Chicago Reader: print issue of May 5, 2016 (Volume 45, Number 30)

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY | K I C K I N G A S S S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | M AY 5 , 2 0 1 6

Politics The UNO charter school network tries and fails to hide its public records. 9 Music New releases from Brian Eno, Anohni, A$AP Ferg, Marissa Nadler, and more 20

NO JOKE

How a string of apparent druggings sparked a movement against harassment and assault in Chicago’s comedy scene

By BRIANNA WELLEN 11

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THIS WEEK

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE 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 The 180 Degree Rule, Doug Benson, “Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979,” the film The Family Fang, and more recommendations

CITY LIFE

8 Fitness Exploring exercise as transcendent experience through SoulCycle

MUSIC 14 10 Transportation Big Marsh could be a terrific bike park, but it’s not yet safe to pedal there.

ARTS & CULTURE

9 9 Joravsky | Politics The UNO charter school network tries and fails to hide its public records.

14 Visual Art Kerry James Marshall reconstructs art history with black Americans at its center.

15 Comedy The latest Second City E.T.C. show demonstrates that even the oldest sketch institutions can make progress.

16 Lit Brian Doyle’s Chicago is rosetinted and hard to dislike.

18 Movies Notfilm revisits the awkward collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton.

19 Small Screen Fox’s Houdini & Doyle needs more magic.

22 Shows of note Cate Le Bon, Earring, Floating Points, Tygers of Pan Tang, and more

FOOD & DRINK

29

29 Restaurant review: The Northman At Chicago’s first cider pub, the food is no match for the juice.

32 Bar review: Hopewell Brewing Coffee and beer, coffee shop and brewpub merge in Logan Square.

19

CLASSIFIEDS

33 Jobs 33 Apartments & Spaces 35 Marketplace 36 Straight Dope Why is polygamy still illegal in the 21st-century U.S.?

37 Savage Love Advice for a 31-year-old virgin: jump in the sack already!

38 Early Warnings Dead Kennedys, Miranda Lambert, Bettye Lavette, Parliament Funkadelic, Violent Femmes, and more upcoming shows 38 Gossip Wolf Juke Underground celebrates a huge new compilation, and more music news

FEATURES

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COMEDY/NEWS

MUSIC

No joke

Record-review roundup

How a string of apparent druggings sparked a movement against harassment and assault in Chicago’s comedy scene

New releases from Brian Eno, Anohni, A$AP Ferg, Marissa Nadler, and more

By BRIANNA WELLEN 11

By READER STAFF 20 MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 3

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Sun 3 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, raventheatre.com, $17-$42.

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The King and I Lyric Opera’s glittering production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I has everything going for it except the central thing—the sexual chemistry between the King of Siam (played here by Paolo Montalban) and the British widow he imports to teach his numerous children and wives (the vocally gifted Kate Baldwin). That powerful, constrained attraction is the motor that drives everything else, including the obvious plot points about clashing East-West cultures, feminism, slavery, and imperialism. It’s sorely missed. Still, there’s a wonderful roster of songs like “Shall We Dance” and “Hello, Young Lovers”; an eye-popping ballet version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and memorable performances by Rona Figueroa as the king’s head wife, Lady Thiang; the exquisite Ali Ewoldt as his newest gift, Tuptim; and extraordinary youngster Matthew Uzarraga as the little prince. The production originated at Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. —DEANNA ISAACS Through 5/22: Fri 7 PM, Sat 1:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 1:30 PM (except 5/8, 6:30 PM), Wed 1:30 PM (except 5/4, 12:30 PM); also Tue 5/10 and 5/17, 7 PM; Thu 5/5 and 5/12, 1:30 PM; and Thu 5/19, 7 PM, Civic Opera House, 20 N. Wacker, 312-332-2244, civicoperahouse.com, $29-$199.

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Best of Enemies ! SIMON SORIN

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater Best of Enemies Based on R Osha Gray Davidson’s 1996 book, Mark St. Germain’s play brings to life

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the improbable real-life relationship between C.P. Ellis, a Grand Cyclops of the KKK, and Ann Atwater, an African-American civil rights activist. The setting, Durham, North Carolina, in 1971, is fraught with tension around school desegregation. As Ellis, Rod Armentrout exudes a frightening and radical racism that’s met its match in Atwater, played take-no-prisoners style by Felicia Fields, a Tony nominee for her performance in the Broadway musical The Color Purple. While chairing a desegregation-focused charrette and trading nasty barbs rooted in baseless stereotypes, the oil-and-vinegar pair develop an empathetic, then friendly understanding that defies societal norms and quickly warms hearts. While the humor is spot-on throughout thanks to Fields’s well-timed quips and eye rolls, some scenes feel a bit too short for the drama and characters to develop. —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 6/5: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Provision Theater Company, 1001 W. Roosevelt, 773-506-4429, provisiontheater.org, $10-$30.

Dry Land Playwright Ruby Rae Spiegel adds little to the teen-girl zeitgeist of the last couple decades, at least as expressed through self-consciously edgy mass entertainment (think Harmony Korine’s Kids). Popular self-described slut Amy and unpopular geek Ester fixate on sex, alcohol, gossip, their bodies, and their likability. Each has a dark secret—Amy’s trying to pull off a DIY abortion, Esther’s profoundly self-loathing—and their unlikely friendship routinely turns savage under hair-trigger emotional duress. It’s all a bit dutiful, and Spiegler’s haphazard structure diminishes the play’s overall impact. But her articulation of the girls’ friendship is masterful, as is director Hallie Gordon’s graceful yet gutsy staging for Rivendell. In the lead roles, Bryce Gangel and Jessica Ervin deliver meticulous,

affecting performances that eclipse the limited material. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 5/28: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Rivendell Theatre, 5775 N. Ridge, 773-334-7728, rivendelltheatre.org, $32, seniors and students $22.

The Eviller Twin Sue Cargill’s elusive new play opens with Clothilde (who’ll end up earning the show’s title) remembering a stern, sexy Jesus appearing on the beach under a “police lamp sun.” The two joined hands, built “sand whores,” and threw smooth stones at them. Any three-minute section from Cargill’s ensuing two-plus hours holds this sort of evocative fancy, often infused with addled religiosity. It’s a literary marvel, but theatrically it struggles to find its bearings; the uniform density and rhythm of her language inhibits forward motion, a problem enhanced by this overly deliberate Curious Theater Branch premiere. Director Stefan Brün wisely imbues the potentially whimsical plot—Clothilde’s pathological jealousy of twin sister Flavia leads her to absurd extremes—with honest emotions, giving the production unlikely gravity. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 6/5: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773539-7838, curioustheatrebranch.com, $15 or pay what you can, $12 in advance.

The House of Blue Leaves John Guare’s 1971 breakthrough play is a comedy about despair. Complaining that he’s “too old to be a young talent,” 45-year-old zoo employee Artie Shaughnessy writes bad songs and performs them for oblivious audiences at open mikes. His wife, Bananas, is nuts. His son, Ronnie, ditto. His childhood friend, Billy, is a movie director whose big-time success makes Artie’s failures all the more agonizing. The only bright spot in Artie’s life is his chaste affair with Bunny—a great cook who nevertheless refuses to feed him unless he runs away with her.

The most significant of several problems with JoAnn Montemurro’s staging is that it pushes the comedy at the expense of the despair and therefore culminates in a surprise ending rather than a powerful one. For all that, Kelli Strickland supplies an interesting Bananas. But Sarah Hayes tries way too hard as Bunny. —TONY ADLER Through 6/18: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM,

Mike Mother If what Jessica Anne describes in the course of her 84-minute performance piece is true, she was subjected to hellish psychological torture as a teen, administered by someone she should’ve been able to trust. That we’re not sure it’s true is a function of her complex narrative strategy. On one level she’s playing with the anti-illusionist precepts of the Neo-Futurarium, where she was an ensemble member for six years. On another, she’s messing with us the way she was messed with (but to an infinitely milder degree), setting us off balance with a careful seeding of doubt. On top of all that, she marries her tale to a genuine theatrical fiction—Marsha Norman’s ’Night, Mother—which she by turns respects, inverts, and subverts. Interestingly, Mike Mother falls flat only when

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Jessica Anne and fellow performer Mike Hamilton attempt conventional sincerity.

The rest of the time, it’s funny, cunning, witty, literally splashy, and exhilarating in its reckless reverence for the truth.

—TONY ADLER Through 6/4: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Neo-Futurarium, 5153 N. Ashland, 773-275-5255, neofuturists.org, $10-$20, pay what you can on Thursdays.

The 180 Degree Rule This juicy R new play by M.E.H. Lewis and Barbara Lhota is part love story, part

mystery thriller, and part acid satire of golden-era Hollywood. The action toggles between the 1930s and 1967, as a film studies professor investigates what became of an obscure female moviemaker. Along the way there are numerous twists—a lesbian love affair, a secret pregnancy, and, when things start to slow down in the second half, a murder involving Nazi sympathizers.

Rachel Edwards Harvith’s nimble staging for Babes with Blades demonstrates how entertaining good old-fashioned melodrama can be. As a glamorous movie star and the key figure in the film director’s life, cast standout Lisa Herceg supplies dry wit, a thick German accent, and just the right amount of camp.

—ZAC THOMPSON Through 5/21: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-293-3682, babeswithblades.org, $22, $14 students and seniors.

Skin in the Game Nudity is the theme for this year’s spring one-act festival at Stage 773. Previous fests have addressed less loaded subjects—Halloween, Chekhov. But fearless actors will rise to any occasion. The veteran Organic Theater Company gives us the futuristic unveiling of a Greta Garbo robot (the “Garbot”) that, in keeping with the Garbo mystique, lies in bed naked refusing to go onstage. Right Brain Project and the Ruckus explore modern intimacy from the opposite end of the spectrum, showcasing the fleshly sides of a virginal wedding night and a small-town love triangle, respectively.

Hobo Junction Productions’ contribution ecstatically reminds us that “private dick,” meaning private detective, can also be a sexual pun. And while the night isn’t a competition, if it were, the Living Canvas’s gorgeous, sensuous

The 180 Degree Rule ! STEVEN TOWNSHEND

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

3 Sisters Practice patience. It takes at least an hour for this 90-minute Theatre Y production to declare itself definitively. Director Andrej Visky seems headed toward parody in the very early going, with his cast of three (Melissa Lorraine, Katie Stimpson, and Kevlyn Hayes) assuming poses suggesting Victorian melodrama. Then the piece turns into a sort of bullet-points version of Chekhov’s great and famous play about provincial angst. Coadapters Visky, Earl H.E. Hill, and Dan Christmann include all the requisite issues and plot elements, but in the manner of a highlights reel, sans conventional textures. Despite some interesting visual touches—a set covered in blue cloth, a lover depicted as red light—things only get interesting in the final movement, when Visky and company go beyond Chekhov’s text to provide a sweetly subversive alternate ending to the sisters’ story. —TONY ADLER Through 6/11: Fri-Sat, and Mon 5/2, 7 PM, Humility Gallery, 564 W. 18th, theatre-y.com, $20, $15 students and seniors.

DANCE A Piece of My Heart Chicago R Danztheatre continues its series focused on women’s issues with a per-

formance about five women’s journeys “before, during, and after” the Vietnam war. 5/6-5/15: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Ebenezer Lutheran Church, 1650 W. Foster, 773-561-8496, danztheatre.org, $20, $15 in advance.

RockCitizen The Seldoms present a performance inspired by the counterculture of the 1960s. 5/5-5/15: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Storefront Theater, Gallery 37 Center for the Arts, 66 E. Randolph, 312-742-8497, theseldoms.org, $15

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COMEDY

The Adventures of Reginald Sampson (and the Consequence of Bliss) Upright Citizens Brigade founding member Matt Besser recently scolded comedy critics for lazily falling back on the expression “hit-or-miss” to describe sketch shows, which are by their very nature hit-or-miss. With that in mind, the ratio is more favorable than not in this set at iO by three-member troupe Vienna Juvenile. Their aim is delightfully dark—a simple game of Marco Polo escalates to all-out madness, and in one of the best gags, Layne Dixon tries to get the attention of her husband a la a Tennessee Williams-style breakdown.

Too many good jokes have the air let out of them by clumsy pacing and an overreliance on dramatic twists, but the trio strike the right tonal balance in time for

an excellent and heartfelt closer. —DAN JAKES Through 5/27: Fri 10:30 PM, iO Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov.com/ chicago, $14.

PM. 150 S. Cottage Hill, Elmhurst, 630834-0202, elmhurstartmuseum.org, $4, $3 seniors, $2 students.

Rational Park “Hatorade Retrograde,” Lise Heller Baggesen’s glitter-covered solo exhibition depicting a “not-sodistant future so sparkly, we’ll have to wear sequin camo.” Opening reception Fri 5/6, 6-9 PM. 5/6-6/11. 2557 W. North, rational-park.com.

LIT (En)Lightning Talks Chicago Tricia Bobeda and Greta Johnsen of the Nerdette podcast host five experts—Paul Sereno, Audrey Petty, Vicky Kalogera, Miguel de Baca, and Eugenia Cheng—who have five minutes each to discuss anything from black holes to contemporary art to dinosaurs.

Registration required. Tue 5/10, 7:30 PM, Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark, 312-642-4600, pbk.org.

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Doug Benson ! SUN-TIMES

Doug Benson The comic hosts R his annual Cinco de Mayo show with a taping of his game-show

podcast Doug Loves Movies. Thu 5/5, 8 PM, Zanies, 5437 Park Pl., Rosemont, rosemont.zanies.com, $20 plus two-drink minimum.

Evanston Literary Festival The R second annual festival featuring discussions, readings, and signings across Evanston. Guests include Zoe Zolbrod, Sharman Apt Russell, and Laura Kasischke. 5/4-5/14, various locations, evanstonlit.org.

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

and Inspector Gadget—should appeal to precocious children, especially little girls interested in the sciences. Adults may find it as derivative and simplistic as the steampunk aesthetic to which it’s indebted, but for a gateway to more resonant cinema and literature, you could do worse. Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci directed. In French with subtitles. —DMITRY SAMAROV 106 min.

Fri 5/6, 2 and 6 PM; Sat 5/7, 4:45 PM; Sun 5/8, 3 PM; Mon 5/9, 7:45 PM; Tue 5/10, 6 PM; Wed 5/11, 7:45 PM; and Thu 5/12, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Captain America: Civil War Despite all the levitating superheroes, this third installment in Marvel’s Captain America franchise almost sinks under the weight of its own gravitas, especially during the largely expository first hour. After unintentionally killing innocents during a mission in Africa, the Avengers must vote on whether to accept oversight by a United Nations panel; Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) leads the supporters, and the naysayers line up behind Captain America (Chris Evans). The players salvage this thing with their acting and

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Guest List A stand-up showcase R hosted by Rebecca O’Neal.

Open run: first and third Saturday of the month, 8 PM, Ancien Cycles, 688 N. Milwaukee, 773-914-0102, anciencycles. com, $10.

Thanks for the Tip You’d think a sketch comedy show about restaurant work written by a former restaurant worker, pH Comedy member Kayce Alltop, would be a comic gold mine, packed with scenes skewering bad customers, insane chefs, and snotty servers. In this case, you’d be wrong. Thanks to Alltop’s ham-fisted sketches, Dan Wright’s off-kilter direction, and a cast of underrehearsed performers, much of this show falls flat. Too many bits poke fun at predictable targets, though here and there are some wonderful moments: in one pantomimed sequence a sneaky waiter (Jared Miller) creeping around to The Pink Panther theme drops a basket of rolls, then picks it up and serves it to a table of unsuspecting costumers. But the high points are all too rare. —JACK HELBIG Through 6/5: Sun 8 PM, pH Comedy Theater, 1515 W. Berwyn, whatisph.com, $15, $10 students.

VISUAL ARTS Elmhurst Art Museum “Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979,” a collection of photographs, films, architectural models, and more from Playboy magazine’s early days. 5/7-8/28. Tue, Thu, and Sat 10 AM-4 PM, Wed 1-8 PM, Fri and Sun 1-4

est. 1967

“Playboy Architecture, 1953-1979” at Elmhurst Art Museum ! COURTESY EAM

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/ movies NEW REVIEWS April and the Extraordinary World Based on a graphic novel by Jacques Tardi, this French-Belgian-Canadian animation (2015) presents an alternate universe in which the age of steam has continued into the 1930s and sinister lizard people kidnap the greatest minds in history for their own nefarious ends.

April, the daughter and granddaughter of scientists seeking a serum for everlasting life, makes for a winsome heroine, and the movie—equal parts Jules Verne, The Adventures of Tintin,

awesome thighs, and the fun really kicks in when Spider-Man (Tom Holland), Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), and Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) join the squabble in an exhilarating airport sequence.

After that centerpiece, the slugfest grows monotonous on its way to a final showdown. Brothers Joe and Anthony Russo directed. —ANDREA GRONVALL PG-13, 146 min. ArcLight Chicago, Block 37, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Lake, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Showplace ICON, 600 N. Michigan, Webster Place The Damned This French thriller (1947)

by René Clément is best remembered for its extended tracking shot down the length of a German submarine, but !

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color-projection piece Cathedrals would win handily. —MAX MALLER Through 5/27: Fri 10:30 PM, Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont, 773-327-5252, stage773.com, $20, $15 in advance.

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MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 5

C O N G R AT U L AT I O N S !

Adolfo Calderon of Public House

AGENDA da, but there’s little here for the layman. Derek Shimoda directed. In Japanese with subtitles. —DMITRY SAMAROV 80 min. Fri 5/6, 7:45 PM; Sat 5/7, 5:45 and 7:45 PM; Sun 5/8 3:45, 5:45, and 7:45 PM; and Mon 5/9-Thu 5/12, 7:45 PM. Facets Cinematheque

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The Family Fang

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!B those close quarters wouldn’t count for anything if Clément hadn’t filled them with an assortment of shifty characters. As Allied forces close in on Berlin, high-ranking Nazis and well-connected French sympathizers shove off from Oslo in search of political refuge; after one of them is wounded, they send a landing party ashore to kidnap a French doctor, but the battle lines in the sub begin to break down when word comes of Hitler’s death. Clément conjures up some good suspense sequences as the doctor hatches a plan to escape in an inflatable dinghy, though what really powers the story is the director’s icy contempt for his ship of fools. In French with subtitles.

—J.R. JONES 105 min. Fri 5/6, 6 PM, and Sat 5/7, 4:45 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center The Family Fang Adapted R from Kevin Wilson’s best-selling novel, this serrated comedy of monstrous parents and damaged children unfolds in the esoteric field of performance art, portrayed here as a sort of cultural bullying.

Fading movie actress Annie Fang (Nicole Kidman) and once-promising novelist Baxter Fang (Jason Bateman) are serendipitously reunited with their highly respected parents, Caleb and Camille (Christopher Walken, Maryann Plunkett), who once enlisted young Annie and Baxter—or A and B, as they were called—in their performance-art stunts. “Life and art, we make them interchangebable,” the father boasts in a documentary interview, though what he’s really done is taken his children’s lives and turned them into his own artwork. Kidman has one of her best roles ever as the resentful daughter; her anger drives the narrative through a minefield of competing egos and into the heart of the parents’ mysterious disappearance. Bateman directed; with Linda Emond and Harris Yulin.

—J.R. JONES R, 105 min. Fri 5/6-Thu 5/12, 2:30, 4:45, 7:10, and 9:30 PM, and Sun 5/8, 11:30 AM, 4:45, 7:10, and 9:30 PM. Music Box

Francophonia “Who would we be without museums?” asks Russian writer-director Aleksandr Sokurov in voice-over during the opening minutes of this avant-garde historical drama, but the film fails to answer his question. A meditation on the meaning of art, cocooned in the story of the Louvre, it vacillates from straight documentary style to fourth-wall breaking reenactments to stagy glimpses into Sokurov’s filmmaking process. He follows the Louvre from its creation during the French Revolution to its emptying during World War II, interspersing impressive present-day tracking shots. But compared to his masterpiece Russian Ark (2002), which distilled three centuries of Russian history into one spectacular, uninterrupted take of the Russian State Hermitage Museum, this is disjointed and dreary, its power diluted by Sokurov’s constant, self-important narration. In one scene Napoleon (Vincent Nemeth) glowers at the Mona Lisa and declares “It’s me!”

Unfortunately, Sokurov’s point—that ego is the enemy of art and society—is diminished by the film’s own pretentiousness. In Russian, French, and German with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 87 min. Fri 5/6, 2 and 8 PM; Sat 5/7, 3 and 7:30 PM; Sun 5/8, 5:30 PM; Tue 5/10, 8:15 PM; Wed 5/11, 6 PM; and Thu 5/12, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center June Bride: Redemption of a Yakuza This 2015 documentary about an ex-yakuza member turning to Jesus might have been a heartfelt story of redemption, but instead it’s a nearly incoherent mix of feel-good truisms, flashy commercial cinematography, and competing narrative strategies. An opening title explains the yakuza practice of severing a member’s digits when he leaves the criminal organization, and a subsequent title communicates the filmmaker’s hope that his work will help save lives. Unfortunately the rest of the movie is devoted to ex-gangsters’ testimony, incongruously paired with nature shots. This may have value as scared-straight propagan-

The Man Who Knew Infinity Dev Patel has cornered the British market on Indian leading-man roles, but he brings so little to this biopic about mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who took Cambridge by storm during the World War I years, that Jeremy Irons easily steals the movie as Ramanujan’s gruff but affectionate English mentor, G.H. Hardy. Adapting a book

by Robert Kanigel, writer-director Matt Brown details the racial antagonism Ramanujan encountered on campus, and there’s a weak romantic subplot involving the wife he left behind in Madras. But mainly this trades in the sort of nerd sanctification familiar from The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, and other math-whiz dramas. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 108 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21 Sworn Virgin This quiet 2015 drama, concerning a bizarre custom in remote Albania, lacks the tension its subject matter demands, though a few subtle exchanges resonate.

