rate, and keep customers out of the black market, Washington’s rate was eventually lowered to 37 percent, with new regulations that took effect on August 1. But that still leaves consumers with the highest marijuana tax rates in the nation. And this back-and-forth has made the potential profitability of legal weed in Illinois hard to predict. Total medical sales revenue in Illinois totaled $4.4 million between November and February, according to the state. That’s a step in the right direction, but it falls short of the results seen in other states—Colorado brought in almost that amount in medical tax revenue alone during the same period. Lindsey, ever the optimist, argues Illinois can benefit from the successes and failures of other states; by the time Illinois is prepared to

“When do things change?” Lindsey wonders. It’s been five years since the feds took action against his former business, but the experience has stayed with him. And just as they did in Montana, authorities could still act against any state with a program they contend violates the federal ban on marijuana. Despite reforms, cannabis is still classified as a schedule I controlled substance, which means the DEA recognizes “no currently accepted medical use” and includes it among “the most dangerous drugs.” Lindsey says he was portrayed as a kingpin in the world of drug dealers after his former business was raided, but to this day he maintains he never made any serious money. After the charges were handed down, his lawyer gave him some advice: “This is your big chance to finally get away from this stuff. You can go make a bunch of money in probate law and rebuild your career.” Lindsey thinks that’s exactly what the authorities would’ve liked to see him do. If you’re of Lindsey’s mind-set, however, this isn’t the time to stay silent and hide from the feds; it’s time to start what will surely be a long conversation. “Our society is struggling right now with how to make this transition,” he says, “but it’s happening.” How soon it happens in Illinois, though, is anyone’s guess.

A POP-UP MARKET CURATED BY POT SHOP Custom pipes, goodie bags, incense burners, lighter holders, ashtrays, and other artist-created paraphernalia Saturday, April 23, 11 AM-5 PM Emporium Logan Square 2363 N. Milwaukee Ave Must be 21+

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@_KECampbell APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 21

“An Intriguing, Timely Portrait of Life in the Public Eye.”

HILLARY AND CLINTON

ARTS & CULTURE

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My God, what have I done? By TONY ADLER

by Lucas Hnath | directed by Chay Yew

Madeline Weinstein, Jack Edwards, and Rebecca Spence ! MICHAEL BROSILOW

And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?” —Talking Heads

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22 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

had been thinking about the ways in which I seem to be different people at different times in my life,” Tracy Letts told Chicago magazine’s Novid Parsi, by way of explaining the genesis of his play Mary Page Marlowe, getting its world premiere now at Steppenwolf Theatre. Sure enough, MPM follows its title character through a lifetime’s worth of identities—seven of them in all, perhaps to correspond with the seven ages Jaques lists during his famous allthe-world’s-a-stage speech in As You Like It. We see Mary Page as a baby, a 12-year-old girl, and a 19-year-old college student anxious for adventure; as a young married woman and a mother on the cusp of divorce, at 50 and as an old lady in her final years. Only not in that order. Letts has chosen to shuffle the chronology so that, for instance, we meet the divorcing mom before the college student and the baby after the old lady. This mosaic style of storytelling matters less than you might think when it comes to comprehensibility; if you can follow the time shifts in The Godfather, Part II, you’re not going to have any trouble here. But the approach also succeeds less than you might hope when it comes to illuminating Mary Page’s life. This mosaic is missing crucial pieces. As I was walking out of the theater after the performance I attended, I overheard a man asking, “Is that it? It’s over?” and knew exactly what he meant. The portrait we piece together out of Letts’s

proliferating scenes depicts Mary Page as a boom-generation Catholic from Ohio, born in 1946 to a war-veteran father—who treats his undiagnosed PTSD with a regimen of silence and liquor—and a deeply pissed-off mom doing some 80-proof self-medicating of her own. Mary Page’s collegiate wanderlust comes to nothing, and she soon enough finds herself in a marriage she succeeds in wrecking with (yes) alcohol, as well as some ferocious sleeping around that simultaneously aggravates and assuages her inner emptiness. That first divorce is just the beginning. Thanks to an early visit with the elderly Mary Page, we know that she’ll serve jail time (though we have to wait to find out why) and fumble another husband. But we also know she’ll come out the other side feeling pretty good, watching House M.D. in her own living room while eating a homemade spaghetti dinner prepared by her incredibly sweet-natured number three, Andy. And that’s where the missing pieces start to matter. We’re not allowed to witness how Mary Page arrives at this moment of equanimity after all the nastiness she’s experienced and heaped on others—to see for ourselves at what point she turns and why. Letts gives us a couple of intriguing hints by specifying his heroine’s Catholicism and her refusal, at age 50, to save herself from prison. But he lets the actual transformation take place offstage, like a battle in a Greek tragedy. This is perfectly consistent with Letts’s conceit that we are different people at different times in our lives. If Mary Page really is a series of identities rather than a single self,

then transitional moments don’t much matter. Yet we know that those moments exist, not just in the world but at some stratum of Mary Page’s consciousness. What’s more, we know that becoming is always more exciting than having arrived. Letts perversely denies us the chance to share in what should be the most fascinating passages in the play—that is, in the play that hangs like a hungry spirit over this one, waiting to be written. No wonder that poor, confused audience member couldn’t tell when the show was over. For all that, Mary Page Marlowe has some great passages. Letts is a master at shaping scenes—especially the sort in which normal people respond to the hidden call of their compulsions—and his mastery is often evident here. A hotel-room exchange between Mary Page and one of her lovers is nothing short of magnificent in that regard. And Anna D. Shapiro’s staging can be powerful in its restraint, with lots of excellent performances from a large and accomplished cast. It’s not what’s there that’s the matter, but what isn’t. v MARY PAGE MARLOWE Through 5/29: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $30-$89.

! @taadler

" Aimee Levitt visited the Chicago History Museum’s new exhibit “LINCOLN’S UNDYING WORDS.” Get her take at chicagoreader.com.

R READER RECOMMENDED b ALL AGES F

COMEDY

Laugh, dance, and be merry EACH MEMBER OF the Comedy Dance Collective—aka the “CDC,” which, as constant disclaimers caution, is not to be confused with the Centers for Disease Control— has a traumatic association with dance. And in videos shown between the troupe’s numbers, the audience hears about them. Sheena Laird was forced by a dance teacher to choose between cookies and ballet at the

From left: Sheena Laird, Michael Silver, Sarah Barnhardt, Holly Gombita, and Jean Bonavita ! TYLER DAVIS

age of eight; Michael Silver went onstage without pants on during his first-ever performance; and Jean Bonavita was picked on by instructors in dance classes for having “T. rex arms.” Maybe that’s why they all ditched the world of tutus and tights for comedy. But now, putting their training to use, the Comedy Dance Collective incorporate traditional and contemporary choreography

into their sketches. The dancing isn’t always incredible, but the performers make up for it with their stage presence; Laird and Silver’s over-the-top facial expressions made me forget to even look at their feet. That duo are particularly delightful in an opening scene in which they actually tango over who will pay the check at the end of the date. The rest of the show goes on to feature a sketch about a dancing Hillary Clinton trying to be cool, a parody of “I Hope I Get It” from A Chorus Line, and a routine inspired by cell phones, with selfie sticks incorporated into the choreography. But the highlight of the performance I saw was an exact re-creation of the final dance in Dirty Dancing, executed by Bonavita and Sarah Barnhardt—and done entirely with T. rex arms. The bit shows that combining the best parts of dance and comedy is the perfect formula for a successful show: dancers aspire to perfection, while comedy is all about embracing your flaws. —BRIANNA WELLEN R WE’RE DANCING! Through 4/29: Fri 8:15 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, stage773.com, $12.

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APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 23

ARTS & CULTURE

Apr 1-30

" Tanner Howard spoke with New York Times film critic A.O. Scott about Better Living Through Criticism. Read the article at chicagoreader.com.

