Chicago Reader: print issue of April 28, 2016 (Volume 45, Number 29)

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 2 8 , 2 0 1 6

Politics CPS still won’t say exactly why it yanked beloved principal Troy LaRaviere. 10

Food & Drink Chef Noah Sandoval spreads his wings at the splurge-only Oriole. 37

The golden ticket

The CHA’s “supervouchers” were supposed to help public housing residents get out of bad neighborhoods and integrate a divided city. So why did the city kill the program before it had a chance to succeed?

By MERIBAH KNIGHT AND MAYA DUKMASOVA 11

©2016 Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company.

Skittles and the Upside Down Rainbow and all affiliated designs are trademarks of the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company or its affiliates.

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2 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

THIS WEEK

C H I C AG O R E A D E R | A P R I L 2 8 , 2 01 6 | VO LU M E 4 5, N U M B E R 2 9

TO CONTACT ANY READER EMPLOYEE, E-MAIL: (FIRST INITIAL)(LAST NAME) @CHICAGOREADER.COM

EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE A. 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 4 Agenda The play Feral, Juan Muñoz at the Art Institute, Zine Fest, and more recommendations

24 Movies In The Club, a sanctuary for disgraced Catholic priests becomes a metaphor for Chile after Pinochet. Plus: Asghar Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday

CITY LIFE

8 Street View A buyer for a secondhand store got a crash course in fashion and business.

MUSIC

22

ARTS & CULTURE

8

8 Chicagoans Skydiving instructor Tom Aussem talks about occupational hazards.

10 Joravsky | Politics CPS still won’t say exactly why it yanked beloved principal Troy LaRaviere.

19 Classical CSO gives Beyond the Score the final curtain.

20 Theater Ike Holter’s Sender is an astonishing new piece of work on the subject of escape.

20 Dance Choreographer Kyle Abraham grapples with civil rights in the time of Laquan McDonald 22 Chicago Humanities Festival A Q&A with fashion designer Maria Pinto and Chicago Manual of Style editor Carol Saller 23 Chicago Humanities Festival Journalist Alexander Solomon discusses Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change.

30 Shows of note Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires, Into It. Over It., Besnard Lakes, and more 32 The Secret History of Chicago Music Percussionist Henry Gibson was a 20-feet-from-stardom soul warrior.

FOOD & DRINK

37 Restaurant review: Oriole Chef Noah Sandoval spreads his wings at the splurge-only West Loop spot.

40 Cocktail Challenge: Big League Chew A drink infused with shredded gum takes Oak + Char’s Michael Tsirtsis back to his childhood.

CLASSIFIEDS

41 Jobs 41 Apartments & Spaces 43 Marketplace 44 Straight Dope Are politicians dumber than the general population?

45 Savage Love A trans man with a twat wonders if he’ll ever have a love life.

46 Early Warnings Against Me!, Drake, Isley Brothers, Toby Keith, and more shows you should know about in the weeks to come 46 Gossip Wolf Che Arthur celebrates Prince—and his own birthday—onstage with Bob Mould.

37

FEATURES

VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES FABIO CAVALIERI, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD ----------------------------------------------------------------

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ON THE COVER: DESIGN CONCEPT AND BUILDINGS BY SUE KWONG, PHOTOGRAPHY AND RETOUCHING BY DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS, ART DIRECTION

BY PAUL JOHN HIGGINS

! JONATHAN GIBBY

! JONATHAN PETERSEN

DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com

NEWS

MUSIC

The golden ticket

Katie Ernst rises like the tide

Why did the city kill the Chicago Housing Authority’s “supervoucher” program before it had a chance to succeed?

The Chicago jazz bassist and vocalist isn’t just helping herself with her talent—she’s also lifting up her peers and students.

By MAYA DUKMASOVA AND MERIBAH KNIGHT 11

By PETER MARGASAK 27

APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 3

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4 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater

potential. —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 5/15: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 5/2, 7:30 PM, Den Theatre, 1329-1333 N. Milwaukee, 773-609-2336, thenewcolony.org, $20.

Bullets Over Broadway It’s a shame this touring show is non-Equity, because I’d love to be able to recommend it without reservation. The production values are far higher here than they were, for instance, in the egregious non-Equity 42nd Street that stopped in Chicago last month. The cast does a great job with Susan Stroman’s novel choreography. The score, consisting of classic popular tunes from the Roaring Twenties, is loads of fun. Woody Allen’s book, based on his 1994 movie, tells the tale of an earnest young playwright’s Broadway sojourn with a sly wit. And little touches—like the whistling-tea-kettle sound Michael Williams makes to express his utter desperation as the young playwright—are engaging. With so much going right, it’d be nice to know that the actors had all the protections and advantages afforded by a union contract. —TONY ADLER Through 5/1: Wed 2 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, and Tue 7:30 PM, PrivateBank Theatre, 18 W. Monroe, 312-902-1400, broadwayinchicago.com, $19-$85.

Evita Although nicely done under Alex Sanchez’s direction, this Marriott Theatre production is helpless in the face of one enormous obstacle: the material itself. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s 1978 pseudo-opera uses squishy politics and pop psychologizing to tell the story of Eva Perón’s rise from small-town temptress to Argentine saint. It’s bad enough that they contrive a silly opposition between Perón and her countryman Che Guevara—using Guevara as a sort of Marxist terrier—to point out easy ironies. Much worse is the way they boil her life down to the familiar theme of a poor girl’s search for true love. Even a cursory look at the real Evita reveals her complexity, drive, courage, and canniness in addressing issues of class and gender on a national scale. Rice and Webber’s rather sexist Dame-aux-Camelias take sells her far too short. —TONY ADLER Through 6/5: Wed 1 and 8 PM, Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 4:30 and 8 PM, Sun 1 and 5 PM, Marriott Theatre in Lincolnshire, 10 Marriott, Lincolnshire, 847-634-0200, marriotttheatre. com, $50-$55.

Even Longer and Farther Away Penned by Chelsea Marcantel and directed by Thrisa Hodits, the New Colony’s follow-up to its standout production of Byhalia, Mississipi turns to another, more storied part of the south— the Appalachian Trail. The story follows Elliot, an angsty 30-year-old hiking the trail with a motley crew carrying his late father’s ashes to honor the man’s dying wish. The setting, a town “no one finds accidentally and no one leaves before they’re ready,” is ripe for suspension of disbelief, dripping with a southern voodoo vibe. It’s filled with “mountain folk” who seem as old as the trees around them—like Trudy, played by Deanna Reed-Foster, whose earthy power sizzles beneath a patient and observant exterior. But despite an interesting big reveal about Elliot’s father, the show’s emotional depth and character development hardly measure up to the setting’s

Feral This timely new play by R Shepsu Aakhu addresses the Black Lives Matter movement, what a

task force recently dubbed the “systemic racism” of the Chicago Police Department, and how these things get depicted in the media. The action hinges on the shooting by police of a radicalized graffiti artist named Francis Xavier (FX for short); in nonlinear scenes we see the buildup and aftermath from the perspective of FX’s spirited teen sister and irascible father. Aakhu has political points to make, but the considerable power of the play stems from the anger and heartbreak of the characters. The same goes for Carla Stillwell’s absorbing production for MPAACT, which features a pair of wrenching performances from Victoria Allen and George C. Stalling as FX’s grieving family. —ZAC THOMPSON Through 5/29: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lin-

In the Heat of the Night In his 2010 stage adaptation of John Ball’s 1965 novel, California playwright Matt Pelfrey borrows plot elements from Stirling Silliphant’s screenplay for the Oscar-winning 1967 film version as well as from Ball’s original book—and also tacks on an extra twist ending different from both. Set in 1962, this noiresque murder mystery concerns an African-American homicide investigator from Pasadena reluctantly recruited to help the all-white police force of a small Alabama town track down a killer. As the detective does his duty he puts his own life at risk, incurring the rage of local racists already on edge about civil rights “agitators” disrupting their way of life.

Shattered Globe Theatre’s production never quite captures the feeling of sultry tension the story demands, though Michael Stanfill’s imaginative lighting design fills the intimate space with a palpable sense of mystery. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 6/5: Thu-Sun 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, sgtheatre.org, $33.

In the Time of the Butterflies Like a sadistic child pulling the wings off butterflies, a dictator destroys a happy family in this adaptation of Julia Alvarez’s 1994 novel. The plot is a fictionalized account of the four Mirabal sisters of the Dominican Republic. In the 1950s, they fought against the bloody regime of Rafael Trujillo, who had three of the women assassinated in 1960. Ricardo Guitierrez’s lyrical staging for Teatro Vista captures the contradictions of tyranny in a tropical paradise, thanks to impassioned performances and lush visuals, particularly Uriel Gomez’s colorful costumes and Liviu Pasare’s gorgeous video projections. All that’s missing from Caridad Svich’s script is historical context; we’re shown Trujillo’s lechery and horrible mistreatment of the Mirabal family, but we could use a clearer detailing of his crimes. —ZAC THOMPSON Through 5/22: Wed 10 AM, Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773871-3000, teatrovista.org, $25-$30, $18 Wednesdays.

The Lion in Winter The zingers and venomous retorts in James Goldman’s costume drama may sound timeless out of the mouths of Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole in the Oscar-winning 1968 movie version, but on the contemporary stage this 1966 play centered on Henry II shows its age. It’s not for lack of capable performers that this Promethean Ensemble production, directed by Brian Pastor, lags and feels out of sync—Brian Parry and Elaine Carlson as King Henry and Eleanor of Aquitane (forerunners of Empire’s Lucious and Cookie Lyon, if you will) play up the comedy in their cat-anddog power-couple dynamic as much as Goldman’s sometimes forced dialogue allows. But this is well-trod territory, and the two hours-plus of royal conniving winds up stranded somewhere between sketch comedy wackiness and ineffectual Shakespearean sobriety. —DAN JAKES Through 5/21: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6860, prometheantheatre. org, $24, seniors $19, students $14.

The Producers Director L. R Walter Stearns’s revival of Mel Brooks’s well-crafted showbiz musical

comedy (written with Broadway veteran Thomas Meehan) is remarkable for what it doesn’t do: attempt to mimic either the blockbuster 2005 Broadway version or the iconic 1968 movie (starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder). Instead, Stearns packs his cast with capable performers who have their own takes on Brooks’s characters. Most notably, Bill Larkin and Matt Crowle remake the show’s leads (a crooked producer and his timid accountant) in their own image, finding new laughs in the old material while making their partnership seem less contrived. Likewise, Allison Sill transforms the stereotypically sexist role of a curvy Swedish secretary into something real, believable, and not so very sexist at all.—JACK HELBIG Through 6/26: Wed 8 PM, Thu 3 and 8 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Mercury Theater, 3745 N. Southport, 773-325-1700, mercurytheaterchicago.com, $30-$65.

A Splintered Soul Perhaps ARLA Productions’ decision to premiere Alan Lester Brooks’s Holocaust survivor play on

The Producers ! BRETT A. BEINER

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Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of April 28

LIT Chicago Zine Fest An annual R fest celebrating small presses and independent publishers from all over

the city. For a full schedule of events, visit chicagozinefest.org. 4/29-4/30, various locations, chicagozinefest.org.

Freda Love Smith In celebration R of Independent Bookstore Day, musician, author, and baker Freda Love

Smith discusses and signs copies of her new memoir, Red Velvet Underground: A Rock Memoir With Recipes, and offers samples of her baked goods. Sat 4/30, 12:30 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, 773-769-9299, womenandchildrenfirst.com.

Taste Surely people will critR icize Benjamin Brand’s 2014 play—based on the true story of two

German men who met so that one could kill, cook, and eat the other—for its prurience (and director Aaron Sawyer’s agonizing, exacting Red Theater production doesn’t spare the weak of stomach).

But the brutality is nothing compared to, say, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

Better to criticize the thematic flimsiness; Brand turns an unaccountable encounter into an overworked, overfamiliar search for a “real” experience in a hypermediated, hyperisolative world.

But dramatically Taste is delicious, and Sawyer expertly orchestrates 90 minutes of excruciating but often hilarious tension. His cast, Gage Wallace and Kevin V. Smith, bring dancerlike precision to nearly every moment. It’s harrowing, hysterical, horrifying, and singularly exhilarating. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 5/22: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays, Sundays, Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-728-7529, redtheater.org. F

Kay Cannon hosts Laughs for Limbs ! ALEX J. BERLINER/UNIVERSAL PICTURES

Faith Foundation, which provides help for amputees. Sat 4/30, 6:30 PM, iO Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov.com/ chicago, $25.

Simmer Brown This comedy R showcase hosted by Prateek Srivastava, Sameena Mustafa, and Rishika

Murthy features three guest comedians: Kellye Howard, Brian Smith, and Taneshia Rice. Sat 4/30, 8 PM, North Bar, 1637 W. North, 773-123-5678, liveatnorthbar.com, $10.

DANCE

VISUAL ARTS

Miami City Ballet Miami City R Ballet presents two different programs over a two-night engagement. Fri

Art Institute of Chicago “Thirteen Laughing at Each Other,” an immersive exhibition by the late Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz (1953-2001). 4/28-10/8. “Foot Soldiers of Fashion,” an exhibit inspired by the Landsknechte, 16th-century German mercenaries as famous for their elaborate attire as for their formidable pikes and halberds. 5/4-11/4. Sun–Wed 10:30 AM–5 PM, Thu-Fri 10:30 AM–8 PM, Sat 10:30 AM–5 PM. 111 S. Michigan, 312443-3600, artinstituteofchicago.org, $25, $19 students, seniors ($5 discount for Chicago residents), free kids under 14; free for Illinois residents Thursdays 5-8 PM.

4/29-Sat 4/30: 7:30 PM, Harris Theater for Music and Dance, 205 E. Randolph, 312-334-7777, harristheaterchicago.org, $35-$130.

Versus An experimental dance R performance that stages different choreography to original music by Antibody Corporation each night. Thu 4/28-Sat 4/30: 7 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, 312-744-6630, chicagoculturalcenter.org. F

COMEDY Laughs for Limbs Kay Cannon R (30 Rock, Pitch Perfect) hosts a night of improv to benefit Steps of

Chicago Artists Coalition “Today Is a New Day,” multimedia artist Iris Bernblum presents her latest solo exhibition.

Opening reception Fri 4/29 at 6 PM. 4/29-5/19. Mon-Thu 9 AM-5 PM, Fri 9 AM-noon. 217 N. Carpenter, 312-491-8887, chicagoartistscoalition.org.

Freda Love Smith ! MARC HAUSER

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/ movies NEW REVIEWS The Club Pablo Larraín (No) directed this story of a young Jesuit investigating a seaside residence used to hide disgraced priests. For J.R. Jones’s review, see page 24. Fri 4/29, 6 PM; Sat 4/30, 8:15 PM; Sun 5/1, 3 PM; Mon 5/2, 7:45 PM Tue 5/3, 8:15 PM; and Wed 5/4, 6 PM; and Thu 5/5, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

R

11 Minutes Fast-moving and formally adventurous, Jerzy Skolimowski’s Polish drama (2015) begins with a quintet of selfie videos, captured on phones, laptops, and closed-circuit TV, that introduce five different characters; after that a more omniscient perspective takes over, and the characters’ lives intersect as Skolimowski follows each through the same 11-minute time span. The best story line involves a sexy actress (Paulina Chapko) fending off the advances of an

American film director (Richard Dormer) in a plush hotel room while her violent boyfriend (Wojciech Mecwaldowski) searches every floor of the building for them. None of the other stories has been developed as fully as this one, but Skolimowski’s technique is impressive: the overlapping narratives are expertly handled, and the points of intersection can be dazzling. In English and subtitled Polish. —J.R. JONES 83 min. Fri 4/29, 6 PM; Sat 4/30, 3 and 6:30 PM; Sun 5/1, 5 PM; Mon 5/2, 6 PM; Wed 5/4, 6 PM; and Thu 5/5, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Fireworks Wednesday Asghar Farhadi (A Separation) directed this 2006 drama about a Tehran couple on the verge of divorce. For J.R. Jones’s review, see page 25. 102 min. Fri-Tue 4/29-5/3, 3 and 7:30 PM; Wed 5/4, 3 PM; and Thu 5/5, 3 and 7:30 PM. Music Box The Huntsman: Winter’s War Whoever came up with the idea of turning the Snow White legend into a PG-13 Game of Thrones is a stone-cold marketing genius. This sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) is digestible as big-budget fantasies go, with capable actors in front of the camera (Emily Blunt, Charlize Theron, Jessica Chastain, Chris Hemsworth) and a story permitting lots of cool special effects in which people and things freeze and erupt into riotous crystals. As in the earlier movie, British character actors (Nick Frost, Rob Brydon, Sheridan Smith, Alexandra Roach) go through the digital looking glass to become dwarves, whose comic scenes, full of romantic fussin’ and fightin’, are uniformly insufferable. Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, a visual effects artist, makes his feature directing debut. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 114 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Lake, New 400, Showplace ICON Keanu Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, of the Comedy Central sketch program Key & Peele, make their bigscreen debut with this weak gangster farce, which begins with a silly premise and follows it to its barely amusing conclusion. After a kitten gets loose from a violent drug lord, Peele finds and adopts it, naming it after his favorite underappreciated actor; bad guys break into his home and steal the cat, so he and Key set out to rescue the little thing. As a comedy team, the stars come off like Costello and Costello, each peddling his own brand of ironic weirdness (Key spends much of his screen time trying to indoctrinate hardened thugs into the music of George Michael). The incongruity between their white-bread delivery and the bad guys’ jive generates a few laughs, but not enough to salvage this thing. Peter Atencio directed a script by Peele and Alex Rubens; with Will Forte, Nia Long, Luis Guzmán, and Method Man. —J.R. JONES R, 98 min. !

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the second day of Passover accounted for the half-filled house opening night.

Or perhaps even the nonobservant knew to stay away. Brooks has spectacular material at his fingertips. A handful of Polish Jews who survived Hitler’s camps cling together in 1947 San Francisco, watched over by former resistance fighter Rabbi Kroeller. Gradually they reveal the horrible acts they perpetrated in order to survive the Nazis; one built steel doors for the Treblinka gas chambers, where his own family was gassed.

Selected moments are engrossing, but most of the time Brooks’s dramatics are clunky, his dialogue tin-eared, and his symbolism transparent. Keira Fromm’s mundane direction provides insufficient momentum to bring much to life.

—JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 5/29: ThuFri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252, stage773.com, $20-$36.

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

www.BrewView.com

3145 N. Sheffield at Belmont

Movie Theater & Full Bar $5.00 sion admis e for th s M o v ie

18 to enter 21 to drink Photo ID required

Friday, April 29 @ 7:00pm Sun, May 1 @ 4:00pm Mon-Thr, May 2-5 @ 7:00pm

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Friday, April 29 @ 9:00pm Sun, May 1 @ 6:00pm Mon-Thr, May 2-5 @ 9:00pm

10 Cloverfield Lane Friday, April 29 @ 11:00pm Sun, May 1 @ 8:00pm

Ride Along 2 y Onl ! Purple Rain $5 Starring PRINCE!

Fri 5/6, Sat 5/7 & Sun 5/8 at 7:00pm Tickets: http://purplerain1984.bpt.me

APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 5

AGENDA To Sleep With Anger

!B Century 12 and CineArts 6, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Lake, New 400, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Showplace ICON The Meddler Lorene Scafaria, who made her debut as writer-director with the apocalyptic love story Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012), returns with a more conventional domestic comedy about a lonely widow (Susan Sarandon) driving her lonely daughter (Rose Byrne) around the bend.

Mom just needs someone to care for, and it can’t be that divorcee with the big gut who keeps hitting on her (Michael McKean); it must be that virile ex-cop who gives her enough space and really appreciates her as a person (J.K. Simmons, wearing a Wilford Brimley mustache). In many respects this plays like a senior-citizen romance with Diane Keaton, but it goes down much easier, thanks to the players’ sincerity and the credible, unassuming dialogue. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 100 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre

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

6 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

Old Fashioned: The Story of the Wisconsin Supper Club Wisconsin native Holly L. De Ruyter traces the history of supper clubs, one of her state’s most beloved cultural institutions, and pays homage to the “supper club values” they instill.

“We have that strong sense of community and fellowship around food,” one patron avows, and her sentiment is echoed throughout the documentary, especially in the customers’ credo of eschewing chains for local businesses. With a title referencing both the unofficial state cocktail and the time-honored ideals of most supper clubs, this is a love letter to midwestern life as much as the clubs themselves, and there’s the rub. Midwestern traditionalists and socially conscious foodies may appreciate the patrons’ reclamation of dining as a sacred, unhurried, and communal experience, but the specificity of

the subject and the homogeneity of the interviewees may prove off-putting to outsiders. —LEAH PICKETT 51 min. De Ruyter attends the screenings. Fri 4/29, 2 PM; Sat 4/30, 5:15 PM; Sun 5/1, 3 PM; Mon 5/2, 6 PM; and Wed 5/4, 7:45 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Rio, I Love You Producer Emmanuel Benbihy has taken it upon himself to bring love to the world one city at a time, and after Paris, Je T’Aime (2006) and New York, I Love You (2009) he hits Rio de Janeiro with the usual international assortment of directors, whose short segments are strung together into a single narrative (2014). The attractions here are Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), whose typically wry story involves a rich old coot (Basil Hoffman) and his pretty young wife (Emily Mortimer); Im Sang-soo (The Housemaid) spinning a wild tale of vampires who have taken over a town and dance in the streets at night; and José Padilha (Elite Force), whose hero skydives past the giant Christ the Redeemer statue and tells Jesus off. Unfortunately these striking moments are overtaken by the fruit-juice mediocrity of everything else, particularly a connecting narrative about a cabdriver who insists on telling all his riders about the woman who got away. With luck the franchise should give out before we have to watch Boise, I Love You. In English and subtitled French, Spanish, and Portuguese. —J.R. JONES 110 min.

