Print Issue of May 24, 2018 (Volume 47, Number 33)

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | M AY 2 4 , 2 0 1 8

J U ST I C E DE L AY E D Hundreds of Illinois prisoners languish behind bars because Cook County court clerk Dorothy Brown has failed to do her job

By MAYA DUKMASOVA 8

Mariachi Herencia de Mexico turns Chicago schoolkids into chart-busting stars 21

2 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

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THIS WEEK

C H I C A G O R E A D E R | M AY 2 4 , 2 0 1 8 | V O L U M E 4 7, N U M B E R 3 3

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

FEATURES

POLITICS

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Justice delayed

More than three years after the Illinois Supreme Court granted him the right to a postconviction hearing, James Allen languishes in prison after Dorothy Brown failed to find his records.

BY MAYA DUKMASOVA 8

Mariachi Herencia de Mexico turns schoolkids into preservationists

The Mariachi Heritage Foundation has partnered with the Chicago Public Schools to create a student band that’s already played Kennedy Center, toured internationally, and released a chart-busting album.

BY PETER MARGASAK 21

IN THIS ISSUE

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32 Restaurant Review: Fisk & Co. This seafood-focused spot in the Kimpton Hotel Monaco needs to work on its public-facing side.

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CITY LIFE

4 Politics An already taxed staff of court interpreters faces furlough days and layoffs, threatening due process rights and even victim safety.

6 News Why can’t the 62 acres of vacant land along the river in the South Loop become the city’s next great public park?

16 Lit Is the world deranged? Or just you? Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina captures this confusion disturbingly well.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

25 Shows of note Cut Worms, DJ Quik, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and more of the week’s best 27 Secret History Crate diggers have caught up with the funky soul of Doug Shorts’s Master Plan Inc.

ARTS & CULTURE

ON THE COVER: PAPERCUT BY YANG PULONGBARIT-CUEVO. FOR MORE OF YANG’S WORK, GO TO YANGCUEVO.COM. PHOTO BY JAMIE RAMSAY.

13 Theater Ike Holter’s latest, The Light Fantastic, is darkly playful.

14 Theater Having Our Say and seven more new shows, reviewed by our critics

18 Movies Paul Schrader’s First Reformed finds pride at the root of despair.

19 Movies Solo: A Star Wars Story and more new films, reviewed by our critics

FOOD & DRINK 17 Visual Art Ivan Albright’s meticulous attention to the human body remains an inspiration to young artists.

31 Key Ingredient Jimmy Papadopoulos of Bellemore poaches fish in the world’s most expensive edible oil.

CLASSIFIEDS

34 Jobs 34 Apartments & Spaces 35 Marketplace 36 Straight Dope Why are races correlated with different earwax types, and when did humans diverge in this regard?

37 Savage Love What to do when someone horns in on all the action at the orgy 38 Early Warnings Shannon & the Clams, Guided by Voices, Tory Lanez, and more shows to look for in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf The Chicago House Party levels up to “music festival” for 2018—and grows a third stage.

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 3

CITY LIFE THE COURTS

Lost in translation

Court interpreters handle more than 60,000 cases a year. Now budget cuts affecting them threaten defendants’ due process rights and even victims’ safety.

By MAYA DUKMASOVA

W

hile observing eviction court proceedings last year, I witnessed a landlord and tenant who both spoke Spanish in the process of negotiating in front of Judge Alison Conlon. A court interpreter stood between them, translating what each said to the other for a patiently attentive Conlon. It seemed that the parties were coming to an agreement, with the landlord leaning toward letting the tenant stay in her apartment a little longer before moving out. Suddenly, the interpreter stopped translating, and turned to Conlon: “Judge, could you please tell them

they need to sort this out on their own? I had to be in the courtroom next door for another hearing five minutes ago.”

With that, the judge told the landlord and tenant to try to come to an agreement and ordered another date for their case, and the interpreter scurried out of the room. I wondered if the case could have been resolved right then had they been able to conclude their negotiations. At the very least, it could have saved the court resources related to holding another hearing on the case.

It’s not unusual for court interpreters to be caught in this sort of bind. Currently, there are

Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle and chief judge Timothy Evans are forced to slash court budgets after the repeal of the soda tax. é RICH HEIN/SUN-TIMES MEDIA

just 28 full-time and 60 part-time court interpreters working across Cook County. The vast majority of them interpret for native Spanish speakers, but there is also a small cadre of Polish-language interpreters as well as those who speak other languages, ranging from Arabic to Urdu. Together the interpreters handle more than 60,000 civil and criminal cases per year, with some stationed permanently at a court-

house while others travel around the county as needed. Already, many of these interpreters feel overworked.

But with a new round of furloughs announced by chief judge Timothy Evans late last month, several have told the Reader that Cook County residents’ due process rights— and in some cases even their safety—could be in jeopardy. If the unionized interpreters don’t

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CITY LIFE each agree to take ten days of furlough by November, two full-time interpreters will be let go. The interpreters argue that the furlough days will have as much negative impact on the public as would the permanent staff cuts.

Facing a $200 million budget shortfall after the soda tax repeal, Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle demanded 10 percent budget cuts across all county agencies last fall, and identified more than 300 positions to be eliminated. More than half of them were in the Office of the Chief Judge, which employs some 2,700 people, including interpreters, probation officers, and forensic experts. (In late November, Evans sued the county, claiming Preckwinkle didn’t have the authority to tell him who to lay off.) Some of the positions targeted by the president fell within the jurisdiction of 13 unions that represent workers in the chief judge’s office. Others were senior, nonunionized management staff.

Evans circulated the preliminary results of his negotiations with the county to all his employees on April 24. “The settlement enables us to save all 180 employees originally scheduled for layoffs by the County Board,” Evans announced in an internal memo obtained by the Reader. “We instead are pursuing employee furloughs.” Evans wrote that nonunionized workers would have to take ten days of furlough and that unionized staff had a choice between furloughs or layoffs, which “will occur as outlined in union contracts.”

Craig Rosenbaum, executive director of the Chicago News Guild, which represents the interpreters (and, full disclosure, the staff of the Reader), says neither furloughs nor layoffs are acceptable. “It’ll cause havoc in the courts because there’ll be a shortage of interpreters,” he says. The furloughs mean there would be days when defendants and petitioners in Cook County courts lack access to interpreters, causing delay in processing cases. “From a civil rights perspective it’s not acceptable to the residents of our community,” Rosenbaum says, adding that cutbacks in hours and staffing could open up the county to costly civil rights lawsuits. “If you’re looking at it as a civil rights issue, there’s no difference between furloughs and layoffs.”

In addition, Rosenbaum says the furloughs would amount to a 4 percent pay cut for the interpreters, who make between $25 and $30 per hour.

Pat Milhizer, a spokesman for Evans, said last week that “the furlough plan is needed to ensure that the Office of the Chief Judge has a balanced budget. Chief Judge Timothy

C. Evans has urged the unions to embrace the furlough plan so that no employees lose their job, and the justice system can maintain current service levels.”

Several court interpreters spoke with the Reader on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. They said current staffing levels and mismanagement already pose a threat to defendants’ and petitioners’ due process rights.

One Polish interpreter related that a defendant called recently to ask about privately hiring her for a hearing in the suburbs. “I said there’s gonna be a Polish interpreter there [provided by the county]. The defendant said to me, ‘They told me that last time and there was no interpreters, and so I want to hire you to go to court with me.’” The interpreter said she was shocked. “They could lose their case or they’re forced to come back the next day or in a week. This is unacceptable.”

A Spanish interpreter said that management exacerbates the short staffing by assigning too few interpreters for the volume of cases in each courtroom. “It’s because management wants to cut corners,” she said. “[Judges] have to stop the proceedings or schedule for another day because there’s not enough interpreters.”

Another interpreter said she was particularly concerned about the shortage of interpreters in domestic violence cases. “Battered women have to be turned away because there’s no interpreter,” she says. “They can’t get that order of protection that day because there’s no interpreter. The consequences are a woman is going back into an abusive situation. . . . There are emotional and there could be physical consequences.”

Milhizer disputed the interpreter’s descriptions of the short staffing at domestic violence courtrooms. “The Domestic Violence Courthouse is staffed with three Spanish interpreters and one Polish interpreter,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Our information is that the lack of availability of an interpreter for a case has been a rare occurrence.”

The settlement between Evans and the county is still in negotiations, and will have to be approved by the Cook County Board.

Though Milhizer says he can’t comment on the litigation, the furlough plan seems to be integral to Evans’s strategy for balancing his budget. But even if implemented it will only make up for about half of the $13 million shortfall his office is facing for 2018. v

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CITY LIFE A view from Rezkoville é RYAN SMITH

DEVELOPMENT

Reimagining Rezkoville

Why can’t the 62 acres of vacant land along the river in the South Loop become the city’s next great public park?

By RYAN SMITH

O

n a warm afternoon in May, a pair of geese and their gaggle of goslings waddle single file over broken pavement and shaggy patches of weeds on their journey to the edge of the Chicago River. Elsewhere, red-winged blackbirds chirp their nasally songs while yellow butterflies flutter over wildflowers peeking through piles of rubble.

Welcome to the gnarled, grassy glen bounded by the river, Roosevelt Road, 16th, and Clark Streets—land informally known as Rezkoville, after Antoin “Tony” Rezko, the erstwhile developer and political fund-raiser.

As has been the case for decades, the land’s identity—and future—remains in limbo. Since it stopped serving as a train yard in 1969, it’s been vacant but has lived on in the shadow of the city as a kind of forbidden wilderness, accidental nature preserve, homeless encampment, and—until recently—barren ruin.

Eighteen months have passed since the overgrowth on the massive site was razed.

The improvised forest was bulldozed, and the waist-high brush cut down. The 50 or so homeless people who’d been living in a tent village were ejected, and ten-foot-high fences were erected around the area’s perimeter. Nature has begun to reclaim the area, and there are even hints of the kind of tallgrass prairie that once covered North America.

It doesn’t take much imagination to visualize how beautiful this space could be if it were cleaned up and curated as a true prairie reserve or reimagined as the next great park in our so-called City in a Garden. “Chicago could always use more park space, especially by the river,” says Juanita Irizarry, executive director

6 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

of the nonprofit Friends of the Park. “We’re 12 on the list of [U.S.] cities in terms of park space per capita. We could do better.”

Or what would happen if, as some have suggested in the past, the land known as Rezkoville were allowed to return to its natural state as a crooked bend of the Chicago River nearly a century after the city engineered its straightening in 1928?

We may never know. The land’s developer, Chicago-based Related Midwest, earlier this month revealed plans for a sprawling megadevelopment. Company officials are calling it “the 78” (as in the 78th neighborhood of Chicago). It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of urban development and green space conceived as an extension of Chicago’s business district, to be connected via a new Red Line station at 15th and Clark, new roads, and bike lanes.

Neither Related Midwest nor the mayor’s office responded to requests for comment, but on its website the developer describes the 78 as a mixed-use neighborhood that would include commercial, residential, academic, cultural, and recreational areas. (The land already abuts Chinatown’s Ping Tom Park, which includes a newer field house and boathouse just south of 16th.)

The proposal includes offices, retail stores, and restaurants. And the big get is a Discovery Partners Institute campus, a $1.2 billion “research and innovation center” connected to the University of Illinois system.

Related says there would be plenty of “green

and open space” and a half mile of developed riverfront similar to the Chicago Riverwalk downtown. An artist’s renderings of the 78 show patches of parks and greenery.

It’s fairly inspired as far as urban development goes, but consider that it could be transcendent—a 62-acre gem of green space nestled next to the Chicago River, like a mini version of New York City’s Central Park or Dallas’s nature district along the Trinity River.

“That would have been magic, but it’s probably too late,” said Margaret Frisbie, executive director of Friends of the Chicago River, a nonprofit that in 2002 suggested that the river be “re-meandered” through Rezkoville to slow the river flow, helping to prevent fluctuations, meaning potentially fewer basements flooding. “It’s too bad that 20 years ago we didn’t make better plans.”

No one yet has put forth any alternatives to Related’s plan. “There haven’t been any public or private proposals to make the site a nature preserve or park,” the office of 25th Ward alderman Danny Solis said in an e-mailed statement. Solis, whose 25th Ward includes Rezkoville, hosted a neighborhood presentation for the project on May 10.

Yet city leaders, conservationists, and nature advocacy groups alike now seemed resigned to the fact that a significantly sized park or preserve on the property is a pipe dream. “We did informally float out the idea of a preserve there, but we were told that the land was so valuable it would never happen, as

it was privately held,” says Frisbie.

The problem isn’t the desire to turn Rezkoville into a big park—it’s capitalism.

Namely, that the property is privately owned by General Mediterranean Holding SA, a general contracting company headed

by Iraqi-British billionaire Nadhmi Auchi.

The Luxembourg-based conglomerate purchased it for $131 million back in 2005 from Rezko, who’d bought the land from the city in March 2002 for $70 million. After leaving the land dormant for a decade, Related Midwest formed a joint venture in 2016 with GMH to develop the site.

Do the math: It’s 62 acres of barren land in an up-and-coming Chicago neighborhood controlled by a foreign company led by one of the thousand richest men in the world. Turning it into one big public park or green space is the longest of long shots because where’s the profit in that?

The 78th is still in its infancy, and plans will be subject to city government approval.

The best-case scenario may be to hold the new owner of this swath of land to its current proposal, which calls for 40 percent green and open space, and make sure the public will have proper access to it. “You have to choose your battles and decide what’s realistic and what’s not,” says Frisbie. “We’re definitely not against this development. We want them to do something with it, and we’re looking forward to working with [Related].”

If the future does change for the 78, it will likely come not as a result of community input but because of the trillion-ton elephant in the room looming over Chicago—Amazon. The Seattle-based corporate behemoth is announcing the site of a new headquarters later this year, and Chicago is one of its finalists. The 78 is one of the city’s proposed sites.

Amazon or not, the advocacy community and conservationists will need to be ready to fight for more open and green space, says Irizarry.

Rezkoville “is a once-in-a-hundred-year Daniel Burnham-like opportunity,” she says.

“Chicago has a history of jumping prematurely into contracts that aren’t good deals. We shouldn’t just sell out to the highest bidder.

Let’s slow this thing down and do the right thing here.” v

@RyanSmithWriter

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Why Haven’t Senior Homeowners Been Told These Facts?

Keep reading if you own a home in the U.S. and were born before 1955.

It’s a well-known fact that for many senior citizens in the U.S. their home is their single biggest asset, often accounting for more than 50% of their total net worth.

Yet, according to new statistics from the mortgage industry, senior homeowners in the U.S. are now sitting on more than 6.1 trillion dollars of unused home equity.1 With people now living longer than ever before and home prices back up again, ignoring this “hidden wealth” may prove to be short sighted.

All things considered, it’s not surprising that more than a million homeowners have already used a governmentinsured Home Equity Conversion Mortgage or “HECM” loan to turn their home equity into extra cash for retirement.

However, today, there are still millions of eligible homeowners who could benefit from this FHA-insured loan but may simply not be aware of this “retirement secret.”

Some homeowners think HECM loans sound “too good to be true.” After all, you get the cash you need out of your home but you have no more monthly mortgage payments.

NO MONTHLY MORTGAGE PAYMENTS?2 EXTRA CASH? It’s a fact: no monthly mortgage payments are required with a government-insured HECM loan;2 however the homeowners are still responsible for paying for the maintenance of their home, property taxes, homeowner’s insurance and, if required, their HOA fees.

Another fact many are not aware of is that HECM reverse mortgages first took hold when President Reagan

signed the FHA Reverse Mortgage Bill into law 29 years ago in order to help senior citizens remain in their homes.

Today, HECM loans are simply an effective way for homeowners 62 and older to get the extra cash they need to enjoy retirement.

Although today’s HECM loans have been improved to provide even greater financial protection for homeowners, there are still many misconceptions.

For example, a lot of people mistakenly believe the home must be paid off in full in order to qualify for a HECM loan, which is not the case. In fact, one key advantage of a HECM is that the proceeds will first be used to pay off any existing liens on the property, which frees up cash flow, a huge blessing for seniors living on a fixed income. Unfortunately, many senior homeowners who might be better off with HECM loan don’t even bother to get more information because of rumors they’ve heard.

That’s a shame because HECM loans are helping many senior homeowners live a better life.

In fact, a recent survey by American Advisors Group (AAG), the nation’s number one HECM lender, found that over 90% of their clients are satisfied with their loans.

While these special loans are not for everyone, they can be a real lifesaver for senior homeowners.

The cash from a HECM loan can be used for any purpose. Many people use the money to save on interest charges by paying off credit cards or other high-interest loans. Other common uses include making home

FACT: In 1988, President Reagan signed an FHA bill that put HECM loans into law.

improvements, paying off medical bills or helping other family members. Some people simply need the extra cash for everyday expenses while others are now using it as a “safety net” for financial emergencies.

If you’re a homeowner age 62 or older, you owe it to yourself to learn more so that you can make an informed decision. Homeowners who are interested in learning more can request a free 2018 HECM loan Information Kit and free Educational DVD by calling American Advisors Group toll-free at 1-(800) 840-3558.

At no cost or obligation, the professionals at AAG can help you find out if you qualify and also answer common questions such as: 1. What’s the government’s role?

2. How much money might I get?

3. Who owns the home after I take out a HECM loan?

You may be pleasantly surprised by what you discover when you call AAG for more information today.

Source: http://reversemortgagedaily.com/2016/06/21/seniors-home-equity-grows-to-6-trillion-reverse-mortgage-opportunity. 2If you qualify and your loan is approved, a Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) must pay off any existing mortgage(s). With a HECM loan, no monthly mortgage payment is required. A HECM increases the principal mortgage loan amount and decreases home equity (it is a negative amortization loan).

AAG works with other lenders and !nancial institutions that offer HECMs. To process your request for a loan, AAG may forward your contact information to such lenders for your consideration of HECM programs that they offer. When the loan is due and payable, some or all of the equity in the property no longer belongs to borrowers, who may need to sell the home or otherwise repay the loan with interest from other proceeds.

AAG charges an origination fee, mortgage insurance premium, closing costs and servicing fees (added to the balance of the loan). The balance of the loan grows over time and AAG charges interest on the balance.

Interest is not tax-deductible until the loan is partially or fully repaid. Borrowers are responsible for paying property taxes and homeowner s insurance (which may be substantial). We do not establish an escrow account for disbursements of these payments. A set-aside account can be set up to pay taxes and insurance and may be required in some cases. Borrowers must occupy home as their primary residence and pay for ongoing maintenance; otherwise the loan becomes due and payable. The loan also becomes due and payable when the last borrower, or eligible non-borrowing surviving spouse, dies, sells the home, permanently moves out, defaults on taxes or insurance payments, or does not otherwise comply with the loan terms. American Advisors Group (AAG) is headquartered at 3800 W. Chapman Ave., 3rd & 7th Floors, Orange CA, 92868.

(MB_0911141), (Illinois Residential Mortgage Licensee; Illinois Commissioner of Banks can be reached at 100 West Randolph, 9th Floor, Chicago, Illinois 60601, (312) 814-4500). V2017.08.23_OR

1

These materials are not from HUD or FHA and were not approved by HUD or a government agency.

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

J U ST I C E D E L AY E D 8 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

Hundreds of Illinois prisoners—like James Allen—languish behind bars because Cook County court clerk Dorothy Brown has failed to do her job

By MAYA DUKMASOVA

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YANG PULONGBARIT-CUEVO

T

his could be the story of two wrongful convictions.

This could be the story of how James Allen was railroaded by a Chicago police detective and Cook County prosecutors who didn’t think he deserved to be free. But before he has the chance to prove that he’s innocent of two murders, Allen needs one thing: for Dorothy Brown, the clerk of the Circuit Court of Cook County, to do her job.

Allen, 68, has been incarcerated since 1984. Currently, he’s at the Pontiac Correctional Center 100 miles south of Chicago,

but over the years he’s seen the inside of every maximum-security prison in the state, and spent some 14 years in solitary confinement—nearly nine of them at the now-closed Tamms supermax. The day before Mother’s Day this year, after spending the morning with his face in his pillow, hiding from fumes seeping through the ventilation system as someone was being maced on a cell tier below, Allen reflected: “I’ve never gotten over the fact that I was not able to see my mother when she passed away.” Most of the rest of his family members too have either died or lost touch with him over the years. “Every person who ever died in my life—I have never been to their wake, I have never been to a funeral, I have never heard a eulogy.”

Allen has been collecting evidence of his innocence in the contract murders of Carl Gibson and Robert Ciralski for years.

