Print Issue of May 31, 2018 (Volume 47, Number 34)

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 3 1 , 2 0 1 8

Too many music fests in Chicago? 23

ROAD TRIPS

When craft beer went corporate 34

2 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

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THIS WEEK

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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

ROAD TRIP ISSUE

IN THIS ISSUE

CITY LIFE

4 Street View Educator/ photographer Rose Velez adds some Caribbean flavor to her look.

ARTS & CULTURE

18 Theater Ireland’s Druid Theatre brings Samuel Beckett’s foreverrelevant play Waiting for Godot to Chicago.

19 Theater The four works that make up Stories of the Body plumb the depths of women’s experience.

19 Theater A Little Night Music and four more new shows, reviewed by our critics 20 Movies Animator Jiří Trnka created magical worlds amid stifling communist censorship.

22 Movies Who We Are Now and more new films, reviewed by our critics

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

29 Shows of note Ric Wilson, Chicago Doomed & Stoned Festival, Wonder Years, and more of the week’s best

Hit the road

If you like cemeteries, Louis Sullivan, and vinyl, here are some spots to check out this summer, from the Mississippi to Michigan City, Savanna to Saint Louis. 5

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33 Restaurant Review: Saba A new chef and a new outpost from low-key Logan Square restaurant group One of a Kind Hospitality make a case for themselves.

34 Beer Josh Noel’s new book Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out chronicles Goose Island’s struggle to maintain its identity in the face of Big Beer.

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FOOD & DRINK

SPRING AWAKEN

ING

LOLLAPALO O

ZA

HIDEOUT B

LOCK PART Y

Does Chicago have too many music festivals?

Lollapalooza’s ticket sales have slowed, and Reggae Fest and Chicago Open Air are canceled—are these the growth pangs of a healthy but crowded ecosystem, or is a crash on the way?

BY LEOR GALIL 23

35 Jobs 35 Apartments & Spaces 36 Marketplace 36 Straight Dope Is it possible to give Congress the ability to override a presidential pardon?

37 Savage Love ‘Could my beautiful bottom boy be turning bi?’ and more 38 Early Warnings Parquet Courts, Godflesh, Carly Rae Jepsen, and more shows to look for in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf Prog paragons Cheer-Accident drop an album that contains multitudes, and more music news.

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 3

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

"I enjoy exploring how to incorporate this island flavor I have,” says Rose Velez. é ISA GIALLORENZO “FOR ME TO BUY A COLORED PIECE, it has to be specific and bold,” says educator and photographer Rose Velez, a New York City transplant who typically favors black. But due to her current infatuation with the Crescent City—“I’m all about New Orleans,” she says—Velez has been adding more vibrant colors to her wardrobe. “Whenever I’m in a style rut, I find myself researching a place,” the 30-year-old explains. “I’m inspired by historical architecture and various cultures.” That includes her Caribbean roots: “I enjoy exploring how to incorporate this island flavor I have in [a place like] Chicago.” Velez says she’s learned from locals how to stay stylish under harsher temps. “They are amazing at still looking good in negative-degree weather. It’s inspired me to challenge the narrative of dressing out of pure survival, and come up with ways to enhance my look during those dreary months—like throwing on a kelly-green coat or indigo-blue knit scarf.”

In this case, though, “I needed a pick-me-up from the extended cold weather we’ve been having and thought a bold crimson red would do the trick.” —ISA GIALLORENZO

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THE CHI CA G O SCHO O L I N . . .

S AI N T LOU I S?

S A INT LO UIS SULLIVAN

T R A SH OR T R E A SUR E ?

The City Museum’s collection of Louis Sullivan-designed pieces keeps growing.

Visit Newfields—formerly the Indianapolis Museum of Art— and decide for yourself.

BY JULIA THIEL 5

BY DEANNA ISAACS 11

FRO M THE WEST SID E TO THE WORLD

W IL L T H E M USIC F IN AL LY ST OP AT R E CY L E D R E C OR DS?

BY TATIANA WALK-MORRIS 9

T W O R I VERS AND MA NITOWOC, WI S C O NSIN: SUBS, S P U TNIK AND SUNDAES Oh, and a “Dream House” designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

BY MATTHEW GILSON 10

The Springfield store features 30,000 records for as little as $2 each, but its owners are ready to move on.

BY RYAN SMITH 15

PA ST T H E P R AIR IE Leave the flatlands behind with a trip to Savanna and Galena, along the bluffs of the mighty Mississippi.

BY TED COX 16

N OT DE AD Y E T Lincoln, lizard mounds, angels, devil’s curses, and junk food magnates: midwestern cemeteries have ’em all.

BY AIMEE LEVITT 17

é RYAN SEGEDI

Austin travel agent Crystal Dyer arranges trips from global adventures to local outings for youth. Here are a few of her regional favorites.

By JULIA THIEL

é RYAN SEGEDI

ROAD TRIPS

The City Museum will do anything— even risk eternal damnation—to build its collection of Louis Sullivan architectural relics.

T

he first time Rick Erwin, executive director of the City Museum in Saint Louis, tried to buy a piece of a Louis Sullivan building, a Catholic priest damned him to hell. That was back in 2012. The museum had sent workers to Hammond, Indiana, to pick up some terra-cotta by the architect George Grant Elmslie. On that trip, one of Erwin’s colleagues negotiated a deal with Father Donald Rowe, a former head of Saint Ignatius College Prep in Chicago and an avid collector of architecture, who was involved in procuring architectural artifacts for the school’s atrium. The City Museum had arranged to buy a section of cornice from the Sullivan-designed Chicago Stock Exchange building, which had been demolished in 1972. Then, as Erwin tells it, “it just went south really, really fast. Next thing I know I get this e-mail from Father Rowe where he’s basically damning myself and the owner of the City Museum to hell. We’re like, what?

We didn’t do anything!”

Erwin says that he and the museum owner realized that there had been some miscommunication during the negotiation and the deal wasn’t really fair to Father Rowe. They worked things out with the priest, and ended up buying not only the cornice sections but a baluster from the Carson Pirie Scott building, also designed by Sullivan. The museum’s collection of work by the architect has been expanding ever since; the most recent addition, which the museum installed last fall, is another, much larger cornice from the Stock Exchange. This one, which the museum bought from the Chicago Botanic Garden, is a corner section that’s 29 feet long on one side, 13 feet on another, and nine feet high (the section acquired from Father Rowe is about four by six feet, Erwin says).

J

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 5

DON’T MISS A SECOND. In Minnesota, there’s always something magical happening.

All-night art festivals that illuminate the senses.

A million twinkling stars or the warm glow of a roaring campfire.

Photo by Dusty Hoskovec

Only in Minnesota.

6 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

P L A N YO U R M I N N E S O TA VAC AT I O N AT E X P L O R E M I N N E S O TA .C O M

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R O A D T R IP S Sullivan pieces include a cornice from the Chicago Stock Exchange é COURTESY CITY MUSEUM

continued from 5 “Where the City Museum is fortunate is that we can do large-scale stuff that other people can’t,” Erwin says. “If it’s 20 feet, 40 feet long, I can put that up within the building.” That’s a mild understatement. The museum is housed in a 600,000-square-foot former shoe factory that’s ten stories tall, which means that there’s a lot of room for—well, whatever management decides to put there. Four stories of the building and the roof are dedicated to the museum, much of which is essentially a giant playground made from reclaimed industrial materials, part sculpture, part jungle gym. There are tunnels in the ceiling and below the floor, a massive outdoor installation with metal coils Streetlights from Navy Pier é COURTESY CITY MUSEUM big enough to crawl through and two airplane fuselages, and slides everywhere—including Much of the museum’s fourth floor is detwo that go down the entire ten stories. “It’s an evolving sculpture,” Erwin explains. “It voted to work by Sullivan, one of the most started with Bob Cassilly, out of his brain, and influential Chicago School architects. Many we just keep adding to it. It’s all about play, of his iconic buildings have been demolished how play helps you grow and learn.” (Cassilly, over the years, but pieces were salvaged by a sculptor who had made a fortune flipping Chicago-area collectors. Some of those archireal estate, opened the museum in 1997 with tecture custodians are getting older, though, his then-wife; he died in 2011.) “The architec- Erwin says, and are ready to part with their ture, it’s around because we love it. Hopefully collections. it inspires somebody—they can see that things The City Museum acquired a lot of its Sulcan have a second life.” livan pieces from Stuart Grannen, owner of

Theater, and the Stock Exchange. At the time, Erwin says, they didn’t know exactly what they were buying or what went together, since the pieces were so spread out. Later, though, they were able to figure out how to rebuild a cornice secCITY MUSEUM Mon-Thu 9 AM-5 PM, tion of the Garrick Theater.

Fri-Sat 9 AM-midnight, Erwin believes it’s the only Sun 11 AM-5 PM, 750 section of the theater like it N. 16th St., Saint Louis, MO, 314-231-2489 left in the world. While Erwin (CITY), citymuseum. says that the City Museum org, $14. doesn’t have the world’s largest collection of work by Sullivan—that honor goes to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville—it does have some of the largest assemblies of the architect’s work on display, including the Garrick and Stock Exchange cornices.

As for why the City Museum is buying up Chicago architecture from local collectors, Erwin says, “Honestly, people in Chicago don’t want it. It should be in Chicago. I would love for it to be in Chicago. But it’s found its way to us, and we’re more than happy to keep working.”

The museum’s collection of Chicago architecture isn’t limited to Sullivan; it also has pieces from the Manhattan Building, the Fisher Building, and the Plymouth Building, as well as cast-iron art deco swans from a former garage at Lake and Dearborn and cast-iron streetlights adorned with frogs that used to be at Navy Pier. “If it’s large and hard to move, usually we’re the only people that can get it,” Erwin says. He estimates that the swans and frog lights weigh around 400 to 600 pounds each.

Elevator grille and balusters from Sullivan’s There are more than 200 Sullivan pieces in Guaranty Building in Buffalo, New York é storage at the museum just waiting to be reCOURTESY CITY MUSEUM Architectural Artifacts, an enormous antiques built and added to the collection on the fourth store in Ravenswood, who had a collection floor, Erwin says—including a section of stairspread out over several warehouses. Erwin case from Carson Pirie Scott that he’d love to says that he heard Grannen was considering put together somewhere in the museum where selling, and wanted to make sure the collec- people can walk on it. And he’s far from done tion stayed together. In late 2012 the museum collecting. “We’re just always looking,” he began buying all the Sullivan architecture says. “If something [by Sullivan] comes up that they could find in the warehouses. “We and it’s a good value and we can put it out for just kept sending trucks up there,” Erwin display, we definitely want it.” v says. Those purchases included terra-cotta pieces from Carson Pirie Scott, the Garrick m @juliathiel

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

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More than beer and cheese.

But we’ve got those too.

From Goya to William Kentridge, find a summer of inspiration just 90 minutes north.

Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #51, 1964. Formica and commercially printed paper with plastic and acrylic on canvas. Gift of Friends of Art M1970.10. Photograph by John Nienhuis. © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

8 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

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FR OM THE W EST SIDE TO T HE W ORLD

HOUSE OF DR. HENRY PALMER 2985 W. 73rd Pl. Merrillville, IN merrillvillehistory.org

Milwaukee, WI Milwaukee is a fun place to travel because of the city’s overall embrace of diversity, Dyer says. That diversity shines through at the city’s wide-ranging parades and festivals, which include PRIDEFEST (6/7-6/10) and JUNETEENTH DAY (6/19), which celebrates the end of slavery. For travelers with an interest in black history, there’s AMERICA’S BLACK HOLOCAUST MUSEUM, which after closing in 2008 is scheduled to reopen this fall with exhibits on lynching and the slave trade. Of course, you can’t go to Wisconsin and not try any cheese.

Dyer recommends starting with the CLOCK SHADOW CREAMERY, a self-described urban cheese factory.

Austin travel agent Crystal Dyer arranges trips from global adventures to local outings for youth. Here are a few of her regional favorites.

By TATIANA WALK-MORRIS

W

hen Crystal Dyer opened Gone Again Travel & Tours in a storefront in Austin in 2016, she was doing more than establishing a brick-and-mortar business. The site was just four blocks from where her grandson had been killed, and in moving her operations there she was seeking to bring some hope and opportunity to the neighborhood.

“It was devastating,” Dyer says of the murder of her grandson Devin, who was slain in 2011, just five days after he turned 18, when a gunman shot up a party he was attending. “I kept thinking ‘What can I do?’”

A south-side native, Dyer, who’s 62, started Gone Again in 1999 as a side hustle while working as a project manager for AT&T. After a colleague got annoyed at her (often unsolicited) travel advice and sarcastically told her to open her own agency, Dyer did just that after completing the travel certification program at Harper College in Palatine. She started by selling tour packages and airline tickets to friends and colleagues, and after retiring from AT&T in 2004, moved on to Delta Airlines and worked a number of other gigs in the travel industry.

Dyer’s family is from Georgia, and at her request she’d been transferred down to Atlanta to be closer to them, but after Devin’s death, she returned to Austin “with a burning desire to help my family and Austin youth,” she says on her website. “I wanted to show the kids— and the adults—that all you got to have is a dream and put in the work, and you can have whatever you want,” she explains.

In 2015 she founded the nonprofit Chicago Austin Youth Travel Adventures to mentor students. “I thought, you know, I want to start a nonprofit so I can get kids out of the community and at least show them that there are other options in the world—other careers that they don’t normally learn about in school,”

CLOCK SHADOW CREAMERY Crystal Dyer at her travel agency, Gone Again Travel & Tours é TATIANA WALK-MORRIS

she says. Through it she takes youth on adventures around Chicago, such as fishing trips to local parks and excursions like the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s river cruise.

Though a for-profit endeavor, Gone Again, which is located at 5940 W. Chicago, is also a form of giving back to the community. Dyer’s hired a full-time employee, and she’s helped more than 1,000 clients, three-quarters of them from the Austin area, with their travel plans. She donates 10 percent of the agency’s profits to her nonprofit. She also works with a program at Cook County Juvenile Detention, helping homeless youth find foster homes—“No food, no home equal criminal acts,” she says. Since 2016 she’s also served as an executive board member for the West Garfield Park-based Fathers Who Care, a community organization that seeks to put an end to poverty, drug abuse, and violence. And last year she became chair of state rep LaShawn K. Ford’s tourism committee.

Why do clients come to her when they could book travel accommodations online? Customer service, for one. Where online travel booking platforms typically outsource their operations if they offer them at all, Dyer is there for customers if things go wrong. Plus, she says, she’s an expert at finding deals that will save you hundreds of dollars—or at the very least save you all the time it takes to find

the best option for you.

“I’m going to give you affordable luxury,” Dyer says. “I tell my clients, ‘I’m a wizard. I can wave my wand and make all your dreams come true.’”

Dyer has many recommendations for travel closer to home. Here are some of her favorite spots in the midwest.

Michigan City, IN, and vicinity Dyer says she enjoys the ambience of Michigan City’s “quaint” downtown area. Travelers can take their pick of one of the city’s multiple hotels, gamble at local casinos, and have fun at the beaches along Lake Michigan. The Hampton Inn & Suites is Dyer’s go-to hotel, but for a change of pace she recommends the LAKESIDE CABINS RESORT, just north of Michigan City in Three Oaks, Michigan. History buffs may enjoy visiting UNDERGROUND RAILROAD SITES in the area, including the site of the 1836 home of Dr. Henry D. Palmer, Michigan City’s first physician, who aided slaves on their escapes to Michigan and Canada. (The house is now a private residence closed to the public.)

LAKESIDE CABINS RESORT

7650 Warren Woods Rd. Three Oaks, MI lakesidecabinsresort.com

138 W. Bruce St. Milwaukee, WI clockshadowcreamery.com

Saint Charles, IL The 250-acre PHEASANT RUN RESORT in Saint Charles, Illinois, is a good spot for family trips, group trips, and “girlfriend getaways,” Dyer says, offering swimming pools, a spa, an 18-hole golf course, and “amazing” food (there are six restaurants on-site). If you want to explore the locale, Dyer recommends taking a boat ride on the Fox River or visiting the eye-popping BAPS SHRI SWAMINARAYAN MANDIR TEMPLE in nearby Bartlett. “It’s truly a walk through culture,” Dyer says of the Hindu temple. “They have these beautiful grounds outside where they have fountains. You can go there in the summer and just walk around and relax.” v

@Tati_WM tatianawm@live.com PHEASANT RUN RESORT 4051 E. Main St. Saint Charles, IL pheasantrun.com

BAPS SHRI SWAMINARAYAN MANDIR TEMPLE

1851 S. IL Rte. 59 Pramukh Swami Rd. Bartlett, IL baps.org/Global-Network/North-America/ Chicago/Visitor-Info.aspx

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

R OAD T R IP S

T W O RI VERS AN D MA N ITOW OC, W I S C ONS IN : S U BS, SPUTN IK A N D SUNDAES Oh, and a “Dream House” designed

by Frank Lloyd Wright

By MATTHEW GILSON

A

lpacas, Sputnik, exotic wooden fonts, Prairie School architecture, underwater war machines, and the exact spot where the ice cream sundae was invented in 1881 (maybe)— all within a three-hour drive of Chicago—make a trip to Two Rivers and Manitowoc, Wisconsin, a total must.

At least for my family. So earlier this year we booked two nights at Two Rivers’ Bernard Schwartz House, aka STILL BEND, designed for Schwartz, a Wisconsin businessman, by Frank Lloyd Wright along the lines of the “Dream House” the architect devised for Life magazine in 1938. We cooked in the kitchen and played board games by the fire, all the while basking in the truly dreamy space and light of this stunning home. The next morning we explored handcarved wood typefaces and artwork—some vintage, some the recent work of visiting artists—at the HAMILTON WOOD TYPE & PRINTING MUSEUM, which is housed in a factory building where wooden type was manufactured as far back as 1880 and includes work space today. A few miles south, the USS Cobia, a WWII submarine, is docked in the Manitowoc River alongside the excellent WISCONSIN MARITIME MUSEUM. For $44 per person, you can overnight on one of the sub’s bunks—including a few atop (what once were live) torpedoes. Bring a sleeping bag.

