20 Ehlers | On prisons Jordan Neely’s killing demands we all confront racism.
22 Comic Olga Ziemska’s outdoor artworks
24 Book review Alejandra Oliva’s new book explores the politics of translation.
04 The To-Do Rock ’n’ roll, reproductive justice, soul yoga, and more
06 Street View “A Celebration of Chicago Style” brings hope to local designers.
08 Caporale | IML recap International Mr. Leather could be for everyone.
10 NASCAR A NASCAR champ who changed the sport and grew up in the Chicago suburbs
12 Sula | Restaurant feature Café Nova has a strategy for Sri Lankan food in Chicago and beyond.
14 Politics Does BDS solidarity lose elections?
18 Isaacs | Culture Chicago’s public art tells a story; that story is about to be changed.
25 Photography exhibit Ronit Bezalel turns her eye and her lens on Argyle.
26 Exhibitions of Note
Recommended exhibitions at Chicago Manual Style, Mariane Ibrahim, and more
28 Cover story Magic College spells out more than tricks.
32 Reid | Preview Albany Park Theater Project’s Port of Entry creates a home for immigrant stories.
34 Local filmmaking The Unseen has an autistic creator and a disabled star—but first and foremost, it’s a classic supernatural thriller.
35 Screening series Inspired by Oppenheimer, Godzilla is coming to the Music Box Garden.
36 Movies of Note Asteroid City brilliantly blends aesthetic and narrative; Elemental will make your heart melt, even if it’s not Pixar’s best; and more.
38 Feature Christopher Riggs finds an uncommon resonance with their students.
40 City of Win CantBuyDeem to Black men: go to therapy
42 Chicagoans of Note Nataliia Kuryliak, piano instructor and Ukrainian refugee
46 Shows and Records of Note Previews of concerts including Home Is Where, the Chosen
Few Picnic & Festival, and LustSickPuppy, plus reviews of new releases by High Priest and DJ Rude One & RXK Nephew
The short stories of Black Renaissance writer Frank London Brown offer a fascinating look at Chicagoans of all kinds.
Her wit, flamboyance, and virtuosity wouldn’t fit in anybody’s boxes, and her career suffered unjustly for it.
50 Early Warnings Upcoming concerts to have on your radar
50 Gossip Wolf Froghat fills an amphibian-shaped hole in the surf-rock firmament, Dalibor Cruz celebrates a CD-R of spooky cybernetic ambience at Signal Records, and more.
52 Savage Love Dan Savage offers sex and love advice.
54 Jobs
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By MICCO CAPORALE
Summertime in Chicago really reveals the city’s range. When there’s so much to choose from, how to pick any one thing? Well . . .
From Friday, June 30, through Monday, July 3, the American Music Festival returns to Fitzgerald’s (6615 Roosevelt Road, Berwyn) for its 40th anniversary. What began as a small barbecue in 1981 has grown into one of the largest and longest annual celebrations of roots music in the midwest. This year’s headliners include Lucinda Williams , Steve Earle, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and Dave Alvin, but true to tradition, there’s no shortage of up-and-coming talent to see, too.
Some standout openers include the Cactus Blossoms , a Minneapolis-based band with a stripped-down indie rock sound that continues a tradition of country music made by blood relatives. There’s also Thelma and the Sleaze, a queer, Nashville-based honky-tonk group with plenty of rock ’n’ roll grit, and locals Mucca Pazza , some 30-odd self-described freaks who combine elements of marching band pageantry, street theater flourish, and unbridled weirdo energy for an unmistakable spectacle that’s earned them a devout following. Sadly, advanced tickets are sold out—but each day Fitzgerald’s will release a small batch when doors open at noon. If you’re serious about attending, show up early! Children 12 and under get in free with a ticket-holding adult. Tickets range from $60 for single day to $1,199 for a patio suite; some days are sold out. Go to fitzgeraldsnightclub.com for full schedule.
Do you eat, sleep, and read rock ’n’ roll? Then check out City Lit Books (2523 N. Kedzie) on July 1. To celebrate the release of The Gospel of the Hold Steady (an oral history of the midwestern band that gave new life to heartland rock in the aughts), members of the band will be in conversation with rock critic and historian Jessica Hopper. While the book ocially drops July 25, attendees to the event will receive a signed copy, hear behind-the-scenes stories, and get their deepest fan mysteries solved. Tickets are currently sold out, but contact City Lit to see if any tickets become
available before the event. The talk starts at 1 PM. citylitbooks.com/summertime-city-lit
If you want to get down for a cause, look no further than the Chicago Athletic Association hotel (12 S. Michigan) on Saturday, July 8. Chicago publication Hooligan Mag is teaming up with Kickstand Productions to host an Abba-inspired disco to raise money for abortion access. Join them in Stagg Court on the fourth floor of the hotel, where indie darling Liza Anne will host an evening of boogie to benefit the Texas-based mutual aid abortion advocacy group Big Bend Reproductive Coalition. Bella Peterson will provide a photo booth while Solar Intentions will provide nonalcoholic refreshments. Tickets are $18 ($15 in advance) and available to those 21 or older. The dance floor opens at 7 PM. instagram.com/hooliganmagazine
Also on July 8: free yoga classes and wellness workshops will be available 9 AM-5 PM at the Fuller Park Field House (331 W. 45th St.). They’re courtesy of the 12th annual Soul Yoga Fest , which describes itself as celebrating “yoga, wellness, and community, with a focus on highlighting the diversity within the yoga community and the various styles and practices of yoga.” In addition to yoga sessions, other activities and entertainment will be available that cater to children, seniors, and all ages in between. Whether you’re a seasoned yogi or just looking for an opportunity to unwind and vibe, it’s worth being flexible for. (See what I did there?) linktr.ee/Kemetic.yogaskills
The following weekend, Lillstreet Art Center (4401 N. Ravenswood) is hosting a fundraiser for Common Pantry, a Ravenswood-based nonprofit that provides both community and food to local residents looking for nourishment. From 5-8 PM on Friday, July 14, you can purchase a handmade ceramic bowl for around $30, which will include a scoop of ice cream from Jeni’s to be enjoyed among the Lillstreet community. Nondairy options will be available. This event is part of the Empty Bowls movement, which asks artists and art spaces to sell artisanal bowls to benefit groups working to end hunger. If you
are a ceramicist looking to donate a food-safe bowl, Lillstreet will be accepting donations until July 13 during regular business hours. lillstreet.com/upcoming-events
Also on July 14, across town at the Haymarket House (800 W. Buena), the Chicago Poetry Center (CPC) will host its Summer Poetry Party. The event starts at 5:30 PM with an open mike outside in the Haymarket House garden. Then at 6:30 PM there will be performances and readings inside from a variety of poets including special guest Jane Wong , as well as CPC poets in residence Alyx Chandler, Ola Faleti, Luz Magdaleno Flores, Lisa Low, Maya Odim, C. Russell Price, Luis Tubens, and Christie Valentin-Bati. Later, DJ Ca$h Era will get the vibes flowing as folks mix, mingle, and snack both indoors in the main performance space and outside in the garden. This is a free event open to all ages that’s happening mostly outside at an ADA-accessible space. Organizers are expecting it to fill up fast, so you’re encouraged to reserve a spot at Eventbrite. Can’t make it? Donations to CPC are very welcome. poetrycenter.org/ cpc-summer-poetry-party-2023
The next day on Saturday, July 15, Bros Before director and Free Yr Dick curator Henry Hanson is programming a new block of sexy queer shorts at Facets (1517 W. Fullerton). Called Cybergrime , the screening features eight shorts depicting “hypersleazy technophilic homo-depravity.” There are showings at both 7:30 PM and 10 PM with a reception and mixer held in between (8:30-9:55 PM) featur-
ing a live electronic solo set by Keikii, star of the short film A.I. Mama (which is included in the Cybergrime lineup). Note that these screenings are not for the faint of heart—or those under 18. There will be graphic depictions of sexuality and gore including content about suicide, as well as flashing lights. Also note that masks are required when not actively eating or drinking. Tickets are $12 ($10 for members) and should be purchased ASAP because these screenings sell very fast! Tickets purchased for either screening include access to the reception. facets.org/cinema
You know what the best part of art shows is? That they’re pretty easy to slot into your schedule between other things. Lately, I’ve been geeking on a lot of exhibitions at Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center (1034 N. Milwaukee), and their current show, “El Brillo en Sus Ojos,” is no exception. Named after an expression that’s threaded through Mexican pop music, the phrase captures something about how the eyes dilate when overcome by passionate feeling. Artists Vani Aguilar and Juan Arango Palacios present ceramics and paintings on both canvas and textiles that ruminate on the gallops and sparkle of young queer Latinx love. The show is sexy and tender and on view through Saturday, July 15. Roots & Culture is open Fridays (4-7 PM), Saturdays (noon-6 PM), or by appointment, which can be scheduled by calling 773-580-0102 or emailing info@rootsandculturecac.org. rootsandculturecac.org v
@JuggaloReporter
I asked you over for a dinner party.
Gwendolyn and Margaret are here too, but I’m shootin’ the shit with you in the corner. What’s it like, dying young?
Having your husband sit shiva for you?
Ms. Hansberry—what happens to Black girls like us?
Do we crust and sugar over our heavy loads?
I’m asking you, Lorraine.
Tell me about the Other Side.
Do Black girls like us get free?
It must be nice over there—
like Chicago with her broken nose, not easy to love but necessary.
In the purgatory rooms, are Black girls sipping Moscato?
I hope so. Tell me what you want, Lorraine.
I’ll bring the Blacks and a bottle of Henny.
By Diamond SharpDiamond Sharp is a poet from Chicago. Super Sad Black Girl, her debut book of poetry, was published by Haymarket in 2022.
This Poetry Corner is curated by Raych Jackson. Rachel “Raych” Jackson is a writer, educator and voice actor. Her poems have gained over 2 million views on YouTube and have been published by many— including Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, The Shallow Ends, and Washington Square Review. She co-created and co-hosts Big Kid Show, a monthly variety show in Chicago. Raych’s debut collection EVEN THE SAINTS AUDITION (Button Poetry) won Best New Poetry Collection by a Chicagoan in the Chicago Reader fall of 2019. RAYCH-JACKSON.COM
A biweekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.
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Visit the Poetry Foundation this Summer
Spend some of your summer with the Poetry Foundation! Explore our library’s collection of over 30,000 volumes. Experience our gallery’s exhibitions, where visual art and poetry meet. Relax in our courtyard with the latest issue of Poetry magazine.
Poetry is here. For you. For everyone.
Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org
Find out about future events at curioexperience.com
A long-awaited fashion show brings hope to Chicago’s fashion designers.
By ISA GIALLORENZOAwelcome jolt of enthusiasm was infused into the local fashion scene during “A Celebration of Chicago Style,” a fashion show presented by the Curio and 21c Museum Hotel Chicago at the end of May. The celebration, hosted by Barrington-born fashion designer Cynthia Rowley and British photographer Nigel Barker (previously a panel judge on the show America’s Next Top Model), honored acclaimed designer Maria Pinto and featured local designers Sheila Rashid, Lola Osire of Lola Élan, Jamie Hayes of Production Mode, and Adreain Guillory of Ajovang. “A Celebration of Chicago Style” also showcased shoes by Il Fratellino, jewelry by Viviana Langho , and bags by Laudi Vidni. Designs throughout the evening were styled by Sal Yvat of Look Authority Studio.
The event started with Rowley and Barker charmingly twirling on the runway before their introductions of the evening program. Ten days prior, Rowley had received an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she studied painting as an undergrad. After receiving a bachelor of fi ne arts degree in 1981, she immediately packed a U-Haul and moved to New York to start her eponymous clothing line—which is also the backstory of so many other designers who started here in Chicago.
Maria Pinto, the honoree of the evening, has weathered the ups and downs of running
a fashion label in Chicago since 1991. “What’s nice about being out of New York is that Chicago has been like my incubator. I work in a very siloed kind of way. I don’t need to be surrounded by a lot of noise from the industry. But at the same time, in order to be part of the industry, you do have to have one foot in it. So I go to New York, whether it be for press or supplies or manufacturers,” she said.
Pinto was a felicitous choice to headline the event since no other established fashion designer has had such an intrinsic and enduring connection to Chicago. Born on the south side to a large working-class family who then moved to the suburbs, Pinto built her business from the ground up. She’s gone through many iterations of her brand and o erings.
Pinto’s story is one of resilience and success. Some of the highlights of her career include dressing luminaries such as First Lady Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey, receiving the Legend of Fashion Award and an honorary doctorate from SAIC (her alma mater), and becoming a member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), an arduous and invitation-only process that includes being voted in by current members.
A retrospective of Pinto’s designs was showcased on the runway during “A Celebration of Chicago Style,” highlighting the clear evolution of Pinto’s work. “What [my brand is] doing now is very minimalistic,
architectural, washable, functional—very lifestyle driven. And what I was doing before was ultra luxury. I was selling to Bergdorf [Goodman] and Barneys,” remarked Pinto. “One of the gowns [displayed at the show] is composed of 30 yards of chi on, all handcut, all handsewn,” Pinto continued. “It was the right time [for that kind of fashion] then, but it’s not the right time for that now.”
After surviving two major recessions, Pinto launched M2057 in 2013, and pivoted to a more functional, minimal, and a ordable line, without sacrificing quality and taste. On July 7, the M2057 boutique will be relocating to River North near the Magnificent Mile, in a space designed by Pinto herself.
Each of the local designers featured at “A Celebration of Chicago Style” presented distinctive collections that catered to di erent facets of the same modern and fashion-savvy consumer. Ajovang kicked o the show with dramatic yet uncluttered gowns featuring statement-making details and volumes. “Everything is really easy to put on, but there’s still this level of elegance, whimsy, and fantasy,” says Ajovang’s designer Guillory, who’s mostly inspired by fairy tales. Osire of Lola Élan showed a collection fi lled with covetable pieces in beautiful abstract patterns (some of which were African wax prints). An easy glamour was also present in her designs, complemented by the feathery charm of Il
: a
Fratellino shoes (created by brothers Zak Rodriguez and Brian Atwood).
With a more down-to-earth bent, Rashid seems to have carved up a whole niche of her own, something that could be defined as “couture workwear.” She usually favors practical textiles such as denim, gabardine, and canvas, but her attention to detail while working with these humble materials is impressive. Strategic pockets, unexpected cuts, and eye-catching prints make her outfits pop. Vogue has noticed, and cited her as an American designer to watch. Her last look, an impeccably cut utilitarian pantsuit covered in flowers, was hands down one of the highlights of the show.
Another show highlight was provided by Hayes from Production Mode with her midnight-blue trench coat made in an Italian high-tech fabric. Surprisingly washable, it is composed of 100 percent cotton coated with a kind of leathery metallic foil—perfect for some of Hayes’s mod-style pieces. Hayes’s work is very textile-oriented; her asymmetrical knits were also remarkable, as well as a delightful velvet pantsuit reminiscent of the glorious Tom Ford at Gucci era.
Off the runway there was also plenty to dazzle the eye. Guests were dressed to impress in all kinds of attire, from the ultra glam, such as fashion stylist Ray Jeremiah, to the casual chic sported by content creator Brenda Levesque. “I like to support young, local, and independent designers, especially women of color,” Levesque said, while donning a much-praised set by Eiram Knitwear and a bright bag by local brand the Butterfly Villa.
Many guests were wearing their own designs. Stephane St. Jaymes made his patchwork jacket from an 18th-century pattern, and former Project Runway contestant Veronica Shea er had a gorgeous see-through jacket from her own “bridal-for-party-girls” line. Hopefully in a not-too-distant future we’ll be able to see these designers thrive without having to leave Chicago. v
See more photos and read interviews with Rowley and Pinto at chicagoreader.com.
@chicagolooks
In a dimly lit bar with a checkerboard facade overlooking Clark Street, erotic magazine magnate Chuck Renslow and his fetish-artist partner Dom Orejudos held their first BDSM-infused physique competition. It was the 1970s, and they were trying to grow the club as a destination for the then-burgeoning leather community. Forty-five years later, what started as the “Mr. Gold Coast” pageant at the legendary Gold Coast Bar has blossomed into International Mr. Leather (IML), an annual event held over Memorial Day weekend at the Congress Plaza Hotel that attracts hundreds of people from across the world to celebrate queerness and kink.
By the end of the weekend, one person out of 100 global citizens is crowned the new year’s International Mr. Leather—but truth be told, that might be the least exciting part. IML has endured as an institution that serves the LGBTQ+ community by fundraising for grassroots groups as well as providing opportunities to gather and exchange goods, information, and kinship. In addition to three days of pageantry (with some of the best people-watching a chronically stoned journalist
could ask for), there’s also a fetish market, bootblacking, and classes on topics like improving sexual safety, romantic communication, and kink’s accessibility for those most marginalized in the community. There are also endless public and private parties.
Kink is enjoying a renewed moment of pop cultural interest. Look no further than last year’s Balenciaga campaign (which drew the ire of pearl-clutching parents because children in the ads held bondage-ish teddy bears), or the latest season of American Horror Story, which takes place in 1980s New York and borrows generously from the histories of the clubs Mineshaft and Danceteria. In underground T-shirt and tattoo culture, visual elements of pain and role play—barbed wire, chains, maces, gimp masks—are everywhere.
“I think it’s something about trying to make being gay dangerous again,” said Eric Lee, a board member for the longtime New York fetish and kink festival Folsom Street East. Lee also runs a silkscreen apparel company called Come On Strong that advances a very specific visual tradition of bratty humor, scrappy punk attitude, and debauched sex. “Fetish has
become like a benchmark for resisting gay assimilation.”
Even as kink enjoys a moment of attention and urgency, IML represents mounting tensions about how best to preserve physical and cultural space for everyone under the queer and kinky umbrella, not just the more privileged members. IML serves as a touchstone for power exchanges within queer masculinity, preserving and expanding on archetypes like the cowboy, the soldier, the o cer, and so on. While not expressly for gay men, the event is widely understood as a primarily gay male space—with a bias towards cis men.
During the weekend, photographer Brittany Sowacke and I visited an una liated lesbian leather event to hear their perspectives on the gathering. Of those we spoke to, most expressed little to no interest in attending IML, citing it as a place “not for them” or, more specifically, “for men.” This event was advertised for “women, trans, and nonbinary” people—a common but somewhat fraught tethering of identities that rhetorically maintains there are cis men and then there is . . . everyone else. Not only does the phrase invite questions
about how anyone perceived as cis male might be treated in such a space, but it lacks specificity about what the exact problem with “men” is that’s being guarded against.
“I’ve been wrestling with observing this,” a 21-year-old trans man named Mercury told me. “I don’t like having transness separated from the masculinity of IML. Making a separate space feels a little humiliating in a way. But then, I also get it. It’s very hard to explain.”
In their 2015 docu-short for Vice Media called Searching for the Last Lesbian Bars in America , JD Samson notes that gay male spaces have enjoyed a resiliency in a way lesbian spaces have not, not only because of how patriarchy results in the unequal distribution of resources, but also for the way that lesbians have shouldered much of the responsibility of gender and sexual expansiveness in a way gay men haven’t. (It’s worth mentioning that, as of today, there are only 23 self-described lesbian bars operating in the U.S.) Right now, gay spaces of all stripes are facing closures and growing threats of physical and legal violence. There is a pressing need to keep intracommunity wrinkles to a minimum and center the
IML weekend was a success, but the absence of a popular competition begs questions about the institution’s future.Butch Romero (Mr. Chicago Leather 2020) enters IML during opening ceremonies. They were the only Chicago-based finalist this year. BRITTANY SOWACKE
Left: Mercury has noticed more people of color and people with disabilities at the convention since they started attending.
Middle: Mx. Maryland 2023 Finn Gerhardt (a clear crowd favorite) gave an impassioned speech about how leather inspires them to champion trans rights.
most vulnerable members for the safety of everyone.
Wrinkling was apparent at IML in this year’s absence of International Mr. Bootblack (IMBB), an annual competition umbrellaed under IML festivities where trans and gender nonconforming people as well as people of color have always been more visible than in the namesake competition. The winner of IML is supposed to embody leather as an attitude. The material is tough, protective, and primal. The winner of IMBB represents the knowledge and skills necessary to support leather—the physical material, and by extension, the attitude. The competitions are like the yin and the yang of the lifestyle, but as was pointed out in private online message boards some weeks before IML, IMBB and its contestants have never received as much institutional support or funding as IML contestants. Confrontations over this forced a dramatic institutional reckoning that put IMBB on temporary hiatus.