Gibson was an alleged drug dealer prosecutors said was killed in a car in June 1984 by a hired hit man—Allen was convicted as the alleged driver. Ciralski was a drugstore owner who was killed in front of his Hyde Park home in August 1984, allegedly in a hit ordered by some notorious drug dealers because he refused to sell them supplies. In this case too, Allen was the alleged getaway driver. There was never any physical evidence to tie Allen to either of these murders, and the state’s star witness in both cases was a convicted rapist who later recanted his statements about both of them. Court records later showed that the Cook County state’s attorney’s office under Richard M. Daley paid him tens of thousands of dollars for his cooperation.

In 2009, Allen made significant progress toward proving his innocence in the Ciralski case when another Illinois inmate gave him a written confession to the murder. Defendants are free to petition trial courts whenever they believe they’ve discovered new evidence that could challenge their conviction. Hundreds of prisoners file requests for postconviction hearings every year. Most of these petitions are thrown out as frivolous, and the defendants can be fined about $100 for wasting the court’s time. In fact, that’s exactly what happened when Cook County circuit court judge Nicholas Ford rejected the signed confession Allen obtained from the other inmate because it wasn’t notarized. The appellate court agreed with Ford. But in 2015 the Illinois Supreme Court determined that this confession had merit. Allen thus passed what’s known as the first stage of the postconviction process and advanced to the second stage, which entitles him to have a public defender or private attorney argue that he deserves a full evidentiary hearing. That hearing could lead to his conviction being overturned.

Allen’s attorney, Steven Becker, has worked for the Office of the State Appellate Defender (which represents defendants who can’t afford private attorneys in appeals) for close to a decade, and has represented many clients seeking to overturn convictions. “The majority of postconvictions filed do not advance to the second stage,” he says.

But Allen has been waiting for three years to have his day in court with this new evidence after Brown’s staff was unable to locate his full trial record, which Becker is required to review before he can argue in front of a judge on Allen’s behalf. Becker had been requesting these records for 16 months, ever since he took up Allen’s case in January 2017.

Then, last week, three days after the Reader first contacted Brown about Allen’s case, her staff informed Becker that they had finally located the missing files.

“I look at that as divine intervention,” Allen exclaimed upon hearing the news Friday. “I get a chance to come to court, to tell a story that I haven’t been able to tell in 33 years.”

Allen is far from the only defendant whose postconviction proceedings have been stalled because Brown, the guardian of more than a million boxes of Cook County criminal and civil case records, has delayed in finding or failed to supply requested files. Currently some 25 other defendants represented by the appellate defender’s office are in the same situation, and some delays have dragged on for more than a year. (No data is available for the number of defendants stymied by this issue who have private attorneys.)

Brown’s failure to provide warehoused records in a timely manner has been an ongoing problem for years. In 2013, after being publicly chastised by the appellate defender’s office, Brown promised sweeping reforms in her management practices. She also touted major improvements in record storage and retrieval in 2014, when the county opened a $24 million, state-of-the-art warehouse in Cicero, largely for her office’s use. However, as Allen’s case indicates, timely record retrieval continues to be a challenge for the clerk of the circuit court.

Since the passage of a new law in 2017 that requires Brown to provide records for appeals electronically, there’ve also been significant delays in scanning and transmitting warehoused files. Allen’s attorneys haven’t been able to get digital records to proceed with his appeal of a rejected postconviction motion in the Gibson case for more than a year. The appellate defender’s office says more than 600 of its cases are currently held up for the same reason.

“This is not normal,” says Patricia Mysza, head of the state appellate defender’s Cook County office. “Our clients have a constitutional right to an appeal. . . . It’s the clerk’s obligation to prepare the complete record on appeal. And without that record our clients are not getting their constitutional right.”

On Friday, Brown’s office issued a statement acknowledging that the delay in providing records for Allen’s challenge of the Ciralski conviction shouldn’t have happened and said the clerk is working to make sure a situation like this doesn’t come up again.

“The Clerk’s Office is pleased to report that Mr. Allen’s complete files from his 1986 case have been delivered to Attorney Becker as a result of our thorough investigation into this situation,” Brown’s spokeswoman, Jalyne Strong-Shaw, wrote in an e-mail to the Reader. “The Clerk’s Office is disappointed that there was a delay in this particular situation. It’s possible that staffing issues caused by staff reductions due to budget cuts, increased workloads, and the attention required to convert to electronic appeals, combined with the disruption caused by the two-year relocation of a massive numbers of court files to the new Records Storage Center, may have contributed to this delay. Clerk Brown has directed upper management to put in place closer monitoring mechanisms for appellant records completion.”

As the years since the Illinois Supreme Court’s decision in Allen’s favor dragged on, he began to get suspicious.“I have no doubt about the incompetence of the clerk’s office,” he says.

But given the full details of his cases, he’s assumed the worst.

“I started getting paranoid and thinking [Brown] is in on a conspiracy with the forces that be to try to prevent me from getting into court.”

J

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

James Allen at the Pontiac Correctional Center in 1978.

During his first stint in prison he became a licensed medical assistant and legal investigator. é COURTESY OF ALLEN’S FRIENDS

continued from 9

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n a January night in 1969, a 19-year-old Allen sat in the backseat of a stolen car in front of the Bell & Howell camera manufacturing plant in Lincolnwood. Two of his friends—Larry Gibson and Tyrone Oby—sat in the front. Having rehearsed what they would do for three weeks in a row, they patiently waited for the arrival of an armored truck with $60,000 of the company’s payroll that they planned to rob. Allen says their plan was to distribute most of the money to charity groups around the Washington Park neighborhood and keep about two grand each for themselves. They’d brought ski masks, duct tape, handcuffs, and guns—a couple of pistols, and an army AR-15 stolen from a railyard—though they didn’t think they’d need to use them. Allen sat with the rifle in his lap. A half hour passed after the truck’s scheduled delivery time, and the three began to feel nervous; they decided to abandon the robbery. Just as they started to drive away, Chicago police blocked their exit and they were blinded by a floodlight from the roof of the plant.

Allen fired his rifle once, at the floodlight, and then, he says, “all hell broke loose.”

A shootout between officers, Gibson, and Oby erupted, in the course of which police detective Oliver Singleton was hit in the back of the neck and paralyzed. Gibson and Oby were killed on the spot, but Allen survived with a gunshot wound to his buttock. He was convicted of attempted armed robbery and attempted murder. When Singleton died 11 months after being shot, Allen was convicted of murder, even though he wasn’t the one who shot the officer. Allen began serving a sentence of 100 to 200 years in 1970. But the law at the time made him eligible for parole after eight years and six months.

Allen made the most of his time in prison. In the 70s IDOC ran a variety of educational and vocational programs for inmates. He got his GED, earned 80 hours of college credit, and became certified as a medical assistant and a legal investigator. He eventually worked on the defense team in the case of the Pontiac 17—gang leaders indicted in 1978 for starting a prison riot at Pontiac that ended with three guards dead and three injured. All 17 were acquitted, and Allen’s contributions in the case were noted by attorneys from the People’s Law Office, which represented the group. In a 1978 letter to the Illinois Prisoner Review Board Jeffrey Haas, one of the office’s lawyers on the case, noted Allen’s “intelligence, perception, and ability to articulate and understand legal issues,” adding, “My office is willing and anxious to employ him as a legal investigator.” Allen was also offered jobs by a church and the National Conference of Black Lawyers Community College of Law. IDOC records reviewed by the Reader indicate that Allen was never affiliated with any gangs in all his years in prison, nor did he rack up any charges for misbehavior while serving his first stint. Nevertheless, every year that he went before the Prisoner Review Board between 1978 and 1983, the Chicago Police Department and Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office vehemently protested his release. He was finally paroled in spring 1983, but, he says,

10 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

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he didn’t stop being a “cop killer” in the eyes of law enforcement. “I didn’t have a chance from the time I left. I was being followed, I was being watched, every time I’d get on a bus the police would watch me.” He started working for the People’s Law Office, but says he and his boss soon agreed that it was better for him to look for another job because the police were harassing him at work.

Allen remembers seeing cops outside his apartment every day. Sometimes, he says, they’d even follow him to the grocery store. His parole officer helped him to apply for public aid, but he says that he was too embarrassed to be on welfare and focused on looking for a job as a medical assistant. Ultimately, he got financial help from his family—his parents had by then moved back to their hometown in Mississippi, and Allen’s parole officer allowed him to travel and stay there for weeks at a time. But on August 9, 1984, he came home to his South Shore apartment to find the police there with a warrant for his arrest for the murder of 38-year-old Carl Gibson.

Allegedly, Gibson was working for a big-time drug dealer named Charles Ashley, and Ashley put out a hit on him in June 1984 because he suspected Gibson of being a police informant. CPD detective Michael Pochordo, who is now deceased, and prosecutors cited testimony from a confidential informant that Allen was the driver of a car in which Gibson was shot four times in the back of the head and then dumped on an exit ramp of the Chicago Skyway. Another man, Henry Griffin, was convicted of being the shooter and put on death row. No physical evidence was ever presented to tie Allen to the murder. Nevertheless, Allen was convicted by a jury and received a life sentence.

In February 1986, as Allen began serving time for the Gibson murder, he and five others including Griffin were indicted for the murder of 61-year-old Robert Ciralski, the south-side drugstore owner, who was killed on August 1, 1984. Once again, Pochordo and prosecutors claimed Allen was the getaway driver in a murder-for-hire scheme orchestrated by a notorious drug kingpin—this time Willie “Flukey” Stokes. The authorities said Stokes and two other high-level dealers put out a contract hit on Ciralski for allegedly cutting back on the quinine they needed to dilute heroin. No physical evidence tied Allen to this murder either, but this time police had Allen’s testimony before a grand jury acknowledging he was involved in the hit ordered by the three dealers.

However, even before then-state’s attorney Richard M. Daley announced indictments for the Cirlaski murder to the public, Allen and codefendant Franklin Freeman (who also gave grand jury testimony) wrote letters to Stokes’s attorneys saying they had lied to the grand jury under pressure from police and prosecutors. Allen said Pochordo told him he’d get a lighter sentence if he implicated Stokes, because they already had testimony from a confidential informant implicating Allen. In the end, that confidential informant too recanted his story. Of the six people indicted for Ciralski’s murder, only Allen was convicted. Stokes and two other suspected drug dealers who allegedly paid for the murder were cleared because Allen, Freeman, and the confidential informant recanted their statements. Griffin—who never gave a statement in this case—was also cleared due to the recantations.

Allen and Freeman were both prosecuted based on their self-incriminating statements alone, but had separate ju-

“ This is n ot n o r m al. O ur client s have a co nstitutio nal r ight to an ap p e al.”

-Patricia Mysza, head of the state appellate defender’s Cook County office.

ries. Freeman was acquitted in August of 1987, but Allen was convicted. The Tribune summarized the “twist of irony” that ended the case: “The man who allegedly recruited the hit men never was charged; those suspected of hiring the killers went free; the man charged with accompanying the gunman was found innocent; and even the suspected gunman never went to trial for the killing. But . . . the getaway driver, accused of sitting in a car near the murder scene, was convicted. He now faces the death penalty.”

Allen was ultimately spared death row, but the additional life sentence without parole pretty much guaranteed that he’d never be a free man again. His reputation as a thrice-convicted murderer was sealed in the press coverage of his trials.

Pochordo and prosecutors relied on statements from the same confidential informant to bring charges against Allen for both the Gibson and Ciralski murders. That informant was Darryl Moore—a ex-convict and admitted hit man whose credibility was impeached as early as 1986, when he recanted his statements about Stokes contracting the Ciralski murder. He told the Tribune in an interview at the time that he used payments he received from the state’s attorney’s office in exchange for his statements to run a drug operation and that he had “no hesitation” about framing people “for the money.” Under Daley, the state’s attorney’s office paid Moore tens of thousands of dollars for information in heater cases, the Tribune and Chicago Lawyer reported. Court filings by the state’s attorney’s office in the early 2000s confirmed payments of some $66,000. Moore was also able to get reduced sentences for various crimes in exchange for providing testimony.

Ultimately, Moore was convicted of the 1987 rape of an 11-year-old girl in Uptown that he allegedly committed after the state’s attorney’s office dropped charges against him in another case in exchange for his testimony in the Gibson murder. Moore claimed prosecutors pinned the rape charges on him in retaliation for recanting his statements. He’s currently serving a 60-year sentence. In the years after he first implicated Allen in the Gibson and Ciralski murders, Moore made videotaped statements to defense attorneys recanting what he said about both murders.

“When you look at my record, I’ve never been arrested for killing anybody,” Allen says. “No one ever said ‘James Allen shot a gun at this person or that person.’ I was always made the driver.”

With the help of lawyers and friends, Allen has collected a wide array of new evidence that he thinks can prove his innocence—most importantly a signed confession from another IDOC inmate, 73-year-old Robert Langford. Langford says he killed Ciralski during a botched robbery attempt and that Allen had nothing to do with it. Allen believes that unraveling his conviction for the Ciralski murder is a first step to clearing his name in the Gibson murder too, since the same detective and prosecutors were involved in both cases and unreliable statements from Moore were used both times.

Allen never expected the appeals process to be quick or easy, but clerical delays are particularly frustrating. “I know other [prisoners] who have said they’ve had to wait for documents that were missing,” he says. “Even before I had good evidence in my case I’ve heard guys complain about Dorothy Brown for a number of years now—not just her in particular but the clerk’s office.”

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he Better Government Association first shed light on Brown’s delays in processing records requests back in 2013. At the time, a high-level official in the Illinois appellate defender’s office wrote several scathing letters to Brown. In an April 2013 letter, then-deputy defender Alan Goldberg wrote to Brown reminding her that the appellate defender’s office had met with her to discuss the “major problem” of obtaining warehoused court records in 2011. “Virtually no progress has been made,” Goldberg wrote, adding that at that time in 2013 his office had “132 outstanding requests for warehouse transcripts, of which 13 have been outstanding for over one year and 37 have been outstanding for more than six months.” Goldberg wrote that Brown’s office hadn’t offered a solution to this problem at a recent meeting. “I believe that it is critical . . . that the management of the records center be made aware of the difficulty that those involved in this process are having in locating warehouse transcripts, and that a higher level of organization be imposed at the records center.”

Nearly four months later, in July, Goldberg again wrote to Brown saying that he couldn’t “report any real, notable progress” in her office’s delays of servicing warehouse records requests. “Historically, it seems that your office waits until a problem is beyond a crisis and only then works feverishly to correct it,” Goldberg wrote. “However, no new system is J

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 11

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implemented to make sure the problem does not occur.” He added that his office still had 128 outstanding requests for warehouse transcripts, and that 18 had been outstanding for more than a year and an additional 40 for more than six months. “We have still not heard any real solution to this problem of finding and providing these records to us in a timely manner, which appears to relate to problems at the records center.”

Goldberg finally heard back from Brown more than a month later, according to correspondence published by BGA. “You should know that it does concern me that we have revisited these same issues over the last couple of years, which is not acceptable to me,” Brown wrote. She blamed staffing cuts and “inadequate oversight” on the problems Goldberg described.

She said she’d discussed the problems with her staff, “identified areas for improvement in our process/procedures,” and was devising a plan “by which there will be a practical infrastructure in place with measured sustainability.”

The next month, Brown announced “dramatic procedural changes to improve response time to [the] state appellate defender,” which outlined a process to digitize records, making the process of responding to the appellate defender’s office “even more efficient.”

In April 2014, Brown, several Cook County commissioners, and Cook County Board president Toni Preckwinkle proudly announced the opening of the $24.2 million Records Storage and Digital Imaging Center at an enormous warehouse in Cicero. Up till then the circuit court’s archives had been scattered across several aging warehouses. The new facility, roughly the size of four and a half football fields, was supposed to accommodate some 1.1 million boxes of records, and had a staff of 80 employees to keep them organized with “state-of-the-art technology.”

“The vastness and strategic design of this facility allows for the well-organized storage and rapid retrieval of the records,” Brown said at the ribbon cutting. But more than a year later, in June 2015, Fox 32 reported that the facility seemed far from being up and running. Thousands of boxes, still wrapped and on moving pallets, could be seen through its windows, while rows upon rows of shelves stood empty. Fox 32 reported observing the warehouse in this state over the course of several months. Back then, Brown’s office denied any delay in putting the facility to use, but it acknowledged to the Reader last week that “a move of this magnitude has presented various logistical challenges.” Brown’s spokeswoman added that the archive is now entirely in place in Cicero, “enabling the Clerk’s Office to be able to retrieve the documents and files more efficiently.”

The Illinois appellate defender’s office says that despite the announced improvements in the clerk’s office, delays in getting records from Brown continue to be an “ongoing problem.”

“We’re constantly working with them to urge them to try to locate the records, to try to search the warehouse,” says deputy defender Mysza. “The clerk’s office informs us that they are aware of the problems and they are working to fix them.”

In 2016 a circuit court judge denied Allen’s request to present new evidence to prove his innocence of the Gibson murder—a denial he’s now appealing. Mysza said her office requested Allen’s records related to this case in early 2017, and that Brown’s office confirmed that they have them all. How-

12 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

Today, Allen is back at Pontiac, though over the years he’s been at every maximum-security prison in the state. é IDOC

ever, Illinois law now requires circuit court clerks to prepare digitized records for appeal—something Mysza says Brown’s office has chronic difficulty doing in a timely manner.

“When the records were just paper records they would be able to file close to a hundred records a month,” says Mysza.

“In the last several months they’re not averaging anywhere close to that.”

Allen’s is one of more than 600 cases her office can’t proceed to appeal due to delays in processing paper records at what Brown touted as “hi-speed scanning stations” in a press release about the new warehouse.

Brown’s office didn’t provide an explanation about why it’s taking so long to digitize records but acknowledged working on Allen’s file for Mysza’s office. “The Clerk’s Office’s Criminal Division received several volumes of this large file from Records Storage and is completing an audit to ensure that all documents are included,” Strong-Shaw said in her e-mail.

“Once all documents are accounted for, the case is expected to be electronically filed to the [appellate defender].”

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ast month, Brown announced she was running for mayor— much to the surprise of many, given that her office is under a years-long federal probe for job selling and bribery. At the announcement at the glitzy Hilton & Towers downtown, Brown, clad in a red dress and sporting three strings of oversize costume pearls, pledged to revolutionize the mayor’s office as 125 enthusiastic supporters cheered her on.

“I pledge to not just think outside the box but to find new and sustainable revenue sources to create a new box using technology and revenue-generating sources that have been proven effective by cities both here and abroad,” she said.

At the event, the Reader pressed her on why her own office continues to struggle with processing records requests in a timely manner.

“You know if you really got into it really closely you would find that the interesting thing about that is that those records are held by a lot of different people,” Brown said. “We have the state’s attorney and then the public defender—a lot of different people. It’s a moving target, and what I have done to really fix

that is make sure that every record that goes to the state or public defender gets scanned before it leaves my organization so we’re going to continue to do that and that’s how we have fixed that matter.”

Meanwhile, that same day, James Allen sat behind a thick layer of glass in a concrete visitation cubicle at Pontiac Correctional Center. He bears a resemblance to Harry Belafonte—especially when he smiles—and speaks in a deliberate, thoughtful manner. He’s got a knack for recalling dates and sometimes, as he explains various elements of his case, he descends down rhetorical rabbit holes, preempting possible arguments that could be used to challenge him with well-reasoned, evidence-based responses. To remain positive over the years, he’s relied on correspondence with a couple of steadfast friends, his Catholic faith, physical fitness, and the belief that he can prove his innocence. The thought that other people may have faced injustice at the hands of the same police officers and prosecutors has also kept him going. (At least one pending federal lawsuit accuses Pochordo of civil rights violations.)

“I know that I’m innocent,” Allen says. “I’m totally convinced that other people who are in prison today, that Pochordo put in prison, is also innocent.” He also says that the murder victims’ families deserve to have their cases solved and their reputations repaired. A few weeks after Richard M. Daley announced indictments in the Ciralski murder and told reporters the shopkeeper was connected to a drug ring, the Tribune reported that a cross was burned in Ciralski’s African-American widow’s front yard. “The Ciralski family was put through some horrible social situations—neighbors turned their backs on them, friends turned their backs on them, they became a pariah family because of false accusations the police department made,” Allen says. “Those people deserve some respect, they deserve the truth told to clear their family name. Their grandchildren need to know the actual story.”