Fri 4/29, 2 and 8 PM; Sat 4/30, 3 PM; Mon 5/2, 7:45 PM; Tue 5/3, 6 PM; Wed 5/4, 8 PM; and Thu 5/5, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

REVIVALS Get Crazy A sympathetic but disappointing 1983 follow-up to Rock ’n’ Roll High School by director Allan Arkush. Based on his experiences as a light rigger at the Fillmore East, Arkush’s loosely structured story takes place during a New Year’s concert at a

west-coast rock palace that brings together (and lampoons) a fantasy assortment of musical styles: a big city bluesman (Bill Henderson), an addled acid rocker (Howard Volman), a burned-out folkie (Lou Reed), an animalistic punk (Lee Ving), and a British superstud (Malcolm McDowell). Daniel Stern is the manager struggling to keep the show on the road, despite assaults from a motorcycle gang and a bomb planted by a business rival (Ed Begley Jr.). Arkush’s communal vision has a utopian charm, and no one would accuse him of a lack of energy and invention—it’s just that the gags are too numerous, too uneven, and too fuzzily executed to provide the rush the film is aiming for. —DAVE KEHR R, 92 min. Wed 5/4, 7:30 PM. Northeastern Illinois University Auditorium To Sleep With Anger It R seems scandalous that Charles Burnett, the most gifted

black American director offering purely realistic depictions of black urban life, was able to make this 1990 feature only because Danny Glover agreed to play a leading role. Harry Mention (Glover), an old friend from the rural south, arrives on the doorstep of a Los Angeles family, wreaking subtle and not-so-subtle havoc on their lives. The family is headed by a retired farmer (Paul Butler) and his midwife spouse (Mary Alice), whose two married sons (Carl Lumbly and Richard Brooks) are in constant conflict. Burnett’s acute and sensitive direction is free of hackneyed movie conventions; even something as simple as a hello is said differently from the way you’ve heard it in any other movie. All of Burnett’s features have the density of novels, rich with characters and their interplay, and this one is no exception.

—JONATHAN ROSENBAUM PG, 102 min. University of Chicago professor Jacqueline Stewart introduces this free screening. Fri 4/29, 7 PM. Black Cinema House v

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APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE !

OUR MOST READ ARTICLES LAST WEEK ON CHICAGOREADER.COM IN ASCENDING ORDER:

Chicagoans

The skydiving instructor Tom Aussem

! ISA GIALLORENZO

Here’s what’s missing from the Police Accountability Task Force report —STEVE BOGIRA

Street View

Rahm’s Lucas/McPier plan is straight outta Daley’s playbook of south-loop boondoggles —BEN JORAVSKY Chicago is better poised to survive climate change than New York or LA —ROSS PATRICK ROBINSON

Jill of all trades IF YOU’VE SOLD clothes at a secondhand store, you’re familiar with the scene: a salesperson behind a counter sifting through heaps of apparel, meticulously inspecting each item, all while running the cash register, answering random questions, and greeting new customers. That’s the kind of multitasking Teresa Gugliotta-Kremer does at the buy-selltrade store she works for in Wicker Park. She describes the job as a crash course in fashion and business: “As a buyer, there’s a lot of work that goes into learning to select and price clothing appropriately. Constantly being aware of what’s in the store and what’s selling, looking up brands you encounter and don’t know about, researching trends, learning about clothing construction to distinguish a higher-end piece from a lower-end one.” That practice, she says, helps elevate her own thrifting skills. “I think you can buy everything secondhand,” she says, “except things you wear very close to your body.” —ISA GIALLORENZO

Getting rid of Troy LaRaviere is Rahm’s attempt to silence a vocal schools critic —BEN JORAVSKY

Prince used to obsessively watch the 90s Chicago Bulls—even while performing onstage —JAKE MALOOLEY Diameters of circles are proportional to the number of page views received.

I NEVER USE MY LAST NAME professionally in the sport. I just go by Tom. Because try living up to: “I’m Mr. Awesome, professional skydiver.”

How did I get into skydiving? I just kind of fell into it. (Thank you, thank you.) Well, actually, I started flying airplanes at age eight. My parents lived across the street from the old Ottawa, Illinois, airport, and it had a pop machine and a candy machine, which are magnets for an eight-yearold with a bicycle. I was there one day and a guy said, “If you clean all the bugs off my plane’s wings, I’ll take you up for a little spin.” That was all it took. I was at that airport every day till I got out of high school.

When I was 21, Skydive Chicago opened up at the Ottawa airport. I said “What the heck, let’s give it a whirl.” That was my first skydive: May 1, 1992. Since my parents lived across the street, I’d be up there practicing, looking down and seeing my aunt and uncle arrive at my parents’ house, and I’d think, “It’s almost dinnertime. I’ll just land in their backyard and eat dinner.”

I currently work at Skydive Milwaukee, and most of my students do the tandem skydive. I wear a parachute on my back, and you’re attached to the front of me, belly to earth. Over the past 24 years, I’ve pretty much seen

“I have been pooped on, peed on, had people pass out,” says Tom Aussem about occupational hazards. ! CARLY RIES everything that somebody could do to me in free fall. I have been pooped on, peed on, had people pass out. It’s very lonely under the parachute when that happens. When we’re being videoed, I like to play it up a little bit, so I always open my mouth really big and give a great big “Yahoo!” Well, one time my mouth comes open for the “Yahoo!,” and a great big booger comes flying out of the other guy’s nose and into my mouth.

I was jumping in Colorado for a while, in an area with lots of colleges.

All these college girls would come, and in every group there were one or two who refused to get out of the plane. It was like trying to flush a cat down the toilet. Now, as the sport has progressed and liability has changed, if somebody doesn’t want to leave the airplane, you can try to reassure them, but there’s not nearly as much coaxing and pushing as there used to be. I will say that of all the times I have

ever coaxed someone out, they’ve never regretted it.

Modern parachutes are designed so that you come to nearly a complete stop right at the moment you touch down. It’s akin to just stepping down a regular step in your house. And with tandems, we’ll have the student raise their feet up in the air as high as they can for the landing. I’m only five-footfive, so if they were to stand up, I’d be dangling off their back like a monkey.

I don’t particularly get an adrenaline rush from jumping. I just get a feeling of: “I just did something cool that’ll probably change someone’s life forever.” It takes a lot for some people to get to the point where they can jump out of an airplane, and I understand that, and I’m very proud of them for doing it just once. It really is something I think everybody should do. If you make even one skydive, you put yourself into a vastly smaller pool of people. —AS TOLD TO ANNE FORD

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

" Arianna Huffington The media mogul discusses her book The Sleep Revolution as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s spring programming. See page TK for more on CHF. 6 PM, Francis W. Parker School, 2233 N. Clark, chicagohumanities. org, $15.

# The Na ked Ma gic Show Christoper Wayne and Mike Tyler prove that you don’t need clothes to be a skilled magician in this show that combines stripping with sleight of hand. 7:30 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage, parkwestchicago.com, $20-$75.

" American Wh iskey Festival Celebrate whiskey the American way with unlimited samples of more than 100 different kinds, barbecue from Haywood Tavern, a tasting glass, and specials on all whiskey cocktails. 1-4 PM, Crown Liquors, 2821 N. Milwaukee, $35.

$ Chicago Corrupti on Walking Tour Two options for exploring Chicago’s history of corruption on foot: the first spans about a mile and ends at State Street, while the second (the “Bleepin’ Golden Package”) goes on for another mile and ends at the Chicago Brown Line stop. 1 PM, 427 S. Clark, dabble.co, $15-$25.

% Chicago Improv Festival It’s no secret that Chicago is home to some of the world’s most talented improv actors. This fest celebrates them with a weeklong series of events, ranging from musical comedy to long-form and dramatic and experimental performances. 5/2-5/8, various locations, chicagoimprovfestival.org.

" Wine and Wildlife This edition of the lecture series features Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, discussing his book The Humane Economy: How Innovators and Enlightened Consumers Are Transforming the Lives of Animals. Tue 5/3, 6 PM, Lincoln Park Zoo, 2200 N. Cannon, lpzoo.org, $17.

♀ One - Mi nute Play Festival The sixth annual festival features a marathon of one-minute plays by women and women-identified playwrights and directors.

5/3-5/4: 8 PM, Den Theatre, 1333 N. Milwaukee, oneminuteplayfestival.com, $18.

8 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

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APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE

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

Troy LaRaviere ! TRACY SENECA

POLITICS

Principal concerns CPS still won’t say exactly why it yanked Troy LaRaviere.

By BEN JORAVSKY

A

fter Chicago Public Schools officials banished Blaine Elementary School principal Troy LaRaviere, putting him under their version of house arrest, folks all over town looked toward Monday, April 25, as the day of revelation.

That’s when the central office promised to reveal what alleged crimes against humanity LaRaviere committed to warrant being unceremoniously yanked from his job in the middle of spring break.

They could have waited to yank him till summer, when school’s out. Or they could have kept him where he was—what with him being an award-winning principal and everything.

And so it was on Monday that a hush fell over the jam-packed Blaine auditorium as CPS official Janice Jackson announced that Troy Anthony LaRaviere was guilty of . . .

Kicking over the lamp in Mrs. O’Leary’s barn!

10 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

Only joking—Troy’s too young to have started the Great Chicago Fire, though I’m sure Mayor Emanuel would blame it on him if he could.

Alas, the rationale Jackson offered up Monday was as vague as the one given when CPS announced last week that it had “reassigned” LaRaviere “to home.”

According to Jackson, LaRaviere faces 12 unspecified charges having to do with “dereliction of duty, ethics violations of CPS policy and insubordination.”

Plus, he double-dipped in the guacamole at Blaine’s Christmas party.

For what it’s worth, my explanation for why CPS officials did what they did is because Mayor Rahm told them to.

The mayor’s got to be sick and tired of LaRaviere blasting the hell out of him for intimidating principals, force-feeding students standardized tests, wasting time with burden-

some teacher evaluations, stripping schools of funding and trying to privatize what’s left.

LaRaviere has his own blog where he writes things like—just to pick one example—“unfortunately, our mayor and his appointed board of education have been so irresponsible and so reckless, that I find myself squarely in agreement with the CTU on several school issues.”

A principal defending the Chicago Teachers Union? Now that’s revolutionary!

And bound to stick in the mayor’s craw.

Also, LaRaviere endorsed Jesus “Chuy” Garcia over Emanuel in last year’s mayoral election. Then the principal doubled down by doing a commercial for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in which he said, “The chief politician standing in the way of us getting good schools is our mayor.”

Even I never said that. Though if you asked . . .

After LaRaviere was reassigned, Sanders issued a statement ripping “Mayor Emanuel’s unhealthy obsession with taking revenge.”

You know, it’s sad that you’ve got to go all the way to Vermont to find a Democratic elected official willing to tell it like it is about Rahm.

Emanuel might have been willing to overlook all this if LaRaviere hadn’t pursued an even bigger bully pulpit by running for president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association.

As someone I know recently said, having LaRaviere at the head of the principals’ group would be like having two Karen Lewises in town. Who was it again? Oh, wait, that was me.

LaRaviere’s reassignment bars him from entering any public school, which will make it difficult for him to campaign for next month’s election. Still, Jackson said Monday that LaRaviere was free to run.

Jackson also insisted that LaRaviere’s reassignment was not the result of his criticism of the mayor. “I can honestly say this was not a politically motivated decision,” she said.

This was a follow-up to her remarks last week, when she said, “We did not consult with the mayor in making this decision.”

Actually, the real question is whether Emanuel consulted with her before he made the decision. Or did he just bark out the command?

For the record, Emanuel claims he had nothing to do with LaRaviere’s punishment, telling reporters, “I do not get involved in a personnel decision.”

I think Chicagoans believe this about as much as they believe Rahm’s assertion that last year’s election played no role in his decision to bury the Laquan McDonald video.

Monday’s meeting was Jackson’s first opportunity as an official to face a hostile northside audience enraged by an ill-conceived CPS decision shoved down their throats.

This is a rite of passage that previous CPS leaders (such as Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan) have had to endure.

Emanuel and Claypool live within walking distance of Blaine Elementary. But apparently they were busy doing something else on Monday—perhaps hiding under their desks.

Unlike Duncan or Vallas, however, Jackson isn’t the highest-ranking CPS official—she’s the chief education officer. The chief executive officer (can they make this anymore confusing?) is Forrest Claypool, Emanuel’s old pal.

Coincidentally, Emanuel and Claypool both live within walking distance of Blaine. But apparently they were busy doing something else on Monday—perhaps hiding under their desks—so they dispatched Jackson to face the crowd.

Now this showdown moves to the principals’ association election—words I never imagined I would write.

Traditionally, the association has been a moderate group that stays clear of confrontations with the mayor.

The other candidate in the race is Kenneth Hunter, who took an admirable stand against Emanuel’s decision to stick a Noble Network charter school across the street from Prosser Career Academy, a public vocational high school.

But in this race, Hunter’s clearly Rahm’s candidate—or at least the candidate Emanuel wants to win.

When I called LaRaviere for an interview, he said he had no comment.

But it looks as though he’ll be very busy over the next few weeks, simultaneously running for office while defending himself against CPS’s accusations—whatever they may be. v

! @joravben

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The golden ticket

The CHA’s “supervouchers” were supposed to help public housing residents get out of bad neighborhoods and integrate a divided city. So why did the city kill the program before it had a chance to succeed?

By MAYA DUKMASOVA AND MERIBAH KNIGHT

O

n the morning of July 8, 2015, Julian Castro, the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, stood before a group of reporters and television cameras on Chicago’s south side. Flanked by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago Housing Authority’s acting CEO, Eugene Jones, Castro was in town to make an important announcement—a mea culpa of sorts on behalf of the American government. Nearly 50 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, the nation had failed to reverse decades of segregation. “The truth is, for too long federal efforts have often fallen short,” Castro said, dressed in a navy blue suit and a black tie, his boyish face framed by a thinning hairline slicked into his signature side part. It was time, Castro said, for cities to step up and with help from the federal government do what the law requires and “affirmatively further” fair housing.

But for cities and towns to receive federal funds, he added, they’d need to account for how the money would be used to reduce racial disparities.

If they then failed to meet their objectives, there would be penalties.

Chicago was a fitting backdrop for Castro’s announcement, with its decades of housing policies that kept poor blacks stacked atop one another in decrepit high-rises and discriminatory real estate practices that confined them to deprived neighborhoods. Arguably, no city illustrates the failure of this landmark legislation more acutely. “We have a long history as it relates to fair housing,” Emanuel said when it was his turn to take the mike, his remarks hinting both at Chicago’s legacy of segregation and efforts to redress it. He stood in the footprint of the old Stateway Gardens, one of the city’s most neglected public housing projects. Emanuel was there to unveil its redevelopment, renamed Park Boulevard. Housing a mix of home owners and renters of various income levels, Park Boulevard was ostensibly a prime example of what Castro was there to promote: a bold and meaningful step in the direction of integration, opportunity, and equality.

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APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 11

But only a fraction of low-income Chicagoans end up living in such developments. The majority—nearly 46,000 people who have vouchers today—find their housing on the private market using government-issued housing choice vouchers, also known as Section 8. And just 11 months before Castro stood shoulder to shoulder with Emanuel telling the country we have to work proactively to integrate our cities, the CHA had slashed a small pilot voucher program aimed at doing just that.

Chicago has rarely found itself in the vanguard of progressive housing policy. But the program the CHA had curtailed embodied a new idea, a targeted intervention to combat the pernicious segregation plaguing Chicago. Under the official title of Exception Payment Standards, the “supervoucher” program, as it came to be called, offered a fraction of qualifying low-income families—those who had good credit and a clean rental history—access to Section 8 vouchers that were much higher than normal amounts, up to 300 percent of the fair market rent set by the federal government.

In Chicago, much to the dismay of housing experts, fair market rent is calculated by averaging rental prices for the whole city, the Gold Coast and Englewood alike. This means that standard vouchers are almost never enough to rent in wealthier neighborhoods, yet often wind up being worth more than the market rent in poor ones (which leads to landlords aggressively recruiting mostly very low-income, mostly African-American voucher holders into the poorest, most segregated parts of town to secure higher rents than they could otherwise).

The supervoucher program worked to counteract this problem. If the fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $1,139 a month with a traditional voucher, a household in t he super voucher progra m could get as much as $3,132 for a two-bedroom. What’s more, the supervouchers could be used only in neighborhoods with low poverty and a low concentration of subsidized housing, known in policy parlance as “opportunity areas.”

How to get a “golden ticket

38,509 voucher households in Chicago

12,500 households attended a moving orientation

1,000 voucher households interested in moving to an opportunity area

To qualify for a fancy building, you must meet the following criteria:

Credit score above 600*

Clean background check

*ONLY ABOUT 27% OF VOUCHER HOUSEHOLDS INTERESTED IN MOVING

No eviction record

Proof of income

Now jump over the following hurdles posed by landlord discrimination:

NO KIDS

NO MINORITIES

Unit passes CHA inspection

YOUR INCOME MUST BE 4X THE RENT

I DON’T TAKE VOUCHERS

Landlord must check these boxes to recieve payment from CHA: ONE-YEAR LEASE RENT IS COMPARABLE TO OTHER SIMILAR UNITS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

IT WAS REALLY HARD TO GET HERE!

! JONATHAN PETERSEN

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12 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

“Supervoucher” is issued 291 TOTAL IN 2013

In 2013, just one person got the 300% “golden ticket” supervoucher

NUMBERS ARE FOR 2013

Critics of the supervouchers claimed the program—comprising less than 2 percent of Chicago’s total Section 8 voucher recipients—was wasting taxpayer funds by placing low-income families in luxury high-rises like Aqua Tower while tens of thousands of families languished on the CHA’s voucher waiting list. Chief among them was then-congressman Aaron Schock, a fresh-faced Republican from Peoria, who demanded that HUD conduct an audit of the program and introduced a bill in Congress to restrict it.

Supporters, on the other hand, saw the expansion of exception rents as one of the housing authority’s most innovative programs to date, one that finally pushed the needle, if ever so slightly, toward integration. Larry Pusateri, an affordable housing developer and CEO of Chicago-based VeriGreen Residential Development, puts it this way: “If you are sincerely trying to integrate, why are people not in the Aqua Tower?”

Still, in the wake of incessant media coverage—and preempting the results of a government audit— CHA scaled back the program, dramatically reducing aid for 244 families and forcing nearly as many to find new housing.

Documents obtained by the Reader through an open records request reveal a plan to improve housing options for low-income Chicagoans, the concept of which was approved by the feds. But the Chicago Housing Authority bungled the program’s execution by failing to keep track of its impact on residents and on the agency’s bottom line. In the end, Chicago’s nascent pro-integration strategy was killed before it ever had the chance to succeed.

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orena, 47, remembers the day she walked into 215 W. Washington. It was her son’s 16th birthday, November 18, 2013. Driving by she had assumed it was a hotel.

Now, sitting in the grand lobby, outfitted with a doorman, crisp white furniture, and bowls overflowing with complimentary apples and oranges, she was shocked that her Section 8 voucher might allow her

to live there. The building had a pool, gym, and a game room. There were fitness classes for residents on the weekends.

But Lorena (who asked to be identified by her middle name because of the stigma attached to subsidized housing), was one of the lucky few supervoucher holders. Lorena was able to transfer a housing voucher from her hometown of South Bend, Indiana, to Chicago after finding a job working for a property manager in Lombard. Thanks to her excellent credit and good track record with landlords, her Chicago voucher wound up covering $2,605 a month, allowing her to consider buildings as nice as this one.

When the building rep took Lorena up to the 32nd floor and showed her a two-bedroom apartment, she was sold. “I was like, I don’t even need to see any more units, this is it,” she recalls. From the kitchen and living room windows she could look out on Washington Street and see Millennium Park. “I had never lived in a high-rise. It was just so nice,” she says. There was a master suite with a bathroom, and her 16-year-old son, Doane (also his middle name) would have his own room and bathroom as well. Lorena applied on the spot and was approved. Six weeks later, on a snowy January day in 2014, she and Doane moved in.

Finding the apartment was a huge relief. Doane was a newly enrolled junior at Hyde Park Academy. Coming from Indiana, Lorena’s biggest fear had been moving to a dangerous part of Chicago and what it could mean for her son. “He’s truly 100 percent a momma’s boy,” she says, her face softening as she reads a text message he just sent.

But she was well aware of how young black men like her son can be stereotyped by the police. Then there was the crime and gangs to consider. “I wasn’t worried about him joining no gang,” Lorena says.

“That’s just not him. He has a mind of his own, he’s not easy to influence—his main concern is school.”

But she’d heard plenty about gang violence in the city and knew a five-foot-five black teenager with dreadlocks could become a target

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in some neighborhoods. Living at 215 W. Washington eased Lorena’s fears; she drove Doane to and from school, but she never worried about him getting around safely on his own in the Loop. Her commute to work in Lombard became more manageable.

Soon, their life developed a comfortable rhythm.

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nknowingly, Lorena had moved into her new apartment in the middle of a shifting debate around fair housing. She arrived in the city just as the CHA, faced with a drastic shortage of affordable units in more prosperous parts of town, was experimenting with a new approach to integration.

For decades, housing policy experts and social scientists have debated both the impact of growing up in a neighborhood with a high concentration of poverty and how best to break up such pockets while helping those who live in them. A central question is whether state and federal money should go toward affordable housing and investment in high-poverty neighborhoods, or whether the money would be better spent offering low-income families the opportunity to move.

The debate was born here in Chicago. In the late 1960s, public housing residents sued the CHA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for racially segregating public housing tenants and constructing the buildings only in poor, black neighborhoods. The case against HUD, Hills v. Gautreaux, went all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 1976 the residents won. The court ordered the federal government to allow 7,100 lowincome families living in Chicago public housing to take vouchers and move to majority-white suburbs, where poverty was low and a select number of landlords had made a commitment to taking them. Studies of this mobility program in the 1980s showed positive outcomes: those who moved were more likely to find jobs, their kids more likely to finish school and go to college. And though it had been predicted that such gains would come at the expense of social isolation, researchers found

that families who moved integrated as successfully into their suburban neighborhoods as their counterparts who moved to south- and west-side neighborhoods in the city.