“Noticeably, we are without an IMBB contest this year,” said Billy Lane, one of three members of IML’s operations board, during opening ceremonies. “That did not come lightly. We felt in order for it to be successful moving forward, we would take some time to regroup and recreate the contest.”
On the final night of the IML competition, audience members don their most sophisticated gear to witness the top 20 finalists strut their stuff between intimate stories of what leather means to them. Contestants describe surviving rape, homelessness, suicide attempts, drug addiction, and other soul-slicing
experiences that their leather community has bandaged over. They also detail the ways this has empowered them to give back to their communities and how this embodies “leather.”
This year, there were several speeches throughout the night on the absence of IMBB and the future IML should aspire to. Alistair LeatherHiraeth, International Mr. Bootblack 2022, remarked on the growing hostility towards trans people in his native England and much of the U.S. and how that has limited his ability to participate as fully in the community as he’s wanted in the past year. But he also pointed out how being a titleholder allowed him the platform to crowdfund his then-upcoming top surgery and realize opportunities he never could’ve imagined. He expressed agreement with many of the criticisms that led to IMBB’s cancellation. But he also requested people find grace for IML and nurture them as they improve—a dutiful bootblack polishing leather.
At the end of the night, Marcus Barela was christened International Mr. Leather 2023. But the new title couldn’t capture the full range of the weekend: skillshares, poppers, floggings, AA meetings, polycules, pup patrols, live nude men, NA meetings, panels, history books, diapers, disco lights, erotic art, a wedding. Leather isn’t for everyone, and it doesn’t have to be. Di erences in lifestyles and priorities are healthy. Still, the leather community shows a desire to soften so it can protect as many as possible. v
Women were less visible until Sunday when crowds were much thinner, but at the ceremonies, women showed up in stronger numbers—a noticeable reminder that kink enjoys a coalitional community.
When Chicago’s NASCAR events take over downtown streets in July, people may either leave town to avoid the spectacle or stay and curiously catch sight of something never seen in the city.
One person watching with great interest will be Fred Lorenzen, who will see the NASCAR events through the eyes of a guy who got dirty in the pits, gripped dangerous curves, and experienced the thrill of hoisting a victory trophy at the end of an exhausting race.
If there was a Mount Rushmore for Chicago-area sports stars, alongside Michael Jordan and Walter Payton, one could make the case that “Fearless Freddie” should be there— for his role in changing motorsports and for casting the mold of a new kind of racer.
Fred Lorenzen, also known as the “Elmhurst Express,” grew up in the suburbs, attended York High School in Elmhurst, and was the first notable northerner to make it in the sport of stock car racing, which was widely considered a “southern sport” through the mid-20th century.
In the late 1950s, Lorenzen raced at Soldier Field and the experience put him on the road for a stock car career. In 1965, Lorenzen won the Daytona 500 and came in first in more than 20 other races. In 1963, Lorenzen was also the first NASCAR driver to earn more than $100,000 in prize money in one season.
Lorenzen was a fan favorite for the way he carried himself. He was also widely described as articulate and clean-cut.
“He brought a new style and dimension to our sport,” said Ken Martin, director of historical content at NASCAR, adding that Lorenzen was photogenic and knew how to talk to the media.
“Fred was very smooth . . . On his dashboard, he had his team owner [Ralph] Moody write [the word] ‘THINK’ with an exclamation point. And when Fred would get into a tight situ-
ation, he would look over at that word. And so Fred really had the reputation for being a thinking man’s driver. He was very well aware of his competition, but he knew strategy.”
That attitude set the Chicago-area native apart from others.
“Fred was very serious about his work,” Martin, who was able to see Lorenzen race, continued. “While some of the other drivers were out partying, Fred was in the garage, working on the cars. He looked at it as a business.”
Amanda Lorenzen Gardstrom, Lorenzen’s daughter, has heard stories about how Lorenzen was di erent from other drivers while o the track.
“They’d say ‘Where’s Freddie?’ after a race. And then somebody would say ‘Oh, he’s on the phone with a stockbroker.’ So he would take the money that he won from the race and call a stockbroker back in Chicago and say ‘Hey I got this much money [for you] to invest for me.’ So he started to make money from the money he made.”
Lorenzen started in 158 races during his NASCAR career and enjoyed 26 wins. He also got the attention of Hollywood, starring in the 1968 “speedsploitation” film Speed Lovers. He retired from motorsports in 1970, while he was still at the top of his game.
“To be honest, I got tired of traveling,” Lorenzen said. “My pockets were full of money. I made plenty of money in that short span. And
I had endorsements. So I decided to just get away.”
In 2013, I interviewed Lorenzen for the NPR series Only A Game around the time that the exhibit “On the Road to Glory: Fred Lorenzen” was unveiled at the Elmhurst History Museum. After retiring, Lorenzen came back to the suburbs, sold real estate, picked his kids (Amanda and her brother Chris) up after school, played basketball with them, and took them and their friends to get ice cream or Portillo’s.
“The [other] kids loved him because he always knew everyone’s name. He always took the time to ask ‘How are you doing? What’s going on?’” said Lorenzen Gardstrom, whose family’s den was also Lorenzen’s trophy room.
“I accidentally had the pool stick hit the Daytona 500 trophy and broke one of the wings o the side of it. And I thought ‘Oh my gosh, Dad might get mad.’ I didn’t know what a big magnitude of a race that was until I became an adult.”
She said Lorenzen didn’t talk much to her about his glory years, but she heard others tell stories.
“There was a soldier that wrote from Vietnam and said he kept a picture of him in his helmet and would always look at it for inspiration,” said Lorenzen Gardstrom. “My dad was not just my hero but a legit hero to a ton of people during that time. My dad was, I would say, the first, the golden boy, the first superstar of NASCAR—having the good looks,
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having the charisma, and the drive and determination he had, and then having the class. I would ask him, ‘What made you go fast?’ And he always would say, ‘Well, the fans made me go fast. I wanted to go fast for them.’”
Lorenzen, inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2015, will watch the Chicago race from an assisted living facility in Oak Brook where he currently lives. Lorenzen Gardstrom said that people in Chicago who’ve never seen a race up close are in for a lot of fun.
“I think it’s going to be very exciting. It’s something NASCAR has never done before. It’s definitely going to draw some new fans just to see what it’s all about,” Lorenzen Gardstrom said.
At the Chicago race’s “Fan Zone,” there will be a life-size photo of Lorenzen’s stock car (emblazoned with his number, 28) to take pictures with. Lorenzen Gardstrom’s memories don’t involve images of her dad holding trophies because his connection to the sport during her youth was no longer fast nor furious.
She remembered that on Sundays Lorenzen would sit at a table and write to fans wanting to connect with their sports hero.
“And he would always—no matter who called—he would always sign the autographs, and talk on the phone, and return the fan mail. And I just think that’s really awesome.”
@yolandanews
Around the dawn of the new millennium, Chicago tap dancer Bril Barrett began to share his love of tap dance with his little brother and other local Black kids at the Sammy Dyer School of the Theatre as a way to keep them out of trouble. As word spread, attendance at his weekly sessions began to grow.
Eventually, Barrett invited the young dancers to join him onstage. “I would take those kids that I was working with onstage and make them part of the performance,” he recalls. “Soon people started asking, ‘Can you bring the kids with you?’”
In 2001, Barrett officially launched the performing arts company M.A.D.D. Rhythms, and in 2003, he added a tap academy. Since then, they’ve worked with hundreds of Chicago youth.
M.A.D.D. Rhythms is an abbreviation for “Making a Difference Dancing Rhythms,” which speaks to the company’s mission of nurturing youth and underserved communities through tap, while preserving the art form’s history and advocating for its future. “We have to always be connected and be about exposing tapdance to our community,” Barrett says.
M.A.D.D. Rhythms professional company currently includes 15 dancers. Roughly 40 students are enrolled in its tap academy, which serves adults and youth, and includes a Tap for Tots class for children ages three through five. They also have a teen workstudy program, where students can receive a stipend upon completion of their training.
That speaks to the organization’s goal of nurturing aspiring professional tap dancers. In fact, five members of the professional company started their training in M.A.D.D.’s youth program.
“Ever since I ever learned about the school-to-prison pipeline [harsh education and public safety policies that have pushed a disproportionate number of youth from marginalized backgrounds toward the criminal justice system], I’ve wanted to create the artistic opposite,” Barrett says. “We can take a kid who comes in and starts classes as a beginner and develop them into a professional career.”
To date, M.A.D.D. Rhythms’ dance company has produced nine full-length productions and has had brief performance stints in different parts of the country. Eventually Barrett would like to take them on an official tour. “We’ve been a staple of Chicago’s
dance scene, and the next logical step is to get out and preach the gospel of tap,” he says. “We want to get out and share this thing with the world because I think we have a unique approach to tap.”
In 2023, M.A.D.D. Rhythms joined the Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project (CBDLP), a multiyear initiative to reduce inequities in the city’s dance community by empowering local Black dance organizations with funding, resources, and performance opportunities. Barrett says that joining the cohort has allowed M.A.D.D. to collaborate with other Black dance organizations as they navigate shared obstacles, such as applying for grants and connecting potential funders.
“We realized that we’re not alone in some of the challenges that we’re facing,” Barrett says. “I think what the Chicago Black Legacy Dance Project is enabling us to do is to speak as a unit—even though we’re separate companies—in terms of facing down some of those inequities.”
Barrett says that the history of tap has been largely whitewashed, leaving much of the general public unaware of its roots in Black culture. That makes M.A.D.D. Rhythms’ presence as a Black-led tap organization all the more vital. “Our presence is very important for the representation of tap worldwide because so many people don’t know that it’s a Black art form,” Barrett says. “The history was changed and narratives were created to give other people credit.”
To correct those narratives and promote further discourse, the organization hosts two podcasts: The Either / And Podcast with Bril Barrett, which explores tap as a microcosm of what’s happening in greater society, and Gasps From a Dying Art Form, which focuses on the cultural significance and history behind the art form.
Barrett also strives to upli tap as an art in a climate that doesn’t always take it seriously. “[Tap] was not a dance genre that was considered a legitimate technique because it had nothing to do with ballet,” Barrett says. “So when you tell people I’m a dancer, they ask what kind of dance? When I say I’m a tap dancer, it’s o en ‘Oh, I thought you were a dancer-dancer.’”
Barrett says it would be nice to focus exclusively on dance, but as long as miseducation around tap exists, M.A.D.D. Rhythms advocacy work will continue. “I would love when we get to the time when we can just present tap as artists,” he says. “That time is not quite now because we’re still fighting for the legitimacy and the recognition of tap as a legitimate art form. Kudos to all the ancestors who came before us that made it possible.”
This fall, M.A.D.D. Rhythms will host the Chicago Tap Summit. The event, which runs from September 29 through October 1, will feature three days of dance performance, discussion, and classes. As the icing on the cake, M.A.D.D. Rhythms’s dance company will premiere their latest piece.
The Chicago Black Dance Legacy Project is a program of the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Their current cohort of local dance companies includes Chicago Multi-Cultural Dance Center & Hiplet Ballerinas, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater, the Era Footwork Collective, Forward Momentum Chicago, Joel Hall Dancers & Center, M.A.D.D. Rhythms, Move Me Soul, Muntu Dance Theatre of Chicago, NAJWA Dance Corps, and Praize Productions Inc. For more about CBDLP, visit chicagoblackdancelegacy.org, and chicagoreader.com/special/ logan-center-for-the-arts-at-the-university-of-chicago.
Chicago’s M.A.D.D. Rhythms is on a mission to share the gospel of tapPhoto by Theon Reynolds
The first Sri Lankan Panda Express quietly opened in Rogers Park late last March.
That’s what Kiso Sivarasa and his partners hoped when they launched Café Nova on the ground floor of Loyola University’s Granada Center, just a few doors down from Subway and across Sheridan from Taco Bell and Potbelly.
“We want to grow into something that big,”
he says. “Ten curries laid out in the front, and then you pick your rice, pick your protein.”
South Indian food has a small but solid presence in Chicago’s culinary landscape, but until now there’s been nothing to represent the food of its southeastern island neighbor.
Sri Lanka’s food is more intensely seasoned, more coconut-reliant (if possible) than, say, Kerala food, due to its proximity to the coastal spice trade. Consequently it features a distinct
Indonesian and Dutch influence. You wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that by scanning Café Nova’s o cial menu, which features just six dishes that could be called uniquely Sri Lankan (though only four are labeled as such). There’s no permanent Pandastyle buffet set up yet either, but on most Sundays, Sivarasa’s chef, Ravi Bopage, lays out a sprawling all-you-can-eat Sri Lankan spread featuring some dozen dishes, most of which
he can make to order anytime—with enough advance notice.
Originally from the capital Colombo, Bopage has cooked all across the world over the past 25 years. He met Sivarasa in 2016 when they were both cooking at Devon Avenue’s late vegetarian South Indian Mysore Woodlands. Sivarasa, from northern Vavuniya, recently graduated from medical school in St. Vincent, where he was working
the dosa station, while Bopage was the executive chef.
When they joined forces at Café Nova, they prominently featured the thin, crispy rice flour dosas, the crepes stu ed with a variety of toppings, and familiar northern Indian appetizers and main dishes like saag paneer and chicken tikka masala.
One item, however, jumped off the page. Kothu paratha is a variant of Sri Lanka’s most popular street food: a finely chopped and griddled mix of flatbread, cabbage, carrots, leeks, and scrambled eggs, served with a thick, smoldering bone-in chicken curry, flecked with mustard seed, redolent of Ceylon cinnamon. There’s also a chicken thigh curry, swimming with mustard leaves; and tomato-based tuna curry. The dal curry takes on a particularly Sri Lankan profile, with a heavy dose of turmeric, pandan and curry leaves, and mustard seeds,
subject to a single sauté, indicative of the cuisine’s tendency to feature single rather than multiple masalas.
At first, that was it. The partners wanted to establish themselves with a broad selection of dishes to appeal to a diversity of Loyola students. But repeated requests for more Sri Lankan dishes led to the first Sunday buffet in late May, with dishes featuring harder-tosource ingredients, like Maldive fish chips: dried, cured, and shredded tuna flakes that contribute an oceanic umami flavor to potato and eggplant curries, the latter also containing the fibrous drumstick seedpods of the moringa tree, meant to be split open and dentally scraped like an artichoke leaf. There was chicken goraka, a deeply browned, almost gumbo-like curry, made with dried Garcinia cambogia fruit, or the Malabar tamarind, adding a bracing tartness. There was banana
blossom fried rice, and a fiery cassava-spinach curry, mellowed with vegetal, vanilla-like pandan leaves. At the end of the long spread was a pan of chili-spiked coconut roti, alongside bowls of katta sambol, a fiery salted chili condiment deepened by Maldive fish chips.
When I returned a few weeks later for a late afternoon lunch, Sivarasa served a handful of these things, but also a sweet-and-sour carrot chili pickle, and vivid green shrimp curry with pandan and mustard leaves, the invertebrate analogue to the chicken mustard curry.
For now, he says they’ll make any of the omenu Sri Lankan dishes upon request, as long as folks are patient—give them a 45-minute
heads-up. Going forward, Sundays will be devoted to Sri Lankan cuisine. If you miss the bu et from noon to 4, you can order Sri Lankan dishes a la carte until closing. The next Sri Lankan bu et is this Sunday, July 2.
It’s all part of a broad strategy. As a side hustle, Sivarasa currently rents a trio of Honda Metropolitan scooters from Café Nova. A few more will make their way to their second location at 655 W. Irving Park, opening within a few weeks.
“I want to see at least five to seven in the Chicago area,” he says.
@MikeSula
Raids at mosques, refugee camps, and neighborhoods have killed over 100 Palestinians so far in 2023 according to the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
Johnson ran his campaign on taxing the rich to address homelessness, investing in schools, supporting mental health services, and focusing on the root causes of crime. His historic campaign was backed by a coalition of labor unions and Chicago’s grassroots progressive movements.
However, on March 30, shortly before the election, Johnson told a group of Orthodox Jewish voters that the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement was not aligned with his values. This was documented by the online publication Jewish Insider.
During the same election season, 50th Ward City Council candidate Mueze Bawany also condemned BDS. His comments came after facing backlash over old tweets that were unearthed where he criticized Israel during the 2019 assault on Gaza.
Data from the mayoral election shows that Chicagoans on both sides of the Israel and Palestine conflict were not single-issue voters.
By ANKUR SINGHOn a Saturday evening in May, Zwelivelile “Mandla” Mandela, an elected member of the South African National Assembly and the grandson of Nelson Mandela, stood on stage at the Chicago Teachers Union and recited a chant from a South African tradition that echoed across the rooms of the hall.
Mandela, invited to Chicago by organizers from the U.S. Palestinian Community Network (USPCN) and the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, was in town to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Nakba and to encourage solidar-
ity between Black people, Palestinians, and other oppressed communities.
The Nakba refers to the initial creation of the Israeli state. In 1948, nearly 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled from their land in a mass displacement. In The Nation , Mohammed El-Kurd described the Nakba as “an ongoing process of ethnic cleansing.”
“To be a Palestinian family is to have a Nakba story,” Mandela said to the crowd. “These stories form the foundation. They unite the Palestinians in a community of suffering and resilience. They unite all of us who
identify with the su ering of the Palestinian people, and who stand in solidarity with the greatest moral issue of our time.”
Earlier in the same week of May, a former public school teacher and organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union was sworn in as the 57th Mayor of Chicago. Mayor Brandon Johnson has spent a considerable amount of time in the same building that Mandela stood in.
As Chicago was undergoing a citywide election this spring, ripple e ects were felt here from confl ict in the Middle East as Israel began another wave of violence in Palestine.
BDS, a nonviolent tactic inspired from the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, is a call from Palestinian unions, civil society organizations, and activists for international solidarity to put pressure on companies and governments to stop supporting the Israeli occupation.
Both Johnson’s and Bawany’s comments highlight the complexities of how the Israel/ Palestine confl ict comes up in local elections, especially as a multiracial progressive movement coalition is increasingly gaining power at City Hall.
“One of the main strategies for us as a broader movement for Palestinian rights is having relationships with oppressed communities,” said Hatem Abudayyeh, the national chair of USPCN. “Now that some of those oppressed communities have representation in the city council on the leadership level and in the mayor’s o ce can only be a positive for us.”
When Bawany fi rst decided to run for City Council in the 50th Ward, he and his team had a vision of creating a campaign that was inclusive of the diversity that made up the neighborhood of West Ridge. The neighborhood, home to Orthodox Jews and working-class South Asian immigrants, is where he grew up after his family immigrated to
Chicago from Pakistan.
In an interview with the Reader in January, Bawany said that despite whatever geopolitical tensions might be happening in West Ridge’s community members’ country of origin, “we’re all family here.”
However, after months of organizing, controversy erupted.
On February 2, the Chicago Tribune published a story featuring tweets posted in 2019 from a now-deleted account where Bawany wrote, “Fuck Israel and fuck all you Zionist scum,” in reaction to Israeli airstrikes that killed over 100 Palestinians that year.
The backlash was swift. Bawany was accused of being anti-semetic and a racist.
His opponent, incumbent alderperson Debra Silverstein, said in a statement, “As a member of Chicago’s largest Jewish community, I am particularly horrified by this attempt to delegitimize the State of Israel and deny its fundamental right to exist. This kind of hateful rhetoric is a part of a broader pattern that normalizes violence and creates space for animosity to become violent action. It puts my Jewish friends and neighbors at risk.”
Elected officials across the state condemned Bawany’s tweets. The Jewish caucus of the Illinois General Assembly wrote a letter to both the Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU Healthcare (who had donated large amounts of money to Bawany’s campaign) requesting a meeting regarding the issue. There was an uproar on social media.
As the controversy unfolded, donations to Bawany’s campaign slowed. Meanwhile, Silverstein’s fundraising remained steady. She even received $1,800 from To Protect Our Heritage PAC, a pro-Israel group.
Underpinning the controversy is a debate on the defi nition of anti-Semitism and whether or not it includes criticism of the state of Israel.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) defines anti-Semitism as “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
Human rights groups argue that this defi-
nition has been unfairly used to label critics of Israel as anti-Semitic. The IHRA defi nition has been adopted by the U.S. State Department, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other local governments. The United Nations is currently facing pressure by pro-Israel lobbying groups to adopt IHRA’s defi nition as well.
Asher Kaplan, a volunteer organizer with If Not Now, grew up hearing stories about family members who died during the Holocaust. According to him, as a response to the trauma of the Holocaust young people are told that the establishment of a Jewish nation-state is their assurance that Jewish people will always have a safe place to live.