VISUAL ART “Wizard Can” Exhibit by Victoria Martinez Art Exhibition

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Apr 26 Quartet-in-Residence: Dover Quartet Music

The Arts Together Join us on Northwestern University’s Evanston campus, your destination for world-class performances and exhibits. For a schedule of events, visit artscircle.northwestern.edu

24 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

lot of great art confuses, suggests, and forces us to make associations, in part because of what’s left out of its message. “Rodrigo Lara Zendejas: La Paz,” the title artist’s solo show at the Hyde Park Art Center, is all about its own spaces and mysteries. The exhibit is based on Zendejas’s memories of his first studio, in his grandparents’ garden in La Paz, San Luis Potosí, in central Mexico. That’s a nostalgic topic, obviously, but Zendejas approaches nostalgia elliptically. The show is put together like a book with pages ripped out and then pasted in again in the wrong place and at odd angles. Burghers of El Rayo features a group of monklike, roughly foot-high ceramic figures standing sidewise on a canvas hung on the wall; two fight each other, bones in hand, another, on closer inspection, has a bird’s beak. The sculpture Monumento al Minero is a drum kit with blue ceramic feet at the base of its legs. Resting on top of the kit is a large, toy-size faux-Grecian temple; balanced on top of that are small sculptures of two laborers who resemble WPA art from the 30s. Mina San Ignacio is another drum kit, this time including busts of a man and a woman in place of a couple of the cymbals. The busts’ clothing looks like dated finery, but the facial expressions are crudely drawn smiley faces. Since the show is about Zendejas’s youth, connections can be thought up—perhaps he, or somebody he knew, played the drums. But

other references are pleasantly, or ominously, opaque. Are the sideways monks in Burghers of El Rayo a reference to something Zendejas saw, or something he imagined? Are those busts on the drum kit meant to represent his grandparents, and if so, why are their faces so disturbingly schematic? Enano, Coneja y Rigo is a painting of children, one of whom is bearded, brandishing guns; stuck to the top of the painting is a 3-D ceramic hand. Is this a memory of childhood? Is Zendejas one of the children? Whose hand is that, and what is it reaching for? Panteon Muncipal is a gray-white sculpture of a cat hanged by the neck. The dangling feline has human attributes, from the handlike paws to a frankly rendered penis. The work doesn’t convey the playfulness of the rest of the exhibit—its frank grotesqueness makes it an outlier. But perhaps that’s why it belongs in a show that’s about how time and space, memory and the present, can fail to mesh. The garden is in Zendejas’s mind, parts of which are unseeable—most likely, there are things even he can’t identify. Memory in “La Paz” is imperfect, uncertain, and private, filled with discomfort, confusion, and joy. v R “RODRIGO LARA ZENDEJAS: LA PAZ” Through 7/17. Public reception with Zendejas Sun 5/22, 3 PM, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, 773-324-5520, hydeparkart.org. F

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CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL MOVIES & MUSIC FESTIVAL Thu 4/14-Sun 4/17, Logan (unless otherwise noted), 2646 N. Milwaukee, cimmfest.org, $12, film passes $60.

ARTS & CULTURE Bill Evans: Time Remembered

MOVIES

Sight and sound

he eighth annual Chicago International Movies & Music Festival opened Wednesday night and continues through Sunday, April 17, with screenings and live music shows all over town. Following are reviews of selected features screening; for my review of the opening-night film, The Smart Studios Story, visit chicagoreader.com/bleader; and for Luca Cimarusti’s roundup of the music shows, visit chicagoreader.com/music. Unless otherwise noted, all screenings are at the Logan Theatre, 2646 N. Milwaukee; a full festival schedule can be found at cimmfest.org. —J.R. JONES

BILL EVANS: TIME REMEMBERED Few jazz pianists had Bill Evans’s touch: his distinct sound was both resonant and delicate. Influenced equally by Bach and Bud Powell, Evans created an elegant, fluid, frequently introspective style that was unusual during the post- and hard-bop eras; he strongly influenced the development of modal jazz, particularly Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue (to which he contributed as a player and writer). As smooth as Evans’s music could be, though, his personal life was turbulent: he was a junkie, his drug addiction alienated him from his children, and both his common-law wife of many years and his schizophrenic brother committed suicide. Director Bruce Spiegel hits all the right notes of this sad song, condensing Evans’s biography and conveying his significance in a snappy narrative. With Tony Bennett, Jack DeJohnette, Orrin Keepnews, and Paul Motian. —TAL ROSENBERG 84 min. Sat 4/16, 4 PM. Society for Arts

26 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

BLACKHEARTS Norway is still notorious for its black-metal scene of the early 90s, led by a cadre of misanthropes who were known as much for their criminal behavior as their no-fi sound. But the genre has since become an accepted cultural heritage, at least according to this documentary by Fredrik Horn Akselsen; its two Norwegian subjects, Arnt Gronbech and Vegar Larsen, play in the black-metal band Keep of Kalessin, which placed third in Eurovision’s 2010 songwriting contest. Akselsen follows the adventures of three foreign black-metal bands touring Norway—from Colombia, Luciferian; from Greece, Naer Mataron; and from Iran, From the Vastland. The musicians eagerly share their affection for the music’s history, and their passion helps to compensate for the movie’s lack of historical, social, political, or musical context. Giorgos Germenis, bassist for Naer Mataron, was elected to the Greek parliament in 2012 as a member of the fascist Golden Dawn

party, but Akselsen never bothers to explain what this is or to press Germenis about his political ideas. In English and subtitled Greek, Spanish, Norwegian, and Farsi. —LEOR GALIL 83 min. Fri 4/15, 8:30 PM. DESIRE WILL SET YOU FREE Queer twentysomethings traipse around Berlin taking in underground concerts, doing drugs, and having sex. This indie drama from writer-directoractor Yony Leyser (William S. Burroughs: A Man Within) is often as listless as its characters, who fail to emerge from the hallucinogenic blur of artsy gatherings and late-night revelry until the third act. A Chicago native, Leyser is keen on scenery, and his vision of Berlin’s dilapidated edifices, concealed greenery, and pristine transit system make the city feel big and beautiful; not surprisingly, the movie also reverberates whenever he focuses on the slopes and angles of his actors’ faces. In English and subtitled German, Hebrew, and Arabic. —LEOR GALIL 92 min. Sat 4/16, 7 PM. FESTIVAL This 1967 documentary by Murray Lerner (Message to Love: The Isle of Wight Festival) comprises concert footage from four summers (1963-’66) of the Newport Folk Festival, where Bob Dylan laid the foundations for his iconic career. Other featured perform-

ers include Joan Baez; Judy Collins; Donovan; Peter, Paul and Mary; Pete Seeger and his half brother, Mike (rhapsodizing about the power of protest songs); and bluesmen Howlin’ Wolf and Mike Bloomfield (the latter chatting about his Chicago upbringing). Many of the performers and most of the audience are slim, fresh-faced kids in the grips of rebellious solidarity—though one self-conscious nonconformist condemns Dylan as a shill of the establishment. Lerner spends way too much time soliciting remarks from the musicians about the appeal of folk music, then crams in a lot of performances toward the end. Still, the film bears witness to a remarkable, giddy era. —TED SHEN 57 min. Sat 4/16, 5 PM. GARY NUMAN: ANDROID IN LA LA LAND Kraftwerk showed how synthesizers could make people dance, but Gary Numan showed how synths could make them rock out. By feeding the keyboard through a guitar amplifier, Numan crafted a clanging, zapping sound that undeniably influenced other synth-pop acts as well as hair metal and, especially, industrial. Many aspects of Numan’s life story are worth investigating: he was diagnosed with Asperger’s at an early age; he had a falling-out, still unresolved, with his parents, who were his business managers; he married and fathered three children with a member of his fan club; and he suffers from severe depression. Instead, directors Steve Read and Rob Alexander center their documentary on the production of Numan’s 2013 album Splinter; this approach allows for a fine introduction to Numan’s music, but the other subjects are addressed too briefly to cohere as a narrative. —TAL ROSENBERG 85 min. Sat 4/16, 5 PM. A GOOD MAN Produced for the PBS series American Masters, this Kartemquin documentary looks at the revered choreographer Bill T. Jones as he creates a modern-dance piece about Abraham Lincoln to make its world debut at the 2009 Ravinia Festival. The most interesting scenes come near the beginning, as the black artist remembers his childhood in the 1950s and ’60s, marvels at this opportunity to honor “the only white man I was allowed to love unconditionally,” and ponders recent news stories asserting that Lincoln was a white supremacist at heart. But historiography soon gives way to choreography, as filmmakers Bob Hercules and Gordon Quinn observe Jones driving his dancers, musicians, and stage designers to the breaking point. Through it all, you can see what