The results in the Chicago area were so promising that in the early 1990s the federal government decided to try out mobility programs in cities around the country. Results from that experiment, released in 2011, were disappointing, showing little upward mobility for families with children who moved to less poor areas. In 2015, however, a longer-term study of the same program

by Harvard economists found results more in keeping with the earlier Chicago findings: strong economic and educational gains, and significantly better odds for youths to escape poverty. It seemed that mobility had finally proved itself viable.

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ut as Lorena settled into her new apartment, her son doing so well in school that he was ready to graduate a year early, no one was keeping track of the mobility program’s viability in present-day Chicago. From the time news of supervouchers broke in the summer of 2014, the CHA faced a media firestorm and was accused of misappropriating funds. Even Mayor Emanuel chastised the agency for going “awry.” Yet the CHA’s experiment was actually well within the purview of a previous agreement it had with the federal government.

In 1999, Mayor Richard M. Daley was looking to remake the city’s public housing by launching the so-called Plan for Transformation.

Billed as a ten-year undertaking, the plan involved demolishing tens of thousands of units of public housing and greatly expanding the Section 8 voucher program. To execute the unprecedented overhaul, the city needed $1.5 billion from HUD and more control over its finances—a possibility only if the CHA was included in a new laissez-faire HUD pilot program known as Moving to Work.

Participating in the program meant reduced federal oversight so that local housing authorities could have “the flexibility to design and test various approaches” to housing

assistance, according to the agreement. The designation was initially awarded to 24 “high-performing” agencies with proven track records for budgetary efficiency and strong management.

Despite being a poster child for corruption and financial mismanagement, in 2000 the CHA was among those selected by HUD for the program. This baffled observers throughout the country. Today the CHA remains the only one of 42 housing authorities to have gained initial acceptance to the program by a “direct selection.”

In 2009, Daley bragged that it was his own diligent stumping in Washington—taking his case directly to President Clinton, then President George W. Bush—that helped get the housing authority into the program.

Once it was, all CHA had to show was that its various initiatives were working towards achieving Moving to Work’s three core objectives: achieving greater cost effectiveness, increasing housing opportunities, and offering incentives to families whose heads of household were actively working or seeking work.

This is why, in 2010, when CHA officials and housing advocates proposed the supervoucher program, the agency dove in. It seemed logical and innovative, experts figured, to see what more money could do for a small subset of voucher holders: those who could meet the rigorous credit- and background-check requirements of higher-end buildings when the vast majority of Section 8 families were still stuck in neighborhoods with high concentrations of poverty and higher crime rates.

At the supervoucher program’s peak, 766 voucher households received some form of exception payment, a third of them collecting amounts above 150 percent of fair market rent, according to HUD as well as CHA documents obtained through an open records request. Since the program started in 2010, only 22 households have received payments hitting the 300 percent cap.

“These were folks that wanted to do better,” said Chris Klepper, the executive director of Housing Choice Partners, the agency that partnered with the CHA in offering guidance to

“If you are sincerely trying to integrate, why are people not in the Aqua Tower?”

—Affordable housing developer Larry Pusateri

families interested in moving to opportunity areas where supervouchers were used. And housing experts across the board, from developers to lawyers to academics, agreed: These were top-tier voucher holders, so why shouldn’t they have access to premium housing options?

The CHA knew Section 8 vouchers were falling short of offering lowincome families true mobility. In a February 2015 letter to Kelly Anderson, the HUD regional inspector auditing the supervoucher program, CHA’s then-CEO, Michael Merchant, wrote that one reason the CHA decided to raise exception rents to 300 percent of the market rent from 110 percent was to allow voucher holders “to rent apartments in community areas on the North Side of Chicago.” He went on to write that without the exception payments, voucher holders (the vast majority of whom are African-American) “have a difficult time” finding apartments in that part of the city, leaving the south and west sides as their only options.

Plus, developments like Park Boulevard cost more than $150 million to build, so dishing out thousands of dollars more a month for higher rents was actually cheaper in the short term than building more public housing units, which the authority was woefully behind on anyway.

What’s more, the cost of the program at its peak—$4.8 million in 2014— was a small slice of the CHA’s $1 billion budget, nearly half of which is allocated solely to vouchers.

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n June 10, 2014, U.S. rep Aaron Schock stood before members of Congress with a proposal to curb voucher exception payments, arguing that they “reward a few at the expense of so many” and “allow some families to, in essence, hit the lottery.”

The next month, news of the supervouchers started to spread.

Stories appeared in Crain’s Chicago Business and on local TV networks.

A Crain’s editorial cited the program as “an apparent waste of money, even if the numbers are small” and asked “how are the lucky winners selected?

Are politics and favoritism at work?”

Some landlords and property J

APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 13

One voucher holder’s long ride

Erika Weaver’s commute became routine after two unsuccessful years seeking housing in Chicago.

12 AM On Sunday nights Erika Weaver arrives at Union Station after a three-and-ahalf-hour train ride from her home in downstate Mattoon. From here she takes the Blue Line to her grandmother’s house in west-suburban Hines.

continued from 13

managers of buildings that had accepted voucher holders were complaining too. “This is nuts,” property manager Tony Rossi told Crain’s. “Do [voucher holders] really need a 25thfloor apartment with a lake view? It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

The week that news of the exception rents broke, attorney Allison Bethel was on vacation from her job as director of John Marshall Law School’s Fair Housing Legal Clinic.

Bethel has represented many voucher holders in discrimination cases, and when she returned from her trip, her voice mail was filled with concerned calls from them.

The message from CHA to her clients was “get out now,” Bethel says.

“Many of them, it really disrupted their lives. . . . They had moved and they understood that they were not guaranteed this in perpetuity, but they certainly didn’t think they would be ousted within a year, or so quickly.”

On August 29, 2014, Lorena received a letter from the CHA informing her that effective August 11—more than two weeks before the letter was postmarked—the CHA would only approve exception

payments of up to 150 percent of the fair market rent. Lorena’s share of her monthly housing payments would go from $95 to $1,390; the CHA would cover just $1,310, instead of the $2,605 it covered previously.

“Mentally, I couldn’t even wrap my mind around it,” she says.

In the end, there was no legal ground to halt what Schock had set in motion, as the CHA had made no commitment to residents about how long they’d receive the exception payments. Bethel and her staff were, however, able to halt the relocation of the 244 households whose exception rent was above 150 percent until their leases were up or their vouchers were up for renewal, the last of which turn over in 2018. “We were able to limit the harm,” she says.

Still, as the summer turned to fall, voucher holders kept calling Bethel, each one more deflated than the next. “The calls changed from being angry and frustrated to sad and then resignation. And now people are just so disillusioned with the whole thing,” Bethel says of the program.

“Most people who come to me are not looking for a great legal case,” she says. “They are looking to get a house.”

14 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

7:30 AM Weaver leaves her grandmother’s and heads downtown for school.

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n August 2014, though the CHA had already moved to curtail the program, HUD’s Office of Inspector General launched an audit at Schock’s urging. The office requested reams of data and interviewed HUD and CHA staff, investigating how the housing authority had come to set supervouchers at three times the fair market rates and why.

The audit revea led that the program was giving exception payments to 766 families, costing the CHA $4.8 million a year, less than one-half of 1 percent of its total annual budget. In addition, the report noted that CHA started that year with $220 million in reserves for the entire voucher program. That number backed up the findings of a study released six months earlier by the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a Chicago-based bipartisan think tank. It claimed that between 2004 and 2012, the CHA averaged an annual surplus of $90 million while issuing far fewer vouchers than funding allowed—13,534 fewer a year since 2008, to be exact.

Schock also complained that tens of thousands of low-income families

7:45 AM Weaver has been taking the same route to the Blue Line for so long that she knows the bus drivers by name.

languished on a voucher waiting list.

However, in 2014, the real number was far less: 332, according to CHA. (In contrast, the separate waiting list for public housing units was more than 11,200, according to the housing agency.)

What crippled the CHA’s defense of exception payments most of all, though, was its lack of institutional memory. During the life of the supervoucher program, the CHA was helmed by four different CEOs. The churn meant that no one could produce for HUD investigators documents that explained how the agency arrived at the 300 percent cap in 2010. “We don’t know exactly why 300—I think that was a safe number just to be able to capture and give people flexibility,” says Michael Merchant, who headed the CHA when HUD launched its audit.

In the end, HUD’s inspector general found that the CHA “lacked the documentation” to justify its master plan for supervouchers and prove that it was “reasonable and cost effective.”

(Some CHA sources have claimed that the 300 percent cap was based on a 2010 market analysis, but the CHA was unable to provide these

documents to the federal government or the Reader.)

Merchant, who’s now the director of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, emphasizes that the vouchers covering the full 300 percent were only supposed to be used for “extreme situations,” such as a person in need of handicappedaccessible housing.

The CHA’s own records show that throughout the life of the program only 22 households had vouchers that maxed out at the 300 percent exception payment. Additionally, in response to the inspector general’s inquiries, the CHA conducted a retrospective housing market analysis for 2010, which revealed that the Near North Side and Lakeview had more housing units than any other neighborhood, but required nearly 300 percent of the fair market rent to become accessible to families with children.

Records also show that from the start of the exception-rent pilot, CHA was transparent with HUD about its objectives and the local housing authority’s cost. In fact, it had come to an understanding with the federal agency that cost management wasn’t the program’s driving factor. In

l

Photos by SUNSHINE TUCKER

8 AM Waiting for the train at the Forest Park stop

9 AM After an hour on the Blue Line, Weaver transfers to the Red Line at Jackson.

She waits at particular parts of the platforms to make her transfer easier.

9:15 AM Weaver finally arrives at Loyola University’s downtown law school campus.

On Wednesday she’ll head back to Mattoon and start the cycle again.

CHA’s 2010 proposal for the program to HUD, the housing authority said it sought to revise the objective of exception payments, from “reducing costs and increasing housing options to only increasing housing options for low-income families.” CHA’s primary concern was no longer how much the subset of supervouchers cost, but rather what options it could provide low-income families to get out of high-poverty neighborhoods. Documents show that in 2010, when HUD asked CHA about the anticipated cost savings from the exception rents, CHA replied: “there is no anticipated amount of reduced costs.” HUD approved the change of language. As such, every subsequent annual report states only one statutory objective for the supervoucher program: “Increase housing choices for low income families.”

During the audit, in September 2014, CHA provided HUD’s inspector general with a financial analysis of people in the program who were receiving higher exception payments.

The analysis showed that if the exception payment cap was dropped to 150 from 300 percent, only 9 percent of families would be able to afford their current units, or 21

families out of 234. Despite the fact that hundreds of people like Lorena were likely to be priced out of their homes—and despite HUD’s 2010 approval of CHA’s revised objectives— investigators determined that CHA was in violation of its Moving to Work agreement.

Both HUD and CHA sources say the inspector general’s findings were frustrating after the two agencies had collaborated on the pilot. Once the report was published, however, HUD had no choice but to enforce the findings—the Moving to Work agreement with the federal government cited all three objectives. But not only did HUD enforce the report’s findings, last winter it asked the CHA to conduct a thorough financial analysis (yet to be completed) of the original supervoucher program.

Based on the conclusions of the analysis, the agency could be asked to reimburse HUD for “unreasonable” voucher payouts.

children decided Lincoln Park was their top choice.

But Weaver, who is African-American, quickly realized that even with access to CHA’s new supervouchers, finding affordable housing in a prime Chicago neighborhood wasn’t easy.

“We had a few places that said, ‘Yes, we love her, we want to do this!’ ” Weaver recalls. “Then when they found out I had a voucher they would say no.” Eventually Weaver told her real estate agent to alert people up front that she had a voucher and see if they were still willing to show her the apartment. “I would say out of ten at least seven canceled.”

Weaver continued her apartment hunt throughout the north side over the summer of 2013. But by August she still hadn’t found anything, forcing her to defer law school until the following academic year. The decision was “traumatic,” she says.

“I think I cried for two weeks.”

A year later, Weaver was still spinning her wheels—there was a shortage of family-size apartments in neighborhoods with good public schools, and when she located one, landlords continued to reject her application. Come fall 2014 Weaver was still apartmentless, but she had to

R

egardless of its reputation as a golden ticket, many Section 8 families who received a supervoucher found that, despite having more money to work with, they still

faced discrimination.

In spring 2013, Erika Weaver received a letter of acceptance from the Loyola University Chicago School of Law, a goal she’d had since she was 14 years old. Then 39, Weaver was living with her three children, 17-year-old son Kylon and two daughters, Tayler, 14, and Morgan, nine, in Mattoon, a small town three hours south of Chicago. Weaver worked at Lake Land College there, and had a Section 8 voucher from the local housing authority to help pay for her three-bedroom apartment.

That May, she began to search for a new place in a Chicago opportunity area, where supervouchers were provided as part of the CHA’s mobility program. On paper, Weaver was the perfect candidate. She had a credit score well above 600, no eviction record, and no criminal history. She had also managed to save $4,000 for a security deposit and move-in fees. Weaver’s priority was finding an apartment in a safe neighborhood with a good public high school, “a place that would be comfortable for my family, moving from a small, rural town into the city,” she says. After driving around different neighborhoods, she and her

start law school or lose her deposit.

By then, her son Kylon had graduated high school, so she enrolled him at Harold Washington College in anticipation of the move to Chicago.

They spent the first semester sleeping at a friend’s house, Weaver regularly dipping into her savings to pay application fees anywhere between $75 and $90 apiece for apartments that continued to fall through. When she could no longer afford their security deposits, she gave up searching in downtown buildings altogether.

Yvette Jones has been a real estate broker for 22 years and works with many voucher holders. She says that out of ten listing agents or landlords she might reach out to, “maybe one” will be open to leasing the unit to a Section 8 client, supervoucher or not.

Chicago is one of the few places in the country that bars discrimination based on a renter’s source of income, including vouchers. The law is supposed to protect voucher holders like Weaver, but it’s rarely enforced, and when it is, the penalty for landlords is only $500. According to the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, which investigates discrimination cases of every sort, only about 60 voucher-related rental J

APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 15

continued from 15

discrimination complaints are filed every year in the city.

Bethel, the fair housing lawyer, says that this is because legal action against discriminatory rental practices is slow and rarely rewarding.

Her clinic usually tries to resolve the issue by attempting to persuade offending landlords to “change their decision voluntarily.” Many landlords and property managers simply don’t know how the voucher program works or that they are legally bound to accept voucher holders if they meet other requirements such as credit and background checks, she said.

In January 2015, after having searched for almost two years and trying to secure more than 40 units, Weaver threw in the towel. She wouldn’t move to Chicago after all.

“The process should not be that exhausting,” she says.

She’s now in her second year of law school at Loyola but still lives in Mattoon. Every Sunday, Weaver takes a three-hour train ride into the city to stay with her grandmother, then commutes another hour to Loyola’s downtown classrooms by public transit. On Wednesday nights she returns home to spend the remainder of the week with her children.

“Trying to move to Chicago was one of the most disgusting and deplorable experiences I’ve had,” Weaver says. When landlords saw she was in law school they were impressed and motivated to rent to her.

“Then they hear that I have a voucher and they feel like I’ve defrauded them in some way.”

M

eanwhile, for a typical voucher holder, the vast majority of whom do not live in o p p o r t u n i t y a re a s where exception rents were granted, discrimination on the part of landlords is only the first hurdle. Once a unit is secured, many must contend with poor property maintenance, unpredictable rent increases, unsafe neighborhoods, and frequent moves.

The Reader’s analysis of CHA inspection data for 2015 shows that 69 percent of units paid for by CHA vouchers failed at least one inspec-

tion. (According to CHA spokeswoman Molly Sullivan, “It is common for owners to fail the first inspection, usually for minor reasons that are easily corrected.”) However, nearly a quarter of the units failed two or more inspections. Meanwhile, the owners of the seven buildings with the most violations that year received more than $4 million in total voucher payments from the CHA—nearly as much as the $4.8 million per year it cost to house all the supervoucher families.

The analysis supplied by CHA to HUD’s inspector general found that 53 percent of exception rent households had access to top-rated elementary schools in their opportunity area neighborhoods, compared to 15 percent of households in poorer neighborhoods.

There are other problems to contend with too. Jackie Paige, 52, has had a Section 8 voucher since the early 2000s. Paige is African-American and a native south-sider, and she wanted to live in the Hyde Park area so she could send her two children to Kenwood Academy. Her voucher, however, covered only enough for rent in the most decrepit and crime-ridden parts of the neighborhood. Her first apartment, on 54th and Maryland, was infested with rodents, she says. “I hated that place,” she recalls. “I couldn’t wait to get out.” She knew there were gangs in the area and that drugs were sold along Drexel Avenue, just a block away. After a few years she moved to a new apartment nearby, but it wasn’t much better.

Then, in summer 2002, when Paige’s son, Tarek, was nine and her daughter, Jameelah, was 12, she wasn’t able to afford summer camp for them. Tarek “hung out with people who did drugs, and they took him under their wing because I had to work,” she says, her voice heavy. Soon enough, a gang had pulled him in.

In 2009, after the rent went up in her second Hyde Park apartment, Paige moved to Bronzeville. Still, her son “continued his associations with the bad element,” Paige says. “He’d go back and visit them. Once that connection was made he never severed it. Even though I would move and get him away from that.”

16 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

“People resent lower-income people living around rich people. I think that’s what this is all about.”

—CHA voucher holder Jackie Paige

At 3 AM on a day in November 2011, Paige got a knock at the door.

It was the police. “[They] told me that my car was found and a body was in it. And they showed me [his] tattoos.” Tarek, then 18, had been shot to death.

Paige is grateful for her voucher; without it, she says, she would have had to live in even more dangerous neighborhoods. But she can’t help but wonder if living in a different neighborhood, a more prosperous neighborhood—perhaps with the help of a supervoucher—might have saved her son.

In 2012, two years into the CHA’s program, Paige qualified for a supervoucher. She found a South Loop apartment she knew she could afford. Her application was approved.

But the deal fell through when the landlord realized she had a subsidy, Paige says.

In all, Paige moved four times in ten years. She now lives with her daughter (who just graduated from Roosevelt University) in a quiet part of Bronzeville, where her street is always plowed in winter; her building has a cleaning staff and a laundry room on each floor “so no long waits.” It’s not in an opportunity area, but she feels safe there. And she only needs to take one bus to get to her job at a Magnificent Mile department store. Though she never benefited from exception rents herself, she thinks they were a good idea and is disappointed by the CHA’s response to the controversy. “People resent lower-income people living around rich people. I think that’s what this is all about.”

“T

here is probably never going to be enough vouchers,” says Bethel, the fair housing attorney.

“But it seems that reducing them so that all you’re doing is perpetuating segregated housing patterns as they already exist is not helping anyone.

It is not helping the city. And that, arguably, is illegal.”

So why did the CHA slash the exception rents program before it was properly evaluated, before it had a chance to succeed? The question is especially perplexing given

the federal government’s renewed commitment to housing integration.

The supervoucher program was by no means a panacea for the myriad problems facing precariously housed Chicagoans. However, it was the only strategy that targeted Chicago’s long pattern of segregation by offering the financing, unit by unit, to combat it.

The CHA didn’t have to rely on housing voucher holders in luxury condo buildings to put a dent in the city’s segregation patterns. However, the severe shortage of available rental housing in the city’s more affordable and integrated neighborhoods, combined with rampant discrimination, left the agency with fewer viable options. For example, a recent study by the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law found that on the northwest side—where rental prices are low enough to accommodate working-class families and neighborhoods are integrated—landlords turned away African-American voucher holders 58 percent of the time, “the highest frequency of refusal to rent” for this demographic in the entire city. The same study found that landlords “discriminated against African-American voucher holders 53% of the time, in all areas of the city tested except the Loop and Hyde Park.”

Even more than a year after scaling it back, CHA continues to be under fire for the exception rent program. Meanwhile, fair housing experts and advocates keep urging us to look at it in context, to not distort the issue or turn the conversation away from the conventional voucher program’s failure to challenge existing patterns of segregation.

Today, with the exception rent scaled back to 150 percent, the CHA reports that 12 of Chicago’s 77 community areas have fallen out of reach for families with vouchers. Among them are Lincoln Park and the Loop, but also more moderately priced neighborhoods such as Uptown and Bridgeport. More than 80 percent of the city is still accessible, at least in theory. By now, though, it’s clear the obstacles to finding safe, affordable housing are more complex than the numbers reveal.

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Last May, when the Harvard study on the long-term benefits of mobility was published, housing secretary Castro told the New York Times he was energized by the new data—so much so that HUD was looking at altering funding so that some people moving to more expensive neighborhoods would be eligible for larger vouchers. He didn’t specify by how much.

There is also mounting evidence that keeping low-income people in segregated, shoddy housing is costing taxpayers significant money. In March, Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond published Evicted, a landmark book on skyrocketing eviction rates among poor Americans. Desmond’s work focused on Milwaukee, but his findings are as relevant to Chicago. Only a small fraction of rent-burdened families (those paying more than 30 percent of their monthly income in rent) benefit from vouchers across the country.

In Chicago more than 40 percent of households in 73 of 77 community areas are rent burdened. And while a single person making less than $43,000 can qualify for a voucher, fewer than 7 percent of renter households in the city have one.

Milwaukee, like Chicago, has landlords who recruit voucher holders into poor neighborhoods to bring in more revenue than the market would. Desmond, the first to crunch the numbers, found that “overcharging voucher holders cost taxpayers an additional $3.6 million each year in Milwaukee—the equivalent of supplying 588 more needy families with housing assistance.” In Chicago—which has eight times as many voucher households than Milwaukee—using vouchers to pay for substandard housing in segregated neighborhoods is likely costing the CHA far more than the supervouchers ever did.

