Chicago Reader print issue of June 27, 2024 (Vol. 53, No. 21)

Summer Theater & Arts

THIS WEEK

LETTERS

04 Readers Respond 17-yearolds can vote, sometimes.

04 Editor’s Note Our theater and dance editor weighs in on summer.

FOOD & DRINK

06 Sula | Feature Michuu Restaurant serves exceedingly rare Ethiopian dishes.

08 Reader Bites Cohasset Punch

CITY LIFE

09 Sports Freelance Wrestling is a proving ground for indie talent.

NEWS & POLITICS

10 Environment Looking back at the past and celebrating the future of the Chicago River

COMMENTARY

14 Isaacs | On Culture The Driehaus Museum adds a building.

ARTS & CULTURE

15 Gallery A DIY approach to transformative processes at Weatherproof

16 Books The Chicago Poetry Center turns 50.

18 Exhibition “What Is Seen and Unseen” highlights contemporary South Asian art in Chicago.

18 Cra Work Little Village Library Cra and Concerts series for teens

THEATER & DANCE

20 Cover story | Dance Moonwater Dance Project creates

a new repertoire for women in movement

22 Comedy Hanging out between sets with Adam Burke

24 Review Little Bear Ridge Road at Steppenwolf forges a path to forgiveness.

25 Previews Summer performance picks from our critics

26 Plays of Note Corduroy at Chicago Shakespeare and Zac Efron at Token Theatre.

FILM

27 Repertory Explore the cinematic legacies of an unlikely duo, Stan Brakhage and Sidney Lumet.

29 The Moviegoer A Nichols for your thoughts

29 Movies of Note Daddio is cliche, A-listers can’t save A Family Affair , and Fancy Dance is Lily Gladstone at her best.

30 Preview Sundance Institute x Chicago brings the iconic film fest to the midwest.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

32 City of Win Mikahl Anthony’s debut album holds more than a decade of history.

34 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Om Unit, AJRadico, Taste Rubber, and the Logan Square Arts Festival

38 Chicagoans of Note Braeden Long, youth rock scene photographer

40 Gossip Wolf Precocious

Neophyte plays its last show as a Chicago band, Cre8ive Sessions throws a special version of its happy hour, and more.

CLASSIFIEDS

41 Jobs

42 Housing

42 Professionals & Services

42 Matches

OPINION

43 Savage Love New to polyamory and already writing in for advice

ON THE COVER: PHOTO OF MOONWATER DANCE PROJECT MEMBERS BY REN PICCO-FREEMAN. MORE FROM PICCO-FREEMAN CAN BE FOUND ON INSTAGRAM (@RENSTUDIO). COVER PULL QUOTE SAID BY NOELLE KAYSER IN “MOONWATER DANCE PROJECT CREATES A WOMAN-FOCUSED REPERTOIRE” BY NORA PAUL, P. 20

CEO AND PUBLISHER SOLOMON LIEBERMAN

ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER AMBER NETTLES

EDITOR IN CHIEF SALEM COLLO-JULIN

MANAGING EDITOR SHEBA WHITE

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR

SAVANNAH RAY HUGUELEY

ART DIRECTOR JAMES HOSKING

PRODUCTION MANAGER KIRK WILLIAMSON

SENIOR GRAPHIC DESIGNER AMBER HUFF

THEATER & DANCE EDITOR KERRY REID

MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO

CULTURE EDITOR: FILM, MEDIA, FOOD TARYN ALLEN

CULTURE EDITOR: ART, ARCHITECTURE, BOOKS KERRY CARDOZA

NEWS EDITOR SHAWN MULCAHY

ASSOCIATE EDITOR & BRANDED

CONTENT SPECIALIST JAMIE LUDWIG

DIGITAL EDITOR TYRA NICOLE TRICHE

SENIOR WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA

FEATURES WRITER KATIE PROUT

Donate any amount, or just $5 per month to become a

SOCIAL JUSTICE REPORTER DMB (DEBBIE-MARIE BROWN)

STAFF WRITER MICCO CAPORALE

SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT

ASSOCIATE CHARLI RENKEN

ART DEPARTMENT INTERN SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

VICE PRESIDENT OF OPERATIONS

ANN SCHOLHAMER

CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER JIM STRUTHERS

VICE PRESIDENT OF PEOPLE AND CULTURE ALIA GRAHAM

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING AND STRATEGIC

COMMUNICATIONS CHASITY COOPER

MULTIMEDIA CONTENT PRODUCER SHAWNEE DAY

MARKETING ASSOCIATE MAJA STACHNIK

MEMBERSHIP MANAGER MICHAEL THOMPSON

GRANTS MANAGER JOEY MANDEVILLE

VICE PRESIDENT OF SALES AMY MATHENY

SENIOR SALES REPRESENTATIVE LINDSAY FIGURSKI SALES REPRESENTATIVE WILL ROGERS DIGITAL SALES ASSOCIATE AYANA ROLLING MEDIA SALES ASSOCIATE JILLIAN MUELLER

ADVERTISING

ADS@CHICAGOREADER.COM

312-392-2970

CLASSIFIEDS: CREATE A LISTING AT CLASSIFIEDS.CHICAGOREADER.COM

DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS

distributionissues@chicagoreader.com 312-392-2970

READER INSTITUTE FOR COMMUNITY JOURNALISM, INC.

CHAIRPERSON EILEEN RHODES

TREASURER REESE MARCUSSON

SECRETARY TORRENCE GARDNER

DIRECTORS MONIQUE BRINKMAN-HILL, JULIETTE BUFORD, JAMAL DEGERATTO, DANIEL DEVER, MATT DOUBLEDAY, TIMO MARTINEZ, JAKE MIKVA, ROBERT REITER, CHRISTINA CRAWFORD STEED

READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY THE READER INSTITUTE FOR COMMUNITY JOURNALISM 2930 S. MICHIGAN, SUITE 102 CHICAGO, IL 60616 312-392-2934, CHICAGOREADER.COM

COPYRIGHT © 2024 CHICAGO READER

PERIODICAL POSTAGE PAID AT CHICAGO, IL ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CHICAGO READER, READER, AND REVERSED R: REGISTERED TRADEMARKS ® TO CONTACT ANY READER EMPLOYEE, EMAIL: (FIRST INITIAL)(LAST NAME) @CHICAGOREADER.COM

BREAK CYCLES TO BUILD FUTURES

Reader Letters m

Re: “Planet Earth created queer-friendly spaces on and off the dance floor,” written by Leor Galil and published in the June 20 issue (volume 53, number 20)

I love pieces like this and I love learning about Chicago subculture history from before my time. Document nightlife! Write stuff down! —DJ Fagotron, via X

Re: “Downtown curfew, DNC security, police surveillance lawsuit,” an installment of the Make It Make Sense column written by Shawn Mulcahy and published online on June 7

Some of our older 17-year-old citizens can vote in the primary elections in Illinois, 23 other states, and Washington, D.C. The rules are that a 17-year-old may vote in a primary election if that person will become 18 years old by the general election. This is a good way for young adults to become active in the political process. We have to get more people voting in our political elections. —Michael Lipschutz, via Facebook

Note from the Reader: For more information on Illinois voting eligibility, consult vote411.org.

Find us on socials: facebook.com/chicagoreader twitter.com/Chicago_Reader instagram.com/chicago_reader linkedin.com search chicago-reader threads.net/@chicago_reader

EDITOR’S NOTE

The Chicago Reader accepts comments and letters to the editor of less than 400 words for publication consideration.

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Ifinally saw my first cicadas last weekend out at my sister’s place in Naperville—although most of them were dead on the sidewalk. Despite the hype, the critters never emerged anywhere near my place in Rogers Park. Summer in Chicago can be like that sometimes: an amped-up atmosphere of FOMO for a season that disappears all too soon. (OK, we’re not all burrowing underground for 17 years before we emerge for our too-brief frolics, but allow me my tortured metaphors!) But it’s not all glossy

big-ticket festivals invading public parks in our town. There are still plenty of places to slow down and contemplate beauty, whether by yourself or in the company of others.

This week’s Summer Theater and Arts Issue cover story on Moonwater Dance Project focuses on how the woman-led company brings together the individual and the collective. As contributor Nora Paul notes, “Each dancer is an example— not of one another, as their uniqueness is sharp in the light—but of the whole, the

movement that is collectively possible.” We try to balance that same tension in our arts coverage every week in the Reader . As we move into the most fraught election year of my lifetime, I’m struck anew by how often the arts can show us a model of empathy and collaboration absent in so many other aspects of our civic existence. We hope you can find some time to savor the bounty of the season as well.  v

—Kerry Reid, theater and dance editor m kreid@chicagoreader.com

Moonwater Dance Project’s Emily Brand (being li ed) and Lucy Pierson (li ing) REN PICCO-FREEMAN

Are you 55 and Older Caring for a Child Under 18 or Loved One (19-59) with a Disability?

Grandparents or Older Relatives Raising Children Program FREE support services include:

Education &Training:

Gap-Filling Funds: Learn about topics such as legal services, financial literacy, and strategies to support the emotional and educational development of the child.

Help buying essential items like school supplies, technology, uniforms, furniture, clothes, after-school or summer camp fees.

One-on-One Counseling: Discuss self-care, decision-making, and ways to cope with stress when feeling overwhelmed with the challenges of raising children unexpectedly.

Support Groups: Share your stories, challenges, & successes caring for your loved ones.

Contact the DFSS Senior Services Division Information aging@cityofchicago.org • (312) 744-4016 and Assistance Unit

FOOD & DRINK

Michuu Restaurant serves exceedingly rare Ethiopian dishes

Damme Lemu’s “highland” cuisine is scratch-made with love, but her Oromo specialties are a beacon from Uptown.

By MIKE SULA

Late last month, the Ethiopian entrepreneur and TikTok influencer Mensur Jemal arrived in town on business.

With more than a million and a half followers, he’s well-known to expat Ethiopians, especially if they, like him, are among the Oromo, the largest of the country’s 80-some ethnic groups. In fact, when Jemal was walking downtown, he was spotted by an Oromo limo driver, who o ered to take him to a new restaurant in Uptown.

An Oromo couple had opened Michuu Ethiopian Restaurant just a month earlier in the

space that was once home to Tesfa (now in larger digs in Edgewater).

In itself, an Oromo-owned restaurant isn’t that unusual, but among the sambusas, doro wot, atakilt alicha, and other relatively common national, globally known Ethiopian “highland” cuisine, chef (and server) Damme Lemu cooks a handful of Oromo preparations that are exceedingly rare, if not nonexistent, at U.S. Ethiopian restaurants.

As Lemu emerged from the kitchen bearing an injera-blanketed platter heaped with food, Jemal, seated among his sharp-

dressed colleagues, whipped out his phone and started filming. “Wow, wow, wow!” he exclaimed at the arrival of a buttery, garlicky, turmeric- tinted bowl of minced anchote, or Coccinia abyssinica, a tuber native to the Oromia region of western Ethiopia, where he and Lemu grew up.

For Lemu, that was the small, rural town of Gawo Kebe Kake in Oromia, where her father taught high school and her mother taught her to cook. Scratch-made extended family meals were supplied by her grandparents’ coffee farm about a 30-minute walk away, where they

also grew onions, tomatoes, potatoes, ginger, garlic, beans, barley, corn, teff for injera— and anchote.

In the rolling, verdant landscape, almost everybody grew anchote, Lemu says, and yet the drought-resistant, nutrient-dense tuber— believed to be good for treating broken bones, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, and tumors—isn’t even recognizable to many Ethiopians from other parts of the country.

It’s just one of many distinctive aspects of Oromo culture and cuisine. Though they have the numbers—Afaan Oromo is the fourth most

Clockwise from L: Damme Lemu making chororsa; injera made from corn fl our; ukaamsaa and anchote SANDY NOTO

CHICAGO

Her uniquely Oromo dishes ought to enshrine Michuu as a midwestern destination.

commonly spoken language in Africa—the Oromo have historically been marginalized relative to privileged, politically dominant groups like the Amhara and, for a time, the Tigrayans. As a result, Oromo expats are less widespread abroad, according to Harry Kloman, author of Mesob Across America: Ethiopian Food in the U.S.A. Though Ethiopia’s current prime minister is at least half Oromo, political unrest has persisted for years, and tensions can travel between continents.

That’s why Lemu and her husband, Tolina Rikitu, display an ornate beaded red, white, and black ceremonial Oromo coffee set in Michuu’s dining room alongside an elaborately decorated one that’s more representative of the “national” culture. It’s also the reason they chose the name Michuu, which means “friendly” in Afaan Oromo and is also close to the Amharic word for “comfortable.”

At 19, Lemu moved to the capital, Addis Ababa, to study nursing, while Rikitu worked for a German agricultural NGO. In 2007, he moved to Chicago and started driving a cab before returning home for Lemu six years later. The pair then came to Chicago, and Lemu found work as a housekeeper at the Gwen Hotel downtown, while adjusting to married life far away from home, friends, and family.

“Just after I came, I didn’t like it.” But, she says, “I always love cooking: When alone at home, when I feel depressed, and when I feel like, ‘Why am I here? Why did I come to this country?’ Sometimes you feel scared, and you don’t have anything here. So, I take my stress, and when I cook, I feel happy. When I cook, I call our friends to eat in our home. A lot of people say, ‘Your food is delicious. You have to open a restaurant.’ When I see the empty plates, I’m so happy.”

Lemu began testing dishes at church functions, and as her confidence grew along with the encouragement, she started wondering if it was really a possibility.

“My husband helped me a lot. He says, ‘Why do we not do this? If you like cooking, instead of feeding them free, maybe we can change our life.’”

They opened Michuu in early May, and there Lemu cooks the way she learned as a girl. She makes everything from scratch, beginning with the batter for her injera, made with 100 percent teff flour that achieves its distinct sourdough tanginess after a two- to threeday fermentation period. For the ubiquitous spiced butter niter kibbeh, she clarifies and seasons it herself, customizing the spice blend in different batches depending on the dish she’ll use it for.

Her vegetarian spreads are as fresh and vibrant as any in town, kaleidoscopic arrays of, say, the berbere-spiced lentil pulse yemisir

wot and chickpea puree shiro; deep-green gomen, chopped collards; or imperial, purple-colored beets. These often surround ample portions of protein, such as zilzil tibs (charbroiled strips of beef) or the tartare-like minced kitfo, powered by mitmita, the chili-cardamon-clove blend that brings heat to so many Ethiopian foods.

But her uniquely Oromo dishes ought to enshrine Michuu as a midwestern destination.

She gets the anchote, which is seasonal in the summer, from a relative who owns an Oromo restaurant in Addis Ababa. It’s shipped overnight, already boiled and minced, an expense Lemu says is worth it, given its purported medicinal value.

She sautes it to order in niter kibbeh, spiced with cardamom, ginger, cumin, turmeric, and fenugreek along with copious amounts of garlic and ginger, and serves it with a side of kochkocha, a condiment of pureed green chili and onion.

FOOD & DRINK

Ukaamsaa, or afanyi in Amharic, is also common where Lemu and Rikitu grew up, but not so much elsewhere. It’s ground beef or sometimes lamb, sauteed in niter kibbeh with heroic amounts of green chili, ginger, and garlic. Rikitu says that during COVID, many folks back home believed eating ukaamsaa kept the virus at bay.

This dish is served with another rarity: injera made from corn flour. It’s lighter and less filling than injera made from te , and it manages to soften the dish’s sting while fully absorbing the seasoned butter.

Both ukaamsaa and anchote are relatively simple to prepare, says Lemu.

Chororsa, or chumbo, is not. A showstopper, typically prepared for celebrations, it’s a large circle of flatbread made from a dark-brown variety of teff. Relative to injera, its batter has a short fermentation period—three to five hours—kickstarted by a te mother she tends to each day.

Meanwhile, Lemu prepares ayib, a fresh cheese she curdles from whole milk. Once cooled, she mixes in a little mitmita, cardamom, niter kibbeh, and salt. During baking, the

dark-brown bread rises about a half inch high; she spreads it with the ayib and uses a spoon to notch a wavelike pattern into the surface of the cheese. Tableside, she drizzles warm niter kibbeh spiked with mitmita all over its surface and cuts it into slices like a pizza.

She recommends placing an order for chororsa at least several hours in advance.

“I like to decorate food,” she says. “I like to present with love and with respect. That’s how we were raised.” She applies the same principles to an abbreviated version of the hours-long Ethiopian coffee ceremony, which she performed for Mensur Jemal and his companions.

Up until Jemal’s visit, business had been slow. Most of Lemu’s customers had been white, unfamiliar with Oromo cuisine and culture. But the businessman was impressed enough by Lemu and Michuu that he posted his enthusiasm to TikTok, a gesture that prompted a rush of new Ethiopian customers in the following days.

“It really helped,” says Lemu. “God sent him.” v

Damme Lemu SANDY NOTO FOR CHICAGO READER

FOOD & DRINK

This vinous, raisiny, fruity and sweet, rum-based liqueur is the historic Good Twin to Malört’s menacing dive bar gremlin. In fact, it’s a few decades senior to Carl Jeppson’s bitter Prohibition “medicine”; it was first blended on the fly in the 1890s by a pair of upmarket, Gilded Age Chicago barmen with the express purpose of squashing a flock of blue-blooded New England party swells with oversize opinions of their posh rum punches. Bottled back home, it became a sensation—interrupted by Prohibition—rising and falling in popularity as Chicago’s uno cial signature cocktail/liqueur up until the late 1980s when the bottling line slowed to a halt.

Cohasset Negroni, subbing the punch for sweet red vermouth, makes perfect sense. If your tastes run sweeter than mine, you might like some of the classic cocktails Shutters reengineered, like the Cohasset Royale, Cohasset Margarita, and the Cohasset Sour. Or maybe you’d roll with it the way they did in 1899: stirred with ice and strained over a brandy-soaked peach. One unintended yet happy result of Cohasset Punch’s resurrection is how well it pairs with its Evil Twin. At 60 proof, it’s only slightly boozier than Malört. The bitter wormwood liqueur, with its own hint of grapefruit, balances the punch’s sweetness without wrecking its more delicate cherry and citrus notes. Shutters is on the case with a Boulevardier ri he calls the Magnificent Mile, subbing sweet vermouth with Cohasset Punch, and Campari with Malört. Swap out that drink’s bourbon for gin, and you have his Big Shoulders, another two-fisted Negroni twist.

Cohasset Punch’s almost-forgotten century was dusted off by cocktail historian Greg Shutters, who went down a rabbit hole trying to re-create the original formula from a complementary history of scratch recipes, often involving some combination of dark rum, sweet vermouth, lemon juice, peach syrup, and orange bitters.

I can’t say how close Shutters has come to the original. But tasted by itself, his revived Cohasset Punch is a bit sticky-sweet for my depraved palate. Nevertheless, it makes a great addition to boozier, more challenging spirits. A splash can buff the edges o a spicy rye or soften the blow of a bottom-shelf bourbon. Even better, a

Cohasset Punch hasn’t made its way into any Chicago bars yet. Its first run was bought entirely by Binny’s, which is where you can find it for $29.99 a bottle. But Shutters says he’s just run a new batch, and so far some half dozen spots have expressed interest in stocking it. So it may be only a matter of time before Chicago’s cocktail professionals bring Cohasset Punch into the 21st century, the way they did for Malört. —MIKE SULA $29.99, binnys.com, cohassetpunch.com v

Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at fooddrink@ chicagoreader.com.

Cohasset Punch

Freelance X ten year celebration

Fri 6/28, 8 PM, Logan Square Auditorium, 2539 N. Kedzie, sold out

More information at freelancewrestling.com

High-flying moves

An independent wrestling company celebrates a decade of holds and throws.

By ALEJANDRO HERNANDEZ

“Two thousand sixteen was the year of my first Freelance Wrestling match. [That] was also the year I was gonna hang it up,” said professional wrestler Mustafa Ali in front of fans at the Logan Square Auditorium in April. A circle of local independent wrestlers who just finished a night of putting their bodies on the line for the sake of entertainment surrounded him in the ring.

Ali is a former World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Superstar who cut his teeth in Chicago’s indie wrestling scene more than a decade ago. In April, he competed at the event “In Freelance We Trust,” a bout organized by the Chicago-based independently owned professional wrestling company Freelance Wrestling (FW). The night before this appearance, Ali defeated Japanese wrestler Hiromu Takahashi during Windy City Riot, a professional event organized by New Japan Pro-Wrestling at Wintrust Arena.

Ali told the sold-out crowd in Logan Square about sending a tape of his debut Freelance Wrestling appearance (a January 2016 title match against Chicago wrestler Isaias Velazquez) to WWE, which led to an invite to their 2016 Cruiserweight Classic tournament. From 2016 until 2023, Ali wowed WWE fans with high-risk and high-reward maneuvers before transitioning back to the independent scene earlier this year. In February, Ali competed at Total Nonstop Action (TNA) Wrestling’s “No Surrender” annual competition. He won the TNA X Division Championship with this debut appearance.

Ali recounted a 2016 conversation with FW’s founder to the crowd at Logan Square Auditorium that revealed his love of the organization. “I told them, ‘Matt, I got one more year left in me. Just get me in one show because at Freelance,’” he said, voice breaking, “‘you guys make us feel fucking alive.’”

m letters@chicagoreader.com FREELANCE

FW was founded in 2014 by Nick Almendarez (who wrestles under the name Matt Knicks) and serves as both a proving ground for Chicago’s rising wrestling talent and a stop for traveling wrestlers from major companies. The organization celebrates their tenth anniversary with a sold-out event scheduled for Logan Square Auditorium on June 28. Almendarez never predicted this kind of longevity and success. “I never wanted to be the promoter. I

never wanted to be the boss. I just wanted to be a wrestler,” Almendarez told the Reader . “And it kind of grew into this community more than I had intended and, you know, I’m happy and blessed to be a part of something like that.”