According to the Kanun tradition, a woman unwilling to submit to men in the community must become a burrnesh, rejecting her femininity and living as a celibate man. The film follows one such transitioned man (Alba Rohrwacher) as he resolves to leave his mountain village and return to life as a woman with his cousin in Italy (Flonja Kodheli). Writer-director Laura Bispuri, making her feature debut, captures the region’s visual splendor, but her protagonist’s inner life is muted.

Though the delicate Rohrwacher hardly passes for a man, only the cousin’s teenage daughter (Emily Ferratello) states the obvious; the danger faced by many gender-nonconforming people is unrealistically absent. In Albanian and Italian with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 84 min.

Fri 5/6, 7 and 9 PM; Sat 5/7, 5, 7, and 9 PM; Sun 5/8, 1, 3, 5, and 7 PM; and Mon 5/9-Thu 5/12, 7 and 9 PM. Facets Cinematheque

SPECIAL EVENTS An Evening With Ox-Bow Short films by artists from the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency. Sat 5/7, 8 PM, and Tue 5/10, 6:30 PM, Columbia College Hokin Hall, 623 S. Wabash.

Sonic Celluloid Silent and experimental work, presented by Northwestern University’s film program with live musical accompaniment.

Northwestern University Block Museum of Art v

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MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE Taking place in candlelit rooms and led by impassioned instructors delivering inspirational phrases, SoulCycle’s spin classes can feel churchy.

FITNESS

Mind, body, and SoulCycle Exercise as transcendant experience

By LAURA PEARSON

% COURTESY

M

uch ink has been spilled about SoulCycle, the boutique indoor cycling chain with quasi-spiritual elements that enjoys a devout following at 60 studios in ten states. Founded on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2006, the company is best known for its 45-minute spin classes, which have a meditative but partylike atmosphere. Think candles and EDM. “SoulCycle Is a Cult and This Is Its Dumbass Manifesto,” reads a Gawker headline from July 30, 2015, the day the company filed for an initial public offering. The writer wasted no time in plucking plenty of snark-worthy phrases from the paperwork: “We are a ‘culture of yes,’” “We Aspire to Inspire” (capital A, capital I), and “The experience is tribal. It is primal. And it is fun.”

A decade into SoulCycle’s existence, the fitness brand—cofounded by a former real estate broker, Elizabeth Cutler, and an ex-talent agent, Julie Rice (both of whom resigned last month to “pursue other projects”), and now majority-owned by health club Equinox—is bigger than ever, and there are more confessional essays than ever along the lines of “Why I Finally Quit SoulCycle.” Journalists and bloggers aren’t alone in

their derision. Comedy series such as Broad City and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have parodied the so-called “cardio party,” which celebrities love to love, and others—Flywheel devotees, the hoi polloi—love to hate. Whether it’s joining the chorus of reactions to how comically expensive the workout is (a $30 entry fee doesn’t even cover the rental of shoes that clip into the bike) or scoffing at the self-serious mantras inscribed on the wall (athlete. legend. warrior. renegade. rockstar.), mocking SoulCycle is a tribal experience. It is primal. And it is fun.

So it surprised me when the company opened its first Chicago location in Old Town a year ago, shortly before filing its IPO, that few local media outlets seemed to notice or care; it certainly didn’t get nearly the same attention as other New York imports like Eataly and Shake Shack (because we’d rather be putting calories on than burning them off?). Seeing a journalistic opportunity, I decided to check out a SoulCycle class with the intention of writing about the experience. It surprised me further when, for all my skepticism and general distaste for religiosity and expensive fitness trends, I got hooked.

SOULCYCLE

Despite being billed as a party, my first SoulCycle class was ridiculously difficult. The dim room, aglow with candles, felt less like a fitness studio and more like the set of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video. The darkness concealed the fact I was wearing old, threadbare workout attire in a sea of toned, Lululemon-clad class members.

SoulCycle is all about spinning in sync—with subtle choreography and occasional light weights—to a clubby playlist of Top 40 and EDM (as well as EDM remixes of Top 40 ballads, e.g., Adele’s “Hello” sped up to 128 bpm, with gratuitous bass drops). On a pedestal up front, an uberfit instructor “leads the pack” on our sole mission of pedaling to the beat. To SoulCycle, the beat is the supreme entity. Every so often, the instructor unclips from her bike to dance around the room in front of a wall-spanning mirror like no one’s watching—even though everyone’s watching—while shouting directives such as “Tap it back, bitches!” (referring to a specific move) and inspira-

tion like “Fear is a useless emotion!”

We crank the dial on our stationary bikes to add resistance. We climb up an imaginary hill slowly, laboriously as the music builds. We turn the dial again to add even more resistance, trying to keep pace with the beat. Will this song ever stop building? Where is the top of this godforsaken hill?! It feels a little like the Saturday Night Live digital short about a schlocky megaclub DJ (portrayed by Andy Samberg) whose desperately anticipated bass drops make heads explode.

It’s easy to see why SoulCycle is so enticing to lampoon. After my first class, though, I was too busy feeling amazing to be critical. I felt as if I were levitating a little off the sidewalk, all thanks to the endorphin high.

The next week, I attended another SoulCycle class to confirm the intoxicating experience wasn’t a fluke. Then I went to another. Then my sister was visiting from LA, and I dragged her to one. A few weeks later, there was a country-themed

ride, and I thought that would be hilarious to try. And it was: the instructor, Brent, showed up in custom jorts.

Then a second location opened in the Loop, and I wanted to get a feel for that too—you know, for journalism.

At some point, I had to accept that I was more involved with SoulCycle than I cared to admit. And not for an article I was supposedly writing either, but for the actual workout— the experience of exercising much, much harder than I ever would on my own. Maybe even for that oft-touted moment of “soul.” This “spiritual” portion of the ride is the primary thing sold to potential investors as separating SoulCycle from other fitness brands.

My apparent conversion was kind of embarrassing. Also, I was spending money I didn’t really have. As group classes go, SoulCycle is not only expensive but exclusive: the pay-per-class model means riders can register only one week at a time, with sign-ups starting every Monday at noon. If you don’t act fast, it

continued on 35

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

! Cinco de Mayo dinner Bridgeport organic restaurant Nana celebrates Cinco de Mayo with a fourcourse dinner including kingfish ceviche, chicken roulade, and cochinita pibil. Specialty cocktails included. Reservations required. 7 PM, Nana, 3267 S. Halsted, nanaorganic. com, $35.

! Pr ime Time This month’s late-night celebration of music and art is themed “Purple” in dedication to Prince, the man who straddled both worlds. Avery R. Young performs a Prince retrospective. 7-11 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, mcachicago.org, $20. Sold out.

" Ch icago Beer Classic Ticketholders can enjoy 48 two-ounce samples of beers from breweries both big and small (Goose Island to Aquanaut). If that won’t suffice, additional drink tickets are available. 11:30 AM and 4 PM, Soldier Field, 1410 S. Museum Campus, chicagobeerclassic.com, $65-$75.

" Trash Movie Night: Moth er ’s Day Ditch the brunch and flowers and instead bring your mom to this horror-movie marathon including Serial Mom and Mother’s Day (no, not that one). 8 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar, 1366 N. Milwaukee, emporiumchicago.com. F

# Fo und Poet r y The Poetry Foundation hosts this discussion and workshop about drawing inspiration for poetry from found objects. 7 PM, Comfort Station, 2579 N. Milwaukee, comfortstationprojects@gmail.com, comfortstationlogansquare.org. F

☼ Neil DeGrasse Tyson The king of the universe (or at least the king of the knowledge of the universe) discusses the science behind the mysteries of space. 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, thechicagotheatre.com, $59.75-$150.

$ Cinderella The Joffrey Ballet closes its 60th season with Sir Frederick Ashton’s classic ballet. 5/11-5/22: Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Wed 5/11, 7:30 PM and Thu 5/19, 7:30 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, 800-982-2787, joffrey.org, $32-$170.

8 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

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CITY LIFE

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

POLITICS

! BOBBY SIMS

UNO’s artless dodge

The charter school network tries and fails to hide its public records.

By BEN JORAVSKY

G

iven that Mayor Emanuel’s Board of Education said last week that it may throw even more money at charter schools, it’s a good time to remind you that charters haven’t always spent their public dollars wisely in the past.

And that some charters have fiercely fought to keep their financial records a secret.

And that if it wasn’t for the efforts of Dan Mihalopoulos—a bulldog investigative reporter for the Sun-Times—at least one charter would still be dodging public scrutiny of its finances.

In fact, this particular charter network might still be doing the accountability dodge, were it not for Mihalopoulos’s intrepid efforts.

Basically, it’s time for me to update you on the saga I call Mihalopoulos v. United Neighborhood Organization, an epic legal ordeal that if made into a 60s noir would star the greatest old-school Greek/Jewish duo in Hollywood, John Cassavetes as Mihalopoulos and Peter Falk as his dogged sidekick, attorney Neil Rosenbaum. (More on him in a second.)

To remind you, charter schools are privately run but publicly funded, generally nonunion operations.

As such they’ve become useful instruments in the ongoing attempt by politicians like our

very own Governor Rauner to obliterate various teachers’ unions.

C’mon. You don’t think Rauner supports charters because he cares about educating children, did you?

Over the years charters have generally claimed that their educational mission is so important they shouldn’t have to abide by the same set of rules as real public schools.

That includes not abiding by public record laws.

Which brings us to the Mihalopoulos case.

In February 2013, Mihalopoulos broke the story that UNO—which had the backing of Mayors Daley and Emanuel as well as Illinois house speaker Michael Madigan—had funneled millions of dollars in construction contracts to companies owned by brothers of its chief operating officer.

A no-no even for Chicago.

In the aftermath of that exposé, UNO’s longtime CEO Juan Rangel—who also happened to be the cochair of Emanuel’s 2011 mayoral campaign—was eventually forced to step down.

Emboldened by his initial investigation, Mihalopoulos filed a Freedom of Information Act request with UNO to test his hunch that

this wasn’t the only instance of wasteful spending or nepotism.

He assumed—as any rational person would—that UNO would be subject to public records laws because it’s taking public money.

To stymie him, UNO employed a clever little dodge that charter schools throughout the country have used to keep the public from examining their books.

This is going to be complicated—as most dodges are—so stay with me, people.

For years, UNO operated as a community organization that served Latino neighborhoods.

It created a separate organization to apply for charters to run schools—the UNO Charter School Network, or UCSN. Then UCSN turned around and contracted UNO to manage the charter schools.

When Mihalopoulos came calling in February 2013, UCSN told him that UNO was the custodian of the financial records he was seeking.

But because UNO was a private not-forprofit, it argued, the organization wasn’t subject to state FOIA laws. Stated another way, Mihalopolous was told that the company that had the records wasn’t subject to FOIA. And the company that was subject to FOIA law didn’t have the records.

Even though they were basically the same company.

As dodges go, it was classic.

Mihalopoulos appealed to Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan’s office, which is what you do when recalcitrant public entities give you the middle finger on FOIA requests.

In July 2013, the attorney general ruled in Mihalopoulos’s favor.

UNO appealed to the Cook County Circuit Court, forcing the Sun-Times to bring in the heavy artillery—a lawyer named Neil Rosenbaum. (At this point I’m compelled to remind you that the Sun-Times and the Reader are owned by the same company—Wrapports.)

The case dragged on until February 2015, when Cook County judge David Atkins ordered UNO to turn over the records on the grounds that the company’s argument was full of shit.

Well, he didn’t put it that clearly. Instead, Atkins wrote: “The purported distinctions between UNO and UCSN are not as compelling as the similarities between the two entities.”

That just may be the legal understatement of the century.

UNO appealed Atkins’s decision to the appellate court. And so the matter dragged on for another year.

By this time, Rangel had made his Elvis-like departure from the UNO premises.

And at this point you really had to wonder: What was the point of UNO fighting the Atkins ruling? UNO’s new bosses were in a perfect position to blame any possible excesses on Rangel, much like Emanuel blames everything on Mayor Daley. (Though, unlike Emanuel, I’m sure UNO’s folks weren’t afraid to mention Rangel’s name.)

Plus, the company wasn’t just fighting off Mihalopoulos—UNO officials had both him and Rosenbaum gnawing at their ankles.

All kidding aside, if this situation proves anything, it’s that, sadly, to get access to public records you need patience, money, and a good lawyer.

I guess UNO got tired of fighting. Because before the appellate court had a chance to rule, UNO settled the case and agreed to turn over the records.

Not long thereafter, on March 26, the SunTimes ran “UNO’s secret spending spree,” a front-page scoop in which Mihalopoulos revealed that, among other things, Rangel had flown on junkets all over the world and rung up some hefty tabs at fancy restaurants on the “taxpayers’ dime.”

Obviously, charter school operators can party like rock stars, so long as they pay their teachers lousy wages.

I’d say this story has a happy ending, but there’s one wrinkle: Yes, Mihalopoulos and Rosenbaum forced UNO to cough up the goodies. But other charter operators are still free to try the old management-company dodge should inquisitive citizens come looking for their financial records. Yes, these companies would probably lose, thanks to Judge Atkins’s order. But they could delay turning over information for so long that people not as diligent—or well lawyered—as Mihalopoulos might give up.

What’s really needed to fix this problem is a state law clearly stipulating that even subcontractors that manage charter schools are subject to FOIA laws.

I’d say we get my old pals state senator Heather Steans and state rep Christian Mitchell—two big charter boosters—to introduce the bill.

After all, if we, the taxpayers, are going to give our money to charter school operators, the least they can do is tell us how they spend it.

In the meantime, congratulations, Dan and Neil. It’s nice to know that once in a while the good guys actually win—even in Chicago. v

" @joravben MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE A Slow Roll winter ride to Big Marsh. Heavy truck traffic makes biking into the park a risky proposition. ! JOHN GREENFIELD

TRANSPORTATION

Wild ride Big Marsh could be a terrific bike park, but it’s not yet safe to pedal there.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

L

ast week I rode the Red Line to 95th Street with my cruiser bike in tow, then pedaled about six miles to the future site of Big Marsh Bike Park, just east of Lake Calumet. Boosters say it will be a world-class, family-friendly venue for BMX riding, mountain biking, and cyclocross racing that will also provide recreational and economic opportunities for residents of low-income southeast-side neighborhoods near the park.

The bike park will lie within Big Marsh, a 278-acre expanse of open space that the Chicago Park District acquired in 2011. Environmental remediation is currently under way, since the area was formerly a slag-dumping site for steel mills, and the Park District expects the facility will open in late fall.

But my ride from the el station would have been traumatizing for novice cyclists. It was comfortable at first—a bike lane led south on State Street, then another took me east on 103rd. But after I passed under the Metra Electric tracks at Cottage Grove, the bike lane disappeared and 103rd ballooned into a four-lane highway with fast traffic, including several 18-wheelers.

Next I rode south on Stony Island toward Lake Calumet, but things weren’t much better

10 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

on that stretch of road. Although Stony and Doty, the two streets that circle the lake, offer scenic views of the remediated landfill, with its tallgrass, ponds, and a variety of wild birds, they’re also frequented by fast-moving trucks headed to and from industrial businesses. I got spooked by a huge gas tanker thundering by even though I spent six years of my life working as a bike messenger on the mean streets of the Loop.

Getting to Big Marsh is equally arduous if you’re coming from the Roseland and Pullman communities to the west, the East Side, South Deering, and Hegewisch neighborhoods to the east, or the Altgeld Gardens housing project to the south. There is no direct transit access to the park, although several CTA bus lines terminate at a bus garage a 2.5-mile bike ride from the park.

While the bike park should attract cycling aficionados from across the city and the region, for it to succeed in its mission of revitalizing the surrounding communities it also needs to be accessible to all nearby residents, including those who don’t drive.

“Friends of Big Marsh doesn’t just want to be the friends of people who drive 45 minutes with their multithousand-dollar bikes to ride the trails,” says Steve Buchtel, a member of

the coalition that supports the development of the park, who also leads the advocacy group Trails for Illinois. “We also want to create a world-class park experience for the people who live close by.”

Last year Oboi Reed, cofounder of Slow Roll Chicago, which promotes cycling on the south and west sides, told the Chicago Tribune that the access problem is also an equity issue.

“The idea that people can just drive there is exclusionary,” he said. “Many low-income people don’t own cars.” (Reed is also a Streetsblog Chicago board member.)

Fortunately the access problem seems to be on the city’s radar. While CTA spokesman Jeff Tolman said there are no plans for direct bus service to Big Marsh, the Chicago Department of Transportation’s Mike Claffey noted that the department has been working with residents and community leaders to identify priority bike routes on the far south side. At bikeway hearings in the East Side and Pullman last month, residents made it clear that they want safe routes to the bike park and let CDOT know which streets they’d like to see improved.

Some asked that existing bike lanes on 103rd be extended farther east, and for side paths to be added to make it safer to get past the Bishop Ford Expressway access ramps.

Another intriguing idea was to build a carfree east-west bike route on an existing land bridge across Lake Calumet at about 114th Street, which roughly bifurcates the lake.

Not only would this be safer than sharing the road with trucks, it would also be a significant shortcut for riders coming from Pullman and Altgeld Gardens.

Although CDOT plans to build buffered lanes on Cottage Grove between 93rd and 115th (a route that’s somewhat useful for cyclists approaching Big Marsh from the north) as soon as this fall, it looks like the department won’t be striping additional bike lanes in the area before the park opens. Doing so could take years—Chicago bikeways are usually funded by federal grants that require a multiyear approval process.

Still, Peter Taylor, a leader of the predominantly African-American Major Taylor Cycling Club of Chicago (named for the renowned turn-of-the-century professional bike racer— no relation to Peter), says he thinks CDOT got the message. “Right now Big Marsh is pretty

much cut off by distant transit and convoluted and unfriendly [routes for cyclists]. Certainly where there is no simple and facilitated access there can be no success.”

The Active Transportation Alliance recently collaborated with Slow Roll and the Pullman Porter Museum on a Big Marsh access study that recommends some short-term interventions such as adding wayfinding signs, patching potholes, and clearing debris from the shoulders of streets like Doty, Stony Island, and 122nd. In the future, these routes could be upgraded with protected bike lanes. The report also recommends giving “road diets” to and installing bike lanes on 115th, Torrence, and other roadways that have more lanes than traffic.

“Friends of Big Marsh doesn’t just want to be the friends of people who drive 45 minutes with their multithousanddollar bikes to ride the trails. We also want to create a world-class park experience for the people who live close by.”

—Friends of Big Marsh member Steve Buchtel

“The big question is, How can we move access to Big Marsh and Lake Calumet up the priority list for decision makers to make sure it will be taken care of in a timely manner?” asks Active Trans campaign manager Jim Merrell.

“I feel CDOT and the Park District have made a good effort with this so far,” Friends of Big Marsh director Jay Readey says. “Whether there’s continued energy towards improving access—not just by the city but also by the advocates and citizens—that’s going to be the real test.” v

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

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No joke

O

The morning after an open-mike night, Jill woke up paralyzed and suspected she’d been drugged. What happened next sparked a movement against harassment and assault in Chicago’s comedy scene.

By BRIANNA WELLEN

! GARY MUSGRAVE

n the November 2015 night that Jill says she was drugged, she was one of nearly 60 people packed into a makeshift living room theater for a night of open-mike comedy. The monthly event, All Effin’ Night, was billed as “comics only”—a chance for stand-ups to try out new material on each other. As usual, the Roscoe Village apartment was lined with rows of couches, stools, and folding chairs.

The fridge was full of beer for the taking.

Open bottles of liquor circulated freely. The stage was hung with bedsheets, and the four hosts were dressed in pajamas; they were prepared for a long night.

Jill, 26, was relatively new to Chicago’s comedy scene, although it wasn’t her first time at All Effin’ Night. A petite sci-fi and video-game nerd with short-cropped brown hair, Jill (who asked to be identified by her middle name) had moved to Chicago from Indianapolis after graduating college in 2013. She started work at a local financial consulting firm, and in February 2015 became interested in comedy.

She decided to try her hand at stand-up after realizing how few women there were—by her count only about one in five, “a terrible ratio,” she says. By July of that year she was performing at open mikes three nights a week.

As Jill scanned the room, she recognized several other comics she knew, including 26-yearold cohost Sam Gordon and 31-year-old Kahlil Wilson, a tall, brawny dude with a bushy mustache and big grin. But there were people there that night she didn’t recognize—the scene is abundant with newcomers and drop-ins.