A

fter months of trying to get answers from the CHA about her options, Lorena was notified that she’d have to move when her lease was up, in January 2016. With nowhere to go, she and her son moved into the Woodlawn home of her friend, a nail techni-

cian. The following week she sat at an orientation session hosted by Housing Choice Partners, where she and other voucher holders were told not to bother looking for a home downtown—the reduced exception payments would most certainly not be enough to cover the cost.

Nearly three months later, Lorena is still living in Woodlawn with her friend. “I’m sick of living out of a box,” she says, shaking her head in frustration. Her goal is still to move to a neighborhood where her son will be safe. To this day she doesn’t understand how a legislator from Peoria, three and a half hours south of Chicago, where median rents for a two-bedromm apartment were $705 in 2015 compared to Chicago’s $1,840, was able to exercise such power over her housing.

Sitting at a round metal table inside a South Loop Mariano’s, she gets worked up when she thinks about Schock.

“I think he made a comment like, ‘They got a golden ticket,’” she says of the former congressman, who in an ironic turn of events was forced to resign when questions arose over his misuse of public funds—among them spending $40,000 from his official office budget to redecorate his Capitol Hill digs to resemble the set of PBS’s Downton Abbey. As of press time, Schock had not responded to a request for comment on his campaign to restrict exception payments.

Digging into one of two overstuffed purses, Lorena pulls pages of letters from the CHA and printed e-mails of her frantic back-and-forth with the leasing office at 215 W. Washington. She pauses to check another text from her son, then continues, “A lot of these people, they wasn’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth. A lot of these people is trying to better themselves,” she says, addressing Schock. “They don’t want to stay in messed-up areas. They wanna live like you livin’. And then you come in here and you just put a whole damper on their dreams?”

But she’s also disappointed with the CHA. “They basically did what he said, honored what he said, and didn’t have our backs. No one stood up for us.” v

This story was produced as part of the Social Justice News Nexus fellowship at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, with support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

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APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 17

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ARTS AND CULTURE A 2015 Beyond the Score performance on the work of composer Leonard Bernstein ! TODD ROSENBERG

CLASSICAL

CSO gives Beyond the Score the final curtain The innovative multimedia shows were meant to bring new audiences to the symphony.

By DEANNA ISAACS

I

s there a future for symphony orchestras? That question was in the air a decade ago, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra hired British writer, broadcaster, and composer Gerard McBurney to launch an extraordinary experiment called Beyond the Score.

And it’s still hanging there now, as CSO ends Beyond the Score. Two performances scheduled for next month will be the last in this innovative, ambitious, and arguably most successful of the orchestra’s attempts at audience expansion.

In three original multimedia shows each year, Beyond the Score put great pieces of music into the context of the lives and times that created them. The shows include actors, a narrator, video, and the full orchestra; the result at its best is a powerful sort of documentary theater that anchors and enhances the music.

The live events at Symphony Center have been one piece of a three-part strategy. Each new show was filmed, so that it could be

posted online, free to anyone with a Web connection anywhere in the world. And each show was available for license to other orchestras for their own live performances—with the assumption that licensing fees would offset some of the original production costs.

The shows at Symphony Center were so popular that CSO eventually added a second performance for each. In the ten years since they began, McBurney has developed and narrated 30 different programs, presenting everyone from Beethoven to Bernstein. This season included a much-praised tribute to the difficult music of Pierre Boulez, with stage design by Frank Gehry.

So why is the program now being axed?

Well, for one thing, there’s been a changing of the guard at CSO. McBurney—who was recruited for the job after he and his brother, actor and director Simon McBurney, created a piece for the launch of LA’s Disney Hall—says Beyond the Score was the idea of former CSO president Deborah Rutter and vice president Martha Gilmer, both of whom have since left.

(Rutter is now president of the John F. Kennedy Center; Gilmer is CEO of the San Diego Symphony.) Rutter’s successor, Jeff Alexander, took over at the start of last year, after CSO’s iconic music director Riccardo Muti reportedly advocated for him.

“It had run its course and we really needed to move on. Not every project continues forever.”

—CSO president Jeff Alexander

Artistically, “we were all proud of it,” says Alexander of Beyond the Score, but “we just felt it was time, after ten years. It had run its course, and we really needed to move on. Not every project continues forever.”

And, he says, this program wasn’t hitting all its marks: CSO did an audience analysis of Beyond the Score about a year ago and “found that the majority of people who were coming were actually not new to the CSO.” (The majority weren’t when I wrote about the program in 2008 either, but Kevin Giglinto, then vice president of marketing, was pleased to report that “more than 35 percent . . . are first-time customers.”)

The audience also failed to grow when the schedule was expanded, Alexander says, though he’s not citing any numbers.

“But the real problem was the cost of doing it,” Alexander says. “The cost of all the extra elements far outweighed the revenue from ticket sales. And the ability to attract large philanthropic funds to support the project after its third or fourth or fifth year became very difficult. For the last five years, it was losing quite a bit of money.”

How much? CSO’s not willing to say. (According to CSO’s annual reports, the symphony had a $1.3 million deficit on an operating budget of $72.7 million in 2015, down a hair from its $1.4 million deficit a year earlier.)

However, one part of the Beyond the Score strategy is getting a second chance. CSO is now making a “revitalized effort” on the licensing component, “because we have 30 of these wonderful programs in stock,” Alexander says.

Until now, “revenue from the licensing was not enough to be particularly helpful.”

The final Beyond the Score show is focused on Nights in the Garden of Spain by early 20th-century composer Manuel de Falla. McBurney says it was inspired by the Alhambra palace in Granada. “It’s a piece about night and dreams,” McBurney says, “and the nighttime is always a good place to end a cycle of stories.”

As for the future of symphony orchestras?

Alexander says he’s been eyeballing the lobby crowd, seeing “more and more young people coming on a regular basis.” He thinks they realize that “to come hear a live classical music concert with a full magnificent symphony orchestra is a very special experience, more invigorating than all the electronics that they’re bombarded with.” The average age of CSO subscribers and single-ticket buyers is 50, which, he says, “is the youngest average age of all major U.S. orchestras.” Also, 20 percent of the audience is millennials, 19 percent are Gen Xers, and last year 17,000 student tickets were sold at $20 each.

His glass is clearly half full. v

! @DeannaIsaacs APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 19

ARTS & CULTURE

R

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

F

Steve Haggard, McKenzie Chinn

THEATER

Back from the dead

By TONY ADLER

I

n a time when you can find anybody, disappearance is a powerful fantasy. ¶ Last week I saw Steep Theatre’s production of The Few, Samuel D. Hunter’s recent play about a man who returns home after four years spent who knows where. Before that Jackalope premiered Calamity West’s The Rolling, in which a disgraced reporter goes into seclusion—physical and digital—while trying to sort out her life. I know that’s not a wide sampling, but the theme of somehow getting beyond the reach of all webs and every connection seems especially striking in light of Ike Holter’s astonishing new piece of work on the subject, Sender.

Leonard Harris is the sort of guy who can pull off a nickname like “Lynx.” Holter’s character description calls him “magnetic and attractive.” His former lover Tess, on the other hand, calls him “motherfucker” when he materializes in her Chicago apartment 365 days (366, she corrects, since it’s past midnight) after having stolen off without a word, leaving everyone to believe that his bike, found abandoned on the shore, signified a drunken stumble into Lake Michigan.

20 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

Well, almost everyone. While Lynx’s other friends mourned as best they could in the absence of a body, the classically and aptly named Cassandra knew, as she says, “something else was up.” Married, pregnant, and earning serious money at a grown-up job, she’s become the inverse image of Lynx’s airy irresponsibility and is no longer subject to his mystique. Cassandra sees herself as having assumed leadership of the group that once gathered around Lynx. As having shepherded them through their trauma. She wants him gone again, this time for good.

Most of all she wants to keep him as far as possible from her husband, Jordan, who idolized Lynx with a fervor that rivaled Tess’s.

Of course, Cassandra fails in that regard.

And once Jordan sees Lynx, matters get serious. The Peter Pan of Logan Square (or Humboldt Park, maybe—some locus of hipsterism) hasn’t dropped his fantasy of escape. Lynx isn’t back to resume his life but to lure others out of theirs. It’s a tempting offer. Tess is a dog walker (“I have a degree in poetry and a minor in art, the only thing I can do is walk dogs”), Jordan works for Groupon, and the baby in Cassandra’s womb has made

reality entirely too real. Beer was good once.

Music was fun. Sex was amazing. It might be nice to fuck up completely, once and for all, and drop off the grid.

A big part of the genius of Sender is the breakneck momentum embedded in Holter’s script and carried through by Shade Murray’s canny 90-minute staging for A Red Orchid Theatre. Holter, the Chicago-based wunderkind best known for his Stonewall-riot drama Hit the Wall, is fearless here. He lets his characters spin out like wet clay on a lopsided potter’s wheel, knowing there’s every possibility they’ll end up, well, hitting the wall. Yet, for all its centrifugal force, the play never gives the impression of outrunning its author’s capacities. Holter’s comic sense is too strong for that, endlessly and hilariously asserting itself. More so is his poetic sense. Sender treads an interesting, exhilarating line between everyday hipster patois (“I’m just saying”) and something more ugly/exalted (“Lynx, why did you screw everything the fuck up? Everything the fuck up. Everything the fuck up, everything the fuck up, Leonard Harris . . . ”). Like the name Cassandra, Holter’s language occasionally touches the mythic.

And the cast is pretty much perfect for its demands. Steve Haggard’s Lynx exudes the slimy, smooth, uncertain confidence of a man who used to be celebrated for his cool recklessness but aged out of his golden god phase and is now just plain lost. It’s fascinating to watch him wield the one power he’s got left: his ability to play on the nostalgia and affection of the people he used to exploit. Mary Williamson and Steven Wilson are depressingly believable as the exploitees, Tess and Jordan. Wilson, in particular, combines the softness of the perpetual second fiddle with something far more desperate. McKenzie Chinn, meanwhile, is positively Delphic as Cassandra—taking no shit, unshakeable in her sense that she knows what things cost when she’s mistaken about the currency. v R SENDER Through 5/29: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells, 312943-8722, aredorchidtheatre.org, $30-$35.

! @taadler

! TIM BARDEN

! MICHAEL BROSILOW

DANCE

Kyle Abraham is still insisting HATE IS A POWERFUL MOTIVATOR for Kyle Abraham. And the New York-based choreographer doesn’t shy from putting it front and center in “When the Wolves Came In,” a trio of dances whose title refers to the 1960 protest album We Insist! Freedom Now Suite by jazz drummer and composer Max Roach and singer-songwriter Oscar Brown Jr. Set to a score that ranges from contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly to spirituals and designed by artist Glenn Ligon, the striking work incorporates projections “of incidents that were racially charged, racially questionable,” says Vinson Fraley, a member of the choreographer’s company Abraham.In.Motion. “You have people in blackface, you have interesting things happening visually,” Fraley says. “The images are so vivid, so strong you can’t not have a reaction to them.”

Reaction seems to be the point. One of the questions Abraham grapples with in Wolves is the progress—or lack thereof—of civil rights in the time of Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, Laquan McDonald, and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“People ask how much of the work has to do with what happened a long time ago, back in the civil rights movement,” Fraley says. “I think what we’re trying to get across is that these things are happening today, right now. They’re happening in a lot of ways, we just don’t see it.” —MATT DE LA PEÑA R KYLE ABRAHAM/ABRAHAM.IN.MOTION: WHEN THE WOLVES CAME IN 4/28-5/1: ThuSat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org, $30.

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APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE Rules, by their very nature, are oversimplifications; there are many exceptions to them.

Sometimes it’s those exceptions that make the most elegant writing or give a writer a unique voice.

PINTO: That’s so cool, Carol. It reminds me of something—I have several friends that English is their second language. I always find it really intriguing how they might use a word in such a different context that it kind of brightens the meaning of it in an interesting, strange way.

Carol Saller and Maria Pinto ! COURTESY CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL

CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL

Editorial style and fashion style: It’s not all about appearances

By JULIA THIEL

F

or the Chicago Humanities Festival panel Style Matters, fashion designer Maria Pinto and Chicago Manual of Style editor Carol Saller will join other style experts to discuss “how we should dress, write, and live” in a series of conversations. Pinto will talk with fellow designer Rachel Roy; Saller with New York Times reporter Jennifer Schuessler (SAIC Fashion Resource Center director Gillion Carrara will be talking with journalist and graphic-design expert Jude Stewart). Intrigued by the possible parallels between editorial style and fashion style, we asked Pinto and Saller what style means to them, what the rules are, and when it makes sense to break those rules.

JULIA THIEL: What does style mean to each of you, as it applies to your profession?

MARIA PINTO: That’s kind of a trigger word for me. I think there’s an implied sense of what style should be by trends and fashion dictates. That’s not really the path I encourage my clients to take—I think that style should really be about personal expression.

CAROL SALLER: People know what fashion style means, but when you say editorial style sometimes you get blank stares. So let me just say what that covers: the way you style a manuscript is by applying punctuation, capitalization, hyphenation. Those rules aren’t the same

22 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

for every publisher, so there are different style guides that lay out different rules. Writing style also has to do with personal expression, like Maria said. But there are more rules; grammar and usage come into play. In informal, creative contexts, the author can break all those rules. But I’m a representative of a rule maker.

How do rules apply to fashion and writing?

How strict are they, and are they made to be broken?

PINTO: I think all rules are made to be broken. But there’s a time and place. If I have a

banker [as a client], I’m not going to encourage her to wear biker boots with her sheath dress, because I know that’s not going to be appropriate. Someone who’s creative, I might try to get her to express that creativity.

Clothing is a great tool, because we do judge a book by its cover.

SALLER: You’re using a writing metaphor. The parallels are uncanny: the context of writing has to be judged in the way that the appropriateness of clothing is judged, because the way we speak conveys something about our person, just like clothing.

Rules, yes, are made to be broken, and it’s something that editors can facilitate. I went to a conference recently where someone, her name is Sarah Gray, said something great: “We are word professionals. Sticklers are amateurs.” I think what she was getting at is that sticklers have a limited bag of tricks. They haven’t gained the writing skills that professional writers and editors would use to manipulate the rules successfully.

Is it also true that in the fashion world, it’s the amateurs who really want to stick to the rules?

PINTO: Fashion designers, I think, are always really trying to break the rules. I’m not sure they’re always doing it successfully.

A set of words I use a lot with this new collection [M2057] is “deconstructed couture.”

Couture is all about rules, understanding and knowing your craft. And then it gives you permission to really start looking at it and deconstructing it. When I work with my technical team—like a pattern maker, who is very technical, and she knows exactly how something should be done—it’s really fun to challenge them and put ideas in front of them that help them take that set of rules or knowledge to another place. That’s where the deconstruction comes in.

Do you see other parallels between fashion and grammar?

SALLER: When people online post comments on language sites, there’s often a lot of nitpicking and shaming that goes on. There’s a very popular book, Eats, Shoot & Leaves, where Lynne Truss seems to promote pointing out, or even defacing, signs that have the wrong apostrophes—grammar shaming. I feel that this is inappropriate and rude, and there should be civility and respect for people’s expression. When it comes to clothing and fashion, does this kind of thing go on too?

PINTO: Oh yeah, look at the red carpet!

These brilliant actresses or writers, and all they’re doing is ripping them apart for the dress they had on, or the bad hair they had.

I’m finding it really intriguing how many parallels there are. The whole fashion thing, I take it very seriously, but a lot of people—it’s not their first thing. They might do things in a way that would be considered wrong or not as well put together. There’s an authenticity that we should be looking at as well. I don’t judge people that harshly. But [other] people do. My

l

Andrew Solomon ! TIMOTHY GREENFIELD-SANDERS

brain moves so quickly that I’m accused of going from one to six; I can’t express myself in a more poetic, thoughtful way because I’m trying to move so quickly.

Should I be judged for grammar that’s not always perfect?

SALLER: When you talked about deconstructed couture, I thought, that’s what poets are doing. They’re taking language and deconstructing it. Or reconstructing it. But it’s a whole creative process, taking components of something and putting them together in different ways. You start with fabric, and I start with words.

Following the rules doesn’t make you inauthentic. There are people who have a great facility within the rules—and in some contexts, such as scholarly writing, it’s very rule oriented. A lot of eloquence and great arguments takes place within those bounds.

PINTO: It’s very personal. It’s important to understand the rules. Alexander McQueen learned from the masters and totally deconstructed every aspect of it, but still maintained a lot of the rules around how to construct a well-tailored jacket. Our culture today, we’re not investing time—we want to go straight from school to being at the top of our game.

There’s no room for you to really develop your craft.

SALLER: That’s an interesting distinction, between craft and art. I tend to think of editors as craftsmen. We take what the writer has done, we hone it. In fact, I used the metaphor of a couturier in the preface to my book [The Subversive Copy Editor]. “Knowing how to tinker with a broken piece of prose until it hums is a source of contentment known by all who have mastered a worthy craft. The midwife works with a laboring woman to produce a healthy child.

A seamstress or tailor finishes the couturier’s garment until it’s a perfect, flattering fit.” Someone who follows the rules more closely because they’re not in charge—they’re working to help craft a finished product. Whereas the rule breaker maybe takes art to a higher level.

Both are worthy, authentic pursuits. v STYLE MATTERS Sat 4/30, 12:30-2 PM, Art Institute of Chicago, Fullerton Hall, 111 S. Michigan, 312-443-3600, chicagohumanities.org, $15.

! @juliathiel

CHICAGO HUMANITIES FESTIVAL

A brief interview with Andrew Solomon

By NISSA RHEE

W

riter Andrew Solomon says he has “a burning curiosity about the world.” He’s journeyed to more than 80 countries during 25 years of reporting for the New York Times magazine, the New Yorker, and other publications. He’s been kidnapped by revolutionaries in Ecuador, faced tanks during the 1991 August coup d’etat attempt in Moscow, and been tied up in ram intestines during an exorcism in Senegal.

Solomon recounts these adventures and more in his new essay collection, Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change.

The book is his fourth work of nonfiction and follows his National Book Critics Circle Award winner Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity; his 2001 memoir The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Solomon will appear in discussion with Aleksandar Hemon on May 1 as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival Spring Style series.

The Reader spoke with him by phone from his home in Greenwich Village.

NISSA RHEE: In Far and Away, you write that if all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world’s diplomatic problems could be solved. What do you mean by that?

ANDREW SOLOMON: I think a lot of the time people assume that their values are universal.

And they don’t understand which aspects of

their values are actually universal and which aspects are very specific.

So I think what would be helpful about instituting that program of early travel is not so much the particulars of what people would encounter in the countries that they went to, but simply the fact that once you’ve been somewhere else, you will know that there are other ways of doing things. And there are other people who are doing things in that other way, who actually prefer doing things their way, and that they don’t want to turn into you.

I think an awful lot of the diplomatic problems that exist in the world come from people assuming that their society is the one with a purchase on truth. It’s deeply humbling to realize that there is no such thing as a society with a purchase on truth.

I was struck by how often you question your own truths and assumptions about a place.

In your essay “Naked, Covered in Ram’s Blood, Drinking a Coke, and Feeling Pretty Good” you recall a trip you took to Senegal to research depression. And you go through a tribal exorcism called n’deup that sounds completely out-there and crazy from the American perspective of depression. But in the end, it sounds like it helped. Did it work for you?

It didn’t work for me in the sense of me actually believing that I was occupied by spirits and that the ritual was casting the spirits out of me. But there were things that were in it structurally that were very powerful—particularly the sense of having a mental illness characterized as something that can be cast out. It’s an idea that I think is extremely useful.

I was also struck by the fact that the entire village, without any pay or anything, took the day off to all come together and work toward my restoration. The support of all the people was moving. The sense of celebration, that they thought they did something that helped, was moving. And I was exhilarated by it in ways that I couldn’t have imagined.

The fact of the matter is that going to a small, dark office on Central Park West lacks some of what it was that made n’deup powerful. And it’s too easy to make it into a big joke.

To say, “That was way out-there, that crazy exorcism, can you believe that?”

ARTS & CULTURE

some profound way. And what other people really want is to become America. And that if you remove all the stuff that is interfering, you will automatically move toward democracy and move toward the creation of wealth.

My experience is that people don’t automatically move toward those things. Often when you remove all those things, you get chaos, you get violence, you get horror, and you get tyranny. Sometimes you get other things that are better than that.

This notion that democracy is where everyone is ultimately heading is a misguided one.

I don’t think I would have understood that if I hadn’t spent so much time in so many other parts of the world.

Where do you want to travel next? Is there any country you’re itching to go to?

The country that I am going to travel to next is Sri Lanka, because I’m going to write a travel story there this summer.

I feel like the gap in my travel is in the Middle East. It’s such an explosive—in both the good and bad sense—part of the world map right now. And I’d really like to explore that area if the opportunity arises. v R ANDREW SOLOMON: FAR AND AWAY Sun 5/1, noon, Art Institute of Chicago, Rubloff Auditorium, 230 S. Columbus, 312-443-3600, tickets.chicagohumanities.org. $15, $12 for members, $10 for students and teachers.

! @nissarhee

How has traveling to so many different countries changed the way you look at the world?

There is an assumption that people often make here that America has gotten it right in

APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 23

The Club ssss Directed by Pablo Larraín. 97 min. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.

ARTS & CULTURE

MOVIES

Priests gone wild

By J.R. JONES

W

e all have problems with our parents, but Pablo Larraín’s play out on the national stage.

His mother, Magdalena Matte, belongs to one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Chile, and his father, Hernán Larraín, serves as president of the Independent Democratic Union, a right-wing party founded in the 1980s to support military dictator Augusto Pinochet. As students at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in the early 70s, both parents were influenced by the procorporate authoritarianism of the Gremialismo movement, which helped drive President Salvador Allende from power. Pablo, who was born in 1976 and made his directing debut at age 30, has spoken out against the repression of the Pinochet years, and in his films he’s tried to make sense of his family’s role in Chilean history: Tony Manero (2008) is a chilling portrait of a Santiago serial killer in the bleakest years of the Pinochet regime; Post Mortem (2010) deals with a disappeared woman in the last days of the Allende presidency; and No (2012) follows a team of political strategists in the run-up to the 1988 plebiscite that finally ended Pinochet’s rule.