Attending a FW show offers a unique and welcoming experience for Chicago’s wrestling fans, particularly those of marginalized backgrounds. Despite its popularity across different cultures, mainstream professional wrestling has historically included problematic and distasteful representations of racial and gender stereotypes, as well as homophobia. FW is an organization that actively addresses those issues. Almendarez said this wasn’t a part of the company’s original mission but manifested naturally.

“The only real instructions that I give people [who work] on our show is don’t say anything racist, homophobic, or any kind of derogatory remarks like that,” he explained. “It’s not very hard to not do that kind of stuff. We call it ‘cheap heat,’ where you just call someone bad words that you wouldn’t say regularly. You’re able to get your character across in a more organic way, so I think a lot of the talent we book kind of bring that flair with them, and it grows into the atmosphere we have today.”

For April’s “In Freelance We Trust,” one of the night’s most exciting bouts featured a surprise appearance from Sonny Kiss, a Black genderfluid wrestler who gained notoriety for their tenure in All Elite Wrestling (AEW) from 2019 to 2023. Competing in the triple threat

match alongside Kiss was Freelance regular E y, a gay wrestler who wore fishnet stockings and trunks that had “Daddy” written in pink script across the rear. Several of the matches also featured women holding their own against male opponents.

Many people’s first impressions of professional wrestling are the televised productions put on by companies like WWE, AEW, and TNA. However, professional wrestling—like music or other creative industries—thrives on the independent scene where talents like Ali first learn the ropes of the wrestling business. Almendarez takes immense pride in FW being an intermediary space for aspiring wrestlers. He describes the energy transferred from fans as an ebb and flow that the wrestlers feed from. On nights when alumni such as Ali come back and remind the audiences just how important this energy is to them, Almendarez says it helps add perspective.

“In most entertainment fields, it’s very easy to become jaded and lose focus on a lot of things that are important. . . . It makes me feel accomplished,” Almendarez told the Reader. “Ultimately—I’ve told this to our kids at the wrestling school and wrestlers we book—I don’t want to book you forever. I want you to get signed and achieve your dreams and it makes me happy to see that. Then to have them come back and give that love back to us as well—because they don’t have to do that either—it’s awesome and humbling.” v

Mustafa Ali celebrates his win at the April

Mustafa Ali (le ) and Storm Grayson (right) catch some air in Logan Square. ALEJANDRO HERNANDEZ

NEWS & POLITICS

CONSERVATION

Muddy waters

The Backward River Festival celebrates efforts to preserve and restore the south branch of the Chicago River.

By S. NICOLE LANE

Walking toward the Canalport Riverwalk, a crane lifts shredded metals as traffic speeds toward a bridge. A flashing sign alerting drivers of pedestrians doesn’t work. Visitors aren’t expected on this stretch of the Chicago River’s south branch. But they’re here. Fishermen, couples on dates, kayakers, rowing teams, even the occasional Jet Ski rider. They all make appearances at the narrow plot of land that juts into the water just west of Ashland and just north of 31st Street in Bridgeport.

One gloomy weekend in early June, there’s even a festival.

The University of Illinois Chicago’s Freshwater Lab is hosting the fourth iteration of its Backward River Festival along the Riverwalk. The goal is to educate the public about rewilding the river, the importance of keeping the water clean, and—the literal shadows hanging over this year’s event—saving the Damen Silos, the city’s first skyscrapers.

Over the course of decades, the river has come a long way from the dumping ground it once was. Sage Rossman, community outreach and programs manager from Urban Rivers, an organization that transforms urban waterways into wildlife sanctuaries by incorporating gardens and walkways, says it’s been “no small feat.”

Where the Riverwalk is located today, there was once an area of riverside shanties filled with immigrant laborers promised opportunity in the 1800s. As industrialization in Chicago boomed, steel mills and lumber yards dumped waste into the river. In 1865, the infamous Union Stock Yards opened nearby. At Bubbly Creek, just south of the Riverwalk, methane gases from discarded cow and pig carcasses rose from the bottom, forming rancid bubbles. A thick, hard grease formed that chickens and people could walk on.

While the south branch got a bad reputation, the whole of the river was in despair. The city’s sewage system mixed with the animal waste and emptied into Lake Michigan, our primary source of drinking water. Cholera, dysentery,

where it’s cleaned before being released. The bottom of Bubbly Creek still contains metal contaminants and industrial chemicals. Nevertheless, it’s resilient. In 2022, scientists at Shedd Aquarium found the south branch had more diverse fish species than anywhere else in the Chicago River.

That same year, Urban Rivers and Shedd installed floating gardens to restore habitat for native wildlife in challenging areas. Rossman

and typhoid swept the city, especially the lower-income communities living and working near the river. To prevent an epidemic, the city needed a solution.

In 1892, officials hired construction crews to create canal locks. They also dredged, deepened, and widened the river—which emptied into an entirely new canal called the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal—to reverse its flow. Since then, the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) can be credited with most of the river’s cleanup. Even after the river’s reversal, Chicagoans continued to dump waste into the river, so the MWRD installed additional sewer pipes to divert wastewater away from the river. Since the 1990s, the district has been working on the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP), a deep tunnel system that forces rainwater to water reclamation plants,

activists and advocates, such as the Pilsen Environmental Rights and Reform Organization and the Warehouse Workers for Justice, are interspersed between performances.

Rossman says she’s “consistently amazed at the enthusiasm with which Chicago’s communities, especially on the south branch, engage with the river when it is made accessible and approachable to them.” Urban Rivers and the South Branch Park Advisory Council o er free community kayaking out of Park Number 571’s boathouse. June kayaking dates sold out in two and a half days. “The river hosts multidisciplinary problems,” Rossman says, “which must be met with multidisciplinary solutions. And I think this festival is a fantastic example of those networks aligning for impact.”

In addition to Chicago’s waterways, this year’s festival focuses on the fate of the Damen Silos on the opposite side of the Riverwalk. We can’t access them, but it’s the closest the public can get to these monuments to Chicago’s past. In 2022, Michael Tadin Jr. purchased the grain silos from the state for $6.52 million— double the initial bid. Tadin is the owner of MAT Asphalt, which in 2023 agreed to a $1.2 million class-action lawsuit settlement after McKinley Park neighbors said the plant was polluting their neighborhood. MAT Asphalt said the plant’s emissions were below regulatory limits and denied wrongdoing.

The silos were built in 1906 and are one of the last standing remnants of the grain and agricultural industry that built Chicago. They stored wheat, corn, and barley that would eventually be sold at the markets. They’re why Carl Sandburg called Chicago the “Stacker of Wheat.”

explains, “These gardens are full of native wetland plants that grow hydroponically through the garden modules into the water, providing quality habitat both above and below the water’s surface. They mimic a normal midwestern wetland habitat, creating a natural foothold within highly urbanized waterways.”

At the festival, these accomplishments are on display. Local vendors pass out informational packets, host bird-watching workshops, teach festivalgoers about soil health, create seed bombs, and promote open discussions about why our waterways matter.

With a stage set up against the backdrop of the river and the Damen Silos, performances include a water ritual by drag artist Loteria, a performance selection by the Free Street Theater, music by Jarochicanos, and an opera by Chicago Fringe Opera. Speeches from local

In 1977, layers of grain dust mixed with heat, causing an explosion and leaving the silos closed for good. They soon became popular destinations for ruin porn enthusiasts and were the backdrop for a 2014 Transformers movie. But now, the silos’ future hangs in limbo. Tadin is working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Historic Preservation Division of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, and the Chicago Department of Public Health to obtain five demolition permits and address environmental concerns. Rachel Havrelock, director of the Freshwater Lab, says if the silos aren’t saved, “then the 2024 Backward River Festival will be a kind of silos’ last stand, a celebration of a significant waterfront site, and a coming together of people who hope to shape the future of the south branch of the Chicago River in positive ways.” She’s hopeful, however, that they can be “re-

The Damen Silos face the Canalport Riverwalk in Bridgeport. S. NICOLE LANE

At A irm: The Rush Center for Gender, Sexuality and Reproductive Health, we want your entire health care experience to be relevant and compassionate. From routine checkups to gender-a irming services and surgery to specialists and advanced care, our doctors and sta are dedicated to inclusive care that celebrates who you are.

To learn more about LGBTQ+ care at Rush, scan the code below, visit rush.edu/a irm or call (833) 624-5428 .

POETRY CORNER

A Tiara Made with Rubies dripping Blood,

Do You Want It?

Dearest gentle chicago readers,

By Umnia Khan

A man who sat as the CEO of a local business dynasty died last year in a freak car accident, brakes locked and failed to deploy.

From a 2023 obituary: James Crown, a Chicago billionaire businessman, was CEO of Henry Crown and Co., which owns General Dynamics, a weapons manufacturing firm. Under President Barack Obama, Crown served as a member of the president’s intelligence advisory board. He also was chairman of the Aspen Institute, which hosts an ideas festival each summer.

Business specialty: killer drones. A name to invest, or to instate, or to install, to ordain, to enthrone. a diadem, a wreath, a zenith, a pinnacle

You, dear reader, are gentle, busy with memberships, parking passes, bills, rent, mortgage, car, PTO and parking tickets, childcare Strapped schools cheer on jewel-toned galas, We envision a future of global health equity where all people realize their right to the highest attainable standards of health black footnotes doused in gasoline, the rich are quick to get into their cars to coastal enclaves.

You, common reader, take your chance and attend the gala, Spent too much on this dress, free wine and champagne while protesters hold placards and chant outside.

General Dynamics reports first-quarter 2024 revenues of $10.7 billion up 8.6% A bloodline scrubbed endlessly clean on our hands and knees, profits from maiming and starving upwards of 2.2 million lives. Nearly the size of Chicago. Hey, come here, look at this, imagine this, our city, your city of big shoulders lost both arms. No legs. No roof, no walls. lakeshore drive pummeled into dust, undrivable. Remote control bombs fall from the sky. Would you hold your beloved in a plastic bag, have you ever loved anyone that much? It couldn’t happen to you, right, dear Chicagoan? They wouldn’t do it to you, right? If you look down at the color of your skin when you answer this question, you know the answer.

Umnia Khan is a writer and performer from Chicago, IL.

Poem curated by Bindu Poroori (@himabindu). Bindu wishes for the annihilation of class, caste, and race. They are Interim Director of Community Organizing at Arts Alliance Illinois, an organizing member of @chicagodesiyouthrising (CDYR), an organizer with UChicago Alumni for Palestine (@uchialum4palestine), and part of the surf punkBollywood cover band, Do The Needful (@dtn_chicago). She would love to talk to you about green mango dal.

A weekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

Summer Hours

Wednesday–Saturday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM

Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony: Patricia Smith

The ceremony will present Chicago poet Patricia Smith with the Fuller Award for her lifetime contributions to literature. Chicago Poet Laureate avery r. young will lead a lineup of presenters that includes Nora Brooks Blakely, Reginald Gibbons, Poetry Out Loud National Champion Niveah Glover, Adrian Matejka, Marc Smith, and Jamila Woods. Lynne Thompson will moderate a conversation with Ms. Smith at the end of the program. Thursday, July 11 at 7:00 PM CT

Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org

NEWS & POLITICS

continued from p. 10

purposed in ways that benefit the community.”

Area residents have asked the federal government to preserve the silos. In 2022, Neighbors for Environmental Justice asked the state to suspend their plan to sell to Tadin. A month later, they and several other southwest-side community groups and elected o cials sent a letter to Governor J.B. Pritzker demanding he stop the sale. The Army Corps told residents at an early 2024 community meeting in McKinley Park that the demolition would have an “adverse historical e ect.” Tadin says that despite all the pushback, they’ve “given great consideration to what community members have shared about the property’s future.”

Colin Smalley, the Army Corps’s Damen Silos project manager, says the Chicago Park District is continuing its work to find a solution to memorialize the silos. While he says they don’t have a final idea, they’re close to drafting an agreement. Smalley says the parties involved discussed numerous ideas, like repurposing the silos as a walking path or displaying a collection of historical photos. Regardless of ultimate plans for the silos, any new development along the river requires a 30-foot setback from the water for public access.

In addition to the silos’ historical significance, residents are also concerned that their

demolition could impact air and water quality. Havrelock worries dust, debris, and pollutants could blanket the neighborhood if the massive structures are torn down, like what happened in Little Village in 2020, when a discontinued industrial smokestack imploded and cast a massive cloud of toxic dust over the southwest side.

Asked about possible impacts on the waterways and community, Tadin says he’ll continue to abide by regulations related to the property and demolition. And he says safety is a concern at the silos in their current state. “Although we have retained multiple security sta for the property, trespassing and other criminal activity continues to occur. I am very concerned that it’s not a matter of if, but when, something tragic happens there. It is vital that this process keeps moving forward for the sake of people’s safety.” He says there aren’t any concrete plans for the Damen Silos and remains “committed to seeing the historic review process through to completion.”

Havrelock hopes she doesn’t see the silos come down. But she says, “If we do, then our intent for the festival is to have eyes on the site and on the demolition in the name of protecting residents, air, water, birds, fish, and the safety of Chicago’s southwest side.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Dozens gather at the south branch for the Freshwater Lab’s Backward River Festival. S. NICOLE LANE

Summer eater & Arts

ON CULTURE

More is more

The Driehaus Museum adds a building.

By DEANNA ISAACS

Financial guru, philanthropist, selfmade tycoon, and devoted Chicago preservationist Richard Driehaus died suddenly after a cerebral hemorrhage on March 9, 2021. Three months later, the Chicago museum that bears his name fulfilled a final aspiration of his by announcing its purchase of the building that has stood next door to the museum for a century.

And last week, after a year of renovation, with a flourish of Chicago Symphony Orchestra trumpets, a garland of balloons, and a reading of Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” poem by actor Harry Lennix, the museum opened the John B. Murphy Memorial Auditorium—and its own new front door—to the public.

The renovation restored a connecting passageway between the two buildings that had been constructed by their previous owner, the American College of Surgeons. (Antunovich Associates was the renovation architect; Bulley & Andrews did the painstaking construction.) Visitors to the museum will now enter via one of the Murphy’s twin exterior staircases and through its Tiffany-designed bronze doors—embellished with panels celebrating the history of medicine, as of 1920 (the Murphy’s exuberant facade, by Drake Hotel architect Benjamin Marshall, is a copy

of a neobaroque church in Paris). So the museum has a new address, several upper floors of new office, studio, and event space, and a handsome, domed auditorium for lectures, meetings, films, and performances.

But the museum itself is, as it has been since it opened in 2008, the jaw-dropping main attraction: a time capsule and monument to the excesses and artisans of a previous gilded age. It’s an understatement to note that Richard Driehaus was not a fan of stripped-down modernism. Raised in a Chicago family of very modest means and educated in Catholic schools all the way through to bachelor’s and master’s degrees from DePaul University (in 1965 and 1970, respectively), he was a traditionalist and a classicist—so much so that, in 2003, he launched an architectural design prize to counter the Pritzker Prize’s modernist bent. The Driehaus Prize is awarded annually for a body of work that “embodies the highest ideals of traditional and classical architecture in contemporary society.”

He was also an independent thinker, combating the stock market’s “buy low, sell high” mantra with a “buy high, sell higher” strategy that looked for companies with an upward trend in both stock price and earnings. Considered the father of what became known as momentum investing, Driehaus said he’d rather purchase the stock of a successful company and share in its continuing upward trajectory than bet on a turnaround in the depressed stock of a company having problems. After a decade of working as an analyst for brokerage firms, he went out on his own, launching Driehaus Securities in 1979, and founding Driehaus Capital Management in 1982.

(At the time of his death, Driehaus Capital was managing over $13 billion in assets.)

By 1987, Driehaus was doing well enough to buy a century-old mansion on the southwest corner of Erie and Wabash, and turn it into a headquarters for his business. And in 2003, after amassing a huge collection of late 19thand early 20th-century art and objects (including one of the world’s largest collections of Ti any glass), he also bought the mansion kitty-corner to the Driehaus o ces.

That house had been built at a cost of $450,000 in 1883 for Samuel Nickerson— another man who rose from modest means to extraordinary financial success. Nickerson made his initial fortune in the liquor business and then went on to more respectable railroads and financial institutions; he was the longtime president of First National Bank of Chicago (now Chase). After losing his home in the Great Chicago Fire, Nickerson had built this one to be both fireproof and fantastic—so opulent it was known as his Marble Palace. An avid art collector and one of the founders of what would become the Art Institute of Chicago, he and his family lived in the three-story mansion until 1900, when he donated his art collection to the Art Institute, moved east to retire, and sold the house to paper container mogul Lucius George Fisher for a mere $75,000.

This was the same Fisher who had commissioned Daniel Burnham’s firm to design the

wonderful glass and Gothic Fisher Building that still stands on South Dearborn, but he was apparently more of a hunter than an aesthete. He hired architect George Maher to redo the mansion’s gallery, replacing Nickerson’s art with mounted weapons and the heads of dead animals. By the time his own family was selling it, in 1919, there was a danger that the house might be torn down. To save it from that fate, a group of more than 100 citizens, (including the likes of Julius Rosenwald and William Wrigley Jr.) bought it and donated it to the American College of Surgeons, which established its headquarters there and, in 1923, tore down the mansion’s carriage house to build the Murphy Auditorium.

Driehaus spent five years restoring the mansion to the condition it had been in when the Nickersons lived and lavishly entertained there, stocking it with original furnishings and period art and sculpture from his own collection. The museum is now offering expanded programming and free admission on Wednesday evenings from 5 PM to 7 PM (daily guided tours of the house are a well-spent extra $5). It’s an American palace, 24,000 square feet of exquisitely crafted art, architecture, and design from a time when inequality was a fact of life and—except for a few incidents like that little dustup over at Haymarket Square—too much of a good thing was thought to be just fine. v

m disaacs@chicagoreader.com

The Richard H. Driehaus Museum (le ) and Murphy Auditorium COURTESY

Harry Lennix KYLE FLUBACKER

R3336 W. Lawrence, Ste. 303, open Sat 1–4 PM,

GALLERY

“Slouching towards being a white cube”

Weatherproof’s alternative gallery model brings challenging art to quotidian spaces.

By NATALIE JENKINS

At the heart of Weatherproof are two bold, young artists eager to agitate, serving up brief yet blistering exhibitions that a rm the vitality of Chicago’s doit-yourself gallery scene. Weatherproof is a passion project turned curatorial umbrella and gallery led by Milo Christie and Sam Dybeck, presenting unusual contemporary art in an Albany Park o ce and a Logan Square vitrine. These settings offer an alternative gallery model while leveling challenging art with quotidian spaces. The result is a run of programming that never fails to intrigue, even as it eschews prevailing tastes in the contemporary market.

Christie and Dybeck are not worried about situating Weatherproof into any particular art world context, instead calling themselves “ambiguously commercial” and “slouching towards being a white cube.” The pair are driven by an obsession for art, scraping funds together every month to keep organizing fresh shows. Because of their DIY approach, their overhead is relatively low, with Christie and Dybeck acting simultaneously as codirectors, art handlers, curators, preparators, administrators, and accountants.

Being this hands-on allows the two to remain unimpeded in their desire to be bold and irreverent, playing off expectations of seriousness in the art world as they organize shows. At the same time, their direct involvement and tangible care enables them to o er diligence and respect for the exciting and often bizarre pieces they show. This past March, Christie and Dybeck worked with Virginiabased artist Chad Mundie to re-create a dark basement environment in their normally bright office space for his solo show “Take Me To Your Darkest Room.” In “The Weatherproof Anniversarial,” the gallery’s first benefit auction that took place this spring, objects

on offer included stuffed monkeys wearing stained glass clothes by Tarik Kentouche and a three-dimensional printed fake granite rock with an embedded photograph of a fake arti-

Summer eater & Arts

exhibiting artists themselves, Christie and Dybeck are no strangers to the alienation of moving works from the private studio to the public eye, and they are keenly aware of the many lives and forms shows can inhabit as they unfold.

At Weatherproof, their role in these transformations is that of facilitators, allowing artists to take the lead in creating, selecting, and contextualizing art for the public. Christie and Dybeck prioritize an artist-centric attitude, only mediating the ways in which artists interact with the display spaces to ensure each show is responsive to its site. This results in oddly delightful site-specific moments like Brandon Bandy’s text covering Weatherproof’s baseboards in the show “Excellent Form/White Pill” and Braden Skelton’s wall-spanning in-

fact by Rachel Jackson. Consistent dedication to unusual works like these establishes a fundamental trust in the Weatherproof curatorial ethos among their audience members, who can always expect to see works that will surprise and challenge.

The codirectors hinge their development of exhibitions on what they regard as transformative processes: the transformation of art from private to public and the transformation of shows from conception to closing. As two

outside to enclose it. Christie began inviting artists to create miniaturized installations in the Hole, with the instructions that they make sure to “weatherproof” their art to survive the vitrine’s exposure to the elements. From this, Weatherproof was born.

Soon after, Weatherproof acquired an o ce space above a corner store in Albany Park, which the codirectors call Annex/Cointelpro. The name is a nod to the o ce’s presence as an addition to Weatherproof and a tongue-incheek reference to the disruptive and illegal e orts of the FBI in targeting subversive political organizations from the 50s to the early 70s. Annex/Cointelpro reflects Weatherproof’s provocative and o eat presence in Chicago’s gallery scene and marks the codirectors’ acceptance of the political in art; the codirectors intend Weatherproof to be a social space for a community to form around, which to them is always a political act.

Christie’s endless passion for the project energized him to pursue an extremely prolific short-term programming structure he characterizes as a “score,” with shows in Annex/ Cointelpro lasting only four weeks and shows in the Hole lasting just two. This has allowed Weatherproof to expand rapidly, hosting more than 40 exhibitions in just two years and collaborating with organizations including Kiki and Bouba Projects, the New Art Dealers Alliance, and, most recently, Barely Fair and the Auction Collective.

stallation of letters from a Planet Fitness sign rearranged to spell “Pestilent” in the show “Genre Fiction.”