“We’re taught that being Jewish and loving and advocating for Israel is one and the same thing,” he said. “And any sort of attack on Israel is an attack on Judaism.”
“The crux of the thing is that criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic,” Kaplan continued. “Zionism in its form as a political social movement is a relatively new development in the history of the Jewish people. It is not the same thing as being Jewish. To critique Zionism and reject it is not anti-Semitic but actually just another way of being Jewish.“
According to Scout Bratt, a Chicago organizer with Jewish Voice For Peace, there have been anti-Zionist Jewish people for generations. “When we’re confl ating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism it makes it hard for us to address the intersection of anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia that are alive and well,” Bratt said. “We are not focused on how other forces of hate are linked on the ground because we are focused on how criticisms of Israel are anti-Semitic.”
As reported by Jewish Insider, former candidate Paul Vallas said his view of anti-Semitism is aligned with the IHRA. While Johnson did not specifically name IHRA, his view of anti-Semitism is “any speech or any e ort to delegitimize Israel and its right to exist.”
It was amid this ongoing debate that Bawany was accused of anti-Semitism. In response to the outcry, he stated, “I want to own that these were my tweets and let those they hurt know that I apologize unequivocally.”
A few weeks later Bawany made another comment in an attempt to address the controversy that sparked further backlash.
At a community forum he disavowed BDS
and said that the movement unfairly targets Israel, “without taking into consideration the behavior of other bad-faith countries,” according to reporting from Block Club Chicago.
His comments were perceived by several on the left as an abandonment of his values as a progressive organizer that stands with oppressed people. When asked recently by the Reader about this issue, Bawany declined to comment.
As a result of Bawany’s anti-BDS comments, the Chicago chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America rescinded their endorsement of him. In addition, several volunteers had accused Bawany of mistreatment, prompting Asian American Midwest Progressives to also rescind their endorsement.
The multiracial working class coalition that the campaign had spent months building unraveled in just a few weeks. Bawany lost the election, receiving only 32 percent of the vote.
A few weeks later Johnson would make similar comments about BDS, claiming that the movement doesn’t align with his values. Johnson’s campaign did not respond to a re-
quest for comment for this story.
“I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t disappointment,” Abudayyeh recalled.
Bratt also was let down by Johnson’s comments. “I was like, ‘Come on Brandon. I don’t really think this is aligned with the way you’ve been speaking about the rest of your values and your platform,’” they said.
Shortly after Johnson made his comments, Abudayyeh and other Arab American organizers in Chicago reached out to the campaign for a conversation. Johnson agreed.
“He actually opened his door to people from the community,” Abudayyeh said. “He took time to meet with folks about the issue, about what he said, about wanting to learn more. We believe that he was being sincere about it.”
“The fact that he took time to meet with us in a meeting that was organized by allies of ours in the Black community proves that he’s di erent from what we’ve seen in the past in the mayor’s office,” Abudayyeh continued. “We give him the benefit of the doubt unless and until he proves otherwise. We feel he doesn’t know the issue very well, yet.”
Abudayyeh says that progressive
Palestinian Arab community members are not single-issue voters and that, “they care about a lot of other issues, including issues that Brandon Johnson cares about.”
“The community was ultimately happy that he won and that it was important for the development of this city that we got control of City Hall from those who only care about business interests,” he said.
According to Abudayyeh, Johnson’s response to their conversation was markedly different from discussions USPCN has had with other local o cials they consider “Progressive Except For Palestine,” who were more defensive.
After all, this isn’t the fi rst time that BDS has come up in a local election in Chicago. In 2017, Daniel Biss, the current mayor of Evanston who was running for Illinois governor at the time, dropped alderperson Carlos Ramirez-Rosa from his ticket due to Rosa’s support of BDS.
USPCN also currently has an active campaign targeting Congressperson Jan Schakowsky, demanding that she support a bill that would prohibit Israel from using U.S. taxpayer dollars on the occupation of Palestine.
Abudayyeh noted that even though Israel/ Palestine can be a contentious issue, there are several progressives who have won o ces and are willing to criticize the Israeli occupation, such as Jesús García, Marie Newman, Danny Davis, and Bobby Rush.
Johnson and Bawany were both backed by United Working Families (UWF), an in-
dependent political organization formed in 2014 that trains and runs progressive candidates for o ce who come out of Chicago’s grassroots social justice movements. Despite many campaigns led by the Arab American community in Chicago, UWF has not publicly made any stances around BDS or Palestine and did not respond to requests for comment.
Chicago and surrounding suburbs are home to thousands of Palestinians whose families have been displaced from Palestine. Many live in Bridgeview, a southwest suburb also known as Little Palestine, which for years has been suspected to be under FBI surveillance targeting Arab Americans.
Palestinian organizers have held massive marches in downtown Chicago over the years protesting Israeli violence. In addition, students at local universities have led BDS campaigns. Currently, organizers are calling on a Chicago-based architecture fi rm to withdraw from participating in plans to build a new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, a move that was fi nalized by the Trump administration and is continuing under Biden’s administration.
According to election data, the majority of Orthodox Jewish voters in Chicago did not vote for either Johnson or Bawany, despite their anti-BDS comments.
In three precincts with a high concentration of Orthodox Jewish voters in the 50th Ward, Bawany received only 10 to 15 percent of the vote.
Similarly, in both the 50th Ward and 39th Ward, also home to Orthodox Jewish voters, Johnson also only received 34 percent of the vote. In precincts with a high concentration
of Orthodox Jewish voters, Vallas received over 80 percent of the vote.
Similar to Chicago’s Palestinian community, Orthodox Jewish people are not single-issue voters.
According to Rabbi Shlomo Soroka, the director of government a airs at Agudath Israel Illinois, the Orthodox Jewish community in Chicago has an existential need for Jewish day schools to help preserve their culture. “There are certain government programs that have enabled us to sustain that system and help it grow and thrive,” he said. Other important issues for Orthodox Jewish communities are crime and public safety and the rise in anti-Semitism.
Soroka says that the Orthodox Jewish community in Chicago is growing, with increased voter turnout in 2023 and new schools and synagogues regularly opening.
In the mayoral race, it appears that Vallas’s campaign promoting school choice and more spending on policing ultimately won over Orthodox Jewish voters more than Johnson’s disapproval of BDS.
However, USPCN and other Palestinian organizers in Chicago are not deterred. “Our issues are not separate from the issues of his community, the Black community, the immigrant community, and other oppressed communities in Chicago, because they’re not separate,” said Abudayyeh.
“We believe that, you know, we will be able to address Palestine, with him and others as well.” v
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Yes, people get passionate about public art. The Monuments Project recommended contextualization for “problematic” existing works that will remain in place, along with the creation of new monuments that, as advisor and SAIC professor Romi Crawford suggested in an essay in the final report, might not all need to be grand in scale or even permanent, but could take innovative new forms, and should include a much broader range of subjects.
By DEANNA ISAACS
We’re coming up on the three-year anniversary of Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s stealth eviction of Christopher Columbus from Grant Park. Under the cover of darkness—and for his own good, she said—the larger-than-life explorer/looter was separated from his 20-foot pedestal and hustled off to storage where he’d no longer o end the protesters seeking to topple him for his heinous treatment of Indigenous people.
This was noticed, especially in Chicago’s Little Italy.
Columbus, as interpreted in bronze by sculptor Carlo Brioschi, had presided over that spot at the intersection of Roosevelt Road and Columbus(!) Drive since the 1933 World’s Fair. It was a gift from the area’s Italian American community (though a special tax helped pay for installation), and its dedication ceremony included a personal message from Mussolini that read, in part, “Italy, rejuvenated by Fascism, is happy to join in the celebration.”
Lightfoot also sent two other Columbus statues to storage—one from Arrigo Park in Little Italy, the other from a South Chicago
traffic island at 92nd Street. Then she announced the creation of the Chicago Monuments Project, which would reconsider the city’s public art (including art in parks and schools) from a “racial healing and historical reckoning” perspective, and would make suggestions to guide future commissions. Chaired by former Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) commissioner Mark Kelly, Landmarks Illinois president and CEO Bonnie McDonald, and former Jane Addams Hull-House director Jennifer Scott, and assisted by an advisory committee of artists, scholars, and o cials, it would “address the hard truths of Chicago’s racial history” and find “new ways to memorialize” the “true and complete” story of the city.
So much for those romanticized images of noble Native Americans blissfully welcoming their European plunderers. Or, alternatively, attacking them.
Last August, after numerous public meetings and a year or so of delay, the Monuments Project issued a thoughtful, comprehensive final report. It recommended permanent re-
moval of the Columbus statues (and others, including the Fort Dearborn Massacre, DuSable Bridge reliefs, and the Italo Balbo Monument), but included a dissenting essay by Sergio Giangrande, an advisory committee member and former president of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans. “We cannot rewrite history,” Giangrande wrote, adding that existing monuments are historical artifacts, and that instead of removing them, we should be adding new artwork “telling the stories that need to be told.”
In July 2021, the JCCIA had filed a breach of contract lawsuit against the city, contesting the removal of the Arrigo Park statue. That lawsuit is still pending, as is a more recent lawsuit by former Park District lawyer George Smyrniotis, who claims that then-Mayor Lightfoot defamed him (ultimately causing him to lose his job) in a Zoom call about his handling of a request to pull the Arrigo Park statue from storage for a Columbus Day parade. According to his instantly viral complaint, this was the call on which she also claimed to have “the biggest dick in Chicago.”
The report announced that eight projects were getting $50,000 each from the city for initial development. The projects would be honoring Mahalia Jackson; the Latina/x experience in Pilsen; Mother Jones (with a statue in the Water Tower park); Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable and Kitihawa; survivors of police torture under former Chicago Police commander Jon Burge (called for by the city’s 2015 reparations legislation); victims of the Chicago race riot of 1919; Rekia Boyd (and other missing and murdered Black girls and women, in conjunction with A Long Walk Home’s Visibility Project); and, more generally, victims of Chicago gun violence.
Last week Mayor Brandon Johnson announced a new $6.8 million grant from the Mellon Foundation that will allow seven of those previously funded projects, and an “intervention” by Amanda Williams at the George Washington statue in Bronzeville, to move forward. The monument to victims of Chicago gun violence, which was to be “community-led,” was the only project from the original list not included in the announcement of this second round of funding. According to a city spokesperson, “The project idea has not been replaced. Our efforts to support public art projects which address gun violence are ongoing and include three current mural projects that are underway, as well as continuing conversations with community groups and artists to develop future projects that promote healing in our city.”
That sounds like an invitation waiting to be grabbed. While we’re at it, how about taking legislative action to get rid of the guns? That would be the best way to honor those victims. v
@DeannaIsaacs
any time, for something as small as yelling.” It sends a message to the Black community that their lives are expendable.
But this video isn’t the first one like it, and it sadly won’t be the last. Racist violence is something Black and Brown people live with every day in this country. The police, who are supposed to protect citizens—all citizens— kill Black people at higher rates than white people in this country.
According to a 2020 Harvard study, Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. The study found that in Chicago and its suburbs, the disparity was higher: Black people in Chicagoland are more than 6.5 times as likely to be killed in a police encounter than white people.
Neely, a homeless Black man, was choked to death on a New York subway by a white man in May.
By ANTHONY EHLERS
On June 14, Daniel Penny was indicted for second-degree manslaughter for choking Jordan Neely to death on a New York subway in May. According to witnesses, Neely, a 30-year-old homeless Black man, was shouting that he didn’t have food or water, but also wasn’t threatening other passengers, when Penny, a 24-year-old white man, grabbed him by the neck. Two other passengers held Neely’s arms while Penny choked him to death. Should you be able to kill someone simply because you are afraid? Is that all it takes? Since when is being afraid sufficient justification to kill someone? Unfortunately, it seems like this is the direction our country is going in.
As I watched the footage of Penny choking Neely, I was horrified. At no point did Penny attempt to detain Neely. He simply walked up behind him and choked him to death. According to Juan Alberto Vázquez, the freelance journalist who filmed the killing, Neely held the chokehold for at least seven and possibly
as long as 15 minutes.
Think about how long 15 minutes is, and how terrified Neely must have been. He was being choked by a person he never even saw coming. We watched as he struggled and fought for his life. Even after he passed out, unmoving, Penny continued to choke him.
The video is very disturbing: you are actually watching the death throes of another human being.
Sometimes when there is a video of someone being killed, the media won’t show it. Yet they continued to show this horrifying video over and over. I had to wonder why. Would they have shown it repeatedly if it was a Black man choking a white man? Somehow, I doubt it.
Can you imagine how painful it was for Black and Brown communities to have to watch the video of this Black man fighting for his life over and over again? Repeatedly airing a video like that one instills more fear into the Black community. It’s a subliminal message to Black men that says, “You can be killed at
The Police Violence Report found that police killed at least 1,176 people nationwide in 2022, making it the deadliest year on record for police violence. Black people were 24 percent of those killed in 2022 while making up only 13 percent of the overall population. And according to a recent report by the independent monitoring team overseeing the Chicago Police Department’s compliance with a federal consent decree, in 2018 and 2019 Black Chicagoans were nine times more likely to be pulled over and searched by Chicago police than white Chicagoans were.
Some people may ask why Daniel Penny would attack Jordan Neely. In my opinion, it’s what we see the police do all too often. All the police have to do is say they are afraid, and that gives them the right to kill someone. Similarly, Penny claimed that he was protecting himself and other passengers from Neely, who he said was shouting “threats.”
So Penny got up and tried to subdue Neely. The problem was that Penny, as a former U.S. Marine, is trained in ways to kill people, rather than subdue them, and he killed Neely. In doing so, Penny followed the decades-long example set for him by the police.
The police initially let Penny go without charging him. What message does that send to the Black community? Here is another white man, not even a police o cer, who killed another unarmed Black man—and he wasn’t even arrested!
Now, Penny has been charged with second-degree manslaughter and faces up to 15 years in prison. The decision to charge him with a crime that carries a lighter sentence than first-degree manslaughter or murder
shows that the entire criminal justice system is racist. Had Penny been a Black man, he almost certainly would have been arrested on the spot and charged with first-degree murder.
Recently, a seventh-grade class read a piece I wrote, “The ‘tough on crime’ myth.” The whole class read it, and they had some questions for me, so their teacher sent me a list. Those kids are so smart, and they asked some great, insightful questions. One of them stopped me in my tracks. They asked, “How can we end hatred against Black people?”
I want to share with all of you what I told those kids. Here’s what I said:
To be honest, I don’t ever think you’ll be able to stop people from hating, but, there are far more people who do not hate, than those who do. There is no one answer to end hate, but there are things we can do. One of those things is to make sure that we see people who don’t look like us as human beings.
Everyone—Black, Brown, or white—faces similar problems. They worry about the rent and their car payments, and they want the best for their children. They want good schools, and nice neighborhoods, and they want to be safe.
I told the kids that one very powerful thing that you can do right now is to decide that you will never hate anybody because of how they look, and that you will stand up for people who don’t look like you. When you see someone doing and saying things that are hateful, you have to stand up and say, “No, absolutely not. We are not going to allow this.”
I know as young people it’s easy to think that you don’t have a voice, but you do. We all have voices. Don’t be afraid to speak out against hate, or write about it, and encourage others to speak out with you. Because your voice is loudest when it’s joined by others.
This is what I said to those kids, and I say it now to all of you as well. Speak out when you see racism and hatred. Let your voice be heard, and others will join you. All of us can stand up to bigotry, racism, and hatred together.
If we don’t, how can we expect our children to? v
@prisonjourn
feat. DJs Derrick Carter, Michael Serafini, and Garrett David
the National Immigrant Justice Center in Chicago, Oliva’s work in the immigration world began in January 2017, fresh into Trump’s presidency. Wanting to focus on something new and to make herself useful, she accepts a friend’s invitation to do translation work at a pro se asylum application clinic in New York. A “heritage speaker,” Oliva is often working in groups of three “well-meaning” volunteers, asking strangers to recount traumas and condense whole lives into the 150 words allotted by the I-589.
with a warmer Spanish, calling people cariño, or with a truncated Spanish obviously learned in English-language high schools.
In translation settings, she finds that the way she gives care mirrors how her parents care for her when they converse. Giving attention to people feels like inviting them into a familial language, welcoming them into the bounds of her own awkwardness and limited ways of using Spanish and “hoping they felt the a ection at the heart of it.” Oliva’s book is similarly open, offering up her own motivations and not shying away when they are at times flawed, as human lives are.
I’ve often described my advocacy and communications work as “translation,” learning a person’s story and molding it into a form—a news article, an op-ed, an action tool kit, or an application—in an attempt to fulfill needs by way of words.
Translation can build connections and prompt material change, but it can also exclude and yield toward those with more power. Within these complexities is where Mexican American translator, immigration advocate, and divinity school graduate Alejandra Oliva focuses her attention in Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration
Oliva’s nonfiction debut is sectioned into three parts: “Caminante No Hay Camino,” which explores the river as a metaphor for border crossings and the crossings between languages; “Sobremesa,” which delves into Oliva’s experience with language around her family’s dinner table and the tables where she translates for the I-589, the Application for
Asylum and for Withholding of Removal; and “El Azote,” on how the walls of the immigration and carceral systems intersect. While many narratives about immigration focus on literal borders or border crossings, Oliva shows that the immigration system’s impact is far-reaching and spans generations, triggering migrant crises all over the U.S., including in Chicago. She follows migrants’ paths chronologically and geographically, from places as varied as the border town of Tijuana to a church basement in New York, immigration courts in Boston, and prisons in the rural south.
One might also expect a book following migrants’ journeys to closely follow and profile characters in a journalistic fashion, but Oliva takes on a less externally probing role, turning the lens toward U.S. immigration policies, her personal politics, and those of her fellow translators.
Now a community engagement manager at
A lawyer at the clinic calls this “‘bureaucratic violence,’ the carrying across of people out of their own words, their own language, the mutilation of the stories they tell.” It is “a violence I participated in,” Oliva writes, “even if it was as gentle as I could make it.” She doesn’t leave readers with guilty hand-wringing, however, or offer relenting justifications for her role in the larger system of “government surveillance.” Instead, she delves into the underlying dynamics of the room, offering lessons learned and a path forward.
Volunteers are instructed to call asylum seekers “friends” to avoid legal liability, a term she finds patronizing and overly intimate. Some volunteers “got o on the sense of emergency” and the “high drama of Helping Others,” offering impractical, unearned, or blunt advice. Oliva is stuck in the middle, “trying to translate into existence a respect that wasn’t there.”
She shields people from the worst comments, before later coming across organizer Roberto Tijerina’s popular curriculum “Interpreting for Social Justice,” in which he outlines the separate goals of interpreters and advocates. Interpreters are neutral and translate everything in a room, while advocates take a side and act on behalf of someone. When done well, interpreting should empower folks to advocate for themselves. By trying to protect people that hadn’t asked for her protection by translating around awkward moments, Oliva inadvertently engaged in her own form of paternalism.
For Oliva, translation is a “constellation of many acts” that includes interpretation, interviewing, advocacy, diplomacy, and care. Her work cannot be divorced from her own upbringing, growing up “between two languages.” She speaks Spanish with her parents, a “bright Spanglish” with her younger siblings, and English in public. Other volunteers speak
RRIVERMOUTH: A CHRONICLE OF LANGUAGE, FAITH, AND MIGRATION by Alejandra Oliva
Astra House, hardcover, 304 pp., $28, astrapublishinghouse.com
In 2019, Oliva travels to Tijuana to translate, to Boston Immigration Court as a volunteer court observer, to an immigration detention center on behalf of a professional organization—always bearing witness. In Tijuana, she observes the workings of “la lista,” a notebook containing the names of every migrant who wants to cross the border “the right way.” People are randomly called to cross in a purposely opaque and arbitrary way, keeping them in the dark and shielding the U.S. government from culpability.
In Boston, Oliva similarly observes that “deportation court, and all the forms and motions and tiny minutiae that feel overwhelming even for someone who speaks English, sometimes feels like it has been specifically designed to make it difficult to proceed—deportation by bureaucracy.” Asylum seekers participate in court hearings through video calls while translators are phoned in, creating a jumble of disembodied voices as information travels slowly around the room. It is a cruel and disturbing scene, one that Oliva literally sits in as she attempts to explore the territory of “solidarity and its limits.”
Oliva doesn’t argue that translation alone will better the world, and for many it is simply a matter of survival rather than a “specialized skill” to be flexed. On Oliva’s worst days, translation feels “pointless in the face of great su ering,” yet she also believes it matters as a political reality and as a gesture—like faith, it can be enough to ritualize your values into a practice, to invite others in, and to show up, again and again. v @maiittran
A new exhibition features Ronit Bezalel’s black-and-white portraits of the market’s visitors.