With The Club, Larraín has found a powerful metaphor for the Pinochet years, one that strikes at the heart of his parents’ (and his own) identity. The film takes place in the coastal village of La Boca, among a group of disgraced Catholic priests who’ve been sequestered in a house by the ocean to atone for their sins. Father Vidal (Alfredo Castro) is a pedophile; Father Ortega (Alejandro Goic) is a ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

baby snatcher. Not all of them are criminals— Father Silva (Jaime Vadell) simply ran afoul of the Chilean military—but all of them are unrepentant sinners enjoying a quiet, idyllic life in their rustic seaside home. This setting allows Larraín to examine their several varieties of denial, even as the men’s little haven is increasingly threatened by a disturbed man intent on avenging his childhood sexual abuse.

As in the national memory, the crimes of the past just won’t go away.

Father Ortega calls the house a prison, but it’s a pretty soft one: the men pray, sing, celebrate mass, hear each other’s confessions, and spend the rest of the time doing as they please.

They’re allowed to walk around town at specified hours (though they’re forbidden to go out together, speak to strangers, or handle money or cell phones). This quiet routine is shattered with the arrival of a new boarder, the bearded, haunted Father Lazcano (José Soza), and, shortly thereafter, his scruffy, emotionally damaged victim Sandokan (Roberto Farías), who stands outside the house shouting out Lazcano’s past abuse in language so graphically ugly I won’t repeat it (even in the Reader).

Father Silva, a former army chaplain, thrusts a revolver at Lazcano and orders him to go outside and fire a warning shot; instead the priest approaches his victim and, showing a penitence his housemates lack, shoots himself in the head.

This shocking development, not ten minutes into the film, prompts a response from the Vatican in the form of Father García (Marcelo Alonso), a polished “spiritual director” who

ss AVERAGE

24 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

s POOR

•

takes up residence in the house to counsel the others and, simultaneously, conduct an investigation into what happened. The priests and their minder, a defrocked nun named Sister Mónica (Antonia Zegers), cover up the incident, claiming that Lazcano was depressed and smuggled the gun in himself. Even so, García doesn’t like what he sees. “This house is not a spa,” he tells Mónica. “It’s not a retreat.

It’s a center for prayer and repentance.” García bans alcohol from the house and forbids the men to wager money on Monica’s greyhound, a prizewinner at local races. The men bristle at his sanctimony, and as he interviews them one by one, they hasten to justify their past offenses, inventing their own Catholic theology.

Father Silva is really being protected by the church more than punished: after 35 years in the military, he was caught keeping a notebook of all the atrocities revealed to him by soldiers in confession. “Secret burial grounds, theft of money,” he explains to García. “Secret torture houses, murder. Everything.” This might position him as a hero in the story, but Silva is a ruthless man, schooled in the worst human impulses and given to hard realities. He scoffs at the efforts to prosecute these crimes. “A lot of soldiers repented,” he points out. “But those left-wing civilians wanted to resolve a spiritual matter in a secular court. They realized it was their only chance at revenge, because God would forgive all of them in heaven. Even the murderers.” For Father Silva, Judgment Day comes without any judgment at all.

From the opposite end of the political spectrum comes Father Ortega, who has let

his liberation theology get the better of him: he’s been caught running his own secret adoption service, presiding over fake funerals and transferring infants to new homes. When García brings this up in their interview, Ortega denounces him as a bureaucrat who stays in five-star hotels. “How long has it been since you were in a parish?” he demands to know.

“With people, suffering people? With women who cannot bear children. With girls who don’t want their children and want to throw them in the trash? Why? Why such injustice?”

Because of him, he boasts, Chile has blond children in the slums and dark-skinned children being raised by wealthy families. García accuses him of playing God, but for Ortega this is the priesthood’s primary appeal.

The most controversial of them all is Father Vidal, who confesses in his interview that he invited a child into his bed, “hugged and prayed” with him, and dolled him up with lipstick. But it was all very spiritual, you see.

“You don’t know the sickness of the mind can be cured when the body explodes,” he tells García, defending human sexual impulse. Vidal is the one who spots Sandokan at a dog race and, flouting the house rules, approaches him.

When Sandokan asks if he’s gay, Vidal explains that he’s celibate but adds, “Homosexuality has broadened my concept of sexuality. Between a man and a woman, it’s just a matter of procreation. Whereas, between homosexuals, it’s something much deeper.” For Sandokan it’s definitely been something much deeper, and he rebuffs the priest, sarcastically offering to come over and service everyone in the house. “It would be beautiful,” he promises.

“We could all reach holiness!”

Despite all the catechizing, The Club works beautifully as a suspense film, especially after Vidal’s encounter with Sandokan prompts the victim to resume his harassment of the priests, camping out near their house and continuing to shout accusations. Threatened with exposure to the neighborhood, some of the occupants begin hatching a plot against the troubled man, and as the situation careens toward a violent climax, the characters’ individual sins are all subsumed in original sin—the sin of Adam, passed down through the ages. Larraín clearly understands the concept of original sin from his many years of Catholic school: it’s the kind you get from your parents. v

! @JR_Jones

WORTHLESS

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FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY ss Directed by Asghar Farhadi. 102 min. Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $11.

Susan Sarandon Rose Byrne

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J.K. Simmons

“AN INSISTENTLY WINNING, HOPELESSLY IRRESISTIBLE MOTHER-DAUGHTER DUET.” –Manohla Dargis, THE NEW YORK TIMES

Fireworks Wednesday

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ranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi came to international prominence with the Oscar-winning A Separation (2011), about a husband and wife trying to end their marriage amid the strict morality of the Islamic Revolution. That Oscar win has stoked interest in Farhadi’s earlier work: his engrossing mystery About Elly (2009), in which the sudden disappearance of a young woman roils a group of vacationing professionals, screened last year at Gene Siskel Film Center, and this week Music Box presents Fireworks Wednesday (2006), another tale of a married couple on the rocks. Farhadi is an essential filmmaker, but I’m not sure Fireworks is an essential film: though I appreciate it as a warm-up for his later, better films, I have to concede that its plotting can be murky, and for the most part it lacks the provocative social and religious overtones that make some of his subsequent dramas extraordinary.

Fireworks is Farhadi’s third feature, and his dramatic style is already pretty well developed.

When his characters argue—and they argue a lot—they never trade in the sort of polished, writerly comebacks you hear in American movies. They speak plainly and fight bitterly, getting in each other’s faces, as if the sheer force of their anger will turn the tide. The bickering goes on interminably, and every conflict threatens to spiral out of control. Fireworks follows the sneaky young Roohi (Taraneh Alidoosti) during the course of a day as she collects an assignment from a temp agency to clean an apartment and arrives at the home of Morteza (Hamid Farokhnezhad) and his wife, Mozhde (Hediyeh Tehrani), who are on the brink of separation. Mozhde suspects Morteza of cheating on her with the hairdresser who lives upstairs, and she enlists Roohi in a plan to expose the affair. But Roohi has other ideas.

Farhadi’s stories tend to be physically complicated (the grievances and misunderstandings typically involve practical problems) and morally complex (the ethical high ground can give way at a moment’s notice). Much of Fireworks turns on the hairdresser’s business, which she’s running out of her apartment to the inconvenience and growing resentment of her neighbors.

One hairdressing client, who has blocked the apartment’s entry gate with her car, comes downstairs after her appointment to find her tire slashed. But even as these complications take up most of the action onscreen, Mozhde and Morteza are constantly trying to get the upper hand over the other, the wife digging at her husband’s infidelity and the husband grasping at Sharia law to condemn his wife’s disrespect and disobedience.

No one watching Fireworks could overlook the fact that it takes place in the Islamic Republic, but Farhadi still hasn’t figured out how to knit the country’s regressive social codes into the fabric of the story. In his next feature About Elly, the disappearance of the young woman implicates her travel companions, who have lied about her marital status so that she can accompany them to the seashore without a chaperone. In A Separation, the wife wants to take advantage of a temporary visa to get their daughter out of Iran so she won’t have to live in a theocracy, whereas the husband feels compelled to stay and look after his infirm father. Fireworks Wednesday may not equal those films (or Farhadi’s most recent release, The Past), but they show a filmmaker honing the storytelling skills that will serve him well on more ambitious projects. v

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! @JR_Jones APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 25

26 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

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MUSIC

TWIN TALK; PAUL GIALLORENZO, JULIAN KIRSHNER, AND ANTON HATWICH Sat 4/30, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10, 18+

Katie Ernst rises like the tide

By PETER MARGASAK

K

atie Ernst is one of the most promising bassists in Chicago’s bustling jazz scene, but she didn’t get exposed to much music growing up in Naperville. “My dad had a couple of records,” she says. “One was by Simon & Garfunkel, and I liked that. I had younger sisters who listened to Raffi, and I listened to that too. I could accept anything,

and I was into it.” Since then Ernst has gotten choosier about her listening—she’s developed an aesthetic of her own—but she’s also held on to that openness from her childhood.

Combined with her quick wit, confidence, and charisma, it’s helped her seize opportunities that might’ve slipped past other musicians, or create opportunities of her own—at the ripe old age of 27, not only is she a dazzling

! JONATHAN GIBBY

This Chicago jazz bassist and vocalist isn’t just helping herself with her talent, wit, and confidence—she’s also lifting up her peers and students.

talent whose potential makes her someone to watch, but she’s also something of a trusted eminence.

In summer 2011, having just earned a degree in jazz studies at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, Ernst began an internship at the Jazz Institute of Chicago, the venerable organization that programs the annual Chicago Jazz Festival—

TWIN TALK, STIRRUP WITH CHARLES RUMBACK Mon 5/16, 9:30 PM, California Clipper, 1002 N. California, 21+ F

and further promotes the music by organizing free concerts year-round and running a wide variety of educational programs. The internship paid Ernst a stipend that allowed her to work there for a year, and she spent many of her evenings trying to break into the local scene.

At the time one of Ernst’s friends, saxophonist Corbin Andrick, led a weekly engagement and jam session at Lincoln Park bar Lilly’s. His bassist had just left for a gig on a cruise ship, and Ernst pounced. “It was great, because I wasn’t just going to a session and saying, ‘Hi, I’m Katie, I play the bass,’ ” she says. “I had a different relationship—people asked to play my bass.” She already knew some of the regular players at Lilly’s, having met them at a two-week annual jazz camp at the Birch Creek Music Performance Center in Door County, Wisconsin, that she’d attended for four years in the mid-aughts. Others, including acclaimed trumpeter Marquis Hill, she met there for the first time. “It was great to reconnect with the people in the house band,” she says. “But it gave me an instant ability to meet a bunch of young musicians in Chicago every week.”

Ernst kept that gig for three years. She admits that dumb luck helped her land the position in the first place, but it was through preparedness and eagerness to adapt that she made the most of it—she’s grabbed the proverbial bull by the horns throughout her young career. For four years she’s played in Twin Talk, a leaderless trio with saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi and drummer Andrew Green, and after they drop their second album on Friday—a self-titled collection on local label Ears&Eyes—they’ll take their longest tour yet, a two-week east-coast trip that will pass through New York, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., among other locales.

The tour launches Saturday, April 30, with a release concert at Constellation, and after Twin Talk return to town, they play Monday, May 19, at the California Clipper.

The album and tour are the latest points on Ernst’s steady upward trajectory, whose course she began to imagine in summer 2003—her first year at the Birch Creek camp.

(She went every summer till 2006, then started at Eastman in 2007.) Someone at camp played her a recording by SuperBass—the all-star bass trio of Ray Brown, Christian McBride, and John Clayton—and it opened her ears to how much the instrument she’d been playing for five years could actually do. “It made me realize that the bass was much J

APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 27

MUSIC continued from 27

more than just the whole notes I was playing in orchestra,” she says. “That was when I really got fired up.”

That’s not to say Ernst wasn’t already curious and ambitious, though. When she was in second grade, a teacher’s offhand comment bolstered her confidence about using her voice. “I always sang in the choir, and at one point in my youth my piano teacher told my mom that I had a pleasant voice and that it was in tune,” she says. “So my mom somehow relayed that to me, and I always thought, ‘I have a pleasant voice and I’m always in tune,’ and that was all I needed.” She didn’t just play bass in her school’s orchestra and jazz ensembles but also sang in them—and she joined a madrigal group.

“My MO is to be doing a lot of things all of the time,” Ernst says. “That’s been consistent since I was able to decide what I was going to be doing at any time.” By the time she arrived at Eastman, the knowledge of jazz phrasing and improvisation that she’d accumulated as a bassist had seeped into her singing, and she was soon recruited to sing in the school’s big band; she even took an off-campus gig as a vocalist for veteran Dixieland combo the Smugtown Stompers.

Jazz Institute executive director Lauren Deutsch recognized Ernst’s energy and drive early on. While still in high school, the bassist had participated in JIC’s Jazz Links educational program, and Deutsch was happy to welcome her back for the internship. “I was impressed by her self-confidence and fearlessness, combined with an openness to working as part of a team,” she says. “Not surprising, really, since all of those are qualities of a good jazz player.

“She immediately had good ideas, including starting an initiative that would connect next-gen players to the Jazz Institute—an idea that fortuitously collided with the Drake Hotel’s interest in starting a monthly jazz series to draw young people,” adds Deutsch, who has kept Ernst on as a part-time employee since the internship ended. “It’s been great to watch her grow her career over the past six years, both musically and in all of the other areas in which she works. She has a keen vision that propels her forward, but rather than leaving everyone behind in the dust, she sweeps us all along in her wake.”

Twin Talk formed in early 2012, about six months after Ernst moved to Chicago. Though she knew Laurenzi through a mutual friend, she didn’t meet Green till the first time the

28 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

Andrew Green, Katie Ernst, and Dustin Laurenzi, aka Twin Talk, rehearsing at Green’s place ! JONATHAN GIBBY

three of them got together to read through some of Laurenzi’s compositions. “We all played sessions with lots of other people frequently, but there was something special about this particular grouping,” Ernst says.

“Andrew [Green] and I would catch things together, turning on a dime, from the get-go.”

The three of them immediately decided to form a working band, initially called Laurenzi/Ernst/Green, and in 2013 they released the album Sightline, whose cool, agile sound is rooted in postbop but whose tempered energy recalls vintage west-coast jazz. Ernst adds vocals on a handful of tracks, giving the trio a fourth voice by singing lyrics of her own as well as wordless lines. Last year the group renamed itself—as Ernst puts it in the new album’s press materials, “We didn’t want to be a jazz law-firm anymore.”

As tightly as Ernst has bonded with Chicago’s thriving under-30 jazz community, she’s also grown increasingly invested in the city’s rich history. She’s been reading The Freedom Principle—a history of free jazz from the 50s through the 80s by Chicago critic John Litweiler—and thinking a lot about the AACM and Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Band. “Our trio was thinking that we’re coming up with some new concept about being collaborative, but there’s already this precedent and huge canon for that,” she says. “Our belief system has already been established, and we can just feed off of it.”

Ernst doesn’t consider her education to have ended at Eastman. In 2013 and ’14 she participated in the prestigious Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead residency at the Kennedy Center.

The program is under the direction of MacArthur fellow and pianist Jason Moran, and it was there that he became of an admirer of Ernst—eventually he asked her to participate in a high-profile commission, a collaboration with artist Theaster Gates called Looks of a Lot that premiered at Symphony Center in June 2014. For that one-off performance, Ernst sang an English translation of Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger,” accompanied by the Kenwood Academy Jazz Band, and then played bass with Moran’s long-running trio the Bandwagon for the rest of the concert. “Katie Ernst I met because she was in the Jazz Ahead program at the Kennedy Center for the past two years,” Moran said at the time. “After the first year, I thought, ‘Oh my goodness, she’s a really great composer, she’s a really great bassist, she’s a really great singer.’ I said, ‘I’m doing this thing next year, and I want you to be a part of it. I don’t know what you’re going to do yet, but I need you to be up there with us.’”

Last year Ernst released Little Words, an album of original settings of poems by Algonquin Round Table writer Dorothy Parker.

She’s joined by her Twin Talk bandmates and New York pianist Samora Pinderhughes, and though her refined singing takes on a bigger

role than usual, she remains committed to the bass. More recently Ernst has started a duo with a veteran of the local scene, clarinetist James Falzone. “She’s smart as a musician and smart as a person, and she’s wise beyond her years,” Falzone says. “There’s something joyful about her music making that makes her open to anything. There’s no baggage. People respond to that joy, both listeners and musicians. They respond to her positivity and her openness for making art.”

Twin Talk is Ernst’s current focus, and the new album demonstrates astonishing growth. Laurenzi plays with a beguiling cool that belies the sophistication and flexibility of his lines, and Green expertly drives the music without overpowering it. Ernst anchors the band with muscular, precise bass playing and adds her elegant vocals to four of the 11 tunes.

“I’ve been advised by some jazz higher-ups that it would be wise to do more vocals or make that the forefront of the band,” Ernst says wryly. “But I think that’s coming from a desire to be able to categorize the group in the vocal-jazz box or something. I think it’s more interesting to present something where you can’t figure out what it is. Sometimes I’ll sing words, sometimes I’ll just sing syllables, and sometimes I don’t sing at all. I think that’s way more interesting, with a wider palette to play with. Our last tour we did, we turned a corner in taking a lot more risks and getting a lot more open and free. I started to add more wordless vocals to our improvisations. It’s cool to have that option without feeling like this is my role specifically.”

Twin Talk is gaining confidence and attracting attention, but Ernst isn’t narrowly focused on her own ambition—she’s committed to giving back. She’s currently the jazz-ensemble director and jazz-bass teacher at Wheaton College, and she teaches at the same camp in Door Country she attended in high school. She also gives bass lessons at Whitney Young High School and coordinates the Jazz Links Student Council program for the Jazz Institute of Chicago. “My development has been so influenced by mentors, whether they’re just a couple of years older than me at jazz camp or they’re a professor,” she says. “There’s been this constant giveand-take, watching and learning from them, but there’s also these kids learning from me and my people. I love the idea of that mentorship cycle.” v

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MUSIC APRIL 28TH

TECH N9NE W/ RITTZ

APRIL 29TH

Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of April 28 b

ALL AGES

F

PICK OF THE WEEK

On the new Changes wailing soul man Charles Bradley reworks a Black Sabbath ballad

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Evan Weiss of Into it. Over it. !

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Charles Bradley & His Extraordinaires See Pick of the Week.

Tenement open. 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, sold out. 17+

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MAY 8TH

HVOB Joel Chandler and Josh Adam open. 8 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $13, $9 in advance.

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MAY 15TH STREETLIGHT MANIFESTO

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VETERAN SOUL SINGER CHARLES BRADLEY has grown on each recording he’s cut since Daptone Records capo Gabriel Roth stumbled onto his James Brown tribute act Black Velvet in 2000, and he’s moved beyond his trademark “screaming eagle” wail to convey an impressive range of expressions. His albums, including the new Changes (Dunham/ Daptone), tap into familiar old-school soul molds—especially the gritty Stax Records sound—but Bradley has never transcended the deployment of decades-old templates as he does on this latest effort. Punctuated by a buzzing little synthesizer figure, the smoldering midtempo burner “Ain’t Gonna Give It Up” finds him laying his heart bare, his throaty, low-down rasp betraying his vulnerability toward his lover even as he insists he’s not surrendering anything to her. On the album’s centerpiece, a cover of the Black Sabbath ballad “Changes,” Bradley supplies shades of anguish missing from the original. The mournful horn section, which adds layers of depth across the entire album, lends the track a kind of elegiac sadness, and the slow lope of the groove brings to mind the poignant Sam Cooke number “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Written by Bradley’s superb band, the solid new tunes subtly tweak conventions or make sly citations (the horn line in “Nobody But You” quotes a melody line from the Seals & Croft hit “Summer Breeze”). —PETER MARGASAK

The electronic sound of Austrian duo HVOB (aka Her Voice Over Boys) ebbs and flows with the seductive voice of leader Anna Muller, and the more her controlled singing resembles a whisper, the more you’re encouraged to crank the volume.

Her tender, dramatically colored vocals nudge the group’s otherwise timid-sounding production into unfolding and building upward until it envelops you in a cocoon. HVOB is downtempo pop that’s minimal house music by way of long-standing German indie band the Notwist. It’s so easy to imagine Notwist front man Markus Acher dueting with Muller during a remix version of the pensive tune “Reason” (from HVOB’s 2013 self-titled album). Last year’s Trialog (Stil vor Talent) is more brooding and immersive than its predecessor, with HVOB layering complex instrumentation without letting the songs get too dense. The nimble, handclap-spiked percussion and melting horn lines on “Cool Melt” gel into an engrossing, ascending melody that goes higher and higher with no apotheosis in sight. Muller’s serene vocals keep the track grounded—and she remains prohibitively cool even as she features a word like “viscosity” so many times that you can’t help but harp on it. —LEOR GALIL

Lil Uzi Vert Famouns Dex, Martin Sky, Logan Cage, Webster X, Roy French, Warhol SS, and Elz the DJ open. 6:45 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, sold out. b Philadelphia rapper Symere Woods, aka Lil Uzi Vert, emerged last year with all the colorful gusto and amateurism of an elementary school J

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MUSIC continued from 30 student playing with finger paint for the first time.