Weatherproof was founded in 2022 by Christie in an architectural abnormality on the side of his home in Logan Square—what Christie named the “Hole.” The Hole, a small exteriorfacing alcove measuring only about nine inches square and four inches deep, became a vitrine space for artistic intervention when Christie attached a clear acrylic panel on the

In the past year, Dybeck joined Christie as codirector after they worked together at LVL3 gallery and Dybeck exhibited at Weatherproof twice. The two are now working with an eye toward longevity in order to cement Weatherproof’s place as a community stalwart. The pair are hoping to find what they call a “specific tone of cultural production in the midwest,” even as Weatherproof projects look more globally. Christie and Dybeck are critical players in Chicago’s arts ecosystem, simultaneously engaging their subversive curatorial vision as a conduit for people to interact with the ambitious art coming out of Chicago and as a means to contextualize challenging work from outside of the city for a midwestern audience.

Weatherproof’s upcoming exhibition, “Tenebrae,” opens on July 11 as yet another radical entry into their ever-evolving programming and will certainly be a standout among Chicago’s summer arts events. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Milo Christie and Sam Dybeck at Red Hot Ranch, 2024 SAM DYBECK

Summer eater & Arts

POETRY

A half century of poetic possibilities

Chicago Poetry Center celebrates a milestone with an exhibition, a new documentary, and live performances.

By CHARLIE KOLODZIEJ

When the Chicago Poetry Center (CPC) first arrived on the scene in 1974, poets were expected to imitate the classics and follow convention; anything more experimental was quick to meet an editor’s trash bin. Fifty years later, the diverse landscape of American poetry is thanks in part to CPC’s tireless efforts to broaden our poetic possibilities.

The CPC will celebrate its enduring legacy this summer with the exhibition, “A Bigger Table: 50 Years of the Chicago Poetry Center,” on view June 27–September 14 at the Poetry Foundation. Cocurated through a joint partnership with the Poetry Foundation’s creative director Fred Sasaki and library director Katherine Litwin, the exhibition will feature artifacts from the early days of the CPC’s founding alongside original poetry reflecting on the organization’s future.

The exhibition takes its name from the literary magazine Big Table, an early predecessor to today’s CPC that was founded in 1959 by Irving Rosenthal and Paul Carroll. Rosenthal and Carroll were then editors at the University of Chicago’s literary magazine, the Chicago Review. The duo were looking for something fresh and began corresponding with famed poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who sent Rosenthal and Carroll names now synonymous with the Beat generation—Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac.

“This writing is, of course, completely scandalous for the status quo of the time,” said B. Metzger Sampson, executive director of the CPC. “An article [came] out from the Chicago Daily News with the very eye-catching headline of ‘Filthy Writing on the Midway.’”

What followed was a censorial response from the university. Frustrated by the administration’s directive to next put out a

“completely innocuous” issue, Rosenthal and Carroll left the Chicago Review and started their own magazine, Big Table . “The story goes that Jack Kerouac just o andedly writes a note to himself at some point on a draft that says ‘note to self: get a bigger table,’” said Sampson. “So they were like, ‘Great, a bigger table. That’s what we’ll be.’”

Big Table aimed to be a bigger table for everyone, one that welcomed queer and racially diverse poets struggling to find publication at more traditional outlets. The magazine began hosting literary readings and public performances in the basement of the Museum of Contemporary Art, then located at the Gold Coast’s former Playboy headquarters. Early predecessors of today’s ubiquitous “open mikes,” these performances galvanized Big Table into a cultural force in American poetry. The momentum eventually led to the formal founding of the CPC.

The center’s exhibition will showcase 50 posters from the early days of the organization’s live events; featuring now iconic names like Ginsberg, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka. The exhibit will also display artifacts from the center’s educational programs, such as student poetry, correspondences between students and famous poets, and props from “Queen Zee’s Poetic Adventures”—the center’s series of streaming poetry lessons.

R“A BIGGER TABLE: 50 YEARS OF THE CHICAGO POETRY CENTER”

Through 9/ 14: Wed–Sat, 11 AM– 5 PM, Poetry Foundation, 61 W. Superior, poetrycenter.org

only the second program in the nation to bring poets into public schools. “In 1997, it was again this bigger-table idea when school budgets were getting radically slashed,” said Sampson. “They knew that there needed to be outside support to maintain artistic expression in school settings.”

Sampson began her work at the CPC in the organization’s education program while pursuing an MFA in writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). After leaving Chicago for a few years, they returned in 2012 to find the CPC balancing a shoestring budget that resulted in major sta ng cuts and an end to the educational programs that were once a backbone of the institution. “It was really at this flexion point that was, essentially, are we going to close? Or are we going to find a way to reinvent ourselves and keep going?” said Sampson.

Through the diligent efforts of Sampson, fellow CPC staff, and

also the first arts partner in the city to begin asynchronous teaching in CPS classrooms mere weeks following the start of the COVID19 pandemic, a fact Sampson is particularly proud of.

Inspired by pieces from the CPC’s archive, the exhibition will also feature an original poem by poet and CPC director of programs, Helene Achanzar. Titled “Bright Bloom,” the piece is what’s known as a cento, a poetic form where the poem is composed entirely of lines borrowed from other poems. The center invited poets in residence, staff, and board members to submit original poetry that Achanzar then assembled into the final piece. The composition will be displayed as a broadside—letterpress prints of poetry paired with artwork—alongside a series of 49 broadsides from the center’s archives. “It was really important for us for this broadside to not necessarily represent one poet or one idea but to really be representative of the Chicago Poetry Center community. What made sense was to make a broadside of a poem that reflected the di erent voices that exist within the organization,” said Achanzar.

Launched in 1997 by then executive director Ken Clarke and teaching artist Kenneth Koch, the CPC’s educational wing was at the time

a deus ex machina donor, the organization slowly began to recover. This past year, the center supported 13 active teaching poets in 23 schools and 95 classrooms across Chicago. The center was

Achanzar will be reading her cento at an exhibition event on July 13, 2-4 PM, at the Poetry Foundation. The event, which is open to the public, will feature live performances from student poet Layla Abdullah and musician and former CPC poet-in-residence Marvin Tate. The evening will also see the premiere of a documentary about the organization’s founding— A Bigger Table: 50 Years of the Chicago Poetry Center, directed by Poetry Foundation media associate Moyo Abiona. “I just want to keep growing the bigger table,” said Sampson. “I want to make sure that I do my best to steward it to the next set of people who will make di erent decisions and respond di erently to their time for what that bigger table should look like for them.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Chicago Poetry Center staff

Summer eater & Arts

R“WHAT IS SEEN AND UNSEEN: MAPPING SOUTH ASIAN AMERICAN ART IN CHICAGO” Through 10/26 : Thu–Sat 11 AM– 6 PM, South Asia Institute, 1925 S. Michigan, saichicago.org/exhibition, $10 for adults, $ 5 for students with valid ID, free on Fridays

EXHIBITION

Shadow bodies dancing under the sun

“What Is Seen and Unseen” unearths the marks le by South Asian artists in Chicago.

By XIAO DACUNHA

An ambitious project is unfolding at the South Asia Institute (SAI). As part of this year’s programming for Art Design Chicago, “What Is Seen and Unseen: Mapping South Asian American Art in Chicago” is a journey from the past into the future, unearthing the marks left by South Asian artists in Chicago.

South Asian culture has had an irreplaceable influence on nearly every American art form. “South Asian American poets transfuse a wealth of new images into the bloodstream of U.S. poetry,” wrote the editors of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, and the same goes for other art forms. Afro-South Asian collaborations flow through music history, from John Coltrane’s embrace of Indian culture to the six-note tumbi melody in Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On,” borrowed from bhangra, a dance music form in Punjab, India. A stroll through Chicago will quickly spotlight many buildings

inspired by South Asian and oriental architectural characteristics, from the Bahá’í House of Worship in Wilmette to the James M. Nederlander Theatre right in the Loop.

Once you look, you begin to notice South Asian influences everywhere throughout America and Chicago’s art history over the past century. And that makes one wonder: Why don’t we hear about South Asian art’s influence on our city’s culture more frequently and regularly?

“What Is Seen and Unseen” is the first comprehensive study of South Asian artists’ contributions to Chicago’s art history. Connecting a past that has been largely overlooked until now with a group of artists that has been actively making spaces for themselves and their community, the exhibition has two components. “Shadows Dance Within the Archives” is a chronology of the underdocumented South Asian exhibitions and cultural history over the past century; “Are Shadow Bodies Electric?” is its contemporary counterpart, featuring work

by eight Chicago-based South Asian artists. Cunningly playing with words, the two subtitles summarize this exhibition’s fundamental principle: the shadow bodies who were encapsulated by darkness will, from this point on, be so audaciously bright that they can no longer be ignored.

The archive exhibition follows a chronological order, starting when traditional South Asian art forms were first introduced to Chicago in 1893 under colonial-era perspectives, including documentation at the India Pavilion at the World’s Columbian Exposition and the Indian delegation at the World’s Parliament of Religions. The exhibition demonstrates a growing interest in South Asian culture and artifacts, reflected in the increased acquisition of Asian antiquities in the U.S. between 1920 and 1940. Though still regarded through a colonial approach, it is undeniable that South Asian art forms had a powerful impact on America’s counterculture movements throughout the 1980s.

receipt paper, and Antidote, where those messages are rolled up and stored in glass tubes.

One piece that manifests this fearless stance is Move in Place I by Brendan Fernandes. Fernandes, a local artist of Kenyan Indian descent, created this body of printed digital assemblages by collaging body parts of ballet dancers onto 3D scans of objects from the Seattle Art Museum’s African collection and the Justin and Elisabeth Lang Collection of African Art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. The piece shows a ballet dancer’s graceful arms spreading to the sides, fingers elegantly pointing downwards. However, the body is replaced

Once you look, you begin to notice South Asian influences everywhere throughout America and Chicago’s art history over the past century.

with an African totem, which resembles the dancer’s garment. This juxtaposition explores how African culture, like South Asian culture, has long been regarded as a visual, discursive object by Western museums.

The curatorial process was similar to an archaeological discovery. “Everything was in the records. But they’re buried in the archives,” said Shelly Bahl, the exhibition’s curator. “Nobody is aware of it. This project shows there are these nuggets of gold buried in the archive [that] are forgotten today and are also not necessarily seen as part of American art history. And what we’re doing is not an exhaustive kind of survey. Maybe other research will happen [after this].”

The survey is organized by the core themes that helped define and develop contemporary South Asian diaspora and immigration identities. These artists honor their heritage while reshaping South Asian identity by integrating their unique personal and collective experiences into their creative practices. Many pieces are a combination of traditional motifs and modern objects. For example, Saira Wasim mashes biblical characters with a smartphone in her painting. Others are purely conceptual pieces that stray from traditional visual art formats, such as Amay Kataria’s Momimsafe , featuring messages the artist received during the pandemic printed on blue

These contemporary artists are part of the future generations of the shadow bodies unveiled in the archive exhibition. They have been and will continue to walk out of the darkness that has shrouded their community and tell their stories loudly and fearlessly. It is only by viewing “What Is Seen and Unseen” that one can understand how far the South Asian community has come and how much further they will continue to venture.

At the end of our conversation, Bahl shared a quote from a South Asian woman from the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago: “We are here. We are going to be the women of the future. We are going to be the doctors, engineers, and artists of the future.” By making visible what has always existed in the archive and mapping through the past into the contemporary, this exhibition investigates the absence and presence of the South Asian body through time and helps write the true experience and influence of South Asian art in Chicago’s cultural landscape. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

L to R: Installation views of Brendan Fernandes’s Move in Place I (2015) and Amay Kataria’s Antidote (2020), as part of “What Is Seen and Unseen” at South Asia Institute PRATYUSH

R7/ 11 –8/1: Thu 5 PM–7 PM, Little Village Library, 2311 S. Kedzie, chipublib.bibliocommons.com/events/664 cab9b2038232f 008847c9

DIY nights at the library

Little Village Library hosts a teen activities series filled with cra s and music.

By EMMA OXNEVAD

Chicago Public Library’s (CPL) Little Village branch is o ering free live music and crafts throughout the summer, with organizers and performers both aiming to engage with the community and expose attendees to a diverse array of local talent and artistic activities.

The Little Village branch’s Craft and Concerts series, hosted over four weeks in July and August, will feature performances from local bands, as well as crafts created by the library’s 14 teen interns. Sara Heymann, the branch’s teen library associate, explains that the event was created as part of the CPL’s Summer Learning Challenge, which this year is focused on music-based programming.

Heymann joined the Little Village branch last year after working as a teen library associate at the Douglass branch. She says that the Craft and Concerts series is her first “largescale music-related event” at Little Village and that she was inspired by her experience running a DIY space and later living in a DIY community for over a decade.

Heymann, who previously sang in 60s cover band Girl Group Chicago, hopes to teach the library’s interns the ins and outs of organizing shows, with her “ultimate dream” being teen interns booking bands to play at the library in the future.

“[It’s] probably because I come from the punk and DIY scene that I really believe that we all have it in us to just go ahead and make things happen,” Heymann says. “Every time

“We’re in

a big city,

and I

will make cool stu .”

Heymann adds that she plans to encourage the teen interns with dance and music backgrounds to perform at the series—but won’t place pressure.

The crafts part of the series will be determined by the teen interns, with Heymann noting that crafting supplies available for weekly use at stations in the library’s teen section— like studs and spikes for creating punk jackets, contact microphones, and punch needle embroidery patches—are examples of potentially featured projects.

Heymann says the crafts offered at the series are available to all ages, but are designed with attendees aged 13-19 in mind. She says her interns have expressed interest in 3D rhinestone animal creation, origami, embroidery, and printmaking, among other crafts.

Summer eater & Arts

the genre while attending Farragut Career Academy, where it “wasn’t the norm.”

“We don’t try to gatekeep,” Lopez adds. “We want to share this music with as many people as possible and with future generations.”

Heymann says the library is comparable to a community center and she hopes that the Craft and Concerts series will provide handson educational entertainment to attendees. “Learning isn’t necessarily just reading a book. It’s doing, it’s messing around with stu . It’s kind of just putting yourself out there and just trying new things with people in your community.”

She also says that the interns remarked that

“Having a space and having some kind of artistic or cultural programming is a great benefit, because too often, one factor that is almost always overlooked is the factor of inspiration,” he says. “I know I started music by watching my father’s bandmates play.”

Armando Fernandez, guitarist for shoegaze band Almost There But Not Really, says he spent his summers growing up in Blue Island loitering in businesses or “destroy[ing] things in the park” since they were free sources of entertainment. He says that teenagers in Little Village and similar neighborhoods are “always looking for something to do,” but often don’t have the same access to camps or other costly summer enrichment activities.

free spaces for teens are “places to connect with each other and that they provide opportunities to help them determine their future.”

CPL will host a wide range of music-related events this summer, including Queer Radical Fair on July 25, a hip-hop recording workshop on July 11 at the Whitney M. Young Jr. Branch, and a weekly Lofi and Games night also at the Little Village branch.

think kids need a place that is safe and that exposes them to everything Chicago has to o er.”

that I’ve had teen interns, they always really make amazing stuff. And I think we should trust teens more to do big things and take on big projects and have a vision and then help facilitate them to bring it to fruition. I hope to inspire them to do that, and I trust that they

About 42 bands applied to perform at the series. Heymann says that the series will prioritize bands from Little Village and the surrounding neighborhoods.

Punk band Eske is composed of Little Village natives, with bassist Miguel Lopez describing their August 1 set as a “homecoming show.”

Lopez says the band is enthusiastic about exposing younger generations to punk through the series and notes that they fell in love with

“Being a teen is an important part of their life because they’re transitioning into adulthood, which is di cult, and connecting with other teens can be comforting,” Heymann says. “They also said that it was important to have spaces where they can express themselves, meet other teens, and build social skills. It also gives them a place to experiment with new things.”

C Mikhail, bassist and covocalist for Arab music ensemble Sumoud Collective, says they were drawn to apply in part to participate in a “free series for the community.”

“We’re in a big city, and I think kids need a place that is safe and that exposes them to everything Chicago has to o er,” Mikhail says.

Ronnie Malley, Sumoud’s oud player, says teens having a space to be inspired through learning something new “can go a long way.”

“I think the city should do everything it can to give teens something to do, and if that something is avant-garde jazz, that’s all the better,” he says.

Eddie Guzman, the band’s vocalist and guitarist, also says that free concerts accessible to teenagers can help ingratiate inspiring musicians into Chicago’s local music scene. “Growing up, I couldn’t go to a lot of shows because everything is 21-plus, 18-plus,” he says. “And that kind of discouraged me from being part of the music scene as a kid. It’s like I can’t meet people I can work with. It’s hard to build something without that community, and I think this is a great opportunity for people to connect.”

With teen curfews in place at free spaces like Millennium Park and Navy Pier, and ticketed events cutting off access to Chicago’s parks, it can be challenging for teens in the city to find safe, free spots to spend time when out of school. Heymann, however, says the library offers young people a space to be themselves without “any obligations. . . . [If] they want to just hang out, they can,” she says. “If they want to nerd out about things and really get into it, we’re there to help them do that and give them opportunities for that.”  v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

A teen creates a zine at Little Village Library. SARA HEYMANN

Summer eater & Arts

DANCE PREVIEW

Moonwater Dance Project creates a woman-focused repertoire

The company celebrates individual strength and collective possibilities.

By NORA PAUL

Three dancers stand far upstage, lit by dim lights and with their backs to the audience.

To their left, three dancers lay on their sides. As the upstage dancers slowly—joined step for step—turn to face front, the dancers on the floor sit up to reveal that their faces are covered by their jackets’ hoods. Center stage, a dancer pulls hers down to finally reveal her face.

So begins Grisly Bare , which Moonwater Dance Project first performed in 2019 for their second annual performance, and which will return to the stage at Ruth Page Center for Moonwater VI this weekend. Aside from Grisly Bare , choreographed by Katie Carey, the bill will include Montage , which Jessica Miller Tomlinson created for Moonwater in 2021, along with two world premieres.

6/28 -6/30 : Fri-Sat 7: 30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Ruth Page Center for the Arts, 1016 N. Dearborn, moonwaterdanceproject.com, $ 35 -$ 60

energy. There is pervasive ambiguity between tenderness and friction, as a caress can just as easily become a shove, and a hold can become a fall.

Vulnerability is physicalized: In one moment from a duet, a dancer supports their weight by grasping another dancer’s arm. In the next, the hold is released, and, without the counterweight of her partner, she falls down. As the partnered movement is not gendered, each dancer finds many things available to her as an individual—ways to be seen and ways to do. Rather than the ambiguity of character, the result is an expanded range.

Over the past five years, the contemporary repertory company has amassed a body of work born from collaborations with several prominent women in the Chicago dance community and far beyond and has graced stages such as the Auditorium Theatre for last August’s Dance for Life. The company has grown through their cogent demonstration of a collective created through individual empowerment. Throughout their repertoire, roles are fluid and porous, and each of the dancers initiates shifts in energy and focus.

Emily Brand, founding member of the woman-driven company, will perform a solo choreographed by Moonwater founder and executive artistic director Mackenzie King. King emphasizes that this creation process has been highly collaborative, growing out of

the creative relationship the two artists have had for the past six years. More importantly, the solo is personal in focus.

King describes the piece’s physicality as a peaceful state.

“I sometimes feel like what I need to relax or calm down or shut myself o from the rest of the world is to be in a more confined space. I like to feel protected. So, I choreographed this solo for [Brand] exploring that idea.” The concept of confinement is also expressed through the lighting design, which features a single spotlight for the solo’s entire duration.

Montage is a highly technical and fast-paced work. Moonwater dancers joke that it feels like running a marathon. The piece epitomizes the company’s image in its frequent use of partnering and lifts. These moments of part-

nering are found through a sharing of weight. Through this physical give and take, the roles of who provides support and who is supported are interchangeable.

This choreographic choice subverts traditional partnering choreography within the ballet and contemporary genres between a man and a woman, with the male dancer supporting and lifting the female dancer, most often initiating the contact himself.

Grisly Bare is athletic, grounded, and conceptual. The piece alternates between summoning the individuality of the dancers and their collectivity. There is an e ect of the gaze zooming in and out, as a single dancer expresses her own story or enacts her own struggle, or as the whole cast moves together in the accumulation of an emotion or state of

The world premiere of Cloud Land , choreographed by Ching Ching Wong and Noelle Kayser, is the product of multiple contingencies, a topic summoned in the piece itself.

King had been following Wong’s wide-ranging experience as a performer. Wong danced for seven seasons with Portland’s Northwest Dance Project, and in 2017, she was included in Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” list. She became rehearsal director for Ballets Jazz Montréal in 2022, and as a freelance artist, collaborations with renowned choreographers have taken her worldwide. Wong is also a founding member of PARA.MAR Dance Theatre alongside Kayser. Kayser herself has collaborated in the past with Moonwater Dance Project with the 2022 piece Water From the Trees . Her performance history in Chicago spans back to 2011 with now defunct Luna Negra Dance Theater, and she has since danced with Visceral Dance Chicago and Northwest Dance Project. Kayser deepened her Chicago roots in her role as founding rehearsal director, dancer, and administrator for PARA.MAR under the direction of founder and artistic director Stephanie Martinez, and subsequently as the assistant and repetiteur for Martinez in her creations for companies nationwide.

King had approached Wong after a performance in which the latter had danced, and the two later began discussing a possible piece for Moonwater. Wong mentioned she and Kayser were interested in co-choreographing.

Wong and Kayser’s collaboration was a product of their friendship and creative exchange. Kayser recalls the conversation with Wong: “We were brainstorming, and then

Caitlin Yatsuhashi (le ) and Kalli Loudan REN PICCO-FREEMAN

Summer eater & Arts

she was just like, ‘Why don’t we just make this together?’” It is both artists’ first time co-choreographing.

