Hundreds of lawsuits against Wexford Health Sources, a for-profit medical corporation operating inside Illinois prisons, allege substandard care. An employee handbook describes how clinicians were trained to be skeptical of incarcerated patients.
By CLARISSA DONNELLY-DEROVEN p. 12
04 The To-Do Our new guide to upcoming activities and events
06 Lacrosse Chicago’s south-side high schools are adding lacrosse teams to their sports programs.
10 Sula Worlds collide with DaNang Kitchen’s Vietnamese brunch.
imagines a dystopian future at Wrightwood 659.
26 Museums A stanley brouwn
12 Prisons | Cover Feature Wexford Health and Illinois prisons
20 Joravsky | On Politics Mayor Johnson’s new chief of staff has mainstream Chicago abuzz.
21 Isaacs | On Culture The bitter legal battle over Art Shay’s photos
22 Books Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes’s vital new handbook
24 Art Review Artist Kongkee
exhibition at AIC resists easy interpretation.
27 Comics Journalism | Amanda Williams Coco Picard looks at Williams’s Redefining Redlining.
30 Dance Dance Divas lets concert dancers explore drag for a good cause.
32 Plays of Note New theater reviews including Gender Play, or what you Will at About Face; Hatefuck at First Floor; and The October Storm at Raven.
34 Feature Workshed Animation has a debut feature film on the way.
35 Movies of Note Love Again is a wild bummer of a movie; Love to Love You, Donna Summer is an overwhelmingly human portrait.
Mirani, 5 Magazine founder
44 Secret History of Chicago
Music Austin High Gang
46 Shows and Records of Note
Previews of concerts by Y La Bamba, Kayo, Martin Dupont, and others, plus reviews of new releases by Kari Faux and Yakuza
50 Early Warnings New concerts and other updated listings
50 Gossip Wolf New EP from K.Raydio, the Daoui, and more
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36 Profile | Viets-VanLear
Shawnee Dez, superstar
28 Profile Jack Helbig on Matthew C. Yee, whose new musical gives a country-western spin to Asian American identity.
38 French Police The Mexican American postpunk trio play to bigger audiences.
40 Profile | Hernandez Producer Thelonious Martin
42 Chicagoans of Note Czarina
51 Comics
51 Savage Love Dan Savage examines erotic literature and banned books.
52 Jobs
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Warmer weather is finally here to stay. You’re probably hoping to be everywhere all at once, but here are a few things you won’t want to miss!
Right now, the Color Club (4146 N. Elston) is one of the hottest places to catch upand-coming comedy and sketch theater in the city. While they’re closing out the month with plenty of great shows, some standouts include a May 26 installment of Maggie Winters’s autobiographical play Marguerite , which sold out its initial two-performance debut at Sleeping Village in March. Directed by her brothers, Melkbelly’s Bart and Liam Winters, Marguerite details the wry, true story of how Maggie learned to be funny growing up in Beverly. There’s also Reveries on May 27, which has comedy writers Anthony Oberbeck and Matt Barats arriving from New York to spin surrealist yarns against ambient music and abstract video montages. It’s the kind of 60s coffee-shop attitude paired with late capitalist commentary that’ll have you hitting your vape. To buy tickets or see the full lineup of events, check out colorclub.events/events. Must be 18 or older.
May 31 is going to be a great night of loud weirdo music at Cafe Mustache (2313 N. Milwaukee)—at least, for those 21 and up. Dog (from New York) joins locals Blood Nymph, Pillbug Junction, and Unmanned Ship. Blood Nymph is a pleading, vengeful queer doom metal outfit while Pillbug Junction is the playful, spasming electronic project of Jill Lloyd Flanagan of Forced Into Femininity fame. Unmanned Ship is a trio that fuses elements of psych rock with field recordings to create music that vacillates between brooding and spritely. Combined with Dog’s punishing electronic chaos, you’ll be crashing, mashing, and thrashing all over the dance floor. The show kicks o at 8 PM, and it’s $10 at the door; go to cafemustache.com for more information.
From June 2-4, the Leather Archives is teaming up with Facets (1517 N. Fullerton) to present fi ve of David Cronenberg’s fi lms:
Crimes of the Future, Crash , Videodrome, Rabid, and Shivers. Cronenberg is considered the godfather of onscreen body horror; his work is riddled with dark themes concerning power, pain, selfhood, technology, and transformation, making him a particular favorite of kinky and queer fi lm enthusiasts. In a 2022 interview with Vulture, when asked whether he was consciously trying to engage with trans experiences through his work, Cronenberg said: “[The transgender movement is] saying, ‘Body is reality. I want to change my reality. That means I have to change my body.’ . . . I say, go ahead. This is an artist giving their all to their art.” Cronenberg is also an outspoken advocate of the movie theater as a communal experience similar to church, so this is a chance to really luxuriate in a master’s work as he intended it to be experienced. It’s $40 to catch all five, $15 for a double feature, $12 for a single, and $10 for Facets members. Tickets are available at facets.org.
If you want an intimate look at Black gay life in 1980s Chicago, head to Wrightwood 659 (659 W. Wrightwood). Through July 15, the gallery presents “Patric McCoy: Take My Picture.” McCoy is a scientist by trade, art collector by passion, and photographer by request. Throughout the 1980s, disco was a staple in McCoy’s life, and he’d bring his cameras to clubs like the now-defunct Rialto Tap, where he’d photograph anyone who asked for a snapshot. “Take My Picture” shows 50 of those images: evocative portraits spanning a decade that document not only disco’s cultural evolution into house but also how AIDS radically changed nightlife. To hear the stories behind the images, catch McCoy at 3 PM on June 4 . He’ll be joined by Craig Scott, Jim Harvey, DaVon Anderson, Michael O’Conner, and John Robinson for a panel called “Men of a Certain Age,” where the six men will trade memories from the South Loop social scene that defi ned the era for them. Tickets are $15 and must be reserved in advance. To plan your visit, check out wrightwood659.org. The Pilsen Food Pantry is looking for do-
nations to help incoming migrants. Since August 2022, Texas has sent over 8,000 asylum seekers to the city with little to no advanced coordination, so our new neighbors need help getting settled. The Pantry is requesting items such as unopened cold medicine, children’s cough syrup, allergy medicines, menstrual pads, and travel-size unscented lotions. They’re also seeking books in Spanish, baby diapers and wipes, new undergar-
ments for both children and adults, gently used clothing and blankets, and hygiene products (razors, deodorant, brushes, etc.). For the most up-to-date list of needs and drop-o locations, check out the Pantry’s Instagram: @pilsen_food_pantry. You can also donate money for supplies via their website: pilsenfoodpantry.com/donate. v @JuggaloReporter
The spirit of lacrosse has been a part of the fabric of North America for centuries, since the original Indigenous peoples created the game in 1100 AD. Now it’s widely considered to be one of the oldest team sports in the world. Chicago has a long history of celebrating all sports, including those that are relatively rare to locals such as field hockey, rugby, water polo, and especially pickleball. In Illinois, there are 102 boys’ high school lacrosse teams; there are also 84 teams for girls. The CPS Chicago Public League only has seven boys’ teams and nine girls’ teams. Chicago public high schools were introduced to the game of lacrosse in the 1990s when club teams like Lane Tech High School came onto the scene. But the Illinois High School Association didn’t sponsor the sport until 2010. For the last four years, this city’s
south side has been home for the sport, as it has produced nearly hundreds of Black athletes each spring. Some of those kids have a few years of experience, while others have never played the game at all.
Lacrosse is an athletic activity that Black high schools can lean toward, giving their youth opportunities to play something other than common sports like basketball, baseball, and most defi nitely football. However, Kenwood Academy and De La Salle Institute are the only high schools on the south side with predominantly Black teams.
“I think Kenwood lacrosse has been a social upheaval as far as the sports scene in Hyde Park,” says Kenwood Academy boys’ lacrosse head coach Scott Johnson. “And a lot of people who aren’t exposed to it are showing more interest. So, as a result of that, other schools are going to start to follow
suit. I know for a fact that other schools want lacrosse teams. But the difficulty is finding somebody who is willing to do it.”
Johnson, 28, is a white Waukegan native who fi rst fell in love with the sport in eighth grade. He started his playing career as a freshman at Warren Township High School in the northern suburb of Gurnee. The 2013 graduate played throughout his entire four years for the Blue Devils as well as for three different travel clubs. Johnson took his talents to Michigan State University as he competed for their intramural team before graduating with an interdisciplinary studies degree in 2016.
“I didn’t know much about it other than it was kind of a similar type of sport to ice hockey,” says Johnson. “That’s what fi rst drew me in. My dad was an ice hockey player; I did not actually play ice hockey. But seeing lacrosse,
I felt like that was kind of a similar type of game. I got interested in it, and from there I just kind of became obsessed with it. And I had a lot of fun.”
Johnson became a student teacher at Everett High School in Lansing, Michigan, after graduation. He eventually left after almost a year and moved back to Illinois, becoming a day-to-day substitute teacher for CPS high schools until he snagged a full-time teaching job at Kenwood Academy in January 2018.
The eighth-grade social studies and freshman human geography teacher was approached by former principal Greg Jones to coach the school’s eighth-grade lacrosse team thanks to longtime social studies and language arts teacher Ivan Sarudi, who generated the idea to have a team the previous fall. Sarudi, along with assistant coach Dan Getachew, recruited students and gathered just 15-20 players for the middle school team. Although they only played three games that 2018 season, it cultivated an opportunity for the school to add the sport to their high school program the following spring season.
“It was just mostly kind of fun and experimental,” Johnson says. “And we were just seeing what we were able to do that year.”
The Broncos boys’ varsity lacrosse team had only won one out of 14 games in their
Chicago’s south-side high schools are adding lacrosse teams in their sports programs.
fi rst high school season in 2019; it was Johnson’s fi rst year as the head coach, appointed by former athletic director Danae Russell. However, that predicament didn’t discourage the team at all. The school also added a girls’ lacrosse team that same year.
“It was just a really good opportunity to just get out there and play some high school lacrosse games,” Johnson says.
Both varsity teams were able to display slight improvement two seasons later in 2021 when they amalgamated a total of eight wins (the season was shortened due to the COVID19 pandemic).
“If we continue to grow, generate more interest within the school, and attract more students, I defi nitely think that the program in Kenwood has an opportunity to be very competitive,” says Kenwood Academy boys’ assistant coach Chase Wheeler. “Definitely within the Chicago Public School system, but then also against some of the better teams in the Chicago area.”
Wheeler, 38, was born in Indiana and raised in Chicago’s Jackson Park Highlands neighborhood on the south side. After graduating from Christian Brothers High School in Memphis, Tennessee, Wheeler enrolled in Howard University as a business administration major. He soon discovered lacrosse
during his sophomore year and subsequently joined their club team, which competed in the National College Lacrosse League. The former African American midfielder played three years for the Bison before graduating in 2007.
“I didn’t play in high school, unfortunately—I wish I had,” says Wheeler. “I picked up the sport very quickly, and I’ve grown up playing sports. But it became very clear that I enjoy playing lacrosse more than any other sport that I ever played.”
Wheeler was asked if he had any interest in becoming an assistant coach for Kenwood’s boys’ team last season, and Wheeler couldn’t refuse. He was amazed to see how the players were immediately drawn to the game despite not being too accustomed.
“It was an immediate yes for me,” Wheeler says. “Kenwood has an academic center. And in the academic center, we have a lacrosse team. So, that’s a great opportunity for middle schoolers to be exposed to the game and start to develop skills. It requires a skill set that is different from other sports. You’re throwing and catching a ball with your stick. And it’s something that a lot of children don’t experience, whether it’s in their backyard, gym class, or summer camp. But we also have freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors
who just have interest in coming out and trying their fi rst experience with lacrosse.”
Like all of the other sports programs in Kenwood, both lacrosse teams require their players’ parents to remit yearly fees of $150. Johnson received an endowment from the Urban Lacrosse Alliance grant that’s worth $5,000. The school supports both varsity teams with uniforms, backstops, and other equipment.
“That $150 that the kids are charged, that almost entirely goes to just lacrosse balls,” Johnson adds. “Because we lose a ton of them.”
Lately, in this current season, the Broncos boys’ varsity lacrosse team has been doing superbly well in producing and developing their skills. Talented Black players from their roster received all-conference honors in the Chicago Public League last season. Senior midfielder Rondell Wetzel, specifically, is establishing himself as a premier force on the field, as well as senior defensemen Charles Tinzie Jr. and Donllen Cooke.
But it’s senior attacker Adin Farmer who is starting to evolve into an offensively lethal weapon for Kenwood. Farmer, 18, was the CPL’s first-team all-conference player from the previous season. But as of now, he is the Broncos’ leader in goals with 49 and in points with 59. (Points include both goals and assists.) Although he doesn’t necessarily believe that his presence is making an impact on other Black kids who want to play, Farmer would love to see more of them embrace the sport.
“I hope there will be more Black kids who play lacrosse,” he says. “Because I genuinely believe if the barriers of entry for the sport were lower, then there would be so many other Black kids who love the sport as much as I do.”
The Broncos’ leading scorer was born in Richmond, Virginia, while his parents were grad students at Virginia Union University. Farmer and his family subsequently moved to Chicago when he was one year old. At the age of 12, Farmer arrived at Kenwood Academy. In that same year, he found a sport that would change his life forever.
“I decided to join the team just to try it out the summer after that year, and I never looked back,” Farmer says. “The fi rst time I played it was in a summer tournament with some of the people I play with now, which is really cool, but I had no clue what I was doing and was running around extremely tired. I really enjoyed myself despite being
completely clueless and more tired than I had ever been in my life at that point, but I’m glad I started, because it started something that I’m really passionate about now.”
Farmer eventually competed for midwest club teams like East Ave in Elmhurst and Four Star shortly after. Once he joined Kenwood’s varsity squad as a freshman in 2020, the rising attacker was ready to unleash his prolific scoring ability on the field despite his limited three years of experience.
This season, Farmer reached a remarkable milestone in his career when he scored 27 points in just four games. This incredible breakthrough launched him into the Illinois High School Association’s individual statistical ranking as the state’s top point-scorer for a few weeks. Currently, Farmer is fi fth in most points in the IHSA.
Despite Farmer’s success, most lacrosse players from all levels in the northeastern and mideastern states are white U.S. citizens from wealthy environments, meaning that derogatory epithets and ethnic slurs are assuredly every Black player’s worst concern. While succeeding in a white sport like lacrosse, Farmer is keenly aware of being a target of overt racism.
“Honestly while playing the games at Kenwood I have not [been targeted],” he says. “But in my experiences playing for club teams and in other places in the midwest, I have certainly experienced some strange comments and slights about people being surprised that I play and that I’m good. I’ve had comments made about my hair or even just other players slighting me because of the color of my skin. But I’m aware of my position as a minority player in the sport, and it makes me more passionate about allowing lacrosse to become more expansive in Black communities so that no more people will have to feel like I have felt for just playing the sport that I love.”
Within the last five seasons of coaching Kenwood’s middle and high school teams, Johnson remembers unpleasant moments that have no place in any sport, let alone one as electrifying as lacrosse.
“There have definitely been some moments,” says Johnson. “In a middle school game against Beverly, one of my players was called the n-word by another player on the field. He was really upset; we talked to the other coach, and she talked to this player. Beyond that, there wasn’t really much else that we did. We talked about it, we tried to fi x it and repair it the best we could. But once
continued from p. 7
somebody’s said something like that to you, it hurts.”
The outcome of that first incident left Johnson’s player understandably livid during the Broncos’ 2017-2018 middle school season. But the head coach has witnessed other instances in games that were unjust and disappointing.
“As far as, like, covert things, I guess I sometimes make the observation that it seems like when our kids are getting beat down, it’s almost like a fl ag is never thrown,” Johnson adds. “Whenever one of our kids hits a kid too hard, sometimes I noticed that it’s like, ‘Alright, what’s the deal here? Why are we always getting fl ags for playing aggressive? But the other team never gets a fl ag for playing aggressive?’ So, that type of thing has come up a bit.”
Johnson and his team were tested yet again in another ugly matter.
“With the same exact kid, he was in eighth grade when it fi rst happened,” says Johnson. “We were playing Latin School and it happened again. At that time, I think what ended up happening in that situation was he kinda charged the kid after the game and tried to confront him about it. And a bunch of players got in his way. And then, we dove deeper and deeper and had meetings with Latin and emailed back and forth about it. And they kind of denied the situation, and it kind of di used from there.”
Despite facing racial hostility, Kenwood Academy is still planning to become a well-talented lacrosse program in this state. And they aren’t willing to relinquish anytime soon. Their current boys’ varsity team is the perfect example of diversifying a unit in this sport—they have three white players, one Hispanic player, one Asian player, and 20 Black players.
“I think for Kenwood lacrosse specifically in the next few years, we’re going to continue to improve quite a bit,” Johnson mentions. “Because, as we have been operating this high school club, the middle school team acts as our feeder. And we have about ten kids who are eighth graders that are going to graduate. They’ll kind of be the next generation of Kenwood lacrosse players.”
Kenwood’s lacrosse program is actively playing this season, but Urban Prep Academy’s Englewood boys’ team will not play this season due to a lack of student participation. For a team that has only recorded one victory in their four seasons of existence, the
Lions forfeited the last four games during the previous year. Despite this, lacrosse has allowed the students to try an activity that is relatively new to them.
“Lacrosse provides an experience that is truly one of a kind,” says Lions head coach Garrett Hannett. “At Urban Prep, it would allow for athletes playing other sports to learn new skills and apply them on the field and for other students to discover a new sport to play and love. These students deserve to have another sport to play other than football and basketball.”
A Lynwood, Illinois, native and Marian Catholic High School graduate, Hannett competed for the Spartans and eventually Illinois State University’s club lacrosse team. He was informed by a college teammate that Urban Prep was searching for a head coach since their previous coach, Matthew Wegh, left after the 2021 season to accept a new position at De La Salle, which he maintains today. Wegh was also a prominent figure for the Lions as he and other administrators helped build the program when it started in 2019. As an African American fan and player who adores the sport, Hannett took the new head coaching position shortly after but failed to gain a victory last season.
“Some struggles the team experienced were the number of players to field a team,” says Hannett. “It can be hard for new programs to get fully committed players, but that was to be expected. Other struggles were mainly around acquiring equipment for players due to the cost.”
Urban Prep was able to contribute funds of around $1,500 for equipment for their players thanks to StringKing, a small sporting goods store that gave the team a discount. This was a great gesture for the team to avoid spending money on annual emoluments. However, high expenses on full packs of equipment have overburdened the program beyond Urban Prep’s budget for sports.
But the 27-year-old has good faith in the program and expects to return to the field with his team in the future. “I would like for the team to return and grow,” says Hannett. Nonprofit organizations can also help introduce the sport to Black communities and inner-city youth. OWLS Lacrosse (Outreach With Lacrosse and Schools) has been a pillar for south- and west-side congregations since 2011. Since 2018, their scholars have earned around $900,000 in scholarships and fi nancial aid for more than 300 Black kids per year.
“This centuries-old game has brought and
continues to bring people together from all walks of life and experience for a common goal (or two),” says OWLS Lacrosse executive director Sam Angelotta. “It’s fast-paced, fun to watch, and exciting to play.”
As an Ohio native and Indiana University graduate, Angelotta moved to Chicago in 2009 after a year of playing in a senior lacrosse premier league in the north of England for the Manchester Waconians. The former early childhood educator and athletic director at Saint Malachy School founded OWLS Lacrosse as he was completing his master’s degree at DePaul University; Angelotta noticed during this time how African American children were facing some extreme disparities in Chicago. His goals are to confront childhood obesity and lack of enrichment opportunities.
“The ultimate goal is not only to provide access to the game but access to a high-quality college prep education and beyond,” says Angelotta. “We track our academy scholars through attainment of high-quality postsecondary credentials and/or valuable careers.”
Angelotta, 37, makes sure all of his scholars will obtain full support from his organization, which includes academic and career workshops, lacrosse clinics, and 12-month mentorships.
Since there are only two fully Black teams in the city, many coaches, players, and administrators would love to see more primarily Black schools add more lacrosse teams to their athletic programs. Black teenagers can view lacrosse as a healthy outlet and a new gateway to seek athletic or academic scholarships. It’s very understandable that Chicago wants to send a clear message that this sport is for everyone.
“I would absolutely love to see other Black schools start lacrosse teams,” says Hannett. “Diversity is needed in the sport, and all are welcome to play.”
As for Farmer, Kenwood’s sensational star has ambitions to enroll at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign next fall and join their club team.
“I’ve always just been someone who loves feeling progress in the things I do,” says Farmer. “Lacrosse provides me with some very tangible feelings of progress, and it just feels good to get better. In addition to wanting to get better just because I like being good at things, lacrosse has also become a very meditative practice for me. It helps me clear my head and feel more clear overall, and I love that.”
Chef Sydney Le’s steak and egg skillets fit right in—somewhere between breakfast and lunch.
By MIKE SULAThere’s no such thing as brunch in Vietnam.
That’s according to Jeanette TranDean of the Vietnamese-Guatemalan pop-up Gi ng Gi ng. “It’s eat morning or eat night,” she tells me.
Nevertheless, Argyle Street’s DaNang Kitchen recently started offering a “Vietnamese brunch,” featuring a few relatively uncommon dishes that can address a Western appetite for hangover-mitigating egg skillets.
I was alerted to this a few months ago by reader Andy Rader, who always has a keen eye for uncommon, new-to-Chicago dishes. What made me sit up straight was the bánh mì chảo, in this case a cast-iron skillet housing stirfried ribeye, fried eggs, a slab of the emulsified pork sausage chả lụ a, a gob of livery pâte, a bone marrow luge, and cherry tomatoes, all with a crispy baguette on the side. Sometimes you see English-speaking food writers refer to
this as the Vietnamese full English breakfast, and yes, that’s lazy and inaccurate, but it’s not hard to see why.
By chance, I had just sought out a version of this dish on a recent trip to San Jose, California (home to more Vietnamese people than any city outside of Vietnam). The tiny strip mall food court stall Bò Né Phú Yên had just been written up by the San Francisco Chronicle, and the owner told me the crush of new customers meant he had to suspend his entire menu—except for his signature, which he serves on a cast-iron plate shaped like a cow.
So I was thrilled to see something like this appear in Chicago, though Tran-Dean reminded me that she and David Hollinger served a version of it at the very first Monday Night Foodball. At a recent Loaf Lounge pop-up, Tran-Dean and Hollinger also served a version of the pork meatball dish xíu m ạ i—which is also on the brunch menu at DaNang.
In Vietnam, nobody eats these things for breakfast, says Tran-Dean. Breakfast is for ph ở and other noodle dishes. Xíu m ạ i and bánh mì chảo are all-day snacks.
Nevertheless, I had to get them in front of me, so I planted myself at a sidewalk table in front of DaNang at the ungodly hour of 11 AM and ordered the full Vietnamese brunch menu.
DaNang’s steak and eggs certainly scratched an itch; the whole set is plated in the skillet with sweet soy that mingles with the runny yolks and housemade livery pâté (chef-owner Sydney Le’s mom’s recipe) into a saucy alloy that’s perfect for baguette dredging.
But the xíu mại was the standout—a pair of super-soft pork meatballs in a sweet and sour tomato gravy, each orb containing a perfectly gooey quail egg to complement the sunnyside-up cackleberry.
The only other item on DaNang’s brunch
menu is xôi mặn, an infinitely variable, savory sticky rice snack, here served with chả l ụ a, shredded Chinese sausage, omelet strips, pork floss, and more pâté. It’s another typical all-day snack, but it somehow seems right in the late morning with an iced egg co ee and Vietnamese steak and eggs.
Le tells me she’s had so many requests from people who have eaten bánh mì ch ảo in California but couldn’t find it here that she had to figure out a way to get it on her menu. Brunch seemed obvious. “I think in the United States we learn to combine good things from di erent cultures,” she says.
But the fact is you can eat these dishes pretty much any time of day at DaNang Kitchen, and since they recently started offering it every day except Tuesday (closed), that makes Vietnamese brunch an 11/6 a air.
@MikeSulaThe facade slipped off, & the boy wept alone.
A shriek too loud for his young eardrums
He ran only to hide & never to find a new home. He ran for so long, he forgot what he was running from. Was it lies or was it truth?
He Couldnt distinguish the two.
Like how scandalous whispers blend in the wind
Or how insecurities stem from within
With waterfalls in his tear ducts
Trying to see clearly but Its so blurry nowadays. He Yearned for empathy
But received crocodile tears instead. He wished for peace
But Folks still wanted off with his head. Who were the voices criticizing him?
Why did their words cut so deep?
The crowd in his head drove him away from where he was meant to be. -Happy & free.
By Cristian SanchezCristian Sanchez is a multidisciplinary-latino artist from Logan square, whose work explores the modern day human condition, spiritual growth, & the gritty journey to actualization. Cristian juxtaposes inspiration from his upbringing though his immigrant parents, the radical change/gentrification of his community, & his longing for a resilient community.
Poem curated by Chima “Naira” Ikoro. Naira is an interdisciplinary writer from the South Side of Chicago. She is a Columbia College Chicago alum, a teaching artist at Young Chicago Authors, and South Side Weekly’s Community Builder. Alongside her friends, Naira co-founded Blck Rising, a mutual aid abolitionist collective created in direct response to the ongoing pandemic and 2020 uprisings.
A biweekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.
Hours
Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday: 11:00 AM–4:00 PM
Thursday: 11:00 AM–7:00 PM
Performances of No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks
Written by Chicago poets Eve L. Ewing and Nate Marshall, No Blue Memories is a uniquely staged retelling of Brooks’s life using simple, illuminative paper-cut puppetry by Manual Cinema set to music composed by Jamila Woods and Ayanna Woods.
Thursday, May 18, 6PM, Harold Washington Library
Gwendolyn Brooks Panel: Reflecting on a Chicago Legend
Join us for a roundtable discussion of legendary Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks and her book Blacks with Nora Brooks Blakely, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Kelly Norman Ellis.