Jill grabbed a cold PBR from a 30-rack and took a small sip. She’d already had one drink at another open mike earlier that evening, and she didn’t want to get too drunk—she wanted to be relatively sober while trying out her new jokes.

She nursed her beer for the next few hours, setting it down occasionally as she watched other people perform. Yet when Jill went up for her set around 1 AM, she stumbled over her jokes—and the stage itself—causing the hosts and partygoers to write her off as drunk.

“I remember doing my set, and after that I can’t remember anything,” she says. “I remember my set was not great.” When she was done she stumbled from the stage to a couch. A friend deemed her too drunk to stay at the party and put her in an Uber home to Logan Square.

A tipsy comic at a casual open mike isn’t unusual. But when Jill woke up the next morning she was practically paralyzed in her bed, unable to move and barely able to speak.

Even rolling out of bed to go to the bathroom was too much for her body to handle. She J

MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 11

comedy druggings continued from 11

“We can’t blame some creep at the bar because the creep appears to be among our own community.”

soiled herself, and remained frozen in place for nearly 18 hours.

Jill knew this wasn’t a typical hangover—“I only had two beers, I don’t understand why I woke up feeling like I was dead,” she says.

She came to the conclusion that she’d been drugged.

She didn’t appear to have been assaulted, however. Nor did she seem to be otherwise injured. So instead of going to the hospital or calling the police, she decided to sleep it off, hoping that would be her best option for a quick recovery.

By Monday morning Jill was feeling back to normal. But the effects of that strange Saturday night would linger, sending shockwaves through the comedy scene she’d come to love.

This incident—and others like it—would ultimately push local female comics together to confront the sexism, harassment, and assault they say has plagued their community for years. Their efforts are ongoing—even though the mystery of who might be drugging comics and why remains unsolved.

A

few days later, Jill told Wilson about what had happened at the open mike.

Wilson, it turned out, had had a similar experience.

He arrived at the house party around midnight, and grabbed a beer from the same case in the kitchen. He had drunk two beers at another open mike right before, and as the night went on he had two more. He also took sips here and there from other comics’ drinks—including Jill’s beer. And like Jill, Wilson went up on stage, did a less than stellar set, and blacked out.

When Wilson came to he was still sitting in the audience. The show was winding down, and the party’s hosts asked him to leave. But when he tried to stand up, he couldn’t move.

“It was really weird,” he says. But he reacted to the suspicion that he’d been drugged differently than Jill had. “It was a little bit less scary for me. I’m a big dude. I wasn’t scared—I almost thought it was funny.”

Eventually the hosts helped Wilson to the bathroom, where he made himself throw up.

He instantly felt better—a sign to him that something bad had been in his system—and got a ride home to Pilsen from a fellow comic.

The next morning he felt fine. He never considered reporting the incident to the police or getting checked out by a doctor.

When Jill heard Wilson’s story, she says she thought, “It’s not a stranger in a bar following drunk comedians, it’s someone in the scene.”

Jill also told Gordon, one of the show’s co-

12 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

—Comic Sam Gordon in a December 2015 Facebook post

! GARY MUSGRAVE

hosts, what had happened. Gordon, a veteran of the scene, agreed that something had likely happened to Jill. “I know what she’s like when she’s drunk, and she usually can handle herself, so this was very out of character,” Gordon says. The possibility that Wilson had been drugged too “made us think that something was tainted in the common space.”

Gordon went to Facebook and wrote a post about what had happened to Wilson and Jill.

“I sincerely hope that it was only these two people,” she wrote, “but if you were there and think you may have also been drugged, please, please talk to one of us.” She asked anyone who had noticed anything suspicious that night to reach out to her. And she issued a stern rebuke: “Having this at All Effin’ Night is particularly disturbing since it is a house show that generally only has Chicago comedians and people we personally know there. We can’t blame some creep at the bar because the creep appears to be among our own community.”

O

ther people chimed in: this wasn’t the first time comics had suspected they’d being drugged.

Two months earlier a female comic had allegedly been drugged at a standup night at Cole’s Bar in Logan Square, wrote the event’s organizer.

The woman was a 24-year-old comic named Kendall—also a petite brunette, who asked to be identified by her first name. The bar was crowded that night, and she left her drink unattended when she went out for a smoke.

She’d been drugged a year earlier, at a Fourth of July party, she told the Reader. So when she blacked out after two beers at Cole’s, then woke up the next day with a raging hangover, she says she knew what had happened.

“Honestly, when I woke up and put the pieces together, I was mostly just mad that I probably had a really bad set,” she says. “I was just angry because people who didn’t know me probably just thought I was just a drunk idiot, and that made me very sad. I was bothered that I seemed so unprofessional.

“I’m lucky that that’s what I get to be upset about, because the situation doesn’t pan out like that for so many people,” she adds. Like Jill, Kendall made it home to Logan Square safely and showed no signs of having been assaulted.

Gordon and the other open-mike hosts began speculating about who might be responsible for these two incidents, cross-referencing their guest lists in an attempt to narrow down the suspects. The All Effin’ Night show had been videotaped by a stationary camera set up at the back of the living room, so there was a record of every performance—and every guest

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who walked in that night. The hosts pored over the footage, digging into each attendee’s whereabouts, even creating a time line of the night’s events.

The only person who stood out, according to Gordon, was a guy in a blue hoodie who sat in the kitchen and instructed partygoers on which beers to grab because “they were the coldest.” (“That’s not how a 30-rack of beer works,” Gordon says.) The man in the hoodie was one of few people multiple partygoers couldn’t identify, and according to those present, he never went up to perform a set. But because of the way the camera was positioned, the “party space”—the kitchen, porch, and back side of the living room—was off camera, and multiple viewings of the video revealed no such mysterious man, as far as Gordon could tell.

Ultimately the hosts came up empty-handed.

The only other constant between the two events was a large group of drunk comics.

But a few weeks later, rumors of another incident began to circulate. A male comic had shown signs of being drugged after iO’s annual holiday party in Lincoln Park, people said, after sharing drinks with a group of female improvisers. But attendees also say that everyone at the party was so intoxicated that it was unclear whether anyone had really been drugged or not. (And after months of searching, the Reader was unable to identify this man, or any of the women he was reportedly drinking with.) Still, rumors about the iO party, plus the conversation about what had happened to Kendall, Jill, and Wilson, began to crystallize into a shared sense of fear, anger, and frustration—especially among the scene’s female comics.

A

fter the alleged drugging at Cole’s, female stand-ups and improvisers created a private Facebook group where they could air their grievances about men they say had been harassing or assaulting them. After the incident at All Effin’ Night they took the private online conversations public, meeting in person with law enforcement, rape advocacy groups, and each other to share stories and learn how to report incidents to police and higher-ups at comedy theaters and clubs.

Victoria Elena Nones, a local musical comedian, launched a group called Women in Comedy in response to the problem. “This organization is not just to help end sexual harassment,” Nones told the Reader in January.

“We want to address the issues of our community; we also want to empower women. It’s also about coming together as a community and supporting each other.”

The group held its first event at the Laugh Factory in Lakeview on December 6, just one week after Jill was allegedly drugged. Nones asked Alex Kumin, a scene veteran who also does training and outreach work with sexual assault victims for the YWCA, to facilitate the meeting and counsel any women in need. “As a comedian with a background in this, my main concern was making sure everyone was feeling safe,” Kumin says. But providing this kind of care to her fellow comics was difficult even for her. “It was really disappointing for me in the sense that comedy was sort of the place that I didn’t have to think about rape crisis work,” Kumin says. “It was my place that I had established outside of my work that helped me with my self-care. To have those worlds collide so suddenly and so strongly was tough.”

The meeting was billed as a “speed networking” event for women in comedy to casually meet each other and discuss shared experiences in the scene. Every woman who attended was asked to write a Post-it note about something that bothered them about the scene. “That someone is drugging ladies at open mics,” read one Post-it hanging in the center of the wall.

Women in Comedy and other independent gatherings of female comics planned several other events in December and January, including a panel discussion about antiharassment guidelines and reporting assault, and womenonly performances at the Laugh Factory, Under the Gun Theater, and ComedySportz.

The group also organized an industry blackout on January 31, when female comics were asked to boycott theaters, clubs, classes, and shows where they’d been made to feel unsafe by men and instead gather at a networking event led

by Women in Comedy.

Some of these efforts were met with a backlash: many male comics complained that the women were making accusations behind their backs without giving them a chance to respond; some women saw the female-only shows as a form of harmful self-segregation, especially when female comics have worked so hard to get equal billing to their male counterparts; others resented the way that the alleged druggings were conflated with more routine forms of harassment and inequality.

Jill also faced a backlash of sorts. While women believed her story, she found male comics much less sympathetic. None of them “really wanted to talk about it,” she says.

And although Jill’s situation had helped bring about this nascent movement, the advocacy yielded her mixed results. At a meeting in mid-December, a few weeks after

her experience, she decided to file a police report. “I was encouraged by the group to take action, so I did,” Jill says. But because she hadn’t gone to the hospital directly after the incident, there was no physical evidence—“It is undetermined if victim was drugged,” the report reads. Police also asked her to accompany them back to the apartment to go over the night in more detail, but Jill didn’t want to. “The idea of going back to the scene gives me the willies,” she says.

Still, Jill reached out to Wilson and Kendall, asking if they would consider filing their own police reports—she thought that perhaps a greater number of similar complaints would warrant a larger investigation—but that was futile. So much time had passed that Kendall felt a report would do little to help, and she wanted to move on with her life. “It’s always like, ‘Why didn’t she get checked out?’” she says. “I have things to do. I can’t be fucking derailed by this.

Obviously if someone had attacked me, I would have gone to the hospital and gotten a [rape] kit or gone to the police.” Wilson wasn’t interested because his own experience didn’t negatively affect him as Jill’s had.

Jill was disappointed by their response. “If I’m the only one going through the effort then

it’s not really worth it,” she says.

Ultimately CPD didn’t investigate Jill’s case, a department spokesperson says, because of the lack of evidence. And despite community scrutiny, the motivation behind the apparent druggings remains unclear—as far as anyone knows, no one was assaulted and no one appeared to be a direct target.

Today, Wilson feels unscathed by what happened to him in November. He hosts multiple regularly occurring comedy shows and attends an open mike almost every night. “I never felt fear,” he says. “I have seen other people drugged out at a bar, and when I see people acting superdrunk, I think, ‘Good for them!’ I didn’t feel bad or anything until I knew they were drugged.”

But Gordon has since stopped running All Effin’ Night, to prevent any new incidents from occurring on her watch. And Jill was traumatized—she says the incident has affected her job, her relationships, and her trust in others. The lack of closure left her feeling that her only choice was to drop comedy. “I miss stand-up so much,” she says. “I just don’t feel safe.” v

! @BriannaWellen

MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 13

ARTS & CULTURE

R

School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012); A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) ! SEAN PATHASEMA; MATTHEW FRIED/MCA

VISUAL ART

Paint it black

By SASHA GEFFEN

A

rt history has long served as an arena for white supremacy to proliferate. The white portraits that hang in museums reinforce the fiction that only white narratives guide history. After visiting the LACMA for the first time as an elementary-school student in 1965, Kerry James Marshall wanted to learn as much as possible about art, and while absorbing everything from Rembrandt to Roy Lichtenstein he quickly began to understand that fine art didn’t depict people who looked like him. Noting the dearth of black representation in the art-historical canon, Marshall wrote his own history.

“Kerry James Marshall: Mastry,” a new retrospective of Marshall’s work now showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, follows the painter from his early book-size pieces to expansive canvases that proportionately develop his conceptual ambitions. Marshall’s art includes abundant references to canonical paintings such as Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) and Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533), except the white bodies in those European images are absent. In their place stand vivid black subjects who stare at the

14 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

viewer with a piercing force that intensifies the transgression against the white interpretation of art history. The subjects’ eyes stand out because their skin is stark, symbolic black: charcoal, ebony, obsidian. Marshall paints human figures with the darkest shade of each composition’s palette. They appear to be negative space, but they’re all fiercely human.

Each room of the MCA’s fourth-floor exhibition organizes Marshall’s work chronologically and thematically. The oldest painting is also one of the smallest: A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980) measures 8 x 6.5 inches, depicting a man whose eyes and broken smile glow against a dark backdrop. The title nods to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; conceptually, the image draws from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the 1952 novel that sparked a creative breakthrough for Marshall. Invisible Man interrogates the simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility of American blackness: throughout American history, whiteness has shut out black men and women from being subjects in culture, rendering blackness invisible; transgressions against that proscription, however, render

blackness hypervisible, watched, targeted.

Marshall’s paintings further tangle with this paradox—the color and definition explore the fine line that whiteness must tread to preserve this dichotomy, to sanctify itself against marginalized cultures.

In the larger galleries, Marshall’s tapestry-size pieces punch bright holes in the MCA’s walls. The works belong in a museum, where they can engage in dialogue with the images that such institutions typically display, thereby disrupting the art-historical hegemony therein. One section of the exhibition, a re-creation of the 2003 installation Baobab Ensemble, has cushions on the floor for viewers to sit on, where they can browse clippings of art Marshall has used for reference. The interactive space collapses the divisions between artist and viewer and elucidates Marshall’s process, but it also encourages the notion that his paintings are part of an active art-historical lineage. One can see what he’s looking at when he’s painting—his works aren’t authoritative or isolated images, but mutations of existing historical themes and tropes.

The artworks also reveal their own material history: the largest pieces have no frames but hang bare from the walls. The creases are visible, indicating the years the objects spent folded away because Marshall lacked the space and resources to store them at their full dimensions. The human scale of the paintings facilitates a visceral identification with their subjects—the figures, engaged in rituals of

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intimacy or grief, are the size of real people.

Marshall overlays symbols that zigzag across the frame, from dancing sheet music to a veve (a religious symbol typically used in voodoo) hovering in the air.

There are moments of love and sexuality in the exhibit. Two early-90s paintings hung across from each other portray figures in private romantic moments. In Slow Dance (1992-’93), a man and a woman embrace while the lyrics to a song arc above their heads.

Could This Be Love (1992) catches a couple undressing in a bedroom; the man looks at the viewer while the words “What a Woman What a Woman” appear written next to his mouth, as if he’s letting you in on a secret. These scenes represent the black subject as desirable, warm, and worthy of love, most overtly in They Know That I Know (1992), in which a black Adam and Eve make love at the base of the tree of life.

More violent paintings also grapple with archetypes traditionally represented by white bodies. In Beauty Examined (1993) there’s a corpse whose arm has been skinned, an echo of Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632). A coroner’s identifications surround her, as does the platitude “Beauty is only skin deep.” Diagram markers point out her “big ass,” “big hips,” “big waistline.” The piece carries an implicit criticism of Western culture’s obsession with dead, pretty white girls, but the body’s symbolic dissection also foreshadows that of Michael Brown, whose coroner’s report was published online in support of the state-sponsored argument that the fatal violence he suffered at the hands of a Ferguson, Missouri, cop was his fault alone.

Marshall’s work acknowledges the systemic violence that has killed black Americans for decades, yet it subverts the ways in which the black body is identified as an object marked for death: red-and-white targets are the haloes of saints in The Ecstasy of Communion (1990), and the skull in Woman With Death on Her Mind (1990) glows gold. But Marshall’s most arresting paintings show the world in all its luminous complexity, on street corners and in barbershops or living rooms, symbols of life amid structural racism’s insistence on death. v R “KERRY JAMES MARSHALL: MASTRY” Through 9/25, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago. org, $12 adults, $7 students and seniors, free for Illinois residents on Tuesdays.

! @sashageffen

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ARTS & CULTURE Aasia Lashay Bullock and Lisa Beasley ! TODD ROSENBERG

COMEDY

Second City: The next generation

By BRIANNA WELLEN

O

ver the past few years Second City has lived in my mind as a stale representation of the comedy world, unable to move beyond the casting formula that led to past success behind some of my favorite talents, like Bill Murray and Chris Farley and the queen herself, Miss Tina Fey. Don’t get me wrong: I could watch comics do versions of Farley’s Matt Foley sketch over and over again and still laugh. But what the comedy club’s needed for years is something entirely different to prove it’s on the pulse—and that that pulse is going strong. The latest from the E.T.C. ensemble, A Red Line Runs Through It, is just the thing to do it.

It’s important to note that I’m 25 years old and love Hamilton, Netflix, and dominating at pub trivia—all topics that feature heavily in this sketch show. While I’m sure that senior theater critic Tony Adler or any other of our older reviewers would recognize the talent these six relative newcomers bring to the stage, I doubt they’d take the same delight in a nostalgic reference to a late-90s song that asks the world to “back dat azz up” (though you never know).

From the second the lights go up, the cast’s immediate standouts are Lisa Beasley and Aasia Lashay Bullock. In one opening sketch the pair of black women play neighbors who politely hold their tongues while their white maleman (er, mailman) chuckles and tells the ladies to “get in formation.” They courteously smile, wait for him to leave, then

lose their goddamn minds over his appropriation of Beyonce. It’s instantly clear that this show isn’t going to be yet another featuring an overweight comedian falling onto tables overseen by a slim, attractive white woman and a dude.

Beasley shines again as Barack Obama in a Hamilton-esque parody. Another politically focused musical number highlights the talents of the entire cast, who expertly croon cutting lyrics inspired by local politics (“Rahm-a-linga-ding-dong” runs the doo-wop-style refrain), police brutality, and the murder of unarmed black teens.

A thread of social consciousness runs throughout the show. Sure, some jokes are just plain funny, like Beasley struggling through an exercise video while the spunky Julie Marchiano replies with automated messages of encouragement. (“I’m dying!” Beasley cries. “Way to go!” answers Marchiano.) And there is, inevitably, a skit with a straight man in drag. But it’s encouraging to see that the next generation of sketch comedians is looking more like the Beasleys and Bullocks and Marchianos. We need performers who bring a fresh perspective to politically charged issues—not to mention a good-old-fashioned Notorious RBG hip-hop breakdown. v R A RED LINE RUNS THROUGH IT Open run: Thu 8 PM, Fri-Sat 8 and 11 PM, Sun 7 PM, the Second City E.T.C. Theatre, 230 W. North, second floor, secondcity.com, $23-$48.

! @BriannaWellen MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 15

ARTS & CULTURE LIT

City of rose-colored glasses

By JEROME LUDWIG

W

please recycle this paper

hile “city of the big shoulders” has long served as a sobriquet for Chicago, Brian Doyle may have found its successor: “that middle knuckle in our national fist.” The phrase pops up in the first sentence of Chicago, Doyle’s charming tale of a young man’s brief residency in this “rough and burly city in the middle of America.” It will be especially charming to north-siders who know the area bounded by the lake, Broadway, Belmont, and Addison, where the narrator shows up to rent an apartment, arriving with not much more than a job offer, some clothes, and a well-worn basketball.

This unnamed narrator, just out of college, has taken a job as a journalist at a Catholic magazine based downtown. He is well served by his natural curiosity and openness. Set in around 1979 or 1980 (based on a couple of LaMarr Hoyt and Wilbur Wood references, among other choice tidbits), the action follows his explorations of the city, usually by el or bus, but often zigzagging “this vast verb of an urb” while dribbling his basketball.

The physical city itself is mostly rendered extraordinary in Doyle’s recounting. But it’s the people the narrator encounters who express the city’s “Chicagoness.” His apartment building is populated by a number of interesting characters. Miss Elminides, the

resident owner, is sweet but a bit of a mystery (age, occupation: indeterminate). A woman on one floor bakes otherworldly empanadas (her eventual business is “helped greatly by a glowing review in the Chicago Reader newspaper”). Mr. Pawlowsky, the building’s caretaker, who never once in his life has set foot outside the city limits, becomes the young man’s confidant and mentor in all things Chicago—and in life.

Then there’s Edward, Mr. Pawlowsky’s dog.

Perhaps Edward, who exhibits wisdom far beyond that of your ordinary canine, is the narrator’s foremost confidant and mentor.

He knows all the best places and all the best routes to get to those places. Edward is also a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln.

Early on the narrator thinks, “It wasn’t all beaches and dream, of course. . . . I paid attention, in my ambling and wandering and jaunting, and I saw a lot of broken and sad and ragged and dark.” The book is, to be sure, mostly beaches and dream. But come visit again soon, Brian Doyle. Chicago has changed some since the early 80s, but someone like Edward will still know of a nice gyro joint on the corner. v CHICAGO By Brian Doyle (Thomas Dunne Books)

! @jeromeludwig

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hit Broadway musical at the beautiful Civic Opera House Now through May 22 Including five performances Mother’s Day weekend Rodgers & Hammerstein’s THE KING AND I Music by RICHARD RODGERS Book and Lyrics by OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II Based on “Anna and the King of Siam” by Margaret Landon Original Orchestrations by Robert Russell Bennett

Photo: Todd Rosenberg

Original Dance Arrangements by Trude Rittmann

Original Choreography by Jerome Robbins

16 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

LYRICOPERA.ORG | 312.827.5600

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Buster Keaton in 1964 on the set of Film, the subject of Ross Lipman’s video essay Notfilm

ARTS & CULTURE

onscreen. Drawing on such varied witnesses as actress Billie Whitelaw, cinematographer Haskell Wexler, filmmaker Kevin Brownlow, and critic Leonard Maltin, Lipman provides vivid portaits of the production personnel who struggled to accommodate Beckett’s rigid vision, and of Keaton, who stubbornly claimed not to understand the story but did more to make it work than anyone else.