The creation process ran on two parallel tracks that wove in and out of each other, running together awhile, and altering each other’s course. Wong and Kayser had different methods of working to develop the piece, but, like the other pieces in Moonwater VI, their composition materials were experiential, directly from memory and sensation.

create the feeling of, in Kayser’s words, “an in-between space on the precipice of something final.”

“I like to be a place where women can show their creativity and what they bring to the space.”

The performance opens “this portal that we all exist in for just a slow moment in time,” explains Wong. The choreography creates the impression of stagnant time. In one moment, all the dancers approach stillness except for one, who begins a fluid, pulsing solo.

Wong continues: “It’s both close and distant, both present and nostalgic . . . [the message] is overt, but also, sometimes it just feels like these faraway memories. . . . I think what’s important is that these layers stack on top of each other to create Cloud Land.” King is excited for this commission to enter the company’s repertoire.

Kayser created the sound for the piece. Wong and Kayser generated the movement in a highly elastic process with the Moonwater dance artists during a ten-day residency with the company.

The departure point came in the form of the tagline “purgatory fanfiction,” which Kayser and Wong still use to describe the piece. But everything beyond that has expanded on that concept.

Cloud Land presents like a painting, a tableau of simultaneous signs and gestures. Its elements, while cumulatively composing the full image, gleam and glint on their own. The piece reflects how an unexpected event can

Historically, directors of large companies have hired predominantly or exclusively male choreographers. Moonwater becomes a physical place to counter that. Tomlinson, Robyn Mineko Williams, Shannon Alvis, and Hanna Brictson are just a few of the women who have stood at the front of the room to create for the company’s recent seasons.

“I like to be a place where women can show their creativity and what they bring to the space,” says King.

This focus is clear in the presentation of Moonwater’s repertoire as well. The production involved is typically minimal, the lighting and costumes are simple, and the dancers do not hide. It is as though they move without anything mediating their physical expression.

The exception is in Grisly Bare , when the dancers’ jacket hoods tightly cover their entire heads, serving as a foil to the bareness and starkness of their emergence from their cloth.

King asserts: “For us, I like to focus on the beauty of the body and what we’re capable of.”

Foregrounding each piece is the technical form of the physical structure. Each dancer is an example—not of one another, as their uniqueness is sharp in the light—but of the whole, the movement that is collectively possible. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Kalli Loudan REN PICCO-FREEMAN

Summer eater & Arts

STAND-UP STALWART

Talking comedy between sets with Adam Burke

“If

there were a formula, what would be the point?”

By JONAH NINK

Adam Burke had an hour between Laugh Factory sets to talk to me. The 48-year-old Chicago comedy iconoclast and I exited the noisy theater and began walking down Broadway, on the lookout for a quiet bar for an interview. It was a chilly Friday night in late May, the first truly nice night of the summer, and the street was packed with people looking for a way to spend it. Before we’d left the Laugh Factory, Burke asked why he was being interviewed. “What prompted this?” he said. It was a mystifying question considering the guy’s history. Burke has been a Chicago comedy scene staple since he started slinging jokes in 2009. He had just released his second comedy album, Weaponized Empathy , in February through A Special Thing Records.

“four stand-up sets in three days” lifestyle was never the long-term goal. “I liked making jokes, but I liked making them quietly at parties,” he explained.

A “shy” (his word) person from Northern Ireland by way of Australia, Burke spent time in Texas before landing in Chicago in 2004. As the legend goes, in 2006 Burke was tasked with covering the city’s stand-up scene for Chicago Social, and it would inspire him to take a crack at the open-mike circuit.

Adam Burke, the résumé, is prestigious and venerable, but don’t let that scare you. Adam Burke, the man, is down-to-earth, humble, and self-aware. The latter was partly the inspiration for the title of Weaponized Empathy. The album is all about coming to terms with the self-serving element that guides our predispositions, morals, and opinions. “If anything, it’s about calling out my own bullshit,” he said. “We can be morally correct, but that doesn’t always make us right. Rightness is such a human, fuzzy-math kind of thing.”

Burke and I found a noisy bar a block and some change down from the Laugh Factory. I shouted a question to him about why his first album, Universal Squirrel Theory , also released via A Special Thing Records back in 2012, hasn’t received a follow-up until now. “I can’t explain the ten-year gap,” Burke shouted back. “I’m not bragging, but I say I’ve probably gone through about two hours or three hours of material [in the last ten years]. . . . There might be like three minutes that hang around, but stuff gets shunted out.” The high joke turnover works well within the quick and dirty 20-minute sets Burke is accustomed to, but it can make the task of wrangling an hour seem more complicated.

everything like a nerd.

“[No Respect] truly is the perfect record of what it would have been like to see Rodney Dangerfield at that moment in time,” he said. “You want someone to hear your album and go, ‘Yeah, that’s what they’re like.’”

You can judge someone’s passion for something based on their ability to talk shop about it. That’s when you really unearth those grimy details about the process that fellow geeks run toward and Tinder dates run far, far away from. I asked Burke about his writing process, and without hesitation he threw a tiny notebook on the table, “I’m one of these guys,” he answered. Burke’s joke flow state comes in waves, more often than not on a bus or train in between gigs. You can still find Burke regularly testing material at open mikes, where he works to break chunks of new ideas down into digestible bits.

“It sounds so pretentious—it is kind of like you’re at the potter’s wheel, where you get it down to kind of this smaller shape of the vase you want,” he said. Though he stressed that it’s wrong to apply a single writing philosophy to all forms of comedy, Burke said that a telltale sign of a good joke is when both the audience and the comedian can easily identify that it’s over. “It’s a combination of the magic trick and the point of the presentation.”

He had opened for giants like John Mulaney, Hannibal Buress, Maria Bamford, and John Oliver. Scene geriatrics will remember that 2009 was also when he and Cameron Esposito started the popular open mike at Cole’s Bar. He was a writer on WGN’s Man of the People With Pat Tomasulo and is a regular panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! Goddamnit, he was even voted 2014’s best stand-up by the Chicago Reader (the paper you are Chicago-reading!).

“Because you’re everywhere,” I’d told him. Before the interview, Burke had laid out his weekend to me as we coordinated a time to meet over Messenger. It included two Laugh Factory sets on Friday, along with shows the following Saturday and Sunday. Though he had always been interested in comedy, the

There’s no wrong way to do a comedy album, but Burke said that his favorite albums focus on capturing a moment within a comedian’s career. “I just relistened to No Respect, Rodney Dangerfield’s 1980 album. He’s got ten years of just killing it on the [Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson], and then he finally puts out this album. It’s one of the most perfect comedy albums, but it’s not the modern conception of a comedy album. It’s just his fucking set at his nightclub.”

Listen to No Respect and you’ll be surprised by how small the crowd feels, a far cry from Kevin Hart–style stadium specials. At one point, Dangerfield runs out of jokes and starts taking audience questions. In his sets, Burke will often build up a scenario for a joke, then deconstruct that scenario for a few more jokes, and end with a jab at himself deconstructing

He needed a moment before we left for the interview, so to kill time I leaned up against the wall opposite the Laugh Factory bar and pretended to be on my phone so I could eavesdrop on the other comics as they’d swap praise and feedback on each other’s sets. Once again, pure shop talk—no different from engineers working on the Blue Line or scene kids after a Beat Kitchen gig. Burke was among incredible company that night, sharing the bill with vets like Hannah Roeschlein, Ian Abramson, and Deanna Ortiz. A lot of our interview time was spent praising other comics, which Burke admitted is more exciting than talking about his own material. (Our mutual conclusion: it’s unfuckingbelievable the amount of comedy talent in Chicago.)

The inside-baseball stuff makes for a fun conversation, but Burke said that he and every other comedian would prefer it if you just caught one of their shows. “The great thing about comedy is I can do the bit the best I can, and there are still people who are like, ‘I don’t get it.’ And that’s great. If there were a formula, what would be the point? If everybody likes it, then who gives a fuck?” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Adam Burke onstage at Zanies JESSICA LENAI

 Chryssa & New York is co-organized by Dia Art Foundation and the Menil Collection, Houston, in collaboration with Alphawood Foundation at Wrightwood 659, Chicago.  IMAGE CREDIT: Chryssa, Cents Sign Traveling from Broadway to Africa via Guadeloupe, 1968. © Εstate of Chryssa, National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens. Courtesy Brooklyn Museum  Chryssa & New York is presented by Alphawood Exhibitions at Wrightwood 659.

Summer eater & Arts

R LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD

Through 8/4: Tue-Fri 7: 30 PM, Sat 3 and 7: 30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Sun 7/28 and 8/47: 30 PM, no show Thu 7/4 or Tue 7/ 16, Tue 7/ 10 2 PM only; audio description and touch tour Sun 7/73 PM (touch tour 1: 30 PM), ASL interpretation Fri 7/ 12 7: 30 PM, open captions Sat 7/ 13 3 PM and Thu 7/ 18 7: 30 PM; Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335 -1650, steppenwolf.org, $20 -$168

REVIEW

Forging a path to forgiveness down Little Bear Ridge Road

Samuel D. Hunter’s new drama is a lightning rod for blistering performances.

By DAN JAKES

The characters at the center of Samuel D. Hunter’s plays aren’t rude, per se. They’re more what you might call post-courteous—people whose battles against the clock, their inadequacies, and/or their loathing, self-directed or otherwise, leave nothing left in the tank for feigned interest in small talk or social grace for the sake of it.

So is the case for the last surviving Fernsbys, the extended-turned-immediate Idaho family at the center of Hunter’s newest one-act, soul-wrenching, and often strikingly funny drama. At the breakout of the COVID19 pandemic, an emotionally and creatively stunted thirtysomething writer (Micah Stock)

temporarily moves in with his sixtysomething nurse aunt (Laurie Metcalf) in his rural hometown in order to settle the estate of his estranged late father.

The last time his dad reached out, Ethan says, was to beg for meth money—then to lob a slur at his gay son upon being rejected. “You know that was the drugs talking,” Sarah tries to reassure him. Ethan flatly points out, “It was also him talking.”

For Metcalf, director Joe Mantello’s exceptional Steppenwolf world premiere production is a career highlight in a career of highlights. Little Bear Ridge Road will, no doubt, have a long life after its debut Steppenwolf run, and yet, the impression Metcalf leaves on Sarah is

so indelible that it’s hard to envision what this play will look like with another actor in the role. She’s matched bar-for-bar in creating incredible dramatic harmonies with Stock, whose embodiment of Ethan is as endlessly frustrating as it is sympathetic. No matter how insolent or self-pitying he gets, Stock has these pools for eyes that just betray every vulnerability he’s trying to hide away, making you want to dive in and rescue him.

Little Bear is also one of the more sophisticated acknowledgments and uses of the pandemic in drama I’ve seen to date. There’s a perverse coziness to clinical depression that can be hard to shed, and the rate at which people climbed out of the collective global hangover after yearslong isolation and death varied from person to person. Some, like Ethan, survived but never escaped. One of the biggest gut punches here comes not from one of the horrifying revelations or verbal jabs but an o and timestamp revealing a full year has gone by without much movement forward in Ethan’s increasingly pathetic life, despite the clouds having lifted around him.

One of the criticisms sometimes lodged against Hunter’s body of work is that it can be maudlin, maybe even indulgent in its misery. He has, no doubt, a fascination with “difficult” characters and situations— Christian fundamentalists, substance abusers, deaths of despair, economic exploitation, and the bleakest chain restaurants and big-box stores imaginable. All of his plays take place in or in the immediate vicinity of a glamourless Idaho, and many feature themes of queer trauma, loneliness, and haunted pasts.

(At this point in Hunter’s career, it’s at least a little funny to imagine a beleaguered Idaho tourism development director opening each new script every few years, skimming the pages, and immediately going, “Oh no, oh jeez, oh c’mon . . . ”)

But I would push back against accusations

of sentimentality. For one, there’s muchearned hope in his works. In Little Bear, that largely comes by way of James (John Drea), a bespectacled astrophysics cutie with family money, clear future goals, and a crush on a big ol’ handsome lug he meets at the Wagon Wheel. One might reasonably wonder what a sweetheart with so much upward mobility and emotional intelligence like James would see in a sad sack like Ethan, but I think that’s answered by Stock’s performance—and the reality that there’s only so many fish in the red-state gay-bar sea.

Hunter, notably, isn’t concerned with happily-ever-afters or will-they-won’t-theys. Though the status of their relationship is left ambiguous, we get the sense James and Ethan’s connection is a finite and necessary respite for them both, and that there’s beauty and value in forming bonds that will inevitably and invariably break.

There are so many elements to this production working in sync, from Mantello’s airtight direction to Scott Pask’s scenic design and Heather Gilbert’s lighting. A seemingly simple couch on a round of carpet, the design elements here tell us exactly who Sarah is and what she prioritizes. It’s a clean, safe, pretension-free space, and the sort of “minimal” that, in fact, requires an incredible amount of specificity and execution. That’s even more true when James, even briefly, gets Ethan to stop furrowing his brow toward the ground and take in the heavens above.

For all of Little Bear’s explosions of catharsis, one of the most hard-hitting times I teared up was in a slower moment of these incredibly well-established characters simply hanging out. Feet up on the couch and snacking out, Sarah bounces thoughts off of James about a streaming show while Ethan paces in the foreground, absolutely terrorizing a medical insurance agent over the phone on Sarah’s behalf. “If you can’t find someone else for me to get mad at,” he seethes, “then I’m going to have to get mad at you.”

It’s a small but profound act of love and unburdening, and it gets to the heart of Hunter’s story of faith and the need to lean on one another. Taking up the mantle of righteous anger at a broken system for someone we love, even briefly, is the sort of quiet, load-bearing act of humanity that makes the pitch-black mystery of the future a little less terrifying to wade into. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Laurie Metcalf (le ) and Micah Stock in Little Bear Ridge Road at Steppenwolf Theatre MICHAEL BROSILOW

PERFORMANCE PICKS

Summer sensations

Our critics highlight some of the most intriguing live performances of the season.

By IRENE HSIAO, DEANNA ISAACS, AND KERRY REID

The cicadas are dying o , but the summer performing arts season is still going full steam ahead. Here are some of the buzziest options to savor in the next couple of months.

COMEDY/VARIETY (Kerry Reid)

Delirium: The Pansy Craze

To close out Pride month, Willy LaQueue (aka Chicago’s Demon Dandy) hosts an evening of “dancing disrobing divas, sirens of song, and feats from freakish fiends!” Inspired by 1920s underground performers, Delirium explores how queer performance aesthetics have been “shaping and shifting culture” before and after the roaring twenties. Featured acts include Faggedy Randy and P. No Noire. 6/28-6/29: Fri-Sat 9:30 PM, Newport Theater, 956 W. Newport, 773-270-3440, newporttheater.com, $35-$45

DANCE (Irene Hsiao)

Tend

Make an appointment with dancers Enid Smith, Chih-Hsien Lin, Gina Hoch-Stall, Helen Lee, and Tina Diaz for an intimate and personal experience of touch, conversation, and movement in Khecari’s Tend in the Yates Gallery of the Chicago Cultural Center. The hour-long performances begin every 30 minutes within an installation of photography, projection, and fabric. Director Julia Rae Antonick says, “I first started thinking about this work because of a curiosity on what might be the other needs being met behind the prevalent practices of grooming services (hair, nails, etc.) and did a deep dive into same-species social grooming (allogrooming). At the same time, I was also

interested in thinking about a world in which a weekly or monthly dance appointment was deemed as necessary or important as one’s therapy appointment or hair appointment. Sometimes there is a feeling of dance being an extravagance that one can’t figure out how to make time for or pay for.” 6/27 and 6/29 and 7/6, 7/8, 7/11, 7/13, and 7/18 (appointments scheduled between noon and 5 PM); Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, khecari.org/tend, free

OPERA (Deanna Isaacs)

African Queens

Soprano Karen Slack and pianist Kevin Miller lead a program that features new works for voice and piano by seven contemporary composers, connected by narrative text and set among some traditional repertoire. Ravinia Festival was the lead commissioner for this project, which honors seven African queens who were celebrated rulers and warriors. Slack, an alum of Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute, is also Lyric Opera’s 2024–2025 artist in residence. The new work is by Jasmine Barnes,

Summer eater & Arts

Damien Geter, Jessie Montgomery, Shawn Okpebholo, Dave Ragland, Carlos Simon, and Joel Thompson. The Martin Theatre is Ravinia’s vintage indoor venue; unlike the Pavilion, it is entirely enclosed. Thu 8/1 7:30 PM (gates open 5 PM); Martin Theatre, Ravinia Festival, 201 Ravinia Park Road (West Parking Lot), Highland Park; ravinia.org, 847-2665100, Martin Theatre $40-$60, lawn $15

THEATER (Kerry Reid) Spank Bank Time Machine

After a short run at the Neo-Futurists last fall, solo performer John Michael brings his funny and aching piece about friendship, drugs, and mankinis to Steppenwolf’s LookOut series this weekend. The self-described “trauma clown” talks about sex, the pain of losing friends to overdose, and Narcan as a tool for “time travel” in saving lives. Information about Narcan will be available at each performance through the

Community Outreach Intervention Projects of the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health. 6/28-6/30: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM; ASL interpretation at 6/30 performance; Steppenwolf 1700 Theater, 1700 N. Halsted, steppenwolf.org, $25

Hedwig and the Angry Inch Haven Chicago goes out the way they came in—with a big, raucous dose of queer musical theater. The company’s first production back in 2013, John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s portrait of trans, East Berlin refugee Hedwig (and her doomed obsession with musical protege Tommy Gnosis) now serves as their swan song. Over the past 11 years, Haven has delivered some of my favorite shows, including 2019’s The Total Bent by Stew and Heidi Rodewald, and Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die in 2017. The company also made its mark with the innovative Director’s Haven program, which helped emerging artists go through the process of putting a fully staged short play on its feet. For Hedwig, JD Caudill directs a genderqueer cast, including Hell in a Handbag regular Tyler Anthony Smith in the title role and Ismael García as bandmate Yitzhak. 7/5-8/4: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; industry night Mon 7/22 7:30 PM, understudy performance Wed 7/31 7:30 PM; Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-3830, havenchi.org, pay-what-youcan previews 7/5-7/9, regular run 7/10-8/4 $36 (reserved $46, students and industry $21) v m letters@chicagoreader.com

Book by TAYLOR MAC

Music and Lyrics by JASON ROBERT BROWN

Choreography by TANYA BIRL - TORRES

Directed by ROB ASHFORD

Based on the New York Times Best-Selling Book by JOHN BERENDT

Acclaimed author John Berendt’s iconic New York Times best seller becomes a seductive new musical. Southern charm is bountiful in Savannah, Georgia. But behind polite smiles, the eccentric residents are filled with secrets and motives. When wealthy antiques dealer Jim Williams is accused of murder, the sensational trial uncovers hidden truths and exposes the fine line between good and evil – which sparks Lady Chablis and other Savannahians to change the city forever. MacArthur “Genius” grantee Taylor Mac, Tony Award winners Jason Robert Brown and Rob Ashford, and choreographer Tanya Birl-Torres bring the true-crime blockbuster book and its beloved characters to life in a new musical adaptation.

EXTENDED

BY POPULAR DEMAND THROUGH AUGUST 11 !

Summer eater & Arts

OPENING

RCorduroy, clown style

The beloved bear comes to crowdpleasing life at Chicago Shakespeare.

In a 1967 letter to his editor Annis Duff, author Don Freeman made an assertion that feels like it makes sense, even if it technically makes no sense: “Buttons and bears do go together, somehow.” He was certainly onto something, and the sentient plush at the center of Amber Mak’s production of Barry Kornhauser’s book-tostage adaptation would be the first to agree.

Gone is the mild-mannered, distractible toy who muses internally in Palatino typeface about climbing mountains and mattresses. No, this Corduroy—played by the rubberbodied, gravity-defying circus artist Jean Claudio in a rousing Chicago Shakespeare Theater debut—has a singular, John Wick–level focus: replacing his missing right overall button, floor upon floor of themed collateral department store mischief be damned.

Mak’s joyful circus-inspired 60-minute staging pulls out just about every kid-pleasing theatrical stop, including bubbles, beach balls, Silly String, dance breaks, confetti, balloons, and a warm and loving mother-daughter pair (Celeste M. Cooper and Demetra Dee, respectively) navigating the universal kid-parent challenge of mastering, or at least not catastrophically botching, chores. One of the special charms of seeing children’s theater is experiencing an age-old bit, like the “holding up a tiny shrunken sweater from the laundry basket” sight gag, absolutely crushing with a crowd of five-year-olds.

Also crushing it is Danielle Davis as the night guard, the closest thing Corduroy has to an antagonist, insomuch as she just wants to retain her job by the morning. It’s a performance of physical comedy and child attention–commanding vocal presence that highlights the Venn diagram overlap between Shakespearean verse and storytelling for kids—a laudable achievement in the fine art of playing pretend. —DAN JAKES

be an actor. Both men are frustrated by the limitations that being Asian and gay in America has put on their prospects. When David accidentally wanders through the path of Wai’s webcam while Hornyscope is on-air, it causes a small sensation and David reluctantly agrees to become Wai’s costar.

In classic rom-com style, the pair can’t see they belong together, though it’s obvious to everyone else in their lives. An on-air kiss—staged as a stunt to gain enough followers to get corporate sponsorship—leads to an irrevocable change in Wai and David’s relationship. This is Token Theatre’s inaugural show, and they throw everything but the kitchen sink at what is, at

CORDUROY Through 7/14: Tue-Wed 11 AM, Thu-Sun 11 AM and 2 PM; no shows Thu 7/4 and Tue 7/9; audio description Sun 7/7 11 AM, sensory-friendly performance Wed 7/10 11 AM, ASL interpretation Fri 7/12 2 PM; Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, $26 for children 12 and under, $42 for adults

RSlapstick rom-com, Asian American style

Token Theatre’s Zac Efron marks them as a company to watch.