Thursday, May 25, 2023, 7PM
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Hundreds of lawsuits against Wexford Health Sources, a for-profit medical corporation operating inside Illinois prisons, allege substandard care. An employee handbook describes how clinicians were trained to be skeptical of incarcerated patients.
By CLARISSA DONNELLY-DEROVENContent note: This story contains descriptions of deaths in prisons, including suicide.
On July 16, 2010, at 11 PM, Jeremy started sweating. He walked to the health-care unit inside the Lawrence Correctional Center, a medium-security men’s prison in southeast Illinois, where he was serving a 14-year sentence. The facility sits about 90 minutes from Terre Haute, Indiana, where the federal government conducts executions.
Jeremy told the health-care workers inside the prison clinic that the left side of his chest hurt. Tammy Troyer, a nurse at the facility, took his blood pressure. It was an alarmingly high 172/105. Doctors consider healthy blood pressure to be below 120/80.
Troyer picked up the phone and called Dr. James Fenoglio, Lawrence’s medical director, for a consultation. Thirty minutes later, the two providers sent Jeremy back to his cell. They did not listen to his chest, o er him aspirin or oxygen, or take a full medical history, according to a complaint Jeremy’s family filed in federal court in 2011. (The details of Jeremy’s story come from that complaint. In their response to the complaint, Fenoglio and Troyer denied the allegations and said Jeremy’s blood pressure lowered su ciently before they sent him back to his cell.)
Jeremy stayed in his cell for the next hour, but by 12:30 AM he hobbled back to the clinic.
‘Inmates are extremely manipulative’
He told Troyer that he felt a squeezing sensation in his chest and that his pain was an eight out of ten. Troyer took his blood pressure again. It was 188/112. She called Fenoglio again. After another hour passed, the two sent Jeremy back to his cell.
Two hours later, at 3:20 AM, Jeremy returned to the clinic for a third time. “My chest still hurts on the left side,” he said, according to the federal complaint. He told them he was still in pain and short of breath. This time, Troyer did not call Fenoglio and after a ten-minute visit, she sent Jeremy back to his cell. The next morning, Jeremy was dead. An autopsy concluded he died of a heart attack.
Troyer and Fenoglio both worked in a prison operated by the Illinois Department of Corrections—private prisons are illegal in the state—but neither of them was employed by the IDOC. Instead, they worked for Wexford Health Sources, a privately held for-profit medical corporation based near Pittsburgh. Troyer and Fenoglio did not respond to requests for comment sent to personal and professional social media pages.
Over the last decade, with very few exceptions, Wexford employees have provided all health care to incarcerated people in Illinois. Between 2011 and 2021, Illinois paid the company nearly $1.4 billion of taxpayer money to provide medical care inside every prison in the state. And though the company’s contract was set to expire in 2021, it’s been extended multiple times since, to the tune of nearly $418 million.
Wexford has worked with the Illinois state prison system since the 1990s. The company also controls the medical systems of at least 120 prisons and jails in states including New Mexico, Arizona, Alabama, Virginia, West Virginia, and New Hampshire. “This makes us large enough to e ciently deliver the services required by our clients, yet not so large that we cannot respond quickly to their needs and concerns,” Wexford wrote on its corporate website in 2021, which has since been redesigned. “Incorporated in 1992 for the sole purpose of servicing correctional facilities, our unique combination of experience, resources, reliability, and responsiveness enables us to provide clients with quality, cost-effective inmate health services.” The “clients” Wexford mentions are not the incarcerated patients, but the prisons or jails with whom it contracts. Some states, like Florida, have terminated their contracts with Wexford amidst allegations of shoddy care. Wexford has denied these allegations.
Wexford has hired 123 lobbyists across the country over the last 16 years, 71 of whom currently operate in Illinois, according to Open Secrets, a national organization that tracks campaign finance contributions. The company disputes these numbers. Wendelyn R. Pekich, Wexford’s vice president of strategic communication, said Open Secrets’ lobbyist count is inaccurate because it includes lobbyists who work for a firm, as well as firm subcontractors, neither of whom necessarily lobby for Wexford.
Pekich pointed to the company’s lobbying page on the Illinois secretary of state’s website as a more accurate picture. It lists three lobbying firms that work on behalf of Wexford: Advantage Government Strategies LLC, Phelps Barry & Associates LLC, and Stricklin & Associates.
State and federal prisons are legally required to provide quality medical care to incarcerated people. When states like Illinois turn that obligation over to private for-profit correctional medicine companies like Wexford, there is far less transparency about how that health care gets delivered. In court, Wexford often argues against the disclosure of its training manuals and other policy documents that describe the day-to-day conduct of its sta inside these public institutions, arguing that those records are proprietary and confidential. Publicizing them, the thinking goes, would put the company at a disadvantage relative to fellow correctional medicine companies that it competes against for contracts. The company also extends that argument toward disclosing profits. When asked by the Reader if their profits are in the million or billion-dollar range, the company declined to answer, saying it was Wexford’s “proprietary financial information.”
Wexford connected the Reader with Andy DeVooght, an attorney who works as an advisor in Illinois for the company, to answer questions about Wexford’s work inside prisons. Quotes and comments attributed to Wexford henceforth come from him. During the hourlong conversation, Wexford denied all of the allegations against the company described in this piece.
While Wexford is unwilling to disclose much information publicly, the Reader obtained some of the company’s internal documents through an incarcerated source: a clinician handbook for company employees from 2008 and guidelines Wexford gives to outside physicians who see incarcerated patients for specialty care. Wexford would not confirm or
deny the authenticity of these documents. The company did confirm that clinician handbooks and guidelines are not available to the public.
It is unclear whether the 2008 handbook reflects the current policies Wexford sta follow in Illinois prisons.
Both internal documents advise clinicians to be skeptical of their incarcerated patients. The manual describes the people inside as “patient-inmates” and bluntly writes “inmates are extremely manipulative” and “inmates may exaggerate their conditions.”
The documents advise clinicians that when interviewing patients about health problems, “be willing to accept their claims and descriptions, but maintain a healthy amount of doubtful suspicion.”
These documents, along with settlement agreements the company entered into with Illinois prisoners and their families following lawsuits that alleged Wexford provided them substandard medical care while they were incarcerated, begin to paint a picture of how the company operates inside Illinois prisons.
Between 2011 and 2020, the company paid out $20 million dollars in 206 of these confidential settlements in Illinois, according to an analysis of the settlement agreements by the Reader
In none of the agreements does Wexford admit wrongdoing or neglect by its employees. The settlements contain strict nondisclosure agreements. Most stipulate that if the recipient discusses the settlement, the company can attempt to sue them for breach of contract to recoup the entire amount awarded.
Two years after Jeremy’s death, Wexford paid his family $150,000. But they can’t talk about it. “There are confidentiality clauses that will not allow me or my client to speak to you,” Jeremy’s family’s lawyer told me in an email. “I wish we could help, but the releases forbid it.” Wexford cited the same confidentiality clauses and declined to comment on the settled cases.
For this reason, Jeremy is a pseudonym. All of the details written here about him—and everybody else who received a settlement— come from court documents and public records. But because nobody gave their consent to have these highly personal, and sometimes traumatic, medical details shared, we’re concealing their identities unless explicitly noted.
In the winter of 2020, I sent a public records request to the Illinois Department of Corrections. I wanted to see every out-of-court settlement (meaning agreements between the
parties to end a lawsuit without the court’s involvement) that Wexford had entered into with people incarcerated in Illinois prisons between 2011 and 2020. These documents became accessible to the public nearly two years earlier thanks to the Illinois Times, Springfield’s alt-weekly, which sued IDOC.
It all started when a reporter at the Illinois Times grew curious about the case of Alfonso Franco, who died in prison in 2012 from cancer. In 2015, the reporter sent a public records request to IDOC for any settlement agreements relating to Franco’s death that involved Wexford. IDOC told the paper that Wexford had those documents and that the company was refusing to turn them over.
Wexford argued the documents the paper requested were “confidential in nature” and, therefore, not a public record. The case wound its way through the courts until it arrived at the state supreme court. In 2019, the court ruled that it did not find the company’s argument persuasive. Because IDOC contracts with Wexford to provide medical care to incarcerated people on its behalf, the court said, the settlement agreement “directly relates to the medical care that Wexford provided to an inmate. Thus, it is a public record of the DOC for purposes of FOIA.”
Despite the court ruling, the Illinois Times still waited months for the documents to arrive. The paper first published a story in September 2020. At that point, they’d received about 20 settlements, which showed Wexford had paid $1.2 million in settlements since January. In November, after a court-appointed independent monitor published a report about the quality of care in Illinois prisons, the paper reported that Wexford or its insurers paid about $17 million in settlements since 2011.
A few months later, the documents I obtained through a public records request showed an even higher sum. I spent months matching the settlements with their corresponding federal court case. I calculated how much money Wexford spent and analyzed the court records to see if any patterns existed: Did some facilities see higher numbers of settlements than others? Did incarcerated people struggle to obtain specific types of medical attention—dental care, for example? What did the relationship look like between settlement amount and race? The analysis does not include monetary awards from cases that went to trial, only payments the company or its insurers gave to incarcerated persons or their families between 2011 and 2020 in exchange for dropping a lawsuit.
Inside Wexford’s 2008 provider handbook, the company explains that providers of prison health care are prohibited from displaying “deliberate indi erence” to an incarcerated person’s medical needs. The Supreme Court first defined “deliberate indi erence” in the 1994 opinion Farmer v. Brennan. The court ruled that individual prison o cials could be held responsible for Eighth Amendment violations if an incarcerated person could prove that they faced a serious risk to their health or safety, and the prison o cial knew about it and didn’t do anything to help.
prison are much more likely to have hepatitis, high blood pressure, asthma, cancer, and other chronic conditions than the free population. While most of these ailments are manageable when attended to, they can be deadly without proper care.
“Incarcerated patients are wards of their respective state or county with no alternatives for care other than services the institution provides,” the company writes. But “the state does NOT have a responsibility to provide a service simply because an inmate demands it be done. Nor does the state have a responsibility to CURE, only to appropriately diagnose and treat. . . . Medical service is NOT the mission of corrections (though the institution is required to provide such). Medical care is a supportive service.”
Later, in a section of the handbook that describes “health care roles” in the prison, Wexford explains that at the top of the prison hierarchy is the warden. They are “responsible for everything that happens in the unit. Although on occasion a medical decision may be in conflict with [the warden’s] express wishes, most decisions should respect [the warden’s] management responsibility.”
“Security is the prime objective of all prison operations,” Wexford writes. “And you are expected to understand and respect that responsibility.”
The highest settlements didn’t always go to those who were the sickest, or even those who died.
plainti s raised in the lawsuit.
Still, many families continue to argue that the company did not do enough to monitor and protect their loved ones. The family of Jacob, a man who died by suicide in prison under Wexford’s care, claimed in their lawsuit, “A cost-saving policy of understa ng and an inappropriate reliance on medications designed to quiet and restrain rather than treat mentally ill inmates left [Jacob] without treatment at a critical period of his mental illness.”
The largest settlement in the public records I received from 2011-2020 was for $5,975,012. It went to the family of Manny. Manny came to Graham Correctional in 2014 with a disability and he fell into a coma just a year later. His family alleged in their lawsuit that the prison didn’t respond to his chronic health needs.
The second largest settlement went to Robert. In 2007, Robert was incarcerated at the Northern Reception and Classification Center at Stateville. According to allegations in federal court records, prison officials and medical providers knew Robert had epilepsy, and prescribed him seizure medication: two tablets to be taken once a day. According to the suit, administration records show that nobody gave Robert his medication for 11 days. On the 12th day, a nurse found him unresponsive in his cell. He was transported to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with a ruptured brain aneurysm, the result of seizures he had while at the prison. Robert suffered permanent brain damage. Settlement documents show his family received about $3 million.
During the ten-year period in which it held the $1.4 billion contract in Illinois, Wexford was required to pay for any o -site care that a patient received at a facility other than a hospital—an MRI or an evaluation by an oncologist, for example. The company denies that it factored into their decision to approve or deny o -site care.
“I understand in the abstract if you start putting these pieces together—like the contract is worth X, and they’re a private company, and you have utilization management—but it’s really gluing things together that don’t go together,” DeVooght, the Wexford advisor, said. “When you look at them, the actual facts, about each of those points, they don’t support the way they’re being used.”
Utilization management is the process private medical companies like Wexford use to determine whether a procedure is medically necessary, and whether to pay for it or not. Wexford said that when it used utilization management in Illinois, its approvals for off-site care were above 80 percent, though it did not provide data for the Reader to independently verify.
The company explains in the handbook that a prison must provide incarcerated people with medical care “that is ‘equal to that available in the local community.’” But, this doesn’t mean Wexford or its doctors have “a mandate ‘to cure.’” Rather, they write, “it is a mandate requiring problems be addressed in an appropriate and professional manner.”
“Although a program of comprehensive medical care is required, not every diagnosis mandates treatment, nor is repair done on every existing condition,” the handbook says. Wexford’s care philosophy, according to the handbook, is to operate “somewhat like ‘workers compensation.’” If a person gets sick because of their incarceration, Wexford is required to treat them. But, if they come in with a chronic condition, these “require monitoring only.” Numerous studies show that people in
Out of the 206 settlements, seven followed deaths people suffered while in the company’s care. Those seven totaled about $4.5 million, and the median amount received was $250,000.
Three of those seven people died by suicide, and according to complaints filed in federal lawsuits, all were known by Wexford sta to su er from mental health issues.
Wexford said settlements are based on the specific facts and circumstances in a particular case. The company pointed to the 2022 federal appeals court ruling in Rasho v. Je erys, a case about the state of mental health care in Illinois prisons. The district judge ruled against IDOC and Wexford, declaring them to have been “deliberately indi erent” to incarcerated people’s psychiatric needs, primarily through their failure to su ciently sta mental health units. But the appeals court reversed that decision, writing that the state and Wexford “took reasonable steps” to fix many of the problems—including the sta ng issues—the
Though the company rejects this characterization, attorneys who’ve sued Wexford argue that Wexford’s contract with the state introduces incentives for it to spend as little money as it can on care. “Their business model is to receive a flat amount of money and then profit o of any money that they are not forced to spend,” said Sarah Grady, formerly the lead attorney at the Prisoners’ Rights Project at the civil rights firm Loevy & Loevy in Chicago. She has since begun her own independent prisoners’ rights legal practice.
In its 2008 employee handbook, the company gestures toward the role cost plays in providing care: “A criticism frequently directed toward private managed care companies like Wexford is that services are withheld to improve profits. Similar criticism has been directed at the medical industry in general, implying that cost—money—should never be a consideration in regards to providing medical care. Cost has always been a consideration in treatment.”
During its decade-long contract, Grady said Wexford had numerous “gatekeepers” who worked to prevent o -site care from happening. To receive care somewhere other than the prison, the facility’s medical director (who was a Wexford employee) first would have to give their approval, and then the request would go to the company’s regional medical director, and then to the medical director who works in Wexford’s corporate office in Pittsburgh.
If a patient was allowed to see an off-site doctor, the 2008 handbook notes that physicians who are Wexford “consultants” should be considered first. It is unclear if these “consultants” received any payment from the company, though they did receive a document with guidelines on how to care for “patient-inmates.” Those guidelines advised physicians not to tell patients when their next appointment is, inform patients about their specific diagnosis, give patients any documentation about their treatment plan, o er patients any “equipment or supportive aid,” or attend to any medical problems besides the one they’d been sent for.
“DO NOT EVER explain symptoms you would expect to see to confirm a diagnosis to an inmate,” the company writes. “If you should, those symptoms will likely be present with the next visit.”
The skepticism the company advises cli-
nicians to have of their patients extends into their treatment recommendations. In the documents, Wexford advises that because many patients have substance use disorders, doctors should think twice before prescribing pain medication. Also, they explain, physical therapy is “often abused” by incarcerated patients, and they warn doctors to be cautious when giving a patient a prosthetic limb. “Just remember,” Wexford writes, “our patients are often very skilled, and can make serious weapons from innocuous materials.”
The 2008 handbook also gives Wexford sta doctors license to ignore recommendations of outside clinicians if they don’t fit within the confines of prison health care.
“It is important for you to inform your consultant of the patient’s history, physical and laboratory findings, and your reasons for referral. You also have a legitimate right to disagree with a specialist’s position,” the company writes. “Often circumstances of the confinement or security are not understood by the consultants. You are expected to understand these issues and work around or through them. DO NOT BLAME THE PROBLEM ON THE DEPARTMENT/COUNTY—simply explain that you have policy responsibilities that must be addressed.”
Grady, the attorney, explained that in her experience the people in Wexford’s corporate office who were tasked with approving or denying outside care often didn’t have access to a patient’s full medical chart. “They receive whatever is given to them,” she said. “We have seen in some cases where that becomes a justification for delay or denial of care.” The company, though, would rarely write that they were denying someone care, she said. “Instead, they would say things like, ‘We need some more information. Why don’t you come back in a few months after this happens?’ And that thing would be relatively meaningless, and then when that comes up, something else needs to be done and something else. And so people will be shu ed around and around in the system, which effectively denied them care, but it was not the sort of smoking gun that you could point to the page and say, ‘Look! They knew he had cancer and they said don’t send him!’”
Wexford denied these allegations and declined to comment on the specifics of the company’s utilization management policy. But Jack had an experience much like the one Grady described. His family received $130,000 in 2016, the smallest sum following a death in the settlement documents reviewed.
Jack was incarcerated at the Graham Correctional Center, a medium-security prison near Saint Louis. According to the legal complaint filed by his family, in the two years before his death, he was undergoing dialysis treatment.
Between November 2012 and January 2013, more than six tests of Jack’s blood, analyzed by the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign medical center, showed that he had an infection common in dialysis patients. While treatable, the infection can lead to sepsis and death without proper attention.
Jack’s test results were sent from the university medical center to his Wexford doctor and an outside nephrologist. The nephrologist did not work for Wexford but was overseeing Jack’s dialysis, according to the complaint. As the employee handbook explains, even when a patient is sent to an outside specialist, the decision-making power remains with the company doctor since “the specialist does not (or may not) understand the special requirements of the correctional setting.”
During the two-month period, the nephrologist requested that Jack’s blood be taken again and retested. But even though each of the tests showed the same infection, he was not prescribed any treatment. Jack died of sepsis in February 2013, three months after the first test showed the infection.
In 2019 the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation put the Wexford doctor on probation following another lawsuit against them and the next year put their medical license on “permanent inactive status” after they failed to take a required exam.
Allegations of mistreatment and poor medical care from Wexford employees aren’t limited to the 206 who won settlements from the company. I sent 12 letters to incarcerated people—selected at random—inside Illinois prisons to ask about their experience with medical care. With such a small sample size, I didn’t expect to hear anything back. I was wrong.
At Lawrence Correctional, especially, word got around. My letter was photocopied and distributed widely. I received ten letters from incarcerated people, detailing allegations of medical mistreatment and neglect in that prison: a transwoman who said she’s denied gender-a rming care and psychiatric treatment; a man who cannot access services because he only speaks Polish and there aren’t translators; another man who was prescribed physical therapy for a back injury but never received it. Wexford declined to comment on all
active cases but said that as it relates to gender-a rming care, the company works closely with the IDOC to implement its policies.
James Sevier (his real name) was transferred to Lawrence Correctional from Stateville in December 2021. He said that when he arrived, prison sta took away his compression stockings and ankle support because he didn’t have a permit. Sevier wrote to me that he needs those medical devices to manage a chronic injury, but Wexford employees at the facility wouldn’t give them to him.
He said a nurse examined him but didn’t write him a permit for the equipment because only a doctor had that authority. Sevier submitted a grievance to the prison and asked to be seen by a doctor. A counselor at the facility responded in writing, saying that Sevier’s complaint was warranted. “Lawrence [Correctional Center heath-care unit] + Wexford Health Sources does not have a full time physician on site to treat and see patients. Wexford Health Sources Inc has failed to provide physician as stated in IDOC-Wexford Contract.” Wexford declined to comment on Sevier’s case.
Terry Dibble (also his real name) responded to my letter too. He’s 49 years old and incarcerated at Shawnee Correctional near the Kentucky border. For about a decade, Dibble has had a bump on the base of his skull. Over the years, he wanted to see a doctor or a nurse to get the lump examined, and maybe removed, so he put in several requests to the prison health-care unit. But each time, he said a provider would use a finger to poke the growth and tell him it was a lipoma, a fatty noncancerous tumor.
“I asked about getting it removed and they said, ‘Well, our policy is that if it’s cosmetic, we’re not going to do anything with it, unless it’s causing you severe pain,’” Dibble told me over the phone. “I always told them it was definitely painful. For years, I complained.”
In summer 2020, Carissa Luking, a nurse at Lawrence Correctional Center, told Dibble she put in a request to Wexford to ask for approval to remove the growth, according to a lawsuit he filed in July. A week later, Luking called Dibble to the health-care unit. She told him she was going to remove his lipoma. He was taken aback but remembered her saying she had done this several times before in her private practice.
In his lawsuit, Dibble recounts that he laid face down on an exam table. Luking injected him with a numbing agent and cut into his scalp. Dibble couldn’t feel the incision, but he
did feel something warm drip down his neck. It was blood. It gushed from the back of his head and pooled on the ground.
According to his federal complaint, Dibble said Luking told him there would be a lot of bleeding because the numbing agent she used did not have a coagulant to make the blood clot. “I’m thinking to myself: OK. Alright. She knows what she’s doing,” Dibble told me on the phone. “She’s done this before.”
Luking talked to Dibble as she cut, commenting about how mad the incarcerated cleaning workers were going to be that they’d have to clean up so much blood, according to his court filing. Luking showed Dibble the chunk she’d cut out of his head. Not usually one to be squeamish, he felt his belly flop.
The tissue Luking showed wasn’t yellow like the fatty tissue of a lipoma. Instead it was pink—the color of muscle tissue. Dibble told Luking that, but she insisted he was wrong. He sat quietly as she stitched him up. She then destroyed the “lipoma” because she didn’t see a need for a biopsy.
Two weeks later Lawrence’s medical director, Lynn Pittman, called Dibble into her o ce. She said to him, and wrote in his medical records, that the “procedure was unauthorized” and “botched.” In the time since the excision, Dibble had assumed as much: the lipoma was still on his head, and his scalp hurt tremendously.
Pittman referred Dibble to a general surgeon to have the procedure repaired. In her
continued from p. 15
request for off-site care, which is called the Medical Special Services Referral and Report, she wrote: “NP Luking . . . performed an unauthorized, failed lipectomy on the [inmate] in the [health-care unit]. She apparently cut through the lipoma to the muscle layer under the scalp and blunt dissected a segment of muscle from the [inmate’s] head. The lipoma is still present [and the inmate has] increased pain from the botched procedure. General surgery needs to evaluate [the] lipoma and other possible damage.” Wexford declined to comment on Dibble’s case. Luking and the other defendants have not yet filed a response to the lawsuit.
A section within Wexford’s employee handbook states that doctors should “not criticize either medical or correctional staff in an individual’s medical chart.” Pittman no longer works for Wexford. Luking remains a nurse at the prison; she did not respond to a request for comment sent to her professional LinkedIn account.
Twenty million dollars in settlements. What does that mean?
“It’s a big number, obviously, for most people,” said Alan Mills, the executive director of the Uptown People’s Law Center. He’s sued Wexford numerous times, including a class
action lawsuit in 2010 that led to the imposition of a federal court monitor to oversee the medical care provided inside Illinois’s prison system. But for Wexford, “It’s a rounding error in their budget. It has no effect whatsoever on them,” he said, noting that Wexford’s tenyear contract in Illinois was worth $1.4 billion.
“Some of the personal injury lawyers and other people in town who specialize in this kind of work, they can get [$20 million] in one case.”
Mills continued. “And of course, it’s not $20 million divided among 207 cases from Wexford’s point of view. It’s divided among all the cases that were brought up by prisoners, which is many times that 200,” he said. “They have risk assessment people, and I’m sure that they find calculations saying that, ‘It’s cheaper to pay out this than it is to increase the average level of service.’”
Wexford denied thinking “about individuals and human beings as rounding errors in a budget.”
The 2010 class action Mills filed against Wexford and the Illinois Department of Corrections argued that poor medical care inside of the state’s prisons caused the incarcerated plainti s needless pain and su ering. In 2017, a judge ruled that the class action lawsuit could proceed, finding the plainti s had “su ciently alleged that Wexford and the Illinois Department of Corrections have provided deficient medical care on a systemic basis.” In 2019, the court entered a consent decree jointly proposed by the parties to settle the class action lawsuit. Ideally, it would’ve meant individual prisoners would no longer be responsible for filing suits, one by one, to address systemic problems.
The main part of the consent decree involved the appointment of an independent monitor to oversee the overhaul of the prison health-care system. In 2019, a judge appointed Dr. John Raba, the former chief medical o cer for the Cook County Health and Hospitals system, as the monitor. Since then, he’s filed six reports, the most recent in March 2023. According to all of them, the quality of the health care provided inside Illinois prisons has yet to markedly improve.
In his September 2021 report, Raba noted three doctors who he had concerns about. The state permanently suspended one physician’s license, and Wexford fired the other two doctors in July 2021. Movement from a state licensing board was notable, considering that much of Wexford’s litigation strategy appeared designed to avoid implicating its
doctors, according to Grady.
The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation oversees the licenses of nurses and doctors and is empowered to investigate allegations of misconduct. The department also requires insurance carriers and hospitals to report any settlements or final judgments in a negligence case against a physician. These documents are included on a physician’s profile on the agency’s website.
“Hospitals are also required to report to the [Department of Financial and Professional Regulation] if any physician’s hospital privileges have been restricted or terminated or if the hospital is self-insured and paid the judgment or settlement,” said Paul Isaac, a spokesperson for the agency.