A short drive away in Manitowoc, you can check out the Frisbee-size brass ring embedded just a few feet north of the intersection of North Eighth and Park Streets, which marks the spot where a chunk of the Soviet KORABL SPUTNIK-1 SATELLITE crashed to earth in 1960.

Manitowoc celebrates the landing every year with SPUTNIKFEST, a two-day event that among

10 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

STILL BEND, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S BERNARD SCHWARTZ HOUSE

3425 Adams St., Two Rivers, WI, 612-840-7507, theschwartzhouse. com

LONDONDAIRY ALPACAS RANCH

6827 State Hwy. 147, Two Rivers, WI, 920-793-4165, londondairyalpacas.com

The USS Cobia is a WWII submarine floating docked at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum at Manitowoc and available for overnight stays. é MATTHEW GILSON

WISCONSIN MARITIME MUSEUM AT MANITOWOC

The entry area to the master bedroom in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bernard Schwartz house, aka Still Bend é MATTHEW GILSON

75 Maritime Dr., Manitowoc, WI, 920-684-0218, wisconsinmaritime. org

HAMILTON WOOD TYPE & PRINTING MUSEUM

1816 Tenth St., Two Rivers, WI, 920-794-6272, woodtype.org

SPUTNIKFEST

Fri 9/7-Sat 9/8, N. Eighth and Park St., Manitowoc, WI, manitowoc. org/1109/Sputnikfest

BERNERS ICE CREAM PARLOR

Two Rivers Visitor Center, 1622 Jefferson St., Two Rivers, WI, 920793-2490, tworivers-history.org/ museums/#/washington-house

other highlights features an “alien drop,” an alien pet contest, and the Ms. Space Debris Pageant. This year the festival’s September 7 and 8.

Back in Two Rivers, we visited the LONDONDAIRY ALPACAS RANCH, where a group of friendly yet feisty alpacas ate snacks from our hands.

Inside Washington House, a former inn that now serves as the Two Rivers Visitor Center, is BERNERS ICE CREAM PARLOR, which lays claim to having originated the sundae in 1881. To our deep regret, it was closed during our visit—all the more reason to return. v

matt@matthewgilson.com

Alpaca meet and greet, LondonDairy Alpacas Ranch é MATTHEW GILSON

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T RA S H OR TR E A SU R E ?

Visit Newfields—formerly the Indianapolis Museum of Art—and decide for yourself.

By DEANNA ISAACS

L Project wall, Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum é MATTHEW GILSON

Font #138, 18 line, Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum é MATTHEW GILSON

Sputnik crash site, Manitowoc é MATTHEW GILSON

ast October the Indianapolis Museum of Art—an improbably grand institution for a midsize midwestern metropolis— was either gloriously reborn or notoriously trashed.

That was when the museum’s controversial director, Charles Venable, launched a rebranding campaign that buried the IMA name under a new umbrella identity, devoid of any mention of either “museum” or “art.”

Henceforth, IMA and its 152-acre campus a few miles north of downtown Indianapolis would be known as Newfields. The new name was meant to signal that a visit to IMA could be more than just a sojourn through one of the top ten most comprehensive art museums in the nation.

The art world took note: two months later, for example, in a widely read article in the online magazine CityLab about the “Instagramming” of cities, critic Kriston Capps declared the rebranding “the greatest travesty in the art world in 2017.” “[M]useums are cultural treasures, not amusement parks,” Capps argued, pinning the blame squarely on the director: “Venable has turned a grand encyclopedic museum into a cheap Midwestern boardwalk.”

As evidence, Capps cited a holiday light show that, by the end of its run, attracted 70,000 visitors. It’s the same event, Winterlights, that Venable likes to cite as evidence of the rebranding’s success.

You can judge for yourself whether the IMA has suffered a mission-crushing blow or—at a time when many museums are struggling to remain relevant—been thrown a lifeline.

A three-hour drive through the flatlands and wind farms south of Chicago and a left turn off I-65 at 38th Street in Indianapolis will deliver you to the stanchion announcing your arrival at Newfields’ gate. You’ll have to search the wall behind it to spot, in smaller letters, INDIANA MUSEUM OF ART. Inside that gate? Let me paint you this only slightly hyperbolic mental picture: imagine the Art Institute of Chicago (OK, smaller), dropped into the midst of the Chicago Botanic Garden and surrounded by 100 acres of forest preserve and art park.

While it’s not the million-square-foot AIC, the Indianapolis museum is not small. Its collection of about 54,000 works covers the same 5,000-year span of global art, with the advantage that you can, if you push it, view just about everything that’s on display in a day.

What you’ll see is one piece each by many of the major names in the Western canon, with more depth in neo-impressionism, pointillism, and J.M.W. Turner, and selections from notable collections of Japanese, Chinese, and African art.

Organized in 1883 as the Art Association of Indianapolis, the museum has been in its current location nearly 50 years thanks to the heirs to the Eli Lilly and Company pharmaceutical fortune. Lilly’s great-grandchildren, Josiah K. Lilly III and Ruth Lilly, gave their parents’ home and estate, known as Oldfields, to the IMA in 1966. (This is the same Ruth Lilly who in 2002 let the Poetry Foundation know that she was bequeathing it a transformational gift of stock, ultimately worth about $200 million.) The Lilly home, a national historic landmark with a sumptuously restored and furnished main floor and gardens designed by Olmsted Brothers associate Percival Gallagher, became part of the IMA campus.

The museum building opened in stages between 1970 and 1975, and underwent a major expansion between 2002 and 2005 that included the glassy oval atrium that’s the first space you’ll walk through when you enter. In 2010, a huge adjoining chunk of land was added to the campus with the opening of the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park: 100 Acres. It was hoped that the expanded museum could attract as many as a million visitors a year.

But those numbers never materialized, and the expansion, followed by the recession of 2008, left the museum deeply in debt. In a phone interview earlier this month, Venable said that when he arrived in 2012, the museum had $121 million in construction bond debt, which has now been reduced to $81 million with a ten-year plan to pay it off completely.

To get a handle on the finances, Venable made some controversial changes. There were staff layoffs and curatorial depar- J

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 11

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he knows more about meat and the science of barbecue than perhaps anyone you have ever met

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North Siders have been doing just that at BBQ Supply Co.’s original Rogers Park location since 2010, and in November 2017, the restaurant opened a second location on 53rd Street in Hyde Park.

likes being a part of a “cool, diverse neighborhood – it’s fun to talk with all the different guests we get in – from students, to university employees, to people that…have lived here 30 or 40 years.”

Dylan and Jared Leonard are co-owners and partners in the restaurant group Stone Soup Collective, which includes BBQ Supply Co. as well as other properties. They met through mutual friends at events in the barbecue community, and teaming up was a natural fit.

The restaurant has a supper club look, with wood, leather, and classic gold hand-painted signage, and with the addition of Wagyu beef short ribs on Friday nights and smoked prime rib on Saturday nights, Dylan says, “They make you feel like you’re at a steakhouse when you’re in a barbecue joint.”

The restaurant has been a welcome addition for a neighborhood long in need of local barbecue spot.

Dylan is the Director of Culinary Operations and “pitmaster,” which basically translates into making sure everything you eat at BBQ Supply Co. is delicious. With the launch of their outdoor seating and cocktail menu, the corner of 53rd Street and Kimbark Avenue will be the perfect place to spend a summer night, “enjoying barbecue outside the way it’s meant to be,” said Dylan.

Growing up in a small town in downstate Illinois, Dylan started cooking as a teenager for neighborhood catering events, and later attended nearby Rend Lake College for Culinary Arts. Classically trained as a chef, Dylan worked in the Caribbean

at several resorts before exclusively focusing on barbecue in the past eight years, and he even competes in barbecue competitions in his free time.

BBQ Supply Co. starts with quality meats from providers including Idaho’s Snake River Farms for Wagyu beef and Wichita Packing Company’s Duroc pork sourced from a farm in Iowa. Meat is cooked in 8,000-lb Texas smokers over a hardwood fire – the wood is so essential to the taste that Jared trucks in quarter-split post oak logs from central Texas.

Before the restaurant opened, Dylan was a regular in Hyde Park. He and his wife lived in Pullman, were friends with farmers at the 61st Street Farmers Market, and participated in cooking events at the Experimental Station. He would flip through the stacks at Hyde Park Records while his wife did yoga at Promontory Point, not yet knowing he’d be running a restaurant just a few doors east. He

BBQ Supply Co.’s menu includes truffle mac and cheese, cornbread, beans, cole slaw, deviled egg potato salad, and house-made pickles. The restaurant’s drink menu includes 24 different whiskeys and bourbons, over one dozen local craft beers, and five signature house cocktails. Desserts include peach cobbler, apple pie, old fashioned banana pudding, and ice cream in rotating seasonal flavors – with bourbon vanilla milkshakes ready for summer.

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MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 13

R OAD T R IP S Scenes from the museum and gardens at the new—and improved?— Newfields é IMAGES COURTESY OF NEWFIELDS

continued from 11

tures, and he began using audience research to determine marketing approaches and the direction of programming that now includes movie nights, book clubs, and yoga. The most controversial decision, instituted in 2015, replaced IMA’s free access with an $18 admission fee for adults.

When the museum was free, there was “no urgency to join,” Venable says. After the admission charge was instituted, membership, which starts at $55 annually, rose from about 5,500 to its current level of more than 17,000.

According to figures provided by Newfields, total attendance, including the still-free Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, was about 347,000 last year, but only 125,000 of those visitors paid to enter the art museum.

Venable wants to see that number grow, but for the weekend visitor (or day-tripper), New-

14 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

fields’ relatively sparse attendance is a bonus. areas dedicated to activities for kids.

From the museum it’s a short walk through In comparison to the crush at Chicago museums, it offers blessed breathing room—inside exquisite gardens to Lilly House, a 22-room and out. During my midweek visit, I had many mansion where you can get a look at what life galleries (most equipped was like for the very rich in the early part with comfortable sofas of the 20th century. A and chairs that invite NEWFIELDS Fri-Wed 11 AM-5 PM, Thu 11 you to linger) nearly to beer garden featuring AM-9 PM, 4000 Michigan Rd., local brews is also open myself. That included Indianapolis, IN, 317-923-1331, T h u r s d a y t h ro u g h even the central atrium, discovernewfields.org, $18, $10 Saturday, and the addominated by Robert youth six to 17, free ages five and under. jacent 100-acre nature Indiana’s familiar LOVE sculpture, and my two faand art park features lakeside paths, woods, vorite galleries: one devoted to urban scenes, the other to American playgrounds, and climbable sculpture like realism (including Edward Hopper’s unfor- Funky Bones—a giant skeleton, flat on its back, gettably stark Hotel Lobby). There’s a nicely grinning up at the big Indiana sky.

Get there this year, and you’ll catch “Besappointed cafe (open for lunch whenever the museum is open and for dinner on Thursdays Ben: The Mad Hatter of Chicago,” an exhibit through Saturdays), a theater, a gift shop, and of sculptural and theatrical millinery by

Benjamin Green-Field. Textile and fashion curator Niloo Paydar says there are 59 of GreenField’s famously quirky creations on view, with embellishments that include cigarettes, baseballs, puppies, and whole birds; all but six of them are from IMA’s own collection. It’s up through January 6, 2019.

Starting June 1, “Summer Wonderland: Spectacular Creatures,” a kid-pleasing invasion of about 500 plastic animals by Italy’s Cracking Art collective, will join the giant blue snail already in residence in the entry atrium.

Something decidedly more adult, “Sensual/ Sexual/Social,” George Platt Lynes’s photography of the male nude from the collection of Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute opens September 30. v

@DeannaIsaacs disaacs@chicagoreader.com

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R O A D T R IP S

The Springfield store features 30,000 records for as little as $2 each, but its owners are ready to move on.

By RYAN SMITH

é RYAN SMITH

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t’s a balmy May morning and the streets of downtown Springfield are quiet save for a stretch of Adams Street near the Old State Capitol. For more than a block, the sounds of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin” can be heard blaring from speakers perched against the screen windows on the second floor of Springfield Furniture and Recycled Records.

Dylan’s 1964 album—one of nearly 30,000 vinyl LPs packed into this record and antique store—is a fitting soundtrack. This is an uncertain time for a storefront that seems to have remained frozen in time—or more accurately, covered in dust—for several decades.

Brothers Mark and Gary Kessler, the co-owners, are trying to sell the well-worn shop their maternal grandparents, Joe and Ida Katz, originally established as a furniture store in 1910 and their parents, Bill and Grace Kessler, passed on to them.

It’s a matter of wanting to take a break from the daily rigors of running a small business, says Mark, the elder brother.

“When I turned 70 last November, I decided I wanted to relax a bit,” Mark says as he leans his elbows against a glass counter filled with old cassette tapes. In his plaid shirt, jeans, and thick-framed glasses he fits right in with his clientele. “I just want to be able to take a threeweek vacation with my wife and not have to worry about being in charge of everything.”

Mark has been at the store since 1978, the year he returned to central Illinois to work in

90s when everyone was dumping it,” says Mark. “It could have been a huge mistake, but eventually it paid off. We didn’t know we were right until about five years ago.”

Walk up a set of creaky stairs (labeled STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN) in the back of the store to the second floor and you’ll find row upon row of massive crates, most arranged by genre. You can easily track down the best sellers—especially classic rock, country, and jazz (“We probably sell more country and bluegrass than you do in Chicago,” Mark says) or hunt for hidden gems and obscurities: old comedy albums, recordings of presidential speeches, even much-sought-after collectors’ items. “I just sold a first pressing of Sun Ra’s first album that came with a special booklet for $900,” Mark says. “This guy passing through town had never seen it before and was like, ‘Wow, you’ve got an incredible jazz collection.’”

Much of the vinyl is also dirt cheap. Even albums in excellent condition often go for $2.

“If someone buys this place, the first thing a new owner will do is probably triple the prices,” a gray-haired Recycled Records employee tells an inquisitive customer asking about the potential sale.

The Kesslers say low prices and personalized attention to customers (in contrast to the service, or lack thereof, at the Best Buys and Amazons of the world) have helped them survive the ups and downs of the retail industry over the past four decades. They draw audiophiles from throughout Illinois and beyond. “I go out and have a beer with some of my regulars,” says Mark.

But now the Kesslers are ready to flip over to the B sides of their lives and divest themselves of the family business—preferably selling to some accessories and knickknacks: costume an entrepreneur who wants to keep the store jewelry, neon beer signs, German beer steins, more or less intact. early 20th-century postcards, vintage Play“I don’t want to be conceited, but I think boys and comic books. this place is good for the community, and it’s These days nearly every box, shelf, and nook been here forever,” Mark says. “A lot of people and cranny in the store has been taken over tell us, ‘You can’t close!’ And I say, ‘It’s the last by music and related parathing I want to do, and it phernalia. There are more would be heartbreaking, RECYCLED RECORDS than 5,000 CDs and a clutch but will I do that? Yeah.’”

625 E. Adams St., Springfield, IL, 217-522-5122, of eight-tracks and cassette If Recycled Records does recycledrecords.com tapes, but the vast majority live on under new owners, of the collection—between they’ll have at least one 25,000 and 30,000 LPs and potential employee. Mark 45s—is classic vinyl. The format has become doesn’t want to run the place, but he’s willtrendy again in recent years, but it’s not that ing to remain on as a part-time record clerk. for the Kesslers—they just stubbornly held on Maybe times aren’t a-changin’ that quickly to their favorite format until it happened to after all. v become cool again.

“I think the smartest thing we did was we @RyanSmithWriter kept buying vinyl from people in the 80s and rsmith@chicagoreader.com é OTHER MARK, RECYCLED RECORDS

W ILL THE MU SIC F IN ALLY S T OP AT R ECY LED R EC ORD S ?

The shop has been in the same family fam since 1910.

the family business after a decade in Chicago.

His first and most successful experiment was improvising a music section at the furniture store. He’d been a record hound at Val’s Halla Records in Oak Park, and realized that the capital city had no equivalent. The vinyl area started small—800 records tucked away in a balcony on the second floor—but kept expanding as sales increased over the years.

“We had a tie-dyed curtain that would divide the room between records and furniture overstock,” Mark says. “We kept moving the curtain back to expand the record section until it reached the end, and then eventually the curtain came down and we took over the whole upstairs.”

The store’s marquee still reads SPRINGFIELd FURNITURE, but today there isn’t much furniture to be found, unless you count turntables and stereo equipment. The first floor does hold

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 15

R OAD T R IP S

PA S T THE PRAIRIE

Leave the flatlands behind with a trip to Savanna and Galena, along the bluffs of the mighty Mississippi.

By TED COX

W

ant to leave Illinois without actually setting foot out of the state? Head west.

As you approach the Mississippi River, the flat plain slowly falls away and the landscape begins to undulate, rolling up and down before dropping into the river basin in breathtaking fashion.

“It’s just so different,” said Chris Lain, a former Lincoln Square resident so charmed

by Savanna, a small river town 150 miles from Chicago, that he and his partner, Jube Manderico, dropped everything and moved there five years ago.

In a historic building on Main Street downtown, the couple opened the SAVANNA MARKETPLACE, a gift shop, and THE BLUE BEDROOM INN, a bed-and-breakfast above the store. They made friends and established themselves in the community, and then even entered local politics—Lain was elected mayor a year ago in a landslide, a gay liberal from a solid blue city in a town that had gone for Trump in the last presidential election.

But Savanna is overshadowed by its neighbor a half hour’s drive to the north. Galena, already a tourist site known for its antique stores, only stands to get more popular this year after the release of Ron Chernow’s new biography, Grant, which follows his best-selling bio of Alexander Hamilton, the inspiration for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s blockbuster musical Hamilton. Galena belongs to Ulysses S. Grant, and the town won’t let you forget it—he’s everywhere. Yet the story of Grant—who failed at several endeavors and in middle age was

16 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

all but written off as a drunk before rising to serve as the commander of the Union forces in the Civil War—is as relatable and charming as it is ultimately humbling. GRANT HOUSE, given to him by the city fathers upon his return from the war, is a lovely little redbrick structure with a view of the Galena River, but it pales next to the 160-year-old BELVEDERE MANSION down the hill and closer to the river.