Wai (Wai Yim) is the flamboyant, brash host of a YouTube show called Hornyscope; David (Hansel Tan) is his buttoned-up friend, who works as a teacher but wants to

heart, a simple story. The tone oscillates from overthe-top camp comedy to heartfelt drama in sometimes jarring ways. The play is at its best when addressing the generational divide between the men and their respective Chinese and Korean parents, rather than listing the inequities their race and orientation subject them to. The first feels lived-in and felt, while the other, though undoubtedly valid, comes off as talking points. The sincere moments, especially toward the end, are the most compelling. By that time, the earlier slapstick is mostly forgotten.

This is an ambitious new theater company, and I look forward to what they do next. —DMITRY SAMAROV ZAC EFRON Through 7/21: Thu-Sat 7 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Mon 7/1 7 PM (industry), no performances Sun 6/30 or Thu 7/4; A Red Orchid Theatre, 1531 N. Wells, tokentheatre.net, $40 (industry/seniors $25, students/military $20) v

Corduroy LIZ LAUREN

Summer eater & Arts

FILM SERIES

Stan and Sidney

Explore the cinematic legacies of an unlikely duo, Stan Brakhage and Sidney Lumet, with two retrospective screening series.

By KAT SACHS

What do experimental cinema pioneer Stan Brakhage and five-time Oscar nominee (and Honorary Oscar winner) Sidney Lumet have in common? Both are filmmakers . . . and, well, that’s where the similarities end. One might even think of them as epitomizing opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum: Brakhage eschews all expectations of both form and content, and Lumet embraces a more conventional form to espouse similarly conventional stories, albeit to a cumulatively powerful e ect.

Chicagoans will have the opportunity to reevaluate this assertion June 28–30, as Tone Glow (helmed by my colleague, Reader contributor Joshua Minsoo Kim) presents Inventing Eternity: The Undersung Films of Late-Era Stan Brakhage, a 51-film, eight-program retrospective of Brakhage’s later work, projected entirely on 16-millimeter at Sweet Void Cinema in Humboldt Park. Meanwhile, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, the Sidney Lumet Centennial retrospective is underway through August 21, with 12 films spanning the director’s career from start to finish.

Brakhage himself may have best qualified the di erence between what he and filmmakers like Lumet did. “Poetry is a totally di erent art than film,” he told IndieWire in a 2001 interview about what made filmmakers like himself di erent from those working with or adjacent to the studio system. “But it separates what my contemporaries and I do from

R INVENTING ETERNITY: THE UNDERSUNG FILMS OF LATE-ERA STAN BRAKHAGE Fri 6/28 –Sun 6/30, Sweet Void Cinema, 3036 W. Chicago, free, sweetvoidcinema.com

R SIDNEY LUMET CENTENNIAL Through Wed 8/21, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, $13 general admission, $ 8 students and youth, $ 6 Film Center members, $ 5 SAIC students and faculty, and staff of the Art Institute, siskelfilmcenter.org/lumet

grown children, his sons in particular, as well as about their feelings toward the father who had been filming them since birth.” (His 1959 film Window Water Baby Moving, for example, famously documents the birth of Brakhage’s first child with then wife Jane.)

A Child’s Garden and the Serious Sea (1991), screening Sunday, June 30 at 2 PM with The Mammals of Victoria (1994), “shows Brakhage in full maturity, making work unsurpassed in all of cinema,” writes R. Bruce Elder in his

the Hollywood movie, in a way that doesn’t assume that one is greater than the other. Novelists and poets have existed side by side forever. The Hollywood movies are more like novels, and the kinds of films I make are more like poems.”

Several of the programs are composed of short films, the majority of which are under ten minutes; the longest of the films being screened, Tortured Dust (1984), is approximately 90 minutes and will be presented with two short films on Friday, June 28, at 9 PM. The final entry of his Book of the Film cycle, Tortured Dust is a four-part film that he insisted be screened altogether. “For Brakhage,” writes critic Tony Pipolo in his book

The Melancholy Lens: Loss and Mourning in American Avant-Garde Cinema , “having children and raising a family were essential to his self-image, but also sources of anxiety and rage. . . . Perhaps the film title that best expresses this fact is Tortured Dust .” Pipolo continues that the film “prompts the viewer to think about Brakhage’s feelings toward his

childhood environs of his second wife, Marilyn Jull, in Victoria, British Columbia. He has said that they were conceived of as an imaginary biography of di erent stages of Marilyn’s life as refracted through ‘the weave of sea and light and seen,’ in which the first part corresponds to her early childhood, the second to adolescence, and the third to a purported ‘mid-aged crisis.’”

As I suggested above, nothing is ever so straightforward in a Brakhage film. Yet, there is something to suggest that it was relatively straightforward to Brakhage himself. Former Reader critic Fred Camper writes that the artist “films his objects so as to violate the possibility of the viewer making any connection with his direct experience. One cannot understand Brakhage in terms of what you see, or the way you view the world; you must understand his work by trying to understand the way he sees the world.”

book The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson. The film “isolates and calls to our attention the perceptual contents of our quotidian existence and, by doing so, encourages us to understand them in a new way.” If you’re unfamiliar with Brakhage’s work, it’s probably evident by now that they defy summarization; there is no plot in his films, only perception. Water is, quite literally, the core element of this particular work. As Elder elaborates, “The film’s prolonged concentration on such a simple element makes [it] an extraordinary display of Brakhage’s capacity to create many (seemingly endless) variations from a single visual form, and thus of the strength and fecundity of his imagination.”

The film screens as part of a program that’s the entire first half of Brakhage’s Vancouver Island Quartet; the second part, which is also composed of two films, screens at 4:30 PM. As David James notes in Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker, “The series is perhaps Brakhage’s most extensive study of a single location, the

Attempting to palliate Brakhage’s films by understanding them as being symbolic is a two-fold exercise in futility and perspicacity. On Saturday, June 29, at 2 PM, the three series mentioned in the program title will screen as part of Closed-Eye Visions: The Roman, Egyptian, and Babylon Series. The closed eye of the title refers to hypnagogic vision, or, as Camper simply defines, “the shapes and colors we see when our eyes are closed.” Of course, the titles of these films evoke more clearly rendered symbols, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics. Rather, as Brakhage said in a 1993 interview with Sight & Sound, “When I made those films I was trying to do two things: to get a sense of the moving visual thinking of those cultures, and to see how out of it rose the glyphs—hieroglyphs—that shape their language. I tried to represent pictorially what occurs during this ‘seeing,’ and how within this flow of electrical colouration there are also bits of memory feedback that intermix with the hypnagogic and help shape the glyphs.”

The above are but a smattering of the late-era Brakhage films (both represented in the program and in his overall filmography) and just a small fraction of the over 350 films he made overall. The Inventing Eternity retrospective also includes a program of works made for and with fellow experimental filmmaker Phil Solomon (The Subconscious Storehouse: From Stan Brakhage to Phil Solomon on Friday, June 28, at 7 PM) and two programs—Brakhage and the Composers of the Avant-Garde on Saturday at 4:30 PM and Peculiar Laws: The Faust Films at 8 PM—that involve sound, a rarity among Brakhage’s

A still from Stan Brakhage’s Night Music (1986) SIGHT & SOUND

The Sit Down

Summer eater & Arts

typically silent oeuvre. “Film is obviously visual,” Brakhage said in the aforementioned Sight & Sound interview about his creative philosophy around sound, “and from an aesthetic standpoint, I see no need for a film to be accompanied by sound any more than I would expect a painting to be.”

Sidney Lumet, however, asserted that “Almost every picture is improved by a good musical score.” What is a starker contrast than silence and sound? Still, in spite of the filmmakers’ differences, it can’t be denied that both were prolific, respective to their modes. Lumet made 44 films in 50 years, beginning with 12 Angry Men in 1957 (what a debut) to Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in 2007, a few years before his death in 2011. Both are included in the Centennial series, with the former having already screened and the latter, appropriately, closing it out. Lumet’s films were distinct enough that it wouldn’t be right to think of him as a mere journeyman; rather, he was more of a craftsman, a consummate filmmaker in the most technical sense of the word whilst still making it seem almost e ortless.

stories involving injustice ( 12 Angry Men and 1982’s The Verdict), the Holocaust (1964’s The Pawnbroker ), an indictment of the military and corporal punishment ( The Hill ), police corruption ( Serpico and 1981’s Prince of the City), and anti-war activism (1988’s Running on Empty)—and that’s just 12 films. He did not, however, consider himself a director of films specifically focused on such issues. Rather, he liked them as character studies, saying that “usually the most dramatic confrontations happen between characters in the context

of the society they live in. . . . So I guess my taste leads me to films that have political undercurrents.”

“To say he lacked a noticeable visual style is a compliment,” wrote Roger Ebert in his remembrance of the director upon his death. “He reduced every scene to its necessary elements, and filmed them, he liked to say, ‘invisibly.’ You should not be thinking about the camera. He wanted you to think about the characters and the story.”

Lumet was a proud actor’s director; his films may be best judged for the strength of their performances, with often several distinguished turns amongst a cast. Most popularly it’s the likes of Henry Fonda as the holdout juror in 12 Angry Men and a wide-eyed (literally) Al Pacino in Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975) (both screening as part of the series); less so it’s Sean Connery in The Hill (1965), between Bond roles, and The Anderson Tapes (1971). Smaller characters are often even more noticeable in Lumet’s films.

Consider the rest of the jury in 12 Angry Men, John Cazale in Dog Day Afternoon, F. Murray Abraham in Serpico, and Beatrice Straight in Network (1976). There are no small parts, they say, just small actors. Luckily there are neither in Lumet’s films.

Nor are there small subjects. Just among the films playing in the Film Center’s series are

Also included in the series is Lumet’s much-maligned but now cult classic musical The Wiz (1978), an adaptation of the 1974 Broadway musical, starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor. For the Reader , Dave Kehr remarked about the fi lm, “A lot to look at, little to contemplate, and nothing to hum.” (Whereas one might definitively say of any Brakhage film, a lot to look at, even more to contemplate, and still nothing to hum.) “Still,” Kehr concedes, “it’s one of the more competent neomusicals of the period.” Most of Lumet’s fi lms were set in his native New York, and he campaigned to have the film both set and made in the city. It’s since become a beloved representation of Black joy, a legacy for which its makers could be proud.

Brakhage and Lumet couldn’t be more different, but these retrospectives offer a chance to explore a spectrum of cinema in a concerted way rarely a orded to the modern moviegoer. Whether it’s the crash course in late-era Brakhage or the more contemplative pacing of a several-month Lumet series, there’s something for everyone and much to learn about fi lm, the fi lmmakers, and maybe even yourself. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

hosted by Shawnee Dez

A still from Sidney Lumet’s The Wiz (1978)

GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER

Summer eater & Arts

In the past week, I’ve seen two films directed by Mike Nichols. The first was his 1996 comedy The Birdcage—written by his one-time improvisational comedy partner and a venerable auteur in her own right, Elaine May, one of my favorite filmmakers—and the second was his 1966 feature debut, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Each Music Box Theatre screening had its particular advantages: there was a short drag show before The Birdcage, which played as part of the monthly Rated Q series, where drag is the amuse-bouche before the movie meal, and Virginia Woolf? was screening on 35 millimeter. Enough said.

At first they may seem entirely di erent, almost impossibly made by the same person, but upon further consideration, similarities begin to emerge. Most significantly, both center on romantic partnerships and familial constructs (real and imagined) and confront the issue of truth and how it pertains to reality. The Birdcage is a remake of Édouard Molinaro’s 1978 French film La Cage aux Folles (itself based on Jean Poiret’s 1973 play); in it, nightclub owner Armand (the late, great Robin Williams) is compelled to hide both his sexuality and his life partner/club star, Albert (Nathan Lane), at the behest of his son, Val (Dan Futterman), who’s marrying the daughter of a conservative senator. (At the screening, someone would yell, “You suck, Val!” everytime he appeared onscreen. I’m usually not a fan of having my movie viewing disturbed as such, but it felt appropriate here, because Val really does suck.)

In Virginia Woolf? the game of cat and mouse between older couple George (Richard Burton) and Martha (Elizabeth Taylor), and between

them and younger couple Nick (George Segal) and Honey (Sandy Dennis), has the illusion of truth at its center. Various facets of George and Martha’s chaotic relationship and the question of whether or not they’re real or simply storylines in a never-ending, tortuous role-play game become points of contention between all involved. (Said role-play may or may not also be foreplay? Honestly, while I understand it di erently than I did when I studied the text in college, I still think it’s possible that I don’t actually understand it at all.)

Overall, I adore The Birdcage as a riotous comedy (May’s script, my god!) that makes me double over in laughter every time I see it. I also make it a point to go to as many Rated Q screenings as I can; while in general I’m not a big fan of the recent trends of screenings needing to be “eventized,” I like these because not only is drag another art form, but it can sometimes help to better understand the film in question. Camp, when contextualized as such, can take on an entirely new meaning. With Virginia Woolf? in particular, I just really love hearing Elizabeth Taylor rage in adaptations of great stage plays.

(See also: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which screened last month also as part of the ongoing Liz & Monty Matinees series.) “I am the Earth Mother,” she declares in this, “and you are all flops!” The audience broke into applause at this part, and rightfully so.

Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film bu , collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to o er.

NOW PLAYING

Daddio

What we have in Daddio is a failure to imagine—and what a failure. In a time when it’s finally trendy again to explore gender, identity, and the systems we take for granted, how exhausting for a movie to believe repeating the same cliches is a revelation.

Any time a woman character claims she’s “not that girl” is generally a clear indicator of cliche (and a red flag), and Dakota Johnson’s fare embodies everything about the concept to the degree that her character is just credited as “Girlie.” Meanwhile, Sean Penn’s salty, working-class cabbie chauffeuring her around NYC for a long convo and informal therapy session gets a claim to no less than three character names throughout Daddio’s runtime.

As the movie quickly establishes its old-school sympathies—an affection for cash versus the cloud, cabs in general, and, most predictably, a distaste for plugging in—Johnson remains stubbornly blurred. She is meant to represent a confident modern woman, a programmer who thrives in a male world, but the closest thing she has to a personality is that of an actress trying on a very outdated pick-me girl persona.

It would be fun if this were a conscious choice, but it’s difficult to think of a cliche Johnson doesn’t embody: an affair with a married family man old enough to be her father, the daddy issues, a lack of closeness to other women, including her sister. As for Penn, the movie seems to believe his proclamations regarding the male taste for female flesh is an edgy throwback to when you could tell it like it is. Yawn.

If writer-director Christy Hall can’t imagine a world where Sean Penn’s demographic isn’t the center of everything, she at least shows a lack of interest in punishing Johnson for her mistakes. That’s cold comfort when other films have imagined better, then and now. —ANDREA THOMPSON R, 101 min. Wide release in theaters

ing to call him a celebrity; he’s a movie star. This diva is only put together because of one person: Zara (Joey King), his hard-working 24-year-old assistant who grabs his dry cleaning, organizes his schedule, and regularly picks up diamond earrings to console Chris’s girlfriends when he dumps them. Yikes.

One day, Chris spirals into one of his routine temper tantrums, and Zara has had enough. Rather than writing the apology letter he demands, she leaves. But Chris, partially realizing his mistakes, drive’s to Zara’s home to apologize. There, he stumbles inside an unlocked door and terrifies Zara’s mother Brooke (Kidman). Somehow, the two spend the a ernoon sipping on Casamigos and scratching the surface of their traumas. One thing leads to the next, and the unlikely couple begins to hook up. That is until Zara walks in, and, in shock, chokes on her gumball a er slamming her head into the door frame. It’s a slapstick opening to a tumultuous romance.

Granted, Efron and Kidman have some chemistry. It’s likely due to the actors’ raw talent, because it’s certainly not coming from the wooden and occasionally nonsensical script. All that said, the rest of A Family Affair lacks the heart needed to pull off the older single mom fantasy. It’s troubled by Zara, whose emotions are inaccessible and whose storyline appears poorly thought out. Like any dime-store romance, A Family Affair is not going to stand the test of time. —MAXWELL RABB PG-13, 111 min. Netflix

R Fancy Dance

A Family Affair

An arrogant movie star in his mid-30s with intimacy issues breaks into his assistant’s house and instead finds her mother, a widowed fashion writer living in a waterside mansion. Like magic, they fall in love. This reads like the back cover of a pulp fiction romance novel, where in reality, it’s an A-list rom-com with arguably the most shocking pairing of the 2020s: Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman.

A Family Affair is the latest addition to the apparent demand for middle-aged moms to date celebrities. Well, in this case, as Efron’s Chris Cole emphasizes, it’s insult-

Lily Gladstone appeared in two films in 2023. Martin Scorsese’s white-centered Killers of the Flower Moon received all the attention, but Erica Tremblay’s Fancy Dance is so far superior that it feels like an insult to even compare them. Gladstone plays Jax, a Cayuga woman whose sister, Wadatawi, has disappeared from the rez. Jax is desperately searching for her while caring for Wadatawi’s 13-year-old daughter, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson). The police and authorities are much more interested in separating Roki from Jax (who has a past criminal record) than they are in finding out what happened to Wadatawi, and the film quietly but relentlessly depicts the dynamics of racist microand not-so-micro aggressions. Deroy-Olson is stunning as a girl who can’t let herself know what she’s obviously way too smart not to know, and Gladstone, in one of the absolute best performances of the year, portrays Jax with layer a er layer of strength and vulnerability, fear and courage. Bleak as the story is, Tremblay refuses to make it solely about trauma or despair, dwelling lovingly on the relationship between Jax and Roki, as aunt (or “other mother” in Cayuga) teaches niece how to steal cars and deal with her first period, while niece teaches aunt how to mourn. Fancy Dance is about how Native women are ignored and marginalized, so it’s not exactly a surprise that it too, as a story about Native women, hasn’t gotten the public or critical attention it deserves. Now that it’s streaming on Apple TV+, though, you should do yourself a favor and watch this perfect, heartbreaking film. —NOAH BERLATSKY R, 90 min Apple TV+, limited release in theaters v

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) MUSIC BOX THEATRE

Summer eater & Arts

FESTIVAL PREVIEW

Sundance nds new horizons in Chicago

The city’s independent film scene will step onto an international stage when Sundance Institute x Chicago brings the iconic fest to the midwest.

By MAXWELL RABB

Sundance is searching for new horizons—and what’s better than the Chicago skyline?

Back in 1978, at the Utah/U.S. Film Festival in Salt Lake City, the low-budget comedy western The Whole Shootin’ Match mesmerized a certain Robert Redford. This movie affected the famed actor so much that he devoted himself to independent filmmaking by founding the Sundance Institute on a small ranch outside Park City in 1981. By 1985, the institute swallowed the state’s seminal film festival, and ever since, Sundance has been tethered to the small ski resort town.

In recent months, Sundance revealed it’s looking for a new home, with budding interest from Atlanta, Boulder, San Francisco, and many other cultural hubs. But first, the Sundance Institute is breaking new ground in Chicago for its first-ever festival outside of the Beehive State. Through its collaboration with Choose Chicago and the City of Chicago, the Sundance Institute is adding a one of a kind pin to the Windy City’s dense film festival schedule, which boasts more than 50 events. This move promises to foster a symbiotic relationship, meant to expand the horizons for independent filmmakers and audiences alike.

“And yet, there’s been a sense of isolation from access to the larger industry and networks, and Sundance and their team provide that.”

Sundance Institute x Chicago will kick off on June 28, immediately following Chicago’s

R SUNDANCE INSTITUTE X CHICAGO

Fri 6/28 –Sun 6/30

Davis Theater, Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago Cultural Center Free–$22 40

tor Dawn Porter on June 28. This film captures the life and career of Luther Vandross through rare archival footage and talking heads as star-striking as Mariah Carey and Dionne Warwick. Opening June 29 is Sugarcane, directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, a documentary exploring the dark history of an Indigenous residential school and its lasting impacts on the Sugarcane Reserve.

Meanwhile, Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man , starring Sebastian Stan, follows an aspiring actor who submits himself to massive surgical procedures to achieve his dream face. However, the world he dreamed of crumbles in front of his eyes. Caroline Lindy’s Your Monster is closing the festival, featuring a phenomenal cast composed of Melissa Barrera, Tommy Dewey, and Meghann Fahy. This fantastical horror-romance follows a heart-

Chicago’s distinct creative voice, further establishing the city as a pivotal center for innovative filmmaking and cultural exchange.

“We’re trying to encourage and champion these local creators that are doing this work currently, but also trying to create the relationships and the partnerships that will lead to our community as a whole,” Zeiger

“Chicago is a fantastic place to make films—it’s a fantastic place to be an independent filmmaker.”

said. “[We want] the stakeholders in our city to think about, to support our storytellers, [because] we need to support our filmmakers if we want to have a media landscape that is not just Hollywood product, that is not just commercial product for mass audiences. It’s important to celebrate these smaller films and to help them have an impact beyond their size.”

Beyond the film screenings, there is a short film master class on June 29 and 30, led by Sundance programmer Mike Plante, who will provide insight into the film selection process and the process of making a short film. The A Better Way? panel, composed of film experts and cultural representatives such as Lauren Pabst of the MacArthur Foundation, will talk about the evolving landscape of film production and its financial sustainability.

“Chicago is the primary talent hub in the country for so many creatives,” Jonah Zeiger, deputy commissioner at the Chicago Film Office within the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, told the Reader

Independent Film Exhibition Conference, which closes on the same day. The inaugural festival’s primary programming will premiere four films from the January 2024 Sundance Film Festival. Accompanying these films, the new festival will host a full docket of short film programming, Q&A panels at the Chicago Cultural Center, and several workshops for emerging filmmakers.

Kicking o the screenings, Sundance Institute x Chicago will present the soulful documentary Luther: Never Too Much from direc-

broken actress who finds a (more sympathetic than most) monster in her closet.