Even if Allen’s convictions for the Gibson and Ciralski murders are overturned, and even if the Cook County state’s attorney declines to retry him, Allen won’t necessarily walk out of prison. Because the Gibson murder indictment interrupted his parole, he’s still got an ongoing sentence for the murder of Singleton. He could theoretically be eligible for parole again, but there’d be one more hitch: In 1990, after months in solitary confinement, Allen and five other inmates escaped from the Joliet Correctional Center. After they were caught, Allen got an additional four years tacked on to his sentence—to be served on top of his other sentences and not concurrently. But Allen’s optimistic about his chances at a gubernatorial pardon.

He muses about what he would do with his life if he were to make it out. He says he’d definitely get involved in various justice and violence-prevention causes. But his dream is to go back to Clark County, Mississippi, to some land his father’s family has owned for generations. He dreams of visiting his parents’ graves there, and living out the remainder of his years as a farmer. In fact, that had been his plan when he was released on parole in 1983. “My entire goal was to get back to Mississippi,” he says. v

@mdoukmas Ashley Mizuo contributed reporting to this story.

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READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

ARTS & CULTURE

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Brianna Buckley, Diego Colón, Janice ONeill, and Tommy Malouf é JOEL MAISONET

THEATER

The Light Fantastic is darkly playful

Jackalope gives Ike Holter’s latest a consummate storefront staging.

By TONY ADLER “ . . . pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . . .”

—Polonius, Hamlet, act II, scene 2

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here appears to be any number of Ike Holters. On the one hand, he’s written topical plays about the Chicago Public Schools crisis (Exit Strategy) and the blue fear in Chicago neighborhoods (The Wolf at the End of the Block); on the other, a historical one about the Stonewall riot (Hit the Wall), a creepy one about the reunion of three friends in a remote cabin (Loom), a comic-bookish one about misfits teaming up to kick bully ass (Prowess), and a plain old excellent drama about the return of a bad-penny hipster who likes to call himself Lynx (Sender).

This being America in the year 2018, Holter’s eclecticism has been framed in terms of his blackness. A recent feature on him in Newcity says, “Pushing back against what historically white institutions expect from a writer of color has been an ongoing struggle in Holter’s career.”

I don’t doubt that’s true, and I hope he wins the struggle, because his work is lots of fun to watch. Holter’s large, he contains multitudes—

and he’s really into playing with genres.

Especially pop genres. His latest, The Light Fantastic—getting its world premiere now in a witty production directed by Gus Menary for Jackalope Theatre—takes him into horror, satanic division.

Set in rural Indiana, a place Holter clearly regards as a horror in itself, The Light Fantastic centers on Grace, a bad penny like Lynx of Sender, but without his vaunted charisma. In fact, only one person is willing to celebrate Grace’s tail-between-her-legs return to her hometown after years away: Eddie, a sad-sack bartender and fuck buddy who’s always had a love-you-in-spite-of-yourself thing for her.

Grace’s old pal Harriet, now a local cop, still harbors a grudge over something that happened back in high school involving unauthorized use of the PA system. Even her eccentric, dying mom is more than a little wary of her.

And Grace doesn’t blame them. “I was mean and I was spoiled,” she admits, “and I was a rotten, rotten bitch.” Her reappearance betokens a weary contrition.

Thing is, it may be too late for atonement.

Because there’s somebody else besides Eddie ready to welcome Grace back—the one who’s been getting into people’s heads lately, causing them to do awful things like gut 16 grazing

sheep. He calls himself Rufus, and Grace will have to reckon with him.

Holter’s script is shot through with frustrating omissions and ambiguities. What exactly was the terrible thing Grace told everybody about Harriet in high school? We don’t know.

And precisely what crimes did she commit during her sojourn in the wide world? We never find out. Is Rufus already in town when Grace arrives or did he follow her there? Or is he everywhere at once and merely noticed her, a la the Mothman—perhaps by picking up the scent of her moral rot? The evidence is inconclusive. Holter seems more interested in piling on the genre tropes than working out the details, but that’s where the devil is, so to speak.

The lack is far from damning, though, because Holter’s writing is so clever, his appetite for cultural reference so huge (even Ghost gets in there), and his zest for make-believe so contagious. Most playwrights communicate the sense that they’re out to entertain you; Holter makes you feel like he’s entertaining himself and giving you the chance to tag along.

Menary and his large staff of designers pick up nicely on that energy. More often than not this staging comes across as the most sophisticated piece of backyard theater you’re ever likely to see, complete with scary-cool effects and faux-Hollywood titles achieved on a budget. It’s a testament to the whole concept of Chicago storefront theater that Jackalope can simply and convincingly pull off a classic horror-film moment like the one where a malevolent presence starts makes everything in the house move on its own.

The cast is equally convincing. Paloma Nozicka makes it easy to believe in both Grace’s former rebelliousness and her current exhaustion; she seems awfully in-your-face, however, for someone raised in the ethos of small-town Indiana. Diego Colón, meanwhile, is a perfect teddy bear as Eddie. Brianna Buckley effectively combines self-discipline and rage as Harriet the cop, making her all the more volcanic when she gets her opportunity to let go. Janice O’Neill pretty much defines “prickly” as mom. Tommy Malouf provides welcome relief from the ambient acrimony as a genuinely civil therapist. And Andrew Burden Swanson has enough of the Paul Bettany in him to give Rufus just a touch of the (irritably) tragic. v R THE LIGHT FANTASTIC Through 6/16: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Jackalope Theatre, Broadway Armory Park, 5917 N. Broadway, jackalopetheatre.org, $30, $20 students and seniors.

m @taadler

THEATER

and Pilate’s excellent R Judas adventure The Book of Maggie follows an epic quest to preserve Armageddon.

Hell is a blast. Beats living. You get to garden, the drugs are free, and if the Harrowing’s planned for anytime soon, no one’s informed Judas Iscariot or Pontius Pilate, the double-quadruple-damned linchpins to Houston playwright Brendan Bourque-Sheil’s show, which makes its Chicago debut here with Death and Pretzels under director Madison Smith. Minus an understandable touch of guilt at having brought about the death of Christ, this Judas (Jake Baker) and this Pilate (Nick Strauss) are set.

Judas broods and boozes, Pilate tends to a fern, and in general their infinite term of confinement to darkness pretty much wiles itself away.

But according to a prophecy written on Hebrew tablets and placed under Heaven’s reception desk, which naturally is staffed by Saint Peter (Collin Quinn Rice, spiffy in a pointed mitre), dejected teenage Maggie (Tia Pinson) is the Book of Revelation’s woman clothed with the sun who’s slated to give birth to a new savior on the day of rapture. Judas has to save Maggie first, though; this lonely girl, for whom life has been an utter disaster (think suicidal pets), is literally just about to blow her brains out on a beach. Whoops. Awful day for Armageddon, lovely day for an intervention.

Rice can be raucously funny, and Taylor Toms as Joan, Maggie’s mysterious helper, shows considerable talent. The cast as a whole probably could not have done better work with this premise, but with a premise this warped that isn’t saying much. Great incidental music by Matt Orenstein, incidentally. —MAX MALLER

THE BOOK OF MAGGIE Through 6/16: Thu-Sat

7:30 PM, Nox Arca Theatre, 4001 N. Ravenswood, deathandpretzels.com, $18, $15 students.

R House of horrors

Writers Theatre’s Buried Child sacrifies ghoulish humor for tragedy.

Director Kimberly Senior’s monumental staging of Sam Shepard’s career-defining Buried Child has all the heft and anguish of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the play Shepard called the greatest in American history. Like O’Neill’s masterpiece, Buried Child focuses on a spiritually bankrupt family torn asunder and glued together by unspeakable secrets. When estranged grandson Vince, heading out west to reconnect with his errant father, stops by the Illinois homestead, he’s drawn inexorably into the childhood home where everything’s familiar and nothing’s recognizable. With each exhausted and exhausting interaction, it’s clear this family’s entrenched in ruts far deeper than the one that holds something horrible out back.

Senior and her mostly stellar cast dig deep into those trenches, resulting in brutal hyperrealism (Larry Yando’s Dodge, the decimated patriarch, seems likely to die in the first few minutes from all his drawn-out hacking). This stylistic approach makes for a consistently harrowing evening, especially whenever traumatized son Tilden, the play’s emotional core, appears. Mark L. Montgomery’s Tilden is a walking wound, disguising his own intellectual damage even as he hugs the armloads of fresh vegetables he keeps bringing into the house as though clutching a newborn.

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MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 13

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REVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION: Chicago Surrealism from Object to Activism

An exhibition, symposium, tour, surrealist salon, musical performances at various locations Thurs. June 7 through Sun. June 10, 2018 Sculpture: Robert Green

Penelope Rosemont, Ron Sakolsky, Paul Garan, Winston Smith, V. Vale, Michael Richardson, Etc Organized by Jennifer Rose Cohn More information at dadachicago.com Or go to: artdesignchicago.org arthistory.uchicago.edu/happenings/events/ 14 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

ARTS & CULTURE continued from 13

But in foregrounding the play’s tragic elements, Senior sacrifices much of its ghastly humor, gothic iconoclasm, and hallucinogenic lyricism, the things Shepard employs to depsychologize O’Neill (he said he was out to “destroy the idea of the American family drama”). It’s a compelling evening, but so weighty it can’t reach the heights of Shepard’s strangeness. —JUSTIN HAYFORD

BURIED CHILD Through 6/17: Wed 3 and 7:30 PM,

Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, 847-242-6000, writerstheatre.org, $60-$80.

R Baby ambivalence

In Cry It Out, four new parents learn what to expect when they’re no longer expecting.

I told you so. Last year, when I saw Molly Smith Metzler’s Cry It Out at the Humana Festival in Louisville, I said its topical content and efficient structure were sure to earn it a berth in somebody’s subscription season. Sure enough, here it is at Northlight Theatre, its virtues intact.

The play gives us four new parents living in close proximity to one another on Long Island. There’s corporate lawyer Jessie, traumatized by her daughter’s touch-and-go birth and thinking she might extend her maternity leave into permanent stay-at-home status.

She befriends hospital worker Lina, who’s also on leave but hasn’t the means even to consider quitting her job.

Literally over their heads, on a bluff where houses sell for $10 million, live entrepreneur Mitchell and haute jewelry designer Adrienne, whom parenthood has simply thrown for a loop.

Metzler lays out their interactions in ways that are formulaic (e.g., the Goldilocks distribution of wealth: rich, poor, right in the middle) without feeling predictable. She allows Lina and Jessie a funny, homey relationship yet doesn’t ignore the real gulf between them.

Mitchell and Adrienne are interestingly at odds, not only in their desires but in their fundamental perceptions of what’s going on. All four are hobbled by a social order that idealizes parenthood without making it feasible.

Jessica Fisch’s staging is as deft as the script, thanks in large part to Laura Lapidus’s complex Lina and Darci Nalepa’s anguished but never maudlin Jessie. Kristina Valada-Viars runs stunningly from mean-girl churlishness to pure thunder as Adrienne, while Gabriel Ruiz rings variations on discomfort as Mitchell. Andrew Boyce’s set and Paul Toben’s lighting find nuance in a suburban backyard. —TONY ADLER CRY IT OUT Through 6/17:

Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 and 7 PM; no 7 PM performance Sun 5/27, Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847673-6300, northlight.org, $30-$76.

R 100 years of badassery

Having Our Say is a fitting tribute to the indomitable Delany sisters.

One of the most ghoulish stories I’ve ever heard was a 2015 NPR piece by Daniel Rosinsky-Larsson about the way a New England newspaper’s well-meaning tribute to the area’s oldest people was being received by some of its recipients. Instead of welcoming the award as a nod to their longevity, some of its horrified winners viewed it as an ominous “kiss of death.” Compared to a lot of other societies, America has some work to do when it comes to taking care of its longest-living citizens—let alone honoring them.

I suppose that’s part of why Emily Mann’s joyful, informative stage adaptation of Bessie and Sadie Delany’s 1993 memoir (cowritten with Amy Hill Hearth) is such an affecting and uplifting experience. One-hundred-and-one-year-old Bessie (Ella Joyce) and 103-yearold Sadie (Marie Thomas) welcome audiences into their living room and kitchen in Mount Vernon, New York, and tell stories from their long lives, which span the postslavery Jim Crow era, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era.

Most memorably, Chuck Smith’s Goodman Theatre production is full of tales of gamesmanship and outright social defiance the Delany sisters engage in while having to navigate the demands placed on women of color in their white-dominated professions (Sadie was a teacher and Bessie a dentist). In some cases, it’s brave mischief, like skirting a face-to-face interview in order to secure a position at a white-run school; in others, it’s staring down death, as when Bessie tells off a leering white sexual harasser. “I wasn’t afraid to die,” she says.

“I know you ain’t got to die but once, and it seemed as good a reason to die as any.” That one of the most badass lines uttered on a Chicago stage this year comes from a based-on-real-life centenarian woman of color is pretty fabulous. —DAN JAKES HAVING OUR SAY:

THE DELANY SISTERS’ FIRST 100 YEARS Through 6/10: Wed 7:30 PM, Thu 2 and 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 7:30 PM; no performance Sun 5/27, 7:30 PM, Goodman Theatre, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $20-$27.

R A docudrama with an epic soul The Laramie Project charts an important moment in the struggle for LGBTQ rights in America.

On October 12, 1998, Matthew Shepard died as the result of a brutal beating by two young men he met at a bar in Laramie, Wyoming, where he was a student at the University of Wyoming. All three—the gay victim and his straight killers—were just 21 years old. Shepard’s shocking murder, heavily and controversially covered by the media at the time, led to the passage of federal hate crimes legislation in October 2009 and is a signal event in the history of the struggle for LGBTQ rights in America.

In the months following Shepard’s death, director-playwright Moises Kaufman and members of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project visited Laramie to interview the townspeople. The result was The Laramie Project, a 2000 docudrama that juxtaposes the facts of the Shepard case with the Tectonic ensemble’s own evolving perspectives on small-town America. The actors in the Aleatoric Theatre Company’s intimate, bare-bones production play multiple roles—portraying the original Tectonic company members as well as the folks they talked with.

Under Nicholas Ryan Lamb’s direction, The Laramie Project charts an evolution of awareness that helps Matt Shepard’s ordeal serve as a pathway to redemptive compassion. The play climaxes with Shepard’s father’s anguished decision to request a life sentence, not the death penalty, for his son’s killers. This is complex, multilayered epic storytelling theater in the Brechtian mold—but in Aleatoric’s simple, honest rendition, it’s deeply moving in a way one doesn’t associate with Brecht. —ALBERT WILLIAMS THE LARAMIE PROJECT

Through 6/17: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; no performance 6/10, Factory Theater, 1623 W. Howard, 312-487-1657, aleatorictheatre.com, $20.

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Ella Joyce and Marie Thomas in Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’s First 100 Years é LIZ LAUREN

R Revisiting The Originalist

Antonin Scalia had his flaws, but he did recognize the power of the Notorious RBG. Antonin Scalia was still alive and Barack Obama was president when John Strand’s fine play about the famously combative conservative Supreme Court justice—known for his vociferous opposition to affirmative action, Roe v. Wade, and all other elements of the progressive agenda and his devotion to preserving the supposed original intent of the framers of the Constitution—was first produced at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., in 2015. In the play, Strand takes pains to show us the man behind “the monster” (as Scalia calls himself). Yes, Scalia gleefully uses his bully pulpit on the Supreme Court to launch myriad fiery verbal assaults on liberal causes and any justices who support them. But he also likes Mozart and Bach and his liberal colleague Ruth Bader Ginsburg (“She is brilliant.”).

Three years later, the world has turned upside down.

Scalia is dead, Obama’s legacy is under siege, and there are “conservatives” in power who may pay lip service to Scalia’s originalism but who indulge in a much more radical and destabilizing kind of reactionary ideology.

Suddenly Scalia, with his insistence on scholarship, integrity, consistency, and the rule of law, seems more teddy bear than monster. Especially the way Edward Gero, who originated the role in 2015, plays him here.

The play’s premise could have been lifted from a 1940s screwball comedy—verbally adept conservative white male judge hires an equally verbally adept liberal, female, African-American law clerk (played ably here by Jade Wheeler, who also originated the role in 2015)—and Gero’s Scalia often feels like a Spencer Tracy to Wheeler’s Katharine Hepburn, though they never pair up. Still, their constant sparring does have a rom-com feel to it, and that adds yet another layer to this rich, fascinating, exceptionally well-written and well-acted play. —JACK HELBIG THE ORIGINALIST Through 6/10: Wed 10:30

AM and 7:30 PM, Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773-753-4472, courttheatre.org, $50-$68.

R Cool story, bro

Refrigerator shows you don’t need to be a philosopher to worry about the imminent future.

First Floor Theater artistic director Hutch Pimentel directs the world premiere of Lucas Baisch’s righteously nightmarish drama of office politics at the end of the world.

In the near future, natural resources are at a premium, and the vast majority of humanity has apparently chosen to give up on meat space in favor of a cloud-based and purportedly eternal existence. But at Icebox—one of the companies that helps customers transition—some employees suspect someone’s got a thumb on the scale.

As Benjamin, the only white male in the office, is about to ascend, his coworkers take turns airing griev-

ances, offering him congratulations, sneaking in final furtive trysts, and wondering aloud about the injustices of their respective fates.

Baisch’s play moves nimbly from comedy to splatter horror to rom-com to tragedy and back again. William Boles’s set is reminiscent of a grubbier and less steampunk version of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Each cast member has transcendent moments, with Shariba Rivers as the coldhearted, pragmatic Mitchell a particular standout.

My one quibble is that by naming each of his characters after a major philosopher or art historian—Roland (Barthes), (W.J.T.) Mitchell, (Linda) Nochlin, et al—Baisch has stacked the deck in a bid for a gravitas his work has already earned under its own steam.

This is an angry and timely piece of theater about the precarious state of our imminent future. No academic’s obtuse theorizing is required for a deep recognition of the point. —DMITRY SAMAROV REFRIGERATOR

Redefining the narrative: Chicago’s youth share their stories in a world-premiere opera.

MAY 31 | 7PM LYRIC OPERA OF CHICAGO Script adapted by Ike Holter | Music by Damien Sneed

Tickets $10-20 on sale now at

lyricopera.org/empower

Through 6/9: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-3830, firstfloortheater.com, $20, $15 students.

Fibonacci out of sequence

Teacher of the Year earns low marks for both math and comedy.

This sounds insignificant, but the cast of Teacher of the Year messes up the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical series in which each number is the sum of the previous two, then liberally incorporates the error into its plot.

The mistake is indicative of the production’s poor attention to detail. The missteps distract from its wit, absurdity, and playfulness with comedy tropes, and it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief—a prerequisite given the show’s bizarre premise.

Five teachers from Nelson High School attend a conference during which the school board names one of them, Derek, teacher of the year. The other four educators are openly frustrated; Derek is, frankly, a dick.

He’s lecherous, boorish, and rude. As the festivities are wrapping up, the Nelson crew discover Derek dead in front of the elevators. They set off on a scavenger hunt, devised by a mystery person, to learn the killer’s identity.

The ensuing chaos reveals the show’s inconsistencies. After Derek’s body is found, the actors break the fourth wall and address potential concerns. For the purposes of this hunt, they say, there is no cell service, all the elevators are out, emergency exits are locked, and no one else is around. Later, they travel up to floor 15—the number is a key clue and is not part of the Fibonacci sequence—without explanation as to why they abandoned the metaconceit. Character traits are broad: the only tangible example provided of Derek’s suckiness is that he farts into teachers’ cars through the window.

And the B story, concerning the school board members, is neither fleshed out nor related in any way to the rest of the show. Comedy lives in specificity, and the lack thereof earns Teacher of the Year low marks. —STEVE HEISLER TEACHER OF THE YEAR Through 6/19: Tue

8 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, theannoyance.com, $8. v

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 15

ARTS & CULTURE LIT

Conspiracy theories

Is the world deranged? Or just you? Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina captures this confusion disturbingly well.

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ick Drnaso’s new graphic novel, Sabrina (Drawn & Quarterly), is a subtle, heart-wrenching, multifaceted look at loneliness and loss in our lunatic asylum of a country and an impressive follow-up to his 2016 debut, Beverly.

The story involves three regular people caught in an irregular situation. The title character has been kidnapped: she is present only as a painful absence. While Sabrina’s sister, Sandra, deals with the loss through medication and group therapy, Sabrina’s boyfriend, Teddy, retreats to his old friend Calvin’s house and into a world of self-loathing and talk radio.

Calvin struggles to be a good friend to the increasingly unhinged Teddy while navigating his own failing marriage and frustrating career. Everyone’s life gets worse as Sabrina’s fate becomes fodder for conspiracy theorists, who bully and threaten all three protagonists.

Panel by panel, Drnaso crafts a gripping, sobering, emotionally resonant story about the perils of living in your own head in the current world.