In Galena, the landscape doesn’t roll so much as it juts up and down, like a little Pittsburgh, but the architecture on all levels is remarkable, a mix of elements brought in from all over as the town enjoyed a mining boom in the mid-1800s. You’ll see mansions with a French balcony half hidden behind Ionic columns, Italianate mansions with towers—a familiar feature in river towns, added so the residents could scout for ships—and a wealth of Victorian buildings. Galena is extremely well preserved, with most of the town declared part of a national historic district.

On a business trip there recently, my travel companion and I stayed at THE DESOTO HOUSE, which boasts of being the oldest operating hotel in Illinois—in fact, it was Grant’s presidential campaign headquarters in 1868. It got an $8 million restoration in the 1980s, and its rooms are named for famous people with a connection to Galena, however slight. (We were in the Herman Melville room; apparently in his somewhat wayward youth the author of Moby-Dick stayed briefly with a relative in Galena before hitting the seas on a trip that would provide the material for his first two

é TED COX/ONE ILLINOIS

é TONY WEBSTER

Savanna (left) is a hidden gem on the Great River Road, along with its better-known neighbor, Galena, which features the DeSoto House.

novels.) We also took advantage of a package that both discounted the room rate and offered a $50 credit in THE GENERALS’ RESTAURANT. (Yes, that’s plural and possessive, named not just for Grant, but for the no fewer than nine Civil War generals that came from the region.)

As we waited in the bar, a server carrying a tray of steaks wafted the aroma at us, looking to tempt us, but he needn’t have bothered—we were already planning on ordering them. We dined like kings and, with the credit, the bill was under $50, drinks included.

The DeSoto House is said to be haunted by a “Lady in Black” who comes knocking at doors in the middle of the night, but we didn’t hear anything of the sort. When we complained about it while checking out the next day, the woman at the front desk said we’d have to phone ahead next time and arrange for her to stop by.

If Galena is a known quantity, Savanna, just to the south along the Mississippi, is a hidden jewel. Who even knew Illinois had a Savanna?

And it’s just a two-and-a-half-hour drive straight west of Chicago. On your way from the city, stop at the NACHUSA GRASSLANDS, a 3,600-acre spread of natural prairie restored by national nonrprofit the Nature Conservancy over the last three decades. A herd of wild bison was brought in a few years ago, and about 130 now graze in fenced-off areas separate from the five hiking trails running through the preserve. The bison can typically be seen from a new visitor center.

Find your way west from there on Routes 52 and 64, and the landscape will again begin to roll as it heads toward the Mississippi. Along the way, round about dusk, we spotted a 12point buck and a few does. The latter highway drops you right into Main Street in Savanna, which declares itself a sportsman’s paradise.

There’s a marina on the river, and just to the north is MISSISSIPPI PALISADES STATE PARK, which has a series of trails, a magnificent vista

at Lookout Point and, according to Lain, some decent natural rock climbing.

The rolling highways in that part of the state also attract bikers, and by that I don’t mean cyclists (although there’s a bicycle path along THE GREAT RIVER ROAD running alongside the Mississippi). Savanna heartily welcomes them at the Iron Horse Social Club and Hawg Dogs, both along Main Street. Despite lacking our own hogs, we were welcomed quite heartily at the latter.

But if you visit Galena for Grant and architecture, head to Savanna just to relax. I can recommend the mayor’s own Blue Bedroom Inn, which has four cozy bedrooms surrounding a communal area, and a kitchen with a big shared breakfast table.

Lain says the 30-mile drive along Route 20 between Savanna and Galena is perhaps the most beautiful scenery in the state. That just may be: the landscape offers some spectacular vistas. You could almost imagine being in the Appalachians or even the Rockies, only without those pain-in-the-ass mountains blocking the view of the sky. This is a part of the Prairie State that no one but a local would recognize as Illinois. v

@tedcoxchicago tedcoxchicago@gmail.com Ted Cox is editor of One Illinois, a nonprofit news website.

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RR OO AA DD TT RR II PP SS Oak Ridge Cemetery é SUN-TIMES PRINT COLLECTION

NOT D EAD YET Lincoln, lizard mounds, angels, devil’s curses, and junk food magnates: midwestern cemeteries have ’em all.

By AIMEE LEVITT

T

here are some people who find traveling for the purpose of visiting cemeteries ghoulish. These individuals, however, should realize that a century or so ago, perWade Chapel of Lake View fectly normal people like them used to hang Cemetery in Cleveland out in cemeteries. This was because there é PROVIDED BY LAKE VIEW CEMETERY was a paucity of public parks, places where city folks could take a picnic and enjoy being someplace cool and green and quiet. They cemetery. Several, notably BELLEFONTAINE in were untroubled by the fact that they were Saint Louis and ELMWOOD in Detroit, currently surrounded by dead people, so much so that double as arboretums. Elmwood in particular they left their trash on the ground and tore up is a fine example of 19th-century landscape the lawns. So the cemeteries put an end to that architecture, as you might expect from a place practice. But then we got parks, so it’s all OK. designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who’s There are plenty of other reasons to visit a best known for his work on Central Park. It’s cemetery besides the obvious, interring or vis- also notable for being the first integrated iting of a loved one. (If you don’t know where cemetery in the midwest. Several members your loved ones are and would like to find of the Underground Railroad network are out, the Newberry Library genealogy desk is a buried there, and the cemetery offers an Afrigreat place to start.) can-American Heritage Tour.

The second-most The Native Americans obvious reason to visit a anticipated Olmsted by OAK RIDGE CEMETERY cemetery is to commune many hundreds of years 1441 Monument Ave., Springfield, IL, 217-789-2340, with the spirit of a longand built elaborate oakridgecemetery.org dead Great Person. The earthworks and burial most-visited pilgrimage mounds all over the ELMWOOD CEMETERY site in the midwest is midwest. The largest 1200 Elmwood St., Detroit, MI, 313-567-3453, A B R A H A M L I N C O L N ’S and most famous are elmwoodhistoriccemetery.org TOMB AT OAK RIDGE CEMthe CAHOKIA MOUNDS, ETERY in Springfield, but just across the MissisCAHOKIA MOUNDS STATE HISTORIC SITE there are plenty of other sippi River from Saint 30 Ramey St., Collinsville, IL, 618death and burial sites Louis. The mounds 346-5160, cahokiamounds.org to visit. For instance, are believed to be the GREENWOOD CEMETERY if you’re interested in remnants of what was 606 S. Church St., Decatur, IL, 217junk food (an essential the largest city in North 422-6563 part of any road trip), America prior to 1800; ROCHESTER CEMETERY LAKEWOOD CEMETERY in some contain the bod1179 and 1180 Cemetery Rd., Minneapolis is a logical ies of victims of ritual Tipton, IA, 563-272-1981 destination: it’s the final sacrifice. There’s also a resting place of flour large concentration of magnate Charles Alfred Pillsbury; Franklin mounds in southern Wisconsin, particularly Mars, creator of the Milky Way candy bar; and in Lizard Mound County Park, northwest of H. David Dalquist, inventor of Nordic Ware Milwaukee, and Aztalan State Park, roughly kitchen tools and the bundt pan. The BUDDY halfway between Milwaukee and Madison.

HOLLY CRASH SITE outside Clear Lake, Iowa, Many of these mounds take the form of variis marked, endearingly, by an oversize pair of ous animals and water spirits. black-rimmed glasses planted in the ground.

Americans of European descent didn’t start Almost every large midwestern city still has creating large pieces of artwork to honor their at least one enormous parklike 19th-century dead until the 19th century, but then they in-

Rochester Cemetery é JACIE THOMSEN

volved some of the finest architects and sculptors of the age. Louis Sullivan designed the WAINWRIGHT TOMB in Bellefontaine; Frank Lloyd Wright was a draftsman on the project. Louis Comfort Tiffany designed the stained-glass windows inside the chapel at LAKE VIEW CEMETERY in Cleveland in 1901. Fun fact: when the chapel was finished, Tiffany was adamant that no gas lamps be allowed inside because the soot would spoil his work.

Instead, he got Thomas Edison to wire it for electricity. It became the first electrified building in the city.

You can find lots of good cemetery statues in the midwest, particularly in the areas of cemeteries that date back to the late 19th or early 20th century, when there was a craze for memorial sculpture. Some people commissioned representations of their loved ones as they appeared in life. Others just settled for angels.

One of the most famous cemetery statues is the black angel of OAKLAND CEMETERY, in Iowa City, which watches over the grave of Teresa Dolezal Feldevert and her family. If you know someone who ever took a poetry or photography class at the University of Iowa, it’s likely he or she immortalized this statue in Art. The black angel was originally bronze. Some people say it’s normal for a bronze statue to turn black through the natural chemical process of oxidation. Others claim that the statue turned black because it was struck by lightning or because Teresa cheated on her husband—or maybe because Teresa was a witch who murdered her son. Kiss it and you will die. Stand in its shadow while pregnant and your baby will die.

You don’t have to go to Iowa to be cursed.

There are plenty of haunted cemeteries around the region. One of the creepiest is GREENWOOD CEMETERY in Decatur, which is haunted by

the ghosts of Confederate prisoners of war (some of whom may not have been fully dead when they were buried) whose graves are now covered by a memorial to Union soldiers. And also a bride who committed suicide after her fiance was murdered by bootleggers on the eve of their wedding. And a whole host of lost souls whose bodies were relocated after the old mausoleum was torn down. If you’d like to make a pact with the devil, Greenwood’s your boneyard; sit in the “Devil’s Chair” and you’ll get anything you want . . . for seven years.

Then there is haunting, which is entirely different from haunted. ROCHESTER CEMETERY in Rochester, Iowa, roughly halfway between Davenport and Iowa City, is such a place.

Because the town was too poor to mow the cemetery regularly, the prairie has gradually overtaken the gravesites. It’s now a marvel of biodiversity: there are 400 plant species on its 13 and a half acres, 337 of which are native to the region. “I came to think of it as the prairie’s own graveyard,” wrote Stephen Longmire, a writer and photographer (and former Reader contributor) who spent a year documenting the cemetery for his book Life and Death on the Prairie. “A graveyard is a living map of the community over time, the place where the underworld and the heavens meet.” v

m @aimeelevitt

alevitt@chicagoreader.com

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 17

ARTS & CULTURE

R

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

F

Aaron Monaghan, Garrett Lombard, and Marty Rea

THEATER

Always Waiting for Godot

é MATTHEW THOMPSON

Ireland’s Druid Theatre brings Samuel Beckett’s forever-relevant play to Chicago.

By TONY ADLER

T

o be or not to be? That’s pretty much the question in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Only the answer isn’t contingent on what ’tis nobler in the mind. Beckett suggests that we put up with the awfulness of being mainly because we’ve decided, on no proof whatsoever, that a mysterious, white-bearded absence called Godot is on his way, and when he finally shows up we’re going to get a big meal and a cozy spot in his attic, furnished with beds of soft straw.

And also because we haven’t got a length of rope suitable for hanging ourselves.

18 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

So we go on waiting for Godot even though he keeps putting us off, sending messages by way of a child saying that although he can’t make it today he’ll certainly come for us tomorrow.

Meanwhile we fill up the time. For Beckett’s iconic tramps, Gogo and Didi, the days are just packed, what with the former’s attempts to walk despite his painfully rotting feet and latter’s attempts to pee despite a painfully enlarged prostate. Gogo apparently spends his off hours getting beaten up by thugs; Didi, scrounging for carrots and turnips. But they meet faithfully every day beneath their

landmark tree (a landmark because it’s the only one), where they banter back and forth (“Moron,” yells Didi. “That’s the idea, let’s abuse each other,” replies an enthusiastic Gogo), repeat favorite gambits, await Godot, and remind themselves that they’re waiting for Godot. Things get really busy when they encounter a wealthy landowner named Pozzo who carries a whip and keeps his elderly servant, Lucky, tied by the neck to a long cord.

All in all, the starkest, most darkly funny distillation of Western—not to say human— religious, economic, and social constructs ever poured into two acts. Indeed, watching the marvelous production by Ireland’s Druid Theatre Company, directed by Garry Hynes and running now at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, you might find yourself thinking how cluttered and limited most conventional plays can seem by comparison, as they attempt to explore this or that current issue, depict a trauma from this or that corner of contemporary life. Waiting for Godot goes to the absurd heart of life on earth.

And yes, by that I mean life on earth as it’s lived now. Beckett’s 1953 “tragicomedy” is so hallowed at this point that we may be tempted to approach it as a relic of mid-20th-century Europe, interesting mainly for what it can teach us about post-World War II sensibilities in general and Catholicism’s hold over the English-colonized Irish in particular. Worse, we may want to tell ourselves we’re past all that. I mean, who really believes in a patriarchal Almighty anymore? Why worry about filling life’s empty hours when we’ve all got smartphones? And how are we to take Pozzo’s remarkable comment that mothers “give birth astride a grave” when our science has taken the death out of so many diseases and magazines do straight-faced cover stories about conquering mortality entirely? Hell, even the Irish are different: the 23 lower counties are free now and they just decided to permit abor-

tion. In shabby old suits and twine belts, Didi and Gogo may seem more picturesque than poor.

But then again. The 2016 U.S. presidential election was nothing if not a lesson to the secular about the persistence of religious literalism. What’s more, last however long you can, distract yourself however much you want, death isn’t dead yet and the waiting isn’t over.

For me, this time, the centerpiece of the play was the one we usually forget about: the pair of Pozzo interludes. In the first, squire Pozzo eats a chicken haunch for lunch and, feeling garrulous, engages social inferiors Gogo and Didi in conversation. As an added treat, he orders Lucky (aka “pig”) to dance and think. In the second, both Pozzo and Lucky have fallen on hard times, yet they remain together. If the earlier interlude doesn’t bring to mind present-day class dynamics, the final one makes the equation vividly clear—especially when Pozzo calls for his whip and Lucky actually brings it to him.

Rory Nolan’s Pozzo and Garrett Lombard’s Lucky are indispensable to the success of these passages. Uncanny in Val Sherlock’s wig and makeup designs, they both dance in their ways. Nolan, in particular, presents a full-out comic ballet of facial and bodily messages expressing the confluence of narcissism, power, and cruelty. Similarly, the physicality Marty Rea and Aaron Monaghan bring to Didi and Gogo might make a silent Godot possible. Rea’s Didi is lean, tall, and disposed to optimism, Monaghan’s Gogo, short, stocky, and grim. Together, they’re human embodiments of the comedy and tragedy masks. v R WAITING FOR GODOT Through 6/3: Wed 7:45 PM, Thu 1 and 7:45 PM, Fri 7:45 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:45 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes. com, $68-$88.

m @taadler

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ARTS & CULTURE Monsieur d’Éon Is a Woman é CHRIS POPIO

Melissa Lorraine as Eva é DEVRON ENARSON

DANCE

The women’s room

The four plays that make up Stories of the Body plumb the depths of female experience.

By IRENE HSIAO

T

heatre Y presents the four András Visky plays that make up Stories of the Body on a set that looks like a bathroom— both a public one with urinals side by side on and a private one with a footed bathtub center stage. Designed by Luminaxis Studio, it’s an ideal locale for stories that plumb the depths of female experience: intimate to the point of unfamiliarity, walled with surfaces that reflect to various degrees of opacity (mirror, glass, tile), implying exterior dirt and interior excrement, offering opportunities to expel, rinse, cleanse, submerge, all within an enclosed acoustic chamber for expression and confession that, with the urinals, never releases its subjects from the tacit menace of masculine presence. In this space, each woman—the artist Artemisia Gentileschi (Katie Sherman), the missionary nun and saint Mother Teresa (Katie Stimpson), the dancer Lina (Laurie Roberts), and the sex worker Eva (Melissa Lorraine)—has one hour to speak.

The experiences they reveal are traumatic, raw, and filled with violence. A gifted paint-

er, Artemisia is exploited by her father and raped by a tutor, then subjected to torture when she dares to testify on her own behalf at the rapist’s trial. Mother Teresa experiences divine inspiration as torment, first the acute agony of voices that compel her to care for the poor and sick, then the worse pain of silence, an absence that abandons her to the fate of the most neglected on earth. Lina discovers that a disabling accident may disfigure her but will not release her from the scrutiny of men. And Eva’s fate is harrowing because it’s so prosaic: abandonment, poverty, physical abuse, substance abuse, every attempt at escape foiled by the particular human evil cultivated by a scarcity of money, love, and imagination. The pieces work together to pose provocative and distressing questions: Can art and religion ever be compensation for a world that only delivers pain? Is Eva’s desire for mortal happiness any less admirable than Mother Teresa’s desire for heavenly love? “Nothing matters.

Only the soul, which doesn’t exist,” says Artemisia. “There are no fathers, only pimps,” says Eva. “Dance? What does that actually mean?,” asks Lina.

Under the direction of Andrej Visky, the playwright’s son, and Theatre Y cofounder and artistic director Melissa Lorraine, each performer works her way under your skin, especially Stimpson, whose astonishing embodiment of a Teresa subjected to visions and possessed with ungodly fire is both viscerally disturbing and utterly enthralling to behold. Sherman’s Artemisia is her cerebral counterpart, eyes blazing with disgust and righteous fury as she recognizes the injustice of her circumstances and, nevertheless, persists. Roberts’s contralto voice grounds a Lina set adrift in a confusing universe of puppets and apparitions. Perhaps it is unfair that a man gets to say what the soul is—here, Caravaggio (Eric K. Roberts) offers the answer—“movement and moment”—as he floats through a play not about him. v R STORIES OF THE BODY Through 7/15: ThuSat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Mon 6/4, 7:30 PM, the Ready, 4546 N. Western, 708-209-0183, theatre-y.com. F

m @IreneCHsiao

THEATER

Modern history

Brutality reveals the banality of violence in contemporary America.