“What you will see if you review the public dockets is that often to reach a settlement, the individual doctors will be dismissed before there is an agreement or as part of the agreement,” Grady, the prisoners’ rights attorney, said. “It allows these doctors to say, ‘I don’t have to report any malpractice payments because I’ve never paid one because I’ve never settled the case. I just happened to be dismissed right before the case reached settlement.’”
Wexford denied the allegation. “There’s no secret strategy,” DeVooght said. “When we’re recruiting people, we need to be able to tell them, ‘You do a good job, we’re gonna stand behind you.’ How else are we going to get people to be willing to perform the care that we need them to perform?”
In the same report from September 2021, Raba indicates that the Illinois Department of Corrections is nowhere near implementing a systematic solution to its health-care issues in prisons. Notably, he explains that the IDOC did not send documentation he requested regarding the credentials of physicians and other medical professionals who work in the prisons, as well as any records of sanctions or disciplinary actions against them. In the documentation they did send him, he notes that six of the 26 physicians working in the prison system lack the credentials required of them by the consent decree.
Wexford said that it is committed to working with IDOC to complete a valid implementation plan to improve health-care services, as required by the consent decree. In August 2022, a federal judge found the IDOC to be in contempt of the court due to its failure to make most of the changes mandated by the decree and the monitor.
While Wexford employees can’t be fired by the Illinois Department of Corrections, “The state of Illinois retains the ability to ensure that Wexford is adhering to its contract,” Grady said, referring to the language within the contract requiring that the company provide adequate health care.
Also, prisons are closed facilities, meaning that the Department of Corrections can prevent someone from entering the facility if they so choose. “It’s a position that the Department of Corrections has almost never taken,” Mills said. “When they do it, it’s usually for security reasons—that is, a doctor is found to be doing something that jeopardizes the security [of the facility], rather than providing terrible medical care.” IDOC did not o er a response to this allegation.
Incarcerated people and their families may accept out-of-court settlements rather than going to trial for a few reasons. Many laws make it very di cult for prisoners to win medical lawsuits against the facilities that incarcerate them. A person has to first prove that the prison showed “deliberate indifference” to their serious medical need, which requires proof that prison o cials both knew about the need and chose to ignore it.
“There’s case law that’s specifically designed to make it di cult to hold Wexford as a corporation to account,” Grady said. “It’s virtually impossible unless someone has representation. And Wexford knows all of that.” Wexford denied the allegation.
Mills mentioned a recent case where an Illinois prison denied a man, who was close to his release date, cancer treatment. Unlike most similar cases, the man took his case to trial. He had legal representation, and ultimately, he received a multimillion-dollar award.
But that’s far from the norm. Most prisoners can’t a ord representation, and even if they find someone who will take on their case, another issue arises. “Prison cases, unlike cases on the outside, generally don’t have any outof-pocket loss. It’s almost impossible to prove loss of future wages for a prisoner because the very fact that you’ve been in prison so much depresses your earning ability afterwards,” Mills said. “Plus, medical expenses are all paid for by Wexford, so you haven’t got any claim for those.”
Winning an award at trial is complicated for incarcerated people because it depends on a jury recognizing and valuing their pain and su ering. “And there are a lot of jurors,” Mills noted, “who say, ‘If you’re in prison, you
“DO NOT EVER explain symptoms you would expect to see to confirm a diagnosis to an inmate,” the company writes.
“If you should, those symptoms will likely be present with the next visit.”
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should su er. Who cares?’”
For people who are still incarcerated, any money can feel like a significant win, even if the amount might seem meager in comparison to the level at which they su ered. “Five thousand dollars doesn’t seem like a lot for an injury. On the other hand, if you’re in prison, and you get $10 a month as your stipend for working a job,” Mills said, “$5,000 is 500 months of work.”
Wexford knows that it’s in a position of power in these negotiations. Grady said she believes that “Wexford has made an intentional choice not to provide a constitutionally adequate level of care in the hopes that it’s too expensive or even impossible for them to be held to account for that decision.” Wexford denied this allegation.
In the documents I reviewed, 37 people received under $1,000 in their settlement. The lowest settlement amounts sometimes correlate with the seriousness of the medical problem—such was the case for a man who has glaucoma and received $400 from Wexford after he sued the company for failing to give him bifocals.
But other times, it doesn’t. One man, for example, received $500 following his lawsuit that argued Wexford failed to treat a rash that had been bothering him for nearly a year. By the time he got a diagnosis, the doctor told him the rash was a permanent fungus he would need to learn to live with.
One clear pattern, however, is that incarcerated Black and Latino people, on average, received fewer settlement dollars from Wexford than incarcerated white people. Wexford denied that race factors into their calculations when determining settlement o ers.
Looking through prison population datasets,
which are published biannually by the IDOC, I determined the race of 170 of the 182 people who received settlements from Wexford (there were 206 total settlements, but 11 people received multiple settlements for di erent cases).
Of those 170 people, 69 percent were Black, 19 percent were white, 11 percent were Latino, and less than 1 percent were Indigenous. Collectively, they received about $18.7 million in settlements.
But the settlements include outliers, or amounts that differ dramatically from the norm, that skew the analysis. The largest settlement in the bunch, for $5.9 million, went to the family of Manny, the Latino man who, according to the family’s lawsuit, fell into a coma after the prison neglected his chronic health needs. There are four other outliers: $1.5 million, $3 million, $2.3 million, and $900,000. All of those settlements went to Black plainti s. They, in fact, represent 72 percent of all settlement money that went to Black plainti s.
With the outliers removed, there’s about $5.1 million remaining, which was distributed among the remaining 165 plaintiffs. Black plainti s received about 48 percent of those settlement dollars, white plainti s got about 28 percent, and Latinos received just 2.5 percent.
The average settlement amount received by plainti s also di ers significantly by race. White plainti s, on average, received $12,500. That’s about two and a half times larger than the average received by Black plainti s ($5,000) and more than four times the average received by Latino plainti s ($3,000).
Within each settlement and court case lies a range of untreated medical problems— unexplained aches and pains, overlooked chronic illnesses, and injuries from fights left unmended. Across many of these complaints stands the accusation that incarcerated people were forced to wait months and even years
before getting the care they both needed and to which they claim they were legally entitled. Many describe in court filings how the company’s doctors and nurses so seriously ignored their complaints of pain that simply getting through the day became a herculean task, their bodies so riddled with physical and emotional su ering.
One man, who is HIV positive, alleged that he had a tooth infection that dentists at two different prisons failed to treat for so long that the infection spread to his lungs and he fell into a coma. He was hospitalized for two months and nearly died. The company settled his case for $425,000.
In 2008 another man at Stateville complained about pain and swelling in his knee, per his legal complaint. He received a physical exam and an X-ray and was soon transferred to another prison where a nurse said no records existed, so they did another X-ray. Multiple medical practitioners noticed an alarming shadow on the X-ray. Over the next two years, the man underwent a battery of tests but struggled to get information from Wexford doctors about his condition. His pain persisted, and doctors prescribed some medication and gave him crutches. In June 2011, three years after his pain first began, he was diagnosed with stage three cancer from the mass on his knee. He received $15,000 in a settlement.
In 2004, while incarcerated at Illinois River Correctional, Paul went to the health-care unit and said he felt a terrible pain in his right groin. According to his legal complaint, a doctor diagnosed Paul with an inguinal hernia, when soft tissue protrudes through a weak spot in the muscle, but didn’t prescribe treatment. The pain persisted. It impeded Paul’s ability to walk, sleep, and go to the bathroom. Over the next three years, he went back to the
health-care unit 16 times. Instead of surgery, the clinicians at the prison shoved the hernia back into Paul’s body, only to have it pop out, over and over again. Every time, Paul said, this hurt tremendously. Wexford eventually settled his claims for $13,000.
Hundreds of stories like these exist both within the documents and within prison walls. In the first few weeks after joining Wexford and other private medical correctional companies, according to attorneys and former employees, doctors and nurses are shown presentations that discuss the di erence between “inmate wants” and “inmate needs.” These presentations, at least in 2008, were followed by an employee handbook that described their soon-to-be patients as “extremely manipulative.” Wexford would not discuss the specific content of their training materials, and said that the company “is focused on making sure that their people are trained so that their patients get the care they need.”
Others don’t see it that way.
“It’s teaching you at the very beginning— before you ever step foot into the prison— these people are going to have a lot of wants, but they’re not going to be needs,” Grady said. “They’re not trying to get better, they’re just trying to manipulate you. And so you have to always be looking at how you’re being manipulated. I’ve deposed so many of their employees. Some of them, I’m left with the feeling that they really don’t intend to harm people, but this is sort of what they’ve been trained to do. And I think there are other people who really have been trained to view people as less than human.” v
As a young, rising Chicago dancer, Enneréssa LaNette envisioned herself leading an arts organization of her own. So in 2010, when she was 25 years old, she founded Prazie Productions Inc. (PPI) on the city’s south side. “I always knew that eventually I would be a professional artist and start an organization where we can really serve people of color and underserved communities,” she says.
At first, Davis taught one to two dance classes weekly to local youth. She’s since expanded PPI to include a RIZE Pro-Elite professional dance company, RIZE Youth Company for dancers ages three to 17, a youth performing arts academy, and community outreach programming.
RIZE Pro-Elite stands out among Chicago dance companies for its strong storytelling, use of spoken word, and movement styles from the African diaspora. The invite-only company, which Davis (who serves as the company’s executive artistic director) describes as a “sisterhood,” consists entirely of women of color, many of whom also lead their own arts organizations or businesses.
“I say that I’m a leader of leaders, and so within the company, we really try to galvanize that next generation of women leaders in the arts,” Davis says.
To accommodate its dancers’ busy schedules, RIZE Pro-Elite has a shorter performance season, and the company only rehearses once to twice a week. However, its members have grown close and still meet up during the offseason.
Through PPI’s youth programming and outreach work, the organization serves nearly 300 students each year. Its youth academy offers a variety of classes, including ballet, jazz, and contemporary. PPI also works with Chicago Public Schools and partners with community groups to provide arts programming tailored to student needs.
Davis and her team take the responsibility of mentoring the next generation of dancers seriously. They pride themselves on their holistic approach to dance, which helps them foster their students’ artistic and personal development. In an industry that’s frequently labeled cutthroat, and is fraught with narrow beauty standards and a lack of body diversity, PPI is committed to cultivating an inclusive, loving environment for emerging dancers.
“The things that we saw and experienced in our prior dance careers, we don’t want to see happen to our students,” says PPI director of arts Tashielle Tamulewicz. “We don’t care what you look like. We don’t care about your size. The one thing that we do care about is just loving on our students and making sure that they’re okay.”
Davis says that PPI has experienced its share of obstacles and setbacks since its founding, but she takes some of those challenges in stride. “Being a Black organization, let’s just keep it real: We’re historically marginalized and underresourced,” she says. “I think the approach that I try to take is to set our own tables and be our own resource throughout our community.”
One of the most effective ways to be your own resource is to connect with like-minded peers. Earlier this year, PPI joined the second cohort of the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project (CBDLP), which was launched in 2019 to provide operational support, funding, and performance opportunities to local Black-led dance organizations in an effort to make Chicago’s dance landscape more equitable.
“Seeing [CBDLP’s] work for those first three years. I was just like, ‘We need to be a part of that,’” Davis says. “It was a no-brainer.”
Many of PPI’s leaders have ties to the other companies within the cohort; Davis, for instance, previously danced for Joel Hall Dancers & Center. By joining CBDLP, PPI has been able to rekindle old connections and work directly with some of Chicago’s most beloved dance institutions to elevate and showcase the necessity of Black artistry. The power of the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project is that it brings Black dance companies together to demonstrate the collective power of these organizations and
how they are stronger when they are unified.
In addition to their involvement with CBDLP, PPI is looking forward to a summer filled with performances and youth programming.
On June 4, they will premiere Call Her By Name, their first staged theatrical work in two years (a er filming their first motion picture), at Millenium Park, as part of the city’s Millenium Park Residency Program. PPI was one of four local organizations selected by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) to take part in the residency (which also includes the Chicago Human Rhythm Project, the Puerto Rican Arts Alliance, and the National Public Housing Museum), and is the only group in the cohort that is Black woman–led. PPI will return to Millenium Park for the Chicago Blues Festival from June 8-11 to present a photography installation titled “The Rhythm Within Our Blues.” And from July 6-28, they’ll host a performing arts summer camp and dance intensive at their home base on South King Drive.
The act of debuting two major creative works in front of the large, diverse audiences that flock to Millennium Park speaks to PPI’s mission of upli ing local artists of color.
“I’m most excited that Chicago really gets a taste of all that the south side has to offer,” Davis says. “We have such great talent here on the south side of Chicago.”
The Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project is a program of the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Their current cohort of local dance companies includes Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center & Hiplet Ballerinas, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, the Era Footwork Collective, Forward Momentum Chicago, Joel Hall Dancers & Center, M.A.D.D. Rhythms, Move Me Soul, Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago, NAJWA Dance Corps, and Praize Productions Inc. For more about CBDLP, visit chicagoblackdancelegacy.org, and chicagoreader.com/special/ logan-center-for-the-arts-at-the-university-of-chicago.
To learn more about Forward Momentum’s programs and upcoming summer camp, visit forwardmomentumchicago.org.
chief of sta .
So they cooked up this fantasy that Rahm was leaving the White House to fulfill his lifelong dream of being mayor of Chicago.
You certainly didn’t wait with bated breath to see who he’d hire as chief of sta . And, no, it wasn’t Lisa Schrader. She was the one before Claypool.
Mainstream Chicago is just a little too giddy about Mayor Johnson’s chief of staff.
By BEN JORAVSKYGuidice’s appointment says less about him and more about us. Or at least the “us” that jumped for joy over his appointment.
Specifically, it says a lot about the journalists, editorial writers, lakefront liberals, and chamber of commerce types who comprise mainstream Chicago, and their anxieties and prejudices about the prospect of Johnson—a 46-year-old Black leftie who got his political start with the Chicago Teachers Union [CTU]—in charge of City Hall.
Not sure what scares them the most about Johnson—the fact that he’s a leftie, a former CTU sta er, or a Black man. Probably a combination of all of the above, but especially the latter.
It definitely reminds me of the anxieties of mainstream Chicago back in 1983, when Mayor Harold Washington took over. Washington was the last Black leftie on the fifth floor.
Will the garbage get collected? Will the snow be removed? Will the police and firefighters answer calls? Will the trains run on time? Where’s Mussolini when we need him?!
When I mention things like this to mainstreamers, they go into spasms of denial, telling me . . .
This is not about race! It’s about the fact that Brandon has no experience running a multibillion-dollar operation like the city of Chicago.
You just trusted Mayor Rahm cause you saw him as an insider who could get things done. Even though the things insiders generally get done are stu no one wants. Except other insiders.
Consider the three dumbest, biggest wastes of money that Chicago mayors either did or tried to do in this century. They would be . . .
The parking meter deal, the Olympics, and the Amazon corporate headquarters.
In one deal, Mayor Daley sold an asset worth about $10 billion for $1 billion. In the other, Mayor Daley essentially gave a blank check to the International Olympic Committee to finance a boondoggle that would have lost billions. And with Amazon, Mayor Rahm and his pal, Governor Rauner, offered Amazon a handout of untold billions of dollars plus the pick of any prime real estate if they would build their headquarters here.
And now here we are four years later, facing a bit of a commercial real estate crisis because more and more workers are working at home.
Apparently, no one in mainstream Chicago ever imagined such a situation when they were o ering Amazon the sun and the moon to build o ce space for 50,000 employees.
They just went along with the mayor like lemmings. As they did with Daley’s Olympic bid and the parking meter deal.
first chief of sta !
You probably can’t—unless your name is Mick Dumke.
I mention Mick (a Block Club Chicago editor and my former writing partner here at the Reader) because he actually knew the answer when I asked him about it the other day.
Then he sort of apologized, apparently a little sheepish for knowing such trivia.
The thing is there’s no compelling reason you should know the name of Mayor Emanuel’s first chief of sta , as Mick would be the first to tell you.
And no, it’s not Joe Deal. He was Mayor Emanuel’s last chief of sta .
Chiefs of staff are the nameless, faceless technocrats in the back rooms of City Hall who make sure that the mayor’s initiatives get car-
ried out—even, gulp, Mayor Rahm’s. As in . . . close more schools, dammit!
So, again, there’s no compelling reason you should remember the name of Mayor Rahm’s first chief of sta . And, no, the answer is not Eileen Mitchell. She was the one before Joe Deal.
I mention all of this as a segue into what I really want to talk about: the embarrassing hoopla mainstream Chicago made over Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson selecting Rich Guidice as his first chief of sta .
Before I go further . . .
This is no dig at Rich Guidice. Don’t know the man—never met him. I’m sure he’s a wonderful guy. He’s been around City Hall for the last 30 or so years in one job or another. I hope he does a great job for Johnson.
Point is, the exhilaration that greeted
To which I say . . . neither did Mayor Rahm. Or Mayor Daley. And I didn’t see you panicking when they first got elected. Didn’t see you worrying about who they picked as chief of sta .
And no, the answer is not Forrest Claypool. That’s the chief of sta Mayor Rahm hired before Eileen Mitchell.
No, you assumed that Mayors Rahm and Daley would know how to run City Hall because you had voted for them and—c’mon, be honest—they kinda looked like you.
Even though in the case of Mayor Rahm, he clearly knew very little about Chicago when you elected him.
I mean, Rahm only got the job because Michelle Obama told President Obama that she couldn’t take another day of having him in the White House, where he was, coincidentally,
Maybe who we really need as chief of sta is someone who’s not afraid to say no to the boss.
Noticeably absent from the list of foolish mayoral proposals is any by Mayor Lightfoot—though the jury’s still out on NASCAR. Guess that makes her the greatest mayor of this century. Admittedly, the bar is low.
Yet mainstream Chicago bailed on her. Like they bailed on Kim Foxx, who’s undoubtedly the greatest Cook County State’s Attorney. To paraphrase Gil Scott-Heron, it follows a pattern if you dig what I mean.
Well, at least they can’t bail on Johnson. As they never supported him to begin with.
By the way . . . Theresa Mintle was Mayor Rahm’s first chief of sta . Oh, don’t act like you knew that.
Unless your name is Mick Dumke. v
@bennyjshow
There’s a nicely curated selection of Art Shay’s photography up through May 27 at Gallery Victor. It includes a lot of familiar images—Marlon Brando kissing his dog, Hugh Hefner with typewriter and playmates in his bedroom office, and, of course, Simone de Beauvoir’s bare bum. Iconic photos of entertainers, athletes, and politicians share the wall with street shots of kids in hardscrabble neighborhoods and pivotal public moments from the war years of the 1940s to the civil rights movement and social upheaval of the 60s.
Shay, who was also a writer, started out as a Life magazine reporter before he became a freelance photographer for that publication as well as all the other photo-heavy national magazines of the mid-20th century. He and his wife, Florence, settled in suburban Chicago in the 1950s and raised their five children there. Three of the kids also became photographers.
This show, titled “Father and Son,” also features photos by Richard Shay, who’s had access to the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan. The work is hung separately, with the exception of twin images of Ann Landers taken decades apart. The elder Shay’s photos are o ered for sale at prices ranging from $3,000 to $12,500.
Art Shay died April 28, 2018, at the age of 96. There’s no hint in this orderly exhibit of the messy, multiyear court battle raging behind the scenes between his two major heirs—Art’s archivist, Erica DeGlopper, and Richard. It’s a battle playing out in four states and multiple counties, but mostly at the Lake County courthouse in Waukegan, Illinois, where they both appeared via Zoom for a hearing last week.
Without getting too deeply into the weeds: Art left 48 percent ownership of his photography archive to Richard and the same amount to DeGlopper, a School of the Art Institute of
Chicago graduate who’d been organizing, documenting, and promoting his enormous body of work since 2005. (When I interviewed Art at his home for a Reader column in 2007, she was there, her massive project just getting underway.) Je rey Dembo, a friend and the executor of Art’s estate, was left a pivotal 4 percent.
In January 2018, three months before he died, Art also signed a notarized ten-year agreement making DeGlopper his representative “in all matters pertaining to the sale or use” of his photographic archive and establishing a 50 percent commission for her on any income the archive might earn.
But the relationship between DeGlopper and the other two owners of the Art Shay Archives Project LLC quickly soured. She claims she hasn’t been paid since September 2019 for her work or for expenses that she personally covered (including the cost of three out-oftown Shay exhibits) and hasn’t received
commissions or ownership distributions from sales by the LLC. She charges that the other two owners scuttled a deal she was arranging for a sale of about 100 photos to the Green Bay Packers; that Shay subsequently “raided” her home [in a court-ordered removal process], taking the archive as well as other possessions without accounting for them; and that they are trying to push her out of the LLC.
Shay claims in court documents that DeGlopper took sole possession of the archive and moved part of it to Florida without the other owners’ permission; that she withdrew $17,500 from the LLC business bank account, also without permission; that she refused to comply with a court order to return the archive to Chicago; and that she’s been “erratic,” “disruptive,” and defamatory in person and via email.
It didn’t help that in 2020, in Madison, Wisconsin, DeGlopper defaced public murals by Black artists that had been commissioned in the wake of the George Floyd protests by adding anti-China messages to them—incidents she refers to as “performance art.” This, Shay argues, reflected badly on the archive, which includes his father’s extensive chronicling of racism in America and the struggle to overcome it.
Shay’s been granted two orders of protection against DeGlopper and in 2021 won a $743,000 (plus interest) judgment in a breach of duty, infliction of distress, and defamation lawsuit against her, which he’s trying to collect through a foreclosure sale of her share of the LLC, to be conducted by the Lake County Sheri . She’s contesting that, arguing, among other claims, that the collection is worth millions, and that a sheri ’s sale is not the proper forum for it.
In court last week, Shay’s lawyer, Konstantinos Armiros, claimed DeGlopper had displayed a gun during a recent Zoom hearing, and 19th Circuit Court associate judge Michael Betar advised her to “chill out a bit.”
Shay is seeking an extension of his most recent order of protection; DeGlopper is fighting both that and the order for a sheri ’s sale. The next Waukegan court dates are set for May 19 and June 27. v
In Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care , Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba ask organizers to retire their inner cynic and imagine what could exist instead.
Out this month through Haymarket Books, Let This Radicalize You is filled with lessons from Hayes and Kaba, both longtime organizers and movement educators. The coauthors examine what political lessons the COVID-19 pandemic brought to life and how the mass mobilization of mutual aid and protests created spaces for care and survival. Designed as a field guide for young and seasoned organizers alike, the book brings together lessons from Hayes and Kaba’s years of activism—walking readers through their journeys, doubts, and collective imaginations in the process.
Let This Radicalize You is written for a world that feels like it is at the constant edge of collapse. The organizers and scholars within its pages insist that we all have a role in imagining and building the world we want to
RLET THIS RADICALIZE YOU Book Launch
Sat 5/20 2 PM, Haymarket House, 8 00 W. Buena, RSVP at haymarketbooks.org/events, $0-$25
been embedded in the norms and functions of this system.”
organizing. After 20 years of organizing in Chicago, Kaba returned home to New York in 2016. Still, her impact has lingered, inspiring activists and movement work to this day.
Hayes joins as a coauthor with an extensive background in organizing and movement education in Chicago. A queer Indigenous organizer, Hayes founded the direct action collective Lifted Voices and the Chicago Light Brigade, leading protests and direct action workshops for organizers. With Truthout, she hosts Movement Memos, “a podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change.” Many Movement Memo guests appear within the pages of Let This Radicalize You. As an educator, Kelly o ers a well of stories, tips, and tools from her past experiences and the practices of her fellow organizers.
Birthed amid pandemic turmoil, mass protests, and the unprecedented rise of mutual aid networks, the book explores many critical events in recent Chicago organizing history and how organizers have served to investigate, educate, and call others to action. Hayes and Kaba follow the experiences of those protesting police brutality in the summer of 2020 who were stranded in the Loop by Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s decision to raise the downtown bridges over the Chicago River. They write about what led to the formation of Chicago Freedom School, the emergence of youth-led, grassroots collectives like Assata’s Daughters, and how organizing creates badly needed homes for young people of color that must be protected. Hayes and Kaba write extensively about reciprocal care as an act of resistance itself.
“Care-driven organizing confounds the logics that are deployed to perpetuate wars, whether against a nation-state, against terrorism, or against ‘crime,” Hayes and Kaba write. “Like antiwar movements that oppose wars waged in and against foreign nations, movements that counter wars of criminalization highlight the number of casualties, the systemic abuses, and the dishonest framing of the system’s ‘warfare.’ They are movements against dehumanization.”
RLET
by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba , Haymarket Books, hardcover, 220 pp., $45, haymarketbooks.orglive in. Together, they invite you to take action and imagine what collective care and liberation can look like.
Kaba is a familiar figure in Chicago’s organizing space. Focusing on transformative justice work, she founded Project NIA and cofounded We Charge Genocide; the Chicago Freedom School; the Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls and Young Women; Love & Protect; the Just Practice Collaborative; and Survived & Punished. In 2021, Haymarket Books published her last book, We Do This ’Til We Free Us, which explores similar terrain— collecting essays, interviews, and talks on the prison industrial complex and abolitionist
After over ten years of organizing together, Hayes and Kaba reflect on their approaches to movement work and lessons learned. Much of their anecdotes are with each other—imagining abolitionism, understanding relationship building, and creating reciprocal care. Their writing brings together the words and memories of other organizers and scholars, like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, and Barbara Ransby. Let This Radicalize You is a collection of stories and advice, not a manual on the nuts and bolts of movement work. It is not a book to take to a protest but to bring to meetings and moments of reflection.