As Sundance Institute x Chicago prepares to roll out this trailblazing programming, the festival sets the stage for widespread community interaction and support. It is crucial for both the festival and the City of Chicago that this event serves as a catalyst to best position Chicago on the international playing field. Carrying Sundance’s long-standing mission of uplifting local and small-budget talent, the festival showcases global stories. It amplifies

“This collaboration . . . is a momentous occasion for our city,” Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a press statement. “It not only celebrates our rich filmmaking heritage but also provides an unparalleled platform for our local talent to engage with industry leaders and decision-makers.”

Zeiger added, “I’m hoping that the excitement and the buzz generated by this weekend will help people realize that Chicago is a fantastic place to make films—it’s a fantastic place to be an independent filmmaker.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

A still from Sugarcane, screening June 29 and 30 as part of Sundance Institute x Chicago SUNDANCE INSTITUTE/CHOOSE CHICAGO

MUSIC

“Trying to build a scene that was super hip-hop, super young, and then coming back into a war zone at the same time and fi lming it was wild,” says

CITY OF WIN

Mikahl Anthony’s debut album holds more than a decade of history

Muse has its roots in the turbulent time when he was filming the 2014 protests in Ferguson and shaping Chicago hip-hop in THEMpeople.

By ALEJANDRO HERNANDEZ

City of Win is a series curated by Isiah “ThoughtPoet” Veney and written by Alejandro Hernandez that uses prose and photography to create portraits of Chicago musicians and cultural innovators working to create positive change in their communities.

During the back half of hip-hop’s iconic blog era—roughly 2012 through 2016—the Chicago music community experienced what many refer to today as a renaissance. One of the city’s key sound architects at that time was the collective THEMpeople, whose members included Sean

Deaux, theMIND, Renzell (aka Lboogie), Via Rosa (later of Drama), and Saint Louis native Mikahl Anthony. They specialized in that soulful blend of hip-hop, jazz, and R&B that would help propel artists such as Mick Jenkins, Noname, and Chance the Rapper to national fame.

Mikahl Anthony says that music chose him. As a kid, he looked up to his older brother, a B-boy whose career led him to Hollywood while Anthony was in the fifth grade. The following year, Anthony was recruited into his middle school’s band, where he was assigned to play trumpet. He says that growing up in

the midwest during the late 90s and early 2000s heavily influenced his creative direction—his move to Chicago in 2007 was even directly inspired by Lupe Fiasco’s 2006 debut album, Food & Liquor.

“The first tape I bought was Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. It had the parental advisory, so you had to get your parents to buy—and I had to beg my mom to get it,” he says. “I played that shit till the tape popped. That’s what kinda represented my style, because I’m really not a dope singer, but I feel like I have vocals. But Bone was kind of cool because they didn’t really sing, but they had melody.”

These days Anthony splits his time between Chicago and Saint Louis, and he remains loyal to midwestern sounds. “[Bone’s] melodic rapping style was a midwest thing,” he says. “I think a lot of midwestern people have southern connections. Miles Davis is from Saint Louis; Scott Joplin is from here. The blues cats from Chicago, they was rapping too.”

Even as Anthony was helping to build a foundation for an entire generation of Chicago artists, he was working on an impressive catalog of his own—music that he’s kept mostly to himself for nearly a decade. Earlier this month, he finally released some of it on an album called Muse

The title means “misusing sensual energy,” and it’s inspired by many of the women who’ve been part of his life over the years. He realized, after going to therapy and unpacking his relationships, that he’d often dated women whose emotional style reminds him of his mother: he calls her his best friend and a great woman, but sometimes, he says, “she was terrible.” On the latter half of the album, he touches on his troubles with knowing how to receive love, which he connects to his upbringing.

“These are my journal entries from really heavy stories—that’s why I put them on Soundcloud,” Anthony explains. “Never gave a fuck about putting them on DSPs until now. These songs are about women that I was dating while focusing on the collective—I was so focused on [THEMpeople] and everything going on in Chicago culture and making sure we curated that properly, that my only relief was dealing in these particular connections.” On the first verse of Muse track “Sooth Sayings,” Anthony sings about seeking life’s answers in psychoactive substances and esoteric belief systems: “Every book has its knowledge / And everyone prays for profit / What should I believe? / My religion was the trees / So we were rolling woods.” In the second verse, he shifts gears to rap about trying

Mikahl Anthony. THOUGHTPOET

to find that same sense of inner peace in the company of a woman. Both searches are attempts to escape the trauma of racial injustice.

Anthony has lived through some of the crucial developments in the Black Lives Matter movement, particularly the Ferguson protests in 2014, and this has had a significant impact on the themes of Muse. He’s worked in video not just to promote musical projects but also to document these important acts of resistance—one of his short films, the 2014 production No End Theory, captures some of the responses in Saint Louis to Michael Brown’s killing.

MUSIC

about love and life in the ghetto in a cleareyed and compassionate way that calls back to Gaye’s 1971 classic. “A generation of killers and leaders / Seeking love,” he sings. “Pushed out of school / And raised by the crooks / And loved by the girl.”

In the same song, he also confronts his experiences in Ferguson, which marked him so deeply: “We’re gonna march down into the face of the empire / Yelling hands up, don’t shoot, arms up, don’t shoot.”

Anthony vividly remembers that time in his life when he was immersed in THEMpeople and immersed in the movement. “Being back

As a filmmaker and student of history, Anthony draws parallels between the present wave of protests and the social upheavals of the Harlem Renaissance and Vietnam War. He says the music of those eras was also shaped by the political climate.

“The soundtrack for the Vietnam War was a beautiful love language, but it was also a beautiful drug language,” he says. “Marvin Gaye was saying, ‘What’s going on,’ and it sounded beautiful. He was giving you a clinic on love and beauty during a time when Black people were tryna figure ourselves out.”

“Vintage Collection,” the intro track on Muse, sets the tone for the project. Frenetic jazz fusion complements Anthony’s melodic crooning, and his lyrics speak not just for himself but also on behalf of a generation. He talks

and forth between Chicago and trying to build a scene that was super hip-hop, super young, and then coming back into a war zone at the same time and filming it was wild,” he recalls. “I was going back home to get my scalp scratched from being out in Ferguson.”

Muse is the soundtrack of that period. “These are all connected ideas, and it was just happening at one time,” Anthony says. “The album encapsulates those concepts.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Photos by ThoughtPoet of Unsocial Aesthetics (UAES), a digital creative studio and resource collective designed to elevate communitydriven storytelling and social activism in Chicago and beyond

Mikahl Anthony THOUGHTPOET FOR CHICAGO READER

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of June 27

b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

UK producer Om Unit brings his ever-evolving dance sound to Chicago

OM

UNIT, FRAIL808, CHRIS WIDMAN, WHOA-B, JACE INMAN

Presented by WLUW’s Abstract Science Sat 6/29, 6 PM, Chase House, Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland, $30, $25 in advance. 21+

IN THE 2000S, UK producer and DJ Jim Coles was up to his eyebrows in hip-hop culture— under the name 2tall, he’d mastered turntablism, battling, and sampling. But as he moved into the 2010s, he shifted his attention back to dance music (he’d produced jungle tracks as a teenager in the 90s) and changed his stage name. As Om Unit, he began releasing music that braided together hyperfast UK rave-style jungle and Chicago footwork—he was one of several forward-thinking British producers and labels transfixed by that futuristic house-derived sound at the time. But as Coles explained to Red Bull Music Academy a few years later, he was wary of limiting himself by giving too much credence to the various stylistic silos in electronic music. “Traditional genre boundaries in 2013 are null and void from the top down, we need to really get over that and just enjoy music for what it is,” he said. “I think your average young person just takes that for granted by this point.”

More than a decade later, Coles continues to find new expressive pathways in dance music. His 2021 album Acid Dub Studies kicked off a series of spacey releases that explore combinations of hard-edged percussion and dub’s subterranean mysteries; Coles has since dropped a sequel to that LP and two fulllength remixes that share the title Acid Dub Versions . His love for dub is also audible on the new Rushing 1621 (Local Action), a collaborative EP with D.C. dance artist James Bangura. The resonant bass and shuddering drums of “Ruffneck” energize the track’s squiggly synths the way the approaching stomps of a Jurassic Park T. Rex shiver the surface of a puddle. —LEOR GALIL

FRIDAY28

Logan Square Arts Festival day one

See also Sat 6/29 and Sun 6/30. Monument Stage: Hannah Frances (5:30 PM), Khaliyah X (7 PM), MJ Lenderman & the Wind (9 PM). Milwaukee Stage: Gully Boys (6:15 PM), Wishy (8 PM). 5–10 PM, Illinois Centennial Monument, intersection of Logan, Kedzie, and Milwaukee, $10 suggested donation. F b

The Logan Square Arts Festival has evolved significantly since its founding in 2009 as the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival. It now occupies the intersection by the Illinois Centennial Monument with vendors, food trucks, and two stages showcasing local and touring up-and-comers in a variety of genres. This year’s music lineup is pretty sweet. On Friday evening, Asheville-based alt-southernrockers MJ Linderman & the Wind (you can get a taste of their rich live sound on last year’s Live and

MJ Lenderman plays at the Logan Square Arts Festival on Friday. COURTESY THE ARTIST

Binki performs at the Logan Square Arts Festival on Sunday.

Loose!) share the bill on the Monument Stage with rising Chicago R&B star Khaliyah X and eclectic new-folk singer-songwriter Hannah Frances. Competition from the Milwaukee Stage will be fierce, though, with sets from Indianapolis dream-rock quintet Wishy and Minneapolis grunge-pop group Gully Boys (who are actually girls).

And Friday is just an appetizer. Saturday and Sunday provide a full slate of music, with two dozen artists to overload your senses. On Saturday, wonkishly named local posthardcore powerhouse Ira Glass, smoldering Chicago-by-way-of-Mexico City rockers Así Así, and local ambient-folk singer-songwriter Oyeme are among the highlights.

Brooklyn singer-songwriter Binki—whose second EP, 2023’s Antennae, simmers with funky blends of hip-hop and indie rock—closes out the Monument Stage on Sunday with a set timed not to compete with the Milwaukee Stage headliner, Los Angeles indie-punk group Phony. Sunday also features Las Vegas groove-metal band Hemlock and several Chicago acts, including horn-driven fusion group New Nostalgia and dreamy bedroom-pop artist Warm Human. For a glimpse of future stars in action, look no further than the Intonation All-Stars, a youth ensemble composed of students from the Intonation Institute.

This lively, diverse bill suggests that the future of summer outdoor music in Chicago lies in neighborhood-friendly fests filled with strong local talent and touring stars on the rise, not bloated extravaganzas that leave behind litter and resentments. The Logan Square Arts Festival is searching for a new location, because the construction that just began on the redesigned Logan Square traffic circle isn’t supposed to end till summer 2026. Increasing insurance and security costs are already putting the pinch on the event’s organizers, so think twice about brushing off that suggested donation— neighborhood support is vital to neighborhoodfriendly fests. —MONICA KENDRICK

SATURDAY29

AJRadico Binki headlines. 10 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $24.72, 21+

Queens rapper, producer, and engineer AJRadico approaches the textures of his music like an inventive architect. He takes great care to be sure every subtle detail is exactly where it should be, and he arranges all the elements so they sound fresh—he can convince you, even against the evidence of your memory, that you’re hearing a specific set of percussion tones for the very first time. On his smoldering 2022 single “Waste No Time,” AJRadico superimposes downy R&B synths and a dusty clarinet loop onto percussion reminiscent of New York drill—skipping, light-footed hi-hats and heavy bass bombs. When AJRadico swoops in with his multitracked, half-sung vocal hook, his almighty swagger will convince you to follow him wherever he leads. He’s a de and animated vocalist, and the way he stitches together R&B crooning and a chopper-style triplet flow makes him sound like he came out of Chicago’s west-side scene in 1997. He’s baked 1990s west-coast hip-hop into his 2023 modern-funk single, “Spell It Out,” but its hypercool gloss makes it feel up-to-the-minute. —LEOR GALIL

MUSIC

Logan Square Arts Festival day two See Fri 6/28. Monument Stage: Oyeme (12:45 PM), Airiel (2:15 PM), Chillona (3:45 PM), Ira Glass (5:15 PM), Precocious Neophyte (7 PM), McKinley Dixon (9 PM). Milwaukee Stage: Plum (noon), Así Así (1:30 PM), Footballhead (3 PM), Dari Bay (4:30 PM), Packs (6 PM), Salami Rose Joe Louis (8 PM). Noon–10 PM, Illinois Centennial Monument, intersection of Logan, Kedzie, and Milwaukee, $10 suggested donation. F b

Om Unit See Pick of the Week at le . Presented by WLUW’s Abstract Science. Frail808, Chris Widman, Whoa-B, and VJ Jace Inman open. 6 PM, Chase House, Epiphany Center for the Arts, 201 S. Ashland, $30, $25 in advance. 21+

SUNDAY30

Caroline Davis & Wendy Eisenberg A quartet of Dave Rempis, Joshua Abrams, Avreeayl Ra, and Jim Baker headlines. 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $15. 21+

Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg are not an obvious musical pairing. Davis is an alto saxophonist whose extramusical interests—cardiac and cognitive functions, the films of Ingmar Bergman—shape the rhythms and dynamics of her compositions, which are also informed by the harmonic architecture and improvisational spirit of Wayne Shorter, Lee Konitz, and Von Freeman. Eisenberg is a guitar and banjo player whose adroit technique and affinity for complex, changing structures has proved equally applicable to radically different tasks: distilling the austerity of Christian Wolff ’s The Possibility of a New Work for Guitar , igniting the thrashy math-rock of Editrix, and powering the clangorous machinery of

MUSIC

the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. But they’re friends, and when one of their mutuals provided them with a steady rehearsal space in 2022, they began playing together in private for the sheer pleasure of it. Their improvisations evolved into abstract, melodically unpredictable songs and intricate instrumentals that bind together intensity and restraint; Eisenberg handles most of the leads, but both musicians sing. The duo’s debut LP, Accept When (Astral Spirits), is an authentic synthesis, in that neither could have produced it alone; Eisenberg flirts with cool jazz lyricism on “How Sensitive,” and Davis plays with unprecedented pungency throughout. Davis and Eisenberg share the bill with Rempis/Abrams/ Ra + Baker, a splendid local quartet that specializes in questing, long-form total improvisation. —BILL MEYER

Logan Square Arts Festival day three See Fri 6/28. Monument Stage: New Nostalgia (12:45 PM), Adelaide (2:15 PM), Woes (3:45 PM), Hemlock (5:15 PM), Flooding (7 PM), Binki (9 PM). Milwaukee Stage: Samuel Aaron (noon), Intonation All-Stars (1:30 PM), Warm Human (3 PM), BSA Gold (4:30 PM), Stuck (6 PM), Phony (8 PM). Noon–10 PM, Illinois Centennial Monument, intersection of Logan, Kedzie, and Milwaukee, $10 suggested donation. F b

Taste Rubber Imelda Marcos headline; Sexual Jeremy, Taste Rubber, and Shri open. 8 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $17.51. 21+

Do you like freewheeling antirock with subtle circus vibes? If so, Chicago’s Taste Rubber might be the band for you! Their sound is like choking on a handful of helium balloons—certain elements evoke the sensation of having strings jammed into your throat or the sharp, acrid tang of latex. In that sense, it’s exactly what their name advertises.

Taste Rubber guitarists Mark Shippy and Jeff

Goulet (alumni of Skin Graft bands U.S. Maple and Lovely Little Girls, respectively) joined forces with bassist Sam Robinson and synthesizer player Abe Collins to create chaos that sits uncomfortably between art-rock and noise. Their 2023 debut, Test (Already Dead Tapes), opens with the nearly nine-minute “Horror Scope,” which creates an almost unbearable tension: it combines the feeling of watching an archer slowly drawing back a bow and aiming the arrow squarely at someone’s eye with the ambient discord of exploring an abandoned house full of broken mirrors during a full moon. “Hare Bodied” is like being on an acid trip and shape-shi ing between a rabbit and a human; each moment suggests a different part of the transmogrification process, as you rapidly and unpredictably morph between different combos of limbs and features. “Makeshift Childbirth” is 15 minutes of wandering, spacious sounds, like trying to find your way out of an eerie, never-ending tunnel, while closer “Pearl Swinery” captures the jaunty frenzy of sweaty clowns on nitrous.

This Sleeping Village show offers a stacked bill for musical weirdos and freaks, headlined by local math-rock elites Imelda Marcos and also featuring Shrift, a newer project by mainstays of the city’s avant-garde music, theater, and art worlds, including Jill Lloyd Flanagan, Carly Wicks, Sonia Monet, and Janice Lim. They’ll also be joined by Texas experimental outfit Sexual Jeremy, whose jittery, nu metal–infused track “Tragic Clown Dog” tells you exactly what to expect of the night’s ambience. —MICCO CAPORALE

MONDAY1

Charlie Musselwhite Ivan Singh opens. 6:30 PM, Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph. F b

It must be strange to have an epic music career but have your fame eclipsed by a fictional character inspired by your work and persona. Though some folks dispute the connection, blues harmonica master Charlie Musselwhite is the probable model for Elwood Blues, the harmonica- slinging

bluesman Dan Aykroyd invented for the Blues Brothers, his comedy and music act with John Belushi.

One thing that isn’t up for debate is that Musselwhite has a vital place in the Windy City’s rich musical history. Born in Mississippi, Musselwhite worked as a ditch digger and moonshine runner before heading to Chicago at age 18 to make music and seek out the holy men of the blues. By the time he arrived in 1962, a major blues revival was underway, and he fit right into the south-side scene—he met masters such as Muddy Waters and Little Walter as well as fellow up-and-comers, among them guitarist Mike Bloomfield and vocalist and harpist Paul Butterfield.

When he wasn’t performing, Musselwhite held down a job at Jazz Record Mart, even renting a room in the store’s basement for a time with legendary harpist Big Joe Williams. Jazz Record Mart was where he met Vanguard Records A&R man Sam Charters, who signed the 22-year-old to the label.

In 1967, Vanguard released Musselwhite’s debut LP, Stand Back! Here Comes Charley Musselwhite’s South Side Band. The album was ahead of the curve in its bridging of blues and rock, and it became so influential in the burgeoning San Francisco rock scene that Musselwhite moved his entire band, including young Chicago guitar god Harvey Mandel, out west.

In the more than half a century since, Musselwhite has played with a who’s who of popular music, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Cyndi Lauper, INXS, and Ben Harper. He’s also released more than 40 albums, and he’s in fine grizzled form on his latest, 2022’s Mississippi Son , doling out raggedy soulful harp playing over sympathetic, no-frills backing. His gritty, lethargic vocals also impress, as does his country-blues guitar vamping, which channels his old pal John Lee Hooker.

In a May 2024 video interview with Australian Musician , Musselwhite talks about his responsibility to keep the blues alive, his love of improvisation, and the “couple dozen” harmonicas he carries on tour. He also discusses his longtime band—guitarist Matt Stubbs, drummer June Core, and bassist Randy Bermudes, who will back him for this Millennium Park concert—and hints at a soon-to-becompleted biography, which should be good and

juicy. The interviewer starts off by casually asking, “How are you?” Without missing a beat, Musselwhite replies, “Better than I deserve.” But the living legend deserves accolades galore—and a packed park at this homecoming for “the real Elwood.” Opening the show is Argentine-born box-guitar shredder Ivan Singh. —STEVE KRAKOW

WEDNESDAY3

Necrot Phobophilic, Street Tombs, and Primal Code open. 7:30 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 2109 S. State, $20. 17+

Necrot emerged from Oakland’s underground metal scene in the early 2010s and quickly earned a reputation for reliably tight, ferocious old-school death metal. They were already operating in fi h gear, and their third album, April’s Lifeless Birth (Tankcrimes), somehow ratchets things up even further. The brutality of “Winds of Hell” and “Drill the Skull” (along with the impressively vivid demonic cover art by Marald van Haasteren) make it too grotesque and depraved to be considered a “feel good” record, but I’d be lying if I said its fast-andfurious riffs, filthy grooves, and crushing drums didn’t immediately put a smile on my face. The title track is a blistering, fist-pounding rager that opens up into soaring guitar interplay, while the melodic solos on the punishing “Dead Memories” delve into the smooth confidence of prog and power metal. Like their Oakland metal brethren High on Fire, Necrot are the kind of band a non-metalhead could check out live and leave a believer. That “everybody in” spirit is sorta the point—the blood and guts in their songs notwithstanding. As vocalist and bassist Luca Indrio told Australian blog Noob Heavy in 2020, “Extreme music should be a place that is open to anyone who wants to be part of it and not a weird elite of people who feel better than others. We all lose when someone doesn’t feel welcome into the metal circle.” Consider that your invitation.

—JAMIE LUDWIG v

Charlie Musselwhite DANNY CLINCH

Wendy Eisenberg (le ) and Caroline Davis

ADI MEYERSON

continued from p. 35

Necrot CHRIS JOHNSTON

THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT

SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED THE SALT SHED

THUNDERCAT

MUSIC

Braeden Long, youth rock scene photographer

“The

process of film

is always exciting for me, ’cause there’s so many variables involved that it challenges me enough.”

As told to LEOR GALIL

In May, photographer Braeden Long published the first issue of A Document of a Chicago Music Community , a photo zine about the city’s vital youth-oriented indie-rock scene. Between February and April of this year, Long took film photos at the Hallogallo Raveup (a sporadic mod-inspired dance party at Fallen Log), Friko’s big headlining show at Metro in March, and other events. He also includes intimate shots of his friends from the scene, among them Peter “Alga” Cimbalo, who went to Libertyville High School with Long (and who plays in the live lineup of Sharp Pins, the solo project of Lifeguard’s Kai Slater).