On 2015’s Luv Is Rage (Generation Now/Atlantic) the 21-year-old scoops up and mixes together distinct rap sounds that have been burbling up online—like Chief Keef’s vitriolic spewage and Young Thug’s syllable-splitting flow. More often than not Woods’s enthusiasm leaves more of a mark than does his artistry, and for now his performances are rooted more in his influences than in his own ideas (Young Thug’s appearance on “Yamborghini Dream” sounds colossal next to much of what Woods lays out on Luv Is Rage). But it’s all part of a process of self-discovery, and on the new Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World (Generation Now) Woods exerts himself in brief, Auto-Tune-speckled lines that melt away at the edges—which does wonders with the

New Album out May 20

serene, filmy synths on “Grab the Wheel.” Woods is joined by a mass of young Chicagoans, including the speedily ascending Famous Dex, who also plays with a mishmash of contemporary rap styles but comes out on the other side with a distinctive sound of his own. I’m not particularly keen on chunks of Dex’s recent OhhMannGoddDamm mixtape, but he always delivers his seesawing flow through what sounds like a mouthful of ice, and he always sounds like himself. —LEOR GALIL

FRIDAY29 Avishai Cohen Quartet 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $22. 18+

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32 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

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Israeli trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s nimble trio Triveni has always been distinguished by its stopon-a-dime agility. Supported by drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Omer Avital, Cohen uncorks muscular, shape-shifting lines that dart and glide with a disarming ease that makes it seem like the trumpet is easy to play. The threesome employs rhythm and melody with stunning grace, pushing and pulling on postbop themes like they own them. With that sound deeply entrenched in my brain, I was initially stunned by the trumpeter’s assured new album Into the Silence (ECM), which features music Cohen composed in the wake of the passing of his father. The deeply introspective recording is lyric and fragile, the strong presence of Israeli pianist Yonathan Avishai (a band-

mate of Cohen’s in the quartet Third World Love) lending a mournful richness to the music as he lays down shimmering, pensive lines and atmospheric chords. Waits and bassist Eric Revis (partners in the trio Tarbaby) provide elastic slow-moving rhythms that ground the music and give it an imperturbably steady pulse but never get in the way of the sorrowful melodic explorations. On a few tracks the group is joined by pitch-perfect saxophonist Bill McHenry, but this album showcases Cohen, highlighting a different side of his vibrant personality—one that’s ruminative yet hopeful, delicate yet forceful. For tonight’s performance he leads a quartet featuring pianist Jason Lindner, bassist Tal Mashiach, and drummer Justin Brown. —PETER MARGASAK

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Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Into It. Over It., Pinegrove See also Saturday. Into It. Over It. headline; The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, Sidekicks, and Pinegrove open. 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $20, $16.50 in advance. 18+ If you’re looking to take emo’s temperature—or perhaps challenge anyone whose perception of the genre is stuck in 2005, 1995, or 1985—this tour is the place to start. Hometown heroes Into It. Over It. headline behind their recent Standards (Triple Crown), a trenchant, sensitive, and contemplative album that explores our ever-changing, sometimes contradictory selves. Front man Evan Weiss sifts through his past, recalling youthful dreams, surveying changes that have marked his early 30s and

affected longtime friends, and examining the constants of his life as they appear to him today. Weiss is often tagged as a spokesperson for emo’s fourth wave and a standard-bearer for the second wave’s “golden age” in the 90s, but he comes off best when listeners put aside labels and simply bask in his explorations of the wishy-washy feelings resident in his head. On the nimble, muscular “No EQ” Weiss acknowledges the hypnotic power of nostalgia and recognizes that the energy it consumes makes it hard to work toward a future. Ultimately Weiss’s ability to give shape to this struggle emboldens Into It. Over It. to move forward. Opener New Jersey outfit Pinegrove are among those helping reshape what emo is today; these punks express themselves in a voice that’s thoroughly alt-country but powered by emo, and this year’s Cardinal (Run for Cover) is

affecting in every raw, cracked vocal and scuzzy guitar drawl. —LEOR GALIL

Myrkur Behemoth headline. 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $30, $25 in advance. 17+ Despite the metal-scene backlash Myrkur has provoked, the only mistake she’s made has been to assume the mantle of the hermetic, anonymous Scandinavian black-metal loner upon the release of her lovely self-titled debut EP in 2014. Amalie Bruun, the project’s mastermind, is in fact Danish by birth, but it was bound to come out that she’d lived in New York City for years, where she’d put out a few records with dream-pop band Ex Cops—and metalheads as a class care enough about “authen-

ticity” to resent feeling duped by PR. That said, the great majority of the ugliness directed at Bruun— she says she’s been bombarded with death threats online—has amounted to cretins flinging their poop because there’s a girl in their clubhouse. For the most recent Myrkur release, last year’s M (Relapse), Bruun enlisted top-shelf collaborators: Ulver front man Garm coproduced, Øyvind Myrvoll of Nidingr contributed live drumming, and Myrvoll’s bandmate Teloch (who’s also been in Mayhem since 2011) played bass and additional guitars. But if you’re tempted to dismiss Bruun as a woman propped up by talented men, put down the poop and step away. She wrote everything herself, draping a gauzy curtain of pop-friendly melody over the grim thicket of Norwegian black metal—the songs are often nudged toward northern European folk or J

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medieval liturgical music, helped along by Bruun’s piano as well as by bowed Icelandic zither, Hardanger fiddle, violin, horn, and tuba. Her voice is sometimes a clotted, feral shriek and sometimes a bright silver ribbon, and she often multiplies it into a radiant angelic chorus. Excepting the touches of black ’n’ roll on “Mordet” and “Skadi,” M has a lyrical, pastoral feel—lots of black metal tries to evoke like a remote, unpopulated arctic forest, but Myrkur’s forest grows in the white light and frigid wind atop the anvil head of a towering thundercloud. Bruun typically tours with a three-piece backing band.

—PHILIP MONTORO

SATURDAY30 Cross Record Loom open. 10 PM, Schubas, 3159 S. Southport, $12, $10 in advance.

Though elements of wispy, free-spirited indie folk pirouette through and twirl in and out of her 2012 record Be Good, former Chicagoan Emily Cross was never meant for the stark path of the solo wanderer with an acoustic guitar slung over her shoulder.

No, a track like that record’s “Dirt Nap” is so foreboding and discordant as Cross’s chantlike, almost unintelligible vocals glide in and out that it feels like you should be listening to it in a head-down, chained-ankle trudge. Now based in Austin, Cross and her husband, Dan Duszynski, have slunk deeper into the shadows with the striking Wabi-Sabi (Ba Da Bing). The pair create a sinister, fantastical atmosphere thanks to their willingness to weave in ambient noise via what sounds like an orchestra of supplemental instrumentation (to get a sense of the group’s present-day direction, please note that Thor Harris of Swans is one of the album’s contributors).

Tracks often flicker and crackle like the brush at the base of a campfire, held barely in place by rhythms that are practically imperceptible; at other times, as on “Steady Waves,” a hard riff materializes from the ether to sternly direct the rest of the instruments between the fleeting swirls of guitar and Cross’s breathy, airy vocals. Wabi-Sabi is a no-doubt triumph for Cross Record and an exciting indicator of how far the couple is willing to explore. —KEVIN WARWICK

Into It. Over It., Pinegrove See Friday.

Into It. Over It. headline; The World Is a Beautiful

Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, Sidekicks, and Pinegrove open. 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, sold out. 18+ Maypole Folk Festival Henhouse Prowlers, Sanctified Grumblers, Son Monarcas, Chris Walz, Wandering Boys, Spitzer Space Telescope & Mareva, Glass Mountain, Blackest Crow, and Can I Get an Amen. 2 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15.

In Chicago, folk-music festivals—the kind with actual folk music as opposed to that bearded indie stuff from the aughts—are often corralled within college campuses, the burbs, or the Old Town School’s north-side stomping grounds. But for its inaugural run the new Maypole Folk Festival plucks some of the local scene’s most interesting and varied players for an afternoon celebration of traditional music very near the city center. Topping the nine-act bill are perennial favorites Henhouse Prowlers, who play a myriad of bluegrass and bluegrass-inspired styles, and the Sanctified Grumblers, who rep prewar roots music, often with a washboard or sousaphone twist. My eye’s on the trio of multi-instrumentalists Glass Mountain, who weave our country’s folk and gospel traditions into a musical arras as jovial as it is apparitional, and Son Monarcas, a local quartet carrying the torch for son jarocho, a folk style that originated in the port city of Veracruz, Mexico. Sink even further into the past with Spitzer & Mareva, a vocal-centric duo consisting of members of Old Town-approved collective Old Lazarus’ Harp, who specialize in the yo-ho-hos of sea shanties and traditional ballads of the British Isles. —ERIN OSMON

SUNDAY1 Julian Lage 7 PM, SPACE, 1245 Chicago, Evanston, $15-$25. b Guitarist Julian Lage has been firing on all cylinders of late, easily transcending his reputation as the wunderkind who helped bring new energy to vibist Gary Burton’s latest band. In the last few years Lage’s stunning facility has become one of the least interesting things about him, as he’s eagerly traversed new paths (evident both on his adventurous duet project with Nels Cline and last year’s knockout solo album World’s Fair). His new record, Arclight (Mack Avenue), pushes in yet another

MUSIC direction. It’s the first he’s made as a leader with an electric guitar—a Telecaster to be precise—and it’s the debut of his current trio with bassist Scott Colley and drummer Kenny Wollesen. Tracks are split between vintage tunes from the 20s and 30s— when the burgeoning American songbook had not yet been partitioned into categories like jazz, country, or blues—and a slew of flinty, catchy originals exploring a modern jazz sound that taps into American folk, whether the ruminative compositions of 70s-era Keith Jarrett or the atmospheric twang of Bill Frisell. With a bigger drum sound and a fatter bass tone, the originals give off a tough rock-influenced edge, and Lage’s nicely scuffed tone and crystalline phrasing suggest a kind of proto-surf-guitar sound (the opening part of “Presley” had me expecting a cover of “Sleepwalk” for a second). He’s just as imaginative on the old material, turning the trite Orientalist trifle “Persian Rug” into a buoyant swinger, and providing a totally modern take on the obscure ballad “Nocturne” with a crisp lyricism that feels genre agnostic. Tonight Lage leads the same group from the record. —PETER MARGASAK

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Like Rats Disrotted, Staring Problem, and Mexican Werewolf open. 7 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $8. 17+ It would just be wrong for a band to be named after a Godflesh song and not also produce a monstrous, unholy racket—especially if that track is the crushing opener from the industrial-metal pioneer’s debut LP. On their brand-new full-length II (Southern Lord) local five-piece Like Rats do just that. With a rhythm section featuring two members from powerviolence punishers Weekend Nachos, Like Rats build their insanely heavy hardcore with the same kind of foundation-cracking tones, but instead of using them to whip up a wild frenzy, they anchor evil riffs on rock-solid rhythms and focus progressions on twisted, demonic moods while the vocals deliver death-metal-inspired grunts and growls. II is a brutal combo of massively dark and enormous sounds, and with Nachos calling it a day this coming fall it’ll be exciting to see how much more devastating Like Rats become once its members go full-time. Tonight is the release party for II; the compact-disc version of the album contains every song the band has recorded, including all the tracks from their limited vinyl-only releases. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

TUESDAY3 Imarhan Cafe Racer opens. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 S. Southport, $15.

On their recent eponymous debut for City Slang this young Tuareg ensemble, whose members grew up together in southern Algeria, join Nigerien guitarist Bombino in pushing Saharan guitar music toward Western influences. Imarhan move easily between different settings, though they never abandon the cycling riffs, clopping rhythms, and soulfully restrained singing. Acoustic guitars and sparse organ stabs shape the airy folksiness of “Tarha Tadagh,” while there’s a driving, almost funky thrust to “Tahabort,” and the influence of Algerian rai J

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APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 35

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

MUSIC continued from 35

wends its way into the incessant groove of “Imarhan.” Naturally, front man Iyad Moussa Ben Abderahmane (aka Sadam) is related to a member of wildly popular Tuareg outfit Tinariwen, but this combo are definitely staking out their own turf. The deft interplay of guitars would still be seductive even if Imarhan lacked originality. —PETER MARGASAK

WEDNESDAY4 Besnard Lakes J Fernandez and Crown Larks open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $14.

Jace Lasek and Olga Goreas, the husband-andwife team at the core of long-running Montreal band Besnard Lakes, tried something new for their latest album, A Coliseum Complex Museum (Jagjaguwar). The pair camped in a trailer by the rural Saskatchewan lake that gave the group their moniker, writing songs and preparing demos which they then brought back to the small coterie of collaborators that helped them build the album. The cinematic new record—lush with gorgeous post-Beach Boys vocal harmonies, sculptural guitar interplay, and a proggy depth—is another strong effort, its lovely melodies unfolding patiently amid dense shoegaze arrangements. But while the band’s method clearly works, they might need to shake up

Cross Record ! BRYAN C. PARKER

the process a bit more; I enjoy the new record, but there’s less and less that distinguishes each new effort from its predecessors. That’s a fine thing if you love a sound so much you can’t bear a change, but you’re out of luck if you want to be surprised.

—PETER MARGASAK v

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36 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

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FOOD & DRINK

R ORIOLE | $$$$$ 661 W. Walnut 312-877-5339 oriolechicago.com

B

NEW REVIEW

Noah Sandoval spreads his wings at Oriole The Senza vet has made the West Loop restaurant one of Chicago’s pricey but fun multicourse destinations.

By MIKE SULA

Lamb belly glazed with jus, macerated huckleberry, ramp leaf puree, anise hyssop, and roasted cipollini, and dusted with sumac ! DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

read service comes right down the middle of the 15-course degustation at Oriole. It’s a slice of sourdough, slathered with cultured butter sprinkled with toasted grains. The synthesis of the tang of the bread, the nutty seed, and especially the cheeselike dairy is so deliciously funky it hits the pleasure centers of the brain with the force of a dope shot.

Upon eating this the folks at my table emitted such alarming groans of gratification that servers quickly returned to the table with seconds. That’s the kind of professionally hospitable gesture one comes to expect when participating in the sort of extravagantly ticketed, multicourse meals that manage to persist here and there in our great eating city.

Up front, I tend to dread potentially precious epic meals in new restaurants. (If only I could recoup the hours and dollars I’ve spent captive to dreary, passionless vision, sloppily brooding over wine pairings.) And at $175 a person, not including pairings or tip, Oriole out of the gate is one of the most expensive restaurants in Chicago.

But that bread course is something of a tell from chef Noah Sandoval, who previously worked at Senza, a restaurant that garnered much acclaim despite serving food completely free of gluten, that scourge of the digestively deluded (with apologies to celiac sufferers everywhere). Sandoval, after all, did time at Green Zebra and Schwa, and has a range of experience that should be comforting to the nervous.

The event begins when you amble up the stairs to the unassuming doors off alleylike Walnut Street and into the host station, an old but operative industrial freight elevator, and then on into a warmly lit, slightly less raw space of exposed brick and wooden support beams containing a comfortably arranged 28 seats. A muted soundtrack of the Skatalites, Fugazi, and Grinderman keeps the atmosphere subliminally charged. Elliot Smith may make a cameo, for a misplaced dose of existential dread.

By contrast, the bright white tiled kitchen is in full view, separated into savory and pastry sides, the latter where Genie Kwon of GT Fish & Oyster, Boka, and Senza fame operates. You can see through the windows that the tweezer game is strong. A blowtorch makes a cameo.

And all is calm, quiet, Alinea-like intensity.

The menu I ate in mid-April was dominated by seafood but began with fruit, a small dish of the year’s first tiny wild French straw- J

APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 37

MUST BE 21+

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SOUTH OF THE BORDER $50 For more information visit chicagoreader.com/kico 38 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

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FOOD & DRINK

A long pretzel cracker dotted with black currant puree, gianduja, and dabs of funky Raclette cheese ! DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

continued from 37

berries—practically out of season the moment they reached our mouths—garnished with watercress and vermouth-infused cream and paired with a cocktail of elderflower, creme de violette, and sparkling wine. It was a combination so ethereal as to make a diversion of what was to follow: a bite of sweet Scottish langoustine topped with a piece of warm lardo and a dollop of briny, buttery caviar. The plate this rested on concealed a bowl of tissuey Iberico ham complemented by sweet, nutty Campo de Montalban cheese, candied black walnut, and pickled mustard seeds. This set up creamy Santa Barbara sea urchin gonad with a touch of the fermented citrus-chile paste yuzu kosho, perched on a single maki roll packed with brown rice. Sweet Alaskan king crab hid in a bowl of fish-sauce-infused coconut cream swimming with cara cara orange (a redfleshed variety of navel) and tart oxalis (aka wood sorrel). Steelhead trout fillets bobbed in a pho-like shishito pepper consomme among smoky-salty roe, purple potato confit, and braised artichoke.

The succession of sea creatures was broken only by the bread course and a single bite of

foie gras torchon garnished with a white-soy gelee and tart clusters of finger lime.

Then it was on to meaty, savory courses. A square of rare, fatty Wagyu beef alongside charred Little Gem lettuce, bearnaise, black garlic puree, and onion ash was a powerfully moving bite that didn’t slow anyone down for the following tangle of caraway-flavored capellini with a cheesy butter sauce emulsified with black truffle and yeast, all showered with ground rye berries. Lush local lamb belly glazed with jus, macerated huckleberry, ramp leaf puree, anise hyssop, and roasted cipollini, all dusted with tart sumac, ended the savory courses. Kwon took the stage with passion-fruit sorbet lollipops enrobed in coconut and kaffir-lime-toasted marshmallow, cleansing the palate for a remarkable cheese course: a long pretzel cracker dotted with black currant puree, gianduja, and dabs of funky Raclette cheese, rich, fruity, sweet, and savory flavors harmonizing like a barbershop quartet. A dish of chicory custard and vanilla-cinnamon ice cream was a cool, creamy penultimate bite before mini croissants scented with cardamom and glazed with rose-acacia honey. Kwon also sends guests home with breakfast—in my case, a lemon-pecan mini pie that didn’t make it to morning.

There are two pairings by former L2O and Intro sommelier Aaron McManus: one strictly wine focused ($125), the other a mix of wine, sake, beer, and cocktails ($75). They are invariably on point: the sea urchin with a multilayered junmai gingo sake from Japan’s oldest active brewery that just kept giving; the beef, or chef ’s “beer course,” with the fruity Belgian La Chouffe blond ale; and, to go with the gianduja, Brachetto d’Acqui, which happens to be the preferred bottle of the commedia dell’arte character the dessert is named for.

Overall Sandoval and Kwon present a crescendoing succession of delicate dishes with excellent product and superb flavors and compositions from which not an ort should remain on the plate. The service is well practiced, almost clairvoyant, but in no way overformal. (There are tampons in the bathroom, along with dental floss, bobby pins, and hairspray, perhaps as a collegial reminder that we’re all human.) Oriole has joined the ranks of the city’s high-dollar but truly fun multicourse events—Alinea, Next, Elizabeth, Schwa—that you should make a point to experience, if only once. v

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" @MikeSula APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 39

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○ Watch a video of Michael Tsirtsis making the Suicide Squeeze cocktail with Big League Chew at chicagoreader.com/food.

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40 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

SOUTH LOOP

Stoli/Absolut & Soco Cocktails $4, Long Island Iced Teas $5, Herradura Margaritas $5, Stella/Hoegaarden/ Deschutes Drafts $4, Goose Island 312 Bottles $3.50 PHOTO: ALEXEY LYSENKO/ GETTY IMAGES

Suicide Squeeze ! CORY POPP

A

s a kid, you played baseball, and you either had a mouthful of sunflower seeds or a mouthful of Big League Chew,” MICHAEL TSIRTSIS says. When ROGER LANDES (MFK) challenged the OAK + CHAR bartender to create a cocktail with the shredded BUBBLE GUM, though, it had been years since he’d sat in a dugout pretending to chew tobacco. “While I was making the cocktail I had a big wad of it in my mouth the entire time, blowing bubbles— it kind of inspired me,” he says. “I got it in my beard quite often.”

The biggest challenge, Tsirtsis says, was retaining the bubble gum flavor while trying to eliminate “that processed, synthetic, unnatural flavor that comes with any type of chewing gum or processed candy.” He looked back to the first chewing gums, made from tree resin, and decided to do “something really earthy that would complement the woodsy type of qualities that a natural gum would have.”

Tsirtsis made a syrup with toasted black and white peppercorns, green cardamom pods, star anise, and juniper berries steeped with sarsaparilla root; after removing the spices, he added three packs of original flavor Big League Chew and simmered the mixture for an hour and a half. The final step was removing the goopy, softened gum (“We went through quite a few slotted spoons,” Tsirtsis says) and adding a little sugar.

Other ingredients included white rum, lemon juice, egg white, and a house-made

tincture of sarsaparilla and cinnamon. To finish the drink, Tsirtsis infused Angostura bitters with Fresno and habanero chiles and grape-flavored Big League Chew, which he spritzed over the top. “It’s really crazy how much [the cocktail] tastes like bubble gum,” he says. “It’s weird, but the bitters spritz on top takes away any medicinal qualities that the straight bubble gum has.”

SUICIDE SQUEEZE

1 EGG WHITE .5 OZ LEMON JUICE 1 OZ BIG LEAGUE CHEW, CARDAMOM, AND BLACK PEPPER SYRUP 2 OZ BANKS WHITE RUM 5 DROPS SARSAPARILLA-AND-CINNAMON TINCTURE ANGOSTURA BITTERS INFUSED WITH FRESNO AND HABANERO CHILES AND GRAPE BIG LEAGUE CHEW Reverse dry shake: add ice and all ingredients except the Angostura bitters to a shaker and shake well. Strain it and shake the cocktail without the ice, then fine strain into a coupe.

Spray with infused Angostura bitters.

WHO’S NEXT:

Tsirtsis has challenged SAMMY FAZE of BILLY SUNDAY to create a cocktail with SQUID INK. v

" @juliathiel

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l

JOBS

SALES & MARKETING OMG! IS SUMMER HERE??