Hayes and Kaba examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic and how activists and organizers mobilized in its wake. The book places readers on the precipice of despair and transformative change. What do activists do when the state fails its people? And how do organizers resist calls to return to normalcy and restore a dehumanizing status quo? They write, “We are surrounded by violence in this society, even under conditions that government authorities would characterize as ‘peaceful,’ because violence has always
“Movement education is, in part, a deprogramming process,” they write. “It is a path toward unlearning mythologies and liberating ourselves from the isolation of individualism and enclosed narratives.” Let this Radicalize You follows the formation of activist-research organizations like Lucy Parsons Labs and Indigenous rights protests as they resist violence and terrorist designations by the state. Their writing constantly interlocks academic theory and lessons from on-the-ground actions for liberation. There is more than one way to organize, so Hayes and Kaba weave together countless stories and visions from activists and their work—offering practical advice and compassionate space to imagine what worlds without oppression can look like.
Imagination is revolutionary in Let This Radicalize You, letting the minds of organizers dream past the violence of state institutions and sketch out what is possible. For the organizers in its pages, it bridges the vast separation between what the world is and what it could be. “Possibility is the hope we wear when we charge into battle. It is stronger than assumption or reaction because it is
intentional,” Hayes writes in her introduction. “We charge into that breach if that is the only way forward because possibility is worth it.” The authors also write extensively about their journeys and mistakes along the way. Many of their interlocutors speak about the dangers of “reading as extraction” or relying solely on leftist theory and socialist ideology to inform one’s organizing work. They often write about how to avoid burnout and exhaustion in the marathon of movement work. But organizing is also a collaborative labor of love. For Hayes and Kaba, “everything worthwhile is done with other people.”
The book’s title comes from an oft-repeated saying from Kaba: “Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.” In times of great crisis, it is a reminder that hope and grief coexist simultaneously—shaping how people see the world and sparking people to action. Hayes and Kaba ask you not to dwell in despair but to know what you are up against and to be mindful that the collective struggle against injustice is long and hard-won. When fighting against state oppression and indi erence, hope can be difficult to find—let alone the ability to reimagine institutions that operate through injustice and exploitation. But for Hayes and Kaba, it is a lived practice when you have inherited a world on fire.
As Hayes’s introduction states, “I cannot tell you that the tumult will relent, because it will not. But I can tell you that, here, on the edge of everything, we are each other’s best hope. As organizers, we are builders in an era of collapse. Our work is set against all probability—and it is in that space of cherished improbability where our art will be made.” v
@reemasabrina
WRIGHTWOOD
Renowned photographer and activist Shahidul Alam exposes the resilience of Bangladeshi people and their continued struggle for freedom over four decades.
An immersive experience tracing the epic journey of legendary Chinese poet Qu Yuan to a cyberpunk future; part comic book, part animated film, part meditation on history, Kongkee takes you back to the future.
Traveling Chicago by bike, always with his camera, Patric McCoy captures 1980s Black gay Chicago, creating a poignant marker of place, time and memory.
CHICAGO
By NICKY NI
If there’s one thing we know about Afrofuturism, it’s that it uses speculative genres as a future-imagining device to share criticism and discontent about the present. Asian Futurism, as discussed by scholars such as Dawn Chan and Xin Wang, is a loose discourse that struggles to find footholds in the west outside of techno-Orientalism. There exists a glaring unease of pitching a show on futurism that is universal but also happens to be Asian.
Curated by Abby Chen, senior associate curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, “Kongkee: Warring States Cyberpunk,” the solo exhibition by Malaysia-born, Hong Kong-raised, and London-based artist Kong Khong-chang, aka Kongkee, glows from San Francisco all the way to Wrightwood 659 in striking colors and provocative imagery that are themselves a publicity stunt. Promoted as “a luminous electronic art installation combining ancient poetry and modern anime . . . presented as a futurist fantasy,” Chen hopes the show helps us imagine what “a vibrant strain of ‘Asian Futurism’ can look and feel like: one full of energy, music, and color that creatively entwines the enigma of the past with caution toward cutting-edge technologies yet to be discovered.” The cyberpunk aesthetic is luring and ironic when it embraces one of the places it draws inspiration from: Hong Kong.
Occupying the third and fourth floors and the rooftop corridors of Wrightwood’s Tadao Ando-designed interior, the show materializes facets of Kongkee’s sprawling universe— largely based on the artist’s comic series Mi Leo Virtual —that reincarnate popular iconographies from ancient Chinese history and mythology into characters of a Hong Kong-inspired cyberpunk dystopia. The exhibition incorporates historical objects to better contextualize the rich Chinese history that Kongkee references: bronze cooking vessels and figurines dating back to the third century BCE are sitting on top of backlit tiles that breathe in neon lights. In the same gallery, two
large vertical LED panels shu e illustrations of robots and retro-futuristic cityscapes, setting a moody and nostalgic atmosphere.
It’s hard not to associate this exhibition with the pro-democracy protests that have occurred in Hong Kong since the Umbrella Revolution in 2014, even though they aren’t mentioned. Coinciding with the preparation of this show, between 2019 and 2020, Hong Kong experienced waves of protests against the government’s introduction of a bill to amend the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance regarding extradition. Under this light, Kongkee’s art can be read as a political allegory that masks a collective anxiety and pessimism.
Using the past as a metaphor to examine the present is a crucial tactic that encompasses Chinese art and literature. History is rarely discussed without some kind of insinuation of its parallel to the present. When criticizing the entities in power in a straightforward manner is not attainable, historical anecdotes become vessels through which to express such dissonance. Besides its functionality of bypassing censorship, it also implies the cyclical nature of history, well accepted by Chinese culture. Mythology becomes prophecy; the present is a memory relived, a history activated.
So is the setup of the Kongkee universe. Joe the Robot is an intelligent android implanted with the memory of Qu Yuan (c. 339-278 BCE), a Chinese poet and politician in the state of Chu during the Warring States period (c. 471-221 BCE) who was later appropriated as a nationalist and patriotic icon—“The People’s Poet”—after the founding of Communist China. Qu Yuan is reimagined as eye candy, a rock musician with a man bun. His counterpart, King Huai of Chu, who in real life was the ruler that Qu Yuan served before the latter was banished, is transformed into an androgynous man who is also Qu Yuan’s love interest and companion. (According to scholarly research, homosexuality in ancient China among the elite was common, and Qu Yuan is believed to have expressed his love toward King Huai in
R“KONGKEE: WARRING STATES CYBERPUNK”
Through 7/ 15 : Thu 1-8 PM, Fri noon-7 PM, Sat 10 AM- 5 PM, Wrightwood 659, 659 W. Wrightwood, wrightwood 659.org, general admission $15, advance tickets required
the former’s well-known epic poem “Li Sao,” or “The Lament”.) The state of Chu was eventually destroyed by the Qin Dynasty, in which the emperor Qin Shi Huang ruled a unified China for merely 14 years.
The climax of the exhibition, the three animated shorts of the series “Dragon’s Disillusion” proposes a speculated bifurcation of history, one that supposes that Qin Shi Huang, who is historically portrayed as a tyrant, successfully procures a formula for immortality and should thus reign for eternity. If a tyranny that doesn’t end doesn’t already sound familiar, Joe wakes up in a peaceful dystopia where an immortal and cyborg population is cybernetically governed by regular system upgrades. Robotic soldiers of Qin’s army are each equipped with a smiling mask (nodding to cynical realism). Certain activities are banned, like video games, that are thought to pollute the spirit and the soul.
“Give up your soul. Without your soul, you won’t feel pain anymore.” This quote recurs in dialogue and intertitles throughout the animation, as Joe, recalling his past life, sets out to discover what it means to be human. The present, flashbacks, speculations—and hallucinations—swirl together with trippy motifs. Narration is destabilized by quick jump-cuts and symbolic close-ups, swashed by a melancholic sentimentality that imbues Hong Kong cinema. Think In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai combined with Paprika by Satoshi Kon (not to mention that Katherine, Kongkee’s red-headed femme fatale, seems a
doppelgänger of the dream-world agent Paprika). This lament of bygone days only hints at the question of what it means to be human without freedom. “Qu Yuan,” King Huai asks, “tell me, why do humans create robots?” “I don’t know . . . ” Qu Yuan replies, “to complete the task that human cannot?” If it’s impossible for a human to free their mind when their body is under surveillance, can a robot attempt otherwise?
The exhibition ends with a monumental three-channel projection, River , an animated video that evokes the cityscape of Hong Kong—street signs, colonial architecture, trains, and ferries—floating on a river like garbage. Once you step outside to the corridors, floor-to-ceiling windows are stenciled with a gigantic pair of wings, framing translated excerpts—quoted from “Xiao Yao You (Free and Easy Wandering),” work by Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi—which fantasize the unimaginable freedom that Peng, the mythological bird of immeasurable size, enjoys. As you turn, you see a stenciled bird sitting in an open human hand. What to make of all this? Perhaps it’s best to resort to a quote from the exhibition catalog, a preface written by Kongkee’s peer Nico Tang: “Let’s not talk about politics, only romance that concerns the wind and the moon.” v
This review has been edited for space; a full version is readable at chicagoreader.com
@mllecolettex
Through 7/31: Mon 11 AM- 5 PM, Thu 11 AM- 8 PM, Fri-Sun 11 AM- 5 PM, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, artic.edu/exhibitions, adults $ 32 ($ 40 Fast Pass, $27 Illinois residents, $20 Chicago residents), seniors 65 +, students, and teens 14 -17 $26 ($ 34 Fast Pass, $21 Illinois residents, $14 Chicago residents), children under 14 free
instructions, specification, measurements, or random chance.
In practice, some exhibition-goers are mystified, others are incredulous. “Too much math,” announced a zealous teenager traveling in a pack of five, after glancing at 10 km 1:5000 (1976), a long length of paper with a faintly drawn line measuring out, presumably, a 10 km distance at one-to-5,000 scale. But critics are only the most vocal, and for me, the quiet exhibition allowed a hallucinatory expansiveness to accompany brouwn’s obsessive exploration of distance and notation. Delightfully little is necessary for a mark to become a scale, to activate spatial imagination.
By EMELINE BOEHRINGERIdon’t understand. stanley brouwn steps?
Oh, another place!
He walks. . . . He appears in places and walks maybe, and he’s video-ing while he walks?
stanley brouwn steps! [Laughs, whispers.]
What? [Laughs.]
Where’s he going to appear? [Laughs.] London!
So flowed a conversation between two seven-year-olds who sat next to me on a bench nestled in the Art Institute’s second-floor contemporary galleries in early May to watch stanley brouwn’s 1989 video steps . Their conversation was more forgiving than the intermittent grumbling in the artist’s monographic exhibition a floor below. “I guess that’s significant . . . to somebody,” commented one museumgoer to the air after circling the show’s two rooms.
Such public distrust is a risk curators Ann Goldstein and Jordan Carter were willing to take in honoring the ethos of the late artist, who inveighed against any and all interpretation and documentation of his life and art. The show includes none of the usual texts typically expected of a major museum exhibition; no o cial description or images of the exhibition exist online. Guards enforce strict “no photography” notices, and both curators have refused interviews with the press. “What is this show that nobody is supposed to talk about . . . ?” wrote Jori Finkel in a recent review. “I could surely find out, though perhaps the more meaningful question . . . is whether I should.”
In a single paragraph published in Art in America , Carter described the exhibition’s curatorial secrecy as uncompromising in its defense of stanley brouwn’s intentions, “ensuring an unmitigated experience . . . between the visitor and the work.” The result is an exhibition that places a greater burden than usual on the unsuspecting public, confronted with work sans explanation.
There’s one exception: “stanley brouwn” includes a short wall-mounted introductory text stylized in the artist’s signature all-lowercase Helvetica type, noting that the artist, a pioneering figure of European conceptual art in the 1960s, was interested in the measurement of space, volume, and distance, elaborated through iterations of regional, historical, and fabricated standards of length. One series is mentioned by name, the relatively well-known this way brouwns (1961-1964), directions drawn by passersby to point the way to another location scribbled in idiosyncratic and inscrutable shorthand on sheets of paper later stamped with the title this way brouwn.
Most works on display are likewise barely there: thin, precise penciled lengths of arcane measurements on long sheets of white paper, a Judd-like plain wood room lit by a single exposed light bulb, and gray metal file cabinets filled with cards tallying daily step counts and making cryptic calculations. It’s exactly the kind of art that draws the most skepticism— part of the point for brouwn, who was firmly in dialogue with conceptual artists of his time and fond of iterative works produced by
In brouwn’s architectural model in 1:100 scale with plan, a simple set of drawn rectangles becomes a plan and elevation, and a stack of plain wood beams implies a clean-lined pavilion. A sheet of paper 1 x 1 pikhalebi (abyssinia) (2005) invokes measurements used in eras and places far away, practical tools reduced to the realm of obsolescence and imagination. The serious, unchanging veneer of the “standard” measurement is reduced to a play of smoke and mirrors, a silly facade built on a crumbling tower of bygone certainties. The artist chooses standards with a fantastical Calvino-ish feel: the defunct Bulgarian arschin, the forearm-length Viking ell, and the ancient Egyptian royal cubit.
He measures the world against himself, too. Along with various demarcations of lengths extrapolated from the artist’s own body, brouwn meticulously logged his steps per day, notated in black type on plain index cards. There is an unsettling absurdity in reducing a life to measurements. The lack of curatorial explanation creates a productive ahistoricity that brings brouwn’s work close to contemporary anxieties. Who hasn’t tracked steps, by choice or by Health-app default? We are now adrift in a sea of often forcibly-gathered biometric data, and brouwn’s bespoke tracking feels both quaint and prescient.
O cial curatorial interpretation can create positive freedom, adding to the understanding of an artwork by widening the breadth of ideas brought into dialogue—or negative freedom—restricting the imagination by imposing a “correct” reading with the backing of nebulous institutional authority.
The exhibition’s unassuming biographical note hints at readings that could be clarified by additional text. The artist’s obsession with distance is often read through his life: critics
and curators argue that the artist, who was born and grew up in Dutch-occupied Suriname, would have read the “standard” measurement of a foot or centimeter as a loaded colonial tool, usurping and replacing indigenous methods of description. In this way, measurement is the most powerful and insidious vehicle for the Western colonial project, invested in theft through the demarcation of borders, territories, and properties, and continuing to format our understanding of space and distance. In the context of his emigration from Paramaribo, Suriname, to Amsterdam, brouwn’s step logs, maps, and measurements are a way to make sense of unfamiliar terrain that rejects “sensibility” for the authority of the artist’s own racialized body.
Other important interpretations are more or less impossible to access within the bounds of the exhibition. Recent scholarship on brouwn identifies the characteristic light brown wood used in many sculptures as okoume, an African hardwood found in the Congo, Gabon, and equatorial Guinea—countries colonized by Belgium, France, and Spain, respectively. Curator Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung notes that brouwn’s titular measurements are sometimes inaccurate, a fact he reads, with other technical observations, as “a subtle but powerful presence that . . . functions within a larger narrative of abstraction common in african expressions.”
Omitting curatorial mediation, of course, does not mean that the exhibition is unmediated. Instead, the cultural texts through which the artwork is read are limited to that which viewers are already equipped with—an invisible miasma of experiences and assumptions, many already filtered through the assumed rules of possibility that accompany any collection of objects called “an exhibition.” The museum is not neutral.
The incredulous visitor to “stanley brouwn,” consciously or not, senses this fact. The exhibition is charged with a sparkling and unusual sense of absence that telescopes the artist’s meditations on measurements and meanings outwards, through the structure of the exhibition and the institutional trappings around it. Underneath all the mumbled “I don’t get it” and “needs more explanation,” the exhibition troubles the surface of the intelligible, as brouwn did—a provocation that succeeds as you exit the show wondering what exactly it is that you were supposed to see. v
Actor, writer, composer, musician, lyricist, visual artist, short film director, and stop-motion animator Matthew C. Yee is no still water. But he does run deep. Yee is currently playing the lead male in Lookingglass Theatre’s Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon, a country-and-western musical about an Asian American couple on the lam from the law. He also wrote the book and the songs.
Lucy and Charlie’s Honeymoon has been gestating for a long time. “I first came up with the idea in 2011,” Yee explains. “I was in school [in a screenwriting class], and I was trying to write a short scene about a couple who are arguing about how they should rob a gas station. And the whole scene is just them fighting.”
The scene was filmed for class, but Yee kept thinking about how to expand it. As a Chinese American artist, he wanted to put more of himself into the story.
“I decided to make these two characters Asian American. And I wanted to tell this story of this couple who have all of this pressure put
on them by their immigrant parents to live the American dream. And rather than embracing the positive American dream, they have embraced the dark side of the American dream, the greed and anger and all of this other stu that’s represented in American cowboy culture.”
Lucy and Charlie also embrace country-western music, something Yee embraces as well, especially classic country tunes of the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. He lists his favorites:
“Johnny Cash, The Carter Family, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Patsy Cline. Glen Campbell’s ‘Wichita Lineman’ is a really big one for me. There’s a song that I’m obsessed with called ‘Big Bad John’ by Jimmy Dean. Country music is a great storytelling device because that kind of music is already so specific and story-driven.”
The fact that the genre back then was mostly lily-white made it more enticing for Yee.
“Most of our cast is Asian American, and I’m like, I love playing this music, and I want a cast
of Asian Americans playing country-western music because it’s just not something—well, that’s not what you usually get. A lot of Americans think [country-western music] belongs to a certain community. I wanted to flip it on its head and make it for everybody.”
And in his show, Yee goes whole-hog CW. In the show’s title song (available on YouTube), Yee and his costar, Aurora Adachi-Winter, twang their way through a tune that has a very Tammy Wynette/George Jones vibe: “We gotta do something to get out of town for a while / To celebrate our marriage with a little bit of style / Doin’ bad things with you really gets my heart rate up / I’m horned up, too / I’m ready to screw / I guess this must be love.”
Yee grew up in Lombard, the son of a first-generation Chinese American father who was born and raised in Chinatown. His father is the subject of Yee’s Ward 25: I Remember Chinatown, his short-subject contribution to Lookingglass’s “50 Wards: A Civic Mosaic” digital project. His mother is a first-generation Scottish American. “I guess I could identify as mixed or whatever, but as I’ve gotten older, I have come to identify really strongly with my Asian heritage,” Yee says.
The irony is not lost on Yee that he has grown increasingly interested in an Asian heritage that his father spent his life distancing himself from. As Yee points out in his short film about his dad, “The first generation desperately tries to forget their heritage and become more American. And the second generation desperately tries to remember and become more Chinese.”
“So [my father] went full on into sort of his American identity and has sort of, I think, lost a little bit of his Asian culture. Like, he doesn’t speak the language [of his parents, Cantonese], and he doesn’t know the stories. When he was a kid, he played football in high school, and he rode a Harley-Davidson. And he did all this stu that made him cool, but also very American.”
Yee was the opposite. “I played football my freshman year, and I hated it.”
To learn about his Chinese heritage, Yee turned to his grandparents. “I talked a lot to my grandmother. I talked a lot to my greataunt. She’s like the gatekeeper. She has all the stories. I think a lot of the time, the second
generation, like me, feels like we’ve lost part of our heritage because there’s somebody that was ahead of us in the line who didn’t keep the stories going or keep that tradition going. So we try and get that stu back.”
But for Yee, the issue of identity was complicated: “Because I was mixed, I had both of these identities within me, and it made things really confusing. I just wanted to know where I belonged. It’s just a very human thing. You want to know what tribe you belong to, right? So you feel safe. And when I was a kid, that just was something that was on my mind all the time. I didn’t know how to fit in very well.”
It didn’t help that kids at school kept asking Yee, “What are you?”
“God, constantly. ‘What are you?’ That’s the worst question. God, I hate that question. Yeah, that one was always frustrating. China is so di erent from America. To accept both cultures—Chinese American and Scottish American—can be really confusing. Dealing with that as a kid, it shaped my personality a lot and put a chip on my shoulder.”
Yee’s song “Renegades” from his current show captures these feelings of alienation that send his just-married protagonists, a pair of star-crossed “first-generation Asian American renegades” (to quote Yee’s lyrics), on a wild American road trip set to a very American tune.
Yee’s song goes, “Lucy was born of Chinese immigrants who came looking for a better world. . . . [But] she found herself quite alienated by the culture of the USA. . . . She was a first-generation Asian American renegade . . . . Charlie’s folks came from China, too. . . . He did drugs and played in bands . . . He was a first-generation Asian American renegade.” Yee was, in a way, a second-generation Asian American renegade. But ultimately, Yee found his footing in life by embracing what made him unique. “I love both sides of my family and their culture. I don’t need to reconcile anything anymore. I don’t need to justify anything. I’m who I am, and I get to have both sides of my family. And I just love getting to embody that every day. That’s what America is supposed to be; it’s this beautiful mix. And whereas when I was younger, I felt like it didn’t make sense to me; now it makes total sense to me, and I don’t have any questions about my identity.
“I just don’t care what anybody thinks. I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do, and as long as I’m happy, that’s all I really care about.” v
@JackHelbig
DANCE DIVAS 2023: A NIGHT AT THE MOVIES
Sat-Sun 5/20 -5/21, 4: 30 and 7 PM, Baton Show Lounge, 4713 N. Broadway, dancedivaschicago.com, $75 at the bar, $100 main floor, $150 for VIP reception, Sat 5/20 5 PM
dance community here in Chicago.”
Boersma was also excited to participate after attending last year’s show and seeing the drag transformation of other dancers he knew. “It’s funny to see some of your friends and not recognize them at all,” he said.
Of course, as dance artists at the time, none of them had the financial means to write a check to help research or to help people get medications. So they thought, ‘Well, what are we good at? We’re good at dancing, so let’s put on a show and try to raise some money.’”
Drag, in all of its glorious forms, has been a locus of revolt throughout the decades. In 2023, we are in a time when the very concept of “dressing in the mode not of one’s ‘essential sex’” is in the bull’s-eye of crypto-fascist Republican lawmakers in many states.
That’s why it seems like winning when an artist like Lizzo brings a battalion of drag performers onstage with her in Tennessee. And why producing even the most wholesome drag queen story hour can be a battle. In the culture wars of 2023, keeping simple performative ideas going in the face of adversity can be a way to quietly support and bolster the LGBTQ+ community. That’s also why it seems fitting that Dance Divas 2023, a performance series produced by Jeremy Plummer of C5 Entertainment, goes up this weekend at the Baton Lounge.
The concept is simple: Create dance pieces (choreographed by Plummer and cochoreographer Harrison McEldowney) around a single theme and set them on dancers who are put into drag (sometimes for the first time ever) for the performances. These aren’t seasoned drag performers, but they are professional dancers for companies such
as the Jo rey, Giordano Dance Chicago, Chicago Tap Theatre, LEVELdance, and Chicago Movement Collective, to name a few. And then make the whole event a benefit for Chicago Dancers United, who are also the force behind Dance for Life, which provides financial aid to professional dancers for health concerns and preventative medical care. Most professional dancers are contract employees, and very few companies o er health insurance to their dancers because many can’t a ord it.
The dancers in the show are happy to volunteer their time to help other dancers and the community as they learn their choreography and put the show together. Jo rey dancer Evan Boersma is one of the first-timers this year. “I like being able to put on a show with other dancers in the community who I wouldn’t normally get to perform with. It’s fun to socialize with them and be in a show environment with dancers other than the ones that I perform with on a regular basis.” Nathaniel Ekman, the executive director of Chicago Dancers United, underscored the same message. “It’s a wonderful example of artists supporting other artists as Dance Divas unites our local top-tier professional talent for a fun and exciting evening that strengthens our thriving
Transformation was also of interest to freelance dancer Jordan Ricks. He’s in the show a second time this year, after a showstopping “Proud Mary” number last year. Ricks said that embodying young Tina Turner was an interesting and engaging creative process. “As far as adding my own artistry to it, I did research. I watched videos of young Tina Turner and just seeing how e ervescent she was and seeing that glow and watching her, you know, shimmy and roll was amazing. Although I don’t know exactly how she felt in that moment, I can use how she made me feel in that moment to fuel the movement.”
Ricks also described the moment of seeing himself in drag for the first time: “When I saw ‘Sparkle’ [his drag persona] for the first time, it was a very gender-euphoric experience. A light bulb went o , and I was like, ‘OK, I now have a place to express this hyperfeminine energy that I have within myself.’ That energy is something that I’ve been both celebrated and ridiculed for growing up, as a young queer kid from the south.”
That moment, combined with anti-drag legislation in states like Tennessee, makes this show an unexpected political act for Ricks. “I think [with] everything especially now, even if it’s not my core intention, drag is a form of activism. And it’s putting my foot down as a queer artist saying, ‘I’m here and I exist. Other queer artists are here, and they exist. We’re just here to show our art form and spread love and light and joy and our energy to the world.’ And I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
This year’s show, A Night at the Movies, will feature scenes and songs from classic films that the audience will recognize and have fun revisiting. The producers are tight-lipped about the actual show content. “We typically keep them all a secret so that it’s a huge surprise for the audience,” said Plummer.
Dance Divas was started by choreographer Tony Savino as an AIDS benefit for dancers living with the disease in 1996. “That was when that pandemic was much less manageable than it is today,” said Plummer. “[Tony] and many others were seeing a lot of their friends pass away and wanting to find a way to help.
That incarnation of the show ran for about a decade, during which Plummer started working as Savino’s assistant. When it ended, the show took a break for a few years and Plummer (with Savino’s blessing) relaunched it in 2017.
Today, says Plummer, “Thankfully, HIV is more manageable to live with. So we raise money for what’s called the Chicago Dancers’ Fund through the artist organization Chicago Dancers United. This fund provides financial support for dance artists or anyone working in the dance field. So if you’re a stage manager for a dance company or lighting designer for a dance company, you can apply for funds from the Dancers’ Fund for anything from health and wellness to critical needs. Our goal [with Dance Divas] is to raise as much money for that fund as possible.”
The show itself will offer up “traditional female impersonation” with high production values and a campy and fun experience for the audience. Plummer explained, “There’s always two rules when we go to write the show. Number one, it has to be fun for the cast to perform it, and number two, it has to be over-the-top entertaining for the audience. Because if you’re gonna come, we want it to be nothing like you’ve seen before. So if you’ve been to a dance concert, great. If you’ve been to a drag show, great, but it’s the best of both of those worlds.”