Long is an autodidact, and while growing up in the northwest suburbs he fell in with a crowd of artistically driven young people. He found his first camera at a Salvation Army in Mundelein and cultivated his outlook on photography by hitting up the Half Price Books in Vernon Hills for cheap volumes on the work of

Annie Leibovitz, Charles Sheeler, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, and others. Long moved to Chicago in 2020 to attend Columbia College, and over the past couple years he’s become a key documentarian of emerging local indie rockers. He develops black-and-white film in a utility sink in his laundry room, but developing color film requires him to pay a lab—he works at Webster’s Wine Bar in Logan Square in part to cover that expense. “I like to shoot a lot,” he says, “so it’s expensive.” The first issue of Document sold out quickly, and Long is working on the second—it should be ready around the end of July.

Long’s friend Amaya Peña opens a show at Constellation on Friday, July 5, and he’ll drum in their four-piece backing band, alongside Lund Surk mastermind Ruben Steiner on bass, Lifeguard bassist Asher Case on guitar, and Destijl’s Jasmin Feliciano on violin and bass.

Istarted photography in high school, but before that, the first medium was guitar. I taught myself to play guitar in late middle school. I started playing with bands, so my whole friend group was based around music and the pursuit of art. Later in high school, we were at that thrift store and I found an old camera, and I thought it was weird that it had a film bag ’cause I’d never really seen that.

So I started researching, messing around. I bought these color chemicals, and I did the roll in my bathroom. I was fascinated about the process, not really about actual photography—like, the finished product. I started making good pictures, pictures that I liked, to make it more rewarding in the end. But I think it was that process—that slow process that is not instantaneous, but you have to actually think and work for it, and all these di erent variables that come with processing and shooting on film—that I really love, and these weird quirks that come with it.

I like to teach myself a lot of stuff. There was a really good book that I found at a thrift store, from the 80s—it’s called Designing a Photograph [by Bill Smith]. There were these really, I thought, beautiful pictures. I’d never really gotten into photography until I saw that book. It was that, combined with the school that I went to that had a darkroom.

One teacher, Ms. Johnson, she’s awesome, she allowed me to do whatever I wanted, because she was excited that I was really into it. Senior year of high school, which was 2019 to 2020, I dropped a bunch of my classes that I

didn’t need. I was only taking my AP portfolio class, darkroom studio, a digital photo class (which I wasn’t really paying attention to—it was very basic stu that I’d already taught myself, a lot through YouTube), and then a lunch class and a study hall. All those five periods, I was able to be in the darkroom the whole time. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in college—my heart wasn’t set on anything. Then I found out about Columbia through my friend Peter [Cimbalo], who I now live with. He went for audio engineering. I was like, “Wow, you can do that in college?” Art school wasn’t pushed, especially in my family, especially in my school. I found out about [Columbia’s] photography program, and I found out they had a color darkroom, and that got me hooked. I toured it, and I was like, “Downtown Chicago’s the place for me.”

My whole friend group migrated into Chicago. I live with two of them, and it’s wonderful. I wasn’t able to take the color darkroom class till last semester—it’s been four years, but that’s OK. I’m glad I’ve taken it now. Now I can use it anytime I want.

The first two years were kind of rough. I was living in the South Loop. I didn’t make too many friends—it was 2020, it was COVID. I was still very into photography, but it was . . . very conceptual. I was never keen on shooting people and making portraits, but I did make some portraits of roommates. I was still obsessed with the process.

I worked a lot with lighting, and at home. I would have to take these big carts—these hot

A self-portrait by Braeden Long BRAEDEN LONG CHICAGOANS OF NOTE

Adelaide at the Empty Bottle in May BRAEDEN LONG

lights and strobes—into my apartment and set my own studio up, which was really nice because I could have an understanding of how light works in a house or a room rather than just this big studio. I would still shoot film. I had to get a digital camera for school, but in the lighting classes I would use medium format—120 [format], six-by-seven slide film— which I fell in love with.

I lived in solitude those two years. Then I started branching out. I lived in Chinatown for a bit with Peter and a few other people; we were into music the whole time and were able to start playing shows again. We started meeting a lot more people, and we would host shows. I started shooting concerts, because that’s what was directly in front of me.

My first time using flash at a show, on film, it was super exciting to get those photos back; at first I was like, “I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m just taking photos because I brought my camera and I like my camera.” But

it was just exciting to capture movement like that.

Down the line, a teacher, Paul D’Amato—who is an amazing photographer—started talking to me about flashes and how to use a flash. That got me really excited, using off-camera flash and [learning] how to meter. I like when I’m able to apply basic mathematics and chemistry to an artistic process.

I worked at this screen-printing place for a bit—probably not even a week. It was horrible; it felt like a sweatshop. I’m not gonna say where, ’cause they do really good work— they’re great people. But it wasn’t for me.

I was a “catcher.” There was this big heat rack—they do, like, 900 shirts an hour, and there’s two of those carousels going. So it’s about 2,000 shirts that I have to pack up and ship out. There was this one run that said “Lifeguard” on it. I was like, “I know that band,” and I put a little note in there, like, “You guys are awesome. If you ever want printing, I can do it better than these guys and way quicker.”

I don’t know if that was a good or a bad thing. I think it benefited me, because they hit me up. I became friends with them, and I did their T-shirts—I still do their T-shirts. Kai [Slater], Asher [Case], Isaac [Lowenstein], they’re all so supportive and nonjudgmental and a loving group of people that make art to make art. That community, specifically, is what keeps me going. I’m really glad they took the chance to let me screen print, ’cause now I’m friends with them and that whole group.

I never really promoted screen printing, but I’ve done a lot of stu for . . . Donkey Basketball, TV Buddha, Friko, Sharp Pins. It started with Peter asking me to do a bunch of stu for him. He was the first one to ask me to do shirts, which gave me the courage to ask Lifeguard to do it. That started out as a hobby—and my illustration stu . I would draw a bunch of stu and be like, “It would be cool to put that on a screen.” I was always a fan of skateboarding, and I always loved the shirts, and that’s where that drew from.

I’ve been wanting to make some sort of zine for the longest time, ’cause I’m surrounded by people that make zines. But I can’t write. All

the zines I’ve ever gotten are writing based, but I love illustration and I love bookmaking. One day, my good friend Amaya [Peña] was like, “These photos are really great. You should make a book.” That’s when I was like, “I could actually try and do this.”

I’m really glad I did. I made it for these people—my friends. I’ve never had a publication; it’s crazy that people find it worthwhile to buy a book of photos in 2024.

I think the process of film is always exciting for me, ’cause there’s so many variables involved that it challenges me enough. Sometimes I know this is how it’s gonna go, and then that just is not how it ends up.

I went to the west coast this past week to see my dad, and then I ended up in LA ’cause Lifeguard was there, and I stayed with them for a few days. I shot a bunch of film—I knew what I was doing in camera, but I’ve never shot this film stock. I go to develop it, and I overdevelop a little bit, and then they all turn out underexposed—like, that’s really strange. Getting what I don’t expect is very fun to me. v

m lgalil@chicagoreader.com

Le : Ad hoc band Les Nu Gallos perform at the Hallogallo Raveup at the Fallen Log in April. Right: New York group Autobahn (with Kai Slater of Lifeguard sitting in on musical saw) play a New Now show in Eli Schmitt’s apartment in March. BRAEDEN LONG

GOSSIP WOLF

A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

PRECOCIOUS NEOPHYTE has become a vital part of Chicago’s growing shoegaze scene since singer-songwriter Jeehye Ham self-released Home in the Desert in 2022. The project began as a solo effort that Ham developed in her apartment, and she still records almost everything herself—but these days Precocious Neophyte also has a full live band with bassist Ethan Waddell, drummer Clinton Weber , and guitarist Brenden Romanowski When they play the Logan Square Arts Festival (see also page 34) on Saturday, June 29, it’ll be Precocious Neophyte’s last gig as a Chicago act. “I’m moving to Colorado for personal reasons,” Ham says, “but I am quite sad to be moving. Chicago is such a great place for artists. I’ll miss Chicago a lot.”

Before moving to Chicago from South Korea in 2018, Ham had been ingrained in Seoul’s indie scene, playing with psych-rock unit JuckJuck Grunzie and shoegaze group Vidulgi OoyoO. When she got here, she had no desire to be in another band, but her songwriting impulse hadn’t le her.

“I lived a very busy life when I was in Seoul,” she says. “But since coming to Chicago, especially a er COVID-19, I had a lot of time on my hands, and naturally I started using it to make music.” She tried her hand at acoustic tunes, but they didn’t satisfy her. “Later, when I went back to the familiar music style of shoegaze, it became relatively easy and more natural for me to make music,” Ham says. “I just feel like it suits my emotions well.”

Earlier this month, Precocious Neophyte headlined Sleeping Village to celebrate the new EP Stony, released via Longinus Recordings—a Michigan label that works with exciting young shoegaze acts from around the

globe, including Seoul’s Parannoul and São Paulo’s Sonhos Tomam Conta. Stony gives Ham’s atmospheres a darker tone than they have on Home in the Desert “I usually reminisce about the past when I make songs, and I went more deeply into a more limited range of spaces and characters for Stony ,” Ham says. “I constantly thought about my hometown of Daehwa in the countryside of South Korea, surrounded by mountains, and about the old pharmacy where I grew up, which feels like a dead space to me (filled with cigarette smoke). I tried to capture the atmosphere, and it naturally went towards the darker side, towards death.” Precocious Neophyte perform on the Monument Stage on Saturday at 7 PM.

IN THE EARLY 2000S , Nonagon singerguitarist John Hastie and drummer Tony Aimone played together for the first time, starting a punk band that went nowhere. “That band ran its course very quickly,” Hastie says, “but Tony and I decided we were gonna keep playing.” In 2004, Hastie recruited bassist Robert Gomez, a friend from the Champaign scene, to start what would become Nonagon. The three of them have kept the band going for such a long time that their 20th anniversary almost snuck up on them. Nonagon celebrate the occasion by headlining the Burlington on Saturday, June 29. Nonagon never set out to conquer the world—and they’re convinced that their decision to treat music making as a hobby has helped their longevity. “It’s been crucial to keep it away from our meal ticket,” Hastie says. “It’s been crucial to keep it away from paying the bills—I know it’s a punk-rock cliche, but when that starts happening, that’s

when you start making decisions that are based more on the income or your status than on what’s on hand at the moment.” Nonagon have issued a small but mighty catalog of recordings over those 20 years: three EPs, a single, and one LP, 2021’s They Birds.

“We’ve never been a ‘looking back’ kind of band,” Hastie says. “The set we play now only includes maybe two or three songs from [ They Birds ] anymore. Anything else is new—newer, certainly.” The band will perform some older material for the big show, though remembering their deep catalog cuts hasn’t been without its challenges. “We don’t remember ’em,” Hastie says. “We had a lot of trouble trying to get the muscle memory back and remember the lyrics.”

Hastie knows that Nonagon’s indifference to commercial success isn’t an approach that everyone will or even can take, but it’s worked out for him. “I think each of us realizes that we are gonna be making music probably until the day we die, even if it’s not with each other,” he says. “But if this is the sustainable thing—and surprise, surprise, it actually is—this is where we are, and it’s really exciting to be doing it.”

CRE8IVE SESSIONS is a “vibrant community of artists, visionaries, and enthusiasts coming together to celebrate the endless possibilities of creative expression,” explains Ruby Hunt, aka Rubes, head of operations for the artists’ collective. Multihyphenate creative Kehari, who runs the group with Hunt, founded it to foster healthy collaborative environments and help local creatives make connections and fi nd success. Cre8ive Sessions kicked off by hosting a series of photography events called Cre8ive Photography Sessions, then began hosting social events under the name Cre8 the Vibe

One of the collective’s newest ventures is the regular Cre8ive Nights Happy Hour at Bar 22 in the South Loop (2244 S. Michigan). This free weekly Friday-night gathering promises to be a great place for creatives to network with like-minded folks. The Cre8ive Nights Happy Hour on Friday, June 28, doubles as the official afterparty for the Over the Rainbow Music Fest in Dan Ryan Woods, which is curated by Cre8ive Sessions team member Heartbreak Homie . The after party will feature sets by Cre8ive Sessions residents DJ God Mode and Very SpecialEd plus an appearance by a surprise DJ. Doors open at 7 PM. —TYRA NICOLE TRICHE AND

Precocious Neophyte MATTHEW CRUZ

JOBS

Health Care Service Corporation seeks Business Analyst (Chicago, IL) to work as a liaison among stakeholders to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems. REQS: This position reqs a Bach deg, or forgn equiv, in Tech or Bus Admin or a rel fld + 2 Yrs of exp as a proj mgr, sys analyst, or a rel position. Telecommuting permitted. Applicants who are interested in this position should submit a complete resume in English to hrciapp@bcbsil.com, search [Business Analyst / R0026599. EOE].

Intermediate Designers

Intermediate Designers for Perkins Eastman Architects DPC to work at our Chicago, IL loc. May telecommute two days per week and more frequently as necessary. Assist design ldr, pjt mngr, + studio team w/ pjct feasibility + site eval re parking, bldng loc, ext mvmnt sys, + solar orient. Dev test fits. Assist w/ master plan srvcs incl site + build components, int mvmnt sys, + blckng + stckng, esp in specific practice areas. Consult w/ clients under direct supervision of team ldrs, to determine funct + spatial reqs of new struct or reno, + comp plan layout for new constr w/ reno constraints. A complete list of duties can be found on the employer’s website (https:// perkinseastman.com/ careers/). Little domestic travel may be involved. Salary is $92,851 annually. Must have Bachelor’s in Architecture or rel field and 6 yrs rel architectural design exp OR Master’s in Architecture or rel field and 3 yrs rel architectural design exp. Also reqs skills (3 yrs exp) in: design and documentation of senior living, workplace, and higher education facilities and campuses; design of independent and assisted living apartments, skilled nursing and memory care units, and common town center amenity spaces; code research for senior living, workplace, and higher education facilities; renovation and expansion projects, including existing building survey and documentation; construction administration project phase, including submittal review, RFI investigation and response, and site observation; using design-build delivery principles; working with building and practice area codes, including IBC, NFPA 101, ANSI, ADA, FGI and BOMA guidelines for healthcare and senior living facilities, workplace, and

education facilities; LEED process management and documentation; assessing room design requirements to account for senior living furniture, medical equipment, and building systems; integrating building plans with site plans and interior layouts with exterior envelope studies; 2D/3D software including AutoCAD, Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Newforma Project Center; design visualization software and rendered output using V-Ray; parametric design, Grasshopper software, plug-ins. Any suitable combination of education, training, or experience is acceptable. Apply at perkinseastman. com/careers.

Financial Analyst

Conduct investment analysis. Req.: masters in finance/rel. fld. Apply: Taos Global Group Inc. 2167B S. China Pl, Chicago, IL60616, Attn: HR

Senior Business Intelligence Platform Developer (League Corp) (Chicago IL): Create & maintn Book of Business & dshbrds; Own & implmnt Looker’s LookML by creating coding stndrds & best prctcs & prfrm reviews to bld & maintn data pipelines; Lvrg Looker’s ablty to intgrt w/ other SQL dialects to avoid d/b lock-ins & maintn envrnmnts rspnsbl for upsclng storage cpcty & data security; Collab w/ anlysts & mngrs to undrstd BI & data needs, dvlp sltns to rslv issues; Advise team on data mdl dsgn & simplify data srcs into data mdls; Train users; Govern data mdls dsgn thru dvlpmt of frmwrks; Monitor creatn of data mdls & ensure mdls meet BI needs. Exp reqd: data mdlg & s/w dvlpmt to dsgn, bld & maintn data warehsg; wrkg w/ team of data engnrs & scntsts to prvd data to stkhldrs; prvdg mentorshp & gdnc to dvlprs; Knwldg of advncd s/w engnrg using SQL & ETL framewrks; advncd Looker dshbrdg mthdlgs; Exp tuning dashbrds & othr data prcssg tools to optmz prfrmnc; Exp dvlpg & implmntg data tools & prcss in rspns to needs & data landscp. Reqs Bachelors or frgn equiv in S/W Eng , Comp Sci or rltd quantv fld & 5 yrs exp as BI Anlyst or rltd. Trvl reqd: 2% to Toronto, CAN. Optn to WFH avlbl. Slry: $137,218 -$202,700/ yr. Send C.V. to todukoya@league.com.

Compliance Manager, OEC Global Strategic Systems Compliance

Manager, OEC Global Strategic Systems, AbbVie Inc., North Chicago, IL. Partner with multiple business functions and stakeholders to provide functional operational compliance guidance to enable global systems & analytics strategy. Perform end-to-end life cycle implementations, from requirements gathering, design & testing to the ongoing support, & governance of strategic systems and analytical tools, enabling the launch of new or enhancements to analytical applications and processes. Design and develop analytics & reporting solutions using various technical tools such as Qlik Sense, Power BI, Smartsheet, & Azure Cloud. Working with various internal business functions such as compliance, audit, legal, medical, regulatory affairs, and finance. Partner with internal and external teams to support the Compliance Analytics platform & advance compliance solutions to facilitate building the global risk landscape. Perform end-to-end life cycle implementations, from requirements gathering, designing, developing, and testing to various enterprise Compliance solutions including Fair Market Value, Remediation, Policy Exceptions, Compliance Analytics, NorthStar/NovaStar, Employee Compliance Dashboard, &/or Enhanced Due Diligence, & use technologies such as including QlikSense, PowerBI, and/or SQL Server. Prepare & present information, subject matter expertise & technical proposals to senior leadership to enable decision making, providing updates and driving department systems and analytics strategies. Work cross-functionally and globally with stakeholders to manage centralized compliance systems (e.g., Fair Market Value), analytics & reporting applications. Advance the global system & analytics programs. Manage consistent business processes, data governance models and data quality standards for existing &/or new data sources utilizing Business Process Management methodologies, Data Management and Data Quality concepts, Kaizen and Six-Sigma techniques. Utilize Python, SQL Server, Smartsheet, Unix Scripts, EntityRelationship-Models, Commercial Data Lake, & Cloud technologies such as Data Store, Compute Engine,&/or Serverless processing. Responsible for data management strategies & process flows to support OEC

operational activities & timelines, collaborating with the cross functional BTS (Business Technology Services) teams as needed. Work in conjunction with key business & analytics stakeholders to perform data & process gap analysis & leverage additional opportunities from the data & information. Enable accessibility, education, & adoption of systems & analytical tools. Must possess a Bachelor’s or foreign equivalent degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related scientific field of study plus 5 years of related progressive experience in: (i) Technologies such as QlikSense, PowerBI, &/or SQL Server; (ii) Performing end-to-end life cycle implementations, from requirements gathering, design, and testing to the ongoing support, & governance of strategic information systems; (iii) Managing consistent business processes, data governance models & data quality standards for existing &/ or new data sources utilizing Business Process Management methodologies, Data Management & Data Quality concepts, Kaizen, &/or Six-Sigma techniques; (iv) Python, SQL Server, Smartsheet, Unix Scripts, Entity-Relationship-Models, Commercial Data Lake; & (v) Cloud technologies such as Data Store, Compute Engine, &/or Serverless processing. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF26061R.