Mutual shyness couldn’t have helped matters. Beckett was notoriously reclusive, unhappy to be photographed and unwilling to be recorded or filmed. In fact Film was his attempt to work through a growing preoccupation with the human eye and its object— identified in the script as E and O. The camera would be E, and Keaton would be O, desperate to escape observation as he runs through the city in a heavy overcoat, his face covered.

Beckett, as Lipman observes in voice-over narration, had written “a chase film, the craziest ever committed to celluloid.” His screenplay contained no dialogue, and the action was spelled out in minute detail, with diagrams explaining the camera movements he wanted. As O fled, the camera would lag behind, staying just out of his peripheral vision at a 45-degree angle lest he see it and speed up. During the production conference, the others pressured Beckett to drop this idea, but he was adamant.

What separated Keaton from the creative team was lack of education. Beckett had graduated from Trinity College in Dublin and was a protege of James Joyce; Keaton had grown up in vaudeville as part of an acrobatic act with his

parents, and according to biographer Marion Meade, people close to him suspected he was functionally illiterate. A decade earlier he had been offered the role of Lucky in the first U.S. production of Waiting for Godot and had handed the script unread to his wife, who advised him to turn down the role. When Schneider visited the 68-year-old comedian in Los Angeles to talk about Film, Keaton seemed baffled by the script and suggested a few gags to liven it up. “I said that we didn’t normally pad Beckett’s material,” Schneider later remembered.

That summer, as cast and crew convened in Manhattan, Schneider took Beckett to Keaton’s hotel, but they found the actor drinking a beer and mutely absorbed in a baseball game on TV. (Even Beckett found him standoffish, Brownlow recalls with great amusement.)

Beckett and Schneider were interested in Keaton only as a performer; you have to wonder if they understood they were dealing with a cinematic genius. Actor James Karen, who put Schneider in touch with Keaton and played a small role in Film, remembers his frustration with the writer and director: “Beckett had never made a movie, nor had Alan Schneider ever directed a movie. And there they were, with a master of moviemaking whom they never took into their confidence.” The irony is that Keaton might have latched on to the film’s technical challenges; some of his most brilliant work dealt with tricks of perception and the paradoxes of cinema. In his short The Playhouse (1921), multiple exposures allow him to play every role; in Sherlock Jr. (1924), he leaps up into the frame of a movie and joins the action, stunned when the picture cuts to a new scene and he’s not where he thought he was. A brilliant architect of sight gags, Keaton had a pronounced sense of geometry that might have served Beckett’s idea of a man being continuously stalked just outside his field of vision.

As it stood, Schneider had problems just getting footage in the can. Film was supposed to begin with an elaborate street scene in which six pairs of characters parade past the camera.

From Rosset, Lipman has salvaged outtakes in which the camera pans over the wide expanse of a deserted street, recording all six couples in motion; closer shots focus on an old man and his wife, then a woman pushing her baby in a carriage. But when the day’s footage was screened, strobe effects ruined some of the panning shots, compromising the sequence. With no budget to bring back the actors, Beckett J

MOVIES

When Beckett met Buster

By J.R. JONES

T

he meeting of minds between Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett might have been one of the greatest in performing-arts history if their minds had actually met. In July 1964, the silent-comedy legend arrived in New York City to spend three weeks shooting an avant-garde short from a script by the lionized Irish playwright. Beckett was strongly influenced by the great clowns—Vladimir and Estragon, the eternally patient protagonists of Waiting for Godot, are nothing but a pair of baggy-pants comedians—and while the play was first being staged in Paris, Beckett got to see Keaton perform at the Cirque Medrano.

Both men pondered the inescapable joke of existence, one trading in the low art of slapstick, the other in the high art of avant-garde poetry. But Keaton was only a hired hand on Film, which is better remembered now for the oddness of the men’s pairing than for its artistic merit.

This weekend director and film archivist Ross Lipman will appear at University of Chicago and the Music Box for screenings of his fascinating video essay Notfilm, which exhaustively documents the conception, realization, and public reception of Film. As a documentary, it could use a tighter edit and a more generous music score, but as a research project, it’s impressive. Lipman has gotten his hands on audiotapes secretly recorded by the film’s producer, Barney Rosset, in which he, Beckett, director Alan Schneider, and cinematographer Boris Kaufman debate how Beckett’s abstract ideas can best be visualized ssss EXCELLENT

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NOTFILM sss Directed by Ross Lipman. 128 min. Sat 5/7, 7 PM, Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th, filmstudiescenter.uchicago.edu, 773-702-8596, free; also Sun 5/8, noon, Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $11

ARTS & CULTURE continued from 17

decided to cut the sequence entirely and turn immediately to Keaton as O, running along a dilapidated brick wall near the Brooklyn Bridge with the camera in hot pursuit. In Notfilm, Karen peruses a book with photographs of Keaton on location, roasting in his overcoat with his iconic flat hat pasted on his head. “Buster would never complain,” says Karen. “Over 100 degrees in the shade, and there was no shade. I had to fight them to get him a chair.”

Even as a performer, Keaton had his work cut out for him: the overcoat hid his body, and Beckett insisted that his face not appear

onscreen until the very end. O, safely inside his cell of a room, contrives to cover up the window, the wall mirror, and even the goldfish bowl, anyplace from which he might be observed. He pulls down a picture of a godlike deity with enormous eyes and tears it into pieces; he sits in a rocking chair reviewing old photographs of himself and shreds them too. At the climax of Film, O finally comes face-to-face with E and stares in shock at his own image. Keaton understood the story perfectly—talking to reporters on location, he remarked, “A man may keep away from everybody but he can’t get away from himself”—yet

later he preferred to play dumb. Lipman includes footage of him on a TV show, saying, “It was one of those art things. I was confused when we shot it, and I’m still confused.”

Notfilm necessarily focuses on Beckett, with Keaton as a supporting player. Yet when Film premiered at the Venice film festival in September 1965, Keaton was given a rapturous welcome not as its star but as a filmmaker in his own right. Unlike Film, his great silent work was the product of glorious improvisation; he and his writers, left to their own devices on their own little back lot, would begin with a character in trouble and then dream up gags to ‘‘

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get him out until they had a picture. Mentally, this process was every bit as demanding as Beckett’s theater, dealing in practicalities of time and space that a stage dramatist could only imagine. How sad that Beckett and Keaton couldn’t find a way to communicate. Whatever absurdities Beckett might have dreamed up for his plays, nothing could have been crazier than amateurs making a film called Film while one of the greatest filmmakers of all time sat around between takes, his face buried in a newspaper he couldn’t read. v

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Deeply affecting and beautifully acted.”

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Visit sonyscreenings.com/ MMReader to enter-to-win an admit-two pass. *No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited or restricted by law. Once 100 admit-two passes have been redeemed, this giveaway will be closed. Screening will be held on Wednesday, May 11 at a downtown Chicago theater. Employees of all promotional partners, their agencies and those who have received a pass within the last 90 days are not eligible.

Please refer to screening passes for all other restrictions. MONEY MONSTER has been rated R by the MPAA for language throughout, some sexuality and brief violence.

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Houdini & Doyle needs more magic

By BRIANNA WELLEN

H

arry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were more like frenemies than friends. Their real-life relationship in the 1920s could be adversarial—Doyle believed in the occult, and Houdini repeatedly (and sometimes successfully) tried to debunk its existence (sorry, kids, his magic wasn’t real). They eventually had a massive falling out and became rivals—but according to Houdini & Doyle, a new drama on Fox, their opposing views made them the perfect pair of rogue detectives.

In the first episode, Doyle (Stephen Mangan) and Houdini (Michael Weston) are asked by Scotland Yard to join female constable Adelaide Stratton (Rebecca Liddiard) to investigate the murder of a young nun.

The only suspect of the crime: a ghost. What follows is like an episode of The X-Files. The believer, Doyle, goes to a medium to try to solve the case, hoping to stop the murders by putting the accused spirit at ease. Houdini, the skeptic, looks for scientific clues and evidence of sleight of hand that would disprove the ghost theory. Constable Stratton, well, she does little more than stand around, trying not to pass out from the tightness of her corset.

At first I thought, “The creator of Sherlock Holmes and the master of escape teaming up to solve mysteries? Sign me up!” But instead of a somewhat ridiculous period drama about two fascinating historical figures, what the show turns into is just another crime procedural. I can almost picture David Caruso stepping in and whipping off his sunglasses when, late in the episode, Houdini says, “Looks like someone wants to make this [pause for dramatic effect] a triple murder.” Maybe that’s because Weston’s Houdini seems like he’d be more at home in an episode of Entourage than in his three-piece suit and pocket watch.

I have nothing against standard crime procedurals—I’ve watched every episode of Law & Order: SVU. But what makes shows like that or Bones or even Castle entertaining is the chemistry between the main characters and the expert structure of the crime and the investigation. So far, Houdini & Doyle has neither. It’s only the first episode—maybe the duo can still bring a little magic to this show.

Then again, maybe these two are just better off as enemies. v HOUDINI & DOYLE Mondays at 8 PM on Fox

! @BriannaWellen MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 19

MUSIC Anohni’s heartfelt but clumsy Hopelessness and 13 more record reviews

alternate between swaying, waltzlike threebeat groupings and funky, rocking twos, and the songs often overlay one atop the other— dancing to this, suspended between two pulses, feels pleasantly like bobbing in a warm sea. —PHILIP MONTORO

Nine Reader writers tackle new releases from ambient wizard Brian Eno, self-proclaimed “Hood Pope” A$AP Ferg, and wintry folksinger Marissa Nadler, to name a few.

ANOHNI Hopelessness (Secretly Canadian) Hopelessness, Anohni’s first album since changing her name from Antony Hegarty, is immaculate and ambitious, but though its experimental electronic pop has its heart in the right place, the songs sometimes go adrift. Anohni has an otherworldly voice, and you can hear her intuitive ear for melodies and rhythms that set cold hearts aflame in Hopelessness’s Autobahn-swift passages of glistening synths and pirouettes of percussion. Her words, on the other hand, are more blunt than deft, and her idealism can obscure the human suffering behind her pointed sloganeering. Hopelessness is more interesting when Anohni ditches the political platform and explores multiple perspectives.

On “Watch Me” her brassy voice lends some humanity to the Big Brothers tracking our every move online, even as she skewers the public justifications they offer for their surveillance. Her lyrics often lack nuance and can land awkwardly (the line “Protecting me from child molesters” sticks out like a sore thumb), but the messiness of her songs does have one virtue: it suggests there are no easy answers.

—LEOR GALIL

20 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

A$AP FERG Always Strive and Prosper (A$AP Worldwide, Polo Grounds) A$AP Ferg is dead-ass serious about stepping up his rap game: the lead single from his sophomore full-length, Always Strive and Prosper, is called “New Level” (and features Future). The album is his testament, weaving in and out of EDM and trap beats as it delivers a documentary-style view of his ascent to self-declared “Hood Pope” status. On the first track, “Rebirth,” a prophetic declaration directs Ferg on his new path: “Be the voice of the people who couldn’t make it out of the hood.” The middle of the album contains its best series of tracks—including the Schoolboy Q-assisted, Lex Luger-produced “Let It Bang”—but unfortunately Ferg gets sidetracked three songs later, reverting to shallow raps about money and misogyny on “Swipe Life” and “Uzi Gang.” He returns to his mission, though, with the Black Lives Matter anthem “Beautiful People,” featuring Public Enemy’s Chuck D: “Beautiful people, let’s take a second and think / We continue these issues, our ship will drown and we sink.” The album could’ve ended here, but it labors on for four more tracks (and three more skits).

Though Always Strive and Prosper is a bit heavy on features, it gives us reason to keep Ferg on the radar. —TIFFANY WALDEN

DEBO BAND Ere Gobez (FPE) This 11-member Boston-based band devotes itself to golden-age Ethiopian pop, which combines traditional scales and vocal styles with Western soul, funk, and rock. Seven of the 11 tracks on their second full-length, Ere Gobez, are covers or adaptations—some of East African songs, others of unrelated material using similar harmonies, including Duke Ellington’s “Blue Pepper (Far East of the Blues)” and a 1948 Okinawan tune called “Hiyamikachi Bushi.” Front man Bruck Tesfaye enlivens his hoarse, athletic voice with a tense quaver, and the large leaps built into the pentatonic scales give the melodies a daredevil energy, simultaneously suspenseful and celebratory. Electric guitar chatters and slashes, accordion surges and flutters, and plump sousaphone dances in tandem with electric bass, braided together into a lively counterweight to Debo’s joyous massed horns and strings. Frothy and extroverted, the front line has the feel of a crowd that’s always almost unraveling, reminiscent of the gang soloing in Dixieland or Balkan brass bands. Licks and riffs cycle independent of one another, and you can take your pick of which to follow—it’s like the friendly bustle of a dance floor where there’s always someone to lead you no matter where you turn. The bubbly, sinuous rhythms

BRIAN ENO The Ship (Warp) Brian Eno is a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to groundbreaking sounds—whether with his early-70s alien-glam or his gorgeous ambient compositions, he’s been operating ahead of the curve for decades. On his brand-new solo LP, The Ship, Eno allows other colors from his expansive sonic palette to creep into his trademark tranquil minimalism. Hypnotic, multitracked spiritual chants gently interrupt the dreamy, crystal-clear electronic soundscape of the title tune, and the next number, “Fickle Sun (I),” erupts into grandeur with a bombastic, orchestral climax and layers of bubbly, distorted vocals. The ambient wizard has conquered a whole new realm of sounds— which makes it even more fun when he brings The Ship full circle on its last track by paying tribute to the psyched-out 60s that shaped him with a cover of the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Set Free.” —LUCA CIMARUSTI FIRE! ORCHESTRA Ritual (Rune Grammofon) Swedish reedist Mats Gustafsson built this unruly ensemble around his trio Fire!, a fleet, energetic group with bassist Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werliin (Wildbirds & Peacedrums). On previous recordings the Fire! Orchestra has swelled to 28 members, thickening the trio’s tough grooves and harsh textures with an armada of horns, chanted vocals, writhing electric guitars, and pure noise. The lineup on Ritual is pared J

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OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 21

On the opener, “Night,” she uses overdubs to layer gorgeous drones, percussive effects, frictive bowing, and deliberately plucked melodies; elsewhere she prefers a more direct, resonant style, its beauty driven by arpeggiated figures whose lyrical qualities matter more than their technique. —PETER MARGASAK

new reviews continued from 20 down to 18, but the results are no less powerful. The album’s five-movement suite puts the singing of Mariam Wallentin and Sofia Jernberg front and center, where they toggle between hectoring melodies and wordless caterwauling. Gustafsson’s control of the ensemble has never been surer, whether the music is exploding in a torrent of violence and tightly coiled riffing or pulling back to a smoldering vamp—and this dynamic richness turns the record into a roller-coaster ride. It’s exhilarating to hear so many of Scandinavia’s finest improvisers unite unerringly behind a single purpose.

—PETER MARGASAK

KRISTIN THORA HARALDSDOTTIR VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 14 (VDSQ) Icelandic violist and composer Kristin Thora Haraldsdottir, now based in LA, generally works on fringes of new music, fastidiously experimenting with electronics, field recordings, and unusual tuning systems. Her engagement with the acoustic guitar is more casual, but no less impressive: her contribution to Vin du Select Qualitite’s excellent ongoing series of solo guitar music is anything but lazy or ordinary. Most artists in the series have built their music with fingerstyle techniques, but Haraldsdottir is more methodical.

22 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

ROBIN HAYWARD Stop Time (Important) British tuba player Robin Hayward has been among the most indefatigable explorers of that notoriously unwieldy horn for two decades, both as a top-flight free improviser and more significantly as an advocate of applying microtonal tuning systems to his instrument. In 2009 he helped develop a microtonal version of the tuba, which he’s used in solo contexts as well as in the wonderful tuba trio Microtub. Stop Time is a 30-minute piece that uses another of his innovations, a software interface called the Hayward Tuning Vine, which helps players visualize and explore the intricacies of just intonation—a system popularized by La Monte Young and the late Tony Conrad in which the intervals in a scale are derived not from a constant frequency multiplier but from varying ratios of whole numbers.

For Stop Time a portion of the interface is adapted into a physical score, which Hayward, cellist Pieter Matthynssens, and baritone saxophonist Bertel Schollaert follow to generate sounds whose pitch relationships are mapped out in overlapping, color-coded quadrants; those colors are projected during live performances to encourage interaction between hue and tone. That might sound like gobbledygook, but the music is exquisite, rippling with dazzling harmonic effects that give its droning tones a seductive richness.

—PETER MARGASAK

KAYTRANADA 99.9% (XL) Louis Kevin Celestin, aka Haitian-born, Montreal-based producer Kaytranada, knows that the first and last measure of a great dance track is whether it can make people move. He’s proved it over the past few years with a string of remixes and productions for rappers on multiple continents, including locals such as Towkio, Mick Jenkins, and Save Money leader Vic Mensa, who pops up on the woozy, thrumming “Drive Me Crazy,” from Kaytranada’s full-length debut, 99.9%. The album demonstrates Celestin’s ability to bend to his collaborators’ personalities—the Internet front woman Syd, for instance, brings her dreamy R&B to “You’re the One”—but retain his refined mix of shimmering funk, clattering disco, and bass-heavy hip-hop. Many of the guest vocalists he’s assembled are part of pop music’s “now” (Anderson .Paak, Goldlink), but he comes out the other side as the album’s dominant force. —LEOR GALIL

LITTLE SCREAM Cult Following (Merge) Laurel Sprengelmeyer established herself as a piercing vocal presence on Little Scream’s 2011 debut, The Golden Record. Amid the album’s stark arrangements, marked by dusky guitars, she was a conspiratorial narra-

tor wielding a bluesy wail or a keening howl.

Little Scream’s second album, Cult Following, which Sprengelmeyer crafted with creative partner Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire, builds on this economical foundation.

Seething synthesizers and orchestral washes fill every nook and cranny, creating bulkedup indie-folk songs with an otherworldly tint.

Sprengelmeyer has also diversified her singing, adding exuberant falsetto to the diffracted disco strut of “Love as a Weapon” and 80s pop-siren shrieks to the electro-poptinged “Dark Dance.” In an even more affecting moment, she matches the regal guest vocals of Mary Margaret O’Hara on “Wishing Well,” an ethereal pop song beamed in from above the clouds. Cult Following is difficult to pigeonhole, but its mystery makes it enchanting. —ANNIE ZALESKI

MODERN BASEBALL Holy Ghost (Run for Cover) Modern Baseball were in the right place at the right time when they dropped their previous album, 2014’s You’re Gonna Miss It All—their trenchant mix of underground pop-punk and emo arrived right as the thirst for those sounds hit a new peak, and the Philadelphia-via-Maryland band landed in the upper half of the Billboard charts. Success came with challenges, though, and a recent Fader feature detailed the postbreakout struggles that singer and guitarist Brendan Lukens had with addiction, depression, and suicidal thoughts. MoBo channeled their collective grief and postadolescent weariness into the concise, nervy Holy Ghost, which combats those heavy feelings with adrenalized anxiety and euphoria. Lukens’s feral howl on “Apple Cider I Don’t Mind” lends conviction to his lyrics, about reconciling his youthful hopes with his troublesome pres-

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MUSIC

ent—and the song’s shimmering guitars and galloping pace suggest that he hasn’t lost all of his optimism. —LEOR GALIL MARISSA NADLER Strangers (Sacred Bones) Marissa Nadler’s wintry folk has reached its highest peak yet on her sixth studio album, Strangers. She hasn’t strayed too far from her intimate guitar and lap-steel arrangements, and her lyrics remain spectral reflections of the people in her songs—but her silky voice has matured beautifully. Nadler excels as a narrative storyteller. Her characters are ghosts aching to touch the living—in the title track, she sings, “I am a stranger now / Playing in the dark,” and yearning colors her voice as profoundly as any electronic effect. And “Waking” tells of a soul who sleeps forever to shut out an unbearable grief in a world that will not stay as it was. But the album isn’t entirely concerned with the intangible and ethereal: the narrator of “Shadow Show Diane” is like a sadder, less drug-addicted version of Ellen Burstyn’s character in Requiem for a Dream, transfixed to a television and waiting for an epiphany that will never come.

Nadler richly illustrates her fascination with desperation through her characters, and she chooses her instrumentation for its similarly desolate tones. A synthesized organ adds an atmosphere of reverence, and the minor chords of the lap steel are fraught with hunger that mirrors the characters’ own. As enchanting as Nadler’s voice is when paired with a simple acoustic guitar, the grander songs shine the brightest—they’re the most compelling representations of the snowy, gossamer world she builds. The ghosts she summons with Strangers linger long after the album ends. —MEAGAN FREDETTE REPOS Poser (Youth Attack!)