While the intent of the show is not to shine a spotlight on current events, the existence and continuation of such a tradition feel like a statement. The act of resistance of putting on drag today can be a tiny beacon for young queer kids and future drag performers living in hostile communities.
When asked what he would tell “little kid Jordan” if he, as an adult, could go back in time and speak to him, Ricks said, “Oh, wow. OK. I would tell them, ‘Hey, boo, you’re in for a ride. Just know that everything that you’re doing right now, all that energy that you feel right now, you don’t have to mute or quiet yourself down. What’s happening now will take you to places unimaginable, and you’re going to transform and evolve into an artist. The sky is not the limit nor space nor the universe or the heavens; the heights are endless for you.’”
This year’s Dance Divas fundraiser comes at a timely moment.
SUMMER SERIES: FACETS MAY 18–21
JUNE 6-11, 2023
BLOOMINGTON, IN
MEG
EVERYTHING WAS DIGITAL
ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT SON LUX
Aztec Human Sacrifice is enlightening and entertaining.
Step into the Aztec Empire during the 16th century, on the eve of a new millennium.
City Lit’s world-premiere musical Aztec Human Sacrifice (written by Kingsley Day and Philip LaZebnik) tells the tale of The Chosen One (Freddy Mauricio), destined for sacrifice to ensure the sun’s rise. Defying fate, he flees with Princess (Marcela Ossa Gómez), provoking a high-stakes chase as the High Priest (Luis Del Valle), Emperor (Miguel De León), and his army pursue the ill-fated couple before the world ends.
This 90-minute fictional play offers a dark twist on a Disney animated adventure film, weaving together romance, twists, witty banter, and drama. Our young protagonist questions his societal norms, embarking on a self-discovery journey, brought to life by an energetic 13-member cast with infectious enthusiasm.
Director Jay Españo’s commitment to authenticity is commendable. Españo collaborated with Xochitl-Quetzal Aztec, a dance company in Little Village dedicated to preserving Mexico’s ancient culture, and consulted Virginia Miller, a professor of Pre-Columbian art at the University of Illinois Chicago, for costumes and set design. Costume designer Andrés Mota, a graduate of Mexico City’s National Institute of Fine Arts, already had a foundation in Aztec culture from his time in school but delved even deeper into Aztec clothing and accessories by watching documentaries.
Over a taut 90 minutes, Fakhrid-Deen unpeels the layers in these characters, making them far more than just representations of anguish and loss. Teamer in particular excels in moving between jocularity and sorrow, a man blown by the wind but hoping to find roots in a home and heart somewhere. —KERRY REID DANDELIONS Through 6/4: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, mpaact.org, $34-$42
Ernest Shackleton Loves Me is a goofy paean to foolish optimism.
Imagine if Harper, the Valium-addicted Mormon wife in Angels in America who imagines herself in Antarctica, actually met famous explorer Ernest Shackleton through some ri in the time-space continuum. Only this time, instead of being a neglected housewife, she’s an aspiring avant-garde composer looking for a big break.
As far as wild premises go, Joe DiPietro’s Ernest Shackleton Loves Me (music by Brendan Milburn, lyrics by Val Vigoda, with additional music by Ryan O’Connell), which is now in its Chicago premiere at Porchlight Music Theatre under Michael Unger’s direction, checks all the boxes. But though the internal logic breaks down from time to time in this 90-minute show, as a paean to “foolish optimists,” it mostly rings true.
Kat (Elisa Carlson) struggles to create new experimental music loops while her infant son sleeps next door. Her slacker boyfriend is on the road with a Journey cover band and hasn’t paid a dime toward the heating bill. Cold and unable to sleep for 36 hours? Who could relate to that? Enter Shackleton (Andrew Mueller) from the back of her refrigerator, bearing a banjo and a message of never giving up.
roles, and one lucky person even gets their own tarot reading.
CHOKRANE AZTEC HUMANThe team’s passion shines through, resulting in an enlightening and entertaining experience. As City Lit’s 42nd season concludes, Aztec Human Sacrifice stands as a fitting finale, made all the more sentimental with artistic director and producer Terry McCabe’s nearing retirement. —BOUTAYNA
SACRIFICE Through 6/18: Fri-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 6/5 and 6/12 7:30 PM; City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-293-3682, citylit.org, $34 ($29 seniors, $12 students and military)
Dandelions blossoms at MPAACT.
A Bronzeville six-flat frames the sometimes melodramatic but compelling story in Tina Fakhrid-Deen’s Dandelions, now in a world premiere at MPAACT under the direction of Lauren Wells-Mann. Opening with a litany of the greats associated with the neighborhood (Sam Cooke, Ida B. Wells), the show soon moves into the lives of everyday people caught up in loss, addiction, and recriminations, all exacerbated by the forces of gentrification.
Mamie Davis (Carolyn Nelson) is the aging owner of the building, struggling to keep up with exploding property taxes. Her son King (André Teamer) lives in the basement and subsists on odd jobs, but his past history with drugs and stealing from his mom means he’s not welcome past her threshold (shades of Bubbles in The Wire). The couple across the hall from Mamie, Bill and Skokie Lane (J. Xavier and Dañelle Taylor, respectively) seem on the surface to represent the rising class, but they, like Mamie and King, have suffered a great tragedy in the past that puts up walls between them. Meantime, Bean (Brittany Davis), a friend of King’s still struggling with her own addiction, serves as a reminder of how hard it is to get clean and how easy it is for people to throw you away if you aren’t.
So OK, it’s kind of hokey, but damned if Carlson and Mueller don’t make it all work. The former in particular has a stupendous set of pipes. Add in Smooch Medina’s terrific projection designs (incorporating Frank Hurley’s real photos and films from the Shackleton archives), and you’ve got an o eat but oddly moving blend of history and hope. If Shackleton and his men could survive hell on earth, maybe an exhausted artist and mom can hold on another day.
—KERRY REID ERNEST SHACKLETONLOVES ME Through 6/1: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Tue 5/30 7:30 PM and Wed-Thu 5/31 and 6/1 1:30 PM; open captions Sat 5/27 2:30 PM; Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn, 773-777-9884, porchlightmusictheatre. org, $48-$77
Two Wills—Wilhelm and Shakespeare— take center stage in About Face’s latest.
All of the world is a stage, and Will Wilhelm knows it. Their new production (cocreated and directed by Erin Murray), Gender Play, or what you Will, is the perfect platform for them to explore their gender journey while also expressing their more dramatic side via monologuing with a side of dissertation. In this charming one-enby show, Wilhelm invites us into their red, velvet-covered salon to explore their lived gender experience through the lens of a séance/tarot reading/soliloquy mash-up on the timelessness of genderqueering, as evidenced by the words of William Shakespeare himself.
During this witty soul search, Wilhelm happily brings the audience into the fold, remarking with an air knock on an air door, “Have you noticed a fourth wall yet?” Audience members are solicited early on, given cameo
One of the most fascinating aspects of Wilhelm’s performance is the singsong rhythm that emerges as they toggle back and forth from the Elizabethan English of their namesake to modern English, selecting epic scenes from various plays by the bard, including Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But Wilhelm themselves cheekily notes that their genderplay is not just for Shakespeare aficionados who might think they know all there is to know about the works of the bard, quoting Shakespeare himself —“A fool thinks himself to be wise but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Instead, Wilhelm digs deep into the experience of being othered as a trans person and draws parallels between the othered folks that Shakespeare made sure to represent (from gender-bending to working-class people to people of foreign descent). They also delicately note that their reflection on Shakespeare necessarily involves their own reflections on themselves, echoing Shakespeare’s “The purpose of playing . . . is to hold, as ‘twere, a mirror up to nature”—the magic essence of all art. —KIMZYN CAMPBELL GENDER PLAY, OR WHAT YOU WILL Through 6/3: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; industry night Mon 5/22 8 PM, no show Sat 5/27 3 PM; Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-3830, aboutfacetheatre.com, pay what you can ($5-$35)
Hatefuck’s romance explodes Muslim stereotypes.
You don’t have to be a sucker for love-hate romances among the literati to fall in love with Rehana Lew Mirza’s Hatefuck but it helps. Then again, Lew Mirza’s play, now in its local premiere with First Floor Theater under Arti Ishak’s clever direction, provides a lens not usually implemented in tales of professional and personal shenanigans in the academic and publishing world. (Think Lucky Hank or The Chair as recent entries in the genre.) That lens is the way in which Muslims are stereotyped and demonized in popular culture. And that gives
Hatefuck higher stakes and deeper resonances than I’ve usually encountered in these scenarios. Layla (Aila Ayilam Peck) is a professor at Wayne State University. She shows up at a party thrown by successful writer Imran (Faiz Siddique), seemingly to let him know she won’t include him on her syllabus because she thinks he’s sold out by exploiting Muslim stereotypes in his bestsellers. Well, as the title implies, that initial acrimony gives way to passionate physical and intellectual fireworks. (Kudos to Samantha Kaufman’s inspired intimacy direction.) “It’s not my job to make Muslims human,” Imran declares. “We are human,” Layla retorts. Lew Mirza’s script is loaded with direct-to-the-gut revelations but also subtle moments that tease out the nuances in how Layla and Imran have become the people they are in a place and time that’s all too quick to reduce them to convenient tropes about burqas and bombs. And at the center of Hatefuck is a funny but aching dissection of an evergreen question: can you change a system from within, or must you settle for holding onto your values while remaining on the sidelines?
—KERRY REID HATEFUCK Through 6/10: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 5/22 and 6/5 8 PM (industry), Wed 5/31 8 PM (understudy performance) and Sat 6/10 3 PM; Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-3830, firstfloortheater.com, $5-$35
MotherFreakingHood! celebrates the sisterhood of parenting.
Mother’s Day weekend provided the perfect time to open this irreverent, boisterous look at three women’s journey from two blue lines on a pee stick to graduation day. Running at Mercury Theater Chicago’s Venus Cabaret, the musical by Julie Dunlap and Sara Stotts features first-time mom Rachel (Tafadzwa Diener), second-time mom Angie (Jacquelyne Jones), and fourth-time mom Marcia (Leah Morrow) assisted by Maya Rowe playing every role from birthing specialist to principal to Mother Xanax.
Director Heidi Van has them dancing in the aisles, enveloping the audience with their high-energy hilarity,
and making the crowd coconspirators in this tale that omits none of the messy, frustrating, embarrassing, and joyful aspects of motherhood.
Rowe delightfully swaps out wigs, costumes, physicality, and intonations to provide a riotous parade of foils to the three mothers who become fast friends. Diener charms as she grows from naive to powerful; Jones captures the CPA control of a powerful mom who must deal with the shattering of careful plans; and Morrow creates a tired, older mom who thought she was done with all the diaper stuff.
Dunlap and Stotts play to the rule that three times is funny with jokes repeating over the 18-year period of the show, eliciting more laughs each time.
While unabashedly a comedy, MotherFreakingHood! is filled with moments of sweetness, celebrating the bonds of women who help each other through the incomparable journey of parenting. —BRIDGETTE M. REDMAN MOTHERFREAKINGHOOD! Through 6/11: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; Venus Cabaret at Mercury Theater Chicago, 3745 N. Southport, 773-360-7365, mercurytheaterchicago. com, $65 (premium reserved tables $260)
Joshua Allen’s south-side story is a rich slice of life.
Expertly written, exquisitely performed, steamy, and hilarious, The October Storm at the Raven Theatre offers a warm slice of south-side Chicago life in the 1960s. Joshua Allen’s play, the second in his Grand Boulevard Trilogy (the first was The Last Pair of Earlies, produced by Raven in 2021) is refreshing in that it explores the depth and humanity of Black life without being tethered to the specter of racism. The outstanding ensemble cast is anchored by powerhouse actor Shariba Rivers, who plays Mrs. Elkins, the tightly wound young grandmother in desperate need of a reason to let her spine slip. Rivers’s portrayal of the terse matriarch is wry and profound as her inescapable gravity suspends the other characters for better or worse.
Jaeda LaVonne is deliciously petulant in her portrayal of Gloria, Mrs. Elkins’s naive and unmoored granddaughter, bursting at the seams with teenage angst. A delightful Brandon J. Sapp provides the perfect counterweight as Crutch, Gloria’s boyfriend, chipper and earnestly dorky. Felisha D. McNeal is an absolute comedic genius, keeping the audience in stitches from her very first line as Lucille, the jolly, busybody neighbor with the heart of gold. Nathaniel Andrew provides the catalyst for this story as the charming army vet Louis, his presence a lightning bolt of change to their predictable lives.
Director Malkia Stampley doesn’t miss a single beat in this richly layered tale, including thoughtful scene transitions that further the storyline and keep you deeply immersed in the storytelling every moment. A rich and nuanced exploration of identity, longing, trauma, and hope, The October Storm is as refreshing as the rain.
—SHERI FLANDERS THE OCTOBER STORM Through 6/25: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; touch tour Sun 6/11 1:45 PM; Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, raventheatre.com, $40 (students, active military, and veterans $15)
Tango gets a U.S premiere at PrideArts.
Last year, speaking to a BBC reporter about the Singapore government repealing Section 377A, a colonial-
ist-era holdover that criminalized gay sex, local LGBTQ+ historian Isaac Tng paraphrased the gay community’s mixed response to the news as follows: “It’s like a nice, hot cup of coffee,” he says, “that got le on the table.”
It’s a sensation I remember from the U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015, which felt like a victory long-deferred and wedged behind a brewing, more vicious, litigiously nihilistic anti-queer movement.
Originally produced by Singapore-based company Pangdemonium in 2017, Joel Tan’s Tango was written to be performed to an audience already immersed in the nonlinear modern history of queer rights in Singapore, a fact that gave director Carol Ann Tan some pause to present to a Chicago audience. In practice, though, sharing this uncompromised vision of Joel Tan’s story with Americans introduces viewers to enlightening parallels and echoes of both progress and backwards steps taken in the West. It also adds complicated, thought-provoking, squeamish layers to watching a white, wealthy British banker shout down an elderly service worker, homophobic as she may be.
In a story that deals with explosive Internet virality, though, ignition points in the story don’t quite build enough dramatic spark to hit as hard as they could. Reliance on aging and de-aging actors, too, creates artifice in a story deeply rooted in generational politics. But moments of tenderness, like those between father (Cai Yong) and son (G Hao Lee), or clandestine lovers (Oscar Hew, Ronnie Derrick Lyall), ring true and hit home—wherever that is. —DAN JAKES TANGO Through 6/11: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Pride Arts Center, 4139 N. Broadway, pridearts.org, $35 (students/ seniors $30)
RA perfect Ten
Gi ’s long-running short play festival makes a triumphant return.
What can you say in ten minutes? If the ten examples in the Gi ’s triumphant return production of its long-running series are any indication, anything and everything.
A mother agonizes over getting her eight-year-old an iPhone. A young man acts out revelations from his childhood telenovela-style. A Da Bears type chafes at COVID-related changes before being rescued by the target of his abuse. A first date skips forward to a deathbed farewell and many points in between. An improv team riffs on audience suggestions in a local tradition as old as deep-dish pizza. A Chicago Lab School summer camp counselor reminisces about watching over some of the city’s most kidnappable children. A theater company agonizes over what to cut from their production of The Seagull while reining in each member’s boundaryless ego. Doctors hold a secret meeting to suss out a response to an existential threat to their profession.
An old man and young woman in a park talk past and around one another to show the incompatibility of one another’s love languages before somehow coming together. Five people bang noisemakers, scream out rhymes, and dance anarchically to purge their collective and individual lockdown traumas.
The wonder of this show is how within each short increment some pieces feel expansive while others zip by, but all suggest only a tip of an iceberg, a hint of endless comedic and dramatic possibility from a very talented theater company. It’s a miraculous grab bag without a rotten apple in the bunch. —DMITRY
SAMAROV TEN 2023 Through 5/22: Mon and ThuSat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; Filament Theatre, 4041 N. Milwaukee, thegifttheatre.org, $10 v
Stop-motion animation is hypnotic. Frame by frame, movement by movement, and adjustment by painstaking adjustment, animators turn clay and plastic puppets into living, breathing characters. Some set pieces in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022), for example, can leave you asking, “How in the hell did they pull that o ?” Talented stop-motion animators can conjure animation magic with nothing but a camera, some puppets, and a pair of precise hands.
The last ten years have been a renaissance for the medium, made evident by the recent deluge of great films. Gone are the days when public perception of stop-motion began and ended with The Nightmare Before Christmas and Tool music videos. Last year alone gave audiences Pinocchio, Henry Selick’s Wendell & Wild , and Phil Tippett’s Mad God , which all
received heaps of critical and audience praise. With more projects on the way this year—including a Chicken Run sequel, of all things— the venerable medium shows no sign of losing its bite.
With all this in mind, one can’t help but wonder: How is Chicago contributing to the animated action?
“We haven’t really seen anything, frankly,” says Neal O’Bryan.
O’Bryan founded Workshed Animation, which specializes in stop-motion horror shorts and features, with longtime collaborator and childhood friend Chad Thurman in 2019. He says that beyond individual animators and programs at Columbia and DePaul, the studio is an island.
“It’d be awesome if Chicago had more proper studios with full sta s that are able to do feature films like Pinocchio,” O’Bryan says. “I
would love that.”
Both originally from Kentucky, O’Bryan, a working photographer, and Thurman, a comedy writer, author, and Onion contributor, initially collaborated on comedy shorts, but they struggled to find a niche.
“You put it out there and sometimes you don’t get any traction whatsoever. It’d be like our parents on Facebook, [saying,] ‘This is lovely,’” O’Bryan says.
As they deliberated on what kinds of projects would set them apart, O’Bryan and Thurman took interest in independent stop-motion shorts. Neither had any experience with the medium, but that wasn’t enough to keep them from taking a crack at it.
“We really just dove in,” says Thurman. “We took a Stan Winston course on stop-motion, and that was run by the Chiodo brothers, who did Team America [and] Killer Klowns From Outer Space.”
He continues, “We took that course. We watched a ton of YouTube videos and tutorials and bought a few books. We really just immersed ourselves in anything we could get our hands on.”
After 18 months of grueling trial-and-error animation work, most of which was done on their north-side apartment’s dining room table late at night, O’Bryan and Thurman released the animated short Toe in 2019. The film adapted “The Big Toe,” a short story from Alvin Schwartz’s 1981 classic children’s horror
collection Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
“We picked a very simple story where we could just focus on atmosphere, set building, and just figuring out how to move a puppet on the stage,” O’Bryan says.
The moody black-and-white short only included two puppets: a hungry, bug-eyed boy and a ghastly, decaying ghost. Both puppets were manufactured by Demi Kay Schlehofer, one of O’Bryan and Thurman’s many collaborators. The overall design aesthetic of the short takes cues from Thurman and O’Bryan’s love of 50s and 80s creature features, with influences including the original King Kong and Eraserhead.
With the short completed, Thurman and O’Bryan set their eyes on the festival circuit.
“There were plenty [of festivals] that we didn’t get into, but we certainly got into some we were surprised about,” O’Bryan says.
“We won a handful of awards,” Thurman says. “I think one really interesting element about doing stop-motion and submitting it to fi lm festivals is when you’re in a shortfilm block at a fest, you’re seeing live-action after live-action [fi lm], and the second that a stop-motion or an animated world starts to come into frame, you immediately notice that people perk up. They’re a little more engaged.”
The short also gained attention online, where it currently sits at around 270,000 views. Most importantly, though, the metal
‘That’s
Workshed Animation is a homegrown stop-motion studio with a debut feature film on the way.
band Shadowspawn requested permission to use parts of Toe in a music video, which is uno cially the highest honor a stop-motion short can achieve. The acclaim proved to O’Bryan and Thurman that their stop-motion studio was worth expanding beyond the DIY level.
“We get people who are sending us résumés and wanting an internship with us. We’ll hopefully get there one day!” O’Bryan says, joking that interns would be let down by the studio’s rugged operation. (“Here’s my bedroom, here’s our bathroom. Here’s where we eat our cereal.”)
Instead of another short, Workshed’s next project is a feature-length film titled The Iron Leech. An original story set on a turn-of-thecentury whaling ship, The Iron Leech is in the early stages of production. O’Bryan and Thurman say that they are currently in the process of developing a trailer and pitch deck to secure funding and distribution.
“There’s certainly an element of naivete of jumping from a stop-motion short that took 18 months to do six and half minutes to trying to take a bite of a feature-length film, but [The Iron Leech] is a story that kind of gripped us these past three years,” Thurman says. “It’s ambitious, but part of me doesn’t want to spend another two years just to do another short film.”
Workshed’s website is adorned with early behind-the-scenes photos and video of me-
ticulously designed sets, elaborate water simulation rigs, and portraits of puppets that straddle the uncanny sweet spot.
“We’ve been itching to do a feature film for a long time,” Thurman says. “We’ve also caught the stop-motion bug.”
Thanks to the Internet, O’Bryan and Thurman are assisted on the project by collaborators from Toe and new ones, including Pennsylvania puppet fabricators Morezmore Studio and VFX artist Jason Walker, who worked on the 2007 Oscar-nominated animated short Madame Tutli-Putli.
Another notable collaborator on the film is Chicago-based engineer Tait Leswing, who constructed a customized “wave rig” for more detailed water e ects.
“Any of the stuff we knew we couldn’t do ourselves or couldn’t do well, we reached out and looked to the Internet to find people who specialized,” O’Bryan says.
O’Bryan and Thurman both hope that Workshed can grow into a studio capable of building on the legacy of a beloved art form.
“That’s movie magic to me,” says Thurman. “There’s an uncanny valley element to [stop motion]. People are immediately drawn to something that’s in a 3D space [and] an inanimate object that you breathe life into. It’s very cool, and it appeals to people instinctively.”
People deride rom-coms, but they’re not exactly easy to make well. It takes a perfect blend of cast, chemistry, and quips to make one that’s even passable, and going above and beyond that to make something truly timeless? That’s basically a miracle.
In fact, very few people can truly write, star in, or direct great rom-coms—something that’s abundantly clear when watching Love Again. An English-language remake of a film first released in Germany in 2016, Love Again stars Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Mira, a boring but beautiful children’s book author whose lovey-dovey boyfriend is struck down by a drunk driver while she watches. She spends the next two years holed up at her parents’ house, and when she eventually decides to return to the city they shared—which is supposed to be New York but very much isn’t, even in skyline shots— she’s persuaded to keep in touch with the spirit of John through conversation.
She takes this to mean that she should text her deepest personal thoughts and sadness to his old phone number, a move that shows wild disregard for how phone systems and time work. As this is a movie, there is of course a handsome and similarly heartbroken man, Rob (Outlander’s Sam Heughan), on the receiving end of those texts, and he attempts to suss out who is sending him the weirdly personal material on his work phone. The pair eventually meet and bond over their shared love of Air Jordans (ugh), and Rob of course withholds how he knew to go looking for her. That turns out to bite him in the ass, but not until the pair fall in love thanks to an ongoing work assignment for Heughan’s character involving Celine Dion, who plays herself—weirdo quirks and all—and is the best part of the movie by far.
Love Again could work, in theory. It’s got a Hallmark-level plot, and in other hands, perhaps the movie could be a little charming. Instead, with Chopra Jonas and Heughan on board, it feels wooden and clunky. Supposedly loving lines have as much upli as a lead balloon, with each of the movie’s attempts at a rom-com trope—dancing in the park, kissing in the snow, a sexy bet on a game of one-on-one basketball—eliciting more groans than actual sentiment. It’s a wild bummer of a movie, one that audiences aren’t apt to fall in love with
any time soon. —MARAH EAKIN PG-13, 104 min. Wide release in theaters
Donna Summer became one of the most iconic recording artists of the 70s and 80s while breaking racial barriers and subverting gender expectations and social norms. But what do we really know about her? What do we really know about anyone in the public eye versus what they want us to believe we know? As Summer (born LaDonna Adrian Gaines) asks in the audio clip that opens Love to Love You, Donna Summer: “I have a secret life. You’re looking at me, but what you see is not what I am. How many roles do I play in my own life?
‘Who is she?’”
In search of the answer, directors Brooklyn Sudano (one of Summer’s daughters) and Roger Ross Williams plumb press snippets, home videos, and archival footage, and conduct intimate conversations with the singer’s family, friends, and colleagues. While some have critiqued the film for skimming much of Summer’s development as a musician and songwriter, including her work with electronic music master Giorgio Moroder (among other chapters), that misses the point; this is a daughter’s exploration of who her mother was at her core, and why she lived her life and made her choices the way she did.
To that extent, Love to Love You paints a vivid picture of a remarkably talented, creative woman on the run from racism, sexism, and an oppressive religious environment. From her singing debut at her family’s church, Summer knew she was destined to be a star, and that knowledge powered her career trajectory from Boston to New York to Europe, returning stateside only a er she helped change the shape of modern music. But fame isn’t depicted as a reward as much as a cross to bear. And all the while, as the film suggests, she struggled with questions of personal identity to the extent that she was o en most comfortable imagining herself in theatrical roles, on and offstage.
Though the chronology is sometimes rocky and some of the performance clips are long enough (or hypnotic enough?) to distract from the narrative, the directors create a touching, thought-provoking, and overwhelmingly human portrait of a fascinating artist.
—JAMIE LUDWIG 107 min. HBO Max vThom Yorke’s soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria is as stark, haunting, and unpredictable as the film itself. On the track “Has Ended,” reverberant drums and bass meld with a meditative tanpura drone and Yorke’s compressed voice, which drifts into the music layered two or three times over. His words are barely distinguishable, as if sung from a great distance through a damp, cavernous hall. Chicago R&B artist Shawnee Dez cites this song—and the rest of Yorke’s soundtrack—as one of the first inspirations for her debut album, Moody Umbra, self-released on April 26.
Dez, 27, says she didn’t intend to replicate the songs’ specific sound, but she felt drawn in by the thorough interconnection between Yorke’s voice and the instrumentation. “I love how the vocals are also being melted into the music,” she explains. “That’s still something that I’m trying to get better at—especially not being a fluent instrumentalist, I think that my voice has been my producer, musician, and instrumentalist power. I’m very intentional about making my voice a part of the music.”