Set in contemporary America and based in part on reallife events, Gustavo Ott’s play, the winner of the 2016 Hispanic Playwriting Competition of Chicago, doesn’t have a single protagonist. Instead, Ott has crafted a oneact, performed in Spanish with English overtitles, with an ensemble of more or less equally important characters—a cop, a lawyer, a school-bus driver, an immigrant from Lebanon, another from Mexico, a pair of rebellious teens—who are all survivors of violence. One couple was at a gay nightclub the night of a hate-inspired mass shooting, another was at a heavy-metal concert disrupted by a terrorist gunman, a third survived the bombing of a federal building.

What makes these characters and their stories remarkable, though, is how unremarkable they are: in scene after scene we see them acting out the mundane rituals of everyday life: waking up, having breakfast, sitting in a coffee shop killing time before a meeting.

It’s only in the course of small talk that we learn of the horrors they have seen and lived through. These scenes intrigue and tease the audience, but it’s ultimately frustrating that they never come together into a compelling, unified narrative.

Director Rosario Vargas has packed this Aguijón Theater production with subtle, strong actors capable of revealing Ott’s insights into the ways people do—and don’t—cope with trauma. Erica Cruz Hernandez and Ana Santo-Sanchez are particularly compelling as a pair of lovers, both recovering from past brutalities, who find a modicum of solace dancing the night away at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. —JACK HELBIG BRUTALITY

Through 6/10: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 6 PM, Aguijón Theater, 2707 N. Laramie, 773-637-5899, aguijontheater.org, $25, $15 students, educators, and seniors.

Road to nowhere

Damascus attempts to tackle faith, politics, and race without a road map.

A parking lot lined with dirty snowbanks lit by fluorescent street lamps and populated by a minivan with its doors and roof removed takes up the entirety of Strawdog Theatre’s stage. The set looks tailor-made for a Hellcab update; what Bennett Fisher presents instead is a tortuous lecture about fanaticism and class and race relations in America.

Hassan is a Somali-American airport shuttle driver so bad at his job that he’s forced to live in his van because he can no longer afford an apartment. When a panicked white college kid named Lloyd wakes him from a nap at the Minneapolis airport and begs to be driven to Chicago, Hassan reluctantly agrees. A series of cre-

dulity-straining episodes follows, ultimately concluding with the young man’s death and Hassan on a prayer rug by the side of the highway, bowing toward Mecca.

The name of this play references a New Testament conversion away from zealotry, but nothing within its muddled narrative gives the audience any road map as to who has been converted, what they’ve been converted to, or why. Hassan and Lloyd aren’t people but crudely formed vessels for the playwright’s heavy-handed ruminations on faith, politics, and economics and, thus, they’re impossible to empathize with.

This is one road all concerned might’ve been better off not to have taken. Cody Estle directed.

—DMITRY SAMAROV DAMASCUS Through 6/23: Thu-

Sat 8 PM, Sun 4 PM, Strawdog Theatre Company, 1802 W. Berenice, 773-644-1380, strawdog.org, $35, $25 seniors.

Neither graphic nor novel

But De Troya does create a somber picture of misery.

To call a work of theater a “graphic novel for the stage,” as playwright Caridad Svich does in the preface to her script for De Troya, implies a couple of things: (a) a heavy emphasis on dynamic visual storytelling, and (b) some novelistic character development—maybe something that takes advantage of the illustrated medium’s lack of limitations when it comes to fantasy. The degree to which Rinska Carrasco-Prestinary’s Halcyon Theatre production delivers on those varies from recognizable but off the mark to downright inscrutable.

A young woman, Mara (Valeria Rosero), absconds with her knife-wielding, perpetually shirtless lover, Gusty (Arik Vega), to the horror of her conservative and devout guardian aunts Lena and Lupe (Tamika Lecheé Morales and Isabel Quintero). A hypnotic, demonlike river creature wreaks havoc on Mara and her family’s lives, testing each character’s faith and ultimately revealing secrets linking the present with the past.

Carrasco-Prestinary’s production relies on projections by Mark “Trace” Umstattd and blocking seemingly based on a pattern of tics for its visual storytelling, and the result is a sluggish, muddy blur. Lena neurotically washes dishes and ladles soup in one corner; Grandpa slams down Tecate and murmurs at the TV in another; the river lady appears stage center and howls. Repeat.

Over the course of two hours, those directions and an endless parade of groans and wails make for a somber picture of misery. One highlight: a tightly constructed monologue delivered by Noe Jara as Grandpa about an ill-fated pet. —DAN JAKES DE TROYA Through 6/30:

Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 6 PM, Christ Lutheran Church, 4541 N. Spaulding, 773-413-0454, halcyontheatre. org, $20 guaranteed advance reservations, free at the door (limited tickets, first come, first served).

of an early summer R Smiles night BoHo Theatre presents a minimalist Little Night Music worthy of Sondheim.

The 1973 Broadway hit A Little Night Music is the third in a string of innovative musicals that compos-

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er-lyricist Stephen Sondheim and director Harold Prince created in the 70s. The first two shows, Company and Follies, had offered a skeptical, even depressing view of middle-aged married life. In Night Music, Sondheim, Prince, and playwright Hugh Wheeler took a lighter approach. Based on filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s 1955 Smiles of a Summer Night, this is a wryly comic yet wistfully sentimental tale of sexual intrigue, complete with that rarity in the Sondheim canon: a happy ending.

Set in Sweden circa 1900, it’s a romantic farce about a bohemian actress, Desirée Armfeldt, and her relationships with two married men—her current paramour, a vain military officer, and her former lover, a bourgeois lawyer now unsatisfactorily wed to an 18-year-old virgin who, without realizing it, is actually in love with the lawyer’s seminarian son. Sondheim’s operetta-style score, set mostly in waltz time, is bubbly and melodic, but also intricate and complex. Linda Fortunato’s intimate, minimalist staging for BoHo Theatre allows listeners to hear the masterfully crafted music sung au naturel with no amplification, prettily accompanied by a chamber quartet led by pianist Tom Vendafreddo.

As Desirée, the excellent Kelli Harrington conveys a mixture of irony and gravity that gives the story a solid if unconventional moral anchor. The supporting players are good, though they need to pay more attention to their final consonants for the sake of period style.

—ALBERT WILLIAMS A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC Through

Monsieur d’Éon Is a Woman tells the story of a remarkable gender-bending life.

Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont lived a revolutionary life in revolutionary times. He began his singular career under Louis XV as both secretary to the Russian ambassador and undercover spy. After a stint as a French dragoon, he became minister plenipotentiary to the British court (while also covertly helping to plan an invasion of England), a position he lost six months later due to insolent behavior. When the king ordered him home, he refused, and after escaping multiple attempts at kidnap and arrest, he published a volume of his diplomatic correspondence, exposing state secrets and turning himself into a celebrity. He spent a decade exiled in London until the playwright Beaumarchais, working for the French government, gave him leave to return home, but only if he professed to be a woman—a gender d’Éon publicly adopted for the next 35 years.

Toronto playwright Mark Brownell’s frisky biodrama employs all manner of anachronistic clowning to sprint through the highlights of d’Éon’s life. It’s raucous fun, cheerfully sexed up in director Nicole Wiesner’s salacious production, but largely devoid of connecting material that might provide context and resonance. It seems Brownell crammed in so much information and chicanery he barely paused to consider why any of it should matter to contemporary audiences.

It’s an uncharacteristically unsophisticated play for Trap Door, but Wiesner’s sophisticated staging—full of visual and sonic dissonance—hypnotizes with 90 minutes of bracing imagery. As d’Éon, the understated David Lovejoy is a block of noble stability in a world gone haywire. —JUSTIN HAYFORD MONSIEUR D’ÉON

IS A WOMAN Through 6/30: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Trap

Door Theatre, 1655 W. Cortland, 773-384-0494, trapdoortheatre.com, $20 Thu-Fri, $25 Sat. v

20 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

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WORTHLESS

“THE PUPPET MASTER: THE COMPLETE JIŘÍ TRNKA”

Sun 6/3-Wed 7/4. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.

THE CZECH YEAR sss

Sun 6/3, 3:45 PM, and Wed 6/6, 6 PM.

THE EMPEROR’S NIGHTINGALE ssss

Sun 6/10, 3:45 PM, and Wed 6/13, 6 PM.

BAYAYA ssss

Sun 6/17, 3:45 PM, and Wed 6/20, 6 PM.

THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK sss

Sun 6/24, 3:30 PM, and Wed 6/27, 6 PM.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM ssss

Sun 7/1, 3:45 PM, and Wed 7/4, 3:15 PM.

TRNKA SHORTS PROGRAM IV, 1962-65 sss Sun 7/1, 2 PM, and Mon 7/2, 6 PM.

7/8: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, bohotheatre.com, $35.

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The Hand

MOVIES

Some strings attached

Master Czech animator Jiří Trnka created magical worlds amid stifling communist censorship.

By J.R. JONES

I

n 1967, a TV crew from the state-run network of communist Czechoslovakia dropped in on veteran illustrator and animator Jiří Trnka at his Prague workshop. The resulting ten-minute segment, which you can find on YouTube, forsakes dialogue for a classical music score—like so many of Trnka’s films—and shows the 55-year-old artist creating the sort of exotic settings and evocative puppet characters he’d brought to life onscreen for 20 years. Trnka, who would die of heart disease two years later, puffs on a cigarette as he kneads a palm-size ball of white plastic compound and uses the edge of a shallow-straight gouge to carve out not just the face of an old man but a whole personality.

With tweezers he attaches tiny flowers and foliage to little sylvan figures and affixes them to a strip of grungy, clear-plastic sheeting; conferring with his production team, he as-

sembles strange sets that evoke Jean Cocteau in their wild imaginings. There isn’t a camera to be seen, yet this is a filmmaker at work, because Trnka generally left the laborious process of frame-by-frame animation to his trusted crew and focused instead on the actual creation of his little worlds.

Chicagoans will get a rare chance to experience this master animator on the big screen in June and early July, when Gene Siskel Film Center presents his six features and 20 shorts as part of the touring series “The Puppet Master: The Complete Jiří Trnka.” The series tracks Trnka’s growing sophistication as a sculptor and designer, tackling one fantastic story after another and generating high drama from his simple but gracefully realized puppets. It also reveals a filmmaker chafing against the constraints of state censorship, as harmless fantasies (The Emperor’s Night-

ingale, Bayaya) and patriotic celebrations of Czech culture (The Czech Year, Old Czech Legends) give way to more trenchant visions of war (The Good Soldier Svejk), modern technology (Cybernetic Grandma), and government control (The Hand).

Born in western Bohemia, Trnka began sculpting puppets and staging little shows as a child, and when he was 17, a mentor at his vocational school persuaded his working-class parents to let him enroll at the School of Applied Arts in Prague. The young artist graduated in 1935 and got his professional start illustrating children’s books (some of which he would later adapt to the screen), though he also launched a puppet-theater troupe in Prague that lasted until the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. After the war Trnka launched an animation studio with two partners and began making short 2-D animations. The first shorts program at the Film Center collects these efforts, which are pleasant but undistinguished; Trnka didn’t really come into his own until he reconnected with his childhood passion and, in fall 1946, set out to make his first puppet-animation feature, The Czech Year.

This captivating celebration of peasant legends and customs, which was honored at the 1948 Venice film festival, shows how effectively Trnka humanized the most rudimentary characters, with their bulbous wooden heads,

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ARTS & CULTURE

button noses, and painted eyes. Though the faces were immobile, his animators could write poetry with the tilting of a head, and the peasants are costumed in warm colors, with lovingly tended hair and mustaches.

Trnka lights the action from multiple angles, throwing meshes of shadow across his sets; the ground is solidly detailed, with actual dirt and foliage, while the backdrops have the two-dimensional look of theatrical flats, often bearing gauzy images of clouds or starry nights. The materials can be ingenious—in one scene a cobra covered in gorgeous green beads slithers by, and during one bucolic stroll, stalks of wheat in soft focus intervene between us and the characters. The puppets’ movement is limited (they seem to rock back and forth more than walk), but the scenes are powerfully kinetic with their zooms, pans, and dynamic editing.

Trnka and his partners won a government subsidy for The Emperor’s Nightingale (1948), adapted from a Hans Christian Andersen tale, and the added production funds are evident onscreen in the fine fabrics Trnka uses to create an ancient Chinese court. The characters are richly costumed, and in contrast to the cheap flats of The Czech Year, the walls of the court are covered in webbings of pleated white gauze or vertical strands of colored beads.

The emperor has every toy a man could want, but when he sees an image of a bird in a book, none of his courtiers can identify the strange creature; in a dazzling sequence, the emperor marches down the length of a wall covered in a giant, white lace doily, the little holes forming blackened circular windows through which his courtiers regretfully shake their heads.

The Emperor’s Nightingale became another international success, winning the top prize at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland and a U.S. release with Boris Karloff providing the English-language voice-over narration.

By the time Trnka made Bayaya (1950), adapting two fairy tales by Czech writer Božena Němcová that he had previously illustrated, his strategic use of shadow had become an art in itself, his elaborate medieval sets often cloaked in darkness, with spot lighting on the characters and immediate objects to conjure up a mood of foreboding. In the opening scene, an owl perches atop the darkened triangular peak of a peasant home, and a slow zoom into the front door acquaints us with a widowed farmer grieving for his dead wife; the poignant scene of his son tending to him in the flickering light of a candle reminded me of Carl

Dreyer’s Danish spiritual drama Ordet (a connection I rarely make watching puppets). One day the boy encounters a white horse, its mane and tail shining like silk, that identifies itself as his mother’s ghost, and Trnka zooms in slowly on its deep dark eye as the mother addresses her son in voice-over. Led by the horse to an eerie castle, the boy falls in love with a princess there and charges into battle with a multiheaded dragon; every time he chops off one of its goggle-eyed heads, which fall to the ground with jaws still snapping, another head pops up to replace it.

Bayaya represents a stylistic advance for Trnka in that the backgrounds are more concrete: there are real walls with moldings and entranceways, and in one eye-popping scene, textured red-and-green wallpaper provides the backdrop for an inky, crawling silhouette of the hydra-headed dragon. Given the greater three-dimensional detail, you might expect Trnka to throw more light on the backgrounds, yet he seizes on the idea of shadow as a sort of set dressing, showing only the tip of the iceberg and heightening the impact of the most important visual elements. Numerous scenes show characters against a field of black, with only minimal structures to suggest the outlines of a room, and the effect can be haunting: in one shot the boy and the princess traipse up a spectral white spiral staircase, and later the boy, riding his luminous white steed, threads through a roomful of white columns. The story ends in joy and redemption, but the overwhelming gloom of the setting tells a different story.

State censors shot down Trnka’s plan for a puppet animation of Don Quixote, so he returned to the safe formula of his debut feature for Old Czech Legends (1952), another patriotic story collection. But two years later Trnka ventured outside his comfort zone of fantasy and folklore to adapt a more iconoclastic story: Jaroslav Hašek’s satirical antiwar novel The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War. The title character, a hapless foot soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, causes havoc wherever he goes, fouling up the plans of his corrupt superiors (Joseph Heller would turn him into Yossarian, the hero of his classic novel Catch-22). Though The Good Soldier Švejk (1955) may lack the exotic visuals of Trnka’s earlier efforts, the characters are more supple than ever, with busy fingers that add to the movie’s droll comedy. Švejk, separated from his regiment, marches around southern Bohemia until he’s taken prisoner as a Russian spy, and Trnka en-

joys himself immensely with the stiff-necked military men of the empire: the gendarme sergeant who interrogates Švejk wears a wax mustache so large and shapely it looks like a bird diving earthward.

For technical skill, nothing in Trnka’s filmography tops his lavish 1959 CinemaScope adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for which the filmmaker abandoned wood sculpting and began working with a plastic material that allowed for more delicate facial features (his Puck is so smooth and white he might have been carved out of soap). But some of the most personal and troubling visions of Trnka’s career can be found in the final shorts program, dating from 1962 to ’65. There are no homey peasant bonfires in Cybernetic Grandma (1962), an exercise in cold, white, geometrical vistas that anticipate the chilly 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A little girl, summoned to visit her astronaut parents in space, travels with her warm, caring grandmother to a futuristic travel center where she’s transported to the parents’ ship, only to discover that they won’t be home for hours and her babysitter is a ghostly robotic grandmother in the form of a rolling recliner chair with a glass head and a lace shawl over its triangular shoulders.

Trnka considered The Hand (1965) to be his best work, and its story of an artist harassed by a giant, white-gloved hand suggests a darkness of the soul commensurate with the visual darkness of his most effective films. The artist wants only to throw pottery, but the hand, which walks on its fingers and hovers in the air to gesture, keeps shaping his clay into a statue of itself, index finger pointing upward. This feud continues until the hand, returning in a black glove, gets tough with artist, punching him and dropping strings to lasso his head and arms. Turned into a marionette and sealed inside a giant birdcage, the artist completes a massive sculpture of the hand and, as his reward, watches a candle slowly burn down to nothing while the hand decorates him with medals and a garland around his head. The film was widely interpreted as not an index finger but a middle finger to the state censors who had controlled Trnka’s creative life for years, and after he died The Hand disappeared from circulation in Czechoslovakia until after the communists fell. Viewed all these years later, it reflects the rage of a man who feared that he’d been the puppet all along. v

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18 to enter 21 to drink Photo ID required

Sat-Sun, June 2-3 @ 4:00pm

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MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE Oh Lucy!

MOVIES NEW REVIEWS

Filmworker

Leon Vitali, right-hand man to Stanley Kubrick on his last three features, shares his memories of the fanatically perfectionist filmmaker, and other witnesses involved in the productions try to fathom the emotional toll of Vitali’s two-decade career doing the master’s bidding.