By JT NEWMANWhen photographer and documentary filmmaker Ronit Bezalel ( Voices of Cabrini , 70 Acres in Chicago ) first walked over to the Argyle Night Market last summer, camera in hand, she didn’t know what to expect. As a documentarian for more than two decades, her ability and confidence in approaching strangers and asking them to take their picture seemed easy. That it would lead to a photography show at Everybody’s Coffee in Uptown hadn’t even entered her mind. She just followed her instinct and used her camera and her keen eye to enter the narrative worlds of her subjects.
Show curator—and longtime friend of Bezalel—Riva Lehrer was taken with Bezalel’s ease with strangers. “I’ve been to public events and street fairs with Ronit, and I’ve always been impressed by her amazing freedom in going up to people,” Lehrer said.
Though Bezalel didn’t know why she felt drawn to documenting the market, she was struck by the beauty of the light and the market’s energy. “There were a few things that really impressed me about it. One was the atmosphere: the diversity and the celebratory spirit. I think it was because we were coming out of COVID, and there was a lot of joy there. And also the light. As a photographer, I saw that the light was just beautiful. It’s called ‘the magic hour’: the sun is very soft, just streaming down with artistry.”
So she started shooting. “I thought, ‘I want to take portraits of people.’ So everybody
who’s in the photos I asked whether I could take the portrait, and overwhelmingly, whoever I asked said yes.”
Bezalel returned a number of times over six weeks in summer 2022. “I got to know people, because I went back every week. So this is Greg. He’s always there sitting and watching music. This is Pauline. She used to be a model.” She points out arresting blackand-white portraits, one after another.
Whittling down the nearly 1,000 photos was a challenge. But Lehrer, a seasoned curator, was up to the task. “I’ve been a curator on and o since the 80s. And I’m [also a] portraitist. So fi rst, you just spread out a bunch of photos, and you just react. And then once we started, we winnowed things down. Then it was about rhythm, and it was about not having the same compositional approach.”
Lehrer explained that it can cause viewers to numb out if the work is too similar. Other curatorial concerns included pacing and size. “Some of them are going to be larger than others. So it’s about having to continue to refresh [what the viewer is seeing]. I’m looking at internal rhythm. And have we got a sense of movement as we put [pieces] into proximity?” Viewers can find out as they check out the “Faces of Argyle,” a solo show of Bezalel’s stunning street portraits celebrating the Argyle Night Market’s vibrant community. v
@Chicago_Reader
Carmen Neely dares viewers to feel comfortable with silence.
Carmen Neely’s large-scale abstract paintings fill Mariane Ibrahim gallery with energy—feminine, intimate, and sensual but also strong and purposeful. “Sometimes a painting is a prayer” is a very personal exhibition; it’s almost esoteric. Soothing hues—creamy beige, earthy maroon, and so pink—blend with wine burgundy, dark plum, and intense black. Lines, scribbles, and symbols take on a life of their own in a visual language that the artist describes as “narrative abstraction.”
Through personal archives including journal pages (in the form of lithographic replicas) that unveil the deepest layers of Neely’s private life, paintings, and works on paper, the artist takes the viewer on a journey through time and emotion. O en, mundane objects of sentimental value are literally affixed to her canvas. Memories, experiences, and reflections on relationships past are brought together as one. The lines between the personal and the collective blur.
“Every painting cannot say everything. One painting cannot contain everything,” reads one print dating back to March 2021 (3.29.21. Remember, 2023.) “And you will survive this. Without forcing your work into a cramped space. Your work will survive this,” she continues poetically—almost foreshadowing her future. To her, the backstory is absolutely necessary. To look forward, it is imperative to look back.
Through an unexpected form of storytelling, she becomes self-aware but at the same time vulnerable. She takes risks, feels hopeful, lets go—and invites the viewer to do the same. Carried away by scale and composition, one needs a closer look to appreciate the intricate details of Neely’s works—to connect the dots. Her paintings are nothing short of riveting.
As you stand in front of the monumental Caught a Glimpse, you find yourself amid a wave of overwhelming emotions. In the backdrop of acrylic, oil, and charcoal on linen, Neely’s words find a way in: “How o en do we feel an uncomfortable urge to fill up the silence in our lives with anything in reach?” she asks. “All space is not a void. There is so much necessary life and emotion that resides in the open air of all things quiet.” You know she’s right. But still you cannot help but wonder: am I really present?—VASIA RIGOU “SOMETIMES A PAINTING IS A PRAYER” Through 7/8: Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM, Mariane Ibrahim, 437 N. Paulina, marianeibrahim.com
“Friendship’s Death” is alive with sensuous form and pleasurable color.
A er the velvet curtains close on glistening spring art fairs and innumerable MFA shows, summer’s strange pitch descends. The next two months can be slow. Drowsy weekend tranquility punctuated, maybe, by a big name (Van Gogh at the Art Institute!), provocative content (Gary Simmons at the MCA!), or a modest but somehow more satisfying group show featuring five artists whose works, visions, and voices are uniquely abstract. See “Friendship’s Death” at Andrew Rafacz. The show’s title, a reference to the eponymous 1987 experimental sci-fi film, is a curious lodestone for an exhibition alive with sensuous form and pleasurable color. The movie’s idiosyncratic ending (a series of abstract visuals juxtaposed against clips of an injured soccer player and a developing fetus, among others) is
mentioned in the press release but sheds limited, if any, light on paintings by Melanie Authier, Leslie Baum, Judy Dolnick, Magalie Guérin, and Melissa Leandro.
Setting aside that Leandro’s richly woven pieces are maybe more tapestry than painting per se, all the pictures on view say more about each other than the show’s title ever could. Take Authier’s tumescent fields of rippling painterly form, silvery and seemingly nonobjective. Paired with Baum’s aqueous, floral-figured close-ups, the Canadian artist’s paintings are suddenly verdant landscapes, rolling in midday breeze. Guérin’s work, whose thick surfaces o en feel so leaden and object-like, similarly opens up in the presence of Dolnick’s airy canvases. Thoughtfully curated and replete with animating contrasts and connections, there’s nothing dead in this show. —ALAN POCARO “FRIENDSHIP’S
DEATH” Through 7/15: Tue-Fri 10 AM-5 PM, Sat 11 AM-5 PM, Andrew Rafacz, 1749 W. Chicago, andrewrafacz.com
This cross-disciplinary exhibition shows music’s ability to both torture and heal.
Can music be propaganda? Torture? How about a tool of manipulation, disorientation, and oppression? “Shi : Music, Meaning, Context” contemplates how music changes in form and interpretation as it moves across time, body, and place. Reflecting history and culture unlike any other medium, music has shaped the world at a micro, meso, and macro level. This cross-disciplinary exhibition, a curatorial collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Goethe-Institut Chicago, which features work from artists across the world—Germany, Morocco, England, Pakistan, Jordan, Nigeria, and the U.S.—reveals just that.
Two uber-colorful works from Hassan Hajjaj’s My Rockstars series nod to hip-hop culture and identity. The mixed media works Acrobat, a metallic C-print in a wood frame with chili powder tins, and Master Cobra Mansa, featuring pimento tins, draw the eye due to their exuberant nature. Across the gallery, Cecil McDonald, Jr. captures unfiltered family life in 1200 Meditation Things My Mother Gave Me, part of the series In the Company of Black, which centers the space between Black misery and Black exceptionalism, both not o en portrayed in the media; he chooses humanity instead. Elsewhere, André Lützen’s black-and-white photographs from his Generation Boul Fale series give an inside look into the rap universe in France and Senegal, where the influence of American rap is very much alive. In Conflicted Phonemes Lawrence Abu Hamdan illustrates language as a determining factor of asylum migration.
But Tony Cokes’s Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) is literally haunting. The video is based on a disturbing, real-life “advanced” interrogation technique deployed by U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere that utilized popular music blasted at defeaning volume as a weapon of psychological torture: AC/DC, Britney Spears, Guns N’ Roses. Blue and red backgrounds, the iconic colors of the American flag, flash for 16 minutes and 27 seconds. The text on the screen is adapted from journalist Moustafa Bayoumi’s article “Disco Inferno.”
“Disco isn’t dead. It has gone to war.” “Torture music has a history.”
MEANING, CONTEXT” Through 8/6: Mon-Wed and Fri-Sat 10 AM-5 PM, Thu 10 AM-8 PM, Sun noon-5 PM, Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan, mocp.org/exhibition/shift, free
At Hyde Park Art Center, artists share the objects that give them strength.
Do you possess a talisman, a lucky charm? Like the amulets of history and myth, these objects can be the beads you wore, the fragrance you sprayed, the ceramic shard you grasped during moments of triumph and survival: the alchemy of everyday happiness. It’s this shared history that imbues these items with their energy, their vitality.
The exhibition “Amuleto,” up at the Hyde Park Art Center, invited over 40 artists to think through what objects serve a similar purpose in their own lives and practices. The show was borne of a collaboration between the independent art spaces The Franklin, The Mayfield, and HPAC. Artists Edra Soto, Madeleine Aguilar, and Alberto Aguilar, founders of the first two aforementioned spaces, all hold a passion for the material of the ordinary. This joy in turn catalyzed the scent, sound, and images of strength that adorn HPAC’s walls.
Artist Joel Kuennen asks if life on earth really matters.
The Kepler Mission was NASA’s first attempt at finding planets with the potential to support life in our galaxy. Scientific maps, governmental documents, and business (yes, business) contracts commonly present data from the mission in the form of a cross; this cross is the space we know the best within the Milky Way. Such knowledge has led to a race to extract resources, a space race borne of colonial and imperial intent.
It’s this cross that splays across the floor of artist, writer, and curator Joel Kuennen’s “Planets Are Slow Animals” at Chicago Manual Style. Curated by Stephanie Cristello, the show is a continuation of Kuennen’s interdisciplinary work on abiogenesis and exoplanets, through experiments with the element of olivine. Exoplanets, or extrasolar planets, exist outside our solar system and some may support abiogenesis, which is the process by which life forms from inanimate matter. Olivine is a mineral whose presence marks environments as hospitable to life, as it is the primary mineral within the Earth’s upper mantle.
”Shi : Music, Meaning, Context” reveals music’s multitudes. It can change shape and form—from torture to healing and back again—it can connect, empower, and inspire. In its vastness, it can be influenced by personal feelings, tastes, opinions, and experiences. It ultimately is what you make it.
An image of artist Krista Franklin’s Library of Love installation sits near work by Diana Gabriel and Bun Stout. Franklin’s work is itself an archive of objects; the shelves in the print brim with crystals, cassette tapes, cherished photos, and fat flowers with butter yellow petals. Franklin’s work functions as a ballast of sorts, as each of the show’s amulets is also an archive—the interior chambers, the hearts of each loved object bursting with butter yellow blooms. —ANNETTE LEPIQUE “AMULETO”
—VASIA RIGOU “SHIFT: MUSIC,Through 8/13: Mon-Thu 10 AM-7 PM, Fri 10 AM-4:30 PM, Sat 10 AM-4 PM, Sun 11 AM-4 PM, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, hydeparkart.org, free
Positioned above the dark panels of the cross is the Messianic Frame (2023) series: five basalt slabs of synthetic olivine Kuennen grew in a lab in Switzerland. Like the Roman or Arabic numerals of a clock, these slabs are markers of a messianic timetable. Nodding to Walter Benjamin’s notion of messianic time, Kuennen asks: if the world, if history, if time is meant to end, by fire, by storm, by messiah, does life here really matter? The answers to this question are beautifully chilling as we float above the slabs of Kuennen’s Kepler Field, where we’re forced to confront both our solitude and what we owe one another. —ANNETTE LEPIQUE “PLANETS ARE SLOW ANIMALS” Through 9/1: hours by appointment, contact info@chicagomanual.style to visit, Chicago Manual Style, 1927 W. Superior, www.chicagomanual.style
information on performances and Chicago Magic College class schedules, see chicagomagiclounge.com.
By MARISSA OBERLANDER
It’s nice to have at least one surprising hobby, so I read recently. It’s a core value I didn’t know I had, despite being a lifelong collector of offbeat and often impassioned pursuits. I cofounded a burlesque troupe in college; I jammed in a klezmer band with my dad; I canoodled with chickens as a local coop volunteer. Not to mention 14 years as a Reader theater critic, which has fueled innumerable and unexpected creative sparks.
Then came a trapdoor into magic, via Harrison Lampert’s “maelstrom of insanity” performance at the Chicago Magic Lounge in January, my first time in this thrilling space. A follow-up newsletter brought the Chicago Magic College to my attention, and my friend Julie and I signed up immediately.
It’s hard to articulate the pull we felt, but I think a universal desire to learn the secrets of magic runs through us all. That, plus both of us missing our college dance performances and looking for some mystery to punctuate our nine-to-fives. I’ve now graduated Level 1 with not just burgeoning technical skills, but also a confidence boost and humble respect for a craft that we could all benefit from practicing.
Walking into the Lounge for the first class was a little scary, as I clocked just four women in the class of 15, and after some very non-Level-1-sounding introductions I was already stressed that my parents never bought me a magic kit. But instructors Harrison Lampert, 33, and Paige Thompson, 36, quickly created a space that felt safe and stayed that way. We met our third instructor, Kayla Drescher, 33, a few weeks later, and she only reinforced the inclusive atmosphere.
A Philadelphia-area native and magician since age ten, Lampert splits his time between magic and theater. A move to LA led to a turn with the Groundlings’s Sunday Company and some TV credits, and he was soon joined by Drescher, whom he met at 14 at a magic convention (yes, a magic power couple). Drescher started in magic at age seven in Connecticut, finding it a perfect combination of performance and experimentation. She went “full-time magic” a year after graduating college and has been performing, teaching, and consulting for a decade.
Drescher got a gig teaching at LA’s famed Magic Castle in 2016 and seized the opportunity to rewrite the rules of how magic is taught. “It wasn’t even starting from a place of equity,” she says, recalling young girls at magic camp abandoning tricks because they didn’t have pockets and the teacher not o ering an alternative. Even in adult classes, early levels featured a diverse set of students, but they dropped o in staggering numbers. She began experimenting with more inclusive teaching methods, Lampert soon joined her, and anecdotal retention wins showed they were on to something.
With the duo’s move to Chicago last September, we’re the lucky recipients of this thoughtful new curriculum, giving everyone an entry point into material formerly taught exclusively for right-handed white men. It’s a testament to their and Thompson’s teaching that I never felt marginalized, given the focus on concepts and problem-solving over specific execution. Looking for a place to stow a prop? It could be your suit jacket, but it could also be a cool bag or a painting of your dog (my act, more on that later).
This was Thompson’s first time teaching, a surprise to me given her empathetic and relatable style. Starting in magic at six, the NorCal native’s number one cheerleader was her grandma, who later served as her “agent,”
booking her at birthday parties and retirement homes in her teens. A stint in Las Vegas after high school led to a gig in Branson, Missouri, a trying environment where her onstage illusions even led to accusations of witchcraft and jeering at the local Walmart.
Finding the Chicago magic community was the first time Thompson felt completely welcome in the magic world, and she’s been performing at the Lounge since it opened in 2018.
“I needed that acceptance and encouragement to actually thrive,” she says.
Thompson credits our class for our creativity, noting it took her 30 years to figure out “I could be myself and that could be entertaining.” She leaves her formerly “super serious” affect at the door these days, embracing a style that centers her passions, from sports to her grandma’s formative role in her career. Authenticity in magic makes it more believable to audiences, and she credits this shift for her current success.
Contrary to what any statistics show, women and people of color are very interested in magic, Drescher shares, and what stops them is the otherness of a thousand cuts. Anything from the pressure to get good grades and be popular, to being handed props at magic camp that don’t work for your skin color (nearly all fake thumbs are white), to being told you need to be sexy onstage to be successful (Drescher started hearing this at 13). Why would
women and people of color stay when they’re constantly being told, with subtle and overt messages, that they don’t belong?
As a white, cisgender male magician, Lampert couldn’t unsee the inequity after the first time Drescher was assumed to be his assistant. He does the work through honest self-examination and speaks up so Drescher and others don’t have to, whether it’s drawing attention to their ideas in meetings or calling out inappropriate moments in classes. He did this in our class with a conviction I seldom see from male allies and it felt unexpectedly meaningful.
“One of the biggest things we strive for is making our classes a safe space,” Lampert says. “Safe to experiment, for things not to work out and know that it’s going to be OK. A big part of that is knowing that the teacher has your back.”
Spaces like these can be a launching pad for the one-of-a-kind magic practiced by women and others who never fit the prescribed box, from the size of their hands to their humor to their pocket count. “We have to figure out how to make your already cool trick work in ways that you’ve never even thought of,” Drescher says.
Drescher started her podcast, Shezam , in 2018 to create conversation and community around women, and eventually all DEI issues,
in magic. She’s approaching season five of this platform, where she can be “outspoken on her own terms,” hosting everyone from women leaders in the space to partners in inclusion like makeup artists and an audio describer for the visually impaired.
There’s limited data on industry composition, with Drescher regularly compiling more information than anyone else with a platform. She pegs the total number of women (from pros to family members) practicing magic at 7 percent, a number that drops dramatically to 2 percent when we’re talking about people making money doing magic. Her ask is simply that professional spaces meet the industry where it is when it comes to representation, whether that’s a podcast, theater, or conference.
It’s the little shifts that o er optimism in the face of Drescher’s often exhausting e orts to create change. It’s a performer saying, “Would it be OK if I touched you?” to a volunteer. It’s magicians removing pronouns from their acts. It’s inbound requests for Drescher to recommend a more diverse slate of magicians or review routines with a lens of inclusivity. It’s changing the original names of tricks to remove racist and culturally appropriative language.
The resolute intentionality required by Drescher, Lampert, and Thompson to do this work is more impressive than any of their unbelievable acts (and Thompson has escaped straitjackets, upside down, with flames encroaching). As students we felt it, having
continued from p. 29
space to explore, experiment, and ultimately emerge more self-assured and embodied people than when we started.
Level 1 student Carol Krochmal, 65, summarizes her career path as “jack of all trades, queen of nothing,” and is currently a fitness coordinator at a local retirement community. A pre-COVID visit to the Lounge with her son brought the college to her attention, and this year she went for it. And as someone who gives frequent seminars and teaches exercise classes, she didn’t expect to feel so intimidated. Wearing a “Believe in Magic” shirt from her son each week, she gamely wrestled with each trick. Being left-handed was a struggle, but Thompson was always nearby with tips and a reserve of patience. Krochmal wanted to quit most weeks, but she remembered she’s never given up just because she’s not naturally gifted at something or doesn’t look like those around her. (She’s got multiple marathons and two powerlifting records under her belt.)
“You get more into your comfort zone, stop making as many new friends, stop trying new things, worried you might get hurt and fall,” she says. “It was so great to be terrified in class and feel like you really sucked at something but know that that’s OK. You enjoy the people who are good so much more.”
Krochmal felt reinvigorated by the group’s genuine kindness and is buzzing with possibility. What’s next? Improv.
An isolating experience as a visual artist in San Francisco led another classmate, Gayle Walsworth, 33, into doing kids’ princess parties, where she first saw magic through their eyes. Her community of circus people proved “you can be creative and you can be a grownup,” something Walsworth held close as she built her character, Miss Make-Believe. “Magic is such an opportunity to be a unique person.”
Creating Miss Make-Believe ( an amalgam of Mary Poppins and Pippi Longstocking) and performing magic have helped Walsworth dial back the princess parties, a win given how hot it is wearing an Elsa wig in the Chicago summer. She joined Level 1 to broaden her skills as a family magician. It was harder magic than she’s used to and a real shift to be speaking as Gayle, not her character, but worth it for the high standards of her audience.
“Kids are so honest, they’re so funny,
they’re geniuses,” Walsworth says. “Getting an eight-year-old who is rolling their eyes at me to smile . . . to me, that’s a feat.”
Fresh off teaching at Clown Camp in Wisconsin, she sees magic as a perspective shift on life and how to connect with others. And she can always tell when a quality, adult act cut their teeth performing for some demanding junior critics.
My partner in Magic College was, fittingly, my college roommate Julie Kaviar, 35. We dove in on the heels of her first run for elected political o ce (she ran for police district council in February). I’ve always admired her conviction and passion, and she’s a friend who generously gives bravery boosts while joining you on unexpected adventures.
“Flying the plane” in magic felt more nerve-racking than in dance, but learning the elegant simplicity behind the illusions was a reminder that people don’t see what you think they see. “They’re not in your head, a remind-
er that you don’t have to be as self-conscious in life because no one is looking at you that closely. You can fake it, start over, and finagle a trick until you’re able to find that ‘aha’ moment,” Kaviar says.