The Repos have existed for 14 years—in fits and starts, granted, given their breakup in 2008, eventual re-formation as the Ropes,

and later reversion to the Repos name—and that’s a colossal feat for a band that delivers one-minute-or-less blasts of filthy and terrifying hardcore. But front man Aaron Aspinwall, guitarist Joe Phillips, and company have been in the Chicago scene way too long to kick the habit now—and they’ve earned the support of hardcore superhoncho Mark McCoy and his Youth Attack! label to boot. While many hateful bands can barely make it to the van to load their gear before combusting, the Repos just keep releasing white-knuckle records full of battering-ram rhythms and demented, gruff vocals. Their newest, Poser (whose album art, by Reader contributor Ryan Lowry, is bound to end up my favorite of the year), transitions from 45 seconds of foot-on-thegas, pummeling disgust (“Everyone Was Upset Except You”) to the stalking title track, which would make a jolly theme song for a hunt through a war zone with a spiked baseball bat and satchel of grenades. Plus, Aspinwall sounds closer than ever to straight-up devouring the microphone—cord, stand, and all. —KEVIN WARWICK

SUSANNA Triangle (SusannaSonata) On this sprawling, 70-minute opus, meticulous Norwegian singer Susanna (nee Susanna Wallumrød) shows off the full diapason

of her talent, moving among stark piano ballads, gooey pop songs, harrowing psychodramas, and more. As usual her gorgeously refined, exquisitely mannered voice provides the heart of the music, whether she’s accompanied by nothing more than her piano or joined by a dizzying cast of collaborators from her homeland and abroad (including guitarist Emmett Kelly of the Cairo Gang and Chicago cellist Allison Chesley). Triangle is both her most diverse effort and her most personal one: “Hole” is steeped in despair that’s belied by an ethereal slow-jam vibe, and the swooping “Born Again” conveys hope despite its paranoid electronic swirls and the spooky saxophone curlicues of Poing’s Rolf-Erik Nystrøm. Triangle sure feels like a masterpiece. —PETER MARGASAK

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LA TÈNE Vouerca/Fahy (Three:Four Records) Ethnography and ecstasy commingle on Vouerca/Fahy, the debut LP by Swiss-French trio La Tène. Alexis Degrenier, Cyril Bondi, and D’incise have named themselves after a town that’s in turn named after the Iron Age culture that preceded the Romans in broad expanses of Europe, and they use traditional instrumentation—hurdy-gurdy, harmonium, and drums—to set in motion cadences derived from the folk music of eastern France and western Switzerland. They bolster their acoustic drones with subliminal, pulsing electronics and elongate their appropriated rhythms with implacable repetitions inspired by minimalists and eccentrics such as Steve Reich, Charlemagne Palestine, and Moondog. Each of the album’s two pieces spans an album side but feels like it could go on all night. La Tène’s music sounds medieval and European, but it’s as trance inducing as something you’d hear at a powwow. —BILL MEYER v

MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 23

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

MUSIC

b

PICK OF THE WEEK

THURSDAY5

Singer Cate Le Bon makes room for wild imagery on the new Crab Day

Melissa Aldana Trio See through Sunday.

8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, $20-$35.

The title track from Back Home (Wommusic), the latest album by Chilean saxophonist Melissa Aldana, has nothing to do with her longing for the confines of her native Santiago. Instead, the tune pays homage to another biographical signpost: brilliant tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the sound of his great 50s trios, to which her own versatile trio is indebted. The original tune’s rollicking groove and intimate sound hark back to Sonny’s classic 1957 California sojourn Way Out West (Contemporary), particularly his interplay with drummer Shelly Manne. For Back Home drummer Jochen Rueckert joins mainstay bassist Pablo Menares to bring a greater sense of propulsion as well as an irresistible buoyancy (both also contribute their own pithy compositions to the album). Simply put, “Back Home” swings like a motherfucker. While Aldana’s playing throughout contains hints of Rollins’s influence, the record is far and away her most assured and forceful effort, without any sacrifice of her lithe mobility or lightness of touch. She regularly pushes her lovely, sere tone into the alto range—recalling the tonal command of masters like Joe Lovano and Mark Turner—but maintains an elegant, unfussy directness. The trio delivers the kind of simple charms that remind me why I got into jazz in the first place. —PETER MARGASAK

Earring Dim and Hecks open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $8. ! IVANA KLIČKOVIĆ

CATE LE BON, MEGA BOG

Mon 5/9, 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $15.

SINCE MOVING TO LA a few years ago and falling into the creative orbit of Tim Presley of White Fence—her partner in last year’s wonderfully raw and chaotic Drinks project— Welsh singer Cate Le Bon has embraced an irresistible dichotomy, combining melodic elegance with increasingly jagged experimental arrangements. That tension reaches a fantastic apotheosis on the new Crab Day (Drag City). The title track opens with a relentless primitive thrum as Le Bon deadpans, “It doesn’t pay to sing your songs,” and when that metronomic beat finally blooms into a swing pattern during the chorus she underlines her stern delivery with an ethereal overdubbed harmony, celebrating an imaginary holiday with a simple request for someone to “sing your heart to me.” In many of the songs there’s open questioning, a kind of existential search that makes room for whimsical turns of phrase and wild imagery; on the hooky “I’m a Dirty Attic,” the title seemingly obvious in its wordplay, she sings, “Paint me in a picture / With a new face.” Le Bon balances things hard and evident with notions slippery with doubt and uncertainty, both in her words and in arrangements that embroider scrappy guitar and keyboards with warm dollops of vibraphone and blurting saxophone. In some ways Crab Day feels transitory compared with her earlier, more refined albums, but it could just be Le Bon is herself transitory, always evolving and pushing. Either scenario works for me: few contemporary singers excite me more. —PETER MARGASAK

24 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

As the side project of crystalline, breezy indie-rock quartet Ne-Hi—a Reader-approved, on-the-verge group of local dudes ready to break out this year with the release of their new record—Earring act as a pleasantly serene downer for the duo of vocalist-guitarist Jason Balla and drummer Alex Otake.

Rhythms drag and crash cymbals ring out forever as stripped-clean guitars swell with simplicity and Balla’s lurking, stony vocals ache to the outer recesses of each track. Their debut full-length, Tunn Star (Fire Talk), is at its most hypnotic when Balla orchestrates crescendoing deep dives with his shoegaze-tinted guitar lines, and during the slogging repetition of a track like “Silt Fence,” the pair together create a dim landscape that feels at once hopeful and bleak.

Track titles like “Sunset Forever” and “Pure Pleasure” suggest a kind of id-driven existence—sans gluttony but heavy on bliss—but Earring are darker than that, as they exhibit on the seven-plus-minute closer, “Midnight Pave,” which feels less like heading toward the light than wandering around in pitch blackness, arms stretched out, trying to find anything tangible to grab ahold of. Tonight was meant to be the record-release party for Tunn Star, but life happens and the records have yet to arrive from the pressing plant. Fear not, though! Earring will be hawking a seven-inch of new material via Manic Static, and you can preorder the full-length and get an advance-listen download code in the process.

—KEVIN WARWICK

ALL AGES

F

Rock, Pop, Etc Amon Amarth, Entombed A.D., Exmortus 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Big Black Delta, Sego, Reaches 9 PM, Empty Bottle Black Lillies, the O’s 8 PM, City Winery b Justin Demus, Blackdaylight, Krucial 8 PM, Double Door Jerry Joseph & the Jackmormons, David Lee 10:30 PM, House of Blues Little Green Cars, John Mark Nelson 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Luna Blues Machine, Dave Miller 7:30 PM, Comfort Station b Malafacha, Runner Ups 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen F Netherfriends 9 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar F Saint Christopher, Mishka Shubaly, Star Anna 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Stick Men, Consider the Source 7 PM, also Fri 5/6, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ John Waite, Anna Rose 8 PM, SPACE b Hip-Hop Astronautalis, Ceschi & Factor Chandelier 10 PM, Schubas Dance Elephante 10 PM, the Mid Blues, Gospel, and R&B Tweet 7 PM, The Promontory Jazz The Bridge #5 with Sylvaine Helary, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Eve Risser, and Mike Reed; The Bridge #12 with David Boykin, Nicole Mitchell, Lionel Garcin, Christian Pruvost, and Christophe Rocher 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Tim Daisy & Wayne Montana, Tim Daisy 9 PM, Elastic b Experimental Patrick Higgins, Greg Fox, Sam Hillmer 9 PM, Hungry Brain

FRIDAY6 Melissa Aldana Trio See Thursday. 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, $20-$35.

Cory Healey’s Beautiful sunshine band Jim Dorling & Steven Dorocke headline; Skyler Rowe & Sam Wagster and Cory Healey’s Beautiful Sunshine Band open. 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10 suggested donation. b Drummer and Iowa native Cory Healey bounced around a bit before settling in Minneapolis three years ago. He made a stab at the New York jazz scene and also worked here in Chicago—playing in Fareed Haque’s Flat Earth Society and proggy postrock band Algernon—but he seems to have found a sweet spot in the Twin Cities with his flexible working group Beautiful Sunshine Band. The group’s eponymous debut on the Shifting Paradigm label features some key figures from that scene, including electric bassist Erik Fratzke and tenor saxophonist Brandon Wozniak, both members of the Dave King

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Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

La Sera ! JULIA BROKAW

3855 N. LINCOLN

martyrslive.com

provides the connective tissue that binds the mixtape’s solemn synth instrumentals to its turn-up tracks to its nouveau, minimal dance collage, built by former Chicagoan Brenmar. Saint Millie coats his voice in varying layers of Auto-Tune and pulls in a hit squad of Chicago rappers (Sir Michael Rocks, Mano, Logan, Sicko Mobb), but some of the most magnetic moments on Adderall are when he lays it bare.

—LEOR GALIL

THU, 5/5

BIG C JAMBOREE… ROCKIN JOHNNY BURGIN FRI 5/6

JAMES & THE DRIFTERS, SECRET SCIENCE, JOSEFINA SAT, 5/7

Say Anything, Teen Suicide Say Anything headline; Mewithoutyou, Teen Suicide, and Museum Mouth open. 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, 2047 N. Milwaukee, $21.50. 17+

Trucking Company, an energetic combo led by the Bad Plus drummer. Healey shares King’s drive and predilection for creatively slopping up the groove with off-kilter accents and unexpected tom explosions, but it’s his melodic sensibilities that set him apart, whether he’s adapting the bouncy, joyful lyricism of Ornette Coleman on “Ubiquitous Condiments,” tapping into classic bebop on his “Aragon,” or pushing a moody, overdriven noir vibe on “Omen.” Rounded out by trumpeter Jake Baldwin and guitarist Zacc Harris, the band also includes a pair of rock covers on the record (the aching St. Vincent ballad “Cheerleader” and Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side”), both of which offer plenty to tear into melodically as the rhythm section kicks up a head of grinding dust. For tonight’s gig superb Milwaukee trumpeter Russ Johnson subs for Baldwin. —PETER MARGASAK

La Sera Turn to Crime and the Bingers open.

9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15, $13 in advance.

One of the canniest covers of the 2000s is Bobby Bare Jr.’s twangy, alt-country version of the Smiths’ “What Difference Does It Make,” which transforms the languidly melodramatic misery of 1980s Britain into the languidly melodramatic misery of modern-day Nashville. Somewhere Katy Goodman was listening. Her group’s recent Ryan Adams-produced album Music for Listening to Music to (Polyvinyl) moves from the catchy indie rock of their early catalog toward a Brit-pop-influenced hootenanny. The rolling tune “High Notes” underlines the connection between Johnny Marr and rockabilly, while lyrics like “I might be tall but I’m not half the man you thought you knew” might make Morrissey himself sonorously moan in melancholic ecstasy. “Time to Go” is perhaps even more perfect, with Goodman launching into familiar Smiths’ “Ooooh, ooooh, ooohs!” and declaring, “The last look that we shared filled you with envy” just before guitarist (and husband) Todd Wisenbaker launches into a hot-picking guitar solo. For the first time Goodman shares vocal duties, and though Wisenbaker’s singing is nasal and uninspired in comparison to the striking purity of her performance, La Sera is still a smart, distinctive band that combines unexpected influences in satisfying ways. —NOAH BERLATSKY

Okkyung Lee Handmade Blade and Tomeka Reid Stringtet open. 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15. 18+ Lots of musicians insist that they don’t pay much heed to style or genre, but there aren’t many improvisers and composers that embody openness like cellist Okkyung Lee—she embraces musical challenges like most folks draw breath. Last week she helped legendary pianist Cecil Taylor close out a two-week celebration at the Whitney in New York, and that was only a week after playing with longtime collaborator Vijay Iyer. In fact, the musicians she’s performed with this year all have one thing in common: a strong and original musical personality. Lee enhances such personalities with her playing, but that’s simply one characteristic of her aesthetic. She’s in town playing solo, where her dexterous technique and quicksilver imagination can go a myriad of ways—her sound might be rife with tension or gossamer delicate, or both in rapid succession. At a time when so much improvised music lacks the sense of surprise that’s supposed to define it, Lee embraces unpredictability. For the opening night of cellist Tomeka Reid’s Chicago Jazz String Summit, Lee will perform first, followed by cellist Peggy Lee’s trio Handmade Blade and Reid’s own Stringtet. —PETER MARGASAK

Saint Millie DJ Sliink & Brenmar headline; Saint Millie, DJ Spinn, and OG Webbie open.

8 PM, Double Door, 1551 N. Damen, $20, $10 in advance. 18+ In 2014 Crain’s Chicago Business published a piece on the rebound of Oak Street, also known as “Chicago’s Rodeo Drive,” the strip of luxury stores in a section of Gold Coast close enough to Lake Michigan that the smell of sand might waft into its eastern border. The place represents the kind of extravagance that I do not care for—the level of splendor is so extreme it feels alien to me—but on “Oak Street Anthem” Chicago rapper and Treated Crew member Saint Millie projects his dreams onto those pristine sidewalks. His tender, half-sung vocals allow me to see a part of this city in a new light, and that’s a rewarding effect I yearn to experience in music.

“Oak Street Anthem” kicks off the new Adderall, on which Saint Millie’s earnest, affable personality

On Teen Suicide’s recent It’s the Big, Joyous Celebration, Let’s Stir the Honeypot (Run for Cover), the track “Pavement” contains some lyrics that the other three bands on tonight’s bill can certainly relate to: “Pavement were an OK band / You don’t gotta sound like them.” Not that any of tonight’s bands have tried to or ever even wanted to sound like Pavement—headliners Say Anything have actively raged against that particular indierock machine since day one. Led by Max Bemis, that iconoclastic group began pushing against the confines of emo, pop-punk, and, yes, indie rock back in 2000, producing one of the more stylistically unwieldy but trenchant and exciting catalogs in any of those genres. Say Anything released their seventh album, February’s I Don’t Think It Is (Equal Vision), with just a week’s notice of its existence, and it’s proved divisive, its splurge of music swerving from confounding to affecting; both sensations are acute when Bemis turns his critical eye on himself on “Jiminy,” bleating about an “aging pop-punk vocalist.” Bemis’s creativity always forges something new, but his musical impulses have been deeply influential and remain well ingrained on the scene. Take aforementioned openers Teen Suicide, fronted by Sam Ray, the Young Thug of the indierock world, who’s responsible for delightful music released through a variety of projects including Ricky Eat Acid and Julia Brown. Teen Suicide were originally around for just a couple years, and after breaking up in 2012 they took on a mythical status among young fans that has held throughout their fragmented reunion shows and the original release of “Pavement” on a Topshelf 2014 label sampler (at the time the band said the song was a hoax and that they hadn’t made it). Last month’s mammoth 26-song Big, Joyous Celebration corrals black-metal blastbeats, twee vocal harmonies, lo-fi tape experimentation, and some fine melodies that capture the evanescence of a lovely spring day. —LEOR GALIL Rock, Pop, Etc Darlingside, David Wax Museum, Haroula Rose 8 PM, Schubas Alejandro Escovedo, Lucette 8 PM, also Sat 5/7, 8 PM, SPACE b Ellie Goulding, Years & Years, Bebe Rexha 7 PM, Allstate Arena b Jerry Joseph & the Jackmormons, Matt Hendricks 10:30 PM, House of Blues Tori Kelly 8 PM, Rosemont Theater Mobile Deathcamp 9 PM, Cobra Lounge No Ritual, Hidden Hospitals, Gardens 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon

HERBERT WISER, MISTER F, SPLOR MON, 5/9

ANDY OBERHAUSEN’S BREADWINNERS, NATE LEPINE TRIO TUE, 5/10

QUIET HOLLERS, BAD BAD MEOW, MEAN SEA LEVEL WED, 5/11 - SOLD OUT

TRIBUTOSAURUS BECOMES… EAGLES THU, 5/12

GREAT MOMENTS IN VINYL PERFORMS LED ZEPPELIN I & III FRI, 5/13

YOUNG DUBLINERS, MIKE MARLIN

CORNMEAL SAT, 5/14

THE DRUNKEN HEARTS

FALLPREVIEW ARTSANDMORE 24-7

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J MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 25

MUSIC continued from 25

Pony Time, Mama, James Swanberg 10 PM, GMan Tavern Redline Messiah, Hot Alice, Speed Babes, We Got Ours 8:30 PM, Township Stick Men, Consider the Source 7 PM, also Thu 5/5, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Yuna, Bosco 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Dance Maurice “Ice” Culpepper Noon, Randolph Cafe, Chicago Cultural Center F b Hunter/Game 10 PM, Spy Bar Chris Lake 10 PM, the Mid Palms Trax, Juju & Jordash, Joey Anderson 10 PM, Smart Bar Vicetone, Jenaux 10 PM, Sound-Bar Folk & Country Lucy Kaplansky 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Blues, Gospel, and R&B Jeffrey Osborne, Freddie Jackson, Stephanie Mills 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino Jazz Lowdown Brass Band, Low Spark 8 PM, 1st Ward Nick Mazzarella Quintet, Brahja Waldman 9 PM, California Clipper Experimental Zs, Walter Kitundu, A Michael & His Jackson Sonic Celluloid XIV. 8 PM, Northwestern University Block Museum of Art Classical Nicholas Phillips Piano. 7:30 PM, PianoForte Studios b Spektral Quartet 8 PM, Experimental Sound Studio b Fairs & Festivals Ragnarokkr Metal Apocalypse: Chalice, Salvacion, Riot City, Gatekeeper 5:30 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Ragnarokkr Metal Apocalypse: Jag Panzer, Ashbury, Ambush, War-Cry, Ignitor, and others 5:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club

SATURDAY7 Melissa Aldana Trio See Thursday. 8 and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, $20-$35.

Discwoman Jayda G, Umfang, CL. 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $16, $14 before midnight, $12 in advance.

Discwoman isn’t just a DJ collective. Its aim is to further the profile of women, transwomen, and nonbinary-gender artists in electronic music. That’s a necessary endeavor: according to a TED analysis

by DJ and producer Dani Deahl, women produce just 9 percent of EDM today. And what began as a showcase of female DJs at Bushwick nightclub Bossa Nova Civic Club has now become a fullfledged event-and-book-production collective, with dozens of musicians now performing at Discwoman nights all over the country. Tonight Discwoman

26 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

founder Umfang (also known as Emma Burgess-Olson) spins her provocative, minimal beats. It’s intelligent music that’s direct in its production—kick drums are staccato and melodies are bare, and together they thrive on the sensuality of the dance floor. Her last release, 2015’s Ok (1080p), is a moody piece recalling barely lit Brooklyn DIY venues with winding, smoky hallways. The bill’s lineup of women DJs—which also includes Jayda G and CL—highlights the diversity of talent in electronic music.

—MEAGAN FREDETTE

Floating Points Abstract Science and Rob Sevier spin. 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $23, $20 in advance. 18+ In 2009 underground electronic music reached a point where genres and styles combined in exciting and unexpected ways—’ardkore and dubstep, glitch and hip-hop, IDM and house—and releases were increasingly difficult to assign to a specific category. That same year British artist Sam Shepherd first dropped material as Floating Points, and since then his work has not only become more adventurous and unclassifiable but has reached a stage where it barely even resembles electronic music. His early singles kind of sound like Nintendo scores weaving through breezy two-step beats, but gradually Floating Points mutated into something resembling jazz fusion crossed with 90s house. The superlative 2011 EP Shadows is so seamless and lush that it’s similar to early-70s jazz albums on CTI, like Freddie Hubbard’s Straight Life or Joe Farrell’s Outback.

Most of Shepherd’s cuts have been issued on his own Eglo imprint, but his full-length debut, last year’s Elaenia, was released on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop, a label better known for introducing Tom Ze and Shuggie Otis to enterprising hipsters. But it’s a good fit: Elaenia runs through everything from jazzy house (“Silhouettes”) to dense, squelchy, Enostyle ambient music (“Thin Air”) to pensive, exploratory keyboard workouts that sound like mid-70s releases on ECM (“Elaenia”). It’s beautifully crafted, engaging, and somewhat experimental music—it’s not really “electronic,” and it doesn’t really matter.

—TAL ROSENBERG

Tygers of Pan Tang Part of Ragnarokkr Metal Apocalypse; Medieval Steel, Leather Leone, Satan’s Host, Winterhawk, Spellcaster, Lethal, Impaler, and Midnight Chaser open.

4:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $40, $80 two-day pass. 17+ Lineup changes can be a plague that makes it difficult for a band to progress and find an identity, and arguably no one’s been tripped up by them more than classic New Wave of British Heavy Metal band Tygers of Pan Tang. Named in honor of the critters in Michael Moorcock’s classic sword-andsorcery Elric series, the Tygers prowled the metal scene with respectable ferocity in their youth, split up in 1983, re-formed in 1985 with only one original member in the lineup, dropped a very stinky turd in their litterbox with 1987’s Burning in the Shade, and broke up again in light of poor sales and deservedly scathing reviews. So you wouldn’t think them likely candidates for successful reani-

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architects

Daniel Bell, Mia Wallace, Frankie Vega, Plus Plus 10 PM, Primary Nightclub Grum 10 PM, Sound-Bar Terry Hunter, DJ Mike Dunn, Jon Pierce, Sheree Hicks 9 PM, the Promontory Kennedy Jones 10 PM, the Mid Push Beats, Nunca Duerma, Slot-A, Meftah, Kid Dragon, Cos 9 PM, Double Door

counterparts / sworn in / make them suffer

05.06 FREELANCE WRESTLING PRESENTS: FEELMONGER 05.07 POINT BREAK LIVE! MIDWEST BASS & FESTIVUS PRESENT

05.13 XAEBOR

Blues, Gospel, and R&B R. Kelly 8 PM, Allstate Arena

Jayda G of Discwoman ! FARAH NOSH

mation. But metal necromancy is powerful mojo.

In their post-2000 re-formation, original guitarist Robb Weir has built a fast and lean version of the band with young players—particularly Italian vocalist Jacopo Meille—and kept them steadily gigging and releasing occasional well-received albums: 2012’s Ambush sounds fierce and fresh and hungry.

(They still need to stay away from the power ballads though.) —MONICA KENDRICK Rock, Pop, Etc Arts of Life Band, Normal Toronto, Drool 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Eric Bachmann, Jennifer O’Connor, Skylar Gudasz 9 PM, Schubas Eiffel Tower, Boxing Fetish, Joe Bordenaro, Junkee Girl 9 PM, Burlington Enuff Z Nuff, 4 Without, Steamvalve Nation, Aeraco 7 PM, Red Line Tap Alejandro Escovedo, Lucette 8 PM, also Fri 5/6, 8 PM, SPACE b From Indian Lakes, Pact, Emblems 6:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b Gore Gore Girls, Ovef Ow 10:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Jerry Joseph & the Jackmormons, Nigel Mack 10:30 PM, House of Blues Mar Caribe, Juli Wood Trio 9 PM, California Clipper Mild High Club, Dam Gila, Soft Candy 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Mothers, Palm, Basement Family 9 PM, Empty Bottle Night Ranger 9 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Sadie & the Stark, Brother Starrace, Flowtone 9 PM, 1st Ward Seratones, Bad Bad Meow, Andrew Bryant 9 PM, Hideout Dave Tamkin Trio, Soulfix, Even the Jackals, Cardinal Harbor, Tanks & Guns 8 PM, Double Door Herbert Wiser, Mister F, Splor 9 PM, Martyrs’ Dance Anthony Attalla 10 PM, Spy Bar

SOBER BERT / ZAVA / FILTH MOB / MIMIK MUZIK / TRUKKIS

Jazz The Bridge #5 with Sylvaine Helary, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Eve Risser, and Mike Reed; The Bridge #12 with David Boykin, Nicole Mitchell, Lionel Garcin, Christian Pruvost, and Christophe Roche 7 PM, PianoForte Studios b Trio Amygdala, James Sanders’s Proyecto Libre, Triptych 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+

05.14 TWRK & OG MACO

International Choro de la Pra Ca 7 PM, the Promontory b

05.17 BLAQK AUDIO

SCHRAMM / WYDLEFIRE / DALLY AUSTIN / KARMA / KIDD KOTA / AKONI XX

05.15 ENTER SHIKARI

HANDS LIKE HOUSES / THE WHITE NOISE

05.16 BEACH SLANG

POTTY MOUTH / DYKE DRAMA / TURNSPIT NIGHT RIOTS / CHARMING LIARS

05.20 MARWOOD’S FALL

Fairs & Festivals Ragnarokkr Metal Apocalypse: Hexenhammer, Ordained Fate, Old Wolf, Wulfhook, White Magician 4:30 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint

BUBBLES EROTICA

05.21 ODDITY

EVEN THIEVES / THE 92S / MINOR WITS

05.21 SCHOOL OF ROCK

SUNDAY8

05.25 THE GROW WILD TOUR 05.27 CHASE AWAYS

Melissa Aldana Trio See Thursday. 4, 8, and 10 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, $20-$35.

Rock, Pop, Etc Alberta Cross, Sky White Tiger, Grand Canyon 8 PM, Beat Kitchen Eikthyrnir, Sun God Ra, Magma Dragon, Mile 134 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Honey & the 45s, Cyn, Kelsey Wild, Jess Godwin 7 PM, Hideout Eilen Jewell, Angela James 8 PM, City Winery b King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Murlocs, Running 8 PM, Lincoln Hall LA Witch, Sugar Candy Mountain, Levitation Room 9 PM, Empty Bottle Jamie Lawson, Amy Vachal 8 PM, SPACE b Nao, Mura Masa, Bonzai 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Dance Ava Cherry, Derrick Carter, Michael Serafini, Garrett David 10 PM, Smart Bar Zhu, Gallant 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+

THE FLIPS / LEVER / ALL THE WINE / PAT EGAN & THE HEAVY HEARTS

05.28 WELSHLY ARMS

WILD ADRIATIC / BENNY BASSETT

05.31 LACUNA COIL

STITCHED UP HEART / 9ELECTRIC / PAINTED WIVES

06.04 WHEELER WALKER JR. 06.09 LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES

Never miss a show again.

06.18 ANDY BLACK - THE HOMECOMING TOUR COLOURS

06.24 WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS PRISM TATS

07.09 PITY SEX

PWR BTTM / PETAL 1833 PRESENTS

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Folk & Country Wild Earp & the Free-For-Alls 10 PM, California Clipper

LUMINATE / EDAMAME

Blues, Gospel, and R&B Intruders 4 and 7 PM, the Promontory Jazz Charles Burnham, Macie Stewart & Steve Marquette Chicago Jazz String Summit. 9 PM, Hungry Brain James Davis Quintet 9 PM, Whistler F

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MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 27

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

continued from 27

Earring ! ASHLEIGH DYE

Classical Classical Revolution 10 PM, Jerry’s Fifth House Ensemble 8:30 PM, Constellation Lincoln Quartet 3 PM, South Shore Cultural Center

MONDAY9 Hanami Quartet 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $10, 18+ This local quartet has remained intact since guitarist Andrew Trim and reedist Mai Sugimoto formed it in the wake of the tragic Tohoku tsunami in 2011, but its raison d’etre has changed over the years.

Both musicians spent extended time growing up in Japan, and they originally assembled the band as a one-off project to raise money for the disaster’s victims. But they were so pleased with the performance they decided to keep the quartet—which also includes drummer Charles Rumback and bass clarinetist Jason Stein—working. The group’s terrific 2014 eponymous debut preserves its opening repertoire, a mix of children’s songs, Japanese classical music, and 60s pop tunes made famous by singer-actor Kyu Sakamoto, all played with a refreshing airiness that still leaves room for dramatic tension; Rumback provides his special brand of post-Paul Motian rumble, while the rest of the bass-free ensemble delivers a timbre with a lovely sweet-sour tang. Wary of becoming stuck with a repertoire of Japanese melodies, however, the leaders decided to write original pieces for the new The Only Way to Float Free (Ears & Eyes).

Some compositions, like Sugimoto’s “Hanaikada” and Trim’s title track, retain the airy quality of the debut, but most of the pieces reveal a more aggressive approach. “Kita Nagano Motorcycle Gang” chugs with hard-rock energy, augmented by crunchy riffing from Trim and furious bombs from Rumback (who tuned his kit lower than usual to provide extra bottom), while “Donmai!” leaps from an Ornette-ish head into some high-octane free blowing. The quartet does close with an old Japanese melody from 1901 called “Kojo No Tsuki,” which was later recorded by Thelonious Monk as “Japanese Folk Song” on his 1967 album Straight, No Chaser. —PETER MARGASAK

Cate Le Bon See Pick of the Week on page 24. Mega Bog open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $15.

Eve Risser 7:30 PM, Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 N. Ravenswood, $10, $5 students. b Plenty of improvising pianists explore sounds that come from tinkering around inside the body of their instrument, whether that means placing an object within to change the timbre of a particular string when struck, or directly attacking the strings with hands, mallets, or in the case of Cor Fuhler, powerful magnets. But to my ears, no one has developed those techniques like French pianist Eve Risser, who spent the bulk of her early years studying classical flute but returned to her first instrument after falling in love with the music of Keith Jarrett, Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, and Thelonious Monk. Though she

28 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

initially didn’t feel confident of her conventional technique, she’s proven herself via work in France’s Orchestre National de Jazz and her quirky improvising quartet New Songs (with vocalist Sofia Jernberg and guitarists David Stackenäs and Kim Myhr). But she’s found a ripe avenue for expression inside the piano as well, firmly establishing her own sound on the 2012 album En Corps (Dark Tree). On that trio session with bassist Benjamin Duboc and drummer Edward Perraud she generates a fascinating flow of alternately frictive, ringing, and rumbling sounds, dispatching any sense of novelty with the power of her playing. Even more astonishing and original is last year’s solo album Des Pas Sur la Neige (Clean Feed), on which Risser uses a veritable tool kit of devices, including an EBow, to assemble an otherworldly profusion of haunting, sustained sounds— alternately ethereal, sepulchral, and jarring. Tonight she’ll perform solo and play duets with bassist Jason Roebke. —PETER MARGASAK Rock, Pop, Etc Brass Bed, Great Lie, McConnel 9 PM, Burlington Corners, Death Valley Girls, Limbos 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Dorian Taj, Murder Boots 8 PM, Double Door F Nora O’Connor 7 PM, Hideout Hip-Hop Rich Jones, MC Adad, DJ Tone B. Nimble 8 PM, the Promontory Blues, Gospel, and R&B Akenya 10 PM, California Clipper F Jazz James Falzone, Lia Kohl, Megan Schneeberger 7 PM, Constellation, 18+ F Sylvaine Helary, Lionel Garcin, Rob Clearfield, Matt Ulery, and Marcus Evans 9 PM, Elastic b Andy Oberhausen’s Breadwinners, Nate LePine Trio 8 PM, Martyrs’ Christian Pruvost & Christophe Rocher 9:30 PM, Whistler F Woongi 9 PM, Hungry Brain Classical Musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Tony Arnold Cliff Colnot, conductor (MusicNow). 7 PM, Harris Theater for Music and Dance

TUESDAY10 Rock, Pop, Etc Art Alexakis, Sean Skyler 8 PM, City Winery b

Chain & the Gang, No Men, Clearance 9 PM, Empty Bottle Dude Same, Pylons, Security Culture, Glittertiger 7:30 PM, Double Door F English Beat 8 PM, also Wed 5/11, 8 PM, SPACE b Flutronix 6 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art b Memory Tapes, School Dance, Roommate, Bloodhype 7 PM, Subterranean Tim Menard 9 PM, Hideout Muuy Bien, Symposium, Beat Drun Juel 8 PM, Schubas Tortoise, Chris Brokaw, Axis:Sova 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Jazz Ishmael Ali’s Zebec, Marge Quintet 10 PM, Jerry’s Sylvaine Helary, Christian Pruvost, Lionel Garcin, and Fred Lonberg-Holm 9:30 PM, Whistler F U-High Jazz Band 7:30 PM, the Promontory F

WEDNESDAY11 Rock, Pop, Etc Above & Beyond, Solomon Grey 7 PM, Chicago Theatre b Charlie Coffeen, Nika Nemirovsky, and Nate Lepine 9 PM, Whistler F English Beat 8 PM, also Tue 5/10, 8 PM, SPACE b Ron Haynes Game Changers, Pistachio, Beckman 5 8 PM, Emporium Arcade Bar F Julie Meckler 9 PM, Hungry Brain Quinn XCII 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Solids, Stove, Clique 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Useless Eaters, Life Partner 9 PM, Empty Bottle Dance Syrup, Zebo, Marco Morales, All the Way Kay 9 PM, the Promontory Jazz Bobby Broom Trio 9 PM, California Clipper Clark Sommer’s Ba(SH) 9:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ F Experimental Anthony Janas, Jeremiah Fischer, Wish Fulfillment 9 PM, Hideout International Occidental Gypsy 8:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music F b Classical Kinga Augustyn & Benjamin Laude Violin and piano.

12:15 PM, Preston Bradley Hall, Chicago Cultural Center F b v

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FOOD & DRINK

NEW REVIEW

The Northman is cider central At Chicago’s first cider pub, the food is no match for the juice.

By MIKE SULA

R

avenswood’s Fountainhead is one of the best craft beer and whiskey bars in the city, with dizzyingly long lists that are a pleasure to lose oneself in. When it was announced more than two years ago that its principals were to take over the former Jury’s in nearby North Center and open a cider-focused bar, hopes were widely pinned on the group taking the same careful and comprehensive approach to apple fermentation. Despite many establishments offering a cider here and there, a fledgling but limited yearly Cider Summit at Navy Pier, and a few underwhelmingly stocked shelves at various Binny’s, no one in town had yet seriously tried to bring the beautiful universe of cider into clarity. If anyone could do it, this group could.

On the other hand Fountainhead never really delivered a food menu that could match its beverage program. Even when the talented chef Cleetus Friedman took over in 2013, there was always something disillusioning about what came from the kitchen. But shortly before the Northman opened in March, Friedman left the group and it was announced that Sean

THE NORTHMAN | $$$ 4337 N. Lincoln 773-935-2255 thenorthman.com

Clockwise from left: house cider made from Michigan apples; chips with black-garlic aioli and curried ketchup; 2 Towns’ Made Marion Marionberry cider; handcut chitarra noodles with pickled vegetables, roasted goat, and crescenza cheese ! DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

Sanders, the former chef-owner of the late, great Browntrout, would be taking over both kitchens. This was also promising news. But more about that later.

The restaurant’s beverage program is headed by Brian Rutzen, aka “Cider Brian,” a crusader for fermented apple juice who seems to have it running in his veins. His menu, broken down regionally, provides copious and entertaining tasting notes on some 18 draft ciders and 80 by the glass or bottle.

Additionally, there are apple-based cocktails and what’s claimed to be the largest selection of Calvados in the country as well as a smaller group of other apple brandies and a few choices of French pommeau, the marriage of apple juice and Calvados. If by some flaw in your genetics nothing here piques your interest, there are plenty of other nonpomaceous spirits, beers, and wines.

But it’s difficult to see why anyone wouldn’t want to dive into this multivaried world of cider, if only to marvel at the differences between, say, the light semidry florality of the Canadian Sea Cider Prohibition and the murky unfiltered barnyard funk of Michigan’s Uncle John’s Farmhouse Firkin. Or to guzzle (appropriately) a glass of typically flat Trabanco Sidra streamed into the glass from on high so that it aerates into a frothy, living fluid. Or feel the chills shooting down your legs from a honeyed ice cider—winter’s work on the apple as rich and full-bodied as a Sauternes. There’s so much to explore.

It should be easy to find good food to eat with this diverse group of juices, even as a significant portion of the menu incorporates them, from the cow’s milk and sidra-blended cheese to the pommeau-spiked chicken liver paté to the maple-glazed cider doughnuts.

Among larger and smaller selections there’s a thin Normandy-style French onion soup, traditionally thickened with roux, that’s spiked with a sharply sweet dose of English Thatchers cider that does well with the oozing Gruyere crust. The fries—served alongside a mystifyingly underseasoned burger or on their own with black-garlic aioli and curry ketchup—are as on point as thick, baton-cut English chips, crisp with a cumulous interior. But perhaps the best use of these wonderful chips is under a few chunks of malt-cured Icelandic cod, cider-battered, hard-fried, and sprayed with malt vinegar mist; it’s one of the best versions I’ve come across in some time. A snail-and-bacon ragu rides tandem with a crispy “leek swede J

MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 29

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please recycle this paper 30 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

2 Towns’ Made Marion Marronberry Cider (front) and house cider

continued from 29

strudel” in “beef demi,” which is an earnestly cheffy way of describing something like a rutabaga egg roll in beef stock reduction; it’s an odd dish for this menu, but still satisfying.

Another curveball, hand-cut pasta—fettuccine-like for nominally chitarra noodles— tossed with Mexican-style pickled onions and carrots, chunky bits of roasted goat, and blobs of creamy crescenza cheese—doesn’t quite come together physically but might be one of the most flavorful things on the menu.

Same goes for the fabada—a Spanish butter-bean stew reminiscent of Publican Quality Meats’ fantastic cocido—with chorizo, blood sausage, and bacon, undermined only by the relative lack of stewing liquid to enjoy with the accompanying grilled sourdough.

This dish had great potential, but it’s since been 86’d.

Things go downhill from there, however.

The Northman has joined the ranks of Chicago restaurants offering something called porchetta that no Italian would recognize as such: shaved slices of fatty roasted pork with no crackling, no flavor, and little character, served with an aged half-pretzel baguette that might be more at home at a Panera. A Cornish pasty more resembling a reheated Greek cheese pie consists of greasy puff pastry jacketing a sodden clump of cheese with a gluey sunchoke puree on top. Addressing

! DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

chefs’ current tendency to attempt streetfood makeovers, a doner arrives on a useless slate service piece, the tissue-thin lavash with barely enough structural integrity to contain desiccated shreds of beef, chicken, and lamb and wan out-of-season tomato salad.

A confit chicken curry very well might be a piece of political performance art, a statement on the lasting evils of colonialism and cultural appropriation. Served with pickled caulif lower and shiitake mushrooms, it comes with a spice profile that barely registers anything more complicated than faint chile heat, like something served to residents of the psych ward so as not to excite the choleric humors.

Sanders is way better than this. I’m hoping his too-brief turnaround time after assuming the job is responsible for these failings, and that he’ll make a recovery. Since my early visits he’s already added two hyperseasonal dishes more akin to his work at Browntrout—a chilled soup of ramps and spring peas, and a trio of ramp-Gruyere pancakes not unlike the Korean analogue pajeon. These dishes show promise, but for the moment the Northman is an outstanding place to drink, with food that doesn’t stand up to the cider. v

" @MikeSula

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32 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

f it weren’t for the tap handles behind the bar, it would be easy to mistake the bright, airy Hopewell Brewing Company taproom for a modern-looking coffee shop. Pale wood is everywhere, from the wall panels to the tables and stools to the bar itself, while floor-to-ceiling windows flood the space with light. White accents and high ceilings (not to mention the hanging bulbs) make the minimalist taproom even sunnier—there’s even Ipsento nitro coffee on tap.

To be sure, the massive brewing tanks on display behind a window on one wall are a dead giveaway that this is a brewery rather than a cafe. But on a recent visit, a couple of patrons were sitting alone with a pint of beer and reading in the early evening light, just as they might do up the street at Gaslight Coffee Roasters. There’s Wi-Fi too, making this a promising destination for getting some work done (at least until the third or fourth beer).

Coincidentally it was a coffee beer called Cold Brew that impressed me the most from the nine-beer lineup. We started with a tasting

flight, which includes Hopewell’s five core beers (listed on the left side of the board behind the counter) and your choice of one selection from the new arrivals on the right side of the board. For the other three we ordered half pours, and I was happy to have eight ounces of the Cold Brew rather than a four-ounce tasting portion. It smells and tastes just like iced coffee, with zero bitterness and undertones of milk chocolate (though the beer isn’t sweet at all). After one sip, my friend declared, “This is everything I’ve ever wanted from iced coffee.”

I’m not even much of a coffee drinker, but I had to agree.

Another style that isn’t usually a favorite of mine became one: a kettle sour called All Hope, which is based on the brewery’s Farm and Family saison. Unlike the saison, which is full-bodied, with bubble-gum and banana flavors (much like a typical hefeweizen), the sour starts off slightly metallic and morphs into a lingering orange flavor and a funky finish. Rather than mouth-puckeringly sour, it’s pleasantly tart and easy to drink.

The two new beers I was most excited about, on the other hand, were disappointing.

The floral Old Duck Barleywine had plenty of complexity but was too syrupy-sweet for my taste (and I’m usually a fan of barleywines).

Meanwhile the black pilsner started out with a pleasant light maltiness similar to a brown ale, but then fell flat.

I had better luck with the beer that the black pilsner is based on: First Lager, the earliest beer that Hopewell—which is focusing on lagers—ever brewed. Light and creamy, it has a distinctly bready flavor but still manages to be clean and refreshing. The Endgrain Dark Lager is similar in flavor but sweeter and maltier, a creamy, medium-bodied beer. The Swift IPA is a solid entry for those seeking a straightfoward, balanced pale ale that doesn’t hit you over the head with hops. But it’s the 24:37 Red IPA that I’ll be ordering again. It smells eerily like coffee, though the bartender swore no coffee is used in brewing it; the aroma apparently comes from the roasted malt. The flavor delivers more coffee along with unsweetened chocolate for a restrained but distinct bitterness, finishing with piney hops.