A respected stage actor, Vitali played the proud Lord Bullingdon in Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) and was so enamored of the director that he abandoned his acting career to work behind the camera; he proved invaluable to Kubrick as an acting coach for unschooled talents (Danny Lloyd, the little boy in The Shining; Lee Ermey, the marine drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket) but also handled the million-and-one details of color

164 North State Street

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

Starring Fanning!

MARY SHELLEY

OH LUCY!

June 1 – 7

June 1 – 7

Fri., 6/1 at 3:45 pm & 6 pm; Sat., 6/2 at 5:00 pm & 7:30 pm; Sun., 6/3 at 3 pm; Mon., 6/4 at 7:45 pm; Tue., 6/5 at 7:45 pm; Wed., 6/6 at 7:45 pm; Thu., 6/7 at 6 pm

Fri., 6/1 at 2 pm & 8:15 pm; Sat., 6/2 at 3 pm; Sun., 6/3 at 5:15 pm; Mon., 6/4 at 6 pm; Tue., 6/5 at 8 pm; Wed., 6/6 at 6 pm; Thu., 6/7 at 8:15 pm

“A luscious-looking spectacle, drenched in the colors and visceral sensation of nature, the sensuality of young lovers, the passionate disappointment of loss and betrayal.” — Hollywood Reporter

“An against-the-odds charmer…a near-minor miracle…by turns tender, plaintive, heartfelt and joyful.” — NY Times

JUNE 1 – 7 • YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE BUY TICKETS NOW 22 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

at

“Feverish and gripping and disturbing. ...

[Joaquin] Phoenix leaves a memorable imprint” — Chicago Sun-Times

www.siskelfilmcenter.org

correction, print traffic, archiving, and video-retail packaging. There’s plenty of production detail for Kubrick nuts, though the two competing narratives (Kubrick the genius, Kubrick the tyrant) won’t surprise anyone. Tony Zierra directed; with Ryan O’Neal and Matthew Modine.

—J.R. JONES 94 min. Fri 6/1, 5:45, 7:45, and 9:45 PM; Sat 6/2-Sun 6/2, 11 AM and 1, 5:45, 7:45, and 9:45 PM; and Mon 6/4-Thu 6/7, 5:45, 7:45, and 9:45 PM. Music Box.

Mary Shelley

The author of Frankenstein gets her own biopic, which tracks the book’s genesis but mainly details her tumultuous marriage to Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Teenage Mary (Elle Fanning) comes with quite an intellectual pedigree: her father, William Godwin (Stephen Dillane), is notorious for his anarchist writings, and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, published the landmark Vindication of the Rights of Women before dying from complications of young Mary’s birth. This philosophical baggage gives screenwriter Emma Jensen plenty to explore when Mary falls in love with Shelley (Douglas Booth) and begins to hear her father’s abstract ideas about free love parroted back to her by the poet. Mary’s loss of her firstborn child and her fascination with galvanism prove inspirational when the couple visit Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge) in Geneva and he challenges each of his guests to write a ghost story. The movie, which gradually slows to a crawl, could have used a little galvanism itself. Haifaa Al-Mansour directed. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 120 min. Fri 6/1, 3:45 and 6 PM; Sat 6/2, 5 and 7:30 PM; Sun 6/3, 3 PM; Mon 6/4, 7:45 PM; Tue 6/5, 7:45 PM; Wed 6/6, 7:45 PM; and Thu 6/7, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

R Oh Lucy!

A lonely, middle-aged office worker in Tokyo (Shinobu Terajima) falls head over heels for a young American teaching English as a second language (Josh Hartnett) and chases after him when he returns to his native Los Angeles with her attractive young niece (Shioli Kutsunu). This U.S.-Japanese coproduction was written and directed by Atsuko Hirayanagi, adapting her own short into a memorable debut feature, and produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay of Anchorman fame. This odd trans-Pacific collaboration results in a far-

cical story with some surprisingly tragic moments, and an obsessed heroine who hasn’t gotten the memo that Asian women are supposed to be sweet and modest. As willful, selfish, and cruel as Ferrell’s screen dunces, she blunders into one humiliating situation after another, hardly sympathetic but never less than human. In English and subtitled Japanese. —J.R. JONES 95 min. Fri 6/1, 2 and 8:15 PM; Sat 6/2, 3 PM; Sun 6/3, 5:15 PM; Mon 6/4, 6 PM; Tue 6/5, 8 PM; Wed 6/6, 6 PM; and Thu 6/7, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

The Stormy Man

In this 1957 Japanese drama, a drummer (pop star Yujiro Ishihara) gets his big break and becomes a professional musician. Umetsugu Inoue directed. In Japanese with subtitles. 101 min. Screens as part of the June series “Umetsugu Inoue: Japan’s Music Man”; visit chicagoreader.com/movies for Ben Sachs’s review, posting June 1.

Fri 6/1, 4 PM, and Tue 6/5, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

R Who We Are Now

A woman (Julianne Nicholson) released from prison after serving ten years for manslaughter and the young lawyer (Emma Roberts) representing her in a custody battle for her son are the protagonists of this astonishing drama from writer-director Matthew Newton, asking who deserves redemption and who should decide. The narrative runs on two tracks that eventually collide. In the more interesting of them, the hardened ex-convict fights to convince others—especially her sister and brother-in-law, the child’s legal guardians—that she deserves a second chance; meanwhile the lawyer balances the pressures of her pro-bono firm against the demands of her wealthy, vacuous mother (Lea Thompson). Though similar in plot to the 2006 indie Sherrybaby, this Brooklyn-set drama owes more in tone and style to the searing character studies of John Cassavetes. With memorable supporting performances from Zachary Quinto, Jimmy Smits, and Jason Biggs. —LEAH PICKETT 95 min. Fri 6/1-Thu 6/7. Facets Cinematheque.

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Does Chicago have too many music festivals?

Lollapalooza’s ticket sales have slowed, and Reggae Fest and Chicago Open Air are canceled— are these the growth pangs of a healthy but crowded ecosystem, or is a crash on the way?

By LEOR GALIL

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o launch a music festival, you have to capture the attention of a public that’s already flooded with festival announcements. In this regard, and only in this regard, the first and final Fyre Festival succeeded. On April 27, 2017, throngs of people who’d paid $1,500 per single-day ticket or $12,000+ for a VIP package at the self-described “Coachella of the Bahamas” arrived on the island of Great Exuma expecting to be treated to luxury housing, fine dining, and sets by the likes of Disclosure, Migos, and Blink-182. Instead, they fought over tents and ate plain cheese sandwiches as the performers bailed en masse. Disgruntled tweets from Fyre went viral even before the organizers “postponed” the two-weekend event the morning of April 28, the day it was scheduled to begin. Within the week, festival organizers were hit with the first of nearly a dozen class-action lawsuits.

In March 2018, Fyre founder Billy McFarland pleaded guilty to wire fraud. He’ll be sentenced in June.

As colossal a disaster as Fyre was, at first it looked like an aberration—at the time, the music-festival market seemed able to support several large, multiday events every summer weekend across North America. But in June 2017, the New York Times asked if the market had peaked after the two companies behind Canada’s Pemberton Festival declared bankruptcy and canceled it. Several similar music-focused attractions bit the dust that summer, and in August, Pitchfork reporter Marc

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Hogan surveyed the wreckage: among the casualties were IowaStock, Karoondinha in Pennsylvania, and the UpNorth Music & Arts Festival in Michigan.

By the end of September, two Chicago fests had pulled the plug. On September 5, the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority canceled the inaugural Get in It MusicFest, a one-day event that was to feature Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and Lupe Fiasco on September 16 at Guaranteed Rate Field. And a week before the September 23 date for Aahh! Fest, Common Ground Founda-

tion general manager Tamara Brown scrubbed the event, which launched in 2014 and had already skipped 2015.

I’ve often wondered about the health of Chicago’s musicfestival ecosystem. Every summer the city has so many that it needs to import people to attend them all: you can take your pick from government-supported celebrations of genres important to the city’s history (the Blues Festival, the Jazz Festival, the Chicago House Music Festival), large block parties where you can see high-profile national acts for a small donation J

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continued from 23 (Wicker Park Fest, West Fest), and big-ticket blockbusters that entertain audiences larger than the population of Crystal Lake (according to the 2010 census, that’s a mere 40,475 people, less than half a single day’s crowd at Lollapalooza). In April a piece in RedEye claimed that from May through early October, Chicago hosts 150 festivals (though it counted nonmusical events such as Illinois Craft Beer Week). Clearly, Chicago loves its fests.

But can the city keep making room in its heart for all of them?

Early this year, I started to have doubts. In March, the metal and hard-rock fest Chicago Open Air announced it was going on hiatus, and it’d only existed for two summers. Reggae Fest Chicago, which likewise debuted in 2016, announced last April that it wasn’t coming back in 2017, and to all appearances it’s staying gone this year. When Brown announced the cancellation of last year’s Aahh! Fest, she suggested that fans mark their calendars for September 15, 2018, but I’m skeptical—the festival’s Twitter account hasn’t posted anything since then, nobody at the foundation has answered my e-mails or calls, and fest founder Common is headlining Mamby on the Beach in June.

Even the mighty Lollapalooza gave me reason to worry. For the past few years, the megafest has sold out weekend passes before releasing the name of a single artist on its lineup—usually in a couple hours, if not less. But this March, those same passes took eight days to sell out, even though C3 Presents announced the full lineup the day after they went on sale. (Single-day tickets for Thursday and Sunday were still available at the time of publication.) Lolla had appeared so untouchable that even this modest slowdown felt like a dire harbinger—if its dominance was weakening, even incrementally, what would happen to Chicago festivals with less clout? Was there a crash coming?

I wanted to take the temperature of the local festival ecosystem, so I turned to the folks behind the scenes. I spoke with 14 organizers from ten large music fests. (To help you keep track of who is who, they’re all listed in a box on page 27.) I stuck to bigger-ticket events, though it did eventually become clear to me that concerts by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events and local street festivals do affect the larger players.

I couldn’t get hold of everyone. After reaching out several times to Lollapalooza, I was told by a PR representative that “We do not have anyone available.” I called the company behind Open Air Chicago, a Los Angeles outfit called Danny Wimmer Presents, so often that eventually I got hung up on. But I heard back from enough people that I was able to get a much better understanding of how Chicago came to be home to such a colorful, diverse, and crowded festival scene.

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o understand how the current festival ecosystem evolved, it’s important to remember how easy it is for Chicagoans to throw their own big parties, whether in public parks or on residential streets. You can host a picnic in a park for up to 100 people, with a permit for amplified sound, by spending just a little more than the cost of a four-day Lolla pass ($335) and doing some paperwork. The Chosen Few Picnic & Festival now attracts more than 50,000 people, but it grew out of an annual Fourth of July reunion barbecue that the Hatchett family started decades ago behind the Museum of Science & Industry. In 1990, the first time Chosen Few DJs Tony and Andre Hatchett brought the whole collective to spin at the barbecue, fewer than 50 people came. The Hideout Block Party also launched rather informally in 1997, to celebrate the first

Fans at last year’s Spring Awakening Music Festival in Addams/Medill Park

anniversary of co-owners Tim and Katie Tuten buying the club.

“The first time, we did it as a thank-you, a celebration of ‘Oh, we made it a year,’ and as an excuse to bring our friends up from Austin,” Katie Tuten says. “Over the years, the party just grew organically from the bottom up.”

In Chicago, big street fests preceded by a few years the arrival of large, music-focused outdoor events such as Pitchfork and Lollapalooza—Wicker Park Fest, for example, celebrated its 15th year in 2018. “We wouldn’t be where we’re at—any of these big music festivals—without [street festival organizers] setting the tone,” says Ruido Fest cofounder Max Wagner. Street fests also offered bookers practical experience they could use if they moved on to larger events—Michael Berg, who helped launch the North Coast Music Festival, was a talent buyer for Wicker Park Fest for several years, and as a managing partner at Silver Wrapper he still books for the Taste of Randolph.

When Pitchfork the music site launched Pitchfork the festival, it was originally inspired by street fests too, though it positioned itself as serving an audience that they generally didn’t.

“What if there was another event that catered to music culture and indie-music culture? Nothing was like that,” says founding festival director Mike Reed. “It was a totally different thing to get into the industry—it wasn’t an industry.”

Reed also looked to the Village Voice’s free Siren Music Festival, which brought indie rock to Coney Island, and to London-based All Tomorrow’s Parties, which ran an international series of artist-curated, anticorporate, modestly sized festivals. (Both are now defunct.) Pitchfork’s fest technically debuted in 2006, but the music site had already helped book

é ASHLEE REZIN/SUN-TIMES

the Intonation Music Festival the year before. For Chicago festivals, 2005 turned out to be a momentous year: that summer Lollapalooza rebooted as a destination in Grant Park after failing as a traveling event, and in the fall Riot Fest launched, taking over the Congress Theater for two days.

Before closing in April 2013, the Congress would help incubate several summer festivals, not just Riot Fest. Wagner was a talent buyer for the Congress, as was his Ruido Fest cofounder Eduardo Calvillo, and the job brought them into contact with Latinx alternative artists. “When we worked there, we’d always [said], ‘The folks who are into rock en español and appreciate this form of music are a great crowd, and there should be a festival for them,’” Wagner says. When Lucas King helped launch Spring Awakening, he was a Congress talent buyer too—and an employee of React Presents, which owns the festival. It started in 2008 as an indoor event at the theater, but eventually it “outgrew its home,” according to React general manager Pat Grumley. Spring Awakening moved to Soldier Field in June 2012—and that September, Riot Fest took its first step outdoors, presenting one night at the Congress and two days in Humboldt Park.

After 2012, with each passing year more new festivals seemed to be scuffling over the few remaining summer weekends. The Windy City Smokeout debuted in 2013, Aahh! Fest in 2014, and Mamby on the Beach and Ruido Fest on the same weekend in 2015. Spring Awakening moved to Pilsen’s Addams/ Medill Park in June 2016, so that the park was hosting a large festival every month of the summer—Ruido in July, the inaugural Reggae Fest Chicago in August, and Hip-Hop Summerfest J in September.

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 25

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The festival folks

The key players in this story and their affiliations Michael Berg Managing partner at Silver Wrapper Productions and cofounder of the North Coast Music Festival (August 31-September 2 in Union Park) Brian Griffin Talent buyer for React Presents’ Spring Awakening Music Festival (June 8-10 in Addams/Medill Park) Pat Grumley React Presents general manager Alan King DJ and lawyer who helps organize the Chosen Few Picnic (July 7 in Jackson Park) Lucas King Former React Presents partner and cofounder of the North Coast Music Festival Adam Krefman Senior director of festivals and activations for Pitchfork Mike Petryshyn Cofounder of Riot Fest (September 14-16 in Douglas Park) Mike Reed Founding director of the Pitchfork Music Festival (July 20-22 in Union Park) Matt Rucins React Presents general manager and talent buyer for Mamby on the Beach (June 23-24 on Oakwood Beach) Tim and Katie Tuten Co-owners of the Hideout and organizers of the Hideout Block Party (which may or may not be happening this year) Max Wagner Owner of event production company Metronome and cofounder of Ruido Fest (June 22-24 in Addams/Medill Park) Ed Warm Owner of Joe’s on Weed Street and Joe’s Live, who cofounded the Windy City Smokeout (July 13-15 at 560 W. Grand) Chuck Wren Talent buyer for Reggae Fest Chicago

continued from 25 “It’s the most crowded market of any market from coast to coast,” Berg says. “The fans and the community here are inundated with options all summer long.”

The festival glut creates a lot of competition, which has required many promoters and organizers to target musical or cultural niches in order to survive. Spring Awakening showcases a broad spectrum of electronic music, while North Coast offers mostly jam bands, dance producers, rappers, and R&B singers.

Because of this specialization, many of the organizers I spoke to don’t see other local festivals as competition but rather as part of an industry-wide effort to cultivate the largest possible audience for live music. Sometimes even festivals courting the same crowd can reinforce each other: For years the Chosen Few Picnic was the city’s only major event dedicated to house music, but when DCASE supersized its free Memorial Day weekend house music party this year, Chosen Few DJ Alan King didn’t see it as a threat. “Frankly, we’re happy about any event in this city where house music is being promoted and opportunities are being provided for house music DJs and performers,” he says. “We’re behind it 100 percent.”

The Windy City Smokeout’s closest competitor is Live Nation’s Country LakeShake, a three-day June fest at Huntington Bank Pavilion, but Smokeout cofounder Ed Warm says their relationship is amicable. “We work with them and they work with us,” he says. “We view it as two entirely different festivals.”

Warm is one of the city’s great supporters of country music—in 2017 the Academy of Country Music named him promoter of the year for the work he’s done with Joe’s Live in Rosemont, and he recently bought beloved Uptown country dive Carol’s Pub, shuttered in 2016. “Rising tide raises all the ships,” he says.

“We want to see all the festivals do well.” And the Windy City Smokeout is doing well: Warm says it drew 4,000 people in 2013 and more than 40,000 last year.

Not everyone has had the same success navigating the crowded marketplace. In April 2016, Subterranean and Beat Kitchen owner Robert Gomez, Kickstand Productions, and Optimum Events launched Reggae Fest Chicago. Jump Up! Records owner Chuck Wren and Kickstand talent buyer John Ugolini had about three weeks to assemble a lineup, and they landed legends such as Toots & the Maytals and Lee “Scratch” Perry. The event filled a void in the summer festival landscape (only Riot Fest also reliably books reggae), and Wren thought it had promise. “We all knew most big fests don’t make money in their first year,” he says. “I think the partners wanted to go into year two with more of the ‘let’s break even’ mentality, and when some of the sponsors didn’t come back in the way they wanted, that’s why they didn’t come back in year two.”

Wren believes that the profusion of street fests that ask for donations at the gate makes things harder for new commerical fests with modest means. When you can see, say, Ian Svenonius’s reunited “gospel yeh-yeh” band the Make-Up at West Fest for $5, how eager will you be to take a chance on an unfamiliar one-day festival that costs $37.50?