As a lover of magic, mermaids, glitter, and Hermione Granger, Kaviar knew she’d enjoy the class but didn’t expect the emphasis on individuality in performance. For her, that spurred a rubber-band trick as a metaphor for political flip-flopping, which has been a wow-factor hit at networking events and may find its way into future stump speeches.
“We’ve all got some je ne sais quoi, and it was wonderful to see everyone be surprised by their own stories,” she says.
It should come as a surprise to no one that at our class showcase I performed a mentalism trick about my dog, Swift, focused on the outrageous amount of custom pet art my husband and I have accumulated. I followed Lampert’s advice to “do it until you hate it,” practicing at
home until even Swift got bored. But the result was the euphoric, proud performance moment we dream of, in front of a friends-and-family audience generous with their laughs and applause.
I lead a team in my corporate day job, and I’ve found myself citing lessons from magic class often, whether it’s the importance of practice or the idea of the “magic moment” versus the “magic method,” i.e., not letting on how the sausage is made in any type of performance or presentation. I know there’s a long-held business narrative of taking improv to improve presentation skills or ease social anxiety, but I’d argue there’s a larger treasure trove to mine with magic and all its physical and mental nuances.
Going to Magic College has been the exercise I didn’t know I needed in striving, failing, and ultimately embracing and respecting my individuality. Look for me in Level 2 later this year, and trying to impress my niece and nephews with my sleight of hand. v @MJOberlander
MUSIC AND LYRICS BY PETE
TOWNSHEND
BOOK BY PETE TOWNSHEND AND DES MCANUFF
DIRECTED BY DES MCANUFF
The groundbreaking pop-culture musical sensation is reimagined in a new production.
Myth and spectacle combine in a fresh reinvention of The Who’s exhilarating 1969 rock concept album, Tommy—including the unforgettable anthems “I’m Free,” “See Me, Feel Me,” “Sensation” and “Pinball Wizard.” After witnessing his father shoot his rival, the young Tommy Walker is lost in the universe, endlessly and obsessively staring into the mirror. An innate knack for pinball catapults him from reticent adolescent to celebrity savior. Tony Award-winning composer Pete Townshend and Tony Awardwinning original director Des McAnuff find powerful resonance reexamining this iconic story for today.
Albany Park Theater Project’s latest immersive show is ambitious but intimate.
By KERRY REIDIn 2016, Albany Park Theater Project took over the closed Saint Hyacinth Basilica School in Logan Square and transformed it into the fictional Ellen Gates Starr High School for their ambitious (and hugely successful) immersive ambulatory production, Learning Curve. That show took audiences throughout the school—from classrooms to bathrooms— and deep into the experience of being a teenager at a Chicago public high school, with standardized tests, discussions about The Great Gatsby and the American dream, trips to the guidance counselor’s o ce, and jitters about getting a prom date being just some of the possible scenarios for us to encounter along the way.
Learning Curve was structured so that not every audience member would see every scene. Some were just one-on-one interactions with APTP’s youth ensemble, who as always played all the roles, adults and teens alike. Others were group scenes, where we became part of the student body—right down to the laminated IDs we received at the start of the show.
For their latest immersive production, Port of Entry , the company has (with the help of the Logan Foundation) acquired a building on West Montrose and created a series of apartment settings, complete with a courtyard and back porches, within the 1929 former storage facility. The show takes us through these realistic rooms as we hear stories of immigrant families living within Albany Park.
Parts of the script are culled from the vast archive of community stories collected by APTP’s ensemble members over the decades, while some are new for this show. Given the buzz created by Learning Curve (which ran for around five months) and the fact that audiences for Port of Entry are limited to 28 per performance, it’s no surprise that the initial run of this new show (through August 12) is already sold out. (More tickets will be on sale for the fall shortly.)
But David Feiner, APTP’s cofounder and co-executive director, hopes that Port of Entry will stick around for a long time. Currently APTP plans to run it for at least a year. (The company will also continue to create and re-
Performances sold out through 8/ 12 , with additional performances for fall to be announced soon. 3547 W. Montrose, 773 - 866 -0875, portofentrychicago.com, pay what you choose
hearse other pieces at their home base in the Eugene Field Park field house.)
Earlier this month, Feiner and co-executive director Miguel Angel Rodriguez took me on a tour of the still-under-construction environments for Port of Entry to get a sense of the scope of this project, which perhaps paradoxically promises to be bigger in its ambitions and more intimate in design and concept than Learning Curve. Like that earlier show, Port of Entry was developed in association with Jennine Willett, coartistic director of New York’s Third Rail Projects, which specializes in immersive experiential theater. (The Lewis Carroll-inspired hit, Then She Fell, is probably their best-known piece.)
Planning for Port of Entry began in 2018, “right in the middle of the Trump presidency,” Feiner notes. One of the apartments serves as the home for a Mexican family, where they receive a phone call letting them know that the father has been deported. “We were devising that and rehearsing it in the summer of 2019, when there were daily rumors moving around over social media that ICE agents were about to swarm Albany Park communities,” says Feiner.
Rodriguez notes that a big part of the planning for the show was making sure that audiences understand their role in the world of the play. “When you come in, you immediately realize you are supposed to be here. You are a guest who has been here before. You never have to guess who you are. The actors and the storytelling envelope you into the story right away.” So for example, in the home of the Mexican family, Rodriguez says, “You are immediately brought in and invited to sit down. There’s music, and they invite you to play loteria. If you know how to play it, great. If you don’t, you’ll be quickly taught.”
Later in the tour, Rodriguez shows me the fully functioning kitchen in an apartment for a Filipino family, where visitors are invited to help make turon, a traditional fried dessert. As in past APTP shows, including 2010’s Feast (revived in 2015), Rodriguez notes, “We really wanted to show how food is important to so many families and cultures.”
Port of Entry requires a large technical team to create environments that are believable simulacra of real Chicago apartments and are up to code as public performance spaces. There is an intense amount of attention paid to detail. For example, since there are no real windows in the units, the lighting designers and electricians came up with fake windows lit from behind by walls of LED lights that subtly
simulate the changes from daylight to nightfall. The set dressing and props capture the cultural di erences in the various immigrant families, including a refugee family of Karen immigrants, an oppressed ethnic minority within Myanmar, representative of Albany Park’s diversity. Rodriguez notes that part of the research process involved home visits with some of the families whose stories are being transformed in the show to capture images of the environments.
Despite the bigger budget (Feiner puts the capitalization costs for Port of Entry at $2.5 million, the largest in APTP history by far), one thing that hasn’t changed is the focus on the youth ensemble as the drivers of the stories, whether they play characters their age, adults, or younger children.
Third Rail’s Willett notes that at the first workshops for Learning Curve , which happened around nine years ago, “We had a lot of questions back then just of like, ‘Can a teenager hold status in an immersive scene playing an adult with an audience member who is an adult? How would that even work?’ And it actually worked really, really well. And we completely had proof of concept that it was possible.”
As with Learning Curve, audiences will go through the stories in di erent orders, so one audience member’s experience of the show may be quite different from someone else’s. They may hear the same story but from another character’s point of view. Which seems completely in character with how family stories are passed around through generations.
Outside the building, Feiner and Rodriguez make sure I notice the installation City of Boxes by Albany Park resident and APTP alum Schantelle Alonzo in the front window. The artwork alludes to moments in the show, and also, as Alonzo puts it, honors the “resilience and adaptability that can be found in the personal stories of immigrants coming into this community and their success in building foundations here.”
Rodriguez also finds that it serves as an invitation to the immigrant community to explore the play. He notes that he was out front waiting for a delivery when a man walked by and began studying Alonzo’s installation. “All of a sudden, he said, ‘That’s my flag. That’s where I’m from,’” Rodriguez says. “Turns out he was from Ecuador. And then in Spanish he started to ask me, ‘What is this? And who are you?’ This is exactly why we’re here.”
July 7:
Ne-Yo with special guest
Mario
August 2:
Jason Mraz and His SuperBand with special guest Monica Martin
Sponsor: Megan P. and John L. Anderson
August 3:
Elvin Bishop & Charlie Musselwhite
AND MORE...
TICKETS ON SALE NOW! AT RAVINIA.ORG
From local studio Lakefront Pictures, the new horror film has an autistic creator and a disabled star—but first and foremost, it’s a classic supernatural thriller.
By NOAH BERLATSKYUsually films about disabled characters highlight or focus on the disability. Movies like My Left Foot (1989), Scent of a Woman (1992), Hush (2016), and The Whale (2022) are about how disabled protagonists deal with, transcend, or are defined by cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness, or immobility. The audience is, in general, presumed to be mostly composed of non-disabled people who are at the film, in part, to see how disabled people live. The goal is to display disabled lives so that people can be informed, inspired, or disgusted by what they learn.
The Unseen , a supernatural thriller from Lakefront Pictures, takes a different approach. The film is about a young lawyer, Tommy Olson, who starts out his career investigating a mysterious car crash, only to uncover more than he wanted to know about the accident, about himself, and about supernatural vengeance.
Tommy is played by RJ Mitte, who has cerebral palsy. Tommy has the condition, as well, and it a ects his relationship with his parents and with his peers. But his main problems, and the main themes of the film, don’t include him
struggling with or overcoming his condition. The Unseen is about murder, possession, betrayal, hallucinations, pools of blood—you know. Thriller stu .
The deliberately low-key and deliberately nonexploitive approach to disability can be attributed in part to Jennifer A. Goodman. Goodman is one of the cofounders of Lakefront (along with Ryan Atkins), she acts in The Unseen as Tommy’s older sister, and she wrote the script.
Goodman is autistic; as a child, she was so nonresponsive that doctors thought she was either deaf or intellectually disabled. She was finally diagnosed correctly when she was six and quickly started an extensive therapy program. “It helped me have the skill sets to work and be in the real world with other people,” she told me.
Goodman says she’s come a long way, though there are still challenges. She struggles, she says, “to get the nuances of when to break into a conversation,” and interpersonal dynamics can be a challenge unless she knows the other person well. She gets excited about things in a way that can be o -putting to neurotypical people.
There are some upsides too, though. Goodman’s excitement and energy is a boost when she’s putting together and selling creative projects. She basically invented The Unseen on the spot when networks asked her and her partner what they were working on after her pilot detective series Conrad. “A lot of them asked, ‘What do you have next on the docket?’” Goodman remembers. “And I was like, ‘Oh, we have this movie called The Unseen ! We’re doing this! We’re doing that!’ And they were like, ‘That’s great!’”
She laughs. “My partner, though, was like, ‘Uh, we’ve just talked about something briefly . . . but we never . . .’ And I was like, ‘Guess what? We’re making a feature!’”
Goodman says her interest in acting was also inspired in part by her experience trying to fit in. “Growing up, I would mimic my peers,” she told me. “I would kind of copy what they [would] say and do because I was informed that that’s how you determine what’s normal.” Sometimes people would be put o when she would copy a behavior she’d just seen. But “in the acting world, it’s been really advantageous; it really works well when I’m auditioning.”
The Unseen wasn’t originally written with a disabled protagonist in mind. Goodman, Atkins, and director Vincent Shade cast RJ Mitte because they liked his performance and wanted to work with him. Tommy makes sense as a disabled character, though, in part because Goodman brought some of her own experiences to the script. For example, there are a number of unpleasant high school flashback scenes to Tommy’s experiences of being bullied. “I’ve dealt with being bullied my entire life,” Goodman told me.
Tommy is also desperate to please his parents and make his high-powered attorney dad (William Mark McCullough) proud. Goodman identifies with that feeling, having grown up in Glencoe. “In an environment like the North Shore, there’s a certain facade that one has to live in,” she says. While her parents were a lot more supportive than Tommy’s (abusive, very unpleasant) father, she says she nonetheless often felt like she wasn’t fitting in or achieving the things she was supposed to. “I’ve experienced so much where people don’t understand me,” she says. “I’m constantly wanting to prove that I’m not a failure or prove to people that I am good enough if they’ll give me a chance.”
Goodman says that as an autistic creator, what she’d most like people to understand about autism is that “no two people are the same.” Some people with autism may be withdrawn (as Goodman was as a child); some people may talk a lot (as Goodman does now). “Autism is a spectrum,” she says. “I fall on the side that does things over-the-top.”
The Unseen isn’t a film that hits you over the head with a moral (other than maybe “avoid drawing the attention of vengeful spirits”). But by being so much less didactic than films about disability often are, it manages to make Goodman’s point that not all autistic people, or disabled people, can be put in the same box. Disabled people can be in, and tell, lots of stories—about family tragedy, spooky hauntings, career ambition, or sibling tension, to name just a few threads in Tommy’s narrative. Inspiration and overcoming are the Hollywood disability default. Goodman, Mitte, and their collaborators suggest that there’s a lot more to see. v
GODZILLA AT THE MUSIC BOX GARDEN
8: 30 PM, 7/24 -7/27
Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport
$8 general admission, $ 6 Music Box members musicboxtheatre.com/series-and-festivals/music-box-garden-movies
The anticipated release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer inspired the screenings of four lesser-seen Godzilla classics.
By JOEY SHAPIROClose your eyes. Picture Godzilla. He’s probably breathing fire, definitely rubbery, maybe toppling a Tokyo skyscraper like a Jenga tower. But what if I were to tell you there’s more to this monster than Ping-Pong ball eyes and clunky latex-suited melee? This July, as Oppenheimer fever is rapidly spreading across the moviegoing public, the Music Box Theatre and Chicago film critic and programmer Katie Rife are showing several different sides of Godzilla with four screenings of his later, lesser-seen classics, playing at sundown in the Music Box Garden every night from July 24-27. In his original 1954 incarnation, Godzilla was a direct response to the bombing of Hiroshima, a towering physical manifestation of nature’s revenge on humanity for having the gall to create world-destroying weapons. (Looking at you, J. Robert Oppenheimer.) Sometime shortly after he squared up against King Kong in 1962, Godzilla shed some of that metaphorical subtext to adopt a more cartoonish persona that snowballed with each successive movie, and by the late 60s this grim personification of nuclear holocaust had become the unlikely star of what were essentially (delightful!) children’s movies in which he played beach volleyball with a giant
crab and suplexed his fellow monsters, Hulk Hogan-style.
I grew up watching these sillier kaiju movies—kaiju being the name of this genre of Japanese monster movies, as well as the name for the city-flattening monsters featured in them—until the VHS cassettes wore out, and they hold a special place in my heart. But this monster contains multitudes, and as he entered his 30s, a milestone at which most men decide to get into post-rock and recenter their identity around either a baseball team or a dive bar near their apartment, Godzilla returned to his roots as dark, brooding, and, for the first time in decades, scary. The next 15 years of films, known collectively as the Heisei era of the franchise, as it more or less aligns chronologically with Japan’s Heisei imperial period, would strip away the tonguein-cheek approach that defined many of the sequels in favor of heightened melodrama and surprising brutality.
Rife explains, “What I like about this era is the way it approaches the material, which can be a little exaggerated and silly . . . with total seriousness. I find that really charming.”
The first two screenings of the series, Godzilla vs. Biollante on Monday, July 24, and Godzilla vs. Destoroyah on Tuesday the 25th,
are the undeniable peaks of this era, and any viewers who are only familiar with Godzilla’s earlier work are likely to be shocked by how much of a physical transformation he and the franchise as a whole have taken on. These monsters sweat and bleed, and when our favorite lizard opens his mouth, you can literally see the strands of drool glisten.
Biollante, the antagonist of the first film, is as genuinely frightening as the franchise ever got: like Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors filtered through John Carpenter’s The Thing, it’s a many-toothed marvel of science genetically engineered from a rose, Godzilla’s DNA, and the spirit of the lead scientist’s recently deceased daughter. (Just go with it, it’s Godzilla logic.) The confrontations with Biollante are a bloodbath compared to the 60s and 70s fight scenes, with green goop flying in all directions and, at one point, Godzilla literally being given stigmata by Biollante’s tendrils, which all end in tiny mouths with tiny razor-sharp teeth. Godzilla vs. Destoroyah dials it back on the body horror, but instead goes all-in on the sense of Greek tragedy that underlies most of the Heisei movies. If you can only make it to one of these screenings but still want your Godzilla worldview to be rocked, this is the one to see. It’s my personal favorite, and the only one in which it’s entirely reasonable to get a little emo. A frail, terminally ill Godzilla needs his son Godzilla Junior to fight his battles for him as a disgusting bat/mantis creature attacks Tokyo. How could your eyes not well up? Godzilla’s heart is on the verge of bursting, and, assuming you’re not made of steel, yours will be too. It’s a sweeping, apocalyptic finale of the Heisei era and is framed as the end of the series as a whole, although obviously that idea only lasted a couple years before the king of monsters was back on his feet.
If we’re being technical, that happened in 1998 when he made his Hollywood debut in Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla , but I generously choose to strike that movie from the record—it was so universally reviled that the franchise’s Japanese studio, Toho, retroactively claimed that Godzilla doesn’t appear in it, but it instead features a separate entity called Zilla because Emmerich had, in the words of producer Shōgo Tomiyama, “taken the God out of him.” The following year, however, marked his real return, now entering the
flashier and more CGI-heavy millennium era. If 60s Godzilla felt like Saturday morning cartoons, these millennium films feel like vivid, overstu ed anime. They can be pretty hit-or-miss, but Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack , screening on Wednesday, July 26—if they can fit it on the marquee—is one movie in which the pieces fell perfectly into place. Directed by Shûsuke Kaneko, who headed up the Heisei films of rival kaiju franchise Gamera, GMKG: GMAOA feels like a post-Y2K update on the what-if-big-monsters-knew-WWE-moves premise of some of Godzilla’s earlier hits. There’s no understating how close the fights in this film are to professional wrestling; at one point a helicopter news crew is filming as Godzilla stomps on armadillo/bat kaiju Baragon and narrating it with color commentary like, “And Godzilla puts the boot in again!” This is also notably one of the great showcases for Godzilla’s ethereal sometimes-rival Mothra, who Rife lists as a favorite of hers. “I love Mothra’s femme energy,” she says. “She’s a benevolent goddess who sheds scales o of her wings, and they create a protective mirror that deflects Godzilla’s atomic breath, so she fights with glitter. Plus she has two fairy friends!”
No amount of monster elbow-drops can prepare you for the final film playing in this series, Godzilla: Final Wars, screening Thursday, July 26. There’s a scene in a Halloween episode of The Simpsons in which Homer is sent to Hell, strapped into a chair, and tortured by being force-fed “all the donuts in the world.” He finishes them and asks for more. There’s no better metaphor for Final Wars, a movie expressly designed to give you exactly what you want and more of it than you asked for: a frenetically edited two hours featuring just about every single monster who has ever appeared in this franchise, plus many who haven’t. Yes, that includes Zilla, who fights Godzilla mano a mano in front of the Sydney Opera House while a Sum 41 song blares on the soundtrack.
It’s a hyperactive barrage of kaiju royal rumbles paced like Mad Max: Fury Road, set to an unrelenting techno beat, and populated by MMA fighters-turned-actors and sinister aliens in leather trench coats and sunglasses. There’s no better kind of high-energy incoherence (did I mention the martial arts motorcycle chase?) and certainly no more perfect way to reintroduce Chicago film fans to a giant mutant iguana whose story Christopher Nolan wasn’t brave enough to tell. v
@nicejewishboy69
Asteroid City, the latest from Wes Anderson, is a true achievement from one of America’s most unique cinematic voices. Set in 1955, the early days of the space age, a group of students, parents, military officials, and various passersby gather in a small desert town for an astronomical science competition. The emotional center of the film is Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman), a war photographer and father of one of the competitors who mourns the recent loss of his wife, and Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson), a movie star in town for the competition with her own brainiac daughter. When an extraterrestrial visitor makes an appearance, forcing the town to go under military lockdown, Augie and Midge develop a melancholic chemistry built on navigating the world while maintaining joy in the face of inevitable moments of sorrow.
Asteroid City contains the brilliant ensemble of actors and creative collaborators and the tight stylistic formalism we’ve come to expect from Anderson. A comedy laced with tragedy, tonally, highlights Anderson’s mastery of wry comedic pacing tempered by poignant tragic elements. Structurally, it folds in on itself. It’s a film about a television program about the making of a play, which coils itself so tightly in its own world that it nearly collapses under its own weight of self-referentiality before pulling back into some deeply poignant reflections on tragic endings, exciting new beginnings, and how our identities are shaped for and by those around us.