Since opening its doors in early February, Hopewell has expanded its hours slightly and is now open until 11 PM on weekdays and midnight on weekends. Personally, I’m hoping not for later hours but earlier ones. If it opened before 4 PM during the week, the brewpub could be an ideal place to, say, sit and write bar reviews. v

" @juliathiel

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JOBS

SALES & MARKETING TELESALES! NEED EXCEPTIONAL diamond in the rough

salesperson to sell radio time. Bonus incentives and high earnings for right person. Need big fish for small pond.

Great environment in Skokie. PT/FT. Call 847-679-7660.

TELEPHONE SALES Experienced/aggressive telephone

closers needed now to sell ad space for Chicago’s oldest and largest newspaper rep firm. Immediate openings in Loop office. Salary + commission. 312-368-4884.

MAY CASH BLOOM IN YOUR POCKET! TeleFundraising. Felons need not apply per Illinois Attorney General regulations.

Start ASAP, Call 312-256-5035

food & drink NUTS ON CLARK POPCORN stores now hiring in Chicago for all locations...Earn $ while working with a team. Get paid while training.

Apply in person @ corp. office.

3830 N. Clark St. Chicago.

9 am to 10 am Mon thru Fri. Must bring ID’s to apply.

NUTS ON CLARK POPCORN stores now hiring in Chicago for all locations...Earn $ while working with a team. Get paid while training.

Apply in person @ corp. office.

3830 N. Clark St. Chicago.

9 am to 10 am Mon thru Fri. Must bring ID’s to apply.

General

include: global delivery experience working with off-shore & on-shore teams; advanced Excel, VBA/ Macros, SQL, SAS/R; extracting & analyzing data from multiple sources using analytical tools; & client management experience with primary accountability for peer-level client relationships. To apply, please send resumes to: recruitmentgc@mu-sigma.com.

Must reference job #11089.46.

THE DEPARTMENT OF Oral

Director of Product Development – Social Media 4C Insights, Inc. Chicago, IL Gather business requirements and outline technical specifications for 4C internal engineering teams in a form of clear, and structured internal collateral. Interpret complex sets of data and information related to 4C product and turn it into actionable insights for clients. Create presentations with key reporting insights showing trends, success cases, forecasting future client growth and driving optimization of client brands through a review of the analytical information provided by social media.

Must have a Bachelor’ degree in Business Administration, Mass Communication, Marketing or a closely related field. Must have five (5) years of progressive experience in Marketing, Account Management, Media Solutions, Product Management or a related field. Within the five years, must have experience in social media advertising; interpreting large sets of data and deriving trends data performance/Big Data analytics; direct management of client and/or agency accounts; leading communications with large client accounts; outlining technical requirements for business applications or company product.

We offer a competitive salary and benefits package. If you are interested in applying for the career opportunity listed above, please e-mail your resume to us at caree rs@4cinsights.com and reference DPD0516.

TECHNOLOGY Mu Sigma, Inc. has openings for the following positions: Associate, multiple positions in Northbrook, IL and various, unanticipated sites throughout the U.S. to conduct organizational studies and evaluations, design systems and procedures.

Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci, Eng, Bus, or related field + 1 yr. exp. Exp. to include: global delivery experience working with off-shore & on-shore teams; advanced Excel, VBA/ Macros, SQL, SAS/R; & extracting & analyzing data from multiple sources using analytical tools.

To apply, please send resumes to: recruitmentgc@mu-sigma.com.

Must reference job #11089.59.

Engagement Manager, multiple positions in Northbrook, IL and various, unanticipated sites throughout the U.S. to conduct organizational studies and evaluations, design systems and procedures. Responsible for review of quality client deliverables.

Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci, Eng, Bus, or related field + 3 yrs. exp. Exp. to

intercultural couples; b) working w/ immigration & acculturation issues & issues related to intersectionality; c) clinical supervision of interns or students in clinical environments; d) conducting training in LGBTQ Affirmative practice; & d) running process groups. Must be Illinois Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor. Send resume to: Live Oak, Inc., 1300 W Belmont, Ste 400, Chicago, IL, 60657, Attn: B. Koff.

MENTAL HEALTH COUNSE-

LOR: Provide professional mental health counseling to individuals, couples, family & groups (22-25 contact hours weekly). Diagnose & treat mental & emotional disorders, such as anxiety & depression. Work w/ clients to understand/address sources of disorders. Coord treatment w/ other professionals. Refer clients to other resources or services in the community. Participate in community outreach & conduct workshops on selected topics. Attend staff & supervision meetings & designated training events. Participate in professional training & conferences to stay abreast of developments in the field.

Complete designated paperwork in a timely & accurate manner. Chicago, IL location. Req’s MA in Clinical Psych w/specialization in Counseling. Req’s 2 yrs exp in job offered. Exp must incl a) working w/LGBTQ clients, clients from diverse cultural backgrounds, trauma survivors, clients of low SES backgrounds & interracial/

Biology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), located in a large metropolitan area, is seeking an Assistant Professor to assist the department teach undergraduate and graduate courses related to oral histology to dental students and Master’s and PhD candidates. Other duties include: conduct medical science research in the areas of molecular and cellular biology of the neuron or neuro-degenerative diseases, specifically related to dental pulp regeneration; publish and present research findings; mentor graduate students and postdoctoral fellows; and perform University service as assigned. Requirements are a PhD degree or its foreign equivalent in Biology or related field of study, plus two years of post-doctoral scientific research training. Some travel is required. For fullest consideration, please submit a CV, cover letter, and 3 references to the attention of the Search Coordinator via email at aashi q1@uic.edu, or via mail at UIC, Dept of Oral Biology, 801 S Paulina St., Chicago, IL 60612. UIC is AA/ EOE/M/F/Disabled/Veteran

quired for the right individual. Dr. Getzell is willing to work with an individual at an entry level, should there be no previous medical experience.

Requirements: -Exceptional problem solver -Bright -Curious -Open minded Work schedule: -Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays 2pm-6pm -Saturdays 8am-12pm Please note that the employment hours are not flexible.

Resume submission options: -Email: behavioraloptometry@gmail. com -Fax: 847-866-9822 No phone calls please.

DePaul University seeks ERP Business Analysts/Developers for Chicago, IL loc. to analyze, problem solve & develop solutions for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) sw applications for university website & Internet applications. Bachelor’s in Comp Sci. or Comp. Eng. or Info. Tech. plus 2 yrs exp. req’d. Must have exp. w/ ERP sw applications problem solving, Oracle Peoplesoft & Microsoft applications, SQL, PeopleTools, PeopleCode, Visual Basic, C#, VB.NET, ASP, HTML, Java, .NET, AJAX, Oracle, SQL Server, XML, XSLT, CSS, web services, data mining using Informatica or Cognos. Send resume to: John Amato, REF: PP, 1 E Jackson Blvd., Chicago, IL 60604

CONSULTING: ALIXPARTNERS, LLP (Chicago) seeks Vice President

THE NORTHERN TRUST Co. is

seeking a Sr. Consultant, Applications in Chicago IL, with the following requirements: BS in Computer Science and 6 years of related experience. Prior experience must include: performing troubleshooting of various application related issues in an n-tier environment using Perl, Python, Sybase, Linux, Tidal, Control-M Job Scheduling and PeopleSoft in Hedge Fund System requested on Service Desk Management Software; performing troubleshooting for various application related issues with .NET, C#, COM, IIS, XML and SharePoint technology; converting legacy systems to web based technologies using Linux, Shell Scripts, Oracle, SharePoint and Web Servers; providing recommendation to enhance existing trade life cycle bottle necks including posting trades, pricing in real-time, Clearing and Settlement using SWIFT, CTM, Bloomberg, DTCC and DataScope on Hedge Fund Technology Platform. Please apply on-line at www.northerntrustcareers. com and search for Req. # 16038.

VISUAL THERAPIST NEEDED

(with or without experience) Seeking a college educated individual for a permanent part-time employment in Evanston working with children and adults in a Behavioral Vision Training program with Dr. Jeff Getzell, O.D. Experience preferred but not re-

w/ Master’s in Business Administration, Accounting, or Finance and 3 yrs. of experience in management consulting, strategy analysis, or business analysis (or BS + 6). Work experience must include: (1) sourcing of indirect spend across regional and national restaurant chains in the U.S.; (2) SG&A expense cost reduction in the IT applications and disaster recovery spaces; and (3) developing comprehensive logistics strategies for international retailers including air, ocean, freight, dedicated fleet, and LTL. 80%+ travel required. Send cover letter and resume to klongo@ alixpartners.com. No calls. EOE.

REGULATORY AFFAIRS MANAGER: NORTHBROOK, IL

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

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

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

cial activities and manage accounting department of textile manufacturer.

Req’d: bachelor degree in accountancy, IL Registered or Licensed CPA, 4yrs experience as controller or accountant, experience must include cost accounting. Mail resume to HR, Ezine Inc. DBA Eastern Accents, Inc., 4201 W. Belmont Ave., Chicago, IL 60641

CHICAGO SHAKESPEARE THEATER seeks an experienced,

Sr Index Trader Akuna Capital LLC pls direct resume to Megan Suerth; 333 S Wabash Ave, Ste 2600, Chicago, IL 60604.

Reqs:BS in quantitative field (Finance, Econ, Math, etc);2 yrs of financial trading exp; Must have VBA & python as part of coursework or at least 6 months of exp with tools. Will accept exp in internship, research proj, or work exp. Must pass proprietary Math exam

Sr Derivatives Trader Akuna Capital LLC; pls direct resume to Megan Suerth; 333 S Wabash Ave, Ste 2600, Chicago, IL 60604 Reqs:BS in quantitative field (Finance, Econ, Math, etc);2 yrs of financial trading exp; Must have VBA & python as part of coursework or have at least 6 months of exp with the tools. Will accept exp in internship, research proj, or previous work exp.Must pass proprietary Math exam

INTL FCSTONE, INC. seeks a Senior Software Developer (Job Code 528213) in Chicago, IL to perform development, testing, and implementation of application code; prepare test data, code programs and perform testing/debugging activities with limited guidance. Mail resume referencing Job Code 528213 to Rosemary Carlson, INTL FCStone Inc., 1251 NW Briarcliff Parkway, Suite 800, Kansas City, MO 64116. EOE.

Sr Algo Trader Akuna Capital LLC; pls direct resume to Megan Suerth; 333 S Wabash Ave, Ste 2600, Chicago, IL 60604 Reqs:BS in quantitative field(Finance, Compu Sci, Eng, Math, etc);2 yrs of financial trading exp; Must have at least 6 months of exp with python. Will accept exp in internship, research pro, coursework or prior exp.Must pass proprietary math exam

Astellas Pharma Global

Development, Inc. seeks an experienced Regulatory Affairs Manager to oversee regulatory submissions for assigned oncology/ infectious disease projects. 10-20% domestic and international travel required. Interested applicants should mail a detailed resume, referencing Job Code RM2016, to: Carrie Passavant, Astellas Pharma Global Development, Inc., 1 Astellas Way, Northbrook, IL 60062. Equal Opportunity Employer: M/F/D/V.

CONTROLLER - DIRECT finan-

KIDNEY CARE CENTER Elgin LLC seeks Nephrologist, Lake Forest, IL: DIAGNOSE & TREAT diseases & disorders of kidneys. Reqs med. degree, IL med. lic. & completion of 1 yr. nephrology fellowship training.

Send CV to A. Shazzad, KCC Elgin, 440 N IL Route 31, Elgin, IL 60014

full time custodian. Hours will vary and will include evenings and weekends. Knowledge of cleaning equipment, chemicals and floor care required. Email cover letter and resume to jobs@chicagoshakes.com

EXPLORE YOUR OPTIONS in Healthcare!

We are hiring an Entry Level Billing Analyst to assist our reimbursement department in handling clerical duties as it relates to durable medical equipment. M/F Full Time. Send Resume to jobs@woundcareinc.com

CAR WASH MANAGER , Detailers & Car Washers Needed. 1/2 block from Blue Line Station. Manager position must have valid drivers license & ability to drive a stick shift. Apply in person: 478 N. Milwaukee, Chicago or call Bruce 312-942-3926 between 8am-3pm M-F

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

CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188 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 QUALITY PANGEA APARTMENTS, Studios-4BR, from $450.

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

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)

1BR 6230 S CLAREMONT. Quiet, peaceful bldg. $610/mo Heated, appls. Steadman Realty. 773-284-5822 After 5pm 773-835-9870

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 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 CHICAGO

SOUTH.

BRONZEVILLE 4950 S Prairie.

1BR. Heat, cooking gas, appl incl. Sec 8 ok. Lndry on site, prkg. $660 & up.

Z 773-406-4841 WINTER SPECIAL $500 To-

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

773-637-5957

CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms

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

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

79TH & WOODLAWN 1BR $650-$700, 2BR $775-$800; 76th & Phillips: 2BR $775-$800. Remodeled, appls avail. FREE HEAT. Sec 8 welc. 312-286-5678 CHICAGO SOUTHWEST, FURNISHED rooms with use of house-

hold. $112.50 per week, 1 week security deposit. 773-378-7763

W. AVALON , 1 & 2BR Newly decor. 8059 Ellis, hdwd floors,heat & appliances incl, $585 & $685 Call 708-769-6902

PROJECT ESTIMATOR CONSTRUCTION , Kane/Lake Cty, 3 yr

9147 S. ASHLAND. 1BR, dine-In

exp & travel req’d, send resumes to Caterpillar Carpentry Inc cat60118@ gmail.com

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

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

Kit, appls, laundry, closets. Clean & Secure. $725/mo. No Pets. Avail now! 312-914-8967.

CHICAGO - ROOMS FOR Rent.

7131 S. Yale. $400/mo. No Security Deposit! Utilities included!

Call 773-653-9312 1 & 2BRS , garden apts, newly rehab, spac, appl, lndry facility, Quiet bldg. Sec 8 ok. $600/ month 773-344-4050

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

WEST PULLMAN (INDIANA

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

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

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 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

MAY 5, 2016 | CHICAGO READER 33

CHICAGO 70TH & KING DR,

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

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

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

1 BR $1100 AND OVER LOGAN SQUARE BLVD Carriage

House, 2-story LR with fireplace, loft, 1 bedroom & sitting room, modern kitchen & bath, utils included. $1250/ mo. Non-smoking. 773-235-1066

1 BR $700-$799

1 BR OTHER

7941 S. Woodlawn- 1bed. apt. $775.

00 per month. heated. New car-pet, modern kitchen near trans. Call Long-Kogen, Inc. 773-764-6500 ext "0" 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

1BR, 6959 S. Michigan. $675.

1BR. 6822 1/2 S. Michigan. $675. , 1BR. 108 E. 70th St. $700.

Heat and appliances Included.

Shown by Appt. 773-874-2556 LARGE 1 BD accommodates king bed, 2nd fl, near public transport, quiet block, a/c, security cameras, $700/m plus util. 708-785-0034

1 BR $800-$899 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

ONE

BEDROOM

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

ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT

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

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

Spring is early LET’S GET MOVING!!

OUR COMMUNITY OFFERS...

HEAT, HW & CG Patio & Mini Blinds Plenty of parking on a 37 acre site 1Bdr From $745.00 2Bdr From $925.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** CALL FOR DETAILS! 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 ∫

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 CALUMET CITY 158TH & PAXTON SANDRIDGE APTS 1 & 2 BEDROOM UNITS MODELS OPEN M-F, 9AM-5:30PM *** 708-841-5450 *** CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large 2 room Studio, 1 & 2BR Apts.

Carpet, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $650$975/mo. Call 773-233-4939 CHICAGO, 1916 W. 78th, 3rd floor North. Recently decorated, large 4 room, 1BR, fully heated, $600. Charles (Manager) 312401-0911

LOVELY 5 ROOM Apt, living & dining room, kitchen & new bathroom. Clean bldng with nice people. Call for smaller rooms. 773-264-6711 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 NO MOVE-IN FEE! No Dep! Sec 8 ok. 1, 2 & 3 Bdrms. Elev bldg, laundry, pkg. 6531 S. Lowe.

Call Mani 773-874-0100

CHATHAM- 718 E. 81st St. Newly remodeled 1 BR, 1 BA, Dining room, Living room, hdwd flrs, appliances. & heat included. Call 847-533-5463

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

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

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

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

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200 ROYALTON HOTEL, Kitchenette $135 & up wk. 1810 W. Jackson 312-226-4678

2 BR UNDER $900 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 CHICAGO, 2BR, 1BA, 1st floor Apartment, heat included, quiet building. $800/mo. 1 month’s rent + 1 month’s security. Call 773-7522764 6122 ST LAWRENCE. 2 King Size BR , 5 rms, new kit, bath, ceiling fan, balcony, laundry fac. util. not inc. Sr’s/Sec 8 ok $775. 312504-2008.

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

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

224-223-7787

69TH/DANTE, 3BR. 77th/Essex.

3BR. 71st/Hermitage. 3BR 101st/May 1 & 2BR, New renov. Sec 8 ok. 708-503-1366

CHICAGO

SOUTHSIDE

BRAND new 2, 3 & 4BR apts. Excellent neighborhood, nr trans & schools, Sect 8 Welc., Call 708-7742473 NEAR 111TH & KING Dr.: Clean 2nd floor 2BR, $650/mo. Near bus stop. Call Vernon, RPC 773-7851400 9116 S. CHICAGO AVE $650/month plus security Nice 2BD 1BA carpet & appliances incl. 312-683-5174 1119 W. 72ND St.

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

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

2BR Apt, $730, Near 83rd & Hermitage. Nicely decorated, heat included. A Must See! Call for an appointment 773-783-7098 CHATHAM , 736 E. 81st (Evans), 2 Bedroom, 5 rooms, 2nd floor $825/month Call Mr. Joe at 708-870-4801

2 BR $900-$1099 AUSTIN - 5237 W. HIRSCH, UNIT 1.

Lovely 2nd fl, 2BR, 1BA, hdwd floors. Rent $900, 1 mo sec, utils sep. No smoking.

773-501-5799 6117 S. CAMPBELL, newly decorated 4BR Apt. Heat included.

Stove & refrigerator. $1000/mo + $1000 sec dep. Sect 8 welc. 312719-0524 DES PLAINES/NILES 2BR

$920 Heat & Water Incl.

Pool Parking Pets OK By Highways Shoping & Transport 847-501-0971

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CITY LIFE SoulCycle continued from 8

can be difficult to book a class, much less one with your preferred teacher and/or bike. Experienced SoulCyclists are encouraged to ride up front to help lead the pack, while newbies/ plebeians fill in elsewhere. In an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the title character, played by Elly Kemper, is naive about this arrangement. “Next time let’s go early so we can get bikes next to each other!” she tells her boss, wealthy Manhanttanite Jacqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakowski) after a “SpiritCycle” class.

“Oh, Kimmy, you can’t ride in the front row with me! Tristafé will summon you forward when you’ve earned it,” Jacqueline replies. “I’ll never forget where I was when Tristafé asked me to join the front row . . . ” Maybe silliest of all is the pricey SoulCycle apparel loyally donned by so many in attendance: $50 tank tops emblazoned with slogans like #soulsquad and love at first ride, $128 distressed sweatpants, and all kinds of branded gear on which the o in soul has been replaced by a skull and crossbones. According to Julie Rice, the SoulCycle cofounder, the symbol represents “the way you feel like a badass during and after you ride.” But you know what feels particularly badass? Being an individual and not donning prescribed vestments.

Which brings me to the core complication in my relationship with SoulCycle. Having grown up in an evangelical Christian family—in some ways a scrim through which I failed to truly recognize differing opinions and beliefs—I now have somewhat of a knee-jerk reaction to systems that place too much emphasis on fealty, emotion, and transcendent experiences. Having been taught early on that while facts are important, faith ultimately trumps logic, I was slower than some of my peers to discover the merits of critical thinking. Now as an adult, I work hard to respect other viewpoints, but can’t help but think—upon hearing tales of religious transformation or ghost stories or some “crazily convincing” meeting with a psychic—that the assumptions we make about the supernatural world ultimately pale in comparison to the real mysteries of the natural one. And isn’t Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World a great book?

Sometimes I have flashes of evangelical PTSD. A few years ago, at a friend’s urging, I attended an informational seminar about transcendental meditation, which seemed harmless enough. But I left in a huff after learning that in order to get my supersecret mantra, I’d have to bring my instructor a clean handkerchief, some flowers and fruit, and a

check for $2,500. (Here’s a mantra for you: Hocus-pocus!)

With its clean, all-white interiors and a grapefruit-scented Jonathan Adler candle eternally burning, the lobby of SoulCycle has a spalike feel that can also be interpreted as a sterile, churchy one. The studios, meanwhile, give me occasional flashbacks to my adolescent experience with Acquire the Fire, an evangelistic youth rally sponsored by Christian youth organization Teen Mania Ministries that was first held in 1999 at the Pontiac Silverdome. It was three days in a dark stadium with inspirational sermons and altar calls and 70,000 teens sobbing to worship songs that just build and build. I was hooked. Only later did I begin to understand that specific elements—music, mood lighting, teenage hormones—helped whip us into that emotional state.

After a SoulCycle class late last year, my favorite instructor, Hallie W., stopped me in the lobby and said she noticed I was getting into the “soul” portion, which typically happens during the second-to-last song, when the instructor blows out all but one of the candles in the room and advises riders to close their eyes and really “dig deep” and ponder why we’re there and how fear is a useless emotion and whatnot. “I went by and you were just really feeling it!” she told me.