Brianna Wellen reviews season two of Amazon Prime’s comedy CATASTROPHE at chicagoreader.com.

makes him such an effective artist in a collaborative medium: the ability to enlarge his diva moments into a communal experience. —J.R. JONES 85 min. Sat 4/16, 1 PM. HALF-COCKED A dog-eared valentine to indie-rock slackerdom, this 1994 black-andwhite feature centers on a disaffected young woman in Louisville who impulsively makes off with her brother’s vanful of musical equipment and, along with some similarly aimless pals, embarks on a guerrilla concert tour of the southeast. They can’t play a lick, but they’re perfectly capable of sleeping on floors and scraping together change for convenience-store food, which gives them all the cred they need. First-time filmmakers Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky were veterans of the New York rock scene, yet their movie manages to be wryly satirical without compromising its low-grain verisimilitude; they later graduated to political documentary with the excellent Horns and Halos. Hawley directed; with music by Freakwater, Sleepyhead, and the Grifters. —J.R. JONES 81 min. Fri 4/15, 10:30 PM. HEARTWORN HIGHWAYS Shot in 1975 but not released until 1981, this documentary by James Szalapski captures the nascent stages of a poetic country music played by Texas outsiders like Guy Clark, Steve Young, Townes Van Zandt, and a young Steve Earle. Szalapski was privy to some highly intimate performances—a stunning rendition of “Waiting Around to Die” in Van Zandt’s spartan home, a Christmas Eve jam session at Clark’s place. Performance footage by some of the era’s bigger stars, including Charlie Daniels and David Allen Coe, seems out of place now, but all the artists surveyed share a fondness for the bottle and a distaste for the machinations of Nashville. —PETER MARGASAK 92 min. Sat 4/16, 7:15 PM. Old Town School of Folk Music MUSIC IS THE WEAPON Alex Gibney’s documentary Finding Fela! (2014) provides an excellent introduction to the life, music, and politics of Nigerian musical legend Fela Kuti, but this 1982 French film is a more immediate and arresting experience. Directors JeanJacques Flori and Stéphane Tchalgadjieff begin with Kuti’s visit to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, when he was radicalized by the American black power movement, and follow him back to his native Lagos, where he founded his own commune and political party

and was endlessly persecuted by the Nigerian authorities. “I will be president of this country,” promises the singer, not long after his home was torn apart in a December 1981 siege. He never made good on that pledge, but the musical sequences reaffirm how much power he wielded from the stage, his infectious Afro-pop bringing an eloquent message of human dignity and potential. —J.R. JONES 53 min. Fri 4/15, 7 PM. PRISONER OF HER PAST As a child of Holocaust survivors, Howard Reich grew up immersed in the psychological wreckage of Nazi atrocities. His parents, like many in their position, were tight-lipped about what they’d seen and endured, but when Reich’s mother, Sonia, began sliding into dementia in her 70s, her fearful delusions became a Rosetta stone that Reich used to decode her nightmarish experiences as an adolescent. Dry-eyed but deeply moving, this Kartemquin Films documentary by Gordon Quinn follows Reich (longtime jazz critic for the Chicago Tribune) on a journey of discovery back to the family’s native village of Dubno, Poland. It’s riveting stuff, though the cool jazz score by Jim Trompeter seems like an odd fit for the subject matter. —CLIFF DOERKSEN Sat 4/16, 11:30 AM. SAVAGE BELIEFS: THE MOVIE Fans of Joe Losurdo’s comprehensive documentary You Weren’t There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-1984 might want to investigate this curio from 1984, starring the local quartet Savage Beliefs. Shot in 16-millimeter, with dirty tape edges visible on every splice, it’s a schlocky, unfinished thriller with the musicians playing themselves and guitarist Brian Gay trying to take a woman away from a sinister drug dealer. The band deliver a couple of good numbers in a show at the (now defunct) West End, and there’s even a guest spot by Naked Raygun, but this could have used a lot more tunes and a lot less drama. (Two black-andwhite videos of Savage Beliefs, both superior to the music sequences here, can be found on YouTube.) Charlie Fink directed; among the future notables involved were film-projection specialist James Bond (playing himself—or is he 007?) and Oscar-winning cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List). —J.R. JONES 82 min. Thu 4/14, 8 PM. Martyr’s SIGUR RÓS: HEIMA This 2007 documentary tracks the experimental-rock group Sigur Rós as it performs in small towns and unusu-

al venues in its native Iceland at the conclusion of an international tour. In addition to the concerts, there are interviews with band members and wide-angle shots of the Icelandic landscape. This immense, overcast, and arresting backdrop contextualizes the band’s music, known for its scope (the songs typically run seven to ten minutes) and size (with heavy applications of reverb and frequent use of horn and string sections). This formula makes for a powerful experience on a great sound system after a couple joints, but it’s a dull and oddly morose subject for a movie. —TAL ROSENBERG 97 min. Sat 4/16, 4 PM. Lincoln Hall

VOICE OF THE EAGLE: THE ENIGMA OF ROBBIE BASHO Pete Townshend of the Who is among the talking heads who show up in this documentary to gush over Robbie Basho, the folksinger and guitarist whose idiosyncratic, non-Western style won him a cult following from the 1960s through his untimely death in 1986. Director Liam Barker struggled to piece together a chronology of Basho’s life, but the anecdotal scraps provided by the musician’s adoptive sister, college friends, and various associates don’t offer much insight into him beyond his discography and his devotion to the spiritual principles of Sufism Reoriented. By all accounts he was a remote J

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ARTS & CULTURE

continued from 26 personality, preferring to express himself through his transcendent music; his unearthly trill on “Blue Crystal Fire” expresses more humanity than the interview subjects’ inconsistent accounts of his hygiene and celibacy. —LEOR GALIL 83 min. Sun 5/17, 5 PM. ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE SPIDERS FROM MARS David Bowie’s 1973 farewell concert as alien rocker Ziggy Stardust must have seemed like foolproof material for a movie, but documentarian D.A. Pennebaker (Don’t Look Back, Monterey Pop) made such a mess of it that his

On the Bride’s Side

feature wasn’t released for a decade. This digital restoration replaces the murky soundtrack with a sharp new Dolby mix by Tony Visconti, which should remind viewers what a killer band Bowie had in the glam-rocking Spiders From Mars. Unfortunately no technology can correct the blurry, flat-footed camerawork or ill-conceived stage lighting, which casts a relentless red orange spot on the androgynous star and leaves the band in the dark. Still Bowie’s most inspired and flamboyant album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars predated Pink Floyd’s The Wall in exploring the bizarre emotional life of rock superstars, but it’s not clear whether Pennebaker understands what it’s about—he can only grope for a visual equivalent with cliched shots of overwhelmed fans. —J.R. JONES PG, 91 min. Sun 4/17, 3:45 PM. Lincoln Hall v

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MOVIES

No place like home By FRED CAMPER

onsidering how long Palestinians have lived under military occupation or as refugees, I’m not surprised that statelessness, violence, and oppression underlie all the works I saw from this year’s Chicago Palestine Film Festival. In a somber moment from the generally upbeat documentary ON THE BRIDE’S SIDE (Fri 4/22, 8 PM, and Sun 4/24, 5 PM), one subject, having learned that he’s eligible for citizenship in Italy, says, “It’s the first time I’ve ever had a citizenship.” The film was conceived when two of the three codirectors (Antonio Augugliaro, Gabriele del Grande, and Khaled Soliman al Nassiry) agreed to help a refugee get from Italy to Sweden and disguised their car trip as a wedding party to elude detection. They stop along the way to leave graffiti memorializing friends who’ve been killed, and in several fine scenes a boy raps in Arabic about his hopes for a Palestinian state. In the drama 3000 NIGHTS (Sat 4/30 and Thu 5/5, 8 PM) a woman gives a lift to a wounded boy, not knowing that Israeli authorities suspect him of having killed a soldier, and she’s sentenced to eight years in prison. Director Mai Masri heightens the story’s emotion by connecting many extreme close-ups that revolve around the protagonist (her face as she speaks, her hands and feet shackled to her bed while she’s pregnant) and centering her inside long shots to convey her isolation. On the