Dez can recall the first moment she pictured a future for herself as a singer and performer. She was six or seven years old, singing along to the song “Understanding” by R&B girl group Xscape and crying as she tried again and again to hit a shooting high note near the end. She cemented that idea in her heart during the year she spent as a freshman at the College of Staten Island—she spent most of her weekends at a neighboring college attended by her best friend, organizing a student-run open mike where she often performed.
After bouncing between schools, Dez landed
back in Chicago at Columbia College, and in 2015 she started performing her own music around the city. She released her first single in 2016, and she’s put out a handful more since then.
Across Moody Umbra , Dez showcases the musical skill of her collaborators while stretching her voice across the totality of its range, from hushed and fluttering to powerful and soaring. Produced by Dez alongside drummer Eddie Burns, the album captures the complicated churning of self-examination, unearthing darkness and fear while still finding moments of playfulness. Opening cut “Awakening” is toiling and frenetic, but “Rinky” taps into a dreamy, summery nostalgia, and “Muah” sweeps in with breezy romance.
Dez tells me she approached the production process by imagining the album as a house, with each song a different room. “How do I create this home that feels like we’re all under the same roof, but we’re experiencing di erent rooms at di erent times?”
Dazzling confidence oozes from Dez’s music (and the accompanying videos, photos, and artwork), but her path to the stage wasn’t always clear. She grew up on the southeast side of Chicago and attended an all-girls Catholic high school before moving to the southwest suburbs and transferring to HomewoodFlossmoor High her senior year. While she always felt a desire to be part of the culture making that buzzed around her, she was quite literally miles away from many of the opportunities she wanted to pursue. Just to be included, she had to muster up her motivation and self-reliance.
During Dez’s senior year, that meant taking
a Metra train after school from HomewoodFlossmoor to downtown Chicago, transferring to the Brown Line, and then riding up to Lincoln Square to participate in an After School Matters film-photography program. She usually didn’t get back home until 9 PM. But in her eyes, it was worth it.
“That was me expanding my world, saying, ‘I’m going to experience all that there is to offer in this city, and I know that my little corner is not the edge of my world,’” she says. “‘It’s not even the tip of the iceberg of the world that I could know.’”
Once Dez began performing around Chicago, she needed time before she really felt enmeshed in the collective care of a creative community. “I think Chicago people are very territorial, and I think it’s a direct response to how segregated our city is,” she says. “And so people are comfortable with people that are from their neighborhood, from their high school. And I think for sure it seeps over into our creative culture.”
Dez also struggled to find collaborators she felt at ease with. No one seemed to care about her work or even respect her as a person. “[I kept] running into issues where people aren’t really listening to you, and they’re hearing you just to get to whatever else they wanna say,” she says.
When she met Burns, she was excited to find a musical chemistry she’d never felt before. They began working together four or five years ago, and in January 2020, they traveled to Colorado with a group of musicians to begin work on Moody Umbra. The plan was to finish the album in a few months and release it that fall, but the arrival of the pandemic wrecked
that schedule. Dez took a job at the Reader in October 2021 (she works as a marketing project strategist), but she couldn’t get her album plan back on the rails till this past year.
Dez’s determination to defy any barrier to realize the dream of her career has carried her all the way to this moment. From the beginning, she’s been her own creative director, promotor, booking agent, and biggest cheerleader. With her debut album, she’s not only created a concrete monument to her years of work in Chicago’s DIY community—she’s also reached the spotlight she’s been yearning for her entire life.
“There was a moment when I was hyping myself up,” Dez recalls. “I was talking to myself in my room the day before the record came out. Just really giving myself energy, saying, ‘Shawnee, you’ve been doing this forever. You’ve been working on this project since you were in third grade. Your whole life, literally up until now, whether it be through creating something or just existing, you’ve been working toward this moment without even knowing it.’”
Despite having endured years of obstacles and uncertainty, Dez isn’t worried about what comes next. To have seen this project to fruition is enough of a dream all by itself. “It’s put me in a place of acceptance where whatever I do create in the future, I just have to show up to it with grace and not be hung up on the big or small successes that it may bring,” Dez says.
“I’m happy that I answered my call to do it, and I’m proud of myself for seeing something from A to fucking Z.” v @wowtashawow
Packed into a garage in Garfield Ridge, Manny Herrera and brothers Jesse and Brian Flores practice for an imminent tour of Mexico by their postpunk band French Police. It’s late March, and their first Mexican date is just days away. It’ll be the Mexican American trio’s fourth tour, and their first outside the States. They’re hitting the road with Closed Tear from Los Angeles and Neue Strassen from Mexico City.
“It feels like more pressure—never did I think I’m going to play in Mexico,” says Brian, 27, the band’s songwriter and vocalist.
Brian founded French Police in 2019 with Jesse and two other players, neither of whom is in the band now. By the time COVID hit, Jesse had left, and lockdown pushed Brian to
dissolve the rest of the group. In April 2021, he started over from scratch, bringing on Herrera as lead guitarist, and seven months later Jesse rejoined his brother. The band posted recordings online and slowly gained traction on social media. Once pandemic restrictions were lifted, they got straight back to gigging.
The pre-COVID version of French Police had been used to drawing crowds of maybe 20 people, but the band’s first show back—a house show a few blocks from the garage where they practice—was totally packed. The trio remember this as a pivotal moment. Immediately afterward, they’d bang out three more shows, rapidly boosting their exposure until they had hundreds if not thousands of fans.
French Police took their first tour in July
2022, hitting 11 cities on the west coast and along the route back. On their three tours that year, they played mostly at midsize venues such as 1720 in Los Angeles and Paper Tiger in San Antonio. In November 2022 they recorded a live-in-the-studio video for Chicago-based music-discovery platform Audiotree, which premiered this spring. French Police now have more than 150,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, including 15,000 in Mexico.
Brian attributes the success of French Police to the changes in their style and sound after their self-titled debut in 2019. “I think the song that defined our sound was ‘Clock Man,’” he says. “Before that, the first album I released, it was totally di erent.”
“Clock Man” appears on the band’s second
release, the 2019 EP Pedaleo Nocturno (“Nocturnal Pedaling”). It was their first to foreground the dark, chilly, melodic postpunk that defines their style today.
Before French Police, Brian and Jesse played in the band Karma Wears White Ties, formed in 2012. Herrera was a fan of their poppy mix of indie rock and new wave, which Coog Radio at the University of Houston described in 2015 as “something between the lines of Two Door Cinema Club and Walk the Moon.” KWWT topped out at more than 15,000 Spotify listeners, but in 2018, Brian dismantled the band, having found himself uninspired and bored. Ready to reinvent his sound and look, Brian began making the music that would become French Police.
When the Mexican American postpunks switched to a stark retro sound, their audience blew up.
trio
play darker and tour bigger
“We’re all good at what we do,” says Herrera, 25. “And we all kind of get along in the same way.” The trio’s stage presence is rhythmically synchronized, and the crowd mirrors that energy. All three members wear shades and mostly black, and even though Brian hardly ever addresses the audience, it remains completely enthralled.
French Police’s sound encapsulates several flavors of 80s nostalgia, combining dreamwave with Russian postpunk. Jesse, 25, the trio’s bassist, takes credit for introducing Brian to current Russian bands such as the duo Buerak, which Afisha magazine called a key group of the “new Russian wave.”
“When I ended Karma, I really started going into a darker sound with this one band called Hawaiian Gremlins,” says Brian, referring to a trio from Mexico City. “More darker moody shit.” He’s also a fan of Spanish electro-pop band El Último Vecino.
“[The songs] pull from a lot of different sounds, a lot of different things into one,” Brian says. “Every time we release a new album, it’s kind of slightly different. I think that’s why we have such a broad audience.”
Part of the band’s reach can be attributed to their Spanglish lyrics. French Police’s latest album, the February 2023 release Bleu , features three Spanish songs: “American Thick,” “Diet Coke,” and “Dónde Está Daniel.” Some of the band’s top-performing tracks on Apple Music are also in Spanish, including “En la Noche,” “Hidalgo,” and “Club de Vampiros.”
The band’s Mexican roots made their tour of Mexico even more special. The last time any of them had gone back was more than five years ago, to visit family. “The fans are more passionate,” says Brian. “All the fans knew all the words, and they were just singing over me the whole time. So I didn’t really have to worry
about singing.”
French Police played in Mexico City, Querétaro, and Guadalajara. They had the most fun (and the most interactive crowd) in Mexico City, Brian says, and the tour was a success in part because they did it alongside Closed Tear.
“That’s our boy—known him for like two years already,” Brian explains. “We always love playing with him. It’s kind of just like friends hanging out, and then we just play, you know?”
French Police are planning their first North American tour for this fall. Previously they’ve hit specific regions of the U.S. (the west-coast tour in summer 2022, followed by six eastcoast dates that fall and five stops in Texas in the winter), but this will be their first experience heading coast to coast. They’re nervous about taking on larger venues and new cities, but they also feel a lot of pride in the hard work they’ve put in.
Brian quit his job as a screen-printing technician more than a year ago, and he’s made the band his full-time gig. “I think it’s cool to say, ‘This is what I do. I worked hard at it for many years, and then finally I can live o of it.’ Right? That’s the coolest part about it,” he says. “You kind of have to take risks. If you’re gonna move ahead, you can’t care about money too much. You got to just do it.”
French Police’s North American tour will be more than 20 shows. They’ll play Phoenix and Minneapolis for the first time, and they’re excited to revisit Riverside, California, where they remember having a super engaged audience. Their tourmates will be Closed Tear and another band that’s hit the road with them before, Lesser Care from El Paso, Texas.
Part of the reason French Police stay booked and busy is their management. They signed to
Chicago-based firm Cruel Management in August 2021, becoming its first client. Since then, Cruel has hired more employees and taken on more clients, including Jesse’s band Blood Club in March 2022 and North Carolina house producer Hush Hush in October. Jesse says he’s excited about French Police’s potential, and he hopes they keep growing as fast as they have been.
For Brian, part of the reason he doesn’t say much to the crowds at shows is because he wants to let the songs speak for themselves. “We’re not gonna be up there and talk about my whole life story or anything,” he says. “People are there to see the music.”
“There are so many songs we want to play, so we want to make sure we spend our time playing,” Jesse adds. “Even cutting two songs, we’re like, ‘Oh shit, which ones?’”
French Police will also play the second day of this year’s West Fest, which runs July 7 through July 9 on Chicago between Wood and Damen, with music booked by Empty Bottle Presents. As they reach new markets, expand their fan base across borders, and look forward to their biggest tour yet, the band’s goal is to keep creating.
“I’m not going to stop now, because I didn’t stop back then when nobody listened,” Brian says. “I’m just gonna keep coming out with the best music I can come out with. Just hope that people still fuck with it in five years.”
@Chicago_Reader
His sample-based tracks maintain a connection to the genre’s earliest roots, and now he’s passing along what he knows to the next generation.
By ALEJANDRO HERNANDEZSitting under the warm blue lights of his home studio, Chicago producer Thelonious Martin reflects on his musical influences as he studies a set of shelves completely stacked with obscure vinyl. On the shelves’ top right corner rest thick biographies about two of the greatest innovators in their respective genres: jazz pianist Thelonious Monk and hiphop producer J Dilla.
“Obviously my namesake and a bit of my quirkiness is from Thelonious Monk,” Martin says. “Dilla, Madlib, Alchemist, Just Blaze, Pete Rock—you know, the run-of-the-mill boom-bap hip-hop-ass producers—are definitely my influences. Shout-out No I.D., Xtreme. I try to wear the lineage of soulful Chicago producers, because I’m really prideful about where we come from. Beyond hip-hop and rap, I love Brazilian bossa nova and jazz like João Gilberto, and one day I’ll make a Brazilian-inspired jazz record. Even my boy Topaz Jones is an inspiration for me—that’s
my brother.”
In a way, Jones is where Thelonious Martin’s story begins. Before Martin became one of Chicago’s most respected current producers, before he collaborated over the past nine years with contemporary legends such as Curren$y, G Herbo, and the late Mac Miller, before he made his formal recorded debut with the 2014 release Wünderkid, his musical origin story began when he was a teenager in Montclair, New Jersey. Martin, now 30, split his childhood between the Garden State and the Windy City, and he made his first beat in the late 2000s by sampling a Bobby Womack record on his MacBook at the New Jersey home of close friend and fellow artist Topaz Jones.
Martin came up at a pivotal time and place, between 2012 and 2015 and mostly in Chicago—his formative years overlapped with the back half of the blog era, when underground and independent hip-hop thrived on the In-
ternet thanks to grassroots-powered outlets such as Fake Shore Drive, 2DopeBoyz, and NahRight. Artists and fans alike were able to connect personally on message boards. A young Martin sharpened his sword making beats for an array of artists that now reads like the top of the bill at a hip-hop festival: not just Mac Miller, Herbo, and Curren$y but also Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, Joey Purp, Joey Bada$$, Ab-Soul, RetcH, A$AP Rocky, and more.
They say a true master is an eternal student of his craft, though, and King Thelonious is still sharpening that sword today. In April he dropped the fourth installment in a series of 2023 beat tapes called Season 1 —this one is of course subtitled Episode 4. And last week he dropped a collab with Brooklyn-based underground rapper Radamiz called 2409 West Slauson. Martin says he’s always eager to work with anyone he thinks makes dope music, regardless of how popular they are.
“This year I got new equipment, so I’m tryna put myself in the mind state I was in college,” he says. “I used to make five, ten beats a day and worked relentlessly, but I kind of burned myself out after Wünderkid.” That new gear has changed Martin’s workflow, he explains, making him more efficient. “It’s like go time for me,” he says. “So I’ve been making five beats a day, Monday through Friday. I realized I can make a beat tape a month.”
The title of this series (along with those of many of his other solo projects) is inspired by the omnipresence of TV in our lives. He specifically credits the influence of Toonami, Cartoon Network’s late-night anime-centric programming block, where he was introduced to the iconic soundtracks of shows such as Samurai Champloo, Cowboy Bebop, Gundam Wing, and Inuyasha
“I feel like Toonami really opened up a lot for a lot of people, in terms of just viewing different stu ,” Martin says. Television can bleed into his creative process, he says, especially if he leaves a show going on in the background while he’s working. “It leads to wanting to make stu that’s cinematic or as beautiful as some of the scenes you’re watching.”
Martin compares his creative process to the way a Michelin-starred chef prepares something magical from the simplest ingredients by mastering complex techniques. His search for the rarest raw materials takes many forms—he might happen to have a “Japanese record no one knows about,” he says, or he’ll pore through blogs and online databases looking for artist credits on tracks he knows so he can find other music they helped record. He likes to look up his discoveries on YouTube and then make playlists he can download with an app.
No matter how Martin acquires the building blocks for his tracks, he subjects them to the same treatment: he slices and chops them into samples that create the cinematic moments in his tracks. He describes this process of seeking out music to make music as an endless loop, like the sampled loops he uses to build his beats.
Martin continues to see great promise in Chicago’s hip-hop community, and he wants to help nurture its future. In other words, it’s time for the master to pass along his lifetime’s worth of wisdom and experience.
When I ask Martin what he’s proud of doing, he mentions that he recently spoke to a Columbia College class taught by Alex Fruchter, aka DJ RTC. “I’ve spoken in his class before, but this time I really took the moment to reflect, like, ‘I was once those kids in that class,’” he says. “I try to think of ‘What would 19-year-old Thelo want from that situation?’ I try to give as much as I can—that’s how you live longer in terms of this music stu . A lot of people live closehanded. I’m a firm believer that if you share the recipes, people remember you a lot better. If you get closehanded, you can’t receive no blessings. You’re openhanded, you can’t do nothing but catch them.”
Photos by ThoughtPoet of Unsocial Aesthetics (UAES), a digital creative studio and resource collective designed to elevate communitydriven storytelling and social activism in Chicago and beyond.
Thelonious Martin in his home studio, where he says that lately he’s been making fi ve beats a day, fi ve days a week THOUGHTPOET
Iam the editor, publisher, and owner of 5 Magazine , which is a house-music-slashdance-music magazine. It was “house,” but all the classifications have broadened, so it’s “dance music.” We’re going on 18 years in August. It was a print magazine for the first 13 years. It was a monthly, and then it became a digital twice-a-month [publication], because print was losing its pizzazz. I sometimes dance—I had a dance company for many years—so once in a while we’ll do some shows, but not so much. I have a new show coming up called Cz’s House, which will be on YouTube. I DJ around the city; I throw parties. That’s about it.
I went to NU. Did the whole acting thing for a while, and when I decided I wasn’t gonna go to LA and try to pursue the acting thing, I decided to take my dancing more seriously. I was dancing with the Joel Hall Dancers.
My mom always listened to disco in the Philippines—that’s where I grew up. When I was training at Joel Hall Dancers as a dancer, Joel Hall was a big house fan. He loved Frankie Knuckles. Everything was house music in all of our dance classes, so he really bred that in us. Like, every day—whether it was jazz or ballet or modern—always house. So that’s what I got interested in. I danced for him; I danced for other dancers, other choreographers; I started my own dance company.
In 2005, Czarina Mirani launched 5 Magazine to spread the word about the house-music scene she loves so much. Along with managing editor Terry Matthew and a pool of contributors, Mirani has published indispensable documentation of Chicago’s house history, including interviews with key players such as Frankie Knuckles, Paul Johnson, and Phuture’s DJ Pierre. Whenever I set out to write about
Chicago house, I usually start my research on the 5 Mag website.
Mirani moved to the Chicago area from the Philippines to attend Northwestern University, graduating in 1993. She didn’t come here to launch a magazine, but because she’s a lifelong dancer, she ended up making a crucial contribution to house-music culture. She studied dance in school and founded
the dance company Fivestar Boogie Productions, and ever since her undergrad years she’s been drawn to house music’s irresistible groove. Mirani not only publishes about dance music, she also practices it: she’s been DJing under the name Czboogie for more than a decade. She’ll spin at Smart Bar on Saturday, May 20, as part of a 5 Magazine party.
I did that for a long time, went to a lot of clubs, and was always on the dance floor. I was that girl who didn’t know the name of the song. I didn’t know any of the DJs; I wasn’t part of any cliques. I was just dancing. Then, eventually, in 2005, my business partner and I were like, “Well, why don’t we start a magazine?” He’s like, “You’re always going out; you’re always partying. Maybe we can do something with that.” That’s how it started. It was a ragtag crew of house fans that started it. If you look at the old 5s, they look like college zines.
We didn’t see any house-music magazines. You know when you go to Barnes & Noble,
“A er the first couple years, everybody saw that our intentions were pure. We just wanted to highlight and document all these wonderful DJs—I just really, really did love the music.”
As told to LEOR GALIL5 MAGAZINE PRESENTS TONY HUMPHRIES, CZBOOGIE, AND TOMMASO Sat 5/20, 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $20, $15 in advance, 21+
you get all the music magazines— DJ Mag , Mixmag, XLR8R, right? All that stu . But I just wanted something for Chicago. Honestly, it was just kind of a general idea: “Let’s feature Chicago house,” or “just house.”
It started out, for us, with doing a lot of the Chicago people, because it’s important, right? Chicago is the foundation of house. So we hit up all of those guys first—we wanted to give them their dues—you know, the Steve Hurleys, the Farleys, the Frankie Knuckles. Then it just kind of morphed.
It’s funny, because I didn’t know anybody. I’m from the Philippines, so I didn’t know until later on [that people in the scene] were like, “Who is that girl from the Philippines trying to write about Chicago house? Who does she think she is?” I didn’t realize that there was a lot of gatekeeping. I think eventually, after the first couple years, everybody saw that our intentions were pure. We just wanted to highlight and document all these wonderful DJs—I just really, really did love the music. I know that sounds so cheesy, but I was like, “Hey Terry, it would be so cool to write about them—write about my heroes.” And that’s what we did.
So now, it’s kind of become its own beast. Now it’s international. We’ve featured all these Chicago artists, so we’ve gotten into more esoteric kinds of music too. It’s not just house. It’s trip-hop, garage, techno, all that kind of stu . Downtempo.
I grew up in Manila. My dad’s East Indian; my mom is Filipina. I wanted to be a movie star, honestly. I went to Northwestern to study theater—that was originally my dream. But I just love music too much, and I really love to dance. The dancing brought me into the house community. Eventually, at some point, I learned how to DJ, and I still throw parties, so it’s all full circle. It’s good to be able to hit all the facets of the community, whether it’s community outreach, or DJing, dancing, throwing parties, or being on panels and spreading the word, or obviously journalism. It’s good to be able to do all of it at
some point.
At some point, after interviewing DJs for so many years, you’re gonna get curious. I ventured into it with lots of trepidation. I started DJing in 2010. You know, there’s gonna be the eye rolls, right? “Oh, someone’s gotta DJ.” There was also gatekeeping in there, so I kinda was like, “Ah, I’m gonna change my name. I don’t want people to know I’m DJing.” I’m just really fascinated by the actual art of DJing— how do you do it? I didn’t expect to DJ out; I just wanted to learn the skill. But, you know, things happen, and now I love it.
My DJ debut was my birthday party. It was at Betty’s Blue Star. Oh, it was a disaster, but it was fun! I’m always nervous when I DJ, still. But it’s a gift, to be able to DJ to people.
I love the music. My ideal is to be able to play exactly what I want to play. Every party is di erent. You might be playing on the south side, and you kinda have to stick to classics. Or maybe you’re gonna play for a younger crowd—you might have to play a little bit harder.
I always talk about this, but Frankie Knuckles, Ron Carroll, and Steve Hurley, those were
the first [to get behind 5 ]. I’ll never forget Frankie Knuckles—he was really one of the first to actually accept 5 Mag within the first year. That’s when [Knuckles’s team] bought advertising. They let me interview him, so that’s a big deal.
We’ve been around for so long, and we’ve covered everybody. Or tried to cover as much of everybody. I mean, how much do most publications that start last?
What keeps me motivated, actually, is seeing all the young collectives that are burgeoning here in Chicago. There are so many young groups of people—and when I mean groups, like, collectives—and they’re doing amazing stuff with house music. It’s a little bit different, the way they play it, the way they present it, and they’re in all these little bars and new venues. So I love watching them, and I’m really inspired by them. It’s great to honor classic Chicago house, but I am absolutely floored by all the new groups of people that are doing their own way of presenting house.
@imLeor
Amy Ray Band
with
THURSDAY, MAY 18 8PM
Sondre Lerche In Maurer Hall
FRIDAY, MAY 19 7:30PM
Hall
Partha Bose (sitar) and Indranil Malick (tabla)
String Meets Skin - Classical Music from India In Szold Hall
FRIDAY, MAY 19 8PM
SATURDAY, MAY 20 8PM SOLD OUT!
Alejandro Escovedo
with special guest Nicholas Tremulis In Maurer Hall
SATURDAY, MAY 20 8PM
Tracy Grammer
with special guest Heather Styka • In Szold Hall
SUNDAY, MAY 21 7PM
Carrie Newcomer
with special guest Mike Green • In Szold Hall
FRIDAY, MAY 26 8PM
Willie Watson In Maurer Hall
SUNDAY, MAY 28 4:30PM
National Tap Day with Reggio "The Hoofer" McLaughlin In Maurer Hall
SATURDAY, JUNE 3 8PM
Junior Brown In Maurer Hall
FRIDAY, JUNE 9 8PM
Gary Louris (of The Jayhawks) In Maurer Hall
THE
A group of white kids from the west side ran with the innovations of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and other Black New Orleans transplants.
By STEVE KRAKOWSince 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
In nearly 20 years of writing the Secret History of Chicago Music, I’ve never tackled prewar jazz. The Windy City has been an important center for bebop and avant-garde jazz, and it was also a major player in jazz’s early history. The “Chicago style” has meant different things to different jazz musicians over the decades, but in the 1910s and ’20s, it meant a heavy New Orleans influence. The Crescent City’s “Dixieland” sound had evolved from ragtime, blues, and local marching-band traditions, among other things, and when it arrived in Chicago, its characteristic smallgroup collective improvisation got faster and showier.
This “hot” style was in large part developed and popularized in south-side dance halls and
cabarets by Black musicians from New Orleans. They included some of the most famous and influential figures in the history of jazz:
Louis Armstrong arrived in Chicago in 1922 and spent most of the decade in the city, Jelly Roll Morton lived here in the mid-teens and mid-’20s, and King Oliver first moved to Chicago in 1918. Exciting sounds imported from
New Orleans also inspired a group of white middle-class teenagers on the far west side. The Austin High Gang, as they’re often known, aren’t as well remembered as these giants, but they helped create the foundations of Chicago jazz.
Traditional New Orleans jazz combos employed violin, trumpet, clarinet, and trombone
on the front line, though as volume levels rose in the 1910s, violins fell out of favor. The rhythm section might include drum kit, piano, guitar or banjo, and bass or tuba. In the 1920s, saxophones entered the picture in a big way, and improvised solos became popular—you can hear the latter development in recordings from famous groups of the time, among them
Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band and Armstrong’s Hot Five.
In 1922, a kid named Jimmy McPartland used to hang out with his friends at an ice cream parlor across the street from Austin High School. He’d been playing the violin since he was five and would soon take up cornet. “Every day after school, Frank Teschemacher and Bud Freeman, Jim Lanigan, my brother Dick, myself, and a few others used to go to a little place called the Spoon and Straw,” Jimmy McPartland told Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff for their 1955 book Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It. “You’d get a malted milk, soda, shakes, and all that stu . But they had a Victrola there, and we used to sit around listening to the bunch of records laid on the table.”
One day those records included new sides by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, a white band working in Chicago that had been founded by Crescent City expats looking for better gigs (and whose lineup also included local players). When the Original Dixieland Jazz Band released the first jazz recordings in 1917, they’d been marketed as novelties, but the New Orleans Rhythm Kings made it clear that they considered their music a legitimate genre, not a fad.