Drnaso’s simple, cartoon-style art tells his story plainly and powerfully, via pitch-perfect dialogue and a six-by-four grid. All his characters feel trapped, which Drnaso reinforces with the rigid panel structure that makes them appear caged in their own lives. “I guess it looks very hermetic when you’re reading a 200-page book,” says Drnaso, “but when I’m working day to day it just feels like a natural way to establish some structure. I like treating

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each little panel as an opportunity to practice and tighten my compositions, even if most of the book is essentially characters being fairly static and talking. Hopefully there’s a mood embedded in the content of the story, so by the time I’m drawing and working out the artwork it’s more like solving a puzzle.”

Drnaso makes those puzzle pieces fit via structuring devices that are subtle and inspired. For example, Calvin has to complete a mental health survey each day when he arrives at the air force base for his intel-gathering job, noting his hours slept, alcohol consumed, suicidal thoughts, and interest in seeing a therapist. This simple plot device allows a fuzzy window onto the tortured soul of Calvin and interrogates the reader as well. How much booze and sleep did you have last night?

Sabrina is highly relevant to the current moment, in which conspiracy theories, from the machinations of the so-called deep state to the supposed NASA slave colony on Mars, have colonized all our brains to some degree or another. This relevancy wasn’t intended, which may be why it doesn’t feel contrived.

“It’s just an unfortunate coincidence that this fringe subculture has been getting a lot of attention since Trump was elected,” Drnaso says, “because that wasn’t the case when I had the initial idea for this book in late 2014. I don’t know why I gravitated towards the subject. I think a healthy amount of skepticism is natural, but it’s unfortunate when things become so distorted for some people that it’s hard to

é DRAWN & QUARTERLY

By MARK PETERS

untangle everything. I don’t know how to talk about it in a compelling way. I have blind spots and shortcomings, so in a weird way I feel like I can relate to people that become obsessed with something to the point of delusion.”

Drnaso, 29, who’s from Palos Hills and now lives in Old Irving Park with his fiancee and three cats, said that some tough times in his own life were far more important to the genesis of this book than anything political: “I was having a lot of paranoid fears at the time, to the point where it was hard to function and feel very comfortable out of the house. I had an unhealthy tendency to let hypothetical scenarios get out of hand, where I was basically living with something that hadn’t actually happened, and that’s essentially how I arrived at the story. I guess that’s why I found something relatable with people who entertain doomsday scenarios, because if you spend too long in those circles it really does color the way you see the world.”

Drnaso let the story for Sabrina evolve rather than working from a full script he’d written ahead of time. “I typically only script one ‘scene’ at a time before moving to drawing and coloring,” he says, “then I jump back to writing, and it continues on like that. It was important to work the pages to completion as I was going, as opposed to writing a script, drawing for a few years, then coloring the book. Those in-between times were usually when an idea would pop up.”

Drnaso has created a gut punch of a story that will likely make many year-end best-of lists. Loneliness and madness are timeless, but Sabrina, in its exploration of personal fears, is a precise time capsule of how desperate and deranged 2018 can make any of us. v SABRINA By Nick Drnaso (Drawn & Quarterly).

Book launch Thu 5/24, 7 PM, Quimby’s Books, 1854 W. North, 773-342-0910, quimbys.com. F

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ARTS & CULTURE VISUAL ART

The way of all ‘Flesh’

Ivan Albright’s meticulous attention to the human body remains an inspiration to young artists.

By DMITRY SAMAROV

Portrait of Mary Block (1955-’57) é ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO

W

hen I graduated from Brookline High School in Massachusetts in 1989, my art teacher, Osna Sens, gave me an oversize monograph of Ivan Albright paintings as a present. I was a depressed, lonely kid whose only true outlet was painting and drawing. Perhaps Ms. Sens thought Albright’s ghoulish pictures might strike a chord. I didn’t know then that I would make Chicago my home, but Albright’s lurid, often nightmarish portraits were an early introduction to one of the more unusual artists our city has produced. With “Flesh,” a selection of some 30 paintings from its collection, the Art Institute gives Chicago an opportunity to get reacquainted with Albright. It is the museum’s first exhibition devoted to his work since 1997. “[The year] 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the first time Ivan Albright exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1918,” the show’s curator, John Murphy, tells me via e-mail. “We wanted to honor his close ties to the School and the Museum through a focused exhibition that would give visitors the first chance in over 20 years to see a significant group of Albright paintings together.”

Albright is probably best known today for painting the decaying portrait in the 1945 film The Picture of Dorian Gray. This was an appropriate assignment for an artist who spent time as a medical draftsman during World War I and dedicated his career to meticulous renderings of the effects of disease and the ravages of time on the human body.

Albright’s ambition was clearly stated in this passage from a private notebook: “Make flesh more like flesh than has ever been made before; make flesh close, close, and closer, until you feel it.” Indeed, Albright’s approach to the figure is almost topographical. No blemish, bruise, bump, pockmark, or any other imperfection is ignored. As is noted in the wall text for Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida (1929-30)—a painting I’ve admired on the walls of the museum for nearly 30 years—the model was an attractive and youthful woman. What the artist has made is an imagined future portrait, after time and the elements have made her beauty begin to wilt and fray.

The obsessive meticulousness of Albright’s technique is a hallmark of his work. The underdrawings took him months, while a finished painting might be labored on for more than a decade. “I have noticed visitors getting up close to the paintings to try to see every individual stroke and detail,” Murphy notes. “He

is very obviously a ‘new’ Old Master, someone who consciously competed with artists such as El Greco, Rembrandt, and Albrecht Dürer.

So his work does not belong to his own time, but for all time.”

The culmination of the show is a series of self-portraits Albright undertook late in his life. These paintings differ from much of his output in their looser style and more varied approach. It’s as if, sensing that the end was near, he finally loosened the death grip on his brushes. “Late in his life Albright knew that he would not have time to complete one of his monumental paintings—which could take years or even decades to finish—so he concentrated instead on smaller self-portraits,” Murphy explains. “Taken together, the late self-portraits represent some of the most powerful and haunting work of his career.

In terms of style, some are looser and less detailed than usual for Albright. Yet they also continue his lifelong examination of the body, mortality, and the ‘way of all flesh.’ He made three self-portraits after a debilitating stroke, and one three days before he died. Although he had a reputation for being a morbid or cynical artist, Albright’s total commitment to art until the very end is ultimately life-affirming.”

As a high school student about to enter the School of the Art Institute, the same art school where Albright studied, I found his painstaking pictures fascinating. That an artist could dedicate himself to the end of human beauty and vitality was oddly inspiring. It showed a young aspiring artist a different way forward.

In a 1960 interview Albright asked, “Are there such things as death and decay? In any part of life you find something either growing or disintegrating. All life is strong and powerful, even in the process of dissolution. For me, beauty is a word without real meaning. But strength and power—they’re what I’m after.”

I was glad to revisit Albright’s paintings 29 years after first seeing them. While many of these portraits are truly grotesque, the careful attention paid in their creation should be an inspiration for any young artist. Were I a high school art teacher today, I wouldn’t hesitate to give an Albright monograph to my favorite student. But if he or she were in Chicago, I’d send them to the Art Institute to experience his work in the flesh. v “FLESH: IVAN ALBRIGHT AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO” Through 8/5. Fri-Wed 10:30 AM-5 PM, Thu 10:30 AM-8 PM, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan, 312-443-3600, artic.edu, $25, $19 students, seniors, and teens, free 14 and under.

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 17

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE Ethan Hawke in First Reformed

MOVIES

Blocking the light

Paul Schrader’s spiritual drama First Reformed finds pride at the root of despair.

By J.R. JONES Like the Gospels, this review contains spoilers.

I

n Paul Schrader’s spiritual drama First Reformed, the middle-aged pastor of a historic Reformed Protestant church in upstate New York is called upon by a young parishioner to counsel her husband, a radical environmentalist so distraught over the planet’s future that he wants to kill himself. Conferring in the husband’s study, which is wallpapered with dire scientific charts, Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) urges the troubled Michael (Philip Ettinger) not to surrender to despair. As the minister records the encounter in his journal that evening, he lights on a quote from the Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton: “Despair is a development of pride so great that it chooses some-

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one’s certitude rather than admit that God is more creative than we are.” Toller is glad he didn’t say this to Michael, but the words might have fallen on deaf ears anyway; the next day, Toller receives a text from the young man summoning him to a nearby forest preserve and arrives to discover that Michael has blown his brains out with a rifle.

Despair is Schrader’s preoccupation here, one he manages to electrify by grounding it in the panic over environmental collapse.

“The bad times, they will begin, and from that point everything moves very quickly,” Michael fulminates to the minister. “This social structure can’t bear the stress of multiple crises.

Opportunistic diseases, anarchy, martial law, the tipping point. And this isn’t in some distant future—you will live to see this.” After

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Michael’s death, his pregnant widow, Mary (Amanda Seyfried), asks Toller to help box up her husband’s things, and the minister begins reading up on the state of God’s creation. He recoils from Ed Balq (Michael Gaston), the conservative oil man who’s been bankrolling the renovation of his church, and he gives in to despair himself, because he’s a proud man and he lives in a nation where pride is celebrated.

Some critics have called First Reformed the summit of Schrader’s career, which began in 1976 with his screenplay for Taxi Driver. I wouldn’t go that far—nothing tops Affliction (1997), his bleak drama about a small-town sheriff being destroyed by his toxic father— but First Reformed confronts explicitly some of the spiritual questions the 71-year-old director has been sneaking into his screenplays for years. Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Schrader grew up in the Dutch Reformed Church with a family so pious he never saw a movie until he was 17. Despite the sex and violence of his better-known films (Hardcore, American Gigolo, Cat People, Auto Focus), he loves the ascetic French director Robert Bresson and gravitates toward characters who, in their own warped ways, hunger for transcendence—from sitcom star Bob Crane losing himself in sexual debauchery (Auto Focus) to writer Yukio Mishima committing seppuku after a failed political coup (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters) to cabbie Travis Bickle staging a one-man commando raid to rescue a child prostitute (Taxi Driver).

With Reverend Toller, Schrader has finally gotten his hands on the real thing, a troubled spiritual seeker who—like the protagonist of Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951)— keeps a journal as a form of prayer. As Toller explains to Michael, he served for years as an army chaplain and, over his wife’s objections, persuaded his son to enlist in the wake of 9/11; after the son was killed in Iraq, the minister’s wife left him and he retired from the military.

“Whatever despair you feel about bringing a child into this world cannot equal the despair of taking a child from it,” he tells Michael. The minister deflects romantic overtures from Esther (Victoria Hill), the choir director at the giant Abundant Life Ministries center not

far away, and their conversation hints at a past sexual encounter that now fills him with chagrin. When Toller goes to the toilet, his urine is pink with blood, and when the church custodian takes out the garbage, he finds a bag from the rectory that’s filled with empty liquor bottles.

Schrader knew what he was doing when he made Toller a military veteran, because the bedrock of the armed forces is pride—pride in the uniform, pride in the service, pride in the nation. Soldiers may fear for their lives, but no more than they fear shaming themselves or their unit (or maybe their military parents).

For Merton, however, pride only separates us from God and leads us into despair. “Despair is the absolute extreme of self-love,” Merton wrote in his 1949 book Seeds of Contemplation. “It is reached when a man deliberately turns his back on all help from anyone else in order to taste the rotten luxury of knowing himself to be lost. In every man there is hidden some root of despair because in every man there is pride that vegetates and springs weeds and rank flowers of self-pity as soon as our own resources fail us. . . . But a man who is truly humble cannot despair, because in the humble man there is no longer any such thing as self-pity.”

Toller begins his journal as an exercise in spiritual self-examination, but as he grows increasingly distressed about the environment, one begins to wonder if the journal is helping him or leading him further into despair. Again Schrader modernizes his religious concerns, connecting Toller’s journal to the smartphone loneliness of the young people he counsels at Abundant Life Ministries. “These kids grow up in a world that, you and I, we wouldn’t even recognize,” explains his boss, Pastor Jeffers (Cedric Kyles—aka Cedric the Entertainer—in a sterling dramatic performance). “Global warming, pornography, hyperviolent video games. It’s a world without privacy. Each kid isolated, communicating on media. It’s a world without hope.” The parallel rise in social media and teen suicide has been well noted; a recent study in the journal Clinical Psychological Science found teenagers who spent more than five hours online a day were 70 percent

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L’Enfant Secret

MOVIES NEW REVIEWS

R L’Enfant Secret

Philippe Garrel (Regular Lovers) directed this French autobiographical drama (1979) about a filmmaker (Henri de Maublanc) dealing with a stalled project that stars his lover (Anne Wiazemsky). In French with subtitles. 92 min. Visit chicagoreader.com/ movies for Ben Sachs’s full-length review, posting May 25. Sat 5/26, 3 PM, and Tue 5/29, 8 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

The Guardians

French filmmaker Xavier Beauvois brought an extraordinary sense of solitude and contemplation to his 2010 feature Of Gods and Men, about Trappist monks walking a fine line between selflessness and survival in war-torn Algeria. That same hush pervades this leisurely drama about a French farming family during World War I, with Nathalie Baye in a decidedly unglamorous role as the beleaguered matriarch. Her two sons and her son-in-law have all joined the army, leaving the farm understaffed; help arrives in the form of a hard-working young woman from town, but the mother turns against her after one of the sons, home on leave, falls for her. A story of women waiting for their soldiers to return, this unfolds in fairly predictable fashion, though the film’s solemnity is seductive— when Beauvois indulges in a bit of string music on the soundtrack, it seems almost extravagant. In French with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 135 min. Fri 5/25-Sun 5/27, 2 and 7 PM; Mon 5/28, 11:15 AM and 2 and 7 PM; and Tue 5/29-Thu 5/31, 2 and 7 PM. Music Box.

The Judge

Erika Cohn’s revealing documentary profiles Kholoud

Al-Fiqah, the first female Palestinian judge of sharia law. Her purview is domestic cases, and she often rules on women’s rights. Some of the more sensitive matters involve multiple marriages (under sharia law a husband may have up to four wives simultaneously, so he’d better have money). Her most harrowing experience was a divorce case that ended when the mentally unstable husband murdered his wife, an incident that Kholoud and her colleagues recall at the scene of the crime. The documentary follows Kholoud’s professional ups and downs, throughout which she remains shrewd, committed, and down-toearth. —ANDREA GRONVALL 76 min. Fri 5/25-Thu 5/31.

Facets Cinematheque.

On Chesil Beach

Saoirse Ronan gave her first great screen performance in Atonement (2007), which was based on an Ian McEwan novel, so her starring role in this drama, which McEwan adapted to the screen from his own book, raises certain expectations. She plays a prim, upper-class British girl in the early 1960s, and Billy Howles is the working-class lad she adores against her parents’ wishes. The story begins on the lovers’ wedding day and, as flashbacks chronicle their courtship and romance, inches toward their wedding night, when things don’t go exactly as planned. This narrative structure amounts to a sort of literary tease, though once McEwan fully exposes the couple’s compromised relationship there are some strong scenes of them surveying the wreckage together.

British thespian Dominic Cooke makes his feature directing debut; with Emily Watson and Anne-Marie Duff. —J.R. JONES R, 110 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21.

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RSM

more likely to kill themselves than those who spent one.

First Reformed begins to get really interesting when Schrader turns the tables on his hero—and us, and possibly himself—by noting the pride and self-righteousness of Toller’s environmental awakening. When Toller meets with Jeffers and Ed Balq at a local diner to discuss the reconsecration ceremony for the church, the minister makes the mistake of pressing Balq, a powerful man accustomed to deference, on the immorality of despoiling the air, water, and land. “Will God forgive us for what we’re doing to his creation?” The oil man cuts him off: “You know the mind of God? You spoke to him personally? He told you his plans for earth?” Later in the film Toller clashes with Jeffers over the church’s silence on the issue of climate change. “What if this is his plan?” asks Jeffers. “What if we just can’t see it?” Toller is incredulous: “You think God wants to destroy his creation?” Jeffers doesn’t miss a beat: “He did once. For 40 days and 40 nights.” The same humility that Merton preached can be used as a cover for denial, cowardice, and inaction.

As Toller spirals downward, Schrader reveals how caught up the minister is in himself. When Esther approaches him to worry over his health, Toller turns on her. “I cannot bear your concern, your constant hovering, your neediness,” he spits. “You are a constant reminder of my own personal inadequacies and failings. You want something that never was and never will be. I despise you. I despise what you bring out in me. Your concerns are petty. You are a stumbling block.” The minister stalks off, leaving Esther open-mouthed in shock. Eventually Toller goes off the deep end, trying on a suicide vest that Michael left behind and, in voice-over, quoting from Paul’s sixth letter to the Ephesians: “Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world.” He might as well be Travis Bickle soliloquizing in front of his mirror, though as Schrader has already made clear, the mirror is inside Toller’s head. v FIRST REFORMED sss Directed by Paul Schrader. R, 113 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21.

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Black Panther Sat-Sun, May 26-27 @ 9:00pm

Game Night

Solo: A Star Wars Story

After Rogue One (2016), this is the second installment in Disney’s “Star Wars Anthology” franchise filling bB

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 19

ARTS & CULTURE continued from 19

in the nooks and crannies of George Lucas’s original saga. A prequel to the original 1977 film, it stars Alden Ehrenreich as the daring space pilot Han Solo (taking over for Harrison Ford, who’s too old to be flying), and the story encompasses his first meeting with the perpetually disgruntled Chewbacca (Joonas Suotamo), whom he delivers from slavery (or at least lets off his leash). The story is forgettable, but the sets and properties have a cheap, plastic feel that’s consistent with the modestly budgeted original; close your eyes a little and imagine you’re watching this during the Carter years, before communism fell and the Galactic Empire took over. Ron Howard directed; with Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Donald Glover, and Thandie Newton. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 135 min. ArcLight, Block 37, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Davis, Ford City, Lake, Logan, New 400, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Showplace ICON, 600 N. Michigan, Webster Place.

That Summer

Apparently there’s no limit to public fascination with “Big Edie” Bouvier Beale and her daughter, “Little Edie,” eccentric relatives of Jacqueline Onassis who spent years living in squalor in their dilapidated mansion in East Hampton. First told in the David and Albert Maysles documentary Grey Gardens (1975), the women’s sad story has since been turned into a play, an HBO movie, and a Broadway musical. Albert Maysles used outtakes from the first documentary to create a quick-buck sequel, The Beales of Grey Gardens (2006), and now photographer Peter Beard has coughed up four reels of color footage of the Beales that were shot by the Maysles brothers in 1972 for a documentary about the Hamptons that never saw daylight. Most of the footage shows Little Edie pirouetting around the women’s ratty, junk-filled home, trying out the Blanche DuBois routine she would use to full effect when the brothers, knowing a good freak show when they saw one, came back for more. Göran Hugo Olsson directed. —J.R. JONES 80 min. Fri 5/25, 2 and 6:15 PM; Sat 5/26, 6:15 and 8:15 PM;

164 North State Street

Between Lake & Randolph MOVIE HOTLINE: 312.846.2800 Director Abbie Reese in person!

CHOSEN

THAT SUMMER

CUSTODY OF THE EYES

“Presents the religious life as a true vocation in the best sense of the word.” — Eye For Film

20 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

SPECIAL EVENTS

The Workshop

A touring program of nine shorts by local artists: Laura Harrison, Frederic Moffet, Dena Springer, Hannah Kim, Shayna Connelly, Elisabeth Hogeman, Latham Zearfoss, Seith Mann, and Benjamin Buxton. Raul Benitez, one of the curators, leads a filmmaker Q&A after the screening.