same program, Amr Kawji’s short DETAINING DREAMS intertwines the stories of four young teens arrested separately and beaten brutally by the Israelis. In a telling detail, one describes how the police inspected the teeth of a dog that bit him before they bothered to examine him. Even Amber Fares’s energetic car-racing movie SPEED SISTERS (Sat 4/23, 8 PM, and Thu 4/28, 8:15 PM) is inflected by the characters’ troubled political status: the five young people of the title live for racing but lack adequate spaces to train, and one of them gets shot on a training track. The dialogue can be moving (what matters most to one racer is making the people of the Jenin refugee camp proud), but the scenes of slalom racing are interminably similar. The most affecting work I saw was Anna Fahr’s short TR ANSIT GAME, screening with On the Bride’s Side. Here the issues of displacement come up almost casually, like accepted postulates of existence. Two children who sell newspapers at a desolate crossroads help a stranded Syrian refugee who’s looking for a new home in Lebanon. One child’s parents have disappeared, the other’s are dead, and the landscape’s vastness is rendered almost poetically; sadly, the wandering of exiles can be found in most of the other films too. v CHICAGO PALESTINE FILM FESTIVAL Fri 4/15-Thu 5/5, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.

Kweku Collins outside Soundscape Studios in East Humboldt Park ! ZAKKIYYAH DUMAS

MUSIC

Kweku Collins celebrates a great freshman year at Closed Sessions Raised on poetry and West African drumming, this thoughtful young Evanston rapper and producer just released his first album, Nat Love. By LEOR GALIL

very spring, seniors at Evanston Township High School start coming to class wearing clothes bearing the names of the colleges they’ll attend the next fall. In 2015 the Washington Post ranked ETHS the 17th-most challenging high school in Illinois, and its students end up in colleges all over the country. But last year, when rapper and producer Kweku Collins was about to graduate, he couldn’t join in that tradition—he remembers seeing “hella U. of I. shirts”—because he wasn’t pursuing a traditional higher education at all. Though he’d been accepted to Columbia College, he decided not to go. Instead he showed up at ETHS in a T-shirt advertising an institution that admits fewer people each year than any school: Chicago indie hip-hop label Closed Sessions. Closed Sessions signed Collins last March. Fake Shore Drive broke the news in April by premiering his song “Start a Fire” alongside a get-to-know-him interview. Since then the 19-year-old MC, raised on poetry, West African percussion, and Bob Marley, has contributed vocals to several Closed Sessions releases, usually working with in-house producers OddCouple and Boathouse: the OddCouple

full-length Chatterbox in July, the label compilation Spicy Caliente in September, and the Boathouse EP Hibernation in February. Collins has also kept busy with solo work, dropping singles like a trail of bread crumbs for his fans—most recently “Ego Killed Romance” in late March—and the July EP Say It Here, While It’s Safe, his first for Closed Sessions. In the process Collins has become a marquee artist for the label, which has been an integral part of the local hip-hop scene since it launched as a multimedia experiment in 2009. In January, ABC daytime talk show Windy City Live dedicated about eight minutes of airtime to Closed Sessions, and Collins ended the segment with a live performance of “Memorial,” a heart-wrenching tribute to his late great-grandmother. His smooth, slippery flow nearly cracked with emotion, and he sauntered around the stage with the poise of a veteran in time with the song’s polyrhythmic percussion. A few weeks earlier Collins had performed during a Closed Sessions set at Chi-Town Rising, Chicago’s first outdoor New Year’s Eve party, and in October the label had partnered with international pop-up party Boiler Room for a show in New York, where Collins shared

the bill with the likes of Chicago hip-hop star Saba and New York underground rap heroes Mr. Mfn Exquire and Your Old Droog.

KWEKU COLLINS, QARI, RIC WILSON, BOATHOUSE, ODDCOUPLE

Fri 4/15, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, reggieslive.com, $12, $10 in advance b

Fake Shore Drive founder Andrew Barber thinks the Closed Sessions folks know they’re on to something special. “They’re at a point where they’ve had some success with a number of artists,” he says. “I feel like they feel like this is the one, and I think Kweku can really stand out.” Collins hopes to make the most of his increasing visibility over the past year with the release of Nat Love, which came out on Closed Sessions last week—he’s celebrating with a headlining set at Reggie’s Rock Club on Friday, April 15.

Collins was born into music. His 65-yearold father, Stephan, grew up in Indianapolis surrounded by professional musicians—his mother was a jazz singer, and her father was a jazz saxophonist and bandleader who Stephan says played with legendary bebop trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. A drummer uncle gave Stephan a pair of bongos when he was ten, and by the mid-70s he was working as a jeweler in Madison and gigging at bars and hotels. He attended an open rehearsal led by jazz trombonist Jimmy Cheatham, who’d played with Ornette Coleman and Duke Ellington and was teaching at the University of Wisconsin at the time. Cheatham introduced Stephan to the school’s wealth of resources, and he eventually got hooked on African and Latin percussion and started working with an African theater group. In 1988 Stephan went to SUNY Brockport to join a former UW dance professor as the African drum master for the dance department. SUNY Brockport had a relationship with the University of Ghana in Accra, and Stephan convinced the school to send him to Ghana for four weeks. “That’s when I saw, ‘I’m in the land of drums—let me take some back,’” J

APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 29

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An infant Kweku Collins with the great-grandmother whose life he honors in his song “Memorial” ! COURTESY THE ARTIST

SPEAK LOW IF YOU SPEAK LOVE / DANIEL WADE

04.20 THE WHITE BUFFALO ALICE DRINKS THE KOOL AID

04.23 KVELERTAK

TORCHE / WILD THRONE

04.24 THE SUMMER SET

HANDSOME GHOST / CALL ME KARIZMA

04.29 ZOOFUNKYOU

MARMALETTA / GOOSE CORP / BUTTER

04.30 DROPHOLLOW

SKY MACHINE / RED NOVELLA / GATSBY / THEY NEVER SAY NO

05.06 FREELANCE WRESTLING PRESENTS: FEELMONGER 05.07 POINT BREAK LIVE! 05.15 ENTER SHIKARI

HANDS LIKE HOUSES / THE WHITE NOISE

05.16 BEACH SLANG

POTTY MOUTH / DYKE DRAMA / TURNSPIT

05.17 BLAQK AUDIO

NIGHT RIOTS / CHARMING LIARS

05.21 SCHOOL OF ROCK 05.28 WELSHLY ARMS WILD ADRIATIC

06.09 LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES 06.18 ANDY BLACK - THE HOMECOMING TOUR COLOURS

06.24 WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS 07.09 PITY SEX www.bottomlounge.com 1375 w lake st 312.666.6775

30 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

Kweku Collins continued from 29

he says. “I bought some drums, I shipped them back, and it dawned on me: ‘Wait a minute, there’s a business here.’” In the mid-90s, Stephan launched a company called Afena Akoma African Imports. At SUNY Brockport he also met a 19-year-old dance student named Frances, who would become Kweku’s mom. Kweku is Stephan’s seventh child, but his first with Frances—he arrived about five years later, on September 18, 1996. “I was playing drums with my dad before I could walk,” Collins says. When Stephan traveled to Ghana for work, Collins would make do with a 35-minute instructional VHS his father had made for Afena Akoma, Basics of African Palm Drumming. “Mom would put the video on and he would sit, listen, watch, and play,” Stephan says. Collins also learned capoeira—a Brazilian martial art blended with dance—and listened to Brazilian music. Stephan says his son was joining him during percussion performances by age six. Frances, who’s now an elementary school teacher, got him hooked on poetry. “She was always the one encouraging me to read, to write,” Collins says. When Collins was four, he moved with his parents from upstate New York to Evanston, in part because Afena Akoma was in financial trouble; Stephan says he shuttered the business around 2001. (Collins has a tattoo of Afena Akoma’s logo, a heart and sword, on his left arm.) In 2004 Collins fell for hip-hop after hearing Kanye West’s “Jesus Walks.” His parents didn’t know much about hip-hop and worried about the bad influence it might have on an eight-year-old, but Collins found a way