In the 1920s, the recording industry was still new, and broadcast radio was even newer. Much of society considered jazz “the devil’s music,” but teenagers have always loved to dance—and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings had a seismic impact on the Austin High Gang. The Kings would famously record with Jelly Roll Morton for Gennett Records in 1923, but the songs McPartland and his friends fell in love with were cut in 1922.
“I believe the first tune we played was ‘Farewell Blues.’ Boy, when we heard that—I’ll tell you we went out of our mind,” McPartland said. “Everybody flipped. So we put the others on, ‘Tiger Rag,’ ‘Discontented,’ ‘Tin Roof Blues,’ ‘Bugle Call,’ and such titles. We stayed there from about three in the afternoon until eight at night, just listening to those records one after another, over and over again. Right
then and there we decided we would get a band and try to play like these guys.”
The Austin High Gang (or the Austin High School Gang, depending on who’s talking) didn’t necessarily call themselves that—at first they took the name “the Blue Friars” after the Friar’s Inn (60 E. Van Buren), a reputed gangster hangout where the New Orleans Rhythm Kings played. The kids often stood outside to hear the band, since they weren’t old enough to get in.
In the gang’s early configurations, McPartland played cornet, his brother Dick played banjo and guitar, Bud Freeman played Cmelody saxophone, Frank Teschemacher played alto sax, and Jim Lanigan played piano or drums. (Later Teschemacher would acquire a clarinet, and Lanigan soon switched to tuba and bass.) Of the five, only Freeman didn’t also play violin. Eventually the group grew to include drummer Dave Tough (from Oak Park High School), trombonist Floyd O’Brien, and pianist Dave North.
The young musicians couldn’t read music— as McPartland’s future wife, pianist Marian McPartland, would later recall, their attitude was “if you read music, you’re not a jazz player.” They learned tunes by ear, beginning with “Farewell Blues,” and played wherever they could, mostly at high school fraternity parties and afternoon “tea dances.”
In 1923, Freeman and the McPartland brothers saw Louis Armstrong play with King Oliver at Lincoln Gardens on the south side. “I knew at once I was hearing a master,” Freeman is quoted as saying on a page maintained by Stanford University. “Louis was the great American voice—a genius—and his guide and idol was King Oliver, and nothing would ever be the same again.”
Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke, who’d guested with the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, wasn’t much older than the Austin High Gang, but he was well ahead of them musically—he was on his way to becoming one of the most influential jazz soloists of the 1920s, and the gang idolized him. While Beiderbecke was gigging as the star soloist of a “territory band” called
the Wolverines, he used a night off to take Freeman and Teschemacher to see clarinetist Jimmie Noone and his combo play with Bessie Smith. “She had the most fantastic voice I’ve ever heard,” Freeman said. “From then on, I bought every Bessie Smith record I could find.”
Beiderbecke also took Jimmy McPartland under his wing. As Marian McPartland recalled, “Jimmy just loved it when Bix said to him, ‘I like you, kid. You play like me, but you don’t copy me.’” She also remembers hearing about Bix buying her future husband a new cornet, because at that point McPartland was still scrambling for money.
Beiderbecke helped McPartland get a gig as his replacement in the Wolverines when he left the band in 1924. McPartland recruited other members of the Austin High Gang into the band, but that arrangement only lasted a couple years. It’s hard to say exactly what became of the group they were playing in, because promoter Husk O’Hare had bought the rights to the name and maintained several simultaneous bands called the Wolverines in the late 20s to capitalize on the popularity of the original.
In 1927, four members of the Austin High Gang cut the sides that would properly launch their careers—and the sessions for those two 78s, released by Okeh in 1928, seem likely to be the only time such a large contingent of the original group ever recorded together.
Banjo player, guitarist, pianist, singer, and bandleader Eddie Condon, a contemporary of the gang and equally important to early Chicago jazz, assembled a band called McKenzie and Condon’s Chicagoans. Sponsored by singer and comb player Red McKenzie, the group included McPartland, Freeman, Teschemacher, and Lanigan, plus Condon on banjo, Mezz Mezzrow on cymbals, Joe Sullivan on piano, and (most famously) Gene Krupa on drums. The four songs they released became popular enough that their version of the standard “Nobody’s Sweetheart” was reissued in 1930 as part of a Parlophone split with Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra. These celebrated sides have appeared on numerous LP and CD
compilations since.
This success e ectively dissolved the Austin High Gang, insofar as they were still a coherent group—but only because the members separately started landing higher-profile gigs, mostly in New York City. Condon also went on to have an impressive career, and he’d often hire his old Chicago cohorts—Freeman wrote Condon’s hot 1934 single “The Eel,” for instance, and played a swinging and muchbeloved solo on the tune. In 1956, Condon closed another circle by recording the live album At Newport with Louis Armstrong.
On and o from the late 1920s till the late ’30s, Freeman and Tough’s wide-ranging careers would include gigs and recording sessions with big bands led by Tommy Dorsey and Benny Goodman. During that era, Freeman and Coleman Hawkins could arguably be said to have represented the two main schools of tenor saxophone in jazz—and in 1957 they were paired on the Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart LP The Big Challenge.
Freeman returned to Chicago in 1981, where he wrote his autobiography and led beloved ensembles locally. McPartland also enjoyed a long and celebrated career, and Teschemacher (who died in a car crash in 1932) retains a reputation as a groundbreaking player.
When Freeman passed away in 1991, critic John Litweiler (who’d recently finished an 11year tenure as director of the Jazz Institute of Chicago) eulogized him for the Reader. He also nodded to the Austin High Gang, describing one of the ways their legacy extended beyond the musical. “In the heyday of the first Chicago school, Freeman and his friends were an important bridge between early jazz and the swing era,” he wrote. “Along with their slightly older friend, cornetist Beiderbecke, they were the source of many of their era’s romantic attitudes about jazz: jazz is liberation, jazz is honesty, jazz is social protest.”
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen.
Y La Bamba See Pick of the Week at le . Daniel Villareal opens. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20. 21+
Pinksqueeze Abject Horror and Cloud Houses open. 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, $18.54. b
Chicago four-piece Pinksqueeze should be in the rotation of any local indie-rock connoisseur, and not just because of their skill with their instruments. Sure, these twentysomethings play with the confidence of seasoned veterans who’ve been gigging since before they were born. And sure, their musical chemistry gives an affable warmth to everything they play, whether it’s a quiet, tender passage or a big, reach-for-the-stars chorus. (Full disclosure: Bassist Anna White is a pal and an occasional Reader contributor.) But more than anything else, I like Pinksqueeze because of their blunt, playful irreverence, which they use to poke fun at a style of music with a reputation for self-seriousness. The punky, gnashing “WTF Is Bubblegrunge” mocks the sexist structures of canonization that have warped pop history, which would have the public believe that only white men make important music. The band also catalog the sexism they’ve faced in the male-dominated ecosystem of live music, skewering this depressingly routine buffoonery with thoughtful, thorough lyrics delivered in clipped but often exasperated talk-singing. “WTF Is Bubblegrunge” appears on the group’s new self-released debut album, Be Gay Have Fun , and their wry humor makes their criticism of gender norms (and the vision of contemporary young queerness it implies) even more effective. Pinksqueeze prove that defying the indie-rock status quo won’t keep you from making joyous, irresistible music—in fact, it might be a prerequisite.
—LEOR GALILTHE FIRST SONG I heard from Y La Bamba was the title track from 2016’s tender and expansive Ojos del Sol . The music had a transformative quality that made it feel at once like the nostalgia of returning home and an imagined comfort yet to come. Singer-songwriter and guitarist Luz Elena Mendoza Ramos, the leader of Y La Bamba, continues that wondrous world making on the new album Lucha, which came out last month via Oregon label Tender Loving Empire. The album’s title— an endearing nickname for the artist that also translates to “fight” or “struggle”—encapsulates the dichotomy of ease and hardship in its songs.
Written and recorded during a fraught time in Mendoza Ramos’s life, Lucha is a brave and electric endeavor that hurtles across time and space, chronicling loneliness, ancestral trauma, and grief as well as honoring the enduring power of self-healing and familial bonds. “Eight”
opens the album with gently strummed guitar, piano, woodwinds, and Mendoza Ramos’s signature compressed vocal, which is layered over itself in hushed, heartbreaking, dreamlike harmonies. On “Collapse,” sunny, rhythmic guitar meshes with a catchy vocal hook and a smooth bass line for an undeniably danceable and confident tune.
Mendoza Ramos imbues Lucha with pride for their Chicanx heritage and an unyielding reserve of self-protection, in the process shining a light on a lifetime’s worth of personal growth and understanding. They close the album with the sweet, psychedelic “Walk Along,” the first song they’ve written about a romantic relationship with a woman. They repeat the line “Something tells me that I’m falling for you” in loping echoes over sweeping saxophone into a slow fade-out—a finale that sounds like a celebratory ode to vulnerability and the shimmering swell of new queer love. —TASHA VIETS-VANLEAR
Kayo Khaliyah X headlines; Senite and Kayo open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport. 21+ F
If you like hip-hop that foregrounds reflective lyrics, sumptuous production, and a heady mix of youthful optimism and ambition, Kayo may be your new favorite emerging rapper. On his debut full-length, January’s It Was Fun While It Lasted (released via Kayo’s label and streetwear company, Southside Blue Hearts), he raps over relaxed beats built from dulcet keyboard melodies and spacious percussion. The music’s magnetic pull begins even before his rapping does—any one of these songs can hook me in just a few seconds. The arrangements are lush but not overbearing, and they feel carefully constructed to focus attention on Kayo’s understated, nimble performances. Kayo delivers his verses with nurturing warmth, as if he’s wrapping them in blankets, but every word still comes through clearly, so that the details can stick to your brain. Kayo’s friend-
ly, easygoing demeanor also makes it easy to follow along with him when his lyrics take a big swing with an eye on the bleachers. On “Still Running,” he details his past challenges and big dreams, frequently leaping in time by more than a decade, and his storytelling is so vivid that you’ll feel like you’ve experienced his lifelong journey to the mike with him. Once you finish It Was Fun While It Lasted , you’ll want to know where that journey takes Kayo next.
—LEOR GALILMareux Cold Gawd opens. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $20, $18 in advance. 18+
Mareux is the project of Los Angeles producer and vocalist Aryan Ashtiani, whose music incorporates postpunk, goth, and the European electronic styles he heard via Polish MTV during his summers in Iran as a youth. Mareux’s 2013 debut, the foursong EP Decade , is full of sun-flecked synth-pop that mixes bouncy moods with its wistfulness, but he’s since drifted away from colors toward a palette of whites and grays. His beat-driven 2015 take on the Cure’s “The Perfect Girl” earned him buzz in the international darkwave scene, and his 2020 EP Predestiny trades much of Decade’s nostalgic imagery for atmospheres more suited to subterranean dance floors, with warped coldwave melodies, gritty industrial beats, and occasional vampiric vocals. By then, Ashtiani told VoyageLA in a 2020 interview, he was working as an EMT, with a dream of becoming a physician assistant focusing on underserved communities. I don’t know whether Ashtiani ever reached that goal, but his creative life has blossomed. “The Perfect Girl” found new fans via TikTok, and Ashtiana capitalized on that virality with a 2022 music video for the track that stars RuPaul’s Drag Race winner Violet Chachki. Last year he collaborated with LA guitarist and songwriter Zzzahara on cinematic pop gem “Bulletproof.” Despite the sadness in Mareux’s music, 2023 has been brighter still: a er introducing mainstream audiences to his gloomy romanticism at this year’s Coachella, Ashanti has kicked off a U.S. tour in support of his first fulllength, Lovers From the Past (Revolution/Warner). The compact record mixes tried-and-true coldwave (notably its title track) with a couple of idiosyncratic stunners, including the ethereal “Glass” (a collaboration with King Woman singer and producer Kristina Esfandiari) and the lush, melodic “Hurt.” This Lincoln Hall show should leave the crowd yearning for love and connection—and perhaps for one more gothic a erparty at the legendary Neo, which was once just blocks away. —JAMIE
LUDWIGGiant Swan Fetter and RXM Reality open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $15. 21+
Since the 2010s, a crop of artists have shi ed and contorted electronic dance music into new levels of aggression and experimentation, challenging as well as rewarding their listeners. Bristol duo Giant Swan, who create raw and pummeling indus-
trial techno with meticulous attention to detail, are at the vanguard of this sound. They collide clattering synths and screeching, slamming beats with dense, overwhelming textures, but the energy of their music ensures that even its noisiest and most terrifying moments feel like a great time. The duo’s influences include the late Jah Shaka’s bone-rattling dub sound system, Lightning Bolt’s primordial noise-punk chaos, and the industrial techno of pioneers such as Regis and Surgeon. Some commentators simply call the end result “techno punk,” but it’s more accurate to describe it as high-octane techno that revels in punk’s reckless energy.
On Giant Swan’s latest release, a five-track EP Fantasy Food , they push their propulsive beats to the forefront of their frantic sound. Standout track “Abacuses” centers a pulsating techno beat, with turbulent, frenetic synths dancing around the periphery. On closer “RRR+1,” the duo adorn an unrelenting beat with their characteristic choppedup vocal samples. Fantasy Food leaves you feeling out of breath in the best sense—its sweeping tornado of texture and rhythm is among the very best that contemporary techno has to offer.
Martin Dupont Beau Wanzer and Justin Carver open. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $26, $21 in advance. 18+
Martin Dupont was one of the most enigmatic and exhilarating coldwave bands of the 1980s. The group was founded in 1980 in Marseille, France, by songwriter and bassist Alain Seghir, who wanted to explore new wave a er spending time in rock and jazz bands. Over the next few years he linked up with several musically adventurous artists, including Brigitte Balian, Beverley Jane Crew, and Catherine Loy, to create sprawling tracks suffused with a haunted, kinetic energy. Martin Dupont’s 1984 debut album, Just Because (Facteurs d’Ambiance), showcases their frenetic songwriting. Synth melodies weave dizzyingly in and out of “Sticks in My Brain” as band members trade off vocal lines stacked with bratty yelps and paranoid warbles. On tracks such as “Willy Nilly,” they push their experiments even further, manipulating vocals to the point of cartoonish absurdity.
The band refined their approach on their next two albums, 1985’s Sleep Is a Luxury and 1987’s Hot Paradox . The Sleep song “I Met the Beast” melds needling guitars and eerie synth melodies in a consummate gothic reverie. On “My Analyst Assez” from Hot Paradox , the band layer cryptic, distorted synths and rupture them with Crew’s clarinet; on “He Saw the Light” they deliver warped, allconsuming freestyle.
Martin Dupont disbanded in the late 80s, but they re-formed last year and began playing shows again in early 2023. On their new comeback album, Kintsugi (Minimal Wave), they reconstruct songs from throughout their discography. Inspired by the titular art form—the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with metal dust— the band brought their classic works into a new era by linking with Sandy Casado and Thierry Sintoni, both of French goth trio Rise and Fall of a Decade. That reinvention is clear from opener “Bent at the Window,” which transforms the homespun original into a massive track with choral vocals and string
arrangements. This month Martin Dupont make their first U.S. tour with a fleshed-out lineup that includes Casado, Sintoni, and French musician Ollivier Leroy. Their stop at Metro will allow generations of fans to experience their coldwave brilliance firsthand. —JOSHUA
MINSOO KIMBollweevils The Dopamines and the Reaganomics open. 8 PM, Chop Shop, 2033 W. North, $22.22. 18+
It feels like a lifetime since Chicago pop-punk veterans the Bollweevils have put out an album. They formed in 1989, and unless you count a posthumous compilation, they haven’t released a full-length since 1996—that one was Weevilive, a live recording of a Metro set from the previous year. The group went dormant a er a final show in ’97 so front man Daryl Wilson could focus on his career as a doctor. (He currently works in the emergency department at Edward Hospital in Naperville.) Wilson has found a way to balance a life in medicine with the pursuit of music, and the band have been increasingly active since they began reuniting in the 2000s, first for a WLUW show at Metro in 2003 and then for a couple Riot Fest dates in 2006. This month they released the long-in-the-works Essential (Red Scare Industries), and its tight, vigorous performances make a strong argument for more frequent Bollweevils albums. The band’s four members are locked in together on these tidy recordings, and their collective action underlines one of the album’s main themes: communal interdependence and unity. The value of those ideas comes across most clearly on the soaring “Galt’s Gulch,” via a satire of rugged
individualism from the perspective of an Ayn Rand stan. With the passage of the years, Wilson’s angsty bark has acquired a honeyed softness around its edges, and his blunt delivery meshes perfectly with the sugary jolt of the band’s swinging gallop. Most impressive, the Bollweevils have found a way to age gracefully in pop punk. They don’t try to pretend they aren’t getting older—the last song on Essential is called “Liniment and Tonic”—but they’ve retained the urgent ferocity that made them a phenomenon in the first place. —LEOR GALIL
Tinariwen 8 PM, Old Town School of Folk Music, Maurer Hall, 4544 N. Lincoln, sold out. b
In 2017, Reader critic Peter Margasak noted Tinariwen’s recurring practice of featuring rock musicians as guests on their records. Their new album, Amatssou , doesn’t change that approach, but it perfects it. Originally, the long-running ensemble of Tuareg musicians (also known as Kel Tamasheq, meaning speakers of Tamasheq) intended to make the album at Jack White’s private studio in Nashville, but COVID issues scotched that plan. Instead, recording took place on three continents. From one record or tour to the next, Tinariwen reconfigure their lineup around the core of singer-guitarists Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, Touhami Ag Alhassane, and Abdallah Ag Alhouseyni, and for Amatssou a six-member edition of the band laid down tracks in a temporary studio set up in a tent at an Algerian oasis. Percussionist Amar Chaoui added hand drums in Paris, country-and-western session veterans Wes Corbett and Fats Kaplin contributed from Nashville, and producer Daniel Lanois—who’s also worked with Brian Eno, Bob Dylan, and Emmylou Harris—added final touches in Los Angeles.
The cantering banjo, swooping pedal steel, and Lanois’s trademark ambience complement the
songs without overwhelming their bluesy vibe. The production draws out layers of percussion— hand claps, calabashes, dumbeks—to provide a more detailed rhythmic foundation for Tinariwen’s weaving, open-ended guitars and assertively conversational bass lines. But their songs, sung in Tamasheq, continue to address Tinariwen’s eternal theme of cultural survival. During the band’s lifetime, the Tuareg people have faced off against the Malian and Nigerien governments, climate change, and most recently, Islamist insurgents from abroad and nearby. The anthemic “Anemouhagh’’ calls out for pan-Tuareg unity, while “Iket Adjen’’ recounts the confusion and distrust that must be overcome for such a unification to take place. This Old Town School of Folk Music show opens the band’s eightdate American tour. It’s sold out, but you can sign up on the venue’s site to join the waiting list for any tickets that become available before showtime.
—BILL MEYERhere. In a January interview with Paper, she admitted that while making early single “Me First” she considered quitting music. But with RBDD she hit new peaks while rediscovering her love for her cra .
Born in Little Rock and based in Los Angeles, Faux has found success partially by purposely disconnecting from industry music-making standards and giving herself the space to innovate. She created this well-paced album in Chicago, working alongside brilliant not-so-local musicians TheMIND and Phoelix (they also provide guest vocals on “Past Life,” and Phoelix is her partner) and producers 2forwOyNE and Park Ave. Together, they sculpt a backdrop that’s equal parts thump and think, all while positioning Faux’s growth as a musician front and center. The record also features guests such as Mississippi rapper Big K.R.I.T., Toronto hip-hop artist Jazz Cartier, late great Memphis queen Gangsta Boo, and southern hip-hop pioneer Devin the Dude—who offers a taut, naughty verse that displays he has yet to miss a step in his long career.
Kari
Faux, Real B*tches Don’t Die Drink Sum Wtrkarifaux.bandcamp.com/album/real-b-tches-dontdie
Finally! An album for the real bitches. The ones who let their heart override their wounds and will flash fangs when necessary. This type of R&B- and funktinged, southern-fried hip-hop can’t be duplicated, only demonstrated, and that’s exactly what rapper Kari Faux does on her anthemic new album, Real B*tches Don’t Die
Every artist wants to top their past work, and given the punch of her 2020 release Lowkey Superstar (Deluxe), Faux had a steep climb ahead of her
As a vocalist, Faux knows how to twist a phrase and push an earworm. Her tone is equally fun and “not fucking around with you,” and she knows her pockets; even when she stretches her vocal capabilities, she makes up for any potential shortfall with her charisma and command. Lyrically, she’s at her best on Real B*tches Don’t Die , lobbing callbacks to pop-culture moments and Black southern music’s brightest artists, such as Project Pat and Jermaine Dupri.
On “Money Angels,” Faux douses her lines with humor (“Melodies from heaven / Like Kirk I got the Franklins”) and croons a dreamlike mantra atop a melodic, bass-driven knock. Jazz Cartier levitates on the track with a nomadic, confident flow, expressing gratitude for being resilient, blessed, and highly favored.
Kari’s words on “Drunk Words Sober Thoughts” are even more potent: “This is for my gangsta bitch-
es that need forehead kisses / Who’s le to pacify themselves whenever the plot gets thickened,” she raps, and “I fear I’m made in my mother’s image.” This track reminds us that even the jokesters most hardened by their paths can also be so , squishy, and self-reflective. Real B*tches Don’t Die is an ode to Faux’s southern roots, a well-rounded win for self-proclaimed underdogs, and a balm for real bitches. It couldn’t have come at a better time.
—CRISTALLE BOWEN
Yakuza, Sutra
Svart yazkua.bandcamp.com/album/sutra
Has it really been more than a decade since Yakuza released an album? Yes it has, and I’m probably not the only Chicago metal fan who feels old about it. When the avant-garde metal outfit first sidled onto the local scene in 1999, they threw down a gauntlet: clarinet and saxophone weren’t o en thought of as metal instruments before Yakuza front man Bruce Lamont demonstrated how it’s done. In hindsight, though, it seems obvious that with the right attitude, bloody-mouthed reeds and circular breathing techniques can be metal as hell.
Yakuza’s new Sutra (Svart) is the band’s seventh studio album and their first since 2012’s monumental Beyul (Profound Lore). Their lineup has stayed mostly the same in the meantime, though bassist Jerome Marshall (Hatemonger, Contrition) replaced Ivan Cruz in 2018. When I asked Lamont what caused the long hiatus, he chalked it up
to “life stuff ”: marriages, children, his own musical wanderlust (he’s put out solo work and records with Brain Tentacles and Corrections House, among others), and of course pandemic-related logistical issues. Whatever the reason, it’s good to have Yakuza back.
Sutra is a commanding return to form. The shivery shuffle of “2is1” makes for a welcoming opening track; it starts with drone and guitar swirl that announce the band’s resurrection with a diabolical grin. The thrilling ripper “Burn Before Reading” breaks apart its own mosh machine with a dreamy interlude—a signature Yakuza rug pull. The band’s sense of pacing and structure will reward you with surprise and delight if you trust them and lean in, and they’ll never let you cruise on autopilot for long. “Walking God” incorporates a sultry, seductive rhythm in its heavy mythic vibe, and if it’s heavy riffi ng you want, “Into Forever” and “Psychic Malaise” have that covered. “Embers” sets a somber gothic tone before ripping into sinister, singsong guitar play. “Echoes From the Sky” is an evocative, picaresque quest through a rapidly changing progressive-metal soundscape bordered by space rock, psychedelia, and cosmic jazz, with reed-andguitar interplay that shows a strong Arabic influence. It’s a reminder of where Yakuza have always excelled, and how they’ve carved out a space for themselves that’s truly distinctive. (It’s probably also the kind of sound that explains the boneheaded refusal of the usually reliable Encyclopaedia Metallum to include them.) I know how quickly time can slip away, but Yakuza’s bottled lightning has a timeless charge.