Senior Statistical Analyst Senior Statistical Analyst, AbbVie Inc., North Chicago, IL. Perform statistical programming activities for all assigned Phase I-IV clinical studies sponsored by AbbVie and its partners. Perform statistical programming for clinical studies, integrated summaries, and in support of responses to requests from regulatory authorities. Provide programming and documentation support for multiple studies with high quality. Utilize experience in SAS and Linux. Review statistical analysis plans for all assigned studies and integrated summaries in conjunction with program lead and provide comments to study biostatistician. Utilize knowledge of statistical methodology in clinical trials, FDA regulations and CDISC standards. Create ADaM data set specifications for all assigned studies and integrated summaries. Ensure study analysis is consistent with standard templates and specifications. Contribute to submission support. Contribute to develop-

ment of new standard templates. Participate in development of standard operating procedures and support documents related to Statistical Programming processes. Support urgent regulatory agency requests. Participate in a Statistical Programming process improvement initiative. Manage timelines and ensure good communication with CROs/FSPs and internal programmers. Oversee programming tasks for a single study. Project management and conduct high level review of deliverables provided by CRO/FSP to ensure good quality and accuracy. Must possess a Bachelor’s degree or foreign academic equivalent in Statistics, Mathematics, Engineering or a highly related field of study with at least 5 years of experience. In the alternative, employer will accept a Master’s degree or foreign academic equivalent in the aforementioned fields with at least 2 years of related experience. Each educational alternative with at least 2 years of experience in the following: (i) experience in SAS and Linux; (ii) knowledge of statistical methodology in clinical trials, FDA regulations and CDISC standards; (iii) project management and conducting high level review of deliverables provided by CRO/FSP to ensure good quality and accuracy. Employer will accept any suitable combination of education, training or experience related to the job opportunity. 100% telecommunicating permitted. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF24718K. Salary Range: $136,500 - $157,500 per year

Oracle Developer Oracle Developer, AbbVie Inc., North Chicago, IL. Design & develop data warehouse applications & ETL jobs utilizing databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, No SQL, Postgres, Teradata, etc. Responsible for understanding endtoend operational data warehouses, including system integrations, data quality & harmonization rules, understanding of downstream information. Design data model for data marts & warehouses using TOAD, Erwin data modeler & SQL Developer tools. Utilize advanced analytical SQL functions and performance tuning SQL queries. Develop Unix shell scripts, Python & Java scripts for file/data processing activities. Responsible for reporting & visualizing data using business intelligence tools such as QlikView, Cognos, Spotfire, etc., & using statistics coding tools (e.g. SAS, R, etc.). Employ experience in developing & building enter-

prise data warehouse by ETL jobs using PL/SQL, Informatica. Employ software development experience following Agile models & utilizing tools such as Oracle SQL, PL/ SQL, Unix Shell Scripting, XML, & JSON. Employ experience using version control systems such as GitHub, AWS CodeCommit, & Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Act as a dedicated team player & interface with stakeholders from variety of internal IT disciplines (i.e. DBAs, architects, data scientists, infrastructure teams, etc.). Responsible for maintaining cloud knowledge & exposure in AWS, Azure & GCP. Must possess a Bachelor’s degree or foreign academic equivalent in Computer Science, Information Technology or a highly related field of study with at 3 years of related experience in the following: (i) designing and developing data warehouse applications & ETL jobs utilizing databases such as Oracle, SQL Server, No SQL, Postgres, Teradata, etc.; (ii) designing data model for data marts & warehouses using TOAD, Erwin data modeler & SQL Developer tools; (iii) developing Unix shell scripts, Python & Java scripts for file/data processing activities; (iv) reporting & visualizing data using business intelligence tools such as QlikView, Cognos, Spotfire, etc., & using statistics coding tools (e.g. SAS, R, etc.); (v) software development experience following Agile models & utilizing tools such as Oracle SQL, PL/SQL, Unix Shell Scripting, XML, & JSON; & (vi) version control systems such as GitHub, AWS CodeCommit, & Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF26014H.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Architect Salesforce Marketing Cloud Architect, AbbVie Inc., North Chicago, IL. Lead architecture & design strategy of Marketing Automation Platform that will be built as part of Digital Marketing Hub to deliver omni-channel personalized experience to prospects & patients throughout their journey. Work across BTS Business Relationship Managers, Patient Services Marketing & Consumer marketing organizations to develop & optimize Marketing automation & technology platforms to deliver seamless, unified, & right experience to consumers & patients. Translate business requirements into well-architected solutions that remarkably demonstrate Salesforce platform & facilitate business outcomes. Conceive, design, engi-

neer, & implement data & software solutions that solve significant business problems & implement state-of-the-art marketing technology platforms that drive productivity & efficiency gains across Patient Services & consumer marketing functional areas. Utilize knowledge of Salesforce product suite including Salesforce 1, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Platform, & App Exchange. Lead technical design sessions; architect & document technical solutions that are aligned with business objectives. Conduct formal technical research & define adoption process to solve business problems & improve patient & prospect experiences. Play a significant role in leading strategy, implementation & operations of marketing automation & technology platforms. Utilize knowledge of systems development life cycle, client area’s functions & systems, & systems application program development technological alternatives. Design & architect strategies to integrate marketing automation platform with existing & new technologies including but not limited to: SFDC Service Cloud/ Health Cloud, Adobe Experience Manager / marketing cloud products, data warehouses hosted in AWS, etc. Lead technical delivery of custom development, integrations, & data migration elements of Salesforce implementation. Recognize process inefficiencies across our Salesforce delivery methodology & drive continuous process improvement. Serve as Architect in server side, client side, & cloud technologies. Assist in development & activation of marketing automation campaign metadata; standards / nomenclature / taxonomy, governance model & change management. Run technical scopes & client expectations & provide handson, expert-level technical assistance to developers. Support optimizations of DevOps process for marketing automation platform to gain productivity improvements and reduce the time taken to move the committed code to production. Collaborate with business stakeholders, technology providers, and other architects to develop roadmap for marketing automation & technology implementations. Demonstrate creative ’out of the box’ thinking to solve difficult problems & champion new technologies to achieve project goals. Responsible for domain & platform technology within area of expertise on multiple projects. Demonstrate mastery across a wide

CLASSIFIEDS JOBS

HOUSING PROFESSIONALS & SERVICES MATCHES

range of data & software engineering, including data warehousing, data integration, & software development. Design & lead the execution of test plans to ensure a quality solution is delivered & demonstrate technical thought leadership. Build & develop relationships with a large cross-functional team including but not limited to affiliates, subsidiaries, vendors, & industry peer in accordance with AbbVie Values, Vendor Management Office, & Purchasing to further the mission, vision, & goals of the organization. Responsible for in Marketing Automation Platform design & implementation. Mentor a cross-functional team on marketing automation/technology platforms & use case development & deployments. Responsible for building & delivering large scale service-oriented system architecture. Participate in talent & recruiting activities to help build & grow our team. Must possess expertise/ knowledge sufficient to adequately perform the duties of the job being offered. Expertise/knowledge may be gained through employment experience or education. Such expertise/knowledge cannot be “quantified” by “time”. Required expertise/knowledge includes: (i) Domain and SFMC Platform Experience; (ii) Knowledge of Salesforce product suite including Salesforce 1, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Platform, & App Exchange; (iii) Knowledge of systems development life cycle, client area’s functions & systems, & systems application program development technological alternatives; (iv) Experience as Architect in server side, client side, & cloud technologies; (v) experience in Marketing Automation Platform design & implementation; & (vi) building & delivering large scale service-oriented system architecture. Must have a Bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Electronics Engineering, Business Administration, or closely related field plus 8 years of domain and platform experience. In the alternative, employer will accept a Master’s degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Electronics Engineering, Business Administration, or closely related field plus 4 years of domain and platform experience, or employer will accept a Ph.D. degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Electronics Engineering, Business Administration, or closely related field plus 3 years of domain and platform experience. Employer will accept any

suitable combination of education, training or experience. 100% Telecommuting permitted. Pay Range: $194,534.90 - $223,500.00 per year. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF24716Q

(Rosemont, IL) Metal One America, Inc seeks Sales Coordinator w/ Bach or for deg equiv in Bus or Bus Adm incl courswrk, intrnshp or wrk exp in finc, mrktg & acctg. Occ dom & infrq intl trvl reqd. Apply to S. Wilson, 6250 N. River Rd, Ste 2055, Rosemont, IL 60018

(Rosemont, IL) Metal One America, Inc seeks Commercial Sales Coordinator w/Bach or for deg equiv in any fld incl courswrk, intrnshp or wrk exp in acctg, sales or bus & exp work w/ Jpnse companies. Occ dom trvl reqd. Apply to S. Wilson, 6250 N. River Rd, Ste 2055, Rosemont, IL 60018

Nexus Pharmaceuticals Inc. seeks Analytical Scientists II w/PhD or for deg equiv in Chem or rltd fld & 3 yrs exp in job offer or as Chem, Anly Chem or Anly Sci (also acceptable Mast & 6 yrs exp or Bach & 8 yrs exp). Must have exp w/lab instrm such as HPLC, GC, LCMS, GC-MS, FTIR, and UV-Vis; work w/diff LC dtctrs such as RI, ELSD, CAD & MS; HPLC; and GC, prtc size, wet chem or DSC/TGA. Min (0-5%) dom trvl reqd. Apply to HR, 400 Knightsbridge Pkwy, Lincolnshire, IL 60069 or https://www. nexuspharma. net/careers/

Clinical Psychologist: Chicago, IL location. Send resume to: David Hoover, PsyD, PC d/b/a Chicago Clinical Associates, 111 N Wabash Ave, Ste 1400, Chicago, IL, 60602, Attn: D. Hoover.

Commercial Insurance Business Development Manager (ACE American Insurance Company (Chubb)) (Chicago, IL): Est rltnshps thru cntct, knwldg of Co stratgy & sales plnng w/ Undrwrtg tms; Drive Accnt Retentn, Entrprs Trgt Engagmnt & sell btwn lines; Dvlp tactics to grow business w/ Chubb; Trck mtrcs; Mng grwth, profit & retentn acrss assgnd BUs; Facilitate rltnshps btwn Clnt Execs, Prdcrs & Undrwrtrs; Wrk w/ teams to rmv roadblcks; Undrstnd indstry chrctrstcs & prdct offrg & use to positn prdcts; Mng assgnd distrbtn: Maintn knwldg of competitor offrgs & mrkt trnds; Rslv cmplnts. Communicate custmrs needs; Execute stratgy & lds business twrds financl plans. Exp reqd: techncl risk assumptn & financl forecstg; Knwldg

- JUNE 27,

of cmmrcl undrwrtg & insrc indstry theories & prctcs; sales skills; Ablty to interact w/ business partnrs; & high-lvl knwldg of MS Office Suite. Reqs Bachelor or frgn equiv in Business Admn, Mgmt or rltd & 3 yrs exp as Cmrcl Insrc Undrwrtr or rltd Cmrcl Insrnc Sales or Mrktg role. Trvl reqd 25%: 1-2 trips/mth to Midwest. Infrqt trvl to states outside Midwest may be reqd. Prtl WFH avlbl. Slry: $125,000 - $145,000.00. Send C.V. to elena. chang2@chubb.com

Sr. Program Manager CTC Trading Group, LLC seeks a Sr. Program Manager in Chicago, IL, to promote and facilitate communications with key partners across functions to drive timely completion of key deliverables. Apply at https://www. jobpostingtoday. com/Ref #49292.

(Schaumburg, IL) NLI Chicago Inc seeks General Manager w/Bach or for deg equiv in Bus, Bus Adm, Bus Mgmt or rltd fld & 5 yrs exp in job offered or in mngr role incl exprenc in fild of pckg mchnry & tech, shpg bag machn, baggng machn & indus sewng machn. Occ intl & dmstc trvl reqd (50% intl & 50% dmstc). Apply to HR, 1701 E. Woodfield Rd., Schaumburg, IL 60173 or online at https://nlichicago.com/

Senior Solutions Engineer Senior Solutions Engineer, AbbVie US LLC, North Chicago, IL. Work with sales, marketing and commercial operations leadership and other key stakeholders to develop and maintain all the reporting requirements of the sales organization. Automate recurring analytics reports, build data pipelines for internal clients. Acquire, organize, and transform data into actionable structures. Work with Data Technology team to develop and maintain backend systems and ETLs that support sales, marketing and commercial operations audience reporting and analysis. Create and maintain custom web applications and dashboards using PowerBI & SFDC. Analyze business operations requirements for data, evaluate existing data quality, and recommend improvement opportunities. Develop, debug, and test reports across the portfolio. Process unstructured data into a form suitable for analysis. analyze, solve, and correct issues in real time, providing problem resolution end-to-end. Identify and define new KPIs. Coordinate with internal stakeholders (Marketing, Business Technology, Incentive Compensation) to translate business requirements into actionable, systems

oriented solutions. Keep leadership to date on the status of issues and analyses, including known problems being worked on and perceived risks. Lead reporting initiatives across multiple business units. Most possess a Bachelor’s degree foreign academic equivalent in Information Technology, Computer Science or a highly related field of study with at least 5 years of experience in: (i) Creating and maintaining custom web applications and dashboards using SAP BO, Microsoft Power BI, Snowflake Data Cloud, ThoughtSpot and Figma UI Design tool; (ii) acquire, organize, and transform data into actionable structures, identify and define new KPIs. 100% telecommuting permitted. Pay Range: $170,692.50 - $181,500.00. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/en & reference REF24414I.

Software Developers-Robotic Process Automation Software Developers-Robotic Process Automation, Oak Brook, IL: Design & Dvlpmt of robotic process automations tasks using UiPath & Automation Anywhere. Monitor robotic process tasks during dvlpmt & testing phases. Debug & fix defects found in integration & user acceptance testing. Travel/reloc to various unanticipated U.S. locations. Send res to: Maxil Technology Solutions, Inc., 2625 Butterfield Rd., Suite 138S, Oak Brook, IL 60523.

BASES Group Inc, d/b/a Bases Autism Services seeks Financial Operations Analysts for Elk Grove Village, IL location to perform financial forecasting & reporting of medical therapy expenses. Bachelor’s in Econ/Finance/ Financial Mgmt/related field +2yrs exp req’d. Req’d skills: Oracle, Fusion Middleware, PLSQL, BPEL, Web Logic, OAFramework, OUM/ AIM Methodology, SQL, Data Analysis, R, Data Visualization, Power BI. Send email to: HRBASES @BASESGROUPINC. COM REF: ATA

Greek Teacher Plato Academy seeks a Greek Teacher to teach students how to speak, write & understand the Greek language. Reqs a Bach’s Deg in education or foreign equiv. Send resume, dipl & transcripts to Plato Academy, c/o HR management to 915 Lee St., Des Plaines, IL 60016.

Transportation Engineer Transportation Engineer (Deerfield, IL), Review application construction standards, regs, & contract reqmnts necessary for projs such as designing roads, highways,

sidewalks, retaining walls, steel structures, & bridge inspection. Conduct field inspection of Tollway, IDOT, CDOT, CCDOT, & other firm projs. Review & prep structural drawings & cost estimates using MicroStation updt the changes if needed before submittal. Comply w/ all applicable safety & environmental reqmnts. Contribute to schedules, track proj progress, & keep contract conflict from escalating into a problem. Reqs Mstr’s in Civil Engrg. Mail resumes to HR, Atlas Engineering Group, Ltd, 710 Estate Dr., Deerfield, IL 60015

Accountant Accountant (1pos.avail): Olkhon, Inc (Park Ridge, IL) Maint bkkg rec. mng payr, iss 1099, usg QuickBooks;Prep tax rets, Ens complce w/ reg, Anlyz Bus Op Dev Budgt & prep Fin Rep to mgmt. From $54974/ yr Min.BS in Acctg/Bus/ reltd +24mo exp. Res to olkhoninc@gmail.com

Computer programmer Write, analyze, review, and rewrite programs, using workflow chart and diagram, and applying knowledge of computer capabilities, subject matter, and symbolic logic; Correct errors by making appropriate changes and rechecking the program to ensure that the desired results are produced; Perform or direct revision, repair, or expansion of existing programs to increase operating efficiency or adapt to new requirements; Write, update, and maintain computer programs or software packages to handle specific jobs such as tracking inventory, storing or retrieving data, or controlling other equipment; Consult with managerial, engineering, and technical personnel to clarify program intent, identify problems, and suggest changes; Compile and write documentation of program development and subsequent revisions, inserting comments in the coded instructions so others can understand the program; Coordinate and review work and activities of programming personnel; Develop Web sites. Mail résumé to Amgaa Purevjal, iCodice LLC, 5005 Newport Dr, Suite# 505, Rolling Meadows, IL 60008

Senior Data Science Lead Reveal Data Corporation is seeking a Senior Data Science Lead in Chicago, IL who will design & implmnt modules leveraging ML algrthms & apprches. Pls snd resume 2 hr@revealdata.com, ref#vjhdtkdafu

Operations Associate (Chicago Reader) The Reader is seeking a part-time Operations Associate; hybrid position

with compensation of $21-$25/hour, average 20 hours/week. The OA will work on administrative & advertising sales tasks. The Operations Associate is required to work in the Reader office (at 2930 S. Michigan Ave. in Chicago) on Wednesdays. All other days may be remote. To apply, visit chicagoreader .com/jobs & apply through application link.

GCP DevOps Engineer Chicago, IL – 66degrees, a data and AI solutions co seeks GCP DevOps Engineer to conduct ticket, incident & problem management activities & contribute to continuous operational improvement. Build/maintain tools & dashboards to support internal ops & customer visibility into GCP environment. Add’l job duties avail. On request. Duties may be performed remotely from anywhere in the U.S. REQ: MS in CS, Engineering or closely related degree OR Bach degree in CS, Engineering or closely related degree + 24 mos exp. EMAIL résumé to Human Resources, Director at Recruiting@ 66degrees.com. EOE.

Data Architect Chicago, IL- 66degrees, a data and AI solutions co. seeks Data Architect to design & implement migration strategy to Google Cloud; Design solution architecture on Google Cloud; perform migration activities; provide workshops, arch. Recommendations, & tech. reviews. Work with native Google Cloud & 3rd party tools. Add’l job duties avail. On request. Duties may be performed remotely from anywhere in the U.S. REQ: BS in CS, Engineering, IT, MIS or related + 24 mos exp.; Certification in Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect OR Google Cloud Certified Professional Data Engineer. EMAIL résumé to Human Resources, Director at Recruiting@ 66degrees.com. EOE.

Move, Inc. in Chicago, IL is seek’g Sr. Data Scientist(s) to dvlp & monitor KPIs to drive biz initiatives. No trvl. WFH benefit avail. Must be able to work in office 3 days/wk. Apply at: data_scientist __s r_f86db2873us@ fern. greenhouse.io

Sr. Technical Lead Sr. Technical Lead (Master’s w/ 3 yrs exp or Bach w/ 5 yrs exp; Major: Info. & Communications Tech (Concentration: S/W Design & Programming), or equiv.) – Chicago, IL. Job entails working w/ & reqs exp incl:Selenium, Java, Python, JavaScript, Groovy, JUnit, TestNG, Docker, Jenkins, TeamCity, Eclipse, IntelliJ, Git, Bit-Bucket, SharePoint, Putty, Mind Term, Cucumber, Spira, Jira, Agile,

WaterFall, Confluence, Appium, Android SDK, AccelQ, X-Code, AWS, Fiddler, Postman, ReadyAPI, JQuery, Oracle, SQL Developer, XML, HTML, JSON, Protractor, Tosca, Apache Tomcat, Anaconda Navigator, PyCharm & NumPy. Analyzing & developing applications. Various Worksites - Relocation & travel to unanticipated locations within USA possible. Send resumes to WindyCity Technologies Inc., Attn: HR, 3601 W. Devon Ave, Ste. 306, Chicago, IL 60659.

HOUSING

Intentional Community Interested in voluntary simplicity in response to climate change and hyper-consumerism?

Consider the affordable residency of GreenRise in Chicago at Uptown: www.ica-usa.org/live

PROFESSIONALS & SERVICES

CLEANING SERVICES

CHESTNUT ORGANIZING AND CLEANING SERVICES: especially for people who need an organizing service because of depression, elderly, physical or mental challenges or other causes for your home’s clutter, disorganization, dysfunction, etc. We can organize for the downsizing of your current possessions to

more easily move into a smaller home. With your help, we can help to organize your move. We can organize and clean for the deceased in lieu of having the bereaved needing to do the preparation to sell or rent the deceased’s home. We are absolutely not judgmental; we’ve seen and done “worse” than your job assignment. With your help, can we please help you? Chestnut Cleaning Service: 312-332-5575. www. ChestnutCleaning.com

MATCHES

All romantic dates women wanted All romantic fun dates all requests 24.7 Call (773) 977-8862 swm

Mature Spanish guy seeking Bearded bro for chill times Mature 54; Handsome latin man; seeking bearded bro/Linebacker for friendship & laid back times. into 420; a great drink; fun conversation; worshiping & giving a great foot massage & maybe more. Seeking a masc guy with nice, big, well taken care of feet, for my big hands to massage away your long week! Wanting a regular thing :) Please be under 50ish; straight or bi totally great; athletic also a plus. Let’s get together and kick back! Reach out; chillatinguy@gmail.com. Let’s check things out!

SAVAGE LOVE

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

Wants versus gots

Asking for what you want and knowing what you have

By DAN SAVAGE

Q: I am new to polyamory. I am an ethically nonmonogamous hetero woman in her 50s and recently entered into my first secondary sexual relationship with a married friend (whom I’ve known all my life). We lost touch a er college, but he reconnected and we reentered our previous relationship. Is it normal to want to know if he has other partners? Is it OK to ask him? How do I ask him?

He has asked me directly and I have told him that I don’t have others. But he is very opaque when I try to talk to him about himself. He prefers to keep chats and calls superficial and this has been a source of angst for me. I do like good creative conversation, and I have seen him have it with others, so his reluctance to engage with me is confusing.

I am open in sharing my relationship status when he asks me directly, but I am unable to approach such a topic with him.

I brought up what feels like an unequal power dynamic and he agrees this dynamic exists—but that’s just how it is. We hardly meet even once a year since we live on different continents. (I do the traveling because I have flexibility, and, yes, there’s a dynamic here too which I’m willing to let go.)

The few hours we do meet are like life fuel. We share an incredible chemistry that would be a shame to throw away, so I would like to do all I can to build something with him.

Can you please help me

with any pointers to navigate this? —NOW SEEKING ANSWERS

a: What you want (something deep and meaningful) is imperiling what you’ve got (something casual and annual).

Zooming out for a second: you want to build something more meaningful with this man but he, for reasons he refuses to share, isn’t interested in building something more meaningful with you.

I can make informed guesses about what his reasons might be. The agreement he has with his wife allows for sex with others but not romance or intimacy; or, you only see each other once a year and he doesn’t see the point of forging a deeper emotional connection under these circumstances. But since I can’t subpoena and depose him, NSA, and he’s not telling you, we’re never going to know for sure what he’s thinking.

I can, however, answer your questions for me.

Yes, it’s normal to want to know if he has other partners (in addition to his wife). Yes, it’s okay to ask him if he has other partners. Absent an answer, you should assume he does.

Ask him directly, NSA, but you shouldn’t ask him incessantly . . . unless you’re willing to risk him throwing it/ you away.

Basically, NSA, I think you might have the wrong end of the stick here. You’re convinced that deepening your relationship is the best way to sustain this connection—a connection you value

because the chemistry is off the charts—but pushing to go deep when he’s made it clear he isn’t interested could prompt him to end things.

If you can’t enjoy the chemistry, the sex, and the “same time next year” excitement of this connection— if that’s not enough—you should throw this/him away yourself.

If you’re not willing to settle for what he’s willing to offer, you shouldn’t waste one more international flight on him. But I can’t imagine he’s asked you to be monogamous to him, NSA, which means you have enough bandwidth—emotional bandwidth, sexual bandwidth, social bandwidth—to enjoy what you’ve got with him while pursuing men closer to home who want a deeper connection.

P.S. I wouldn’t call this polyamory. Given the facts in evidence, NSA, it sounds like this man is in an open marriage but that he isn’t seeking—or isn’t allowed to seek—loving and committed relationships with other women. Non-monogamous ≠ polyamorous. v

Got problems? Yes, you do. Email your questions for Dan Savage or record audio for the Savage Lovecast at savage.love/askdan, where you can also listen to podcast archives, read full columns, and more. m mailbox@savage.love

SHIRA FRIEDMAN-PARKS

Explore ever-changing exhibitions, the awardwinning Marisol Restaurant and Bar, and one of the best gift stores in Chicago at the MCA.

Above: Circle and Members’ Preview Reception for Nicole Eisenman: What Happened. MCA Chicago, April 5, 2024. Photo: Jeremy Lawson Photography.