to listen. “I had this little portable radio that somebody gave me as a present—they didn’t really know that I had it,” he says. “I’d go to my room, pop in my headphones, and I’d quietly listen to ‘Jesus Walks.’” Collins started rapping in eighth grade. He released his first mixtape, Freshman Year, in spring 2012, during his first year at Evanston Township. He recorded most of it in a single night at his friend Charlie Culbert’s house. (“I don’t even think that shit’s on the Internet anymore,” he says.) Collins tried out a couple stage names—“Ell Purp’s” and “Black Belief”—and occasionally performed at nondenominational charity events at a south Evanston church called the Vineyard. Early in his sophomore year, he joined the ETHS slampoetry team competing in the Louder Than a Bomb tournament. Collins had his first talk with his parents about his rap dreams when he was 15. “The question was asked: ‘Son, what do you want to do after high school?’” Stephan remembers. “And he says, ‘I want to be a rapper.’ Well, mom just about curled up into a little pelt.” His parents decided to encourage him, though, albeit cautiously, and they started to provide him with recording equipment. “I’m about passion, but positive passion,” Stephan says. “We said, ‘Well, Kweku, that’s all cool, but we want you to be positive.’” In September 2012, shortly after he turned 16, Collins impressed his parents with a posi ditty called “Young & Wonderful” that he uploaded to YouTube. “The boy’s got talent,” Stephan says. “I’d been in the business long enough—I know what a good singer sounds like, I know what

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Mountain Heart label’s library, for instance, and record a song on the fly, writing his lyrics on the spot. Not all Kolar’s tests were musical, though. “One of my favorite things to do is turn off the heat. It’s, like, really fucking cold—‘Are you gonna tough it out?’” Kolar says. “I never told Kweku that was a test. Long after we signed him and he was squad, he was like, ‘Man, I remember that first time with Mike, it was so cold in the studio—white people just like shit so cold.’” Closed Sessions was at a crossroads when Collins came into the picture—Fruchter calls 2015 the label’s YOLO year, because he and Kolar had decided to take bigger risks. They’d been self-financing a small number of releases, and they wanted to put out more music by more artists, hoping they might make some money back. “We looked at our roster—we had one signed artist, a bunch of side projects. Looking at the future, where’s the sustainable growth that’s gonna allow us to have this label for 20 years, raise a family off this label, work with more artists, supply them with resources?” Fruchter says. “Some things were make or break, and we kept that in mind the whole year: Go big or go home.” Collins passed Fruchter and Kolar’s tests and impressed them as a person. And as Kolar explains, Stephan’s involvement cemented the deal. “Working with Chance from obscurity—like pre-#10Day to now—Chance, he’s got it, he’s the golden kid, he was gonna make it. But I guarantee a big part of how quickly and how high he got was having the support of [his father] Ken [Bennett] and his family,” Kolar says. “If you’re gonna take flight at a young age—at 17, at 18, like when Chance started J

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good lyrics are, and he’s got it.” It wasn’t till his junior year that Collins began to take hip-hop seriously, retiring his stage names and drawing on the art he’d grown up with—drumming from dad, poetry from mom, and music from around the world, especially Brazil and West Africa. “I started producing my own music and really delving into my craft,” he says. “‘Oh, I can take these rhythms that I’ve known my whole life and the type of music that I’m most comfortable playing, and I can transition into this.’” In November 2014 Bryan Zawlocki, editor in chief of local hip-hop outlet Elevator, wrote about an eight-song Collins release called The Valley, the first in a trickle of blog write-ups and a major turning point for the young rapper. After Daily Chiefers wrote about him in December 2014, he remembers, “My mom was like, ‘You should actually [take] at least take a year from school and try this.’” In late January 2015, Collins sent Closed Sessions cofounder Alex Fruchter a short introductory e-mail, including a link to the new EP Worlds Away. When Fruchter listened to its gentle opening cut, “Life,” he’d just talked to label cofounder and Soundscape Studios owner Michael Kolar about bringing new artists to Closed Sessions. “I just remembering sitting there—like, ‘Damn, this is dope,’” Fruchter says. “It just brought that sunshine or that energy I was hoping to find.” At Fruchter’s invitation, Collins went to Closed Sessions’ East Humboldt Park headquarters above Soundscape, and Stephan came with him. He began a series of tests with Kolar—he’d have to pick a beat from the

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Kweku Collins continued from 31

to really become something, and like Kwkeu now is starting to become something—if you have good family support, man, I really feel sky’s the limit.” Fruchter and Kolar signed Collins just before South by Southwest. His arrival helped start a transformation for the label: since then Closed Sessions has closed deals with OddCouple and Boathouse; parted ways with its only previous signee, Alex Wiley; brought aboard its first out-of-state artist, Cleveland rapper Kipp Stone; and signed Jamila Woods, one of the go-to vocalists in Chicago’s hiphop scene. Collins’s Closed Sessions connection started to work for him immediately. Barber remembers when Fruchter passed along Collins’s music. “I’d never heard of him before, and he kind of just came out of nowhere—I think Alex in particular has been really good at discovering talent within this city early on,” Barber says. Fruchter’s history of highlighting local talent, both as a DJ and as former editor of hip-hop site Ruby Hornet, has helped give Closed Sessions its cachet: “When they put their stamp on somebody, it means something,” Barber aays. And these days, the quality of Collins’s work reflects back on the label.

“It definitely caught my attention because of the melodic type of vibe to it,” Barber continues. “It definitely doesn’t really sound like what a lot of people are making around here. It’s kinda fresh and it’s fun, and almost has a Native Tongues type of vibe.” Stylistically diverse and conceptually coherent, Collins’s new Nat Love has 11 tracks that total 40 minutes, though last month MTV News writer Carvell Wallace called it an EP. “It’s a cohesive statement—it’s an album in every way that I understand what an album is, going back to when I was 11 years old going to Rose Records,” says Fruchter. “I think he should be proud to call it that.” (Nat Love isn’t free, either, which suggests it’s not a mixtape.) Collins produced most of the album, and the handful of beats from OddCouple or Boathouse fit into the tender, dreamlike aura he creates. His alluring, often intricate production layers minimal percussion lines like a raft woven of branches, and though it’s hardly airtight, it’s more than sturdy enough to support the tendrils of synth, nimble acoustic guitar, somber piano, and various twinkling accoutrements that dip in and out. Collins’s inviting, fluid rapping and singing (and a sort of hybrid of the two that he often uses) pack a wallop as his words sink in. On

“Death of a Salesman,” which turns samples of Solomon Linda’s “Mbube” (aka “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) into a chirping, humming tapestry, he squares off against America’s legacy of racism: “See, I got this Uncle Sam / And I know he hates me too / Told me I was only good / If I was rapping and shooting hoops.” And over the celestial thwomp of “Ego Killed Romance,” which suggests a Rube Goldberg device in its animated complexity (the song also features vocals from labelmate Jamila Woods), Collins raps about balancing dreams and desires: “For something so easy to see / I didn’t have the right clue / Something just

might tear it to bits / I may not have the right glue / To make a mental collage / A physical effort too.” Collins still has room to grow as a rapper, but he’s in a much better position now than he was when he signed his deal. Strangers stop him on the street to talk about his music; last summer he played a ten-year-anniversary show for venerable hip-hop blog Passion of the Weiss, alongside Saba, acerbic underground phenom Open Mike Eagle, and ascendant Long Beach rap king Vince Staples; and his music has been covered by Billboard and Pitchfork, the latter a first for a Closed Sessions artist. Collins poured a lot of energy into Nat Love—in March, he spent the week before Closed Sessions needed a final version of the album sleeping at the label’s offices and finessing the music. It’s a big step for him, but he has modest goals for it. “I hope people hear some of these songs and don’t feel so alone, ’cause I know what that’s like,” he says. “I try to convey a certain sense of empathy in my music—just, like, somebody to walk beside. That’s what I really want for this. I want people to be able to feel like they know me as a friend.” v

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APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 33

MUSIC

" Visit chicagoreader.com for Record Store Day listings and an interactive map detailing in-store performances, discounts, and other specials at participating shops.