“It was an amazing deal to see Toots—there were people who whined about the ticket prices,” Wren says. “Well, if one of these acts headlined HoB, that’s a $30 ticket.” And because so many Chicago fests have successfully become annual events, Wren discovered, some people assumed it would be no big deal to skip Reggae Fest in 2016—they could always go the next year.

“It wasn’t even fathomable to thousands and thousands of peo-

ple that if they didn’t go this year, maybe it won’t be back next year,” he says. “That hurt us.”

For midsize events such as Mamby on the Beach, the crowded midwestern festival circuit has disadvantages. Artists book further in advance each year and favor the largest festivals with the deepest pockets. “There’s not an infinite amount of talent out there—it gets narrower and narrower and narrower every time you start booking the festival,” says Matt Rucins, a general manager at React who helps book Mamby. “It’s the biggest difficulty we have. You think you have this artist in mind, you have the flow of the festival in mind, you go after all your first choices, and then 20 percent of them are available.”

With demand for talent going up and the supply more or less constant, festivals around the country have started offering artists more money. Riot Fest cofounder Mike Petryshyn thinks bookers’ behavior sometimes borders on ridiculous. “The last couple years, stuff we were going for, so-and-so promoter elsewhere in the U.S. will pay double just to have a band,” he says.

“And we’re like, ‘OK, go have fun with that.’”

The corporatization of the festival circuit and the increasing difficulty of booking several stages for multiple days have led to a solution of convenience, where in any given summer the same acts seem to play every big event coast to coast. Thankfully, most Chicago festivals appear to be immune. Earlier this month Pitchfork surveyed the top 20 North American fests (including Lollapalooza and the Pitchfork Music Festival) and listed the 20 most ubiquitous acts of summer 2018. Seventeen of them will play Lolla. “That’s fine and dandy, but we’re a different kind of festival,” says Petryshyn. “We always want to have bands that aren’t doing other festivals.”

Pitchfork led the charge in proving that a midsize festival could thrive with a lineup catering to music obsessives curious about the new and unusual—the sort of people the site hopes to reach as readers. As Pitchfork’s Adam Krefman says, the booking process “is informed by something that is more than just how many tickets so-and-so is selling in the market at this time.” As Pitchfork’s coverage branched out and evolved, the festival’s roster followed suit. And ambitious locals—including the founders of North Coast—took note. “We were actually walking around Pitchfork as fans and talking about if we brought an event there to the same park,” Berg says. “Here we are nine years later.”

One factor that may be helping so many festivals thrive in Chicago is their size—with the exception of Lollapalooza, most are midsize or smaller. True, Pitchfork has a festival in Paris, and Lollapalooza has colonized Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paris, and Berlin—but Riot Fest has scaled back after briefly running satellite festivals in Toronto and Denver starting in 2013. The Toronto run ended in 2015 because Riot Fest’s Canadian partner sold to Live Nation; the Denver version didn’t return in 2017 in part because Riot Fest cofounder and producer Sean P. McKeough had died.

Even the Chosen Few Picnic, which has expanded astronomically from its informal beginnings, isn’t growing for the sake of growing. It went from one day to two in 2016, but this year it’s just one again—mainly because it’s not happening before a Monday holiday. The picnic is a marathon, running from 8 AM till 9 PM (many folks line up before the gates open, hoping to snag good spots for tents and grills), and the organizers knew better than to expect a crowd to turn out on a Sunday if J

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

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they had to work the next morning. “I don’t think we had a real appreciation for what an exhausting day the Chosen Few Picnic is—to ask people to wake up that next morning, turn around, and do it all over again was maybe biting off more than we can chew,” King says. If the timing of the picnic relative to the Fourth of July works out again in the future, though, the second day could come back.

Most organizers are content with the size of their events. Pat Grumley suggests that the less oppressive scale of a “boutique festival” such as Mamby on the Beach (at most 15,000 people per day) is as much of an attraction as the lakeside setting. “It’s easy to navigate and hop from stage to stage in under five minutes, giving fans a chance to catch multiple artists and meet up with friends,” he says. Rucins likewise thinks Mamby is healthy at its present size: “Last year we sold out Saturday, and Sunday did about the same two years in a row—about 10,000 people. We’re on pace this year to surpass last year—that’s all you can ask for, is continued growth.”

Pitchfork hit a plateau several years ago with respect to how many acts it books, but Krefman says he and the team will continue to tinker with the layout. “We’ve talked about

A tiny fraction of the Lollapalooza crowd on the first day of the festival’s 2015 installment é SAIYNA BASHIR/SUN-TIMES

expanding it, but there hasn’t been something that’s so obvious that we’ve had to do it—it’s been a lot of optimizing it year over year and finding new corners of this tiny park that we can use in different ways,” he says. “[With] the number of festivals in Chicago these days, there hasn’t been that obvious need to double the size of the festival.”

Distinctive lineups with interesting artists go a long way, but some Chicago festivals also foster a sense of community, which not even the best-bankrolled competitor can buy away. The Hideout Block Party grew out of the passions of a group of people who’d already adopted the club as a second home. “There’s a theme that goes throughout our block parties: it’s generated by people who have an idea,” says Tim Tuten. “We want it to be something that’s special, that makes sense, that is a wellcurated event, not just 20 bands that are going up and playing a show.”

For the Block Party, the Hideout has partnered with Touch and Go Records and with grassroots arts groups such as Opera-Matic, who piloted a translucent, glowing whale through the crowd during an Andrew Bird set in 2011. Last year Saturday’s bill honored several local musicians turning 60, while Sunday’s celebrated the 20th anniversary of Steve Albini’s studio Electrical Audio. The lineup is often distinguished by the presence of artists such as Bird, who got attached to the club early in their careers and are now much too popular to play inside it. The Tutens say they’ve never gone

into the red on a Hideout Block Party, but they aren’t sure if they’ll host one this year—money or no money, the events are a lot of work.

The evidence I could collect doesn’t clearly point to an impending crisis among Chicago music festivals, though most of the folks who could’ve passed along bad news didn’t talk to me. Some fests have gone belly-up, but it’s not possible to conclusively blame that on market forces rather than bad luck or bad choices— and fests still seem to be failing at a lower rate than, say, tech startups or new restaurants.

One key element that drives the audience for all these events is the most obvious: they’re outdoors in Chicago, during the few months of the year when being outdoors in Chicago for hours at a time is reasonably likely to be pleasant. When Riot Fest first moved outside in 2012, says Petryshyn, it did better than anybody expected: “I thought, maybe we can get to 12 or 15 thousand or something like that, per day, outside. That was the realistic goal,” he says. “But we ended up doing 30 a day, and it blew everybody’s mind.”

Chicagoans spend most of the year waiting for the sun, and most local festivals draw the majority of their crowds from within the city. “Everybody wants to come here in the summertime and enjoy it,” Reed says. “It makes complete sense that there would be events like this—and there always have been.

The nature of them change.” v

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Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of May 31 b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

Ric Wilson lifts his community and Chicago hip-hop on BANBA Martin Rev é XI WEG/FLICKR

THURSDAY31 Shy Technology Seasaw and Like Language open. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $8. 17+

é MICHEAL SALISBURY/COURTESY THESE DAYS

RIC WILSON, VICTOR!, FAMILY REUNION

Sat 6/2, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $20, $15 in advance. b

ONLINE MENSWEAR GIANT Bonobos recently put together an ad campaign with a video that features a rotating panoply of men wearing its clothes. The people behind the clip began it with a shot of effortless cool: a close-up of Chicago activist and rapper Ric Wilson (the ad also closes with images of two other key figures in Chicago hip-hop, star-in-themaking MC Kweku Collins and eminent poet and mentor Kevin Coval). Wilson certainly fits the role of leader in his stance against prejudice and violence—he’s worked with racial justice organizations including Black Youth Project 100 and We Charge Genocide (the latter sent him to speak about the torture of people of color at the hands of CPD before the United Nations Committee Against Torture), and he’s also on the forefront of Chicago hip-hop.

On his new EP, BANBA (for “Black Art, Not Bad Art”), out on Innovative Leisure, he blends chic, minimal, electronic instrumentals that burble and zigzag with earthy, delicate compositions teased out by a full band. BANBA sounds like it came straight from a guy raised in the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church—an incubator of the early civil rights movement—who came of age when local MCs were experimenting with horn sections and suave club production. Wilson feeds off BANBA’s charming bounce with activist aphorisms and euphoric bars that celebrate where he’s from, and songs such as the sauntering “Sinner” show that Wilson will go far by keeping the people, places, and causes that mean so much to him close to his heart. —LEOR GALIL

Shy Technology call Chicago home, but their music is spiritually in sync with a type of melancholic and massive indie rock I’ve come to associate with Scotland; if front man David Coulson sang with a brogue I might have taken the band for Edinburgh four-piece We Were Promised Jetpacks. On their recent single “Crazy Kind” and their three-song EP, Fine Print (both on New Black Market), Shy Technology carve out soundscapes that are smooth and frictionless until they climax with the violence of waves crashing upon craggy seaside boulders.

Their pinging looped guitar lines and bone-dry minimal drums together with Coulson’s mannered, yearnsome bellowing inform a sense that their songs could extend beyond the horizon and go on forever. Since indie rock became a commercially prominent phenomenon in the last decade, any new band whose sound reflects that moment can feel lifeless, as if they were xeroxing a 2008 Urban Outfitters ad and hoping its so-called alternative aesthetic will do the heavy lifting. But Shy Technology show there’s still some power to be mined from indie rock’s recent past—witness the straightforward and immediate opening track on Fine Print, “Claim to Fame.” —LEOR GALIL

FRIDAY1 Chicago Doomed & Stoned Festival See also Saturday and Sunday. Inter Arma headlines; Black Pyramid, Black Road, Attalla, Shadow Witch, Snow Burial, and Pale Grey Lore open.

6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $20, $50 for a three-day pass. 17+ Founded in 2013, blog and Web network Doomed & Stoned has blossomed into a worldwide endeavor with a podcast, a quarterly Bandcamp compilation, and an emphasis on using local reporting to help build up individual scenes. Its laser-sharp focus has helped: the Doomed & Stoned musical aesthetic follows the post-Sabbath school of doom, drone, heavy psych, and stoner metal. Even within those strict parameters this three-day blast—which features

MUSIC

more than 20 bands, a DJ, and a Sunday brunch— showcases sonic diversity in the genre while highlighting some of Chicago’s strongest practitioners of meditative gut churns and heavy riffs. The Skull, Pale Horseman, Scientist, and Faces of the Bog are among the local luminaries holding down (way, way down) the fort, along with hard rockers Black Road, Americana folk-metal storytellers Huntsmen, crust-punk sludgesters Of Wolves, and avantgarde metallic free-jazz trio Brain Tentacles. There are also plenty of touring bands that will sonically slam you up against the wall, including Atlanta’s Whores., Richmond’s Inter Arma, Greenville’s Waft, and Philadelphia’s Age of Truth. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and you’re going to be on sensory overload. But if this is the music you love, then that’s what you’re here for. —MONICA KENDRICK

Martin Rev with Divine Enfant Wolf Eyes and Mystic Ruler with Bentley Anderson open.

DJ Eye Vybe spins between sets. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20. 21+

The loss of confrontational front man and artist Alan Vega in July 2016 could’ve spelled the end of all performances related to transgressive duo Suicide, but Martin Rev, the remaining half of the synthpunk pioneers, has seemingly been on a musical pilgrimage, playing solo shows and making festival appearances across the U.S. and Europe. I was lucky enough to open for him at the Owl in Logan Square in September 2015. That night, Rev and I talked a lot about Chicago free-jazzers like Roscoe Mitchell—and as I witnessed him attack his keyboard with a feral rush of fist pounds and full-arm leans, it all made perfect sense (on this tour he also plays with Mitchell’s Art Ensemble of Chicago in Detroit).

Over his synths and plodding preprogrammed backing tracks, he barked out vocals and occasionally crooned, creating a huge, joyous cacophony that drove the audience into a frenzy. Despite that unconventional approach, Rev was always considered the “musician” of Suicide; in the early 70s he fed his Farfisa organ through a battery of effects while his cheap drum machines ticked out a metronomic pulse. Inspired music-wise by the groundbreaking, proto-electronic 60s duo Silver Apples and performance-wise by the anarchic Stooges, Suicide upped the catharsis level of both while reflecting the crumbling NY dystopian vibes of that time, often adding traces of 50s doo-wop and nods to satanic comic books. When supposedly openminded punk audiences would not accept a band without guitar and drums, leather-clad Alan Vega literally pummeled them with a bike chain while Rev maintained their grinding machines through spiteful storms of spit and taunts (and once an ax, which was thrown at them while they opened for the Clash in the UK). Little did their naysayers know the much-maligned band would become hugely influential and lay down multiple original templates for minimalist electronica, industrial music, noise rock, postpunk, and beyond.

Openers Wolf Eyes are heavily indebted to Suicide’s approach, and will be experimenting live with directional, ultrasonic parametric speakers at the Empty Bottle. Wolf Eyes member Nate Young explains, “It should be extremely unsettling having sounds beamed directly to your head, [but] don’t J

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 29

Summer is more fun with Old Town School

MUSIC Wooden Shjips é JASON POWERS

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worry, they are harmless if exposure is not direct and consistent for over 15 minutes—they use them in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and everyone seems OK.” Rev will be joined by video artist Divine Enfant for what is sure to be an intense set. I’d say bring earplugs if I believed in them. —STEVE KRAKOW

SATURDAY2 Chicago Doomed & Stoned Festival See Friday. The Skull headlines; Sixes, Huntsmen, Brume, Waft, Of Wolves, and Thorr Axe open.

6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $20, $50 for a three-day pass. 17+ Julia Holter & Olivia Block 3 PM, May Chapel at Rosehill Cemetery, 5800 N. Ravenswood. F b

Group classes start JUNE 25 Music • Dance • Art • Theater ® Wiggleworms

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oldtownschool.org 30 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

Last year LA singer and composer Julia Holter underlined her stunning development as an artpop auteur, matching her ethereal melodic sensibility with small-scale orchestrations on her live-inthe-studio album In the Same Room (Domino). The collection featured deft reinventions of songs from her previous two recordings, with new arrangements that completely refresh some of the material. With Holter’s focus on sophisticated pop songs it’s been easy to forget that she has a strong background in more experimental composition; she studied under Michael Pisaro at CalArts and possesses a sharp post-Cagean creativity she now mostly deploys in her collaborations with others, such as the suite of songs written by Chicagoan Alex Temple that she performed with Spektral Quartet a few years ago. This weekend Holter will premiere her collaborative project with Chicago sound artist and composer Olivia Block, and since much of their material will be forged during the weekend leading up to this concert, the details are scant. Their piece, Whenever the Breeze, employs text from “Whenever the Breeze Blows,” the madrigal that inpires its name, along with snippets of contemporary weather-related news reports. It promises to blend Holter’s lovely voice (sparingly processed by Block) with organ, live electronics, field recordings of water and wind, and bells and crotales played live by percussionist Tim Daisy. Bass clarinetist Jason Stein will also be in the performing ensemble. —PETER MARGASAK

Ric Wilson See Pick of the Week, page 29.

Victor! and Family Reunion open. 7 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $20, $15 in advance. b

Wooden Shjips Holy Wave and Dommengang open. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, sold out. 21+ Ripley Johnson has said his Portland quartet Wooden Shjips made its latest album, V. (Thrill Jockey), under a cloud—figuratively and literally.

His band was still grappling with the initial implications of the Trump presidency while ash from forest fires that engulfed much of the countryside surrounding his hometown rained down and cast a fog over the city. The album cover features a giant hand making the peace sign—a colorless yet triumphant symbol within a vivid jungle of psychedelic sci-fi trees and stones—and in the press materials he’s asserted that the mesmerizing grooves of the music were intended as an act of resistance to the tumult of both the national political climate and their physical surroundings. As usual the rhythm section of drummer Omar Ahsanuddin and bassist Dusty Jermier carves out sprawling, stuttering grooves that seem to extend toward infinity, while Johnson’s guitar lines alternate between creeping, fuzzed-out riffs and exploratory improvisations that enhance the liquid grace of Nash Whalen’s floating keyboard parts. There are moments of sunny joy, such as the chill, head-nodding pleasure of “Already Gone,” and the specter of Spacemen 3 hovers over the proceedings, casting a hydroplaning, druggy haze that never allows the music to get tangled up in chaos or anger. Instead, it just unravels with endless patience that is complemented by Johnson’s conversational, half-buried singing. V. was mixed

by Chicagoan Cooper Crain—whose Bitchin Bajas bandmate Rob Frye blows simpatico tenor saxophone lines on album opener “Eclipse” in a heady, but restrained dialogue with Johnson’s guitar—and he gives the songs a sleek, stripped-down grace and brings clarity to music that could easily drown in its own murk. —PETER MARGASAK

SUNDAY3 Chicago Doomed & Stoned Festival See Friday. Whores. headline; Brain Tentacles, Faces of the Bog, Pale Horsemen, the Age of Truth, Tripping the Mechanism, and Scientist open. Plus Doomed & Stoned brunch with DJ Gregg Elzinga from noon to 4 PM. 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $20, $50 for a three-day pass. 17+ Wonder Years Tigers Jaw, Tiny Moving Parts, and Worriers open. 5 PM, Concord Music Hall, 2047 N. Milwaukee, sold out. b As Wonder Years front man Dan “Soupy” Campbell spoke to the press while his band prepared to drop their sixth album, April’s Sister Cities J

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OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 31

MUSIC Mdou Moctar é JEROME FINO

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(Hopeless), he avidly described the new material as a means to seek out and create connectivity. The six-piece group have always wanted to touch people with their music—their catalog emanates empathy, even unto the suburbs they hoped to escape as young men. And hell, their sweet sound is primed for accessibility, though the pop-punk scene they emerged from is divisive among punk and rock fans—remaining one American product that many actively ignore because it’s so sugary. Unfortunately for them, those who turn their noses up at poppunk have missed one of the brightest acts in contemporary music—but on Sister Cities the Wonder Years actively bridge the gap between their existing audiences and those who have yet to pay attention. These songs find inspiration in far-flung locales (most obviously Kyoto, Japan, which appears in the title of the first song), and draw from musical influences far beyond the typical pop-punk palette; you could easily pass off the country-tinged ballad “It Must Get Lonely” as a sweeping indie-rock song to a discerning friend, though Campbell’s impassioned howl at the end of the song might give it away. As with any great Wonder Years album (which includes most of them), the tunes on Sister Cities feel bigger than the moments the band zeroes in on in their lyrics—equipped with savvy songwriting chops, they find nuance in very human feelings through their craft and land hard with tremendous accuracy. And sugary or not, isn’t that the kind of music you want to share with everyone? —LEOR GALIL

TUESDAY5 Sarah Hennies The trio of Carol Genetti, Jeff Kimmel, and Graham Stephenson open. 9 PM, Cafe Mustache, 2313 N. Milwaukee, $5 suggested donation. 21+ New York percussionist and composer Sarah Hennies digs deep into the music she writes, developing minimal sound worlds she inhabits for extended durations. On her new album, Embedded Environments (Blume), she pushes what seem like simple ideas to extremes. “Foragers,” a piece for four percussionists, was recorded in a vacant grain silo in Buffalo, and the structure’s acoustic properties allow the track’s series of murmuring thrums and extended silences to take on a life of their own.