Hallie W. is very down-to-earth and genuinely inspiring. She never phones it in, delivering with sincerity “soulful” messages such as “The dream is free. The hustle’s sold separately!” Even though I know various factors— music, mood lighting, adrenaline—conspired to move me that day, I probably was really into it, in that way that exercising—and especially, I’ve found, exercising in near darkness—engenders a feeling of invincibility and a surge of fiery ambition coupled with the satisfaction of no longer spinning one’s wheels.

I can’t say how long I’ll remain part of this “church.” I haven’t signed up for a class in weeks for lack of disposable income, and this summer I’m more likely to jog outside to my own playlist, featuring way fewer bass drops.

But another SoulCycle location opened in February on Southport, so I’ll probably go make an offering of $30, plus shoe rental, just to re-experience it all.

I have my own rules: Wear what you want.

Never, ever evangelize about it. And let yourself get lost in the transcendent moment sometimes, however contrived. Who am I to judge anyone’s soul journey? v

! @tislaurapearson MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 35

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SOUTH LOOP

PHYLLIS’ MUSICAL INN

PHOTO: ALEXEY LYSENKO/ GETTY IMAGES

A : Man, the polygamy bandwagon is really

picking up steam—no less than Chief Justice John Roberts pitched the idea last year in his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision affirming same-sex marriage.

Roberts argued, essentially, why stop here?

“From the standpoint of history and tradition,” he wrote, “a leap from opposite-sex marriage to same-sex marriage is much greater than one from a two-person union to plural unions, which have deep roots in some cultures around the world.” He was being rhetorical, sure—that scamp—but still, a family law specialist told U.S. News & World Report, the good chief might’ve offered polygamy proponents a “legal foothold” for some future test case. From John Roberts’s lips to God’s ears, eh?

The U.S. News piece was one of a number of contemporaneous articles that went right ahead and asked if this was the next frontier.

Some were bald endorsements: Slate called polygamy “the constitutional, feminist, and sex-positive choice.” Politico made your basic due-process argument: How can access to an important social institution be denied to a whole class of people just because they happen to be plural-curious?

As you imply, traditional arguments against polygamous marriage in the U.S. have tended to be shallow and alarmist, as much about ostracizing Mormons (who ban the practice institutionally though it continues unofficially) as anything else. Still, they’re rooted in some fact—there are a few documented problems with polygamy as we know it:

• A 2012 study found that, in polygynous cultures,

where men take more than one wife, the ensuing sexual competition leads to greater rates of crime and violence. Researchers had been wondering why patriarchal cultures ever transition from polygamy to monogamy at all—it’s not like it’s necessarily in the interests of the guys in charge. Their findings led them to surmise that cultures evolve toward monogamy because it provides “greater net benefits for society at large,” even if, in the short term, it means less nooky for male heads of household.

SLUG SIGNORINO

LINCOLN PARK

marriage equality, why is polygamy still illegal? I’ve read all the usual arguments, which assume only heterosexual males would want multiple partners; successful men will monopolize all the marriageable women, leaving gangs of undesirable bachelors roaming the countryside; etc. They all seem like complete bullshit in the 21st-century U.S. What’s the real reason? —JASON

• If multiple spouses attach themselves to high-sta-

tus individuals, where does that leave the little guy? In 2007 the New York Times reported that hundreds of teenage boys had recently been forced out of a polygamous Mormon community in Utah, apparently to correct a “huge imbalance in the marriage market”—all the brides were being claimed by guys higher up the food chain.

• Monogamous marriage tends to increase the

marrying age of young women, who aren’t being competed for so fiercely. In societies that have made the transition to monogamy, it’s generally preceded women’s greater inclusion in the civic sphere.

You’ll notice a theme among the opposing arguments you say are outdated bullshit: the presumption of a patriarchal society. Well, guess what, pal? That’s the one we’re living in. The overarching claim here is that reverting to our pre-monogamy past will bolster the patriarchy where we’ve already made significant strides to weaken it. Of course, the sexist-society argument cuts both ways: arguing against plural marriage on the grounds that it’s traditionally patriarchal ignores the fact that traditional marriage is traditionally patriarchal. Perhaps practitioners of plural marriages can offer creative alternatives to the male-female patriarchal marriage, in the way gay spouses do by definition—maybe via polyandry, the practice of women taking multiple husbands. Historically this is rare and has been poorly studied, but going forward I wouldn’t mind seeing more sisters doing it for themselves. At the very least, advocates argue, legalizing polygamy may make it easier for victims of spousal abuse in preexisting polygamous marriages to find relief.

So I’m with you in spirit, I suppose, but let’s stipulate: the best chance for successful plural marriage is a total upending of the patriarchy.

Call me back in another century and we’ll see how things are going. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

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SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Advice for a 31-year-old virgin: jump in the sack already Plus: A tip for the “unsexperienced” and a solution to “accidental” anal Q : I’m a 31-year-old straight

woman. I have a good job, great friends, and average attractiveness. I’ve dated close to 30 men at this point, yet I’ve never had a boyfriend or dated anyone for more than a couple months. It’s really starting to wear on my self-esteem— the more time goes on, the more I think there has to be something wrong with me.

The guys ghost me or things fizzle out or we’re not at the same point in our lives. This is particularly true for one guy I’ve remained friends with (common social circle) who’s struggling with his career, though things are still awkward because it’s clear there’s still something there.

Another area of concern: I’m still a virgin. Catholic guilt resulted in me being a late bloomer, with my first kiss at 21. I don’t have unrealistic expectations that I’ll marry the first dick that sticks itself into me—but I’ve waited this long, so I’m not going to jump into the sack with just anyone without knowing that I can at least trust them. The only guy I really do trust is Somewhat Depressed Guy, but propositioning him could further complicate our already awkward friendship. Is something wrong with me, and what the hell should I do?

—WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME?

A : I get variations on the

first half of your question— Is something wrong with me?—all the time. But it’s not a question I’m in a position to answer, WWWM, as I’d need to depose a random sampling of the guys you’ve dated, interrogate your friends, and grill you under a bare lightbulb for a few days to figure out what’s wrong

with you.

But you know what? Could be nothing’s wrong with you.

You may simply have pulled the short straw 30 times in a row, in which case you just need to keep getting out there.

As for the second half: What the hell should you do? Well, gee. What you’ve been doing hasn’t worked, WWWM, so maybe it’s time to do something else. Like fuck some dude on the first date. Or if that’s too drastic, fuck some dude on the second date. Or better yet, go to Somewhat Depressed Guy and say: “I don’t think you want a relationship right now, and I’m not sure I do either. But I like you and trust you, and I could really use your help with something . . . ” While the commitment-and-monogamy-first approach has worked for some, WWWM, it hasn’t worked for you. And being a virgin at 31 isn’t boosting your self-esteem. There are lots of people out there who jumped in the sack and did a little dick-sticking with people they barely knew but had a good feeling about.

The jumping/sticking/dicking approach doesn’t always lead to committed and/or monogamous relationships, but it can and has and does.

Somewhat Depressed Guy might be somewhat less depressed if he was getting some, you might have higher self-esteem if you finally got some, and dispensing with your virginity might make dating after you part ways—if you part ways with him (you never know)—seem a lot less fraught.

Q : I’m a virgin in my late

20s. I’m not waiting until

marriage, just for the right person. I’ve dated enough and had enough fun to continue being a happy, normal, socially competent guy, much to the disbelief of my various knuckledragging, vagina-blinded pals. I’ve been dating this gal for a few months. She’s special. We had a brief conversation about my lack of sexperience when we first started dating, and she was very cool about it. I really like this girl, but I’m not sure yet if she’s the future Mrs. I’m a worrier, and I find myself thinking that if I share this with her and somewhere down the road we end up breaking up, she’s going to be even more devastated because I shared my first time with her. Am I just having silly virgin worries?

I’m also concerned that I might become vagina blinded—that I might immediately tell this girl I want to spend my life with her just because she’s having sex with me.

What should I do? —VERY INDECISIVE, REALLY GETTIN’ NAUGHTY

You must also eliminate “sexperience” from your vocabulary, VIRGN, as it’s equal parts cloying and annoying.

Q : I’ve been with my

boyfriend for more than a year. He’s the first person I’ve had sex with. Four times now while we were having passionate sex, he has slipped out of my vagina and accidentally penetrated me anally. That shit hurts, and I can’t help but cry. I know he feels superguilty each time. I love sex, but I’m kind of scared every time we have it now. We’ve engaged in a little anal play before,

and I wasn’t really a fan. But I’m not averse to the idea of using a butt plug. Do you think this would work?

Surely other people have this problem too, right?

—WRONG HOLE, ANAL TORMENT

A : My own personal

sexperience with anal led me to doubt claims of accidental anal penetration, WHAT, as anal penetration always required focus, precision, and proper breathing techniques. But listeners of the Savage Lovecast schooled me in Episode 340 (tinyurl.com/ j3bj9ww), and I’m now convinced that accidental anal penetration is something too many women have sexperienced. (Do you see how annoying that is, VIRGN?)

A strategically deployed butt plug sounds like a sexcellent solution to the problem, WHAT, but try to get yourself a plug with a base wide enough to prevent your boyfriend’s misdirected cock from pushing the plug, base and all, all the way in you (ouch) or alongside the plug. (If you hate single penetration, you’ll really hate double penetration.)

If the problem persists and your boyfriend’s cock is constantly slamming into the plug, a thumbtack glued to the base should should inspire him to be more focused and precise. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at thestranger.com. ! @fakedansavage

ADMIRAL ★★ !"#$!%# ★★

A : You should fuck this girl

already—provided, of course, that this girl wants to fuck you.

You could wind up saying things you come to regret or have to walk back—her vagina might be that bedazzling—but that’s an unavoidable risk, and not one that’s unique to virgins. The only way to avoid vagina blindness—or ass blindness, etc— is never to have sex with anyone. And I don’t think you’re interested in celibacy, so stop freaking out about the risk that you’ll imprint, ducklinglike, on the first vagina your pee-pee sees the inside of.

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MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 37

Violent Femmes ! EBRU YILDIZ

NEW All Them Witches 7/21, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 5/6, 10 AM Architects, Counterparts 7/13, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge b Bas 6/29, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Bednarek, Farben Lehre 5/26, 7 PM, Portage Theater Jon Bellion 7/23, 9 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Black Milk & Nat Turner 7/9, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Blink 182, A Day to Remember 9/9, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 5/6, 10 AM Bone Thugs-N-Harmony 6/18, 8 PM, Portage Theater Bonerama 7/13, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/5, noon b Busta Rhymes, Warren G 7/23, 7:30 PM, Portage Theater, 18+ Citizen Cope 7/20, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 5/6, noon, 17+ Dead Kennedys 6/17, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Dej Loaf 6/4, 7:30 PM, Portage Theater, 18+ English Beat, Soul Asylum 7/9, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 5/6, 10 AM, 17+ Felly 5/27, 6 PM, Portage Theater Goggs 7/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 5/6, 10 AM Green Music Fest with Black Joe Lewis, King Khan & the Shrines, Langhorne Slim, and more 6/18-19, noon, Damen between North and Schiller b Kevin Griffin 8/19, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 5/7, 11 AM b Hot Stove Cool Music with Liz Phair 6/17, 8 PM, Metro, 18+

Sierra Hull 8/5, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 5/7, 11 AM b Miranda Lambert, Kip Lambert 7/29, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park, on sale Fri 5/6, 10 AM Kenny Lattimore 6/17, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/5, noon b Bettye Lavette 8/3, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/5, noon b Mad Decent Block Party 8/21, 3:30 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion, on sale Fri 5/6, 10 AM Raul Malo 8/27, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 5/7, 11 AM b Stephen “Raga” Marley 6/24, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 5/6, 10 AM, 18+ Marcus Miller 8/9, 7 and 9 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 5/7, 11 AM b Murs, Propaganda 7/15, 9 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 5/6, 10 AM Nails, Full of Hell 6/17, 2 PM, Beat Kitchen b Dan Navarro 8/14, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 5/7, 11 AM b New Madrid 8/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Parliament Funkadelic 6/17, 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino, Hammond, on sale Fri 5/6, 10 AM Pine Leaf Boys 6/18, 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn Project N-fidelikah 7/7, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Puddles Pity Party 10/7, 7:30 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 5/6, 10 AM, 18+ Revelers 7/8, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn Hot Rize 8/21, 7:30 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/5, noon b

38 CHICAGO READER - MAY 5, 2016

Scenics 7/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Jill Scott 8/5, 8 PM, the Venue at Horseshoe Casino, Hammond, on sale Fri 5/6, 10 AM Scythian 8/4, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/5, noon b Straight No Chaser 12/17, 3 and 8 PM, Civic Opera House b Stray Birds 8/30, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 5/7, 11 AM b Toys That Kill 7/28, 9 PM, Quenchers Saloon Twrk, OG Maco 5/14, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Foy Vance 10/28, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 5/6, noon Violent Femmes 7/12, 8:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Walter “Wolfman” Washington 8/5, 10 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Sat 5/7, 11 AM b Wizard Rifle 6/10, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Yarn 6/22, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen

UPDATED Peter Hook & the Light 10/28 and 11/10, 8 PM, Metro, second show added, 18+

UPCOMING Against Me! 6/19, 6:30 PM, Metro b And the Kids 6/23, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ AWOLNATION 7/20, 7:30 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion Balkan Beat Box 6/22, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Beach Fossils 6/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Beach Slang 5/16, 5 PM, Bottom Lounge b The Body 6/4, 9 PM, Empty Bottle

b Cam’ron, Underachievers, G Herbo 6/29, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall b Brandy Clark 7/30, 8 PM, City Winery b Daikaiju 7/13, 7:30 PM, Wire, Berwyn, 18+ Dead Meadow 5/17, 8 PM, Double Door Doomtree 6/3, 10:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Kurt Elling 5/15, 5 and 8 PM; 5/16, 6 and 8:30 PM, City Winery b Ex-Cult 6/1, 9 PM, Hideout Flag, Off With Their Heads 6/8, 7 PM, Double Door, 17+ Ben Frost 5/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Macy Gray 7/10-11, 8 PM, City Winery b Helmet 7/15, 9 PM, Double Door, 17+ Il Divo 10/22, 7 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont b Jesu, Sun Kil Moon 11/13, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ The Kills, L.A. Witch 5/23, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Robby Krieger 6/3, 7:30 PM, City Winery b Jessy Lanza 6/16, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Lyle Lovett & His Large Band, Emmylou Harris 7/18, 7 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park Maritime, Casket Girls 6/17, 8:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ James McCartney 6/21, 8 PM, Schubas Milemarker 8/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Nothing 6/10, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Gary Numan 5/15-17, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ The Obsessed 5/22, 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Dolly Parton 8/7, 7:30 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park Perfume 8/31, 8 PM, the Vic b A Place to Bury Strangers 6/3, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Radioactivity, Bad Sports 6/18, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Rocket From the Crypt 7/23, 10 PM, Subterranean Darrell Scott 7/21, 8 PM, City Winery b Seal 8/28, 7 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park Steely Dan, Steve Winwood 6/11, 7:15 PM, FirstMerit Bank Pavilion Angie Stone 6/17, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Otis Taylor Band 7/2, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Terror, Power Trip 7/6, 5 PM, Double Door b KT Tunstall 7/7, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen Turnover 6/26, 5:30 PM, Subterranean b Twin Peaks 5/13, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall b Carrie Underwood 5/17, 7 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont b

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Keith Urban, Brett Eldredge 10/28, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Urinals 5/26, 9 PM, Hideout Jimmy Webb, Robin Spielberg 6/12, 8 PM, City Winery b Weedeater, Author & Punisher 5/15, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Weekend Nachos 7/1, 6 PM, Township b Weezer, Panic! At the Disco 7/10, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park The Weight 6/10, 7:30 and 10 PM, City Winery b Welshy Arms 5/28, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Aaron West & the Roaring Twenties 6/7, 6:30 PM, Subterranean b Wolvhammer 5/24, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Wussy 6/24, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Wye Oak 8/3, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ X 8/19, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Xaebor 5/13, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ You Won’t 5/12, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Youth Code 5/12, 8 PM, Subterranean

SOLD OUT Alabama Shakes 7/19, 7:30 PM, Civic Opera House 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+ 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 Paul Simon 6/18, 8 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park 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+ 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 MAYBE GOSSIP WOLF HAS missed the boat on Impulsive Hearts, the beachfront pop project of local singer-songwriter Danielle Sines, because swimsuit weather still seems so far away. In February the band (which also features bassist and utility player John Paul and drummer Dan Julian) dropped their debut LP, Sorry in the Summer, via UK label Beautiful Strange. After a few dozen listens to opening jam “I Wannabe Gone,” this wolf is sure Impulsive Hearts always have sand between their toes. Their echoey, languid jams have a touch of Beach House—that is, if Beach House were produced by Phil Spector. Copies of the LP, limited to 500 copies on red “Ruby Tuesday” vinyl, are available from Bandcamp, and on Fri 5/6 Impulsive Hearts play as part of a benefit for Girls Rock! Chicago at Cole’s.

Local footwork collective Juke Underground drops the two-part Juke World Order Vol. 3 this week—the first installment on Thu 5/5 and the second on Sat 5/7. The 76-track collection features artists from around the globe—Belgium’s DJ Peas, Tel Aviv’s Gra’ & OG Kush, Seoul’s Cong Vu—plus Chicago heavy hitters DJ Deeon, Traxman, and DJ Roc. It’s downloadable free from Bandcamp, and Juke Underground celebrates the release with an all-city footwork battle and concert downstairs at Subterranean on Sat 5/7— part of dance monthly Mucho Culo.

In 2013, the Reader’s Kevin Warwick praised the garage jams of local fourpiece Blasted Diplomats as “straight-up hole-in-the-wall rock with a tinge of 90s nostalgia (minus the gratuitous angst).”

Maybe that’s why this wolf likes them! The ’Mats played their final show Wed 5/4 at East Room, but not before bestowing a final album on their fans. Again is downloadable free via Bandcamp, and it sounds like a band hitting their peak—“Smooches!” and “I Don’t Wanna Go Out on Fridays” are full of tasty solos and power-pop hooks. Is it too early for a reunion, guys?

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

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Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS

chicagoreader.com/early

DON’T KNOW HOW TO PLAY? JUST COME STRUM ALONG. Sign up for classes at oldtownschool.org

Just announced

ON SALE AT NOON THURSDAY 5.5 ON SALE TO VINOFILE MEMBERS TUESDAY 5.3

JUNE 17

KENNY LATTIMORE 7PM & 10PM

JULY 13

BONERAMA

AUGUST 3

BETTYE LAVETTE

AUGUST 4

SCYTHIAN

AUGUST 21

HOT RIZE

SEPTEMBER 2

PAUL REISER

7:30PM & 10PM SHOWS

don’t miss

MAY 8 EILEN JEWELL

W/ SPECIAL GUEST ANGELA JAMES

COMING SOON

MAY 13 THE JAMES HUNTER SIX ALBUM RELEASE SHOW

5.8

Story Sessions Mother’s Day Brunch

5.10

Songs & Stories Featuring Art Alexakis of Everclear Nellie McKay Mashina (Meet & Greet Available) Amel Larrieux 7:30pm & 10pm Moby - Porcelain A Memoir - Reading, Signing, & in Conversation w/ Mark Bazer

5.17 5.19 5.20 5.24

MAY 15 & 16 KURT ELLING

5.25

An Intimate Evening with JD Souther

5.26

Billy Joe Shaver

5.30

Sergio Mendes & Brasil “A Celebration of 50 Years of Brasil 66” 5pm & 8pm (Meet & Greet Available)

2 SHOWS PER NIGHT

5.31

Corky Siegel’s Chamber Blues & Saxophone legend Ernie Watts.

MAY 22 KEVIN NEALON

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.5

Joi Ben Solee w/ special guests Gipsy Moon Robby Krieger (of The Doors) 7:30pm John Doe & His Rock n Roll Band w/ special guest Jesse Dayton

6.7

Beth Orton w/ Special Guest Emmy the Great

PASSION WORLD

5PM & 8PM SHOWS 1200 west randolph | 312.red.wine | citywinery.com

LINCOLN SQUARE • LINCOLN PARK

please recycle this paper MAY 5, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 39

CYNDI LAUPER

CAROL BURNETT

HATSUNE MIKU

KEVIN JAMES

CULTURE CLUB

case/lang/veirs

MONDAY, MAY 16

THURSDAY, JUNE 16

AN EVENING OF LAUGHTER AND REFLECTION WHERE THE AUDIENCE ASKS THE QUESTIONS MAY 17, 19 & 20

ORIGINAL LINE-UP IS BACK: BOY GEORGE, ROY, MIKEY & JON FRIDAY, JULY 22

WEDNESDAY, MAY 25

(neko case / k.d. lang / laura veirs) SUNDAY, AUGUST 7

GET ACCESS TO

CHASE PREFERRED

SEATING

AVAILABLE TO CHASE CREDIT AND DEBIT CARDMEMBERS.

For more info, visit Ticketmaster.com or

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M A RQ U EE PA R T N ER O F TH E C H I CAGO T H E AT R E ®

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