Admission is free, but reservations are required at mcachicago.org. Tue 5/29, 6 PM. Museum of Contemporary Art. F

French writer-director Laurent Cantet, whose parents were schoolteachers, returns to the narrative formula of his most celebrated film, The Class (2008), using the interpersonal dynamics among a multicultural group of students to explore the social, political, and racial tensions roiling French society. A famous crime novelist (Marina Fois) blows into a small, economically distressed town near Marseille to teach a summer workshop for young writers, and her most talented student (Matthieu Lucci) turns out to be a closet white nationalist with a giant crush on her. The movie suffers from an anticlimactic ending, but as in The Class, the ensemble scenes are electric; the kind of social divisions evident in the first movie have only been inflamed by unemployment, the growing refugee crisis, and the terror attacks in France over the past decade, which have so often targeted young people. In French with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 113 min. Fri 5/25, 3:45 and 8 PM; Sat 5/26, 8 PM; Sun 5/27, 4:45 PM; Mon 5/28, 3 PM; Tue 5/29, 7:45 PM; Wed 5/30, 6 PM; and Thu 5/31, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

Chicagoland Shorts Vol. 4

Fare Cinema

The Italian Cultural Institute presents the second two of four programs devoted to Italian cinema: Luigi Lo Cascio’s The Ideal City (Sat 5/26, 6 PM) and the lecture “Clothes vs. Costumes” by costume designer Anna Lombardi (Tue 5/29, 6 PM). Both events are free, but reservations are required at iicchicago.esteri.it/iic_chicago/en. F

Personal Perspectives on the Vietnam War Short films about the Vietnam war, dating from 1968 to ’70, along with an excerpt from Loretta Smith’s documentary A Good American: The Times of Ron Kovic (1998). 61 min. Smith attends the screening. Sat 5/26, 8 PM. Chicago Filmmakers. v

Fri., 5/25 at 2 pm & 6:15 pm; Sat., 5/26 at 6:15 pm & 8:15 pm; Sun., 5/27 at 3 pm & 7:45 pm; Mon., 5/28 at 5:15 pm; Tue., 5/29 at 6 pm; Wed., 5/30 at 8:15 pm; Thu., 5/31 at 8:15 pm

Fri., 5/25 at 8:15 pm; Sat., 5/26 at 5 pm; Sun., 5/27 at 7:30 pm; Thu., 5/31 at 8 pm

BUY TICKETS NOW

Sun 5/27, 3 and 7:45 PM; Mon 5/28, 5:15 PM; Tue 5/29, 6 PM; Wed 5/30, 8:15 PM; and Thu 5/31, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

May 25 - 31

May 25 - 31

MAY 25 - 31 • THE WORKSHOP

Solo: A Star Wars Story

“The GREY GARDENS mystique becomes even more intriguing with THAT SUMMER.” — Variety “Laurent Cantet [THE CLASS] makes an enthralling return to form with this topical fusion of political debate session and socially conscious thriller.” — Variety

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That Summer

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Mariachi Herencia de Mexico take both lanes in Pilsen. é CAROLINA SANCHEZ

Mariachi Herencia de Mexico turns schoolkids into preservationists The Mariachi Heritage Foundation has partnered with the Chicago Public Schools to create a student band that’s already played Kennedy Center, toured internationally, and released a chart-busting album.

By PETER MARGASAK

T

he Chicago schoolkids who make up Mariachi Herencia de Mexico had a hell of a summer in 2017. The band, whose members range in age from 11 to 18, had formed in March 2016, and last May they released their first record, Nuestra Herencia. It debuted at number two on iTunes’ U.S. Latino Albums chart, and in July the group appeared with crossover Mexican-American singer Lila Downs at Ravinia.

In August they performed at the prestigious Joe’s Pub in New York, then flew to Guadalajara, Mexico, to play a major mariachi festival. On September 16, the kids participated in

a Mexican Independence Day concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and that same day Chicago classicalmusic station WFMT premiered an hour-long episode of its Introductions program focused on the group. They flew back home in time for school on Monday, and less than a week later they performed as part of Hispanic Heritage Night during a White Sox game.

The Sox are among Mariachi Herencia de Mexico’s many corporate sponsors, and this month the band returned to Guaranteed Rate Field for Cinco de Mayo, performing a short set and then the national anthem before a J

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 21

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22 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

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continued from 21 game with the Minnesota Twins. During an afternoon sound check, White Sox pitcher Miguel Gonzalez, nicknamed “El Mariachi” for his singing voice, sat in with the group for impromptu renditions of hits by ranchera superstar Vicente Fernandez. On Monday, the kids were once again back at school.

Mariachi Herencia de Mexico (herencia means “heritage”) currently involves 90 students at three skill levels, and the band that appears onstage consists of 16 advanced and intermediate players drawn from that larger group. Nearly all the members are at least a couple years from graduation, and during the 2018-’19 school year they’ll be out of town most weekends, performing gigs all around the country. They’re managed by IMG Artists, a huge international talent agency that also represents the likes of Japanese taiko troupe Kodo, Spanish flamenco star Diego el Cigala, and Indian tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain.

Before the current school year ends, though, the group will release their second album, Herencia de la Tierra Mía. They recorded it in Chicago with Grammy-winning producer Javier Limón, whose previous clients include Bebo Valdes, Buika, Paco de Lucia, and Alejandro Sanz. Downs makes a cameo appearance, as does veteran Mexican mariachi singer Aida Cuevas, and the record closes with a medley of two Selena hits: “Dreaming of You” and “I Could Fall in Love.”

Herencia de la Tierra Mía comes out Friday, May 25, and Mariachi Herencia de Mexico celebrate with a concert at the National Museum of Mexican Art on Sunday, May 27.

Bryana Martínez, a 15-year-old violinist in the group, attends Mother McAuley Lib-

eral Arts High School on the city’s heavily Mexican-American southwest side, where she says she’s known as “the mariachi girl.”

Sometimes she has to change into her band uniform, or traje, before she leaves school.

“Getting ready for a gig and walking through the hallways in my traje brings me a lot of happiness—about my family, my heritage, and Mexico,” she says. Some of her classmates have music by Mariachi Herencia de Mexico on their phones, and that’s not the only way they stand behind her. “Whenever I have a gig after school, they’ll come to the bathroom and help me do my makeup,” she says. “They fully support me.”

M

ariachi music is still easy to hear in Chicago, but it has long been surpassed in popularity by other regional Mexican pop styles, including norteño and banda. Mariachi bands, with their colorful matching costumes and oversize sombreros, are often invoked by mainstream culture to stereotype “Mexican music.” In especially cartoony instances, the singers’ sorrowful cries are made to sound like drunken laughter—a disrespectful if not racist way to treat a sophisticated art form whose complex arrangements (usually for violins, trumpets, and several sizes of guitar) require considerable technical skill.

Cesar Maldonado, whose efforts as a booster of mariachi music led to the creation of Mariachi Herencia de Mexico, was born in Chicago in 1984 and grew up in the southwest-side neighborhood of Brighton Park. His parents arrived in the city as undocumented immigrants in the mid-70s and

MARIACHI HERENCIA DE MEXICO Sun 5/27, 7 PM, National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th, $25, all-ages

later became permanent residents—they’re from the same town in the state of Durango, but didn’t meet till they got here. Maldonado listened to mariachi music all the time as a kid, but as an adult—after he’d finished college and established himself as an investment banker—he saw that its culture was fading, especially in the States. The music was no longer a dominant commercial force, the big show bands were dying off, and the stars of the genre were retiring or going pop. He started thinking about how he could give back to a community that had nurtured him for so long.

“Mexican culture and folklore was always part of my life growing up,” says Maldonado. Now 34, he became involved in folkloric dancing when he was four years old, and as a freshman in high school he met his future wife at a dance competition. “Mariachi was always playing on the radio, and I always had an almost purist relationship with the music through college.” He loved the records his father played around the house—he especially remembers the boleros that vocal trio Los Panchos recorded in the 1960s with American pop singer Eydie Gormé. “When I started thinking about doing something for the community that was different, mariachi was the thing,” he says. “My whole life I’ve been

hyped about the music—why not do that?”

Maldonado’s childhood impressed upon him the importance of learning to operate comfortably outside Mexican-American neighborhoods. His parents had come to rely on his ability to translate from Spanish by the time he was six, when he accompanied them to open their first bank account. “Everything they needed to assimilate to the Brighton Park community, they needed me or some third party to help them,” he says. He was accepted to Jones College Prep in 1998, the first year it offered selective enrollment, but his parents were reluctant to let him make the commute. “Getting on the bus every morning at 39th and Sacramento and going to the train station on 35th and Archer and taking the Orange Line downtown every day freaked out my parents,” he says. “We had never been downtown. Because I went to Jones, my family understood what downtown was.”

While in high school Maldonado landed an internship at Merrill Lynch. “The highlight of my day each day was to walk from Jones to the Sears Tower and be in the real world,” he says. “I loved it.” A guidance counselor urged him to apply for a Charles Scholarship from Davidson College in North Carolina, a full-ride award funded by tech businessman John McCartney and geared toward “Latino and Hispanic students” from Chicago Public Schools. His parents resisted again, and when he won the scholarship and headed off to school in fall 2002, his mother didn’t speak to him for his first semester away. He double majored in economics and political science with a minor in Spanish, spending two semesters in Monterey, Mexico. J

Mariachi Herencia de Mexico open for Los Lobos at Joe’s Live in Rosemont on April 5. é CAROLINA SANCHEZ

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 23

continued from 23

Upon graduating in 2006, he accepted a position with J.P. Morgan in New York because it allowed him to move back to Chicago after a year. While in New York he began recruiting and interviewing applicants for the Charles Scholarship, and he’s continued to do that volunteer work since returning in May 2007.

Maldonado left J.P. Morgan in 2011 to become vice president of Chicago-based Cabrera Capital Markets (he’s now partner and managing director at Valdés & Moreno).

At that point he decided he wanted to do something to preserve the legacy of mariachi, and in 2012 he established the nonprofit Mariachi Heritage Foundation to introduce the music to Mexican-American children in Chicago schools—particularly elementary schools on the southwest side that had no music programs of their own.

Before the organization even received its 501(c)3 status, Maldonado began programming local concerts by top-flight mariachi artists to raise money. He wanted to develop a formal curriculum to teach mariachi the way band and orchestra are taught in other city schools, and that wouldn’t be cheap. In the course of booking those fund-raising concerts, he established himself as an important mariachi promoter, working with prominent venues (the Harris Theater, the Auditorium Theatre) and important U.S. and Mexican artists such as Downs, Cuevas, Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan, Mariachi los Camperos, and Mariachi Cobre. Since 2015 he’s also presented a free annual mariachi festival in Millennium Park, which this year falls on June 24—and includes a set by Mariachi Herencia de Mexico.

Getting the schools on board with the MHF’s mission was another task entirely.

In early 2013, Maldonado met with former CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, but he says those talks didn’t go anywhere. He decided to develop the curriculum before trying again, enlisting DePaul University education professor Barbara Radner for the job, and by spring 2014 CPS had signed on to launch the MHF program in five schools that fall.

That summer Maldonado enlisted five teachers, one for each school. Four were locals, and the fifth was a master musician from California he’d met by booking concerts: Roberto Martinez of Mariachi Cobre, which has been a resident ensemble at Epcot Center for 36 years. Martinez moved to Chicago, and all five earned their certifications as instructors.

Maldonado saw mariachi as a way to reach whole families, not just students. “The main reason I chose mariachi wasn’t just because of the music, but because I wanted to find something where parents could become

24 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

Mariachi Herencia de Mexico perform out of uniform at the Mi Tierra restaurant in Little Village this spring. é CAROLINA SANCHEZ

involved in school—so it needed to be something they saw as relevant and didn’t make them feel inferior,” he says. “But it could be something we could assess kids with and set curriculum goals, and serve as a way to empower them too.”

The MHF raised money not just with concerts but also from a growing list of corporate sponsors—which now includes the Sox as well as Xfinity, V&V Supremo Foods, Wintrust Community Banks, and ComEd. It bought violins and eventually guitars for students, who ranged from third to eighth grade. (Members of Mariachi Herencia de Mexico can stay on longer.) In fall 2015, when the program launched, the MHF and CPS shared expenses evenly, but each year the schools have picked up a bigger share of the tab, helping the MHF expand—eight schools are now involved, with a total of 2,100 eligible students, up from an initial five. Maldonado is working on bringing in two high schools next year.

By early 2016, partway through the program’s second year, Maldonado was so impressed by the students’ performance that he tried to persuade CPS to start an allcity mariachi program. When that failed, he took it upon himself, launching what would become Mariachi Herencia de Mexico. “I had kids that were kicking ass, and I wanted to offer a classroom setting where they would be challenged more musically,” he says.

That February he began auditioning musicians. At first he confined himself to students enrolled in the classes he’d developed, but within a month or so he’d started inviting other kids from the city too. He recruited Martinez and Joaquin Rodriguez (of long-running California group Mariachi Sol de Mexico) to serve as musical directors.

In late March the nascent band got an invita-

tion from the White Sox to play the national anthem at a game on April 23—which meant Maldonado had to get the students’ costumes designed and made in a hurry.

The band rehearsed twice a week, once at the National Museum of Mexican Art and once at Back of the Yards College Prep, and Maldonado was sufficiently impressed by the speed of their progress that he arranged for them to make a recording. He booked sessions between fall 2016 and spring 2017 at a community-oriented Pilsen studio called the Remix Project and hired veteran producer José Hernández. The point of releasing Nuestra Herencia wasn’t first and foremost to sell copies but rather to make the band more exciting for the students by giving them something tangible to share. “How cool would it be for the kids to pull out their phones and say, ‘Look!’” Maldonado says.

Surprising everyone involved, the album came within one position of topping iTunes’ U.S. Latino Albums chart, bested only by the latest from international superstar Juanes.

Its peak lasted only four days, but the record would later earn a Grammy nomination. The first time I heard it, I had trouble believing that such polished music had been made by teenagers. The new album, Herencia de la Tierra Mía, is even better. It has a fuller sound and relatively interesting ideas and arrangements—Selena songs are definitely not part of mariachi tradition, and neither is the flamenco guitar that Limón added to “Carlos Arruza.” Mexican harp master Ivan Velasco also guests on “Jarocho I,” a medley of traditional songs from his home state of Veracruz.

“Mariachi music is put into the Mexican regional category, so we have to compete with the commercial norteño and banda music that dominates the radio,” Maldonado

says. “Mariachi is more sophisticated—it’s an orchestra. It needs to go in world music.

And my idea with this album, even before we hired Javier Limón, was to release this as a world-music album. If this music is going to survive and if it’s going to have a shot at playing at big jazz festivals or with flamenco artists or Latin-jazz artists, we have to be in world music.”

That’s a tall order, in no small part because so many Americans still dismiss mariachi as a quaint and kitschy Mexican tradition. But considering that the MFH’s annual budget has grown to $850,000 from $60,000 its first year, it’d be foolish to doubt Maldonado’s commitment. All the money that Mariachi Herencia de Mexico makes—from music sales, from the shows that turn a profit after the daunting travel expenses of a 16-piece ensemble have been met—gets reinvested into the project. (The kids aren’t employees of the Mariachi Heritage Foundation, so it can’t pay them directly.) When there’s enough of a surplus, Maldonado intends to spend it by developing scholarships. He declined to be photographed for this story, preferring to keep the focus on the musicians.

“I set the bar really high for the team and the kids, because I know they can do it,” Maldonado says. “I see myself in these kids. A lot of them are growing up with parents who were like mine, so sometimes the parents are resistant. We’ve been on a really fast pace, and I understand why parents are like, ‘Whoa!’—it’s new for all of us. The metaphor I use with the kids is ‘the bubble,’ and every time I bring it up they all go, ‘Here we go again.’ But we grow up in a four-block radius and we don’t see past it. We use all of these experiences—recording, releasing records, getting a Grammy nomination, traveling all over the country and Mexico—to expand that bubble and let them realize there’s a whole world out there, and they need to think that it’s all there for them.”

The music is also making converts.

Guitarist Eric Nieto, a 16-year-old at Curie Metropolitan High School, says he joined Mariachi Herencia de Mexico to make his father proud—but now he’s become a mariachi fan himself, and he’s spreading the word. “Whenever I’m with my friends, I try to listen to mariachi—they all like rap,” he says.

The group’s success has definitely gotten his classmates’ attention. “They say, ‘Oh snap, he’s doing all this cool stuff, maybe we should listen to it sometimes.’ And they actually do listen to it—one of my friends thanked me for introducing him to it.” v

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Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of Thursday, May 24

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

Singapore trio Wormrot are the voice of modern grindcore

Cut Worms é JOYCE LEE

FRIDAY25 Cut Worms King Tuff headlines; Sasami also opens. 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $20, $18 in advance. 18+

é HIZUAN ZAILANI

WORMROT, ESCUELA, SICK/TIRED, HANDSOME PRICK, MELTING ROT

Wed 5/30, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $15, $12 in advance. 17+

NEAR THE END of Wormrot’s “Hollow Roots,” front man Mohammad Arif bin Suhaimi shrieks, “No point of venting for this fucking long.” He finishes that thought about 43 seconds into a 56-second track, an eternity depending on how extreme—and expedient—you prefer your grindcore. Wormrot, a three-piece that hails from Singapore, is as reputable as a modern grindcore band comes; young metal fans around the world love them as much as the crusty folks who participated in grindcore’s big bang back in the mid-80s.

After discovering their music in the late 2000s, Digby Pearson, founder of crucial extreme-metal label Earache, messaged Wormrot on MySpace to ask them to sign. Since then, the label has released three of the band’s albums, including their most recent, 2016’s Voic-

es (which includes “Hollow Roots”). Wormrot carve out vast soundscapes within seconds; guitarist Muhammad Nurrasyid bin Juraimi sends thick black clouds, jagged lightning bolts, and stampedes of rain across their songs while drummer Vijesh Ashok Ghariwala delivers blastbeats so efficiently that the jackhammering rhythms offer a sense of structure amid the band’s rapid, sometimes erratic shifts. Ghariwala joined Wormrot in 2015 during a lengthy (by the band’s standards) hiatus that was so trying the members appear almost incapable of broaching the subject in interviews, though as Suhaimi told skateboarding magazine Thrasher, he poured his frustrations into the lyrics of Voices. If the album’s sound offers any indication, their struggles have been hard as hell. —LEOR GALIL

Under the name Cut Worms, Max Clarke conjures deeply nostalgic, comforting sounds and bygone eras, evoking the sweet close-harmony singing of the Everly Brothers and the irresistible Merseybeat hooks of early Beatles. While the surface of his tunes on the recent Hollow Ground (Jagjaguwar) appear ripe for joyful sing-alongs, the words that fall out of his mouth in catchy, hypertuneful bunches convey a darkness at odds with the warmth of his vintage pop touch. On “Coward’s Confidence” he lays down sparkling keyboards that conjure the lighthearted atmosphere of a summer carnival and overdubs doo-wop-style harmonies that underline the swaying bass line as he reveals that his giddiness derives from a codependent relationship. “It Won’t Be Too Long” is slathered with woozy pedalsteel embellishments from guest musician Jon “Catfish” Delorme and clanking tack-piano chords, over which Clarke sings “It won’t be too long before we’re free” without ever mentioning just what is holding he and his lover back. The gently sashaying “Till Tomorrow Goes Away” gets more somber; a narrator who seems on the verge of drinking himself into oblivion (if not death) implores his listener, “If I’m taken by the night / Tell my ma I did all right.”