Critics of Anderson fault his filmmaking as overly stylistically focused at the expense of narrative or thematic content, but Asteroid City brilliantly threads the needle of utilizing the best of Anderson’s aesthetic
to convey an emotionally compelling narrative, one which welcomes us to open ourselves up, even if for just a moment, to sharing the pain and joy that make us human. —ADAM MULLINS-KHATIB PG-13, 104 min. Wide release in theaters
Disney’s latest venture Elemental will make your heart melt, even if it’s not Pixar’s best. In Element City, all citizens are divided based on the four classical elements they personify: water, fire, earth, and air. Ember Lumen and her family are “Firish”; her parents once immigrated to Element City, facing discrimination but eventually opening their own convenience store called the Fireplace. Ember grows up dreaming of taking over the store, but her father challenges her to overcome her “fiery temper” first. However, when she meets and falls in love with water element Wade Ripple, she’s forced to question everything she thinks she knows about their world.
This is a movie where Pixar’s animation truly shines. Each character across the elements inhabits their nature in a unique, anthropomorphic way. Seeing how they move through this world is truly a delight, from Wade accidentally absorbing into a sponge as a child to Ember melting broken glass with her own body heat. Wade and Ember’s romance develops slowly and unexpectedly, even though you know this is a love story. The best part is that it’s not just a love story; it’s a story about family, duty, and dreams.
Though Element City is visually stunning, the world-building could use some expanding. There are some inconsistencies that made me question the rules: Ember’s family are immigrants, but are all Fire people? And some of the movie’s themes are a little on-the-nose, though it’s a children’s film, a er all, inspired by director
Peter Sohn’s experiences growing up as the child of Korean immigrants in 1970s NYC. Pixar has been known as one of the heaviest hitters at the House of Mouse, though recent projects have been a hit or a miss. Turning Red and Luca? Hits. Onward and Lightyear? Misses. Elemental is definitely a hit with a gut-punch ending that will leave you misty-eyed. —NOËLLE D. LILLEY PG, 109 min. Wide release in theaters
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the fi h and final installment in the series that launched in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark, picks up 12 years a er the end of its immediate predecessor, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. That film ended with archaeologist-adventurer Henry “Indiana” Jones (Harrison Ford) happily reunited with his estranged lover Marion (played by Ford’s Raiders costar Karen Allen). But in Dial of Destiny, set in 1969—the summer of America’s moon landing—world-weary 70-year-old Indy is once again alone, he and Marion having separated following their son’s death in Vietnam. A chance at emotional resurrection is presented by Indy’s goddaughter, antiquities dealer Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), who invites Indy on a search for a legendary astronomical calculator, the Dial of Archimedes, that may be able to facilitate time travel. Their allies on this globe-trotting quest include Helena’s street-kid sidekick Teddy Kumar (Ethann Isidore) and Indy’s Egyptian comrade Sallah (Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies, reprising the role he played in Raiders of the Lost Ark). Along the way, the treasure seekers tangle with CIA agents (Shaunette Renée Wilson), Moroccan mobsters, and a slew of Nazis under the command of Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen), a German rocket scientist now working in NASA’s Apollo
space-flight program.
Directed by James Mangold (The Wolverine, Logan, Ford v Ferrari), Dial of Destiny is action-packed and breathlessly paced, to be sure. Indy’s AI-enhanced exploits here include a reckless car chase through the cramped and crowded streets of Tangier, a galloping horse ride on the tracks of the New York City subway system, a dive for ancient Roman shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea (where the ophidiophobic Jones must face a swarm of snakelike eels), and a plane flight into a time warp. There’s also plenty of gunplay, and I lost count of the bodies early on. Ford, a decade older than the character he’s playing, brings a rugged, grizzled gravitas to his iconic role, adding credibility to even the most far-fetched fantasy elements and seasoned grit to the screenplay’s sharp (and sometimes not-so-sharp) wisecracks. —ALBERT WILLIAMS PG-13, 154 min. Wide release in theaters
Revoir Paris’s first scene is painfully ordinary. But not without intention. Mia, a Parisian translator played by Virginie Efira, drinks her coffee and prepares for another day. Disruptions to her routine bother us, like when Vincent, her doctor boyfriend played by Grégoire Colin, abruptly leaves dinner to return to the hospital. In the downpour, she heads home on her motorcycle and stops for a drink at a bistro. She sits alone, people-watching, and gradually, the scene develops an unsettling pressure, as if the crowded restaurant becomes more and more visible. The tension suddenly bursts when gunmen open fire in the dining room during a horrifying sequence that recalls the 2015 Bataclan massacre.
Instead of fixating on the cultural a ermath, Alice Winocour’s film narrows in on Mia. Revoir Paris presents a fractured viewpoint of a survivor, avoiding general claims about the all-too-familiar threat of gun violence. The brutal attack circumvents sensationalism, offering a more intimate look into Mia’s psyche. But her memory is obscured, le as remnants three months a er the assault. She struggles to connect with her partner and friends as she performs her routines with a disquieting detachment. So, she seeks comfort from other survivors, returning to the bistro to confront her splintered memory.
Revoir Paris offers a poignant vignette to post-Bataclan Parisian trauma, but the most affecting moments feel diminished by the bulk of the film. Mia’s story suffers from overripe plot devices that feel unconvincingly overt, especially since Efira’s performance excels in its subtlety. Her interactions with other characters o en flatline, resulting in a fruitless pathos that might engage us but leaves us ultimately unaffected. That said, Winocour’s film successfully reframes grief, implicating the world that won’t allow Mia to mourn. Unfortunately, despite a touching finale, Revoir Paris struggles to pull off its muted story. —MAXWELL RABB 105 min. Gene Siskel Film Center v
An experimental guitarist and autistic person, Riggs teaches their classes at Doolittle
Elementary about the creative power of ignoring convention.
By AUSTIN WOODSChristopher Riggs doesn’t just play the electric guitar. They deconstruct it. They strip it down to its most fundamental elements. Forget scales, arpeggios, and even standard tunings—keys and harmonies are myths, anyway. Riggs eschews these things entirely, instead dragging their guitar to the brink and inviting us to hear the results.
That’s not to suggest that Riggs—who’s also a music teacher for Chicago Public Schools—is incapable of making conventionally attractive sounds in conventional ways. They would just prefer not to. They’re much more interested in laying the guitar flat and working it over like a patient on an operating table. They usually “prepare” it by wedging an array of magnets, springs, and other metal objects either be-
tween its strings or under them, contacting the pickups. They like to scrape at it with a violin bow, like a saw against bone, and sometimes they extract the pickups from the guitar entirely to manipulate them. The resulting textures sound more like a pneumatic drill than a guitar: brutalist, abstract, cold.
But Riggs the person is the opposite. They’re a able, warm, and always willing to poke fun at their craft. You might wonder how they ended up devoted to grinding, entropic noise, but the answer is pretty mundane—they make this racket because they like it. Cacophony sounds good to them.
In fact, it’s a bit misleading to carry on about how “ugly” Riggs’s music is, because it’s not meant to evoke ugliness. Riggs says it’s not
really meant to evoke anything. It’s just the sound of someone exploring the limits of their instrument and having a blast doing it. Riggs is an autistic person, and they link this to their musical practice (or “musicking,” as they call it). They view their guitar playing as a form of stimming—short for self-stimulating behavior. Some autistic people engage in stimming to control stress or anxiety, to help with sensory regulation or reinforcement, or simply to relax or enjoy themselves.
“It’s a very satisfactory feedback loop,” Riggs says. “To me, that seems to fit in the framework of stimming . . . like, ‘This sound needs to be very specific, and I just want to keep doing it.’”
It goes without saying Riggs is not your
typical music teacher. Though their students aren’t preparing guitars with electrical wire and bottle caps or writing atonal compositions, that same spirit of exploration remains crucial to Riggs’s classrooms.
Riggs received a bachelor’s degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 2007 and a master’s in music composition from Wesleyan University in 2012. Then they started working toward what Illinois calls a professional educator license. By 2016, they were teaching core subjects at Dore Elementary, and three years later they moved to James Wadsworth Elementary to teach reading.
But throughout this period, Riggs was mainly interested in teaching music. The possibility echoed through their head constantly, like the dull hum of guitar feedback. They had met all the prerequisites for certification—they just needed to pass the Illinois Licensure Testing System’s music exam. Riggs did so in summer 2022, and they applied that fall to teach at Doolittle Elementary in Bronzeville, attracted by the school’s robust selection of elective classes.
“Especially on the south side, you have plenty of schools where the only special class is gym, and that’s incredibly sad,” Riggs says. “To know [principal Iysha Jones] was prioritizing those things made me really happy.”
In January of this year, Riggs started at Doolittle, where they teach pre-K through eighth grade. On an average day, they’ll open class with a song that students might recognize— earlier in June, it was “Wishing Well” by Juice WRLD—and use it as an instructional tool. For their second grade class, Riggs input the “Wishing Well” beat into an online music sequencer, encouraging students to take it apart and make something new using the same components. Of course, if a student preferred to make their own beat from scratch, they were more than welcome to.
Riggs also teaches an elective class every Wednesday afternoon. It’s nonevaluative, meaning no one is graded, and it’s even more exploratory than their other classes. Some students record original songs, during this period or before the school day begins (Jayveon Thomas and Bobby Wright are particularly prolific), with Riggs walking them through the basic steps of the mixing process. Riggs then listens to these recordings and looks for specific techniques—such as the use of triplet rhythms—to discuss in their other classrooms.
This level of creative freedom wasn’t always encouraged in Riggs’s own education. At
Oberlin, a particularly conservative professor strongly discouraged them from performing atonal music. As early as fifth grade, they recall a music teacher playing two pieces, one tonal and one atonal, then asking the class to vote on which was better—and the teacher’s thumb was clearly on the scale for the tonal piece.
“I’m seeing now that, as a teacher, if a child comes to me and they’re legitimately interested in something, I’d better use that as an opportunity to engage with them,” Riggs says. “Whatever it might be, to pass it o is a huge mistake as an educator.”
Riggs and their students have a mutually beneficial relationship. Riggs gives everyone in their classes a space to create and explore, and in the process students frequently introduce Riggs to new sounds. It wasn’t until a recent student concert at Doolittle that Riggs realized the brilliance of Chicago footwork music, for example.
Riggs’s artistry has also been influenced by their students. At Wadsworth, they learned about TikTok from their fourth grade class and subsequently joined the platform, so they could reference it during lessons. Riggs posted a video playing guitar, and other users liked and commented on it. Their account, @autistic guitarist, has since evolved into a creative outlet for Riggs, who has an audience of nearly 14,000 followers.
“I had been in kind of a dark place for a number of years, artistically, prior to that,” they say. “I started getting responses and people liked what I did, and I didn’t have to dress it up at all. I didn’t have to release an album. I didn’t have to be something other than what I was, and they liked it. That made me think that I should keep doing what I’m doing.”
What Riggs does is simple—they seek out sounds that give them pleasure, and they make them over and over again. Maybe those sounds give you pleasure too, in which case you’re welcome to listen. And if not, well, you can just keep scrolling.
What better example to set for young musicians? Riggs’s students might not all wind up as avant-garde noise guitarists, but that isn’t the point. What matters is that they’ll know how to discover their own creative paths and stick with them, regardless of what anyone else might think.
Riggs demonstrates that there’s no right or wrong way to create music—just find a sound you like and start making it. v
@austinwds64
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.
“Igot all these friends but I still feel alone, imagine that,” says CantBuyDeem. These are the first words in Reality Raps, a short film created by and starring the multidisciplinary south-side artist. He’s a rapper, a model, a graphic designer, and now a filmmaker.
Reality Raps , like the album of the same name that Deem released in April, was inspired by his personal mental-health journey
and his experience with going to therapy. He premiered the film at the Logan Theatre on May 24 for a packed room of friends, family, and strangers. Prior to the screening, stand-up comedians warmed up the audience (laughter is the best medicine, after all), and local artist and organizer Jiggy Bars gave a brief musical performance. He ended his set by telling the crowd to give Deem a round of applause for doing something special: “We need more Black men talking about mental health.”
Like any such journey, Deem’s wasn’t an easy one. “I had a really traumatic life growing up, and as I got older I realized just how traumatic it was,” he says. “I have a lot of other people in my life. I know that they need it. And you know, n***as will call me and tell
me all their problems for 45 minutes and get mad at me for not wanting to listen but won’t go to therapy. So I’m like, let me try to make a piece of art that can resonate with these individuals. . . . That was the inspiration to tell my truth and relate to people in the same situation who might have needed that extra push or see someone like them to be able to also try therapy.”
According to a recent study published by Statista, in 2021 only 12.1 percent of men in the U.S. had sought out mental health treatment or counseling in the preceding year. Men are much less likely than women to go to therapy, and the numbers tend to be even lower among men of color. Patriarchal societies define masculinity by strength, and asking for help
or showing emotion is perceived as weakness. Deem says the catalyst that pushed him to finally seek help arrived in 2016, after the passing of his mother. He’d had to spend all the money he’d saved to start a business in order to cover her funeral costs, and he fell into a spiral.
“I started to pacify myself with people and substances,” he laments. “I was just trying to get as many girls as I can in my phone and just putting everything that I shouldn’t be putting in my body all the time, and I wasn’t feeling good. I felt like I needed to make a change.”
That began with what you might call selfcare. “I started working out and staying in the house a little more and meditating and eating better,” Deem says. “And then eventually I got to therapy.”
He also reinforced his new holistic lifestyle by practicing acts of kindness and surrounding himself with like-minded people who were trying to make a change for the better. Becoming a father also helped him mature, and he says his daughter is old enough now to point out his bad behavior to him. This has motivated him to reflect on himself and work to be the best role model he can for her.
In the last scenes of Reality Raps , Deem declines an invitation to go out in order spend time with his daughter. He says that now he’s in a clearer headspace, and while he still experiences moments of depression or emotional outbursts, he’s better able to process those feelings in a healthy, e cient way.
Deem says he can “have conversations about mental health and therapy with women of all races, all financial backgrounds,” but when he addresses those subjects with men, the tone changes.
“When I bring it up to men, it’s like, ‘Get out of here,’ like, ‘I don’t want to hear that,’” he reflects. “Even dudes that aren’t in the streets, we’re all still raised on the street culture because we live in the hood. I’m the black sheep in a lot of situations, so the stigmas that come with it are like, ‘This guy is weak.’ Or just for lack of a better term, flat-out saying, ‘This n***a p***y going somewhere, crying to somebody every week about his problems.’”
True strength, though, comes from humility and knowing when to seek help. Deem
“Money can’t buy you everything,” says CantBuyDeem. “Make sure you get your head right.” THOUGHTPOET FOR CHICAGO READER
often expresses that raw vulnerability in his art, describing it as the “ugly truth.” He says he doesn’t fit into a single mold or genre because he expresses himself according to what he’s experiencing at that specific time and place. He starts o the album version of Reality Raps —which includes skits of Deem in a therapy session—exuding braggadocious confidence over hard trap beats, yet by the end he’s expressing his most vulnerable self over slower, more melodic instrumentals. He hopes that what audiences take away from his music are the core themes of love of self and others—as opposed to seeking the kind of instant gratification that comes from having money. That’s why, he explains, he chose the stage name CantBuyDeem.
“Money can’t buy you everything—like love, respect, friends, you know,” he says. “So get you some, but also make sure you get your head right. That’s my life mission right there.” v
@DroInTheWind_
by
“If you have war in your native country, you will play for what? But now I understand that I can play and teach and live—not just survive.”
As told to JAMIE LUDWIG
Nataliia Kuryliak is an accomplished musician and educator working as a piano instructor at the Christopher Laughlin School of Music in Northbrook. Born in Koropets in western Ukraine, Kuryliak graduated from the Denys Sichynskyi Music College in Ivano-Frankivsk in 2015 and later earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Lviv National Music Academy. In February 2022, she and her infant son became two of millions of Ukrainian citizens fleeing their country after Russia escalated to full-scale war with an unprovoked invasion. After a few months in Poland, they came to the United States under the auspices of the Uniting for Ukraine program, an initiative launched by the Biden administration in April 2022 to pro-
vide Ukrainians and their immediate family a quick pathway (with the support of a sponsor) toward a temporary stay in the U.S. lasting up to two years. Today, Kuryliak and her son live with relatives in Niles. She’s recently begun playing piano for herself again for the first time since she left Ukraine.
To learn more about lessons with Kuryliak, visit ensembleschools.com/laughlin/staff/ nataliia-kuryliak. For details on how to support Ukrainian communities here and abroad, visit the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, Illinois Division (uccaillinois.org), the Ukrainian Medical Association of North America (umana.org), and the Self reliance Association (selfrelianceassociation.net).
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continued from p. 42
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Everyone in my family is a musician. My mom is a piano teacher. My dad is an elementary school music teacher, and my sister is a vocal teacher. So it wasn’t that I had no choice—I just felt like I had to be in music too. I went to music college, and I loved it. Then I was accepted to Lviv National Music Academy. I was the first in my family to graduate from a conservatory with a master’s degree. It’s a really big deal, because I was born in a small town in the west part of Ukraine where everyone was like a big family.
After graduation, I returned to IvanoFrankivsk, where my sister lives. I’d given birth to my son in August 2021, and when he was maybe one or two months old, I got a job at the college I graduated from. It was a huge honor. [Along with piano,] I worked as a concertmaster, and I worked with Ukrainian instruments like the bandura. My sister has her own small music school as a vocal teacher, so I also worked there as a piano and vocal teacher.
On February 24, my life and the lives of all Ukrainian people changed. This was the first day of the war with Russia. My son was six months old, and I lived alone with him. My sister lives on the other side of the city [with her family], my father lives in my hometown, and my mother lives in Poland. I was sleeping when my sister called and told me that it had started. I didn’t have a car, so I called my dad and said, “We have to do something. Maybe you can bring me to my native town?” Tra c was so bad it took him five or six hours to get to us. It’s only around 50 kilometers, or 25 miles away, but we were gone for four hours because everyone was waiting for gas.
So during the first four days of war, I was with my son in my small native town with my dad. It was a few months before my dad turned 60, and the military called him up to do some health checks and other stu . They [told him], “It’s OK. You can stay home.” But I was scared. My dad told me, “If I do go to the army, you will be alone.” So I had no choice. On the fourth day of the war, I decided to leave my country.
My mom was waiting for me in Poland. But still, I had to get there with a baby and without a car. My dad was scared to take me to the border [a few hours away]. But I just went. First
I went back to Ivano-Frankivsk, because it’s closer to the border. I went to my apartment and packed my backpack—if you’re alone with a six-month-old son, you can’t bring some big suitcase—with some medicine and diapers and a blanket because it was February. I just left everything else—it was like life had stopped. [These days] my sister and my dad check my apartment, and I have a camera where I can check on it from here. Every month I pay for electricity, Internet, gas, and water. If all the [displaced] people stopped paying their utilities, our country wouldn’t have money for them.
In Ukraine, we have a lot of apps where you can find a [ride or carpool], because not all Ukrainians have cars. So I found some guy who was headed not to Poland but toward the border. He was a stranger, but I wasn’t afraid—I just knew what I had to do. He dropped us o approximately ten kilometers from the border. I put my son in his stroller and walked. It took about five or six hours. It was night, and it wasn’t so smooth, so my son couldn’t sleep through the night. At that time I was breastfeeding, and I was so grateful to other Ukrainian refugees who let me feed my son in their car. There were so many cars—some people had to stay in their cars for three or four days. We were on an open road, but it wasn’t so much about privacy—it was more about the cold, because it was winter. That night, I understood that a mom can do anything. My mom was waiting for us when we crossed the border into Poland. It was like a di erent world because there were lots of volunteers, and I could take diapers for my son. There was a lot of food and blankets and hot soups. My mom lives [in Wrocław,] about six hours from the border by car, and her friends were really helpful. I didn’t have any clothes with me, and they brought a lot of clothes for me and my son. At that moment, I felt safe. We spent three months in Poland. My sister joined us; she had a one-and-a-half-year-old girl, and there were always sirens and always danger [at home]. We didn’t know what to expect. I thought I’d spend maybe two or three weeks with my mom, and I could return to Ukraine—the war would be finished. But every extra week, extra month, and extra year . . . I couldn’t even imagine that in the middle of
the 21st century, in the middle of Europe, that this could be. It’s terrible.
Coming to the States is a happier story, really. I have a lot of relatives in the United States; I have two aunts, one uncle, and my grandma here. My mom rented a very small apartment [in Poland], but it was too small for two children and three adults. We talked about what we were going to do next. My sister has a husband and a big family back in Ivano-Frankivsk, so she went home, but I didn’t have that choice.