CASH IN YOUR POCKET Tele-Fundraising. Felons need not apply per Illinois Attorney General regulations. Start ASAP, Call 312-256-5035

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NAVIGANT CONSULTING ECONOMICS, LLC seeks Sr. Consultants for Chicago, IL to consult w/ clients to provide advanced financial quantitative & qualitative data research & analysis to develop strategic approaches in support of damage valuations & anti-trust litigation projects for clients in the telecom., manufact., energy industries. Bachelor’s in Economics /Statistics/Public Policy +2yrs exp req’d. Must have 2 yrs financial analysis exp. in support of damage valuations & anti-trust litigation projects for clients in the telecom., manufact., energy industries, creating, auditing, cleaning trial exhibit data, writing & auditing drafts of expert witness rep orts/testimony. Must have exp performing price elasticity studies incorporating price adjustment lags using regressions (linear, multiple, time-series, dummy variable), extracting price & financial

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Analysts, Analytics for Chicago, IL loc. to develop credit risk assessments & business intelligence analytic solutions to serve financial institutions, incl. PLCC providers, using credit risk & statistical techniques.

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R&D AND FIELD ENGINEERING DIRECTOR: Responsible for cutting edge innovation including Energy Efficient Shrink Tunnel Technology, mechanical/ pneumatic and electrical solutions for leading packaging machine manufacturer in Schiller Park, IL. Requires Bachelor degree in mechanical engineering plus 7 years packaging machine experience at least 2 of which are as R&D Director for packaging machine company or any equivalent combination of education training or experience. Extensive travel required.

Mail resume to L. Fitzgerald, ARPAC,LLC 9555 W. Irving Park Rd, Schiller Park, IL 60176.

Development Engineer-CE Niehoff & Co. Dvlp/implmt new product intro prgm & current product imprvmt prgm. Reqs: MS in Mech. or Electrical Eng & 3 yrs exp. as Product Dvlpmt Eng. Exp. must incl. working w/ ISO 9001 (2008) protocols/dvlping std. procedures, work instrs, supplier audits; roll out products w/ approp doc to manage APQP activities; V&V documentation; HD brushless alternator mfg & rot. electrics; use of Six Sigma methodologies inclg DMAIC/DMEDI to imprv design & mfg.; failure mode effects analysis (DFMEA & PFMEA); estblmt of mfg. & assembly verification procedures; reliability imprvmts/ reduction in Warranty claims by leading CPI & NPI projects; joint failure analys. for warranty recovery; multi-gen. product planning for alternators. Six Sigma Certification-Green Belt. Loc. Evanston, IL. Contact: eabr aham@ceniehoff.com

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Duty: Research, evaluate, and prepare curricula, instructional methods, and materials. Mail Resume to I-T Day Care Center, LLC. Attn: Yun Lyu, 1637 Oakton Place, Des Plaines, IL 60018.

PROJECT ESTIMATOR - CONSTRUCTION; Kane/Lake County; 3 yrs exp req’d; local travel req’d. send resumes to cat60118@gmail.com

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $600-$699 EDGEWATER!

1061 W. Rose-

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

STUDIO OTHER CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up.

773-637-5957 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $130/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

1 BR UNDER $700 WEST PULLMAN (INDIANA

CAMPAIGN JOBS

12.25/HR FOR 90 DAYS THEN 15.00/HR

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

PLEASE STOP IN OR CALL 773-478-8111 AFTER 7PM or email resume to: JOHN@ADMIRALX.COM

Ave) Nice, lrg 1 & 2BR w/balcony.

1BR $650, 2BR $750. Move-In Fee $300. Sec 8 Welcome. 773-995-6950

BICKERDIKE APTS WAIT LIST

Opening for Nelson Mandela Apts.

Thursday, April 28 – Saturday, April 30, 2016. Applications will be distributed: Thursday 11:00 a.m. – 8:00 p. m. Friday 11:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Saturday 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. @ 2550 W. North Ave. Chicago, Il 60647. LA APERTURA DE la lista de espera para Nelson Mandela Apts se realizará desde el jueves 28 de Abril al sábado 30 de Abril del 2016.

Las aplicaciones serán distribuidas en los siguientes horarios: Jueves de 11:00 am a 5:00 pm Viernes de 11:00 am a 5:00 pm Sábado de 10 am a 2:00 pm en la 2550 W North Avenue Chicago, IL 60647

79TH & WOODLAWN 1BR $650-$700, 2BR $775-$800; 76th & Phillips: 2BR $775-$800. Remodeled, appls avail. FREE HEAT. Sec 8 welc. 312-286-5678 CHICAGO, BEVERLY/CAL Par k/Blue Island Studio $550 & up, 1BR $650 & up, 2BR $905 & up.

Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Prkg. 708-388-0170 73rd and Jeffery Blvd. Large 1BRs, heated, hardwood flrs, laundry room, appls, near trans. $700 and up. 773-881-3573

STARTING RENT $625 PER Mo. North Island Apartments. Independent Living Seniors 55+. Now Accepting Applications for 1 Bedrooms only.

Free Heat, Elevator, Laundry Facilities on site. Income guidelines apply.

Wheelchair access/EHO. Hrs: Tues 12-4, Wed 10-2 & Fri 8-12. (630)8590877

AUBURN GRESHAM . 8105 S. Paulina St. 1 & 2BD apts, & CALUMET CITY 1BD $650$775/mo. Tom 708-205-1448

QUALITY PANGEA APARTMENTS, Studios-4BR, from $450.

EXCHANGE EAST APTS 1 Brdm $575 w/Free Parking,Appl, AC,Free heat. Near trans. laundry rm. Elec.not incl. Kalabich Mgmt (708) 424-4216

Newly rehabbed. Appliances included. Low Move-in Fees. Hardwood floors. Pangea - Chicago’s South, Southwest & West Neighborhoods.

312-985-0556

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

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

Laundry & Security on Premises.

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

BLUE ISLAND 1 & 2BR Apts.

Newly decorated, off street parking, heat included. $650-$725/month + 1 month sec. Call 708-333-0234 MIDWAY AREA/63RD KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All

modern oak floors, appliances, Security system, on site maint. clean & quiet, Nr. transp. From $445. 773582-1985 (espanol)

77TH & PRAIRIE 1BD, updated, ready now $675/month including heat 84th & Michigan, 2BD ready now, $950/month including heat GR&B Company 773-955-0900 CHICAGO SOUTH - YOU’VE tried the rest, we are the best.

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

773-221-7490, 773-221-7493 WINTER SPECIAL $500 To-

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

9109 S Beverly #2 $750 large studio hardwood floors remodeled Coin operated laundry gas and water inc no sec dep Call Toni 773 916 0039

6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

CHICAGO - SOUTH SHORE Large 1BR, $6 60/mo. Free heat.

Near Transportation. Section 8 Welcome. Call 708-932-4582 CHICAGO 70TH & KING DR,

1BR, clean, quiet, well maintained bldg, Lndry + Heat. Section 8 Ok $645mo. 773-510-9290

70TH/ MAPLEWOOD. 2BR, appls, hardwood flrs, ceiling fans, laundry facilities, intercom system. $775 & up. 773-881-3573 NO SEC DEP 6829 S. Perry.

Studio $460. 1BR. $515.

HEAT INCL 773-955-5106 CHICAGO - HYDE PARK 5401 S. Ellis.

Studios. $400-$470/mo Call 773-955-5106 2-3 BEDROOM APARTMENTS

avail. No utilities included. $825$875/mo. Near 55th & Ashland - 71st & Halsted. Call 872-203-5734 HYDE PARK -SGL.FURN.RMS. With Refrig & Microwave, Utils. Inc. Close to Lake and Trans.$515-$550.

Ldry&24hr sec. 773-577-9361

THE LATEST ON WHO’S PLAYING

AND WHERE THEY’RE PLAYING

EARLY WARNINGS

WEEKLY E-BLAST GET UP TO DATE. SIGN UP NOW. CHICAGOREADER.COM

APRIL 28, 2016 | CHICAGO READER 41

ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT

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

WEST ROGERS PARK (Devon/ Kedzie) Four Room, One bedroom. Newly decorated. Formal DR. 800 sf. Clean, quiet, Second floor. Cultured area. Near shopping, transportation. $795. 773441-5183 WEST HUMBOLDT PK 1 & 2BR Apts, spacious, oak wood flrs, huge closets. heat incl, rehab, $765 up to

875. 847-866-7234

LAKESIDE TOWER, 910 W Lawrence. 1 bedrooms starting at $895-$925 include heat and gas, laundry in building. Great view! Close to CTA Red Line, bus, stores, restaurants, lake, etc. To schedule a showing please contact Celio 773-3961575, Hunter Properties 773-4777070, www.hunterprop.com BEDROOM

NICE, SUNNY ONE bedroom.

Hardwood floors, new kitchen, white tile, bathroom. 3602 W. Irving Park. $800-$1000 plus utilities. 773-5392246, cell 773-332-2098.

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

by Metroplex, Inc

WEST RIDGE, 6200N/ 2200W. Spacious updated one

1 BR $800-$899

ONE

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

Laundry in building. $850/ month.

Available 6/1. 773-761-4318, www. lakefrontmgt.com

GARDEN

apartment near Warren Park and Metra. 6802 N Wolcott. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. $800-$850/ month.

Available 6/1. 773-761-4318, www. lakefrontmgt.com

MONTROSE/ CLARENDON VINTAGE one bedroom. Sunny/

bright, across from park, heat/ gas included. Miniblinds/ ceiling fans.

Free laundry, private porch, block Montrose Harbor. $875 773-9733463.

bedroom garden apartment. Near transportation, shopping, parks.

Heat, appliances, electricity, blinds included. 773-274-8792. $900.

1 BR $1100 AND OVER LOGAN SQUARE Carriage House,

2-story LR with fireplace, loft, 1 bedroom & sitting room, modern kitchen & bath, utilities included. $1250/mo.

Non-smoking. 773-235-1066

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

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

CALUMET CITY 158TH & PAXTON SANDRIDGE APTS 1 & 2 BEDROOM UNITS MODELS OPEN M-F, 9AM-5:30PM *** 708-841-5450 *** CHICAGO, 7727 S. Colfax, ground flr Apt., ideal for senior citizens. Secure bldng. Modern 1BR $595. Lrg 2BR, $800. Free cooking & heating gas. Free parking. 312613-4427 LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888 SUBURBS, RENT TO O W N !

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

Call 708-868-2422 or visit w ww.nhba.com CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708-868-2422 or visit www. nhba.com CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large 2 room Studio, 1 & 2BR Apts.

Carpet, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $650$975/mo. Call 773-233-4939 READY TO MOVE? REMODELED 1, 2 , 3 & 4 BR Apts.

Heat & Appls incl. South Side locations only. Call 773-593-4357

AVAILABLE NOW! NEW Beautiful 2BR Apt, 69th & Green St, walk-in closet, new appls, near trans. 773-203-8491 MOVE IN SPECIAL!!!

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

$40 w/AD 24/7

224-223-7787

60 MINUTES FREE TRIAL

THE HOTTEST GAY CHATLINE

1-312-924-2082 More Local Numbers: 800-777-8000

www.guyspyvoice.com

Ahora en Español/18+

42 CHICAGO READER | APRIL 28, 2016

MUST SEE, LOW COST, CLEAN Calumet City, Quiet. XL 2BR, 2ba, laundry, appls, pkng, owner pays heat. $845/mo. 312339-3517 LAWNDALE: REHABBED 2BR+ $910/mo. Heat & hot water included.

4313 W. Flournoy. Secure building. 630-709-8675.

SOUTHSIDE 815-17 W 76th St, well maintained 2BR apts, hdwd flrs, starting at $750/mo, security deposit required Call 773-8748451

NO MOVE-IN FEE! No Dep! Sec 8

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

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

2 BR UNDER $900 CHICAGO 70TH/ ABERDEEN. Studio & 2BR, $475$695/month + security. Remodeled, heat included. Call 773-6518673

bedroom.

Hardwood floors, new kitchen, white tile, bathroom. 3602 W. Irving Park. $1250 plus utilities. 773-539-2246, cell 773-332-2098.

LAKEVIEW! 1739 W. Addison.

Must See, 2 bedrooms at $1350 hardwood floors, completely renovated apartments, 1 blk to CTA brown line, walking distance to Wrigley Field, restaurants and shops. Application fee $40. No security deposit! Parking space available for a monthly fee.

For a showing please call Saida 773407-6452, Hunter Properties 773477-7070 www.hunterprop.com

2 BR $1500 AND OVER 2 BR/2 BA, 1900 SQ FT, Superb

location, blocks to subway and 90/ 94, 2-CAR ATTACHED GARAGE, 3 floors, Beautifully decorated and spacious home nestled in landscaped court-yard. Great Floorplan, fireplace, granite kitchen counters, wash er/dryer, alarm, hardwood floors, pets ok. $1850/mo. Contact: draketownhome3209@yahoo.com or 847/302-1533

CHICAGO, SPACIOUS 2BR, 8605 S. May. Heat included. Tenant pays cooking gas & electric.

Garage available. $900/mo. 720331-2601

FREE TO LISTEN AND REPLY TO ADS Free Code: Chicago Reader

AUSTIN: 2 BR, newly decorated, 4937 W Maple, tenant pays all utilities. $850/mo + 1 month rent + security. Credit check. 773-379-5016

1119 W. 72ND St. 2 bdrm, 1st flr apt. Sec 8 Welcome. $675/mo+ Sec. Tenant pays utilities. Call Bill 630-854-3723

ROYALTON HOTEL, Kitchen-

2 BR $900-$1099

NICE, SUNNY TWO

2 BR $1300-$1499

Garden apt, SS Stove/ fridge, tenant pays utils. No Sec Dep. Credit Check. $750/mo. 773-405-3472

CHATHAM- 718 E. 81st St. Newly

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

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

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200

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

2 BR $1100-$1299

113TH/MORGAN. Nice 2BR

AVAIL IMMED 2 & 3BR, Loc Nr Augusta and Laverne, tenant pays utils. $850 & $900 /mo.

847-720-9010

ok. 1, 2 & 3 Bdrms. Elev bldg, laundry, pkg. 6531 S. Lowe.

Call Moni 773-874-0100

CHATHAM , 736 E. 81st (Evans), 2 Bedroom, 5 rooms, 2nd floor $825/month Call Mr. Joe at 708-870-4801

CHICAGO, 9305 S. Saginaw, Newly rehabbed, 2BR, carpet, stove & fridge, heat not incl, $950/ mo. Sect 8 welc. Mr. Johnson, 773294-0167

7701 S. South Shore Dr. 2 BDs with 1.5 Baths, Large Combo Living-Dining Rm, FREE Heat & cking gas. Prkng extra. $785-$850, Kalabich Mgmt (708)424-4216

CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE Beauti-

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

CHICAGO SOUTH SHORE Newly remodeled Studio & 1BR Apts.

Near Metra, appls incl. $500-$775/mo. Ray 312-375-2630

CHICAGO - NR 73rd & Harvard, lrg 2BR, newly rehabbed, DR, hardwood flrs, tenant heated, $85 0/mo. NO SECURITY 708-9219506

SOUTH SIDE near 107th/Throop, Excellent 2 bedroom, full basement, side driveway, $800 month plus utilities. 773-615-5698

remodeled 1 BR, 1 BA, Dining room, Living room, hdwd flrs, appliances. & heat included. Call 847-533-5463

COLLEGE GIRL BODY RUBS

2 SPRING SPECIALS 773-4154970 2BD w/hdwd floors, bonus room & cherry kit cabs, ten. pays heat, 5816 Sangamon & 2BD w/ carpet, cherry kit cabinets & Kolher prod, ten. pays heat, 8632 Escanaba, each $600 + security 773-415-4970

91ST & BISHOP, 2BR 1st flr, deluxe Apt, tenant pays all utils & heat, Avail Now. $735/mo + $735 sec dep + 1 mo rent. 773-709-7463 3BR 1.5 bath & 2BR: newly remodeled. Hrdwd flrs, heat & hot water incl. No Sec Dep. Sec 8 welc.. Call 9am-5pm 773-731-8306

10510 S. Maryland. 1 & 2BR.

$620 & $720/mo.

7350 University. 2BR.$770/mo.

No Pets. 1 Mo Sec. 773-374-4357

CHATHAM - 7550 S Blackstone 2BR, $750/mo. Sec 8 OK. Heat & appl. Call Office: 773-966-5275 or Steve: 773-936-4749 CHICAGO 7600 S Essex 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! 773287-9999 /312-446-3333

REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN.

Try FREE: 773-867-1235 More Local Numbers: 1-800-926-6000

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Try FREE: 312-924-2066 More Local Numbers: 1-800-811-1633

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LOGAN SQUARE. RENOVATED 2 bed-room/1 den/1 bathroom

for rent, $1600/month. 2847 W. Shakespeare, Apt 1.

Call Tom 630-286-9607.

LARGE BRIGHT LINCOLN PK

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

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

CONGRESS & SPRINGFIELD

DIXMOOR, CORNER LOT 3br, 1ba, house in quiet neighborhood, available immediately, $1100 mo., 708-670-8199 6343 S. ROCKWELL - 3BR, incl heat. hdwd flrs, lndry facility, fenced in bldg, fireplace, appiances

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

3 BEDROOM 65TH & Talman, stove, fridge, laundry facilities. $900+ Sec. 773-881-8836

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 CHICAGO: E. ROGERS PARK

6726 N. Bosworth Ave. Beautiful, large 3BR, 2BA, DR, LR, Hrdwd flrs.

Nr trans/shops. Heat, appls, laundry included. $1450. Available now.

847-475-3472

6 1/2 rooms, 3BR, unheated, $875/ mo + security. Quiet. No laundry, No dogs. 773-722-0105

non-residential

CHICAGO 8457 S Brandon, 1st flr, 4BR, Section 8 ok, 3BR voucher RESTAURANT 218 S Wahington ok; 2861 E 93rd St. Call 847-926-0625 St Naperville IL 60540 for Rent ; RECENT REHAB. 4-5BR Single MLS # 09163764. Business center of Naperville Family Homes. S. Holland, downtown Jane Dolton, Markham, Harvey. Sec 8 3000SF +basement. ok. $1000 sec & bkgrnd chk. 630- Broker Concentric Realty 630-2999175 247-5146 SOUTH SIDE - 91st and S. Perry Ave. completely rehabbed, 3-4BR, modern kitchen & bath, appls incl., hdwd flrs. Sect 8 ok. 630-362-5152 COUNTRY CLUB HILLS 4-5 BRM, DIN RM, MODERN KITCHEN & BATH, $1200-$1700 + SECURITY. SEC. 8 OK. 847-909-1538

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

1 MNTH FREE RENT! 75th&Essex.

4300 BLK OF Augusta, 2BR, 2nd flr, $1100, utils incl. 4847 W. Jackson, 3BR, $1100+utils. Sect 8 ok. No pets/smkg. 773-4180195

SECT 8 OK, 2 STORY, 5BR/2BA WITH BSMT. NEW DECOR, ARPT THROUGHOUT, CEILING FANS, ST OVE/FRIDGE, $1490. 12037 S. PARNELL, 773-443-5397

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

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

SECTION 8 WELCOME, 2 Different locations, 503 E 89th St & 6714 S Eberhart, 3-5BD c/a, 2 car garage, all appls inc 312-804-0209

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

For information: 708-625-7355

4341 S GREENWOOD 1N $1450 large 4BR, 1BA, all updated, Heat and water inc., no sec dep. Call Toni 773 916 0039

CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent.

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

312-446-3333 or 708-752-3812

CHICAGO: 7000 S Paxton, 3BR, 2BA, hdwd flr, appls incl., heat incl., lndry in bldg, sun porch, Sec 8 welcome. Call (773) 429-0988 BLUE ISLAND NEWLY Decorated 2BR, nr transp, pvt parking, laundry on site, 1 mo rent + 1 mo sec. 708-737-8295 or 708-228-1330

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 VINTAGE NORTH MAYWOOD

3 bedroom 2nd floor apartment.

Newly decorat-ed, hardwood floors, includes stove, frig, parking. Tenant pays lights, heat. $1,025, low security deposit. Available now! 773.960.

3548

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

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799 PARK MANOR: 7805 S. Maryland, Beaut rehab 3BR, 2BA house, granite ctrs, SS appls, fin bsmt. 2-car gar. $1475/mo 708288-4510 SECTION 8 WELCOME \WEST PULLMAN 255 W. 111th Pl, 6BR, 3BA, $1620. Newly remod, appls incl, full bsmt, garage. Joe, 773-793-8339

SECTION 8 WELCOME

ASHBURN: 7921 S Christiana, Beaut. rehabbed 3BR house, granite ctrs, SS appls, fin bsmt, 2-car gar. $1600/mo 708-288-4510

76th/Drexel.

2BR. $700. HEAT INCL. LYNWOOD 3BR, 2BA. $925.

773-874-9637 / 773-493-5359

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

3BR 1.5BA, SPACIOUS clean

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

Newly Decor.

apt. new hardwood flooring throughout. Appliances included, quiet block, off street parking. $1050mo Sec 8 OK 773-280-5554

77 PAULINA , 3BD, 1.5BA rent to own, tenant pays utilities, full basement, fenced front & backyard and garage $1100/mo 708473-5708 CHATHAM 7900 BLOCK of Langley. 3BR 1.5BA, renov kit & BA. Appls & heat incl, lndry. Sec 8 Ok. $1450 Mr. Johnson 630-424-

CHICAGO, WEST SIDE, Newly decorated 5BR house, nr Harrison & Pulaski, $1600/mo.

Tenant pays utils. 630-816-9957

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

116XX S LAFLIN STREET 4BR, 2BA House, 2 car garage w/patio, encl yard. $1550/mo Call C. Johnson 773-865-4741 CHICAGO SOUTHSIDE, NEWLY remodeled 3BR/2BA w/appl. w/d & newly remod 3BR w/ appl Call 773-908-8791 MATTESON, SAUK VILLAGE &

CENTERS.

roommates CHICAGO, NICE ROOM n e a r 78th & Ashland, shared kitchen & bath, $385 + 1/2 sec.