Clarke is an auteur; with the exception of drums he played just about everything on the album. While the fetishism for the pop music of a more innocent time can be cloying, Clarke’s emotional gloom has a way of leavening that sweetness with some real acid. —PETER MARGASAK J

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 25

MUSIC continued from 25 DJ Quik KRS-One, Scarface, MC Lyte, Twista, Shawnna, and Roxanne Shante open. 8 PM, Arie Crown Theater, 2301 S. Lake Shore, $35-$125. b G-funk pioneer DJ Quik made a career out of casting the low-boiling squeal of LA’s definitive gangstarap sound right in his backyard, Compton—and, importantly, right along Compton’s main drag, Rosecrans Avenue. “Every spot in Compton’s got something going on, but Rosecrans is the common denominator,” rapper-producer Problem told the LA Times for a story about the 27-mile stretch of pavement that provides the foundation for many of the city’s best rap songs. The street is also the muse of one of Quik’s best releases of late—last year’s Rosecrans, a collaborative album with Problem that grew out of a 2016 EP of the same name. Mixing G-funk grime with modern-funk sleekness, Rosecrans is built on the knowledge that entire worlds exist within this one piece of land, and that for some people who live in the area, it’s their only connection with the universe. The album succeeds not only because it acknowledges where it came from, but because Quik and Problem harmoniously bridge LA’s past with its present state as a vital home to hip-hop. On “Move Something,” which rests on a minimal ratchet beat that bounces like a quarter on a new mattress, Quik shows his ability to saddle up with the sound of the times and bring his past to the foreground while making a case for his future by working with a bright young artist as equals. —LEOR GALIL

of his other music, instead revealing restrained and almost gothic atmospheres. On his follow-up, All Perfect Days (Denovali), he’s convincingly recalibrated his approach, deftly forging a more kaleidoscopic vision of that aesthetic. The title track builds buzzing, soothing layers of sound—a ringing drone is punctuated by stately piano fragments and, as the piece unfolds, increasing flecks of scratchy guitar noise. As crystalline guitar chords float through “In Midafternoon,” little shards of overtones mysteriously splinter off and collide with cleanly articulated arpeggios as they drift through the sound field. “Elon” sandwiches a gorgeous wash of hovering, reverberant melodies with choking, lashing feedback. There’s a tense cinematic quality to “Pale Watered Floor” that feels a bit too schematic in its suspense-film repetitions, but the closer, “Stare,” does a much better job at crafting a humid feeling rife with elusive tension. —PETER MARGASAK

SATURDAY26 Sen Morimoto Kaina and Qari open. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10, $8 in advance. 21+ Chicago hip-hop thrives and continues to be special because of people like rapper, singer, saxophonist, and producer Sen Morimoto. Born in Kyoto, Japan, Morimoto grew up in western Massachusetts, where he learned to play saxophone under the tutelage of Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers, and during his teenage years he joined the brazen outre hiphop collective Dark World. As much as anyone else in the local scene, Morimoto understands that Chicago rappers don’t need to bend their voices to fit the stereotypes outsiders have of the city’s hip-hop artists—namely, that they either make drill or sound like they could be friends with Chance, a lame bifurcation that ignores a swath of challenging, thoughtful, and eye-opening music. Even within Morimoto’s genre-blurring corner of local hip-hop, which includes ruminative MC Qari (supporting his April

Sen Morimoto é KAINA CASTILLO

EP No Time to Explain), soul-pop vocalist Kaina (whose recent 4U EP was produced by Morimoto), and multi-instrumentalist wunderkind Nnamdi Ogbonnaya (who cofounded Sooper Records, a genre-agnostic indie label on the rise), Sen’s work is distinct. On his Sooper debut, Cannonball!, he smoothly veers from tender, half-whispered, soulful singing to speedy pitter-patter rapping and, atop the wobbly kitchen-sink instrumentation on “This Is Not,” corrugated verses made out of lines in Japanese and English. His instrumentals sometimes have a plastic quality, but they create beguiling moments and evoke the charm of a handcrafted piece of furniture hewn from raw mahogany—every second radiates with Morimoto’s charm and shows how someone can make sounds beautiful by taking the time to show what makes them human. —LEOR GALIL

Michael Vallera é STEPHEN VALLERA

Michael Vallera Scott Tuma opens. 8:30 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10. 21+ Michael Vallera has worked in a wide variety of Chicago bands including Cleared, Luggage, and Maar, exploring disparate facets of his musical interests, many of them aggressively loud. Over the last few years he’s pursued an interest in meditative ambient sounds. I was a bit surprised that on his 2016 solo debut, Vivid Flu, he’d removed most of the dissonance and bite that’s marked so much

26 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

DJ Quik é COURTESY THE ARTIST

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by the title track and “Let Me Tell You What’s Up,” where he defiantly declares “blues till I’m old and grey!” to a lover who demands he either “quit or slow down.” Just like T-Bone Walker (whose influence is heard here), Rodio isn’t afraid to show a little vulnerability on ballads like “Fall in British Columbia,” and there are also a couple of cameos from harmonica giant Billy Branch on “Change My Ways” and “Doctor From the Hood.” —JAMES PORTER

Breezy Rodio é COURTESY THE ARTIST

Jason Stein’s Locksmith Isidore Gerrit Hatcher, Katie Ernst, and Julian Kirshner open.

9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $10. 21+

Breezy Rodio 9:30 PM, Smoke Daddy, 3636 N. Clark. F b The name “Breezy Rodio” might sound like it belongs to an alt-country band. In reality, it’s the moniker of a bluesman who just released his third album. Sometimes the Blues Got Me (Delmark) has a straight-ahead big-band sound that does a great job of highlighting the musician’s passionate, Italianaccented vocals and understated guitar. Originally from Rome, Rodio played behind Chicago bluesman

Linsey Alexander for a decade before striking out on his own in 2017. There are vague echoes of 50s jump blues, and occasionally a mild soul influence rears its head, but for the most part Rodio is aiming straight for the Chicago shuffle, and he does it quite well. Rodio is also a formidable songwriter; at some point he must have had people seriously questioning his career choice, because more than one song deals with the general pressures of being a blues musician. Rodio does a great job of eloquently defending why he does what he does, as evidenced

It’s been eight years since bass clarinetist Jason Stein dropped Three Kinds of Happiness (Not Two), the best and most agile recording thus far by Locksmith Isidore, his trio with bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Mike Pride, but the group has hardly been inactive. When Stein’s half sister, comedian Amy Schumer, enlisted him as an opening act for her international appearances throughout 20152017, he brought along the trio—which emphasized its ability to swing more than its knack for skronk.

The heightened energy and rapport the band shows on its new album, After Caroline (Northern Spy), certainly seems like a result of that experience—Pride and Roebke’s booming, muscular drive in particular. There are tunes that deliver an accessible, hard-swinging sound inspired by classic hard bop, such as the buoyant, Monkish “Eckhart Park,” named for the Noble Square park where Stein would sometimes woodshed. But the album’s extroversion in no way diminishes the exploratory vibe always at the heart of the bass clarinetist’s longestrunning group. The opening piece, “As Many Chances as You Need,” leaps out of the gate with a wild fury as Pride injects a loping backbeat into the 19/8 groove. “Sternum” digs deeply into pure sound, with Roebke producing astringent bowed lines limned by upper-register bite, Pride rumbling J

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

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MUSIC continued from 27

and clattering upon the surface of his kit, and Stein blowing quiet, low-end blobs that bounce around his partners’ activity. On “Walden’s Thing,” named for Stein’s key reed mentor, Donald Walden, Stein tweaks his homage with free-jazz sallies that the titular musician generally would have frowned upon, but within it lies a sincere adoration of music at its most energetic, familiar, and swinging. —PETER MARGASAK

SUNDAY27 Sonido Gallo Negro Kiko Villamizar and Gio Chamba open. Pachanga DJs between sets.

9 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $15-$43. 21+ On its third album, Mambo Cósmico (Glitterbeat), Mexico City juggernaut Sonido Gallo Negro expands well beyond its cumbia roots and further extends its psychedelic treatment of vintage Latin American dance forms. The group balances kitsch with earnest adoration, injecting twangy surf-guitar licks and wheezing Farfisa organ riffs into galloping polyrhythms. Its largely instrumental music (excepting a few simple vocal chants) summons the spirit of the Peruvian chicha craze of the 60s and applies it to an assortment of tropical dances, including mambo, danzon, and porro—the last on a strutting cover of “Tolu,” a 50s gem by Colombian cumbia star Lucho Bermúdez. The group touches on Middle Eastern modalities on “Cumbia Ishtar,” one of several tunes where Jorge Alderete complements the organ lines with theremin melodies. Resonant vibraphone adds a touch of tropical cool to the stately cha-cha “La Foca Cha Cha Chá,” and an ethereal arpa jarocha cascades across the simmering grooves of the original cumbia, “Catemaco.” Several tunes have a decidedly retro flair. “¿Quién Sera?,” an old Mexican mambo by Pablo Beltrán Ruiz, features snaking Peter Gunn-style guitars and has a

Sonido Gallo Negro é DAVID BARAJAS

vibe similar to the theme from the Munsters. “Danzon Fayuquero” deliriously collides a violin-led contra dance with staccato guitar-organ jam that conjures visions of a classic discotheque along Sunset Boulevard. —PETER MARGASAK

Ufomammut White Hills and Vukari open.

7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $20, $18 in advance. 17+ When I saw Italian psychedelic doom trio Ufomammut debut in Chicago on their first-ever U.S. tour in 2015, my only complaint was that the set ended too soon—they’d played for at least an hour, but their blankets of spacey haze, locomotive riffs, and earth-shaking grooves were so entrancing that even another hour would’ve melted away like minutes. This time around, I’m happy Ufomammut are able to play here at all—or anywhere, for that matter. Last month bassist-vocalist Urlo nearly died

Ufomammut é MALLEUS

28 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

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Bonnie Jones é FRIDMAN GALLERY in a motorcycle accident, and he’s postponing the knee surgery he needs till after the band’s spring tour—and with commitment like that, you can see why Ufomammut have had the same lineup since forming in 1999. They’ve released eight albums since then, with each one pushing hard against the musical boundaries established by its predecessor. Recorded live with just a few vocal and synth overdubs, 2017’s 8 (Neurot) focuses on the intrinsic bonds and unstoppable movements in the cosmos. The topic might make you feel insignificant, but it feels so good to immerse yourself in the group’s massive sounds that you won’t care if you matter in the grand scheme of the universe. American rock fans may not yet know Ufomammut they way they do Neurosis, Sleep, or Yob, but if you love far-reaching, doomy metal, these Italian space lords should be among your favorites. Members of Ufomammut also make up two-thirds of celebrated art collective Malleus Rock Art Lab, who will present an Ufomammut pop-up shop at Sideshow Gallery that runs from Friday, May 25, till Sunday’s concert. The shop will feature concert posters, merch, and art books, including last year’s The Art of Ufomammut: From Space 1999 to the Infinity and Beyond. Consider it an opportunity to indulge your mind before it gets completely blown away. —JAMIE LUDWIG

MONDAY28 Bonnie Jones 7:30 PM, Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 N. Ravenswood, $10, $8 students and members. b Baltimore improviser Bonnie Jones hasn’t released any recordings of her work for more than half a decade, but before that self-imposed hiatus she made a series of highly abstract efforts using low-budget electronics. Her finest work features distinctive European improvisers including Andrea Neumann and Christine Abdelnour, and implants

microscopic gestures and refined interaction within abrasive noisescapes larded with sine tones and garbled feedback. For improvisers, recordings are imperfect documents of a practice that’s meant to be experienced in person, but Jones’s operates with a heightened sense of community ethos. Along with fellow improviser Suzanne Thorpe she runs Techne, an organization that teaches female-identified youth the rudiments of building DIY electronic instruments. This week Jones gives her first-ever Chicago solo performance, which will be followed by a conversation with reedist and improviser Ken Vandermark. Her earliest work involved noise, and she recently told me she’s been revisiting that practice through a revisionist lens, building long pieces from sine tones, dense walls of static, and “electronic kludge.” While that recent work has a harsh veneer that harks back to the noise underground, there’s a subtle architectural sophistication in the way she layers, builds, and moves around elements within the din—an art that comes from years of close listening. —PETER MARGASAK

TUESDAY29 Yeah Yeah Yeahs 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 1106 W. Lawrence, sold out. b Within an hour of first seeing the music video for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs single “Maps” on MTV (on MTV, I said!), I stood up, walked to my car, and

drove to a record store to buy their 2003 full-length debut, Fever to Tell. I can’t remember ever having done that before or since. On the album the trio captured the zeitgeist of supra-hyped New York City everything—when excess cool seemed particularly en vogue in rock ’n’ roll—but harnessed the energy of that white-hot scene to become something so much greater than just another local club act happily pinballing around a then-flourishing incubator. And you could really feel it onscreen.

With the elastic and high-strung vocals of the charismatic Karen O and the innovative, jagged riffs of Nick Zinner, Fever to Tell still burbles with chaos in a way that rock music should. It’s often unpredictable, it occasionally flies off the rails, and it’s always fascinating. Though it converges the in-fashion dancepunk of the early 2000s with blown-out glam and dark art-rock, to this day it feels totally alive. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs went on to have success with their solid 2006 follow-up, Show Your Bones, and 2009’s It’s Blitz!, but the rawness and invention of Fever to Tell will always define them. Which is probably why they emerged from a hiatus last year to drop a deluxe remastering and vinyl reissue of the record— one that features rarities and B sides—and head out on this here little tour. —KEVIN WARWICK J

Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs é THEO WARGO

MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 29

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

A Hawk and a Hacksaw

continued from 29

WEDNESDAY30

A Hawk and a Hacksaw Twain opens.

8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15, $12 in advance, 18+

Forest Bathing (LM Duplication) is the first album

by Hawk and a Hacksaw, the Albuquerque duo of Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost, in five years.

Since releasing 2013’s You Have Already Gone to the Other World—a project inspired by Soviet-era director Sergei Paradjanov’s 1964 film Shadows for Forgotten Ancestors—they’ve become more efficient in adapting the eastern-European and particularly Roma sounds that have provided their key influences for more than a decade. But though they’ve continued to travel and further cultivate their relationships with musicians from that region, the new recording, which contains ten original tracks, feels more insular than their previous efforts. Barnes, an ace accordionist, has expanded his instrumental arsenal with a variety of keyboards, the tapan drum, and the santur (a Persian hammer dulcimer), and while a number of guests including Turkish clarinetist Cüneyt Sepetci (who’s released two excellent albums for their LM Duplication imprint) enhance

30 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

é LOUIS SCHALK

the album’s musical arrangements, the married couple handle most of the responsibilities themselves.

That shift has muted the music’s rhythmic attack and timbre, but the process has also imbued it with a new deep melancholy. The Hammond chord organ that trudges through “A Broken Road Lined With Poplar Trees” and the unison lines sculpted by Trost’s violin and guest saxophonist Chris Ogden on “The Shepherd Dogs Are Calling” are pregnant with a sense of contemplation that reflects the Japanese self-healing practice of letting nature’s presence soothe and calm the soul that gave the album its title. There are some more extroverted tunes as well, such as “Babayaga” (about the hideous folkloric archetype who enjoys tripping children with her cane), which has Trost producing wonderful screeches on her violin. “The Washing Bear” evokes the sound of Balkan brass blowouts, with guest trumpet by Chicagoan Sam Johnson. —PETER MARGASAK

Wormrot See Pick of the Week on page 25.

Escuela, Sick/Tired, Handsome Prick, and Melting Rot open. 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $15, $12 in advance. 17+ v

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FOOD & DRINK

○ Watch a video of Jimmy Papadopoulos working with argan oil in the kitchen at chicagoreader.com/food.

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SATURDAY, JUNE 2 7:30PM

By JULIA THIEL

A

RGAN OIL—which comes from the kernels of the Moroccan argan tree—is the most expensive edible oil in the world, but it’s more widely recognized as a hair and skin care product. Chef JIMMY PAPADOPOULOS of Bellemore, challenged by C.J. JACOBSON (EMA) to create a dish with the oil, says, “I didn’t even know it was edible.”

Tasting the argan oil didn’t impress him much. “It tastes like dried Sicilian cured olives.

Imagine that meaty fruitiness you get, the salinity, but then this weird—it kind of reminds me of plastic and cardboard with undertones of olive oil,” he says. Papadopoulos compares the smell to Limburger and funky blue cheese and the flavor to petrol and burnt plastic. “Personally, I don’t really care for it,” he adds.

The oil is traditional in Moroccan cuisine, especially in a dip or spread called amlou, where it’s mixed with ground roasted almonds and honey. Papadopoulos tried making it himself, but says “it was overpowering to the point that I didn’t want to use it—it had an off-putting taste.” He also talked to his pastry chef about using the oil in an ice cream or sorbet, but “that got really weird really quick.”

Struck by the similarity of amlou to a pumpkin-seed paste that he’s currently serving with octopus, Papadopoulos decided to incorporate the argan oil into that instead.

After toasting pumpkin seeds with olive oil, he added garlic, burnt honey, and argan oil and blended everything together into a smooth paste. Instead of octopus, he served it with cod,

which he poached in an “exorbitant amount” of argan oil (he used most of a $90 bottle). “Once we finish poaching the fish I’m seriously considering trying to make some kind of shampoo out of it for my beard,” he said.

To balance the richness of the cod and pumpkin-seed paste, Papadopoulos made a salad of “sharp, acidic, underripened green things,” including green almonds (immature almonds that he compares in texture to “a juicy grape”), green rhubarb, and green strawberries soaked in sweet muscat vinegar with a little salt. He tossed it with argan oil (“as if we didn’t have enough on the cod”) and garnished the dish with dill, wood sorrel, and spigarello (a cousin of broccoli).

When you taste the finished dish, Papadopoulos says, the first flavor you get is argan oil—which means he wasn’t a big fan. “Conceptually, it makes sense—seeds, almonds, fruit—but I’m just not too crazy about it,” he says. “The overpowering taste of the argan oil, it’s hard to cover.”

WHO’S NEXT:

Papadopoulos has challenged MARK HELLYAR, chef at MOMOTARO, to create a dish with BUMBLEBEE CANNED TUNA. “Bar none, he works with some of the best fish in the city,” Papadopoulos says. “I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to tell him that he has to cook with canned tuna.” v

m @juliathiel

National Tap Day

featuring Reggio "The Hoofer" McLaughlin

THURSDAY, JUNE 7 8PM é JULIA THIEL

Jimmy Papadopoulos of Bellemore poaches fish in most of a $90 bottle of argan oil.

Lillie Mae

with special guest Bubbles Brown • In Szold Hall

FRIDAY, JUNE 8 8PM

Bill Frisell Trio

featuring Thomas Morgan and Rudy Royston

SATURDAY, JUNE 9 8PM

Someone Old Someone New / Congress of Starlings Split Vinyl Release Party • In Szold Hall

SATURDAY, JUNE 16 8PM

Asleep at the Wheel SUNDAY, JUNE 17 7PM

Cracker ACROSS THE STREET IN SZOLD HALL 4545 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL

5/25 Global Dance Party: Ethnic Dance Chicago Celebrates the EU 6/10 Teen Arts Collectives Spring Show at Subterranean 6/15 Global Dance Party: Chicago Reel 6/22 Jug Band Kazoobilee featuring Strictly Jug Nuts, the Deep Fried Pickle Project, and Bones Jugs 6/29 Global Dance Party: Peruvian Folk Dance Center

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5/30 Guillermo Velázquez y Los Leones de la Sierra de Xichú Mdou Moctar

6/6

OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 31

FISK & CO. | $$$

225 N. Wabash 312-236-9300 fiskandcochicago.com

FOOD & DRINK

Chef’s sea board and oysters Rockefeller é SANDY NOTO

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Fisk & Co. flexes its mussels

But this seafood-focused spot in the Kimpton Hotel Monaco needs to work on its public-facing side.

By MIKE SULA

A

friend I eat with a lot likes to press his nose up against every menu and scan for typos. When he finds one, it’s like a rancid amuse-bouche that he’s thrilled to alert his server to.

But when a menu misspells prosciutto—and menus often do—it’s even worse, like he found a fly in his soup. The mistake colors his experience with a bilious yellow filter of lowered expectations.

He’s not insane—in fact, I see his point. A lack of attention to detail can be revealing about the essential nature of a restaurant. If you can’t get the spelling on your menu right, what else will you get wrong?

At Fisk & Co., “proscuitto” is wrapped around Chilean sea bass. On the dessert menu noisette, the French word for hazelnut, is spelled with an extra s, and the “goats cheese cheesecake” is accompanied by something called meringue “chards.” (I’ll buy lunch for the first person who spots a typo in this review.)

It did set a certain tone for the way this new “American mussel & beer bar” in the Loop’s Kimpton Hotel Monaco operated each time

32 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

I ate there. Servers seemed outgunned and harried, flitting around a half-empty dining room, rarely available when needed and ill supplied with requisite information once you finally caught one’s attention. The way Fisk & Co. presents itself doesn’t do the back of the house many favors.

The latter’s run by chef Austin Fausett, a

newcomer late of Proof in Washington, D.C., and apart from the misspellings, his menu looks good. It’s seafood focused, at its core a choice of five different mussel preparations: classic, steamed with white wine and butter; tomato-saffron; beer; chorizo; and coconut curry, the rich broth of the last good enough to spoon up even without the provided grilled

bread. Regardless of the presentation, they’re plump and fresh and everything you could ask for in an elemental bowl of shellfish.

Naturally these moules and their respective broths deserve frites, and here they’re attractively blond and lightly crispy and served with a choice of six different serviceable sauces, ranging from a remoulade to a green-peppercorn aioli to a moodily intense black-garlic ketchup.

Apart from this core shellfish lineup Fausett presents a wide variety of seafood options. Classic oyster service from the raw bar features east- and west-coast bivalves ably shucked with minimal damage to the creatures or their shells. Also adept are more inventive exercises like squid-ink tagliatelle sauced with a bright and tangy octopus bolognese more like a loose, spicy arrabiata and a remarkable pressed mixture of shrimp mousse, whole shrimp, and pistachio “mortadella,” sliced thin and dotted with chimichurri and garlic aioli. This is served alongside other “sea charcuterie,” including a deathly rich monkfish-liver mousse and mild, creamy, lightly smoked white fish rillettes, on a chef’s sea board, one of Fausett’s signatures. He’s also adept at porky preserved meats—coppa, saucisson sec—though these aren’t touted quite as much.

At other times Fausett goes by the book: lobster bisque, luxuriously smooth if somewhat wanting for shellfish; crab dip, gooey, turmeric tinged, and similarly crustacean poor; oysters Rockefeller, perfumed with Pernod.