My aunt helped me apply to the [Uniting for Ukraine] program. I’d seen a lot of movies about America, but when I came here [in spring 2022], I realized it’s really different. It’s not a fairy tale. You have to work, but I love it. I had to get used to it, and I had to think how I would live here with my son. But when you go to the Ukrainian church, all the people speak Ukrainian, so you don’t have a problem [communicating].
I live with my aunt and my uncle near O’Hare. I have friends from my college, my school, and from my native city [who also came after the invasion]. One of my friends here is a musician too. That’s nice, but unfortunately the war separated my family. We’re living in different cities, different countries, and even different continents, and the only possibility to see each other is online.
[As a parent] you worry not about yourself but about your children, always. And it’s terrible. Because in my opinion, every Ukrainian child will have a lot of questions for which there’s no answers. One day my son will ask why we left our country. “Why are my grandma and grandpa not with us?” Many children will ask, “Where’s my dad? Where’s my mom?”
Or “Where are my siblings?” Because they will forever be only in our hearts because of war. And for what? We fight for our freedom. But this war is so terrible I cannot even describe it.
Every day I pray that my country has victory as soon as possible. It will, for sure. But when?
When I came to the United States, I couldn’t even imagine that I’d be able to work as a musician. I applied for this job, and of course I googled it because I had to learn more. I found out more about my boss, and I was scared. Christopher Laughlin
across North America and literally around the world. He’s played on five continents—not five countries or five cities, five continents. And he graduated from Yale and [studied at] the Paris music academy. I’m just a plain, regular girl who graduated from the music academy and had maybe five years of experience [teaching]. I was more than sure he wouldn’t even look at my application, but here I am.
For me, this school is like a family. At this moment I’ve been working [part-time], because I have a small child and I can’t handle more. But I just wait for Wednesdays and Thursdays, because I can meet with my lovely students and have a chat with my awesome manager, Barbara. I love it because I have students of di erent ages, from five to maybe 60 or 70. It’s awesome because it’s di erent types of teaching. [With adults] we are focused on music and it’s like serious theory, and it’s never boring for me. And with children, you never know what to expect.
[This school] returned me not just to music but to life. I had no music in my life. From February 24, I didn’t play. I didn’t have a piano in Poland. And for what? If you have war in your native country, you will play for what? But now I understand that I can play and teach and live—not just survive. Because if I am
my relatives, and it won’t help me. If you feel good, your family and your child will feel good too.
My mom always told me, “You have to play. You have to earn a little money to buy a digital piano.” I had been learning how to play and how to teach piano for 15 years—most of my life. So I bought a digital piano maybe five months ago, and I began to play again just for myself. When I started, it was terrible, because my fingers were not mine. I didn’t forget it all, but I couldn’t feel my fingers well, and [it felt like] I had to start all over again. But last winter, I played a performance with a violinist to support Ukraine.
I played a lot of classical music at college and at the academy and afterward, just for myself. But now, when I try to play the same compositions, I can’t. Because I remember all of these happy times. I know the time will come again when [the war] will be finished and we will be able to play the happy, beautiful songs that we played before. But now we have to focus, and we have to work for our country, not just for ourselves. All Ukrainians who came to the United States and to Europe have to think about our victory—because it will happen—and we have to help. v
Pandelis Karayorgis See also Sun 7/2. Karayorgis performs two improvised sets in a quartet with Dave Rempis on saxophones, Jakob Heinemann on bass, and Bill Harris on drums. 8:30 PM, Elastic Arts, 3429 W. Diversey #208, $15. b
Pandelis Karayorgis is all about connections. On The Hasaan, Hope & Monk Project, a fantastic trio session released last year by Driff Records, the Boston-based keyboardist explores the overlapping idiosyncrasies of fellow pianists Thelonious Monk, Elmo Hope, and Hasaan Ibn Ali. In other settings, he has delved deeply into the music of Misha Mengelberg, Duke Ellington, and Sun Ra. Like those past masters, Karayorgis finds endless inspiration in the tensions he can create by suspending complex harmonies and judiciously situated pauses over hard-swinging rhythms. What keeps his music in the present tense is the dialogic rapport he’s developed with other musicians, especially those active in the Boston area (where he’s lived since leaving Athens, Greece, in 1985) and in Chicago. On a series of recordings with Karayorgis—including with the Pandelis Karayorgis Quintet, the Whammies, and Cutout—saxophonist Dave Rempis and trombonist Jeb Bishop have each brought a bristling intensity that tests the stress tolerances of the pianist’s compositions. This week, Karayorgis will reconnect with both of them, and he’ll also play for the first time with a few Chicagoans of a younger generation. On Thursday, he and Rempis will play two sets with bassist Jakob Heinemann and drummer Bill Harris. And on Sunday, he’ll appear in two different ensembles: first in a trio with Bishop and revenant vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, then in a quintet with Rempis, alto saxophonist Sarah Clausen, and drummers Tyler Damon and Lily Glick Finnegan. —BILL MEYER
Emily Kuhn Quintet 8:30 PM, Constellation, 3111 N. Western, $15. 18+
DO YOU EVER feel incapacitated by the firehose of depressing news about our deteriorating environment and the stubborn nonresponse by the governments and corporations who could actually help? What about the deeply ingrained structural racism that disenfranchises and marginalizes large swaths of our communities, or the fascists who want to increase that misery? Maybe what gets you is the untenable rise in the cost of living, while the 1 percent get richer and richer and the management class fantasizes about using AI to destroy our livelihoods. Or maybe you just can’t believe how much money and energy was funneled into making The Flash. Whatever it is that’s pressing down on you, it’s probably already compounded into a ball of stress that sits on your chest—sadly, that’s a feeling almost anybody can recognize. You may also recognize it in The Whaler (Wax Bodega), the new second album from Florida fifth-wave emo standard-bearers Home Is Where—and it
might even help you find some catharsis. The Whaler focuses on 9/11 as a symbolic tipping point past which everything has gotten worse every day. The attacks function as the nexus on an evidence board that’s tangled with connections, linking a web of ideas and feelings and experiences without oversimplifying them. Home Is Where’s impressionistic lyrics give you breathing room to interpret the band’s thesis about our crumbling world, and even if you don’t bother to parse them, the way front woman Brandon MacDonald yelps and brays lets you feel how much worse o we all are. The band blends rough-hewn folk-punk instrumentation and the desperate energy of screamo to supersize the desperation and anger bubbling through the songs, and the album is a reminder of what even a small group can accomplish when they unite as a single organism. Even though we’re born into a hellscape, together we can make something great. —LEOR
GALILAn up-and-coming musician usually gives themselves a starring role on their first record as a bandleader—what better time to show the world what they’re made of? But trumpeter Emily Kuhn, who moved to Chicago a er graduating from Oberlin in 2016, bucked that tradition on her eclectic, dreamy 2020 debut, Sky Stories, which diplomatically spotlights her free-jazz quartet and her nonet, Helios. Kuhn edges into the spotlight on her new second album, Ghosts of Us (BACE), but it still features another of her regular bands—a quintet with drummer Gustavo Cortiñas, guitarist Erik Skov, pianist Meghan Stagl, and bassist Kitt Lyles—with generous coequality.
Sky Stories is many things: suffusing, enveloping, inquisitive, and sometimes sweetly quirky. But it isn’t provocative, and the rather traditionalist Ghosts of Us is even less so. The liner notes of this cool, unfussy album trace the songs’ origins to the 2020 COVID lockdowns, but it sounds more like an easy voyage of bountifully talented friends than a pro-
found meditation on the cataclysm of the pandemic. But it’s well worth joining them on the ride. Skov unfurls stunning solos on “Respire” and “When the World Is Young,” opening the latter with a brooding, eloquent guitar soliloquy. Cortiñas’s de touch reaffirms his status as one of the great drummers in the city’s new guard. And throughout the album, Kuhn plays with the charm of a wizened storyteller, persuasively bringing it home on “Home,” the album’s closing ballad. —HANNAH
EDGARRotundos Division Point, Minivan, and Aisle Five, open. 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $12. 17+
Rising Chicago four-piece Rotundos make lo-fi rock with the kind of freewheeling glee that feeds any good DIY scene. They’ve released a handful of singles and demos, and they’re headlining Beat Kitchen to celebrate their new debut EP, Ya Nos Conocen (Sawyer), which corrals bubblegum-sweet power- pop hooks and rough-and-tumble punk grit into six lean bilingual songs. (Rotundos sing in English and Spanish.) The band sneak bits of melodic flair and instrumental complexity into this charmingly scrappy material, despite its straightforward simplicity. They transform the stormy, morose punk of “When I’m Awake” into an all-out thrash spectacle whose blazing guitar riff feels like it could outrun the rhythm section. Rotundos like to play as fast as they can, if not faster, as if they’re in a rush to get their ideas out before they forget them. I get a jolt of energy when I listen to this EP—I can only imagine what it feels like to see the band play live.
—LEOR GALILPandelis Karayorgis See Thu 6/29. Karayorgis begins the night in a trio with trombonist Jeb Bishop and vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz; for the second set, the pianist will play in a quintet with saxophonists Dave Rempis and Sarah Clausen and drummers Tyler Damon and Lily Glick Finnegan. 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $15. 21+
Square Roots See also Sat 7/8 and Sun 7/9. On the North Stage, Momma headlines and Aunt Kelly opens (X have canceled). On the South Stage, Mucca Pazza headlines; Edward Carpio Salguero and Disaster Kid open. 5-10 PM, Lincoln between Montrose and Wilson, suggested donation $10 for adults, $5 for kids and seniors, $20 for families. b
Chicago’s outdoor entertainment season arrived this year amid more questions than usual: Why NASCAR, and why here? Why did the Chicago Park District extend the C3 Presents Lollapalooza contract in Grant Park for another ten years, when residents in Pilsen, North Lawndale, Belmont Cragin, and other neighborhoods are still duking it out with independent promoters over community resources
and access to public parks? This makes me especially grateful for the 2023 installments of some of Chicago’s longest-running and least problematic summer events—business as usual is sometimes actually a positive thing. And at Square Roots in Lincoln Square, business is good.
Established in 1998 as the Folk & Roots Festival, Square Roots features a mix of rock, roots, and traditional music from around the globe. It includes one indoor and three outdoor stages of music, dance, and family-oriented programming, and proceeds from admission (technically a suggested donation) benefit the Lincoln Square Ravenswood Chamber of Commerce and the Old Town School of Folk Music. This year’s lineup features some familiar faces, including Jon Langford & Sally Timms, Eleventh Dream Day, Split Single, and Superchunk, as well as a couple buzzed-about local up-and-comers. Nineties-influenced alt-rockers Slow Pulp (who just announced their second album, Yard, due on Antiin September) and indie-rock outfit Brigitte Calls Me Baby (whose vocalist, Wes Leavins, could hold his own next to Elvis or Morrissey) are the kind of acts you’ll want to catch now to lock in those “I saw them back when” bragging rights. You’ll find plenty of reasons to come early and stay late, whether your tastes run toward the serene and tranquil (hazy dream-pop band Divino Niño, angel-voiced folk singer Sabine McCalla, country artist Angela James) or whether you crave theatrics and spectacle (you can see not one but two outsider marching bands—Mucca Pazza and Clamor & Lace Noise Brigade—plus tap-dancing indie-pop outfit Them Queers).
Square Roots also shines when it comes to highlighting diverse sounds from outside the predominantly white musical cultures associated with “roots” music in America. Local acts performing this year include Chicago-based Mongolian folk trio Tuvergen Band; renowned multi- instrumentalist, storyteller, and AACM member Shanta Nurullah, who creates hypnotic blends of blues, jazz, and Indian classical music with her group Sitarsys; and Latine rock royalty Los Vicios de Papá, who deliver their fusion of cumbia, reggae, ska, and more with a socially conscious point of view. For a few of the festival’s acts, Lincoln Square is more than a few Brown Line stops away: Nigerien family band Etran de L’Aïr take a pan-African approach to joyful psychedelic rock, and they’re not to be missed.
—JAMIE LUDWIGChosen Few Picnic & Festival With the Chosen Few DJs, Kenny Dope, John Morales, Jamie 3:26, Stan Zeff, BeBe Winans, Lidell Townsell, and Lori Branch. 9 AM, Jackson Park, 63rd St. at Hayes Drive, $60 general admission, $160 for two GA tickets and a parking pass, kids under 12 free. b
Chicagoans rarely suffer from a shortage of music festivals, but few such events make me feel like I’m participating in the city’s cultural fabric like the Chosen Few Picnic. The long-running house-music celebration began informally in 1990, and its roots extend even further back. Wayne Williams founded the Chosen Few DJ collective in 1977 as a high
continued from p. 47
school student, and the group helped Chicago youth keep carrying the disco torch as the music dri ed out of sync with mainstream pop. Williams stabilized the Chosen Few’s lineup over the next few years, first bringing aboard Jesse Saunders, then Tony Hatchett, Alan King, and finally Tony’s younger brother, Andre. They helped evolve the culture of dance music in Chicago, building upon and expanding what Frankie Knuckles had incubated at the Warehouse. But as house music became a citywide phenomenon in the early 1980s, the members of the Chosen Few began moving away for college. Their annual summertime tradition is sometimes called the Chosen Few Reunion Picnic in part because the collective—which added Terry Hunter in 2006 and Mike Dunn in 2012—could use the Fourth of July weekend to reconvene in Chicago. It all started in 1990, when the Chosen Few DJed at the Hatchett family’s annual Independence Day barbecue behind the Museum of Science and Industry.
A lot has changed for the gathering in 33 years. In some respects the Chosen Few Picnic, which draws tens of thousands of people to Jackson Park, now resembles a more traditional summer music festival: it’s become a gated and ticketed event, and these days the DJs spin on a stage outfitted with a jumbotron. But much of the spirit of the picnic’s original incarnation remains intact. Large groups of family and friends show up in the early morning with tents and barbecue grills of all sizes, set up camp in the park, and kick back—and when the music moves them, of course, they dance. Every member of the Chosen Few spins for an hour, along with a slate of guests. As usual, the DJ lineup is filled with dance veterans this year, including Masters at Work cofounder Kenny Dope, London house pioneer Stan Zeff, and Chicago’s first woman house DJ, Lori Branch. The vocalists on the bill perform shorter sets but almost always light up the crowd. This year’s picnic features old-school R&B and gospel singer BeBe Winans and classic Chicago house
vocalist Lidell Townsell—and I hope Townsell performs his 1991 Clubhouse Records single, “Nu Nu,” which alternates between easygoing and spicy. Organizers usually don’t release a detailed schedule till closer to the picnic, but this isn’t the kind of event where you dip in for one set and then leave—it’s about soaking up the atmosphere that all the DJs, singers, dancers, and grill masters create. In other words, you’ll want to get there early.
—LEOR GALIL
Disinter The Everscathed, Abraded, and Derangement open. 9 PM, Reggies Music Joint, 2105 S. State, $15. 21+
Disinter have been spewing forth evil blackened death metal for more than three decades. The Chicago longtimers have changed their lineup many times since their 1997 debut full-length, Desecrated (Pulverizer)—only guitarists Mike “Bats” Martocci and Mike LeGros have survived from that era to the present. But their sound has maintained an unholy consistency, with fierce blizzards of blastbeats, meaty knots of prog-guitar buzz, and largely unintelligible lyrics about bones and hell and death. (It’s fi tting that the band contributed to Satyrn Studios’ recent Slayer tribute album, Forever Reigning , with a very fine cover of “Show No Mercy.”) Old-school fans may still mourn the departure of original vocalist “Evil” Ed Suzuski, whose distinctive low-pitched gargle gave Desecrated a crusty frog-demon slither that the band hasn’t quite manifested since. Still, current vocalist Casey Loving, who came aboard in 2018, is more than capable of handling the throat-defenestrating duties. His vocals on the band’s fi rst full-length in 18 years, 2022’s Breaker of Bones (Pest), are more cathartic and less weird than Suzuski’s, but they add an anthemic charge to tracks such as “Cold Cell Torture.” If you crave a demonic infusion of metal that keeps the (anti-) faith, don’t miss Disinter live.
—NOAH BERLATSKYLustSickPuppy Johnnascus and Casper McFadden open. 7 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $18. b
LustSickPuppy is a filthy cyber dog. A swaggering slut beast. A party howler. The Brooklyn artist’s sound combines elements of hip-hop, breakcore, and nu metal, capturing something animalistic about moving through a mechanical world. Onstage, they use prosthetics, contact lenses, face paint, studs, and spikes to create a strange, sexy interruption of everyday life—like if the erotic thrill ride of Cool World were executed using the settings and characters of Space Jam. Their music is a perfect marriage between club-kid uncanniness and juggalo attitude, promising a party atmosphere that’s alien, exaggerated, and feral.
The title track of LustSickPuppy’s most recent EP, the 2022 release As Hard as You Can , says it all. Against a blistering glitch beat, they describe showing up as an avatar of the self to realize the mission of a fuck- frenzied VR canine. When they scream “I want you to feel me / Feel me, eat me / Treat me like I’m filthy / Feed me, feed me / I want you to need me,” it’s the feverish moans of a dog glitching between being the chest-puffing leader of the pack and someone’s simpering pet. Delivered in a measured, mechanical tone, each line hits like a demand for attention from a spiteful sex Tamagotchi. At this show LustSickPuppy is sure to provide a funny, angry, mainframe-shattering catharsis.
—MICCO CAPORALE
Square Roots See Fri 7/7. On the North Stage, Superchunk headline; Eleventh Dream Day, the Cosmic Country Showcase, Split Single, Nathan Graham, and Jonas Friddle’s Jug Band Happy Hour open. On the South Stage, Divino Niño headline; Gabacho, Jon Langford & Sally Timms, Angela James, and Holy Joke open.
At Maurer Hall (4544 N. Lincoln), Los Vicios de Papá headline; Vagando, OvejaNegra, and
Shanta Nurullah’s Sitarsys open, a er a teen showcase and the Old Town School’s Second Half jam.
The Sunnyside Stage (the festival’s family stage) features Clamor & Lace Noise Brigade, Bollywood Bhangra & More!, Them Queers, and the Dreamtree Shakers, in that order.
Noon-10 PM, Lincoln between Montrose and Wilson, suggested donation $10 for adults, $5 for kids and seniors, $20 for families. b
Square Roots See Fri 7/7. On the North Stage, Real Estate headline; Slow Pulp, Brigitte Calls Me Baby, Tuvergen Band, Chicha Roots, and Mariachi Cuatro Vientos open. On the South Stage, Lala Lala headline; Disq, Etran De L’Aïr, Samba Parade, Dill Costa, and Urban Twang open.
At Maurer Hall (4544 N. Lincoln), Uncovered: Live Band Karaoke headlines; Steve Dawson & the Lucid Dreams, Moontype, and Sabine McCalla open, and a teen open mike starts the day.
The Sunnyside Stage (the festival’s family stage) features a bilingual dance party with Renée, Bill Brickey’s soul sing-along, Abby Lyons, Brandi Berry Benson, and a family barn dance with the Silver Trotters, in that order.
Noon-9 PM, Lincoln between Montrose and Wilson, suggested donation $10 for adults, $5 for kids and seniors, $20 for families. b
Home is Where See Pick of the Week on page 46. Smidley, OK Cool, and Everybody’s Worried About Owen open. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $15. 17+
High Priest, Invocation
Magnetic Eye
highpriestchicago.bandcamp.com/album/invocation
A lot of contemporary heavy metal greats are missing something crucial: a sense of melody. That’s where local four-piece High Priest really stand out. The band members are no strangers to making punishing music—guitarist John Regan and drummer Dan Polak also play in death-metal-influenced hardcore outfit Like Rats, and guitarist Pete Grossman helps run Bricktop Recording, a studio specializing in ridiculous heaviness. On their new record, Invocation (Magnetic Eye), High Priest hammer out stonery, doomy, Sabbath-style galloping riffs with ease, pumping monster grooves through crushing walls of amplifiers. But the best part of Invocation is that it’s incredibly catchy. Bassist and vocalist Justin Valentino croons like a less salty Danzig, adding a hint of sunny sweetness to the layers of destruction. Lead single “Divinity,” with its humongous hooks and a swing-for-the-cheap-seats chorus, is one of the most merciless earworms I’ve heard all year; I’ve already listened to it more times than I can count. Invocation isn’t quite a pop record, but if you’ve been itching for something that fits in with your other heavy shit and also lets you sing along, it’s going to be right up your alley.