—MONICA KENDRICK v
OhGeesy 9/29, 7 PM, Avondale Music Hall b
Genesis Owusu 10/13, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+
Will Paquin 8/16, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+
Justin Peters 7/27, 7:30 PM, Comfort Station Fb Pride Fest/Juneteenth Queen! featuring Derrick Carter, Fatherhood, Garrett David, Michael Serafini, Mikey Newson, Miss Twink USA, Rae Chardonnay, Tama Sumo & Lakuti 6/18, 9 PM, Metro and Smart Bar
Pub Choir 9/10, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Quintron & Miss Pussycat 9/15, 9:30 PM, Hideout Rami & the Reliables 8/3, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b
Damien Rice 12/1, 7:30 PM, Auditorium Theatre b
Max Weinberg’s Jukebox
8/10, 7:30 PM, Park West, 18+
Joyce Wrice 6/20, 8 PM, Subterranean, 18+
Yoke Lore, Girlhouse 8/29, 7:30 PM, Metro b
You Me at Six, Mothica, Wolf & Bear 9/26, 6 PM, Metro b
Zebra, Donnie Vie 9/23, 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+
All Time Low, Gym Class Heroes, Grayscale, Lauran Hibberd 9/23, 5:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom b
Ashnikko 9/16, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom b
Bonzie 8/7, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+
Caster Volor, Rebel Queens, Chains Over Razors, Lady Evil 9/2, 8 PM, Reggies
Music Joint
Cheddar, Spike Carter, Wicked Pickle 8/12, 8 PM, Chop Shop
Chicago Video Game Music Festival featuring Knight of the Round, Kingdom of Zeal, Arc Impulse, Playing With Power, Super Guitar Bros, Jer Roque, Natalie Clyne 8/12, 7 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+
Margo Cilker, Christy Hays 10/14, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+
Clem Snide 9/21, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
Coral Moons 8/5, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+
Santiago Cruz 11/7, 7:30 PM, Park West b
Darlingside 10/28, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
Destroy Boys, Gully Boys, Destructo Disk 7/22, 6 PM, Metro b
Russell Dickerson 10/27, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+
McKinley Dixon 9/9, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Every Avenue, SayWeCanFly 7/3, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ 50 Cent, Busta Rhymes, Jeremih 9/16, 7 PM, United Center b
Fueled by Emo; Sugar, We’re a Fall Out Boy Tribute 7/8, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+
G-Eazy 6/15, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+
G Flip 10/13, 7:30 PM, Park West b
Have Mercy, A Will Away 8/13, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+
Hemlock, Waterfall King 8/20, 8 PM, Reggies Music
Joint
Justice Hill & Nighttime
Love, Basic Comfort 9/8, 9:30 PM, Hideout
Hives 11/5, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+
Hoods, Brick by Brick 8/26, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+
Hulvey, Torey D’Shaun 9/6, 7:30 PM, Subterranean b
Krooked Kings 10/5, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b
Lastlings, Running Touch 9/23, 10 PM, Chop Shop, 18+
A Light Sleeper, Planchette 8/6, 4:30 PM, Hideout Local Natives, Halfnoise 9/8, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+
Lojay 7/3, 7 PM, the Promontory b
Bruno Major 9/25, 7:30 PM, the Vic b
Mighty Poplar 9/13, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
My Morning Jacket 11/9-11/11, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre b
Nanna, Indigo Sparke 8/1, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+
Nekrogoblikon, Inferi, Aether Realm, Hunt the Dinosaur 6/2, 6:15 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+
Stevie Nicks 6/23, 7 PM, United Center b
Nocturna 35th Anniversary Celebration featuring Adult. 6/17, 11:30 PM, Metro, 18+
Righteous Babes 8/19, 8 PM, City Winery b Riot Fest featuring Foo Fighters, Turnstile, Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, Queens of the Stone Age, the Cure, Mars Volta, Mr. Bungle, Tegan and Sara, 100 Gecs, Gaslight Anthem, AFI, Death Grips, the Used, Dresden Dolls, Say Anything, 070 Shake, Breeders, Kim Gordon, Viagra Boys, Pup, Interrupters, Silverstein, Insane Clown Posse, Parliament Funkadelic featuring George Clinton, and more 9/15-9/17, 11 AM, Douglass Park b
Rust Ring, Fever Haze, Brady 6/11, 9 PM, Empty Bottle
Skoli & the Faculty, Lexisnothere, Alaska Jules 6/3, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F So & Dumb, Brinstarr, Anita Hart 7/7, 7 PM, Schubas, 18+ Spits 8/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle J.E. Sunde, Anna Vogelzang 7/18, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b
Corey Taylor, Wargasm, Oxymorrons 8/31, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b
Teal Swan 6/10, 7 PM, Comfort Station Fb
Toad the Wet Sprocket, Marcy Playground 6/28, 8 PM, Cahn Auditorium, Evanston b
Shania Twain, Priscilla Block 7/1, 7:30 PM, Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre, Tinley Park b
Violent J, Ouija Macc, Esham 6/2, 7 PM, Chop Shop, 18+
Vive Chihuahua Fest featuring La Fiera de Ojinaga, La Maquinaria Norteña, La Energia Norteña 9/2, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+
Ab-Soul 6/5, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b
Angela Aguilar 6/2, 8 PM, Auditorium Theatre b
Melody Angel 6/6, 8 PM, City Winery b
Big Joanie, Frida Kill 6/2, 10 PM, Empty Bottle
Do Division Street Fest day one with W.I.T.C.H., Jesse Royal, Brainiac, Cowboys, Akasha, Beats y Bateria 6/2, 5:45 PM, Division between Damen and Leavitt b
Do Division Street Fest day two with Bobby Oroza, Cloakroom, Daniel Villarreal Group, Mspaint, Frankie Rose, Dirty Nil, Conjunto Primitivo, Daniel Romano’s Outfit, Big Joanie, SRSQ, Girls Rock! Chicago, Bonzie, School of Rock Chicago
6/3, 1 PM, Division between Damen and Leavitt b
Do Division Street Fest day three with Dan Deacon, Vundabar, Fingy, Sarah & the Sundays, Surprise Chef, Slaps, Glyders, OK Cool, Lauren Early, Nora Marks, Neptune’s Core, School of Rock Chicago West 6/4, noon, Division between Damen and Leavitt b
Evangelia, DJ Pantazi 6/9, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Musa Keys 6/9, 10 PM, the Promontory
Billy Prine & the Prine Time Band, Scarlett Egan 6/7, 7:30 PM, City Winery b
Riopy 6/11, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
Yob, Cave In, Yakuza 6/6, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ v
EVER SINCE singer, producer, and songwriter Krysta Rayford , aka K.Raydio , moved to Chicago from Minneapolis in summer 2022, Gossip Wolf has been on the alert for every bit of her soulful music. She has an endlessly alluring voice, a keen melodic sense, and a knack for beats that combine classic R&B and soul from the past 20 years with splashes of almost avant-garde ingenuity. She’s issued many self-released singles, EPs, and beat tapes since 2010, including a few since arriving here, and last week she dropped the EP Metamorphosis , her most accomplished work yet. Across its six tracks, Rayford escorts her listeners through different phases of her life, sharing her idealistic childhood daydreams and her hardscrabble midwestern work ethic. These gorgeous, generous songs should earn her plenty of fans in her new town.
It’s been almost three years since Angel Bat Dawid and Oui Ennui dropped Message From the Daoui , the spectacular debut from their jazz-rap project Daoui . Earlier this month, though, Oui Ennui uploaded a new Daoui song to his Bandcamp page: the hypnotic “Lil Blk Ass Prince,” originally accompanied by a video installation that reimagines Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince as a Black story. This wolf hopes the duo will perform the song when they open for Brazilian multi-instrumentalist Hermeto Pascoal at Thalia Hall on Tuesday, May 23.
Ever pass the Logan Boulevard Skate Park under the Kennedy and wish you could see punk bands play there? Well, hang onto your butt! On Friday and Saturday, May 19 and 20, local DIY promoter Bumshows presents all-ages punk fest Shred Your Standards at the skate park.
The 15-act bill leans hard on emerging heavy Chicago bands, including Bovice, We Weren’t Invited, and Break the Cycle Shred Your Standards also includes wares from local artists and vintage resellers. Each day runs from 2 PM to 10 PM and costs $15. —J.R.
NELSON AND LEOR GALILGot a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.
JOBS
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NON-RESIDENTIAL PROFESSIONALS & SERVICES
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JOBS
Regional Operational Excellence Director (Nouryon Chemicals LLC, Chicago, IL): Drive & coach sites on prfmnc improvmt; Influence regnl ISCLT on areas of opprtnty & priorztn in-line w/ top-down ISC directn; Assist in settng & drivng to meet site targets for value genrtn; Wrk w/ Dirctrs on sharng best practcs; Srv as Coach & run initiatvs; Ensure implmntn is aligned w/ stndrd prcses; wrk in regn, assist in drivng initiatvs at global loctns; Operate across functnl line to drive change & im e nc at m sites
Bld operatnl excellnc/ continuous improvmt culture; Deploy, lead & dlvr progrms & initiatives w/in ISC; Id improvmt opps & facilitate executn of improvmt w/in sites.
Reqs exp w/: Dsgn & implmnt continuous improvmt progrms for mfg ops; Leadg mfg & prcs improvmt projcts; Adv knowlg of stat anlys (Multi regressn, Prcs Capablty, DOE, Hypothesis Testg, Measurmt Systm Anlys, etc); Adv exp using Minitab, JMP or equiv; Exp idg & dvlpg talent to serve as mfg & supply chain bench; Ablty to communicate & lead at all lvls of org. Reqs BS or frgn equiv in Mech Eng, Chemical Eng, Industrial Eng or rltd fld & 5 yrs exp as Operational Lead or rltd occ in dsgng & implmntg continuous improvmt progrms for mfg operations. Lean
Six Sigma Black Belt Certification req’d. Travel req’d - 30-50% w/in U.S. & Brazil & Argentina. Optn to WFH.
Salary: $108,680.00$197,600.00. Send c.v. to laura.deeney@nouryon. com and andrew. lampert@nouryon.com.
Assistant Professor of Instruction in Cook Family Writing Program
Northwestern University Evanston, IL Responsible for teaching six undergraduate courses per academic year and conducting research in the field o itin st have a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition, English, Education, Technical or Business Communication, Linguistics or a related field alified a licants should email resumes to writing-program@ northwestern.edu and reference code CFWP0423.
Software Developers
Software Developers
MATCHES ADULT SERVICES
or Bachelor’s + 5 years Exp. Comp. salary, Travel/Relocation within USA possible. Please mail resume to Ref: President, 3365 N Arlington heights Rd, Ste K, Arlington heights, IL 60004
System Business Analysts Northwestern Memorial HealthCare seeks System Business Analysts for Chicago, IL location to dev & maintain enterprise data repositories to support the hospital’s critical planning, mgmnt & decision-making activities. Bachelors in Info Sys/Math/ Data Analytics/Finance/related field +3yrs exp req’d. e d kills s w & relational databases; IT App Proj Mgmt. Exp must incl: Excel; VBA; Python; Power BI; Tableau; R; Econometrics. Background check req’d. May telecommute in the Chicago area w/ability to comm te to hica o office as req’d. Apply online: http://jobseeker.
nm o
REF50340H
Haumiller Engineering Co. seeks Controls Engineers w/Bach or for deg equiv in EE, Electrical or Electron Eng or rltd fld & coursewk, intern or exp in autom mach, to adde Log, Rockwell Stud 5000, Rockwell FactoryTalk View Stud; confg, progr & trbshtg w/Progr Logic Ctrlrs (PLC’s), HMI ctrl, instrum, snsrs, variab freq drives, stepper/servo.
Apply to HR, 370 Joseph Dr., South Elgin, IL 60177 or online: https://www. haumiller.com/careers/
Chicago, IL) to deliver data warehouse & analytic solutions.
Bachelor’s in Comp Sci/Eng or related field +5yrs exp req’d. Req’d Skills: 5yrs w/: data modeling/architecture; data warehousing models & design fundamentals (Kimball & Inmom); OLAP/Tabular cube sw; o data e t action manipulation & reporting. Exp must incl: Agile env; com le e ies & stored procedures; Tableau; SSRS; SSIS; SSAS; dev & maintain ETL/data pipeline. May work remotely at various locations in the Chicago area w/ability to commute to hica o office as needed. Apply online: http://jobseeker.nm.org/ Req ID: REF50339X
Caregiver Serenity
Home Healthcare Inc. in Niles, IL. has Multiple openings for Caregiver position (CG23): Help patients take prescribed medication. Mail resume with job ID# to Ayowale Alao: 6640 W. Touhy Ave., Niles, IL. 60714
esi n is al t dio COBOL. Telecommuting permitted. Apply online: www.depaul.edu/careers, REF: 1022
Senior Accountant
Cheetah Express, Inc seeks a Senior Accountant. Mail resume to 835 Greenleaf Ave, Elk Grove Village, IL.
TECHNICAL
Cisco Systems, Inc. is accepting resumes for multiple positions in Chicago, IL: Network Support Engineer (Ref#: CHI170B): Diagnose and troubleshoot wireless, security, switching, and other various networkrelated issues reported by customers and partners. Telecommuting permitted. Please email resumes including position’s reference number in subject line to Cisco Systems, Inc. at amsjobs@cisco.com. No phone calls please. Must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship. EOE. www. cisco.com
experimental research in lab and theoretical research in thermal sciences. Exp may be concurrent. Must have perm US work auth. Dir inquires to Institute of Gas Technology, 1700 S. Mount Prospect Rd., Des Plaines, IL 60018, Attn: A. Carter, HR.
Caregiver/ Personal Assistant Caregiver and Personal Assistant in LP Chicago. Position is from Noon to 6 PM, M- F. Prep meals, run errands and related household tasks. No housekeeping. Help and assist mobile husband recover from a fractured back vertebrae. References required and must drive. Salary is commensurate.
Adobe Creative Suite, building design + building technology skills as demonstrated in an architecture portfolio. Mail resume to von Weise Associates, 1049 North Ashland Ave, Chicago, IL, 60622.
Secondary School Teacher
– Arlington Heights, IL Biztegy Analytics, Inc
needs professionals:
o k sin acle
AWS, JIRA, Azure, Jenkins, GIT, Docker, Kubernetes, Docker Registry. Req. –Masters’ + 1 year
Senior Finance and Auxiliary Systems Specialist Roosevelt University Chicago, IL Building, implementing and maintaining business tools to streamline financial operations based on the division goals. Improving the existing processes to minimize complexities and optimize to promote effective operations. Creating organizational work flows to automate Purchasing function. Must have a Master’s degree in Management, Business, Accounting, or related field. Must have three (3) years of experience as a Financial Analyst. Must also have three (3) years of experience with Ellucian Banner, MS Flow, MS Teams, MS Power platform App, and MS owe ali ied applicants should submit their resumes to HR@roosevelt.edu and reference job code SFASS23.
Data Engineers
Northwestern Memorial Healthcare seeks Data Engineers for various worksites throughout the hica o a ea
Senior Data Engineer Senior Data Engineer, Chicago, IL, for Aspen Dental Management, Inc. (ADMI): Partner with business, analytics, and engineering teams to design and build data structures to facilitate reporting, models, and monitoring key performance metrics. Req’d: Bach. (or foreign equiv.) in Data Science, Mathematics or related data or computational social or hard science field & 5 yrs. of exp. in IT, Analytics and/or Data Science OR Master’s Deg. (or foreign equiv.) in Data Science, Mathematics, or related data or computational social o ha d science field yrs. of exp. in IT, Analytics and/or Data Science. May work remotely up to 3 days/wk. Resumes to code YZ-SDE, J. Ximenes, ADMI, 800 W. Fulton Market, Chicago, IL 60607.
DePaul University seeks Intermediate ERP Business/Analyst
Developers for various & unanticipated worksites throughout the U.S. hica o to analyze & design ERP sw applications in client/ server & web-based enterprise application environment. Bachelor’s in Comp Sci or Info Sys/Tech or Computer/ Computational field +2yrs exp req’d. Req’d skills: exp in higher edu environment analyzing, designing sw apps; working w/teams to analyze req’s; Oracle e e c stal reports, .NET, JSON, web service integrations, HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS,
Charles Schwab seeks Risk Analyzer/ Modeler (Chicago, IL) – Prfrm modl validtns follwng guidelns basd on SR 11-7, to incl an assssmnt of modl usage, doc, concptl soundnss, data intgrty, the contrl envrnmnt, & the s/w envrnmnt. Reqs edu & exp. EOE. For full job details & to apply online, visit: https:// www.schwabjobs. com/ & search Req. ID: 2023-91962.
Principal Engineer–Energy Delivery & Utilization Design, build, commission apparatuses to investigate impacts/ use of low-carbon (LC) fuels. Duties: collab w tech and project eng staff; oversee experimental programs, simulating performance of LC energy systems; experimental investigations of LC/ renewable energy systems; analytical/ simulation-based investigations of key phenomena in LC energy systems; installation of instrumentation and data acquisition systems; thermodynamic, fluid dynamic, and heat transfer calculations; analyze data and reporting; maintain project budgets; ID new tech/biz areas of activity. Reqd: 2 yrs exp w instrumentation, data acquisition, and control systems specs; BS in ME or CE w 4 yrs exp in experimental research in lab and theoretical research in thermal sciences; in lieu of BS w 4 yrs exp, MS in ME or CE w 2 yrs exp in
Caregiver/Personal Assistant Caregiver and Personal Assistant in LP Chicago. Position is from Noon to 6 PM, M- F. Prep meals, run errands and related household tasks. No housekeeping. Help and assist mobile husband recover from a fractured back vertebrae. Must drive and references required. Contact: lcstebbins@att. net
Functional Process Leader – Warehouse Management Tenneco Automotive Operating Company Inc. is recruiting in Skokie, IL, for a Functional Process LeaderWarehouse Management to develop, drive, implement & measure warehouse management strategy, business process excellence, transformation, continuous improvement, and standardization for warehousing and fulfillment globally. Up to 25% domestic and international travel required. To Apply: Go to jobs.tenneco.com and search for requisition number 5444 in search box. No recruiters. EOE.
Architectural Staff I (Chicago, IL) Full-time, entry-level professional performing architectural assignments. Plan & design structures, such as private residences, office buildings, institutional facilities, and other structural property. Undertakes a variety of assignments requiring the application of standard architectural techniques for small projects or selected segments of a larger project. Performs design layouts & features, which require researching, compiling, & recording information for project work. 5 year Bachelor of Architecture Professional Degree. Required skills: AutoCAD, SketchUp Pro, Rhinoceros 3D,
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Lycee Francais de Chicago seeks Secondary School Teacher in Chicago, IL to teach French and psychology to high school students in its International Baccalaureate program. Reqs bachelor’s in education or related. Must speak, read & write ench entl at a nati e or near-native level. Send CV to hrcareers@ lyceechicago.org. Use job code SST0523.
Multiple Openings
Medline Industries, LP, has multi open’gs in Mundelein, IL for: A) Sr. IS Systems Analyst(s) (Managed Care) to maintain sys’ms to meet ongoing biz needs. No trvl. WFH benefit avail. Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md confidential jobapply ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100TS B) Sr. Database dminist ato e er) to install & configure e e s atch ade se e s o trvl. WFH benefit avail. Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md confidential jobapply ftl?lang=en&job=INn terprise Architect to set EA strategy & direction & coord. EA practices. No trvl. WFH benefit avail. Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md confidential jobapply ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100TT
Multiple Openings Medline Industries, LP has m lti o en s in o thfield IL for: A) Sr. Software Tester(s) (Test Automation) to dsgn, dvlp, & implmnt automated testing & tooling solt’ns, incl’g automated funct’l, regression, & perfrmnc test scripts, & rel’d assets. Local trvl to nearby Medline offices may be needed on occasion, but no overnight stays will be req’d. WFH benefit avail. Apply at: https:// medline.taleo.net/careersection/md_confidential/ jobapply.ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100SG B)
Business Intelligence Managers (Engineering) to deliver bus. intelligence, visualization, reporting, & anlytcs solt’ns. No trvl req’d. WFH benefit avail. Apply at: https:// medline.taleo.net/careersection/md_confidential/ jobapply.ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100SF C) Sr. SAP Basis Administrator(s) to be responsible for SAP solt’n lifecycle mngemnt & for ensuring perfrmnc & reliability of SAP & other enterprise systms. Trvl to other local Medline
offices may be needed, but no overnight stays req’d. WFH benefit avail. Must be avail as on-call support for critical issues during non-working hrs, on occasion & as documented in team supp’rt sched. Apply at: https:// medline.taleo.net/careersection/md_confidential/ jobapply.ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100TP D) Sr. Manager, IS Applications (Distributed Products Systems) to managing a process imprvmnt team in proj/perfrmnc mngmnt, sched’g, execution, strategy, & SOPs. No trvl req’d. WFH benefit avail. Apply at: https://medline. taleo.net/careersection/ md confidential o a l ftl?lang=en&job=INF0100TO
Quality Management Coordinator El Milagro, nc seeks a alit an agement Coordinator. Mail resume to 3050 W. 26th Street. Chicago, IL 60623.
Sales/Biz Dev Representative-Chicago
Reader Sales representatives sell print, digital, and ad products to local businesses. Sales reps shoudl have 2 years of sales experience OR similar skills, & knowledge of media/advertising products. Ideal candidates will be familiar with CRM software & GSuite. Comp packages vary (full or part time), & include salary, commission, and health benefits. Diverse candidates encouraged to apply. This is an ongoing search. Send a resume to careers@chicagoreader. com.
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our brains process visual images 60,000 times faster than text,” said Dr. Burke. “One of the better arguments, in my opinion, about the potential harm of Internet porn—which is actually not exclusive to porn at all and applies to all video-streaming websites—is that the quick succession of videos and rapid processing of all of those images is what sucks us in, sometimes for longer than we would like.”
SEX
What are the long-term effects of reading erotic literature?
By DAN SAVAGE
Q : A lot of studying is being done on pornography and what it does to our brain. My question: are there any studies being done on erotic writing?
“Women’s Romance Literature” is absolutely exploding in the online selfpublishing sector, and my wife is an avid consumer.
“Spice” is the euphemism they use but—wow— romance lit is a hot dish. My wife consumes countless e-books and audiobooks, and there seems to be a huge community of readers like her out there. Erotic lit has been very good for our relationship; we listen to scenes together and I help bring my wife to orgasm
with my hands or tongue. It’s a fun way to be intimate! And listening is definitely less intrusive when we’re “coupling” than watching other people go at it on a screen. Anyway, back to my question: there are lots of studies looking into the effect of porn movies and pornographic images on the brain. But has anyone studied the impact of erotic literature on the brain? It’s got to be the oldest form of titillating art we have.
What’s it doing to us?
—LESSONS IN TITILLATION
a: “I haven’t come across neurological studies of erotic writing or literature,” said Dr. Kelsy Burke. “That
doesn’t really surprise me since the questions scientists ask about sexuality usually reflect broader social and cultural interests—in this case, research on ‘porn’ is almost exclusively about it as a visual medium, not the written word.”
Dr. Burke is a sociologist and the author of The Pornography Wars, a terrific new book about the never-ending culture war over pornography. Suffice it to say, LIT, if Dr. Burke hasn’t run across studies into the kind of dirty stories your wife enjoys reading, those studies don’t exist. And while there are a lot of warring studies that look at the impact of pornographic images—moving and still—on
our brains, much of the data being generated are pretty useless.
“There’s a lot more talk about pornography and the brain than there are definitive empirical studies,” said Dr. Burke. “And a lot of the talk stems from groups with a political or religious interest in opposing porn. Academic studies, on the other hand, offer mixed results and no definitive conclusions about how porn impacts the brain.”
So, despite all these warring studies and claims—from opponents and supporters of porn—we simply don’t know if pornographic images and videos are warping our brains.
“Here’s what we do know:
We all know people who watch too much TV, play too many video games, and spend too much time on TikTok, all media served up on the exact same screens that serve up porn, and all serving up the exact same dopamine hits. But while people express concerns about “screen time” when it comes to Ted Lasso or Minecraft, the combo of sexual pleasure, sexual agency, and the potential for sexual exploitation fuels a unique moral panic about the porn we watch. And there’s generally little concern expressed about people who spend “too much time reading,” even if they’re masturbating to what they read.
“And while we can have a huge queue of romance lit on our Kindles,” said Dr. Burke, “we aren’t likely to stay up all night binging one after the other, as we might do with, say, Netflix, because our brains will tire from all that textual processing.”
So, your wife could be a graduate of the Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics speed-reading program, but there’s a limit—a much lower limit—to the number of dirty stories she can consume in a single day and/or wank.
(Evelyn Wood? Anyone get that reference? Anyone? Bueller?) But the same moral scolds who’ve successfully banned books with LGBTQ+ themes and characters, as well as books that delve into wrongs committed against Black people and other peo-
ple of color (slavery, Jim Crow, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the internment of the Japanese, etc., etc.), are starting to go after romance novels. Books written by Nora Roberts, a popular (and PG) romance novelist, were just pulled from the shelves in a high school in Florida after an activist with the right-wing group Moms for Liberty complained. (You know who was reading Roberts’s books before they got banned? Teachers. You know who’s reading them now? Teenagers.)
“I doubt we’ll see a surge in research on what effect Roberts’s writing has on our brains, not only because banning books is purely political theater,” said Dr. Burke. And we may not see a surge in that kind of research because we ultimately don’t need it. “Neuroscientists already know that the stories in our heads are hugely important to our sexual pleasure,” said Dr. Burke. “These stories—our thoughts and feelings—can help or hinder our sexual experiences. It sounds like for you and your wife, it’s helping.”
Q: I’m a 32-year-old gay man living in a large U.S. city. I sometimes hook up with college guys through the apps. I’m always up-front about what I’m looking for and I try to honor the campsite rule. Occasionally I see the same person more than once and will take them out for dinner or drinks, where I always pay since I remember being a broke college student. This year, I started hooking up a couple of times a month with a 21-year-old guy. Turns out he’s from a very wealthy family—not household names, but super rich. I don’t know exactly how much money he gets from his family, but he let me know money isn’t an issue for him and he insists on paying if we go out. I asked him to
alternate who pays so it doesn’t feel uneven. He also bought me a small gi for my home that cost less than $40. When it’s just dinner or small things, I don’t mind too much. But this summer he’ll be doing an internship in Europe. I’ve always wanted to go to the city where he will be working, and he’s offered to fly me out around my birthday, pay for nice hotels, and cover other expenses like meals. If he were my age, I would accept, but it feels wrong somehow due to the age gap. It’s just so much money for someone that young to be spending, but is it OK since he has access to a family fortune?
Based on everything I know, he can easily afford it, but would I be wrong to accept? What are the ethical concerns of having a sugar daddy fuckbuddy who’s so young?
Additional context: I’ve been very clear I’m not interested in dating, and he’s expressed the same. We describe each other as friends, we both date and hook up with other people, we’re both on PrEP, and I’ve encouraged him to get tested for STIs regularly. I have no connection to his family, I don’t work in the field he’s going into, we don’t use terms like daddy or boy, and he knows I’m financially comfortable, so this gesture seems to be motivated by
generosity, not pity.
—SPENDY HOLIDAY ON WEALTHY UNDERGRAD’S POCKETBOOK
a: His motives could be pure—he could just be generous—or he could be motivated by a desire, possibly subconscious, to control you. When an extremely wealthy person brings an urchin like you or me into their orbit, SHOWUP, we get a glimpse of a world we could never access on our own. The conscious or subconscious awareness that we could be exiled from this world at any moment might lead us to put up with things we wouldn’t tolerate from someone who wasn’t flying us all over the world and picking up the tab for fancy hotels.
That said, it doesn’t sound like your fuckbuddy is being excessively and/or manipulatively lavish, only appropriately and proportionately generous, and I think you should accept his offer. Pick up a few checks, SHOWUP, and enjoy the ride.
P.S. Don’t marry Connor. v
Follow Dr. Burke on Twitter at @kelsyburke. Visit Dr. Burke’s website at kelsyburke.com to learn more about her work.
Ask your burning questions, listen to podcasts, read full columns, and more at https://savage.love @fakedansavage
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