Buckle up for another Record Store Day

This year’s special releases leave a lot to be desired, but RSD’s full slate of in-store performances should make shop hopping worth it anyway. By LEOR GALIL

Record Store Day shoppers at Vintage Vinyl in Evanston in 2014 ! MARK LAWTON/SUN-TIMES MEDIA

ecord Store Day returns for its ninth iteration on Saturday, and though the Reader joked that this ersatz holiday had jumped the shark four years ago, it continues to thrive. I’m pretty ambivalent about RSD by now—it sometimes feels like the only thing separating people who queue up for picture discs of Justin Bieber’s Purpose or Disturbed’s “The Sound of Silence” and people who camp out in front of Best Buy for Black Friday deals on HDTVs is the time of year. Then again, RSD has had a Black Friday version since 2011. Many RSD early birds have had the displeasure of waiting in line behind an eBay reseller who buys up a store’s entire stock of a special release—it’s the kind of thing that can put a person off records, record stores, and even days. But the faithful keep coming back. This year’s list of RSD releases is far from the best I’ve seen, but a handful of items have caught my eye—and among them are a few available for the first time, including previously unissued 1984 demos by grunge progenitors Green River and a seven-inch of unreleased songs, “Sweet Maria” b/w “Missouri Waltz (Missouri State Song),” by transcendentally inept cult band the Shaggs. Sun Ra’s Spaceways (a compilation of live recordings from 1966 and ’68)

34 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

and Kevin Gates’s recent Islah will be available for the first time on vinyl. Most special releases are pressed in runs of 1,000 or more; anything made in smaller quantities is generally called a “regional release.” One of the most enticing this year is native to Chicago: Cannots, a collaboration between jazz drummer Charles Rumback and guitar wunderkind Ryley Walker. The release I’m personally most excited about is regional too: Numero Group’s cassette compilation of the complete recordings by early-90s Chicago rap group Stony Island. It’s only available at the label’s pop-up store at Comfort Station, where the surviving members of Stony Island will reunite for a performance at 2 PM. Record Store Day’s multitude of in-store performances give shoppers a good excuse to keep exploring even after the early-bird deals evaporate. Chicago has more shops now than last year, and Pilsen is becoming a new hot spot for vinyl—Pinwheel Records and 606 Records have opened since 2015’s RSD, and an online vintage and vinyl shop called Shady Rest is preparing to move into a storefront on 18th Street. v

! @imLeor

DON’T KNOW HOW TO PLAY? JUST COME STRUM ALONG.

When you’re here, you’re part of it. Set your own tone. Get in your own groove. Join up with people from all walks of life, from all over Chicago and the world. Strike a chord with us this spring. Find your folk at the Old Town School of Folk Music. New classes start April 25. Sign up at oldtownschool.org

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APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 35

Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of April 14

MUSIC

ALL AGES

Touched By Ghoul

PICK OF THE WEEK

! DEVIN DAVIS

With his evolving vocal delivery Freddie Gibbs heads for higher ground

THURSDAY14 Eszter Balint Daniel Knox opens, accompanied by Eli Dixon, Josh Dumas, and Kate Adams. 8 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $15.

! NICK WALKER

FREDDIE GIBBS, CHRIS SPENCER, MATA

Wed 4/20, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $22-$28. 17+

INDIANA RAPPER FREDDIE GIBBS signed an ill-fated Interscope deal a decade ago, the first of a handful of label affiliations that went nowhere. But no matter how his music-biz fortunes fared, Gibbs could always be counted on to deliver gripping gangsta raps at blistering speeds—even the slivers of daylight between bars are enough for his sweeping, detailed sketches of street life to sink in. Gibbs approached the craft like a master long before he accumulated enough professional mileage for the public to consider him one, and he remains steadfast in his lyrical approach to hip-hop—though his delivery continues to evolve. On November’s Shadow of a Doubt (ESGN), he tries out a singing voice that splits the difference between a purr and a murmur, shifting out of his hyperfast flow and stretching his vowels till they blur into nearly mumbled melodies that exude quixotic triumph and beguiling somberness. Gibbs’s new vocal moves give heart and muscle to the one-two punch of “Careless” and “Fuckin’ Up the Count,” refreshing familiar stories of vacuuming up banded stacks of cash and exhaling weed smoke like an industrial chimney. If your favored intoxicant is green and fuzzy, there may be no better way to indulge yourself on April 20. —LEOR GALIL

36 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

It’s not fair to her, but for me Eszter Balint will forever be the visiting Hungarian cousin in the 1984 Jim Jarmusch film Stranger Than Paradise—the one whose main main is Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Last year she played another visiting Hungarian, appearing as a fleeting love interest on Louis CK’s series Louie. But ever since South by Southwest in 1998, where I saw her perform a set of beguiling originals, I’ve known that she’s just as distinctive and appealing as a musician as she is as an actor. Balint’s discography is patchy at best—the recent Airless Midnight (Red Herring) is just her third album in nearly two decades, though in that time her voice and violin have also turned up on records by Marc Ribot and Michael Gira. She made Airless Midnight with regular collaborator JD Foster, whose arrangements and production help tease out a sparse, delicate, slightly parched sound that’s well suited to her gentle, conversational singing—he adds little but guitar, keyboards, and drums. The new material revolves around various kinds of emotional distance: she dumps a lover on “Departure Song,” voices indifference to the relationship she’s in on “Calls at 3 AM,” and fights the harsh reality of loneliness on “Silence (After the Phonecall).” The songs are modest, but many of their details sneak up on you with their profundity. For this rare Chicago performance, Balint is accompanied by guitarist Chris Cochrane, a member of many 90s downtown bands in New York, including No Safety. —PETER MARGASAK

FRIDAY15 Tim Hecker This performance is part of CIMMfest; see page 26. Bruce Lamont and Good Willsmith open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20. Tim Hecker performs with a laptop plugged into a PA, but it’s getting increasingly inadequate to call him an electronic musician. The sounds of pianos and woodwinds make up the core of his three previous albums, all on the Kranky label. And though

Love Streams, his new debut on 4AD, features pixelated keyboard figures filled with tones that don’t appear in nature, it also contains passages where Hecker drizzles blasts of static, steel drums, and electric-guitar licks over the voices of an Icelandic choir singing motifs inspired by 15th-century Flemish composer Josquin des Prez. But no matter where he gets his material, he processes it with abandon, transforming it into a rushing onslaught of kaleidoscopic sound. When Hecker played here last year as part of Wire’s Drill festival, he performed in almost total darkness, but this time he’ll bring a light show that will match his tonal colors with shimmering LEDs. —BILL MEYER

Made to Break This show is part of CIMMfest; see page 26. Brian Case and a duo of Christof Kurzmann and Tim Daisy open. 9 PM, Burlington, 3425 W. Fullerton, $10. Made to Break isn’t the first of Ken Vandermark’s improvising groups to address the reedist’s love of funk, punk rock, and dub reggae, but it’s the first to apply that aesthetic to modular compositions that can be rearranged on the fly. On the quartet’s latest album, Before the Code (Trost), another kind of spontaneity assumes a bigger role than ever before. The group’s Austrian cofounder, Christof Kurzmann, is a wild card—while Vandermark, drummer Tim Daisy, and Dutch electric bassist Jasper Stadhouders (who’s settled into the role previously filled by Devin Hoff and Nick Macri) all improvise on the bandleader’s themes with great latitude, Kurzmann uses a computer setup not only to contribute preset parts and throw in unexpected samples but also to process the output of his bandmates and play it back in real time. Kurzmann has always done this sort of thing in Made to Break (he uses open-source freeware called “lloopp”), but I’ve never heard it work so effectively. The three extended pieces on Before the Code veer wildly among moods and attacks—on the opening piece, “Dial the Number,” for example, Vandermark’s astringently dancing clarinet tangles with Stadhouders’s knotty, abrasive playing in wide-open passages given structure by Daisy’s sharp, manic beats. Shifts between free and structured or between soft and loud arrive unexpectedly, but while the variety written into each piece is plenty of fun, Made to Break are even more exciting when they adapt to a rejiggered arrangement as they play it. —PETER MARGASAK J

JOE SATRIANI

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APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 37

MUSIC continued from 36

Rihanna Travis Scott opens. 7:30 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison, $29.50-$180. b