In this rare Chicago performance Hennies will perform a piece called “Falsetto,” which also builds a long, slow arc of tintinnabulation generated primarily from cheap bells purchased in thrift stores.

There’s something immersive—and also absurd—

32 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

about the result as she pushes her four-limbed limits to the hilt in an increasingly active and intense performance. In an essay for the online quarterly Lateral Addition Hennies wrote about being pleased with a negative review of the piece whose writer observed of it, “I thought I didn’t understand percussive theory anymore. Hell, I thought I didn’t understand music anymore.” The work produces a sense of confusion and aloneness within Hennies too—one that symbolizes her decision to come out as a trans woman a few years ago. “Falsetto” further reflects her identity and her trans activism with the serendipitous discovery that many listeners connected the small bells with those used in church, an institution that for many years forbade women to perform and instead used men to sing upperregister parts in falsetto. The trio of clarinetist Jeff Kimmel, vocalist Carol Genetti, and trumpeter Graham Stephenson will open the evening with an improvised set. —PETER MARGASAK

WEDNESDAY6 Mdou Moctar 8:30 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln. F b Mdou Moctar’s albums bring to mind the parable of the blind men and the elephant; taken individually, each one gives a misleading impression of the Nigerien artist’s full measure. His first recording, Anar (Sahel Sounds), is a cheap digital production with galloping drum loops and liberally Auto-Tuned vocals that would be the perfect soundtrack for a Mario Kart video game set in Northern Africa. Last year’s Sousoume Tamachek is a solo studio session, but Moctar’s imploring vocals, hand percussion, and rustic guitar picking affirm his music’s roots as communal entertainment for desert caravan stops and small-town picnics. And on his new download-only Mdou Moctar Meets Elite Beat in a Budget Dancehall (Boomarm Nation), his trebly electric-guitar leads thread a leisurely path through elastic reggae beats, wheezing organ, and rhythmically huffed flute. Moctar’s appearances at the Chicago World Music Festival last fall turned the flame up on the skirling, rock-edged sound he achieved on Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai, his soundtrack for a retelling of Prince’s Purple Rain in Tamashek, the native tongue of the Tuareg people. Moctar and his current combo, which includes drummer Aboubacar Ibrahim Mazawadje, bassist Michael Coltun, and rhythm guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane, will have been on the road for a month before they get to Chicago; this time around they might burn even brighter. —BILL MEYER v

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FOOD & DRINK

SABA ITALIAN BAR & KITCHEN | $$

2715 N. Milwaukee 773-697-9273 sabaitalian.com

From left: lamb pizza; interior é MICHELLE KANAAR

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Saba is stealthy Italian that might surprise traditionalists

A new chef and a new outpost from low-key Logan Square restaurant group One of a Kind Hospitality make a case for themselves.

By MIKE SULA

T

he earth didn’t rumble when a new Italian restaurant opened in Logan Square in mid-April. Saba Italian Kitchen & Bar barely said hello through the usual channels (Twitter, Instagram, etc) as it took over a corner spot on Milwaukee across from the Harding Tavern and De Noche Mexicana/Cafe con Leche and next to Red Star Liquors and the Walk In, the latest outpost joining the others in the growing mini empire belonging to homeboy Esam Hani and his One of a Kind Hospitality. It’s interesting to see a low-key but fairly seasoned restaurant group steer clear of the typical

strategy most inflict on the city’s dwindling and desperate food media. That’s especially true given that Hani’s brought on a relative unknown in chef Mark Bestmann, a newcomer late of Boston enoteca Coppa prior to a brief stop on the line at Bad Hunter.

I thought a long-needed local moratorium on Italian openings had been imposed, but here we are with a broad, regionally nonspecific concept of pizzas and pastas, a few meaty entrees, a section of “classic” Italian-American dishes, and hot and cold shared plates, some of which might raise eyebrows among traditionalists but some that might just win them over too.

An arancini Brundlefly—lightly fried orbs stuffed with al dente Arborio rice but dominated by moist salt cod, more like Portuguese pasteis de bacalao—is delicious no matter how you view it, especially when swiped through malt vinegar aioli. Steamed clams wallow in an intensely corny broth made from husks, cobs, and juiced kernels. Cotechino, the normally girthy New Year’s sausage, comes bratwurst size, sliced on the bias, and served atop creamy cannellini beans, its grind redolent of orange, nutmeg, burnt cinnamon, and star anise. An odd pairing of savory deep-fried zeppole and slices of mortadella needs some kind of sauce for sponging, while fried brussels sprouts, the single stand-alone vegetable on the menu, rise above the cliche they’ve become with a bright splash of grapefruit and a briny dusting of bottarga. Soft, springy pork meatballs take a more conventional form, but with the accompanying duo of red sauce and salsa verde, they reach peaks of umami that might make you squint.

Conversely, an arresting-looking romaine salad, dressed with za’atar yogurt and served in a bowl with Parmesan crisps lining the edge like merlons atop a castle wall, is oddly under-

seasoned. It’s called a Caesar, but if that’s true you can call me Brutus. There’s a similarly ascetic touch with salt in the pizzas, which range from a conventional Margherita to an outlier dressed with braised lamb and ricotta mixed with pea puree. The crusts on these pies are pleasant, stippled with char if short on cornicione, but they need sodium to make their surfaces come alive.

Pastas are a mixed bag. Tangles of tagliatelle are nicely al dente but oversauced in a creamy beef and pork ragout. Maltagliati, sheets of flat pasta made with wheat and farro flours, have a mouthfeel reminiscent of burlap, but the toasted farro and sherried mushroom ragout that tops them would be great with a more tender noodle. Meanwhile agnolotti filled with lemony mascarpone with fresh spring peas are soft, silky and altogether delicious, a thrilling taste of spring. The most striking bowl features spongy but dark, almost ash-colored gnocchi, their dough mixed with charred potato skins (a tribute to the peasant tradition of making flour from ash), producing a deeply smoky taste that contrasts well with glazed turnips and spring onion, mint, and parsley pesto.

From the “classics” list, eggplant Parme- J

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 33

Search the Reader’s online database of thousands of Chicago-area restaurants—and add your own review—at chicagoreader.com/food.

FOOD & DRINK

continued from 33

san is all wrong: unbreaded and cooked and delivered to the table in stone ovenware, it arrives stewy and not at all crispy, but at least it has some brightly acidic citric qualities to it. It’s still the most disappointing dish I tried at Saba.

Desserts feature a devastatingly good blondie drenched in eggy sabayon spiked with the restaurant’s namesake, a thick, sweet red-grape reduction. A so-called chocolate panna cotta performs more like a light chocolate ganache; it’s topped with salted caramel whipped cream and accompanied by a slab of chewy, crunchy-fresh granola.

The cocktail program features a selection of spiked cream sodas, the vanilla-Averna much sweeter than you’d expect with cold-brew coffee as its foundation, as well as an amari negroni that’s far too smooth and sweet to be considered one. The wine list has 40 reds, whites, and sparkling wines, all from the Boot excepting the Antxiola, a Basque rosé txakoli that might make you levitate.

Maybe you’ll look at dishes like the panna cotta, the arancini, the cotechino, and the gnocchi as a betrayal of your Nonna’s hard-won kitchen chops even as you shovel bite after bite down your gullet and scrape the last spoonfuls up with whatever crusts you can snatch from your tablemates. But that’s the way many dishes at Saba undercut your assumptions about Italian food. You may not see it coming, but you’re not sorry when it does. v

m @MikeSula

msula@chicagoreader.com

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34 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

BEER

Trouble brewing Josh Noel’s new book Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out chronicles Goose Island’s struggle to maintain its identity in the face of Big Beer.

By JULIA THIEL

T

here wasn’t a single moment when the chummy, jovial craft beer industry became a battlefield of ‘us versus them,’” Josh Noel writes in Barrel-Aged Stout and Selling Out: Goose Island, Anheuser-Busch, and How Craft Beer Became Big Business (Chicago Review Press). “It happened slowly. And then, seemingly, all at once.”

The line isn’t an introduction to his subject matter (it actually comes near the end of the book), but it does encapsulate it fairly neatly. Noel happens to be discussing the attempts of the Brewers Association to define craft beer—which has become an increasingly thorny question as more craft breweries have been bought by global beverage companies (often referred to as Big

Beer). In the early years of the craft brewing renaissance, he says, the term was never really defined. “Craft beer was the underdog.

It was flavor. It was creativity. It was peace, love, and collaboration. Everyone was included—except for Big Beer. There were no wrong answers. But when there are no wrong answers, there are no right answers, and the Brewers Association sought to correct that.”

The question at the core of the debate— and the book—is whether it matters who owns craft breweries. Once they cease to operate independently, do they still count as craft? Goose Island was the first to sell out to Anheuser-Busch InBev, in 2011, but the megacorporation has acquired another nine craft breweries since then, making the matter increasingly pressing. Noel’s focus is Goose Island, but he provides a broad and meticulously researched look at the big picture, including a history of Anheuser-Busch and its gradually evolving attitude toward craft beer. (Noel, a Tribune reporter, broke the news of the Goose Island sale and has been covering the story ever since.)

In fact, Goose Island’s ties to AnheuserBusch go back to the early days of the original Clybourn brewpub, though they were less formal then: Goose Island’s head brewer quit in 1991 when he showed up to pour beer at a summer festival and saw a Budweiser banner over his company’s booth. Noel deftly demonstrates that founder John Hall, who’d been a high-ranking corporate executive before he decided in 1986 that a brewery would be his next project, didn’t get into the business to be an underdog; he’d wanted Goose Island to dominate from the start. In 2006, before he sold out entirely to AB-InBev, he’d sold 42 percent of his company to Anheuser-Busch (before it had itself been acquired by InBev). “He saw no victory in staying small or independently owned,” Noel writes of Hall.

But John Hall and his son Greg, who became head brewer in 1991 after the first one quit, did take risks. That “barrel-aged stout” in the title of the book isn’t there just to rhyme with “selling out”: Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout, created back when barrel aging was all but unheard of, defied categorization when it was introduced in 1995 but became one of the most iconic beers in the country and helped to launch the barrel-aged beer trend. Similarly, Goose Island began experimenting with using the unpredictable yeast Brettanomyces to make beer at a time when most American brewer-

ies were just trying to avoid it (the yeast can cause beer to spoil), producing a Belgian-style ale called Matilda that’s still one of the brewery’s most popular beers.

Those beers illustrate how the way that craft breweries operate—creating a beer and then figuring out how to market and sell it—is entirely differently from the way megabreweries function. “Beer didn’t start as a recipe at Anheuser-Busch; it began as an idea around a conference table strewn with laptops and spreadsheets,” Noel writes. One of his greatest feats is organizing the book in such a way that it delivers a ton of information (including one of the best explanations I’ve read of the three-tier system of beverage distribution) without being dense or dry. Especially compelling is Noel’s account of John Hall announcing to his employees that he’s sold the brewery to Anheuser-Busch and the stunned, angry reactions that followed. Employees met by department to discuss details (upon hearing that they’d be subject to drug testing in a few months, Noel writes, some salespeople snuck off to smoke weed while they still could), then Hall reconvened the staff to say that the sale was a win for craft beer and for Goose Island.

They had created something that AB-InBev couldn’t, which is why the behemoth had bought their brewery.

By 2017, though, with ten craft breweries in the fold, AB-InBev had become the second-largest producer of craft beer in the U.S. Which sounds a lot like winning. Does that mean Goose Island lost? By Noel’s account, it’s not that simple. More than half the book is dedicated to the years following the sale, which have included some rough patches but also a cash infusion by the corporate overlords and significant growth for Goose Island, which was the point all along.

And all that beer they’re making—is it craft?

Not according to the Brewers Association, which has defined craft brewers as “small, independent and traditional” (“independent” in this case means being less than 25 percent owned or controlled by a member of the beverage industry that’s not a craft brewer). Last summer it issued a seal for independent craft brewers to put on their beer labels, making it easy for consumers to distinguish what’s what.

Goose Island, of course, doesn’t qualify. v BARREL-AGED STOUT AND SELLING OUT By Josh Noel (Chicago Review Press). Reading Fri 6/1, 7 PM, The Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-2932665, bookcellarinc.com. F

m @juliathiel

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Call 773-663-7440

CHICAGO 92ND AND M a r quette, Good location, 2BR, first floor, quiet bldg, Nice! Heat includ-

GARY NSA ACCEPTING appli- ed, $750 w/1 mo rent & 1 mo sec. cations for SECTION 8 STUDIO 773-505-1853 AND ONE BDRM Apartments. Apply Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am to 2pm ONLY at 1735 W 5th Ave. Applications are to be filled out on site. Adult applicants must BR provide a current picture ID and SS card.

QUIET, 1BR, steps to Lake Front, hdwd flrs & appls incl, nr cultural ctr, golf course, trans & schls. $750/mo. SecLARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge tion 8 Welc. 773-443-3200 & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888 LARGE GARDEN APARTMENT.

1

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

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

û NO SEC DEP û 6829 S. Perry.

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

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)

$800-$899

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

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

773-637-5957 NEWLY REMOD 1BR & Studios starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St., 773-619-0204 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

AUSTIN - 1BR GARDEN APT, utilities not included. $650/mo + 1 month security deposit. Section 8 Welcome. Call 773-317-1837 7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2

BR $735, Includes Free heat & appliances & cooking gas. (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt 6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

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

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

773-206-9364

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**

LOOKING TO MOVE ASAP? Remodeled 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Apts.

Heat & Appls incl. Sec 8 OK. Southside Only. 773-593-4357

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

please recycle this paper MAY 31, 2018 | CHICAGO READER 35

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 ∫ 6748 CRANDON & 7727 COLFAX MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENTS! 1 & 2BR, $625 & UP. OFF STREET PARKING. 773-947-8572 / 312-613-4424 92ND & ADA, 1 & 2BR, lg & spacious w/ DR, hdwd flrs, sunporch, fireplace, heat & appls incl. Sect 8 ok $850$975/mo + sec. 773-415-6914

SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 7335 S Morgan, 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl., $1400 /mo. 708-288-4510

ROSEMOOR: 10222 S. PRAIRIE; Beautiful rehab 3 +1BR, 2 1/ 2 BA, house, finished bsmt, garage, $1500/mo. 708-288-4510

2 BR $1500 AND OVER

LARGE BRIGHT LINCOLN PK 2Bd, 1Bth, In Unit W/D, Roof Deck, Back Porch, HVAC, Fireplace, DW, Hardwood Floors, Available Immediately. $2000-$2900. Call: 773-4725944

2 BR OTHER ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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

CHICAGO - BEVERLY, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, Hdwd Flrs, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $785-$1030/mo. Call 773-2334939

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

Section 8 Welcome. 312-2826555

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

CHATHAM 74TH/KING DR

SUNNY & LARGE 2 & 3BR, hd wd/ceramic flrs, appls, heat incl’d, Sect 8 OK. $900 plus.

70th & Sangamon/Peoria. 773456-6900 CHICAGO, RENT TO OWN! Buy with no closing costs and get help with your credit. Call 708868-2422 or visit www.nhba.com

CHICAGO SOUTHSIDE. CHEAP CHEAP!!! Rooms For Rent, 79th & Escanaba $380-$400/mo.

Utilities included. 773-387-7367 ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

2 BR $900-$1099 W. HUMBOLDT PARK. 1302-08 N. Kildare. Division/ Pulaski. Newly Rehabbed, 2BR, $785. Sec 8 OK. 773-619-0280 or 773-286-8200

6943 S WOODLAWN 4bdrm 8129 S INGLESIDE

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499

1bdrm & 4bdrm

7655 S. PHILLIPS

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 $2500 AND OVER SOUTH SHORE AREA, near Lake, 71st/Paxton, 6BR, 3BA, driveway, garage, appls incl. $2500/mo. Serious Inquiries.

773-818-3510

3 BR OR MORE flrs, cent air, recessed lighting, granite countertops, cer tile fireplace, nr trans. 773-410-3892

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

HEALTH & WELLNESS

RIVERDALE: Quiet 3BR, Newly decorated. Carpet, nr metra, no pets. $900/mo +sec. Avail Now 708-829-1454 and 708-754-5599

BODY MASSAGE 312-834-2806

66TH/ HOYNE. RENOV 3BR

Located Downtown Chicago In Call / Out Call Available

House $895/mo & 69th/Maplewood 2BR Apt. $550/mo. Tenant pays utilities. 773-905-4567

117TH AND PRINCETON.