Working & references. Prefer lady. 773-530-5298 1 WEEK FREE. 96th & Halsted & other locations. Large Rooms, shared kitchen & bath. $100/week and up.

Call 773-848-4020 SOUTHSIDE LARGE FURNISHED rooms, in Apartment, 1st floor. $400/month, includes utilities.

773-747-2486

MARKETPLACE GOODS

GENERAL SOUTH SHORE: 6801 S.Clyde 3 lrg BRs, 2BA, LR, kitchen, sun parlor, $1325/mo; 2BR, $1000/ mo.

Call 773-374-0772, 773490-1558

FOR SALE BANK OWNED ON-SITE REAL ESTATE AUCTION FLOSSMOOR 227 Shea Drive 2BR, 2.5BA, 2492 Sq. Ft. Single Family Home.

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

GUT

MASSAGE TABLES, NEW and

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

KILL BEDBUGS AND their eggs!

Buy Harris Bed Bug Killers/ KIT Complete Treatment System. Hardware stores, the Home Depot, homedepot. com

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REHAB

open concept home, gourmet kitchen, beautiful architectural details, tons of light, full finished bsmt w/ wet bar. Wrap around porch gretting dbl. lot w/gorgeous landscaping. Hot tub. Entertainers paradise. Great storage. Set in the city’s hottest neighborhood, Independence Park. 3 min to Blue Line & Kennedy Exp., 10 min to Amtrak.

312 961 1535.

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to "An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State," as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16146244 on April 6, 2016, under the Assumed Business Name of Jennings Creative Studio with the business located at 3118 S Morgan, 2nd floor, Chicago, IL 60608. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/ partner(s) is: Jacquelyn Astorga, 3118 S Morgan, 2nd floor, Chicago, IL 60608, USA; Michael Jennings, 3118 S Morgan, 2nd floor, Chicago, IL 60608, USA.

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16146211 on April 6, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of MECS ET MEUFS CLOTHING with the business located at: 4604 N MONTICELLO APT G, CHICAGO, IL 60625. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: JERRY THOMPSON 4604 N MONTICELLO APT G, CHICAGO, IL 60625, USA

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to "An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State," as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16146340 on April 13, 2016, under the Assumed Business Name of Focus Management with the business located at 2020 N California Ave #150, Chicago, IL 60647. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/ partner(s) is: Kevin Henning, 1005 N Wolcott Ave #1, Chicago, IL 60622, USA.

EFFECTIVE 4/2016

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legal notices NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16146335 on April 13, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of CHICA-GO with the business located at: 333 S DESPLAINES ST APT 508, CHICAGO, IL 60661. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: LEENTJE DE LEEUW 333 S DESPLAINES ST APT 508, CHICAGO, IL 60661, USA

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to "An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State," as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16146372 on April 14, 2016, under the Assumed Business Name of Third Coast Psychotherapy with the business located at 1903 North Sheffield Avenue Unit 2, Chicago, IL 60614.

The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/ partner(s) is: Tanya Komblevitz, 1903 North Sheffield Avenue Unit 2, Chicago, IL 60614, USA.

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to "An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State," as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16146133 on March 30, 2016, under the Assumed Business Name of Busy Bie’s Cleaning & Janitorial Services with the business located at 7359 S Luella Avenue Unit 2, Chicago, IL 60649. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner( s)/ partner(s) is: Bianca Danielle Shepherd, 7359 S Luella Avenue Unit 2, Chicago, IL 60649, USA.

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16146121 on March 30, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of ORB RESEARCH with the business located at: 728 RIDGE AVE., EVANSTON, IL 60202. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: SAMUEL B S E NDE LBAC H, 728 RIDGE AVE., EVANSTON, IL 60202, USA

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NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to "An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State," as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16146306 on April 13, 2016, under the Assumed Business Name of Notary Runners with the business located at 1402 Tonset Ln, Schaumburg, IL 60193. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner( s)/ partner(s) is: Alesia Respondi, 1402 Tonset Ln, Schaumburg, IL 60193, USA.

suant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County.

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APRIL 28, 2016 | CHICAGO READER 43

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A: Surely no discussion of dumb politicians can be complete without reference to dearly departed George W., who left behind not just a tanked economy and one or two intractable military misadventures but volumes worth of great lines—you’ll recall “Is our children learning?,” etc. Bush also memorably described looking into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and getting, quite romantically, “a sense of his soul.”

I bring it up because we’d need to give a lot of lawmakers some very thorough eye exams to even begin to answer your question. Are politicians dumb? Who the hell knows? I suspect you’d find that results vary, as with most folks, but that what expresses itself in politicians as apparent dumbness might often reflect a certain kind of savvy.

Sure, we had a good laugh when Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor last February as evidence that global warming is a hoax—but keep in mind that Inhofe is well funded by the fossil-fuel industry, and represents a constituency notable for climate-change skepticism. You think he’s dumb? He’s too busy counting campaign money to care.

It’s important to consider not just politicians’ public statements, which may be pure theater, but the whole “fruit salad of their life,” as Ben Carson recently and so perfectly put it. And there’s another knock on your theory, Knut—Carson seemed like a blathering idiot during the debates, but the guy was a brilliant neurosurgeon by every account.

He’s as good a demonstration as you’ll find

of the theory of multiple intelligences, originated by Harvard professor Howard Gardner: Carson would seem to have what Gardner calls visual-spatial and bodily-kinesthetic intelligences by the bushel, but far less of the verbal-linguistic kind. So:

• Intelligence is a hazy, multifaceted con-

struct that can be tracked in any number of ways.

• There’s not exactly a surfeit of meaningful

data on intelligence as regards politicians as a class.

• Let’s not put too much stock in their public behavior, which can’t be assumed to reflect their actual beliefs.

Of course it’s still tempting to speculate.

One guy who’s succumbed is psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, who in a 2006 study endeavored to estimate IQs for all 42 American presidents up to and including W. Bearing in mind that the guy is essentially guessing, Simonton found Bush to be “definitely intelligent,” with an estimated IQ around 125 as compared to the national average of 100, but below average relative to other presidents, 28 of whom were given a “genius”-level score, typically defined as anything north of 130.

Educational attainment might also be considered as a proxy for brain power, and by this standard modern American legislators do well: Of the current members of Con-

gress, 94 percent of representatives and 100 percent of senators have bachelor’s degrees, as compared to just about a third of the population at large. More than half of senators hold law degrees, 82 members of the House have MAs, etc.

But does this even matter? In a Journal of Politics article last year researchers looked at the track records of 20th-century U.S. congressmen and found that the ones with college degrees didn’t have any more success in terms of getting bills passed and holding on to their seats than the ones without. “The idea that education is a marker of leader quality,” the authors concluded, “is far from the empirical regularity it is made out to be.”

You also asked about “personality traits.”

Here I’ll point you toward a 2012 piece in the Atlantic that described certain people as marked by “lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions.” The author was talking about psychopaths; one neuropsychologist quoted here identifies former British prime minister Tony Blair, for instance, as a perfectly “plausible psychopath.” By this estimation, far from being an impediment to a career in politics, psychopathy could in fact optimize one for it. But then I guess we already knew that. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

l

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Man with a twat thoroughly despairs Will he ever have a love life, or is his being trans the problem?

Q : I am a trans man and I

have no love life. But I did just hook up with a friend two nights ago. It was the first time I’ve had sex in more than a year. My problem is that it was a “onetime thing.” I was hoping to be FWB at least. I’m furious with myself for giving that away for what amounted to a hookup, and sorry for myself for it being a onetime thing, because it nearly always is.

I feel thoroughly unlovable and dejected right now. I was raised a Boston Irish Catholic, and I have PTSD from my parents being difficult. In a backward way, I hope the issue for others is tied to the fallout from my upbringing—because that’s something everyone has problems with. I worry it’s not that, though. I worry my being trans is the first problem a potential partner sees. I’m a man with a twat—a forlorn, underused twat at that. —NOT OFTEN PICKED, EVERYONE NOT INTERESTED SEXUALLY

A : Buck Angel is a public

speaker, a filmmaker, an activist, and a trans man, NOPENIS, who famously and fearlessly bills himself as “the man with a pussy.” I passed your letter on to him because who better to answer a question from a man with a twat than the man with a pussy?

“Anyone who hasn’t had sex in more than a year is going to find it scary to get back out there and start again,” said Buck. “And starting again with a body that you might not be 100 percent comfortable with yet?

That’s even scarier. The first thing that NOPENIS needs to hear—and really believe— is that he is lovable. And he is, even if he doesn’t know it yet.”

The second order of busi-

ness: You gotta stop beating yourself up over that one-night stand. Take it from Buck, your fellow trans man, and take it from me, your fellow Irish Catholic queer: You didn’t do anything wrong, you didn’t give anything away— hell, you were doing something right.

“Hookups can be important for understanding your body sexually,” said Buck.

“We learn and grow from our experiences, even if they’re bad ones. And here’s what I learned from my first experiences in the gay men’s world of sex: Hookups are the way it’s done. I wasn’t prepared for that, because I’d had sex only with women before my transition. That was hard for me too at first. But what I learned was that I wasn’t being rejected, even if it was only a one-night thing. I was being accepted in a way I wasn’t used to.”

Finally, NOPENIS, you’ve got to stop seeing your body and your twat as problems.

It’s the only body you’ll ever have, and it’s a body some will find attractive and some won’t.

“NOPENIS absolutely shouldn’t count himself out just because he’s trans,” said Buck. “The world is different now, and many people are attracted to trans men sexually. He just needs to learn to love himself and to have sexual confidence, because people find that attractive.

And he should continue to experiment and continue to embrace new experiences!”

Q : I have a friend who’s

getting married. She’s cheated on every guy she’s been with—including her last three husbands. I’m sure she’s fed the prospective fourth a million reasons why her first three marriages didn’t work out. She’s obviously a sex fiend, but

she’s not kinky. And here’s the punch line: I found her fiance’s profile on Fetlife, and he has some hardcore fetishes—even by my standards! I’m sure his kinks are going unexplored within their relationship, and that they’ll go unexplored once they’re married, as my friend has been horrified during discussions of my attendance at BDSM events.

I know your rule is generally to “stay the fuck out of it,” but I have a rule that goes like this: “I would like to know that the person I’m dating is a serial cheater who’s probably after me for my money.” So do I warn the guy? —FUCKED REGARDING

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FRIEND, and do so with a clear conscience—because these two sound perfect for each other. He’s on Fetlife looking for someone to diaper him, and she’s probably cheating on him already. If your friend is still a dishonest, lying, heartbreaking cheat, why stop her from marrying a man who is already cheating on her or is likely to cheat on her shortly after the wedding?

To gently paraphrase William Shakespeare: “Let thee not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.”

Watching these two walk down the aisle will be like watching two drunk drivers speed around a closed racetrack. Maybe they’ll crash, maybe they won’t, but so long as no one else is gonna get hurt, why risk your own neck trying to pull these fuckers over? v

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APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 45

b Weekend Classic 5/28, 5 PM, Wire, Berwyn Wolves in the Throne Room 9/23, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 4/29, 11 AM X 8/19, 8 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM, 18+ Xaebor 5/13, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+

UPDATED Guns N’ Roses 7/1 and 7/3, 8 PM, Soldier Field, second show added, on sale Fri 4/29, 8 PM Nils Lofgren 5/20, 8 PM, City Winery, canceled Sonics, Woggles, Barrence Whitfield & the Savages 5/28, 8 PM, the Promontory, canceled

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NEW Against Me! 6/19, 6:30 PM, Metro b Arcadia, Red River 8/27, 5:30 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 4/29, noon b Beverly 6/23, 9 PM, Hideout Algebra Blessett & Anthony David 6/17, 7 and 10 PM, the Promontory, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM, 17+ Bully 7/8, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM Car Seat Headrest 7/16, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Paul Cebar Tomorrow Sound 6/25, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM b Chicago Domination Fest with Brodequin, Malignancy, Dehumanized, Lividity, Inherit Disease, Disentomb, and more 7/29-30, 4 PM, Wire, Berwyn, 18+ Cimorelli 6/27, 7 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 4/29, noon b Jonny Craig 5/10, 6 PM, Wire, Berwyn Curren$y 6/1, 8:30 PM, Metro, 18+ Daikaiju 7/13, 7:30 PM, Wire, Berwyn, 18+ Decemberists, Shakey Graves 7/8, 5:30 PM, Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park, part of Taste of Chicago, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM b Domo Genesis 6/24, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club Drake, Future 7/26-27, 7 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 4/29, noon Fall of Troy 8/13, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Michael Henderson 8/12, 7 and 10 PM, the Promontory, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM b Hiatus Kaiyote 8/10, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM, 18+

Eric Hutchinson 7/7, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM b Billy Idol, Sons of the Silent Age 7/9, 4:30 PM, Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park, part of Taste of Chicago, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM b Isley Brothers, Sheila E 7/10, 4:30 PM, Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park, part of Taste of Chicago, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM b Toby Keith, Eric Paslay 8/12, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM Kongos, Elle King 7/7, 5 PM, Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park, part of Taste of Chicago, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM b Lacuna Coil 5/31, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Jenny Lewis, Watson Twins 9/8, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 4/29, 11 AM b Lucky Chops 7/5, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM b Magnet School 6/26, 9 PM, Hideout Jessica Lea Mayfield 6/18, 10:30 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM Michael McDermott 7/29, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 4/28, noon b Ryan Montbleau 6/8, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 4/28, noon b Mos Generator 6/24, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Mothxr 6/10, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Mountain Goats 7/22, 10 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM MSTRKRFT 6/4, 8 PM, Double Door, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM Mudcrutch 5/28, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM, 18+

46 CHICAGO READER - APRIL 28, 2016

Paul Oakenfold 5/28, 10 PM, the Mid Oxford & Co. 6/9, 8 PM, Schubas Rich Robinson Band 7/22, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 4/28, noon b Roosevelts 5/27, 10 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 4/29, noon Roots, Donnie Trumpet 7/6, 5:30 PM, Petrillo Music Shell, Grant Park, part of Taste of Chicago, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM b Vic Ruggiero 6/25, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Buffy Sainte-Marie 8/24, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 4/28, noon b Oleg Skrypka & Lynne Jordan 7/17, 7:30 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 4/28, noon b Slightly Stoopid 8/26, 6:30 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion, on sale Thu 4/28, 10 AM Soulja Boy, Bobby Raps 5/19, Double Door, 18+ Tegan & Sara 10/21, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 4/29, 9 AM b Terror, Power Trip 7/6, 5 PM, Double Door b Thumbscrew 6/4, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Meghan Trainor, Hailee Steinfeld 8/10, 7 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont, on sale Fri 4/29, 11 AM b KT Tunstall 7/7, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Fri 4/29, 10 AM Turnover 6/26, 5:30 PM, Subterranean b 20 Bands of Summer with Craig Owens, Reflections, By the Thousands, Rookie of the Year, Mark Rose, Daisyhead, and more 6/11-12, 2 PM, Wire, Berwyn Wheeler Walker Jr. 6/4, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+

Above & Beyond 5/11, 7 PM, Chicago Theatre b Lila Ammons & Ben Waters 6/12, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Beach Slang 5/16, 5 PM, Bottom Lounge b Black Mountain 5/12, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall The Body 6/4, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Case/Lang/Veirs 8/7, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre b Cults 6/10, 9 PM, Cubby Bear Dick Dale 8/13, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Discharge, Eyehategod 5/31, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Peter Erskine & Dr. Um 6/24, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Ex-Cult 6/1, 9 PM, Hideout Flag, Off With Their Heads 6/8, 7 PM, Double Door, 17+ God Is an Astronaut 9/3, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Steve Gunn 6/23, 9 PM, Schubas Hatebreed, Devildriver 5/14, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Helmet 7/15, 9 PM, Double Door, 17+ Inter Arma, Withered 7/13, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Jayhawks 6/7-8, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Jesu, Sun Kil Moon 11/13, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ King’s X 6/23, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Robby Krieger 6/3, 7:30 PM, City Winery b Cyndi Lauper 5/16, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre b Masked Intruder, Bigwig 5/26, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Mitski 7/20, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b Moderat 5/21, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Kevin Morby, Jaye Bartell 6/15, 8 PM, Schubas Mothers 5/7, 9 PM, Empty Bottle

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Never miss a show again.

Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Aaron Neville Duo 7/14-15, 8 PM, City Winery b Night Ranger 5/7, 9 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Psychic TV 7/22, 9 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Kenny Rogers 7/24, 7 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park Bob Schneider 6/24-25, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Sigur Ros 9/30, 8:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Southside Johnny & the Asbury Jukes 8/6, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Speedy Ortiz, Hop Along 5/19, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Sublime With Rome, Dirty Heads 7/17, 6:30 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion Sunn O))), Big Brave 6/7, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Useless Eaters 5/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Waxahatchee, Allison Crutchfield 6/19, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Chelsea Wolfe 5/20, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Yanni 7/30, 7:30 PM, Sears Centre, Hoffman Estates

SOLD OUT Alabama Shakes 7/19 and 7/20, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b American Authors 5/14, 7:30 PM, Subterranean b At the Drive-In 5/19-20, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Borns 7/21-22, 7:30 PM, Metro b The Cure, Twilight Sad 6/10-11, 7:30 PM, UIC Pavilion b Lush 9/18, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Bob Mould 5/6, 9 PM, Metro, sold out, 18+ Pearl Jam 8/20 and 8/22, 7:30 PM, Wrigley Field Pierce the Veil, I the Mighty 6/10, 7:30 PM, House of Blues Pvris 6/2, 6 PM, House of Blues b Sturgill Simpson 6/3, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Son Lux 5/19, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Thrice 6/23, 6:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+ The Used 5/17-18, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Widespread Panic 5/5, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Wombats 7/13, 7:30 PM, Metro b Young Thug 5/25, 8 PM, the Vic b v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene LOCAL SOUND ENGINEER Che Arthur can often be found working the board at the Empty Bottle or other spots around town, and he fronts excellent postpunk quartet Pink Avalanche—that is, when he isn’t on the road as tour manager for Bob Mould. Late last week Arthur celebrated his birthday onstage with Mould at famed Minneapolis club First Avenue, singing “When You Were Mine” (joined by members of opening band the Suicide Commandos) as a tribute to the Purple One. Arthur, who might be the biggest Prince maniac Gossip Wolf has ever met, had this to say: “Prince and Bob have both played huge roles in my musical upbringing, and to suddenly find myself onstage with one to pay tribute to the other in their shared hometown was amazing and surreal.”

Gossip Wolf has long admired Chicago Singles Club, which for three years has highlighted great local acts on its website—each month it’s published a profile packed with photos and accompanied by a mini documentary and a pair of songs recorded by CSC. The club also hosts local artists at Cole’s on the fourth Friday of every month. Alas, CSC is winding down its site—no more monthly profiles— but the fourth-Friday showcases will go on. The CSC team celebrates the site’s third birthday on Mon 5/2 at the Empty Bottle with a free show by Grandkids, Oshwa, the Gold Web, and the Runnies.

The Funs, aka Jessee Rose Crane and Philip Jerome Lesicko, left Chicago in 2012 to refurbish a house in downstate New Douglas, but they’ve stayed connected to the local scene. Chicago bands such as Ego and the Sueves have recorded at the Funs’ home, named Rose Raft.

This weekend Crane and Lesicko return to ask for help repairing the place: their fund-raiser features a silent auction and sets by Relevant Hairstyles, Lala Lala, the Hecks, and Swear Beam (which includes both of the Funs). The show is Sat 4/30; e-mail roseraft.info@gmail.com for details.

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

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AND

773-687-7800

*On select models. See dealer for complete details. ^0% APR available on select models with buyers with approved credit. Length of APR may vary. See dealer for details. Offers end 5/2/16.

FOX LINCOLN / FOXLINCOLNCHICAGO.COM 2016 Lincoln

2016 Lincoln

MKC

MKZ

PREMIERE

PREMIERE GAS STK# 16L1111 VIN# 3LGR617614 MSRP: $36,115

LEASE FOR

STK# 16L1067 VIN# 5LGUJ20222 MSRP: $35,060

221

$

*

/MO

LEASE FOR

36 MOS

261

$

36 MOS

NO Hidden Fees!

NO Hidden Fees!

The Price You See Is the Price You Pay!

The Price You See Is the Price You Pay!

2016 Lincoln

2015 Lincoln

PREMIERE

Hybrid

MKX

MKZ

STK# 16L1069 VIN# 2LGBL61156 MSRP: $39,185

314

$

/MO

$3000 DUE AT SIGNING. PLUS TAX, TITLE, LIC & DOC FEE

$3000 DUE AT SIGNING. PLUS TAX, TITLE, LIC & DOC FEE

LEASE FOR

+

^

VIN# 3LFR609216 STK# 15L657 MSRP: $39,505

/MO

36 MOS

$3,500 DUE AT SIGNING. PLUS TAX, TITLE, LIC & DOC FEE

We never throw you a curve ball.

NO Hidden Fees!

34,490

$

#

NO Hidden Fees!

The Price You See Is the Price You Pay!

The Price You See Is the Price You Pay! W Diversey Pkwy Western Ave

2501 N Elston Ave • Chicago, IL 60647 •

BUY FOR

773-687-7800

N N

94

El st

on

Cl yb

ou

Av e

.

rn

Av e

.

Fullerton Ave

*36 month lease. $3,000 required at lease inception. No security deposit required. Tax, title, lic and doc fees not included. All manufacturer rebates and incentives applied. 10,500 miles per year. $0.20 per mile thereafter. ^36 month lease. $3,500 required at lease inception. No security deposit required. Tax, title, lic and doc fees not included. All manufacturer rebates and incentives applied. 10,500 miles per year. $0.20 per mile thereafter. +36 month lease. $3,000 required at lease inception. No security deposit required. Tax, title, lic and doc fees not included. All manufacturer rebates and incentives applied. 10,500 miles per year. $0.20 per mile thereafter. # Price plus tax, title, license and doc fee. See dealer for details. Offers end 5/2/16.

APRIL 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 47

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