There’s more to Rihanna than the bad-gal cartoon she’s become in the public imagination. On Anti (Westbury Road/Roc Nation), released in January, she tops off the clubby dancehall bangers and close-miked, breathy ballads with a hitherto inconceivable cover of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes.” Who knew Rihanna enjoyed dreamy Australian psych-pop? Because she’s a pop star, many people assume she’s beholden to boardroom suits, and while that may be true to an extent, she’s definitely learned to placate her corporate bosses without developing a carefully calculated perso-

Where are the rest of the music listings? Find them at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

na. People make memes of her face as she reacts to other artists’ performances at awards shows, or devote blogs to her rambunctious style (she once wore a Phantom Menace-printed Vetements skirt). Rihanna knows that at some level her celebrity is a joke, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t going to enjoy it. She’s young, talented, and famous, and flaunts it in a carefree display of all the fucks she will never give. Her infectious 2015 smash, “Bitch Better Have My Money,” is even more awesome because it’s so stubbornly apolitical (though the act of a woman demanding fair pay has unfortunately become a radical notion). Rihanna feels no obligation to fight feminist battles every minute of the day—men aren’t held to such a lofty activist standard, so why should she be? And in the video for “Pour It Up,” a fluid, hedonistic recounting of a night at a strip club, she normalizes stripping as labor by simply enjoying it as entertainment. Her confounding seriousness and occasional brashness are a reminder that no woman is to be boxed into any one space. —MEAGAN FREDETTE

Matthew Shipp & Michael Bisio 7:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $20, $15 in advance. 18+ Pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist Michael Bisio continue their fruitful partnership on the new Live in Seattle (Arena Jazz), which documents an April 2015 concert where the pair move deftly between knotty, lyrical Shipp originals and a handful of standards. Shipp’s “Regeneration,” which opens the album, feverishly braids together elegant rhapsodies and strumming rhythms, loosening and tightening by turns: some passages get tangled up with Bisio’s frenetic pizzicato and Shipp’s glassy clusters and left-hand rumbles, while others release tension with sleek walking grooves. The pair also bring a heightened tenderness to the Roberta Flack hit “Where Is the Love,” pushing and pulling between the tune’s breezy melody and deconstructed, frictive turbulence. This duo is less about repertoire than rapport, though, and Shipp and Bisio have something truly special. —PETER MARGASAK

Slum Village This show is part of CIMMfest; see page 26. King’s Court, Black Milk, Guilty Simpson, Phat Kat, Blaq RoyalT, and Demastra open. 9 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park, $22-$35. 18+ Detroit rapper-producer J Dilla died in February 2006, just days after Stones Throw dropped his loose-limbed instrumental masterpiece Donuts, and his legend has grown to Mount Everest proportions in the years since. Music with even a whiff of Jay Dee about it remains in high demand, and his catalog has continued to swell thanks to posthumously released or discovered recordings—hell, in 2013 you could even buy a 12-inch from Dilla’s collection on eBay from his mother, Maureen Yancey. You can also get a new taste of Dilla from Slum Village, the Detroit group he cofounded in the early 90s. True, he went solo in 2001, and the only original member left is rapper T3, but the band still bears Dilla’s mark—in fact, he produced (or coproduced) nine songs on last year’s Yes! (Ne’astra Music Group). A waggish neosoul bump holds the album together,

38 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

sometimes erupting into shuddering punches and sometimes relaxing into serene, sashaying grace, and the rapping complements the heft and stride of each instrumental as though they’re in conversation. The mellow, butterscotch-smooth keyboard melodies and scooting drumbeat of “Where We Come From” evokes Dilla’s lackadaisical magnetism, though Slum Village producer Young RJ contributed the beat—proof that the group remains in good hands. Tonight’s performance is part of a tribute to Jay Dee, and the lineup includes rapperproducer Black Milk, who also contributed to Yes! —LEOR GALIL

SATURDAY16 Charles Rumback & Ryley Walker 10 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10.

Since releasing Primrose Green (Dead Oceans) a year ago, Chicago singer and guitarist Ryley Walker has had a remarkable run, building an audience through relentless touring, meeting and playing with many of his heroes (including Richard Thompson and Danny Thompson), and cultivating an incredible band (with keyboardist Ben Boye, guitarist Brian Sulpizio, and bassist Anton Hatwich) whose internal rapport has increased exponentially. Luckily, Walker hasn’t allowed success to blunt his curiosity or his thirst for collaboration. He loves to play, and he’s down to work with anyone who’ll push him in new directions—he and fellow guitarist Bill MacKay dropped the lovely, lyrical Land of Plenty (Whistler) last August, and he worked with jazz drummer Charles Rumback to make the rangy, largely improvised Cannots (Dead Oceans), one of today’s many Record Store Day releases. The new album’s five gripping instrumentals move from the liquid, quasi-Arabic probing of “Dhoodan” to J

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APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 39

MUSIC continued from 38

the desert-baked extroversion of the title track (which feels like an homage to Sir Richard Bishop) to the seductively meandering, post-Tom Verlaine wanderlust of “Oft Rift.” The music focuses on joint exploration (though you can also hear Walker’s fondness for another kind of joint), and the interaction between the musicians is high-grade shit—Rumback drives and caresses the songs with unstinting empathy. —PETER MARGASAK

SUNDAY17 Santigold Donmonique opens. 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 2047. N. Milwaukee, sold out. 18+ Beginning with her debut, Santogold, the formerly self-titled album prior to her moniker changing to Santigold, Santi White has been bending the boundaries of pop a bit to the side as to allow in subtle mutations of off-kilter reggae and clever R&B and whatever other swatch of hypercolor she’s feeling. Her newest 99¢ (Atlantic) begins not so modestly with its best track “Can’t Get Enough of Myself,” a jaunt that offers the perfect vibe for an impending summer as it playfully bounces along towards a chorus created to pour out of open car windows. The lilting, fun rhythm of “Can’t Get Enough” is the best kind on the album, and as heard on “Chasing

Shadows” for instance, it’s also when White gets to shimmy and strut along the most. Still she’s nothing if not willing to experiment: while a heavier electro track like “Walking in a Circle” might get a little too murky at times, “Rendezvous Girl” features a jogging and addictive hook that deserves a breaking sweat whenever it happens across a dance floor. —KEVIN WARWICK

MONDAY18 Dave Miller’s Old Door Phantoms DJ Eric Henry spins. 10:30 PM, California Clipper, 1002 N. California. F In the press materials for his new album, Old Door Phantoms (Ears&Eyes), guitarist Dave Miller admits something that few musicians who move to New York in search of success ever do: the city all but crushed his creative spirit. With disarming candor, he writes, “I felt I was failing as a musician and as a human, to a certain degree, as well.” The competitiveness of New York’s jazz scene often forces musicians to find a narrow niche and double down on it, hoping it pays off, and for Miller that was apparently a recipe for disaster. He grew up in the Chicago suburbs and consistently demonstrated great versatility and stylistic curiosity before he split town in 2011. He bailed out on New York last year, taking road

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40 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

Where are the rest of the music listings? Find them at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Santigold ! CHRISTELLE DE CASTRO

trips out west before returning here, and his travels through the wide-open spaces of Glacier National Park, the Badlands, and Yellowstone have inspired the music of his new quartet with keyboardist Ben Boye, electric bassist Matt Ulery, and drummer Quin Kirchner. They play the seven melodically rich originals on Old Door Phantoms (which also includes a cover of Joe Meek’s surf standard “Telstar”) as bruising rock tunes, inflected with funk here and twang there, and their fusion sound reads like a fuck-you to jazz-biz orthodoxy. The quartet is clearly having fun chewing up these themes, and Miller unleashes his inner rock star. The album is a blast, but it feels like a palate-cleansing exercise for Miller—this sound is definitely part of him, but I’m sure he’ll spread his vast talents around town in all sorts of directions in the years to come. —PETER MARGASAK

WEDNESDAY20 Freddie Gibbs See Pick of the Week on page 36. Chris Spencer and Mata open. 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $22-$28. 17+ Parquet Courts, Soda Parquet Courts headline. 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $18 in advance. 18+ porting cast—including his sister and Nickel Creek bandmate, Sara Watkins—but most of the songs feel like boilerplate exercises, largely indistinguishable from the generic Americana clogging record bins year after year. —PETER MARGASAK