MUSIC & ARTS

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

847-401-5800

OPEN CALL AUDITIONS for

WOODLAWN APARTMENTS

STATION

ADULT SERVICES

2 BR $1100-$1299

3 $1200-$1499

36 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

GOODS

PAID FOR COMIC BOOKS; MOVIE Magazines/Posters; TV GUIDES; SPORTS Magazines; ADULT Magazines; 773680-2847

ADULT SERVICES

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

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

No Pets. 773-930-6045

MARKETPLACE

CASH

Large, newly renov 2BR Apt, Park Manor Neighborhood. $120 0/mo, heat incl. For all inquiries please call Mr.Hodges at 773524-8157

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

2 pkng, lndry. 708.268.3762

CHICAGO HEIGHTS BARBER Shop and Beauty Salon For Rent 13 year old running business with lots of clientele. 4 stations + extras. $850 month.

Call 708-709-3986 for more details.

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

GENERAL

6259 S COTTAGE GROVE, CHICAGO, IL 60637 16880 S. ANTHONY - 3BR, wall to wall carpet. $1175/mo. Sec- 773-955-8668 WAITLIST OPENING FOR PROJECTtion 8 Welcome. 773-285-3206 BASED SECTION 8 MONDAY, JUNE 4TH, 9:00 AM TO 4:00 PM – ONE DAY ONLY APPLICATIONS WILL BE DISTRIBUTED AT BR OR MORE WOODLAWN RESOURCE CENTER – 6144 S COTTAGE GROVE - FOR 1, 2 AND 3 BEDROOMS NR 77TH & STONY ISLAND 2 story, 3BR/2BA, appls. $1250/mo + fee & utils. Credit check req.

Sec 8 OK Quiet area 646-202-3294 New kitchens & new bathrooms.

69th & Dante, 3BR. 101st & May, 6119 S. ADA. Beautiful 4BR, 1 & 2BRs. We have others! Sec1.5ba, lrg bckyrd, quiet, well kept tion 8 Welcome. 708-503-1366 area, appls & utils not incl.

Sec 8 OK. $1350. 773-720-9787

GLENWOOD,

non-residential

OTHER

HUMONGOUS 4BR, 2BA. Hdwd

1BR. 88th/Dauphin. 1 & 2BR. Both bright & spac, great tran, lndry on site, sec camera. 312.341.1950

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

708-288-4510

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

ADULT SERVICES

Oakton Community College’s PLAY ON! PLAYWRIGHTING FESTIVAL. Directors are seeking men and women of all ages and ethnicities for the five plays. Prepared monologues and cold readings will be heard. June 11 & 12; 6:00 - 9:00 pm. No appointment necessary. Oakton Community College, 1600 East Golf Road, Des Plaines.

(Park in lot A) For more info, call 847.635.1897

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

ADULT SERVICES

STRAIGHT DOPE SLUG SIGNORINO

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***

By Cecil Adams Q : Now that Bill Cosby has been found

guilty, it seems possible President Trump could issue a pardon, letting Cosby off scot-free. Congress has the authority to override a presidential veto. Couldn’t we also give Congress the ability to override a presidential pardon? —CURIOUS IN INDY

A : I see where you’re going there, Indy, but

the scenario you’ve cooked up won’t work: Cosby was convicted under the state law of Pennsylvania, and presidential pardon power extends only to federal crimes. This may come as some surprise to the current officeholder, who last year tweeted that “all agree the U.S. President has the complete power to pardon.”

Who wants to tell him?

But OK, let’s play this one out. Say Cosby had been convicted on federal charges, and say Trump pardoned him. For Congress to block such an action would require not just a law but an amendment to the Constitution.

The power of executive clemency derives from Article II, Section Two, which permits the president “to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States”; an 1866 Supreme Court decision affirmed that it “cannot be fettered by any legislative restrictions.”

If you’re looking to challenge a presidential pardon, then, don’t call your congressperson— call your lawyer, because the real action is in court. Take Trump’s first pardon: that of Joe Arpaio, the longtime Arizona sheriff who in 2011 was ordered by an Arizona judge to stop racially profiling Latino drivers. In 2017, a second judge found him in violation of the earlier order and convicted him, in a bench trial, of criminal contempt of court. A month later, the president handed Sheriff Joe a get-out-of-jailfree card.

A presidential pardon is conventionally given after consultation with the Justice Department to people who, having admitted guilt and expressed remorse, petition the president for mercy. So Trump’s already swimming upstream here: he didn’t talk to anyone from Justice beforehand, and Arpaio remains defiant.

Still, conventions aren’t laws. Where things get interesting is that Trump pardoned Arpaio specifically for a contempt conviction. In doing so he arguably wasn’t extending mercy so much as second-guessing how a federal judge—i.e., a representative of a coequal branch of government—runs her courtroom.

And that may be constitutionally troublesome.

The scope of executive clemency hasn’t been fully hashed out, and one open question

is what happens when the president, in exercising his or her power as enumerated, bumps up against some other part of the Constitution.

In an article last November, legal scholar Kimberly Wehle offered the hypothetical of a president effectively invalidating a new law by preemptively pardoning anybody who might later break it. That wouldn’t fly, Wehle contended, as it would infringe the delineated authority of Congress to make laws in the first place.

Trump’s action in Arizona is analogous—or at least that’s the argument made by critics, including a group of House Democrats, who in an amicus brief claimed the pardon represents “an encroachment by the Executive on the independence of the Judiciary.” The judge in the case subsequently refused to grant Arpaio’s postpardon motion to get his conviction thrown out, leaving the former sheriff in legal limbo: he’s been pardoned by the president, but the court won’t clear his record.

Arpaio has appealed, raising the possibility of a higher court overturning the president’s pardon on the grounds that he overstepped his authority in issuing it.

That’d be an extraordinary development, but one suspects l’affaire Arpaio won’t be the only constitutional strain this particular prez puts on his pardon authority. Another Democratic rep has introduced a constitutional amendment that would curtail a president’s ability to pardon his or her own family members, campaign aides, etc. The amendment— which stands not a snowball’s chance of going anywhere—also proposes to take care of the big orange elephant in the room, prohibiting the president from pardoning himself.

Could he do so under current conditions?

Jury’s out. The last real word we got was a 1974 memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, dated three days before Nixon announced his resignation, concluding that “No one may be a judge in his own case.” But that’s an untested proposition that frankly may not remain untested for much longer. Buckle up. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 30 N. Racine, suite 300, Chicago 60607.

l

l

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

‘Could my beautiful bottom boy be turning bi?’

What’s up with a “gold-star gay” man’s new interests, and more Q : I’m a 38-year-old gay

man with a serious problem.

My boyfriend of five years has developed a strange fascination. We’ve always watched porn together, but lately he’s been looking at straight porn and even lesbian porn (!!!) more and more often. More than once he has expressed an interest in having a MMF threesome—and he’s a selfproclaimed gold-star gay [i.e., he’s never had sex with a woman]! This week, I discovered he had hidden a Fleshlight from me. I could tell he had used it. What is going on with him? On the other hand, we still have sex pretty frequently. He really gets off when I call his ass a “pussy,” which I’ll do to turn him on, but I find it pretty weird. He also tells me he gets off on the thought of the two of us fucking a woman together. This really seems bizarre! Could my beautiful bottom boy be turning bi? If he is, I don’t know how we can handle it. —GUY ALARMED, YEAH,

BY YOUNGER BOYFRIEND’S INTEREST

A : Turning bi? Unlikely.

Always was bi and only just realized it? Likelier.

Always was bi but identified as gay because (1) he prefers men as romantic partners and (2) the biphobia he encountered in gay male spaces/bedrooms/buttholes convinced him to stay closeted but he’s done hiding from the man he loves yet instead of using his words and coming out to you like a grownup, GAYBYBI, your boyfriend is letting you know he’s bi with his porn choices and a big push to make a MMF threesome sound like a sexy adventure you would both enjoy? Likeliest.

As for how to handle it, GAYBYBI: Ask your boy-

friend if he’s bi. (Spoiler: He’s bi, bi-curious, or so homo-flexible he could tour with Cirque du Soleil.) If you’re not interested in having sex with women, tell him so. If being with you means he can never have sex with a woman, tell him so. And if you would never knowingly date a bi guy, tell him he deserves better.

Q : A relationship question

that doesn’t involve sex: Occasionally when two people live together, they bump into each other or one may get in the way of the other. Is it reasonable to be put off if rather than simply saying “Excuse me,” the person trying to gain access says, “Do you have to stand there?” —JUST SEEMS RUDE

A : People who are courteous

to strangers (“Excuse me, may I squeeze past you?”) and contemptuous with intimate partners (“Do you have to stand there, you fucking dumbass?”) don’t value their partners and don’t deserve intimacy. People who are assholes to everyone don’t deserve intimacy either, of course, but they get points for being consistent.

Q : I recently posted an

online ad for a jack-off buddy. I got a response from a man who turned out to be a gorgeous, young Sri Lankan dude with a huge, beautiful uncut cock. Anyway, I was really looking forward to him jacking me off and vice versa.

But when I arrived, he said he was only interested in me giving him a massage and then a hand job. Apparently, he’s a straight guy who wanted to experiment with men in a very limited way.

Like I said, SUPER HOT, so I happily obliged. But after he came, I was really aching for release myself, and as

I stated earlier, he’d made it clear he didn’t want to reciprocate. After we were finished, he indicated that he might hit me up again. Do you think I should continue with the massage and “happy ending” in hopes he’ll someday feel comfortable enough to reciprocate? Or should I just go ahead and find myself another jack-off buddy? —CRAVING UNCUT

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

224-353-1353 Discreet Billing

REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN.

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

please recycle this paper

Ahora español Livelinks.com 18+

MASCULINE SRI LANKAN

A : Another jack-off buddy?

No, no. Additional jack-off buddy.

Q : I recently spent a

wonderful weekend with a young woman from out of town who identifies as queer and poly. Being the curious guy I am, I had her explain what these things meant to her. She went on to say that she is considering changing from poly to nonmonogamous. I find this confusing. I’m certainly nonmonogamous, but I’ve never thought of myself as poly. What is the difference?

—CONFUSED OVER LINES INSIDE NAMES

A : I’d describe the difference as googleable, COLIN. But since you asked: A nonmonogamous person has sex with their partner and others; a poly person has or is open to having committed and concurrent romantic relationships. For example, an ethically nonmonogamous woman fucks the boyfriend/ husband she loves and other guys she doesn’t; a poly woman has two (or more) guys she both loves and fucks. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. m @fakedansavage

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS

chicagoreader.com/early

MAY 31, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 37

Parquet Courts é EBRU YILDIZ

NEW

Virgil Abloh 8/2, 10 PM, Smart Bar, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM Marisa Anderson 6/27, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Arizona, Aces 8/3, 11 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+ Alina Baraz, R.Lum.R 8/4, 11 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+ Basement 8/3, 10 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 PM, 17+ Madison Beer, Chase Atlantic 8/1, 6:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM b Between the Buried & Me, Born of Osiris, Veil of Maya, Erra, Agony Scene, Allegaeon 7/24, 12:30 PM, Concord Music Hall b A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, Femdot 8/3, 11 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Trinidad Cardona 7/27, 8 PM, Schubas b Tyler Childers, Larkin Poe 8/2, 11 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Chvrches, Sasha Sloan 8/1, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Cigarettes After Sex 8/4, 11 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Sabrina Claudio 8/4, 10 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Chick Corea Trio 8/23, 7 and 9:30 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/31, noon b Cuco, Jesse Baez 8/2, 11 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+ Dance With the Dead 10/5, 9 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+ Darwin Deez 10/19, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+

DJ Funk 6/22, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Anderson East, Dales 8/3, 11 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Alejandro Escovedo & Joe Ely 8/24, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 6/1, 8 AM b Alejandro Fernandez 11/16, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM Florence & the Machine, Perfume Genius 10/19, 7 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM Franz Ferdinand 8/1, 9 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Gang of Youths, Matt Maeson 8/2, 10 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+ Godflesh, Harm’s Way 8/24, 8 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 6/1, 9 AM, 18+ Goldlink 8/3, 11 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Curtis Harding 8/3, 10 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM Here Come the Mummies 10/12, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Highly Suspect, Cleopatrick 8/2, 11 PM, The Vic, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Hippie Sabotage 8/4, 10 PM, Logan Square Auditorium, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Houndmouth, Lewis Capaldi 8/3, 11 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Eric Hutchinson & the Believers 10/19, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM b Illenium 8/5, 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Jessie J, Ro James 10/12, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM b

38 CHICAGO READER - MAY 31, 2018

Carly Rae Jepsen, Morgxn 8/3, 11 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Jungle, Superorganism 8/2, 11 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Dermot Kennedy 8/2, 11 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Lany, Harry Hudson 8/1, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Lil Debbie 8/26, 9 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Dua Lipa, Buddy 8/3, 11 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Lizzo, Davie 8/4, 11 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Liz Longley 7/10, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/31, noon b Ziggy Marley 8/28, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+ Miniature Tigers 9/22, 9 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 6/1, noon, 17+ Parquet Courts, Dream Wife 8/2, 11 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+ Petit Biscuit 8/2, 10 PM, Logan Square Auditorium, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Phish 10/26-28, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Sat 6/2, 10 AM Pietasters 9/7, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen John Pizzarelli Trio 9/19, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/31, noon b Pompeya 7/19, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen Post Animal, Tamarron 8/4, 10 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM Trevor Powers 10/12, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM Quinn XCII 7/31, 7 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM b Rebelution, DJ Mel 8/1, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+

b Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band 7/4, 3 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 5/31, noon b Rex Orange County 8/4, 11 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+ Rusko 8/3, 10 PM, Logan Square Auditorium, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Slaves 8/2, 10 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM Super Doppler 8/23, 7:30 PM, Subterranean Tank & the Bangas, Durand Jones & the Indications 8/3, 11 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+ Terror Jr 8/1, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM b Tycho 8/1, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+ Vaccines, Regrettes 8/4, 11 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Greta Van Fleet, Dorothy 8/4, 11 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+ Walk the Moon 8/4, 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 17+ Why? 11/3, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Wimps 8/3, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen Wombats, Future Feats 8/2, 11 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 6/1, 10 AM, 18+

UPCOMING Alestorm, Gloryhammer 9/21, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Alt-J 6/7, 8 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Apocalypse Hoboken 7/13-14, 7:30 PM, Chop Shop, 18+ Bad Wolves, From Ashes to New 6/7, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b James Bay 10/1, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ 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+ Bongripper 7/13, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Canned Heat 9/17, 8 PM, City Winery b Car Seat Headrest, Naked Giants 9/7, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Carbon Leaf 7/7, 6 and 9 PM, City Winery b Brian Chase’s Drums & Drones with Ursula Scherrer 6/24, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Deafheaven, Mono 7/30, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Derketa, Blood Feast 10/6, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Dinosaur Jr. 7/18, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Flasher 6/15, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+ Gomez 6/15-16, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Havok, Extinction AD 7/24, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Hop Along 6/10, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Idles 9/14, 10 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Howard Jones 7/9, 8 PM, City Winery b Joy Formidable, Tancred 11/3, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Kindred the Family Soul 12/29, 8 PM, Portage Theater Kenny Lattimore 7/20, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery b Richard Lloyd Group 8/15, 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint The Matches 7/14, 7 PM, Metro 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 Negative Approach, Dayglo Abortions 6/28, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Oh Sees, Timmy’s Organism 10/12, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Oneida, Cave 7/28, 10 PM, Empty Bottle Pedro the Lion 8/24, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Pelican, Cloakroom 7/26, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Michael Rault 7/5, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle The Sea & Cake, Moonrise Nation 8/16, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park Fb Sleep 8/1, 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b Sleigh Bells 8/17, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Social Distortion 6/22, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Steely Dan, Doobie Brothers 6/21, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Test 6/16, 8:30 PM, ChiTown Futbol Tony Toni Tone 8/10, 7 PM, the Promontory b Frank Turner & the Sleeping Souls 6/23, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Vacationer, Sego 7/19, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Tom Walker 8/27, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Wand 6/18-19, 9 PM, Hideout Wax Idols, Shadow Age 9/9, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Craig Wedren 7/14, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 18+ Kevin Whalum 8/5, 7 PM, City Winery b v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene LAST SUMMER Cheer-Accident dropped Putting Off Death, their first album in six years. And they’re definitely alive—last Friday the long-running local art-rock squad released another LP for fans to get weird to! Fades (Skin Graft) features guests such as Sleepytime Gorilla Museum veteran Carla Kihlstedt, bassoonist Katherine Young, and vocalist Sacha Mullin, who lend their eccentricities to the tunes. The proggy new wave of “Done” sparkles with brass—trumpet, trombone, and “mouthbone” (aka leader Thymme Jones making horn noises with his face). Cheer-Accident return from a west-coast tour to play the Beat Kitchen on Saturday, June 9, with Free Salamander Exhibit and Faun Fables.

Grün Wasser combine rich vocals and dark beats into heady industrial pop—Gossip Wolf digs the local duo’s 2016 tape, Nein/9. On Tuesday, June 5, they drop the album Predator/Prey on vinyl (selfreleased) and CD and cassette (both via Always Lovers). Band members Keely Dowd and Essej Pollock call it “a personal narrative of assaults, abuse, and the act of survival, focusing largely on relaying the harrowing existence of the female ‘condition.’” Lead single “Trace It Back” is a hard-charging, EBM-infused call-out of a “bunch of creeps.” Grün Wasser celebrate Tuesday at Danny’s by playing at Beau Wanzer’s monthly Hot on the Heels party.

Owen Ashworth of Advance Base runs local indie label Orindal Records, and he’s got a great ear for intimate, electrifying tunes. On Sunday, June 3, Orindal hosts a showcase at the Landland print shop (1735 N. Ashland) with local singersongwriter and recent signee Gia Margaret, Tucson experimentalist Karima Walker, and Advance Base. Owen’s brother, Gordon Ashworth, spins records between sets. Landland prints and Orindal merch will be on sale—check out the new Dear Nora record, Skulls Example. You can get advance tickets to the all-ages show at orindal.limitedrun.com/tickets/15186.

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

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