Sole meuniere is a respectful treatment, buttery, silky fillets angled atop snappy justcooked asparagus, a flow of cauliflower puree swooping out from below. The sea bass, its tender white flesh protected by a thin jacket of crisp prosciutto, rests atop charred eggplant puree and is topped with a Basque-style pepper-and-tomato sauce and served alongside roasted fennel and endive.

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FOOD & DRINK

king crab house 1816 N. Halsted St., Chicago

OLDEST CRAB HOUSE IN CITY OF CHICAGO! Monday 5/28 Memorial Day Special All You Can Eat Snow Crab Legs

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Prosciutto-wrapped Chilean sea bass é SANDY NOTO

Fisk & Co.’s interior é SANDY NOTO

Fisk & Co.’s commitment to seafood is admirable, especially for a hotel restaurant, which by definition must also offer a burger, here two thin patties, a blend of ground brisket, chuck, and short rib, blanketed in melted raclette and caramelized onion.

The “chards” on the goat cheesecake turn out to be raspberry-flavored meringue shards scattered over a puck of sweet and pungent caprid dairy with a gluten-free base of crushed almonds and dates. A much simpler miniature rum bundt cake with nicely crispy edges and a

soft, boozy crumb is far less dramatic but far more memorable.

Kimpton positions Fisk as a beer bar with Belgian leanings, but the selection of actual Belgian imports is rather thin, though bolstered by domestic brands brewed in Belgian styles. Beer does feature heavily in bartender Melissa Carroll’s (name mispelled on the website) creations for the cocktail list, some employing brews that have been reduced to cordials, like the Miss Haze, a stiff gin drink sweetened with a reduction of Goose Island Lolita (cocktails are a subject the floor staff were particularly ill-equipped to discuss).

Despite its specialties, most of Fisk & Co.’s business will probably come from within the hotel—I can’t see many townies venturing downtown specifically for Belgian beer and mussels as long as the Hopleaf is still open.

But Fausett’s food shows enough promise that the rest of his menu is deserving of a look. v

EARLY WARNINGS NEVER MISS A SHOW AGAIN

CHICAGOREADER.COM/EARLY

m @MikeSula MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 33

JOBS

SALES & MARKETING Telephone Sales Experienced/aggressive telephone closers needed now to sell ad space for Chicago’s oldest and largest newspaper rep firm.

Immediate openings in Loop office. Salary + commission.

312-368-4884.

TELEFUNDRAISING START ASAP! Call/text 847-863-2275

General Low-Latency Trading Infrastructure Engineer Consolidated Trading LLC Chicago, Illinois Contribute to the design of automated trading strategies and models, working in collaboration with quantitative researchers and traders. Design highly-optimized domain- and platform-specific data structures utilizing knowledge of the Intel x86 hardware architecture. Develop and maintain low-latency exchange connectivity services, including market data feed handlers and order entry gateways.

Must have a Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology, Electrical Engineering, or related discipline. Must have three (3) years of experience as a Software Developer.

Please send resume and cover letter to recruiting@ consolidatedtrading.com and reference LLT0518.

Find hundreds of Readerrecommended restaurants, exclusive video features, and sign up for weekly news chicagoreader.com/ food.

34 CHICAGO READER | MAY 24, 2018

CQG, Inc. sks 1 FT Gateway Database Administrator in Chicago, IL. Rspnsble for implmnttion, devlpmnt, magmnt, supprt, upgrde & monitrng of dtbse environs supprtng CQG apps, infrastrctre systms & services.

Req: Bachelr’s in CompSci, IT or rel; 4 yrs’ exp as MS SQL Server Datbse Admin on Windows pltfrms; exp, in aggrgte, must incl: 2 yrs’ exp interfacing w/financial exchnges, incl Russian exchnges; experience w/distrbted teams esp where English is not native language; exp develpng reports w/MS Reporting Services pltfrm; exp develpng MS Integrtion Services packgs for data prcessng & transfrmatn; exp maintning hi-availablty systms (24 /7/365); famliar w/Dev/Ops concepts, exp wrking w/Dev/Ops team focused on implemntng & enhancng continuous delivery capablties. Select position at http:// careers.cqg.com to apply.

ASSURANCE MANAGER, RISK ASSURANCE ADVANCED RISK & COMPLIANCE ANALYTICS SOLUTIONS (MULT. POS.),

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chicago, IL. Advise clients in the Financial, Healthcare Provider & Payer industries on how to increase the use of analytics. Req. Bach’s deg. or foreign equiv. in MIS, Info Mgmt, Engg, Bus Admin or rel. + 5 yrs postbach’s progress. rel. work exp. in consulting, data analysis, compliance, internal audit or risk; OR a Master’s deg. or foreign equiv. in MIS, Info Mgmt, Engg, Bus Admin or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. in consulting, data analysis, compliance, internal audit or risk. Travel up to 60% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1753, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

(Waukegan, IL) Yaskawa America, Inc. seeks Product Engineer B w/ Bach or for equiv deg in EE, ME or Comp Eng & 3 yrs exp in job offered or in prod eng or rel des exp. Empl also accepts Mast or for equiv deg in EE, ME or Comp Eng & 1 yr exp in job offered or in prod eng or rel des exp. Must have 1 yr exp w/ 2D & 3D CAD syst, design simulation sftwre & analog & digital design; microprocessor & micro-controller based equip; creat proj corresp & doc for prod devp & certif proc, coord & des; & interp & creat schematics, gener BOMs & test plans, & operat reqd test equip.

Occas dom trvl reqd. Send CV & cov ltr to HR, 2121 Norman Drive South, Waukegan, IL 60085 Associate Attorney Ladas & Parry in Chicago,IL; Attorney w/JD+license; Draft IP briefs, apps, letters, analysis reports; Send resume @Richard J. Streit-224 S. Michigan Ave. Chicago,IL

ACCOUNTING CORE ASSURANCE MANAGER (MULT. POS.), PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Chicago, IL. Examine acctng recs, docs & tangible equip. of clients.

Req. Bach’s deg. or foreign equiv. in Acct, Bus Admin or rel. + 5 yrs post-bach’s progress. rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg. or foreign equiv. in Acct, Bus Admin or rel. + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Must have US CPA lic. or foreign equiv. Travel up to 40% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code IL1772, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 W. Boy Scout Blvd, Tampa, FL 33607.

(Waukegan, IL) Yaskawa America, Inc. seeks Controls Engineer C w/ Bach or for equiv deg in EE, ME or Comp Eng or rel fld &1yr exp in job offered or AC Inverter Drives, Servo and Motion Control, and Robotics Automation Systems incl 1 yr exp w/ discrete automation solutions specif for Servo Motion Control & coordinated motion control PLC Programming, Structured text (such as C, Basic, VB); & electrical field test equipment (scope, multi-meter).

Occas dom & intl trvl reqd. Send CV & cov ltr to HR, 2121 Norman Drive South, Waukegan, IL 60085 FINANCIAL: KRAFT FOODS GROUP BRANDS LLC seeks Associate Director, Finance to work in our Chicago, IL office & be responsible for owning the financial rituals & routines for a segment of the US Business to ensure quality, consistency & reliability of meetings, reporting & analysis are in place, as well as interpret analyses in order to identify key P&L risks & opportunities & lead the preparation of weekly, monthly & quarterly update presentations. Degree & commensurate exp req’d. Apply online: kraftheinzcompany.com/applyNA. html at req# R-7174 MARKETING Help build the next generation of

systems behind Facebook’s products.

Facebook, Inc. currently has multiple openings in Chicago, IL (various levels /types): TEAM LEAD,

PARTNER MANAGEMENT (6738N) Lead a team of Partner

Managers to help small and medium sized business drive results through their ad campaigns on Facebook.

Mail resume to: Facebook, Inc. Attn: AA-USIM, 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, CA 94025. Must reference job title & job# shown above, when applying.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPER (FULL Stack Web Appl’ns). Design

& dev. web app. platform; build front-end framework. Bach. deg. or foreign equiv. (Electrical & Computer Engineering or related field) or higher req’d. Min. 6 months’ exp. in pos’n(s) w/ a) software dev. &/or testing using C# programming lang. & b) full stack web app. dev. using Angular JS framework req’d. InnerWorkings, Inc., Chicago, IL. Resumes to: Recruiting, InnerWorkings, 600 W. Chicago Ave., Ste. 850, Chicago, IL 60654.

XCast Labs Inc. needs a Computer Programmer (BS in Comp Science with knowledge in Java).

Mail resume to Vladimir Smelyansky 191 Waukegan Rd, Ste 310, Northfield, IL 60093

Robert D. Ahlgren & Associates seeks Legal Assistant II in Chicago, IL to: Anlze case docs & prep imm apps for filing w/ approp gov agcy. Reqs HS diploma + 12 mo exp in rltd occp. Reqs 12 mo exp w/ imm case mngmt sftwr, such as INSZoom, Immigration Pro, or Law Logix; prep and submt frms: I-485, I-131, I-765, I-130, N-400, I-918, I-751, I-601, I-601A, & I90; Mcrsft Word & Excel. Mail resume to K. Vannucci: 33 N LaSalle St. # 1800 Chicago IL 60602.

(DES PLAINES, IL) Parkway Met-

al Products, Inc. seeks Business Planning Manager w/ Bach or for deg equiv in bus mngnt, mktg, finan or rel fld & 2 yrs exp in job offered or experience in acct & finan, incl finan stmnt prep & analy, budget & forecasting, incl 2 yrs exp in tax & payroll syst; trade & contract negot; bus plan, devp strat & prep bus plans & bus mngnt & mktg. Send CV & Cov Ltr to T. Raczka, 130 Rawls Rd, Des Plaines, IL 60018

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $500-$599 CHICAGO, BEVERLY/CAL Par k/Blue Island: Studio $625 & up; 1BR $700 & up; 2BR $885 & up.

Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Parking. Call 708-3880170

STUDIO $600-$699 Chicago, Hyde Park Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, elevator bldg, phon e/cable, switchboard, fridge, priv bath, lndry, $165/wk, $350/bi-wk or $650/mo. Call 773-493-3500

STUDIO $700-$899 LARGE STUDIO APARTMENT

near Morse red line. 6824 N. Wayne.

Hardwood floors. Pets OK. $750/ month. Heat included. Available 7/1.

(773) 761-4318

STUDIO $900 AND OVER 2650 N. LAKEVIEW

#403, roomy studio in high rise, on site: indoor pool, gym, grocery, prkg. $1400/mo. Rich, 773-621-2045 773288-0640

STUDIO OTHER EAST CHICAGO - Harborside Apartments accepting applications for SECTION 8 1 & 2 Bedroom Apartments. Apply Wednesdays ONLY from 12pm to 4pm at 3610 Alder St. Applications are to be filled out on site. Adult applicants must provide a current picture ID and SS card.

û NO SEC DEP û 6829 S. Perry.

2.5 room. $475/mo. 1BR. $530/mo HEAT INCL 773-955-5105

Elm Street Plaza Subsidized Wait List Elm Street Plaza is pleased to announce that the Studio, 1 and 2 Bedroom wait lists for subsidized apartments will soon be open. Waitlist applications will be accepted online Mon, 6/18/18- Wed, 6/27/18 Elm Street Plaza Management Office - 1130 N. Dearborn, Chicago, IL ELIGIBILITY All applicants must meet certain eligibility requirements: ï Age 18 and older ï U.S. citizenship/legal immigration status ï If a full-time student, must meet HUD guidelines for eligibility ï Pass tenancy history review ï Pass criminal background history review ï Applicants are subject to meet HUD Income eligibility requirements HOW TO APPLY Please visit www.habitat.com/what-we-do/affordable-housing or call the Affordable Housing Hotline (312) 595-3250 for more info. Waitlist applications will be accepted online between 6/18/18-6/27/18. After you have completed the online application, please print the receipt with your application ID for your records. No paper applications will be distributed. All waitlist applications received during that time will be entered in a lottery, and will be randomly selected for placement on the waitlist. *An applicant with a disability or with Limited English Proficiency may request info about obtaining assistance with the pre-application process or making Reasonable Accommodations by contacting 312-3371150 between the office hours of 9:00AM-5:00PM Monday-Friday

l

l

EAST CHICAGO - Harborside Apartments accepting applications for SECTION 8 1 & 2 Bedroom Apartments. Apply Wednesdays ONLY from 12pm to 4pm at 3610 Alder St. Applications are to be filled out on site. Adult applicants must provide a current picture ID and SS card.

LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888 CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

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

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200

1 BR UNDER $700 7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

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

Laundry & Security on Premises.

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

MIDWAY AREA/63RD KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All

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

PRE-SPRING SPECIAL - CHICAGO South Side Beautiful Studios, 1,2,3 & 4 BR’s, Sec 8 ok. Also Homes for rent available. Call Nicole 312-446-1753; W-side locations Tom 630-776-5556; CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up.

773-637-5957 Newly updated, clean furnished rooms in Joliet, near buses & Metra, elevator. Utilities included, $91/wk. $395/mo. 815-722-1212 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $133/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

WEST AVALON, 1BR, Newly decorated. 8059 Ellis, hardwood floors, heat & appliances included. $685/mo. Call 708-769-6902

WOODLAWN

2BD-$900

3BD-$1000M OVE in by Jun 1 Free TV & No Security Niki 773-8082043 NO SEC DEP

7801 S. Bishop. 2BR. $610/mo. HEAT INCL 773-955-5106 108th & PRAIRIE: Studio (BR, kit, Ba) $595, Newly decorated, heat & appls incl. Section 8 ok. 888-249-7971

1 BR $700-$799 73RD/JEFFERY & 75TH/ EBERHART & 70TH/MAPLEWOOD

1 & 2BR apts, c- fans, appls, hdwd flrs, heated, intercom, near trans, laundry rm. $700/mo & up. 773-881-3573

WEST HUMBOLDT PK, 1 & 2BR Apts, spacious, oak wood flrs, huge closets. heat incl, rehab, $815 & $915. Call 847866-7234 RIVERDALE, IL 1 Bedroom Condo, newly decorated, off st. parking, gated comm. $750 + sec.

Call Mr. Jackson 708-846-9734

1 BR $800-$899 HUMBOLDT PARK APARTMENT with one bedroom. Near

shopping area. Walking distance to Walmart. Near public transportation CTA and blue line train. 290 and 90 expressways 10 minutes drive distance. 880.00 per month plus security deposit. Includes heat gas.

773.592.2989

QUIET, 1BR, steps to Lake Front, hdwd flrs & appls incl, nr cultural ctr, golf course, trans & schls. $750/mo. Section 8 Welc. 773-443-3200 LARGE GARDEN APARTMENT. 6802 N. Wolcott. Hardwood floors.

Cats OK. $850/month (heat included) Available 7/1. 773-761-4318.

1 BR $900-$1099 HYDE PARK Large Studio, $850 1BR, $1095 Newly decor, heated, appliances. FREE credit check, no app fee.

1-773-667-6477 or 1-312-8027301 ONE BEDROOM near Loyola Park, 1333 W. Estes. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $925/month. Heat included.

Available 7/1. 773-761-4318.

1 BR OTHER

CHICAGO 7600 S ESSEX PRE-SPRING SPECIAL - 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sec 8 Ok! Also Homes for Rent avail. South Side office: 773-287-9999; West Side office: 773-287-4500

PTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SPRING IS HERE!!!

HEAT, HW & CG PLENTY OF PARKING 1BDR FROM $785.00 2BDR FROM $925.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000***

CHICAGO 5759 S Justine. Updat-

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

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

6325 SHERIDAN RD . 1BR, panoramic view of Lake Michigan, secure building, step out and catch bus to downtown in minutes. Laundry & storage.

Ken 630-243-0632 6748 CRANDON & 7727 COLFAX MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENTS! 1 & 2BR, $625 & UP. OFF STREET PARKING. 773-947-8572 / 312-613-4424 2BR, 1BA, 1ST flr & 3BR, 1BA, 2nd flr, 115th & Damon. 1 mo sec & 1st mo rent. Starting at $1050. mo. Tenants pay all utilities. $35 credit check. Call 773-837-6256 SUNNY & LARGE 2 & 3BR, hd wd/ceramic flrs, appls, heat incl’d, Sect 8 OK. $900 plus.

70th & Sangamon/Peoria. 773456-6900

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

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

ed 2BR, quiet, ceiling fan, ceramic, hdwd flrs, formal LR/DR, encl. porch. $800/mo, 312-719-3733.

2 BR $900-$1099

IMMAC

LOVELY, NEWLY UPDATED

2BR Apt, located near 83rd & Paulina, $730/mo, no pets.

Call for appt 773-783-7098

ADULT SERVICES

ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

BUDLONG WOODS, 5500N/ 2600W. Three bedrooms, full

CHICAGO, 6844 S. Peoria, totally rehabbed, 3 bdrm apartment, tenant pays utilities, $825/ mo, security deposit required.

708-720-0084

66TH ARTESIAN

2 FLAT, 1BR & SMALL 2BR, comes with fridge, stove & microhood, heat incl.

Section 8 Welcome. 312-2826555

GLENWOOD,

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

Updated lrg 1 & 2BR Condos, $850-$990/mo. HF HS, balcony, C/A, appls, heat/water incl.

2 pkng, lndry. 708.268.3762 CHATHAM AREA, Gorgeous, 2BR, 1st flr, updated kit & bath.

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

No Pets. 773-930-6045

2 BR $1100-$1299 Large, newly renov 2BR Apt, Park Manor Neighborhood. $120 0/mo, heat incl. For all inquiries please call Mr.Hodges at 773524-8157 SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 7335 S Morgan, 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl., $1400 /mo. 708-288-4510

laundry on site, security camera.

312-341-1950

CHICAGO-QUIET CHATHAM NEIGHBORHOOD, 91st & Cot-

tage Groove, Sec-8 Welcome, 3BR, 1bath, Living Rm / Dinning Area, Study area, Fridge, Stove, Ceiling fan included. Near Transport. No Pets. Call 312 973 0655

CHICAGO 6747 S. PAXTON , newly renovated, 2BR,

2BA, HWFs thru out, $975/mo, appls, heat & prkg space incl., 773-2853206

CHICAGO. 7838 S. Winchester.

3br, 2nd flr. $1075. Heat Included. Section 8 Accepted.

Call 773-405-7636 RIVERDALE: MUST SEE

2 BR $1300-$1499

Quiet 3BR Apt Newly decorated.

Carpet, nr metra, no pets, $900/mo +sec. Avail Now 708-829-1454

117TH AND PRINCETON.

3BR. $775/mo. Tenant pays utils, No Dogslarge rooms, available now!

847-401-5800

DON’T MISS THIS ONE! Newly decor, huge 3BR, LR, Formal DR, Eat in Kit, 1BA, heated. $1200 + sec. Sect 8 Welc. 708-857-7507 6812 S. ROCKWELL. 3BR, newly

rehabbed, no pets. Heat incl $1100/mo + sec dep. Tenant pays elec & cooking gas. 773-507-8475

2 BD

BELMONT/CICERO, lg

rehabbed sunny apt. lg walk-in closet, close to trans, $1400. call/text Marco 773-443-3030

2 BR $1500 AND OVER

ROGERS PARK, 1224 W Lunt,

2br, 1 block form lake & "L", $1600 mo, free heat & laundry, avail June 1s t.Bob 847-899-7758

ADULT SERVICES

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

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

CHATHAM 88TH/DAUPHIN. 2BR. Both bright & spac, great trans,

3BR/1BA

2 BR UNDER $900

2 BR OTHER

8223 S. MARYLAND XL 2BR $1050/mo. Appls incl, c-fans, LR, DR, beautifully remod. No Sec Dep. Sec 8 OK. Call 312-915-0100.

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

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

AUSTIN BLVD & ERIE , 1&2BR. very lrg beautifully decorated Security system, wood floors/combination carpet. $750-$1100. Section 8 ok.

773-206-9364

floor, appls incl, intercom, $850/mo, heat incl, 1/2 blk to CTA & Metra.

708-261-6566

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

newly remod, spac, quiet block & bldg, nr trans & shops. Won’t Last.

Sec 8 Welcome. 312-519-9771

7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2

CHATHAM: QUIET NOSMOKING building. 2BR, 1BA, 2nd

CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/ C, laundry, near transportation, $680-$1020/mo. Call 773-2334939

HUGE

AUSTIN - 1BR GARDEN APT, utilities not included. $650/mo + 1 month security deposit. Section 8 Welcome. Call 773-317-1837 BR $735, Includes Free heat & appliances & cooking gas. (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. SUMMER IS HERE!!