Gainesville, Florida, may be the land of throaty, beer-soaked beard rock, but it’s also produced Soda’s blast of twisted noise-punk glory. The trio’s latest release, January’s killer Without a Head EP, borrows heavily from the primitive, sleazy stomp of early-90s Sonic Youth, making it simpler, grosser,

and weirder. Soda’s scuzzy caveman throb stands out from the noise-rock pack largely due to the vocal interplay between bassist Lara Lookabaugh and guitarist Arlington Garrett—the former sings in an alien, disenchanted monotone, while the latter groans and slurs, a juxtaposition that makes these six simple songs disorienting and creepy. The fact that Soda oozed out of the same town that brought us the anthemic grit of Hot Water Music and Against Me! makes their music feel even grosser. Without a Head is out on Dull Tools, the label run by Parquet Courts coleader Andrew Savage, and Soda are supporting those prolific New Yorkers on this tour behind their new album, Human Performance. Out on Rough Trade, it’s Parquet Courts’ best record yet, trading in their usual highstrung frenzy for deliberate, introspective melodies. —LUCA CIMARUSTI v

Touched by Ghoul Lasers and Fast and Shit and Vamos open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. F The dynamo voice of front woman Angela Mullenhour (formerly of Sybris, Coins)—one chorus bellowing and ready to devour stage monitors, the next verse tender and sinister enough to lure you off the edge of a cliff—is undoubtedly the on-paper draw for local noisy-rock foursome Touched by Ghoul. But the band’s eight-track debut full-length, Murder Circus (out via new Chicago imprint Under Road Records), can be such a twisting journey that Mullenhour’s vocals, while always incredible, often better augment the dark guitar melodies summoned between her and guitarist Andrea Bauer (who is a former Reader photo editor, by the by). While tracks like opener “B.A.C.M.” and its predecessor “Whores” brazenly shoot through rhythms like all get out and request the thread of Mullenhour forceful vocals to weave together the web, the album’s back half, including “Immaculate Consumption”—with its off-kilter, jagged bridge and crescendoing hypnotic outro—and the banger “Nice Corpse” are mostly carried forward by straightahead rhythms and a hard punk fervor that should have you tapping your foot along in no time. Tonight is the record-release party for Murder Circus. —KEVIN WARWICK

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TUESDAY19 Sean Watkins Anthony D’Amato opens. 8 PM, City Winery, 1200 W. Randolph, $12-$20. b Sean Watkins’s sweet, keening voice injects sinister warmth into “What to Fear,” the title track of his new solo album on Thirty Tigers. The song examines the cynical tendency of media and business to sow fear and need among the public, manufacturing a craving for a kind of narcotic, meaningless comfort they’re more than happy to provide. Watkins has long been a key member of bluegrass-pop outfit Nickel Creek, and if you’re familiar with him in that context—his voice, his personality, his nimble guitar playing—you’ll definitely recognize him here. Except on the title track, though, Watkins doesn’t demonstrate the charisa or songwriting chops that might generate the same kind of excitement Nickel Creek does. The album is solid, and it has a strong sup-

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The Chicago Theatre / Sunday, August 7 ON SALE THIS FRIDAY AT 10AM!

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APRIL 14, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 41

FOOD & DRINK

R NAOKI | $$$

2300 N. Lincoln Park West 773-868-0002 naoki-sushi.com

NEW REVIEW

Naoki is serious sushi The secluded Lettuce Entertain You sushi spot helmed by chef Naoki Nakashima is refreshingly gimmick free. By MIKE SULA

Mackerel dressed with yuzu-chile paste ! JEFFREY MARINI

42 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 14, 2016

aybe you didn’t realize this but the reason it’s called a rainbow roll is because it’s supposed to look like a rainbow. Most sushi restaurants construct this ignoble makimono in such a way that it resembles not so much a moisture-dispersed alignment of the color spectrum as a rag someone would wear to a Phish show. The revelation came to me at Naoki, Lettuce Entertain You’s secluded sushi restaurant hidden behind the kitchen at Intro in Lincoln Park’s Belden Stratford apartments. There I sat at the bar and watched rainbow after perfect rainbow pass over the top as if the chefs were unicorns on laxatives. Pretty as they are, why so many of these crab-cored columns of tuna, salmon, hamachi, and avocado, I wondered, when chef Naoki Nakashima and his minions are capable of sculpting far more subtle and exquisite wonders working with single species? Nakashima has been something of a sleeper agent in Empire Lettuce for some years now, handling the serviceable if prosaic sushi operations for Shaw’s Crab House in River North and Tokio Pub in Schaumburg. He wasn’t even tapped to lead this adventure back when LEYE announced Juno’s now-estranged partners, B.K. Park and Jason Chan, would take it over. That wasn’t the first time Lettuce struggled to find purpose for the late L2O’s hushed private dining room where Laurent Gras once served cured escolar with espelette and mussels in coconut gelee to Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert. Now it’s congested and loud, especially compared to Intro’s muted dining room. Don’t get seated between the pillar and the water pitchers; the worst seat in the house (call it the go-fuck-yourself table) will make the fine fish taste like bait. But if you’re lucky enough to get closer to the action, you can see all the piscine loveliness coming from behind that bar. Nakashima’s signature here is the composed sashimi plate. Five pieces of perfect, glistening fish, arranged like flower petals, with a delicate garnish or two and a light sauce, maybe a bit of oil, perhaps a shiso leaf and a few microplaned root vegetables as a centerpiece. So you might receive thick, buttery sections of scallop crowned with paper-thin slices of serrano pepper and jiggling orbs of roe bathed in a light, barely perceptible yuzu-infused dashi (a Japanese broth), a few squiggles of vivid green shiso oil breaking up the negative

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Rainbow roll " JEFFREY MARINI

space. There are rosy slabs of madai, Japanese sea bream, arranged as if swimming on the surface of mushroom dashi, each topped with a pair of tiny shimeji mushroom caps. Or take a semicircle of sweet chilled lobster, kissed with gingery soy and topped with pickled radishes. In each case, Nakashima’s Japanese-appropriate dressings don’t fuck with the integrity of the fish. It’s a sensible, noninvasive way to treat high-quality sea creatures. Nakashima gives the same subtle treatment to the specialty sashimi and nigiri: slabs of scarlet bluefin tuna with a whisper of soy, topped with dabs of black-olive tapenade and pureed edamame. So long as chefs insist on serving this overfished species, you might try to restore balance to the universe (if not the ocean) by choosing instead the light, almost translucent (and sustainable) mackerel, its skin shining like armor, dressed with just a touch of citric yuzu-chile paste. Pink hamachi is spotted with oniony puree, while the lush fattiness of red salmon is given a lick of smoked soy and textured with a scrap of crispy fried shallot. While these pieces are oceans away from the overembellished monstrosities many sushi chefs use to disguise bad fish, you can opt for even more minimal options, as well as flashier ones. But the operating principle is restraint, which doesn’t mean the subordinate details can’t be pretty special too. The tamago at the core of a salmon-miso maki and a separate unagi maki is probably the smoothest omelet I’ve come across in a sushi bar. The

black-garlic sauce that may streak across the plate between two maki is there only if you want it. (It would make a good salad dressing.) Fresh wasabi, available for an upcharge, is grated, as per custom, on sharkskin. Don’t overlook or hesitate on specials. Every time I got around to the uni, it had already sold out. There are a few larger main plates: lobster, chicken teriyaki, and miso sea bass—but these seem ancillary compared to the more thoughtful appetizers such as tuna tacos, edamame “guac,” and truffle chawanmushi, whose faint fungal character fails to live up to its promise, barely registering over the properly silky custard. A surprisingly abbreviated selection of sakes and beers competes with a much larger wine list, though the seven Japanese whiskeys are far more intriguing, and a few cocktails, namely a pleasantly cheesy miso old-fashioned and the Six Corner Sling, fueled by rye and chartreuse, are worth a sip. Service at this point is woefully harried— unless you’re sitting at the bar, often staffed with four to five chefs who can provide one of the more efficient and exuberant sushi experiences in the city (even on occasions when LEYE chef Jean Joho is mysteriously glowering in the background). Lettuce’s penchant for gimmicky themes is blessedly absent, mirroring Nakashima’s approach to sushi: focused, reverent, but still a lot of fun. v

! @MikeSula

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