Most units Include..

HEAT & HOT WTR Studios From $475.00 1Bdr From $550.00 2Bdr From $745.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**

dining room, spacious living room, 1.5 baths, many closets, near transportation, $1485 includes heat. Marty 773-784-0763.

Spacious 3bdrms, utils, appl, $1300 + $600 - nonrefundable move in fee.

708-214-3674 NR 77TH & STONY ISLAND 2 story, 3BR/2BA, appls. $1250/mo + fee & utils. Credit check req.

Sec 8 OK Quiet area 646-202-3294

6119 S. ADA. Beautiful 4BR, 1.5ba, lrg bckyrd, quiet, well kept area, appls & utils not incl.

Sec 8 OK. $1350. 773-720-9787 Bronzeville, 35th & King Dr, 2BR condo, 2 full BA, W/D in unit, maple cabs, wood flr, granite, fpl, exposed brick. $1295. 773-447-2122

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499 LARGE 3 BEDROOM apartment near Wrigley Field. 3822 N. Fremont.

Hardwood Floors. Cats OK. $2175/ month. Available 7/1. Single parking space available for $175/month. Tandem spot available for $250/month.

(773) 761-4318

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

MONEE - Beautiful, Large 3BR, 2.5BA, sun room, fireplace, on 3 acres, 1 level, 2 car attached garage, $2100/ mo. 708-747-3344 PRE-SPRING SPECIAL CHICAGO Houses for rent. Section 8 Ok, 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail. Call Nicole: 773-287-9999; West Side 773-287-4500

CHICAGO HEIGHTS, 3BR, 1BA, NEWLY REMODELED, APPLS INCL , SECTION 8 OK. NO SEC. DEPOSIT. 708-822-4450 8037 S. HOUSTON, 4BR, hrdwd flrs, lndry. 2nd flr, Sec. 8 ok. 3 or 2 BR Voucher ok. Call 847-312-5643.

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

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

773-253-2132 or 773-253-2137

6943 S WOODLAWN 4bdrm 8129 S INGLESIDE 1bdrm & 4bdrm

7655 S. PHILLIPS

1BR, 2BR, & 4BR 6155 S. KING 2bdrm & 3bdrm 6150 S. VERNON 4 bdrm Stainless steel appliances, hardwood flrs, granite countertops, laundry on site No sec deposit $500 lease signing bonus Section 8 welcome 312-778-1262

Chicago - Hyde PARK 5401 S. Ellis.

2.5 Room Studio. $475/mo.

Call 773-955-5106

R U YO AD E R E H

69,000 stores and merchants offer great discounts.

SERVICES

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT CHICAGO HEIGHTS, Studio, 1, 2 & 3BRs, free heat, gas and parking, close to everything, section 8 welcome. $500 and up.

708-300-5020 CHICAGO, PETERSON & DAMON, Kedzie & Lawrence, Studio, 1, 2, 3 & 4BR Apts. $550 & Up. Section 8 Welcome.

Call 847-401-4574

New kitchens & new bathrooms.

69th & Dante, 3BR. 101st & May, 1 & 2BRs. We have others! Section 8 Welcome. 708-503-1366

non-residential LOOKING TO RENT SHARED OFFICE SPACE! We have rental space available for Massage Therapist, Electrologist, Esthetician or other professional in our beautiful Michigan Avenue location. $365.00 mo. Call 708-420-5803.

STOREFRONTS &GLASS.

Custom shower enclosures, mirrors,table tops, replace broken glass.

Aluminum storefronts, insulates windows,glass designed,painted glass all bevel and polished edges. Board up 24hrs. 7 days. 773-441-2309

HEALTH & WELLNESS BODY MASSAGE 312-834-2806

roommates LARGE NEWLY DECOR ROOM. Near 80th & Halsted. $450/

Located Downtown Chicago In Call / Out Call Available

mo. SSI welc. 773-449-8716

MARKETPLACE

GOODS

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

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

708-288-4510

MALL-FOR-ALL.COM FAST GROWING mall online. Over

SUGAR GROVE - Church Sale, Rt

47 & Bliss Rd. Fri 5/25 & Sat 5/26, 9a-7p. Shop away at one of the largest church sales! Email garagesale@ villagebible.org

MESSAGES LOOKING FOR PART-TIME WORK Sunday-Friday (Flexible hours). Personal Assistant for woman executive. Close to 30 years experience, professional bartender for many years. Call 815-575-6714

SPIRITUAL PSYCHIC READER Tells you past, present , future,

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THE STRAIGHT DOPE MESSAGE BOARD

A : If you’d asked this question not too many years ago, AM, I couldn’t have told you much: we’ve long known there are two types of earwax without knowing a ton more about it.

These are, however, heady times for earwax enthusiasts, as researchers continue to dig out unexpected insights about this lowly substance. As one organic chemist recently put it, we’re at “the beginning of exploring a new and interesting biofluid secretion that has not been looked at in this manner.” And you thought the future was in self-driving cars.

It’s been understood for a while that the consistency of one’s earwax is a genetic trait, distributed ethnogeographically, as your quote describes. Nearly everyone of African descent and most people of European descent have the yellow-brown, sticky kind, called wet earwax; the dry, pale, crumbly kind prevails in East Asia; in between, in Central and South Asia, both types are common.

Since it’s our current understanding that modern humanity first arose in Africa and, starting around 70,000 years ago, fanned out from there to populate the globe, it seemed likely that wet wax was the original kind—the ur-wax—and dry wax the more recent variant.

Over the last decade-plus, though, research out of Japan has helped confirm this idea:

• In 2006 Yoshiura et al announced they’d identified the gene that determines earwax type, called ABCC11; when the gene is deactivated, dry wax is the result. Based on the near ubiquity of the recessive dry form of the gene in Korea and northern China, the authors concluded that this mutation must have originated in northern Asia following the migration from Africa, and suggested that it may have been an adaptation to a colder climate.

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would describe yourself as white or black, your earwax is probably yellow and sticky.

If you are East Asian or Native American, it’s likely to be dry and white.” Is there DNA or other evidence available to show when this difference arose? —AM77494, VIA

findings to the ABCC11 story: (1) Using modern prevalence of the dry-wax gene as the basis for probability simulations, the authors estimated that the dry form of the gene diverged from the default wet version 2,006 generations back, or about 50,000 years ago (which lines up well timing-wise with the out-of-Africa theory); (2) the speed with which the new gene spread through

Asia suggests it conferred some evolutionary advantage; and (3) among modern Asian, Native American, and European populations alike, the dry-wax gene is more common the farther north you go—supporting the earlier idea that maybe it helped humans thrive in the cold.

How, though? The key is that the ears’ ceruminous glands, where wax is produced, are basically souped-up versions of apocrine glands, the more familiar type of sweat gland.

So one might guess, as the Yoshiura team did, that the real adaptational action here had to do with apocrine activity and its role in heat regulation under colder conditions. The change in earwax was apparently a kind of by-product.

But it remains an indicative one. Yoshiura et al noted the longstanding observation that in Asian populations where dry wax is common, sweaty armpits and body odor are rare. Their further research demonstrated in 2009 that earwax type and armpit sweat are strongly associated genetically, and that ABCC11 evidently codes for both. This all makes sense— the apocrine glands, found primarily in the groin and armpits, are also the odorous ones, and these are the ones East Asians tend to have fewer of. In a 2006 paper from Korea, where dry wax is the norm, doctors reported that out of 896 patients who’d received surgical treatment for problematic BO, 860 of them had wet wax.

It’s hard to imagine how earwax knowledge will transform the human experience, but who knows? A 2014 study by scientists at Philadelphia’s Monell Center, a nonprofit institute specializing in taste and smell, projected that analyzing the compounds in an earwax sample could potentially yield all kinds of information about the person it came from: sex, ethnicity, diseases they have, food they’ve eaten. Gross and at least a bit worrisome, sure, but someday it might make for a great episode of CSI: Ear, Nose, and Throat. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 30 N. Racine, suite 300, Chicago 60607.

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SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

What to do when someone horns in on the action at the orgy Even if it’s the host. Plus: threesome success and a lesbian special guest!

Q : I like water sports. I

found a mailing list for those interested in piss play, and it wasn’t long before a guy in a rural area posted about a party he was hosting. People on the list talk a big game, but no one else has stepped up to host something, including me. (I would, but four neighbors look onto my backyard.) But I had a good time. The host had plenty of drinks out, towels, chairs, canopies, and candles to ward off the mosquitos.

Everyone is friendly enough, and there’s the right amount of perversion. So what’s the problem? The host. He’s loud and annoying. He insists on putting classical music on (it doesn’t set the mood very well). He tells the same lame jokes every time he’s pissing on someone. He will complain that people say they’re coming and don’t show. If you’re having a moment with someone, he will invariably horn in on the action. Without being rude, I’ve tried to make it clear that we’re not looking for company, but he doesn’t take the hint. It’s his party, and props to him for hosting it— but it takes the fun out of it when the host doesn’t know when to back off. Do I just get over it, or say something privately? —PERSON EXASPERATES ENTHUSIAST

A : The advice I gave a

different reader about dealing with a guest horning in on the action at an orgy applies in your case: “Even kind and decent people can be terrible about taking hints—especially when doing so means getting cut out of a drunken fuckfest. So don’t hint, tell. There’s no rule of etiquette that can paper over the discomfort and awkwardness of that moment, so you’ll just have to power through it.”

Swap out “drunken fuckfest” for “drenchin’ piss scene,” and the advice works—up to a point, PEE, since the person in your case is the host (and a gracious one to boot—drinks, towels, canopies, etc?) But hosting a sex party doesn’t give someone the right to insert himself into someone else’s scene, and stupid jokes have the power to kill the mood and murder the boners.

So what do you do?

Well, you could send your host an e-mail or give him a call. Thank him for the invite, let him know you appreciate the effort he goes to, and then tell him why some people say they’re coming and don’t show: you’re too loud, your music is awful, you have a bad habit of horning in on the action, etc etc. But I don’t think ticking off a list of his shortcomings is going to get you anywhere other than crossed off the invite list to future parties.

So why not make your own piss party? You don’t need a private backyard—I mean, presumably your place has a tub. Supplement it with a couple of kiddie pools on top of some plastic tarp laid down on the living room or basement floor and ask your guests to keep it there. You get to choose the guys, you get to select the music, and, as host, you can lay down the law about making jokes and horning in on the action.

Q : I had a MMF threesome

with my husband and a man we met on Instagram.

Everyone had a good time, and there was no awkwardness afterward. I think things went so well because after years of reading Savage Love, we knew to “use our words” and treat our “very special guest star” with respect! Thanks,

Dan! —MY ULTIMATE FANTASY FULFILLED

A : You’re welcome, MUFF! Q : I’m a cis woman and

recently came out as a lesbian after identifying as bisexual for three years.

Now that I’m finally out, I don’t want to do anything that would make me feel like denying it again. My question is, am I a bad lesbian if I sleep with a guy? I’m currently working 50 hours a week and going to school. I don’t have time for a relationship, and finding casual hookups with women is difficult. A male friend I know and trust recently propositioned me.

At first I said no, but now I’m rethinking it. Sex with men doesn’t compare at all to sex with women for me. But my mind says “It’s still sex!,” and I would enjoy it to a point. Still, I worry that doing this would call my sexuality into question. I feel like I’d definitely have to hide this from my friends. And would it mean I should identify as bi? —GIRL ASKING YOU

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A : I decided to recuse myself and pass your question on to a lesbian, GAY. “She is way too concerned with labels,” said my lesbian special guest. “I used to slip on a dick once every few years—before I quit drinking tequila—and that didn’t make me any less of a raging, homo-romantic dyke. And if her friends give that much of a fuck about who she bones, she needs friends with more interesting hobbies.”

You might also just identify as queer for now, GAY. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast.com. m @fakedansavage

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EARLY WARNINGS

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MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 37

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Shannon & the Clams é ALYSSE GAFKJEN

NEW

Armnhmr 6/30, 10 PM, the Mid Batushka 8/16, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Bernhoft & the Fashion Bruises 9/15, 9 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 5/25, 10 AM, 18+ Jeff Bradshaw 8/29, 7 and 9:30 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/24, noon b Arthur Buck 9/23, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Cactus 6/22, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Charlatans UK 9/25, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge Jen Cloher 7/31, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 5/25, 10 AM Ralph Covert 8/12, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b DBMK 7/25, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge b Dreamers, Weathers 10/10, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 5/25, 10 AM b Gorilla Biscuits, Modern Life Is War 9/29, 1 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 5/25, 10 AM b Guided by Voices 8/26, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Havok, Extinction AD 7/24, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Ari Hest 8/17, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/24, noon b Jon Hopkins 9/12, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Thu 5/24, 10 AM, 17+ Lydia 8/17, 8:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Jane Monheit 10/3, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/24, noon b Kevin Morby, Anna Burch 7/8, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 5/25, 10 AM Holly Near 9/28, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 5/25, 8 AM b

Negative Approach, Dayglo Abortions 6/28, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Odie 7/11, 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 18+ Oneida, Cave 7/28, 10 PM, Empty Bottle Poptone 6/21, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Ribfest Chicago with Ra Ra Riot, Weeks, Algiers, Yoke Lore, Waco Brothers, and more 6/8-10, Lincoln at Irving Park and Damen b Chris Rob 6/25, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/24, noon b Garnet Rogers & Archie Fisher 9/21, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 5/25, 8 AM b Scorched Tundra X with Sumac, Monolord, Lair of the Minotaur, and more 8/31-9/1, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Shannon & the Clams, Escapeism 10/31, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Spill Canvas, Punchline 8/11, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 5/25, 10 AM b Jon Stickley Trio 8/19, 8 PM, Hideout Sting, Shaggy 10/2, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Thu 5/24, noon Test 6/16, 8:30 PM, ChiTown Futbol Tory Lanez 6/2, 7 PM, House of Blues, on sale Thu 5/24, 10 AM b Vitalic 9/5, 8 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 5/25, 10 AM, 17+ WGCI Summer Jam with Big Sean, Trey Songz, YFN Lucci, and more 7/26, 7:30 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 5/25, 10 AM Kevin Whalum 8/5, 7 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/24, noon b

38 CHICAGO READER - MAY 24, 2018

David Wilcox 9/30, 3 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 5/25, 8 AM b Yellow Days 11/12, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Thu 5/24, noon, 18+

UPDATED Drake, Migos 8/17-18 and 8/20, 7 PM, United Center, third show added

UPCOMING Alt-J 6/7, 8 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Anvil 6/9, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Apocalypse Hoboken 7/13-14, 7:30 PM, Chop Shop, 18+ Nicole Atkins 8/10, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Lee Bains III & the Glory Fires 6/5, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle James Bay 10/1, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ Beach Boys, Righteous Brothers 8/24, 7 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park Jeff Beck & Paul Rogers, Ann Wilson 7/29, 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Belly 10/6, 8 PM, The Vic, 18+ Black Moth Super Rainbow 6/16, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Borns, Twin Shadow 9/30, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Canned Heat 9/17, 8 PM, City Winery b Car Seat Headrest, Naked Giants 9/7, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Brandi Carlile 6/15, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Shawn Colvin 6/1-2, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Combichrist 5/31, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+

Dead Milkmen 7/12, 8 PM, House of Vans Deafheaven, Mono 7/30, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Dinosaur Jr. 7/18, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Jeremy Enigk 6/30, 8:30 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Roky Erickson 11/9, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Faust 7/11, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Flow 10/27, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Ggoolldd 7/27, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Bebel Gilberto 7/26, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Glassjaw, Quicksand 7/8, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Handsome Family 7/13, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Hop Along 6/10, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Mason Jennings 8/17, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Jethro Tull 9/3, 7:30 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard 6/10, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Lake Street Dive 10/27, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Kendrick Lamar, Sza, Schoolboy Q 6/15, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Lemuria 7/27, 10 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Jeff Lynne’s ELO 8/15, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Mavericks 6/9, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Mac McAnally 7/14, 8 PM, City Winery b Meat Puppets 6/29, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Melvins 7/31, 7:30 PM, Park West b The Men 8/25, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Molly Nilsson 10/27, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Oh Sees, Timmy’s Organism 10/12, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Panic! At the Disco, Arizona 7/17, 7 PM, United Center Peach Kelli Pop 6/18, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle F Peking Duk 6/16, 8:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b Pelican, Cloakroom 7/26, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Primus, Mastodon 6/6, 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Princess Nokia 6/8, 8 PM, House of Vans Quintron & Miss Pussycast 9/12, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

F

Rascal Flatts 8/10, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Red City Radio 6/1, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Seal 6/19, 8 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park b Ty Segall, William Tyler 11/2, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Self Defense Family, Sannhet 6/16, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Sleep 8/1, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b Sleigh Bells 8/17, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Snow tha Product 6/2, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Tacocat 8/10, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Unsane, Child Bite 7/14, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Waco Brothers 8/25, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn Wailin’ Jennys 10/26, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b Wand 6/18-19, 9 PM, Hideout Warcry 6/10, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Witch Mountain 8/8, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Yob, Bell Witch 7/8-9, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Neil Young 6/30-7/1, 8 PM, Auditorium Theatre b Young Widows, Emma Ruth Rundle 6/8, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Mike Zito, Bernard Allison, and Vanja Sky 8/10, 10 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Rob Zombie, Marilyn Manson 7/15, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park

SOLD OUT Animal Collective, Lonnie Holley 7/27, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Bon Iver 6/3, 7 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park b David Byrne 6/1-3, 8 PM, Auditorium Theatre Dinosaur Jr. 7/19, 7:30 PM, Temperance Beer Company, Evanston, part of Out of Space Sylvan Esso 7/23-24, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Francis & the Lights 6/14, 7 PM, Metro b Gaslight Anthem 8/11, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Grouplove 6/1, 7:30 PM, Metro b Meg Myers 6/12, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ New Pornographers 6/22, 7:30 PM, Temperance Beer Company, Evanston, part of Out of Space Radiohead 7/6-7, 7:30 PM, United Center Tenacious D 11/13-14, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ The The 9/22, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Voidz 6/15, 9 PM, Empty Bottle v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene FOR A FEW years now the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events has hosted a free house-music party on Memorial Day weekend, and this year it’s getting supersized into the Chicago House Music Festival. On Saturday, May 26, nearly two dozen acts perform on three stages in Millennium Park. Gossip Wolf can’t wait to see New York nightlife king Louie Vega, best known as half of Masters at Work, headline Pritzker Pavilion with his Elements of Life project, though his 7:30 PM slot overlaps with DJ sets from Chicago legends Paul Johnson (on the Chicago Stage) and Ron Trent (on the Deep House Stage). Before the fest, the Cultural Center hosts a series of DJ and dance-music workshops as part of the Chicago House Music Conference and Dance Summit, which spans Thursday (6-9 PM) and Friday (3-10 PM).

Since 2017 noise artist Andy Ortmann, founder of Nihilist Records and Panicsville, has won two Individual Artists Program grants from DCASE, and he’s using them well—in fact, one of them is funding his first solo vinyl release in ten years!

Ortmann says the triple LP Pataphysical Electronics is “a culmination of what I’ve been working on for the last six years, since I built a modular system. It includes excerpts from several cassettes, all recorded in 2017, and some new pieces to round it out.” The other grant will eventually pay for a new Panicsville double LP. On Thursday, May 31, Ortmann celebrates with a free show at the Owl, sharing the bill with Body Love (aka Ka Baird of Spires That in the Sunset Rise and drummer Michael Zerang) and Spires member Louise Bock.

This week Sewingneedle drop an album of beefy, emo-tinged indie rock called User Error. On Thursday, May 24, they throw a listening party at Easy Bar, where Spiteful Brewing will release its User Error ESB. On Friday, May 25, they play Schubas, where they’ll sell User Error LPs (via Aerial Ballet) and tapes (from Already Dead). —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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MAY 24, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 39

GREGORYPORTER SINGS NATKING COLEANDME WITHTHECSO

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Monday, June 11, 7:30

Edwin Outwater conductor Marc-André Hamelin piano Gregory Porter vocals

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Tickets start at $55!

CSO.ORG | 312-294-3000 Presenting Sponsor:

BERNSTEIN Overture to Candide GERSHWIN Rhapsody in Blue

Edwin Outwater and the CSO join forces with Marc-André Hamelin and Gregory Porter for a program of enduring favorites. Hamelin, “one of the wonders of the musical world” (The New Yorker), plays Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The Grammy ®-winning Gregory Porter, praised for his “velvety, mighty baritone voice” (The Evening Standard), performs his newly-released tribute to the legendary Nat King Cole.

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