—LUCA CIMARUSTI
legend DJ Rude One join forces to make magic on The ONEderful Nephew. Rude One is a student of the old school with cosigns from 90s hip-hop royalty (including Kool G Rap and Doom, who appear on his 2016 record, ONEderful), while RXK Nephew represents an emerging wave of underground rap that disregards conventional wisdom. But though the two artists come from different musical worlds, Neph’s brash flow and abrasive lyrics mesh well with Rude’s grimy boom-bap style.
The record sets up its villainous aura perfectly from the start. On opener “F**k Yo’ Set,” Neph punches listeners in the face with blatantly disrespectful bars over Rude’s dark, sinister beat. The track feels fit for a horror movie, but it’s hard not to laugh when Neph delivers “How you 50 with a 12-year-old boy chest?” with his characteristic iconoclastic charm.
Anyone expecting intricate rhyme schemes is given a giant metaphorical middle finger when Neph raps, “I’m not about to get on a beat and rap like Conway.” He’s referring to Griselda Records lyricist Conway the Machine, who’s known for his throwback style—but RXK Nephew walks to the beat of his own drum, and you can take it or leave it.
The album’s standout third track, “Black Ice,” might best exemplify what Neph and Rude One’s synergy feels like when it hits on all cylinders. Neph paints an absurd, vividly detailed heist story over a hypnotic, hollow drum loop, and listening to the track feels like being strapped into the passenger’s seat of a getaway vehicle.
Closed Sessions
djrudeone.bandcamp.com/album/the-onederfulnephew
In a meeting of generations, rising New York-based rapper RXK Nephew and Chicago underground
Neph often raps (and sometimes yells) about outrageous criminality and conspiracy theories, and his blunt approach can be jarring. If you’re used to the polished, formulaic sounds peddled on the radio and DSP playlists, The ONEderful Nephew might be an acquired taste—but fans of the dark grit and grime that thrives in hiphop’s underground are sure to fi nd it impeccable.
—ALEJANDRO HERNANDEZ vTUE 8/15
Baird, South Hill Experiment 8 PM, Schubas, 18+
THU 8/17
Richard Marx, John Waite 7 PM, Auditorium Theatre b
TUE 8/22
March Violets 9 PM, Empty Bottle
FRI 8/25
Jorma Kaukonen, Jack Broadbent 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
Dylan Ryan, Heather McIntosh, and Devin Ryan Trio; Doom Flower 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+
TUE 8/29
DuPont Brass 7 PM, the Promontory
WED 8/30
THU 7/13
Holy Ghost Tabernacle Choir, Stander, What It Felt Like, Bussy Kween Power Trip 8 PM, Sleeping Village
FRI 7/14
Bonny Doon, Anna St. Louis 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+
Project Outtahere: Round 2 featuring C-Mat, Jakey, Prayforsauce, Mission Stark, 3AM, Oxvy.Moron, Jabari, DJ S.Rock 8 PM, Golden Dagger D.S. Wilson 7 PM, the Promontory b
SUN 7/16
Big Time Rush, Max, Jax 7 PM, Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre, Tinley Park b
TUE 7/18
Dead Tooth, Dino Gala, Sunday Cruise 8 PM, Schubas, 18+
Family Junket, Kopano, Black Seinfeld 9 PM, Sleeping Village
FRI 7/21
Florist, Skullcrusher, Adelyn Strei 10 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Palm, Melkbelly 11 PM, Empty Bottle
Zoofunkyou, Mae Simpson Band, Cordoba 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+
SAT 7/22
700 Bliss 10:30 PM, Golden Dagger
Soul Glo, MSPaint 11 PM, Empty Bottle
WED 7/26
AJJ, Open Mike Eagle, Foot Ox, Video Dave 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+
Bad Wolves, Zero 9:36 7 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+
FRI 9/29
Nick Cave 8 PM, Auditorium Theatre b
SAT 9/30
Tank & the Bangas with the Chicago Philharmonic 7:30 PM, Auditorium Theatre b
THU 10/5
Sam Tompkins 8:30 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+
FRI 10/6
THU 7/27
Njomza, Mariah Colon 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+
FRI 7/28
Ausar 6 PM, the Promontory b
SUN 7/30
Myylo, Kate Yeager 8:30 PM, Golden Dagger
THU 8/3
Lollapalooza day one featuring Billie Eilish, Karol G, Noah Kahan, Carly Rae Jepsen, Diplo, Newjeans, Sofi Tukker, Portugal. The Man, Dom Dolla, Lainey Wilson, the Rose, Key Glock, Rema, Men I Trust, Timmy Trumpet, Acraze, Lovejoy, Jessie Murph, J. Worra, Joy Oladokun, Franc Moody, Disco Lines, Spacey Jane, Brakence, Clinton Kane, Dope Lemon, Beaches, Matt Maltese, and more noon, Grant Park b Soup Dreams, Moontype, Hannah Sandoz 8 PM, Golden Dagger
FRI 8/4
Lollapalooza day two featuring Kendrick Lamar, the 1975, Fred Again, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Subtronics, Svdden Death, Tems, Beabadoobee, Big Wild, Sabrina Carpenter, Jessie Reyez, Knocked Loose, Foals, Diesel, Peach Pit, Ken Carson, Armnhmr, Declan McKenna, Sudan Archives, Emo Nite, Ray Volpe, Blanke, Hairitage, Sueco, and more noon, Grant Park b
SAT 8/5
Lollapalooza day three featuring Odesza, Tomorrow X Together, Maggie Rogers, J.I.D, Pusha T, Yung Gravy, Revivalists, Meduza, Nora En Pure, AC Slater, Morgan Wade, Sylvan Esso, Alex G, the Garden, Destroy Lonely, the Knocks, Suki Waterhouse, Niki, Knock2, Ivan Cornejo, Thee Sacred Souls, Solardo, Zack Fox, Tom Odell, Jean Dawson, and more 11:50 AM, Grant Park b
SUN 8/6
Lollapalooza day four featuring Red Hot Chili Peppers, Lana Del Rey, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, Louis the Child, Rina Sawayama, Lil Yachty, Mt. Joy, Backseat Lovers, Alan Walker, Afrojack, Joey Badass, Gorgon City, Maisie Peters, DPR Ian, Poolside, Wax Motif, Holly Humberstone, Dehd, Magdalena Bay, Little Stranger, Big Boss Vette, and more 11:45 AM, Grant Park b
THU 8/10
M.A.G.S., Death Lens 6:30 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+
SAT 8/12
Mason Jennings 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
SUN 8/13
Veil of Maya, For the Fallen Dreams, Hive, Bind the Sacrifice 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+
MON 8/14
Weathers, Almost Monday, Hoko 6:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b
Matt Costa, Travesura 8:30 PM, Gman Tavern
TUE 9/5
Tate McRae, Charlieonnafriday 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b
FRI 9/8
North Mississippi Allstars 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b
SAT 9/9
Kaycyy 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club b
TUE 9/12
King 7 PM, House of Blues b
SAT 9/16
Ashnikko 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom b
MON 9/18
Hippie Death Cult, Spirit Mother 8 PM, Reggies Music Joint
TUE 9/19
Johnny Manchild & the Poor Bastards 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+
THU 9/21
Gus Dapperton, Sarah Kinsley 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+
SUN 9/24
Alice Longyu Gao 6 PM, Cobra Lounge b
Thelma & the Sleaze, Lung 9 PM, Empty Bottle
MON 9/25
Cold Cave, SRSQ 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+
TUE 9/26
Asking Alexandria, the Hu,
Adekunle Gold 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+
SAT 10/7
Eladio Carrion 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+
Little Dragon 8 PM, the Vic, 18+
SUN 10/8
Myke Towers 8 PM, Rosemont Theatre, Rosemont b
THU 10/12
Raphael Saadiq 8 PM, Chicago Theatre b Zhu 10 PM, Radius Chicago, 18+
WED 10/18
Kim Petras 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+
THU 11/2
Gayle 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b
SAT 11/4
Fury of Five, These Streets 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+
WED 11/15
Lil Darkie & the Collapse of Modern Society 7 PM, Riviera Theatre b
SUN 11/19
Mico 7:30 PM, Schubas, 18+
SAT 12/2
MAE 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b
FRI 12/8
Justin Quiles 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+
WED 12/13
Doja Cat, Ice Spice 7:30 PM, United Center b
SAT 1/27/2024
Randy Rainbow 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre b v
CHICAGO ARTIST Nicholas Clark first popped up on Gossip Wolf’s radar in 2016, when his Minnowland studio made a hilariously oddball Claymation video for “Sad Screaming Old Man,” a song by New York indie-folk musician and comic-book artist Jeffrey Lewis about his travails with a loud elderly neighbor. As it turns out, Clark also makes hilariously oddball records of his own, and this wolf is especially enamored with his solo project Froghat, which he says plays “froggressive rock and surf.” It’s easy to love Clark’s perfect repurposing of the Foghat logo and his amphibianstyle motorcycle helmet, but their charm would fade fast if his tunes were bunk. Thankfully, his Dick Dale-adjacent hammy jams—with titles such as “Squid Pro Quo” and “The Long and Winding Toad”—are as catchy as his puns are shameless. He even turns in a sharp cover of Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing,” retitled “Sultans of Surf.” In June, Clark dropped the new album Meet Froghat. and the new single Froghat Plays the Hits, and both seem destined to fill amphibian-shaped holes in the playlists of surf-rock fans worldwide.
Earlier this month, Chicago industrial techno auteur Dalibor Cruz issued the CD-R Veiled Asperity in a tiny edition via underground Greek label Live Adult Entertainment . If you enjoy ambient dance music that titillates and terrifies in equal measure, it’ll be up your alley. International music retailer Boomkat is sold out of Veiled Asperity, but this wolf hopes Signal Records will turn up a few copies when Dalibor Cruz plays a free in-store on Saturday, July 1. Hunting Scene opens, and the show starts at 2 PM.
Since forming in 2021, Chicago hip-hop collective MP3dotcom have issued just one single, last year’s “Igotsomeshit.” But it’s so impressive that this wolf can’t wait to see the group live. On Friday, June 30, they headline the Catacombs at Epiphany Center for the Arts. Koifish and Linda Sol open, and tickets are $15 ($12 in advance).
—J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL
Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.
How do furries happen?
By DAN SAVAGE
Q : I’m a 41-year-old cis female and have experienced a significant amount of physical and emotional abuse in my relationships. I recently started dating again and met a really great guy who told me that he was interested in having a dom/ sub relationship. I thought that would be it and told him so—given my experiences, I wasn’t interested in being his sub—but it turns out he wants me to be his dom. The thought of being the one in control kind of fascinates me and it feels very sexy to think about. But I am so used to worrying about the very scary and very real repercussions of even having an opinion a er everything I have experienced in the past that I’m finding it difficult to navigate this. His interests
aren’t in the whips-andchains wheelhouse; it’s more like wanting to please someone who is demanding and bossy. Do you have any tips, suggestions, or resources you would recommend for me to learn more and be the best Dom Goddess I can possibly be?
—WOMAN HAVING EXTREME EXCITEMENT
a: “Take it slow,” said Midori. “That’s always my first piece of advice: Take it slow. Then take small steps while remembering to center yourself and your joy first.”
An author, artist, educator, and public speaker on sexuality and kink for more than two decades, Midori created the ForteFemme Women’s Dominance Intensive (www.fortefemme.com) to help women to explore domination thoughtfully and
authentically.
“Everyone talks about new relationship energy, and NRE is real,” said Midori, “but new relationship dynamic energy—NRDE—is just as real. NRDE feels just like NRE in important ways. In both cases, enthusiasm can get the better of us. We find ourselves wanting to do-allthe-things-all-at-once. In our excitement we can bite off more than we can chew, and then wind up feeling queasy and upset after. Right now WHEE should allow the sweet spiciness of all the new and exciting things she’s thinking about to continue to percolate while building confidence in herself.”
Once you’re ready to get started — once you’re ready to experiment — take small steps.
“There’s a giant difference between Dominance
and submissive play scenes and D/s relationships, even if the names imply they’re the same thing,” said Midori. “I always refer to the latter as Consented Hierarchical Opted-In Relationships, or CHOIR for short—I know, too cute by half—but it’s helpful to make this distinction between saying yes to a small scene and entering into a D/s relationship.”
Even if you ultimately want a D/s relationship, you should start with some simple play.
“Play is about your fun for tonight,” said Midori, “CHOIR is about structures of decision-making that can encompass ordinary daily life stuff as well as play time. It’s common for folks to mix these up, which can lead to unnecessary pressure, confusion about boundaries, expectation conflict, and other decidedly un-fun feel-
ings. This confusion is so common that I have an online class called “So You Want D/s? Now What?” to help people figure out which is which and how to enjoy them both.”
And your first small step (that first playful scene) doesn’t have to look like BDSM porn. You don’t need gear, outfits, or a dedicated play space.
“WHEE should experiment with adding a power dynamic to her already existing sex life,” said Midori. “It’s an exercise I call ‘Will You to “You Will.”’ Take all the hot vanilla sex stuff you’re already enjoying—the things you’re probably already asking for—and turn the ask into a directive. ‘Will you kiss me?’ becomes ‘You will kiss me.’ ‘Will you lick me?” becomes ‘You will lick me.’ ‘Do you want to fuck me?’ becomes
‘We are going to fuck.’”
It’s about what you want.
“Think about what would please you,” said Midori. “That’s what centering yourself and your joy is about. Many of us have been conditioned to—in the course of our daily lives—to think of others first and not check in on our own wants. A consensual, collaborative D/s play scene can be a lovely way to break down these selferasing, destabilizing habits. But to do that—to go there— you have to honestly ask yourself, ‘What would please me right now?’ It might not be something thought of as kinky or sexual. Do you want your hair brushed? You can tell him to brush your hair.
Do you want a story read to you? You can tell him to read to you. Do you want dinner cooked and served with him dressed or undressed in a
pleasing manner? And then for him to do the dishes? As Westley says to Buttercup, ‘As you wish.’”
To learn more about Midori, to check out her art, and to buy her books, go to planetmidori.com. The next ForteFemme Women’s Dominance Intensive takes place July 7-9, and dates for the fall will be announced soon. To learn more or register, go to fortefemme.com.
Q: Fourteen years ago, I fell for a woman who was into watching guy-on-guy oral sex. I indulged her fetish on multiple occasions at play parties and during pre-arranged hotel encounters with bisexual guys. While I only did this
to please her, I enjoyed these MMF encounters because I got off on her getting off. At the time I thought maybe I was bisexual and had been in denial. But a er we broke up, and a er becoming more thoroughly educated on D/s dynamics, I’ve come to believe I am in fact not bi and instead straight. I’m can just be really subby for the right woman. Most people to whom I disclose my history insist that I’m not straight because of what I did for that one woman. I even encounter this in the kink community, where the D/s perspective should be better understood. My argument that I am straight and not bi is that I’ve never
been romantically attracted to a man. I’ve never gone down on a man without a woman telling me to—and it’s not as if there aren’t any opportunities for me to do so, as I live on the north side of Chicago. (You might be familiar with this neighborhood?) All that being said, do you think I’m straight? —SUCKER FOR DOM WOMEN
a: Sure
Q: How do furries happen? The kink just seems so random. And why are there so many furries now but no furries in ancient history?
FATHOMING UNUSUAL ROLES
a: Cartoons. Disney.
Mascots.
While not everyone who gets off on dressing up in fursuits and/or animal mascot costumes has the same origin story, FUR, many furries trace their kink to—many credit their kink to—the anthropomorphized animal characters they were exposed to in childhood. Now, most kids who watch Disney movies don’t grow up to be furries, just as most kids who take a swim class don’t grow up to have Speedo fetishes or rubber swim cap fetishes. But a certain tiny percentage of all three groups do. Since we can’t predict which random environmental stimuli a kid might fixate on—and therefore can’t predict whose childhood fixa-
tions will become adult sexual obsessions—there’s no controlling for kinks. Some people are gonna be kinky when they grow up, no one’s kinks are consciously chosen, and if they seem random, it’s because they kindasorta are random.
As for the ancients . . .
Anthropomorphized animal characters didn’t come to dominate childhood (mass media, imaginations) until the 20th century—Disney was founded in 1923, Looney Tunes was founded in 1930—but there were adults running around out there with marionette fetishes acquired at puppet shows before Mickey and Bugs took over. (There are still marionette fetishists out there.) As
for the actual ancients, the Roman emperor Nero (37-68 AD) used to dress up in animal skins and pretend to be a wild boar at orgies—according to historians who may have been biased against him—and there are lots of examples of ancient people dressing up as animals for religious festivals and holidays; some of festivals included sacred sexual rites, but some of them were just fuck fests because people are, and have always been, kinky freaks. v
Ask your burning questions, listen to podcasts, read full columns, and more at https://savage.love
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Reader Sales representatives sell print, digital, and ad products to local businesses. Sales reps shoudl have 2 years of sales experience OR similar skills, & knowledge of media/advertising products. Ideal candidates will be familiar with CRM software & GSuite. Comp packages vary (full or part time), & include salary, commission, and health benefits. Diverse candidates encouraged to apply. This is an ongoing search. Send a resume to careers@ chicagoreader.com.
Assistant Professor
“Northwestern University Department of Economics. Position: Assistant Professor. Teach classes, conduct research (applied microeconomics focus), advise graduate students. Required: PhD in economics, outstanding research record, excellent recommendations, teaching ability. Send CV and 3 reference letters to Director of Finance and Adm. To econ@northwestern.edu. AA/EOE.
Associate Attorney Chicago, IL. Conduct legal research & gather evidence. Draft motion, pleadings & legal memo. Issue & respond to written discovery & conduct dep. Represent clients in court proceedings. Mail resume to J. Schuchert, KMA Zuckert LLC, 200 West Madison Street, Floor 16, Chicago IL 60606.
CRYPTO SR ACCT DRW Holdings LLC has opening in Chicago, IL for Crypto Sr Acct (Pos. ID SA/IL/G045) to lead monthly acct close process of DRW’s crypto biz. Req: MS/MA in Acct & 3 yrs exp. Email resume to apply@drw.com, Attn: M. CARTER. Must ref. Pos. ID SA/IL/G045 when applying to ensure consideration for proper position. EOE.
AUDITIONS
FPGA Engineers Canon Medical Research USA, Inc. seeks FPGA Engin-eers for Vernon Hills, IL location to Dev digital FPGA logic solutions targeting apps such as system comm/control, data movement & pro-cessing, & embedded microprocessors. Mast-er’s in Elec Eng/Comp Eng/related field OR Bachelor’s in Elec Eng/ Comp Eng/ related field +2yrs exp req’d. Req’d skills: full life-cycle FPGA design; VHDL; Xilinx Viv- ado; Xilinx ISE; Vivado Logic Analyzer; Model-Sim Simulator; Verilog; System Verilog; Questa; Subversion; PCIe; UVM; HDL design (resource use, clock-rate, laten-cy); storage elements (FIFO, register, Block RAM). Some telecomm-uting permitted. Apply online: www.research. us .medical.canon/ careers Req ID: 1181
Royal Cyber Inc. in Naperville, IL. has openings for Senior Developer (Design, Develop S/W Solutions); Salary range $114,067.00 to 119,000.00 / Year. Req. Masters or foreign equiv CS, Data Analytics, CIS, MIS, Engg (Any), or any rel. field. Travel & reloc. reqd. Mail resume HR Manager, Royal Cyber, Inc.,55 Shuman Blvd, Suite # 275, Naperville, IL 60563 or Email: hr. us@royalcyber.com.
Software Developer
closeout phase. Work is at Employer’s HQ (16500 Vincennes Rd, South Holland, IL 60473) w/ travel to project site visits 4x per month lasting 1-2 hrs per visit w/in the Chicago area. Min Reqs: Master’s in Construction Mgmt, Civil Engineering, Construction Engineering, or a closely rltd field + 2 yrs exp in occupations rltd to Civil Engineering; 2+ yrs exp in: analyzing & working w/ construction blueprints, shop drawings & specs; preparing bids & cost estimations for construction projects; procuring bldg materials & arranging construction equip; & conducting construction site visits; working w/ CAD software such as Auto CAD, BIM (Building Info Modeling), Vico/ Revit, or Sefaira; Project Mgmt software such as Procore or Foundation; Bid Mgmt software such as BuildingConnected or Smartbid; construction estimation & takeoff software such as Active ta eoff, n-screen Takeoff) or Bluebeam; & scheduling software including Primavera P6 or Microsoft Project. Resume to Chicago Heights Glass, Inc at info@ chicagoheightsglass.com
curves, such as LIBOR, T-Bill, and SONIA/SOFR, under various rating scenarios; conducting sensitivity testing and scenario analysis to assess financial models and scorecard models.
Skill Sets: Python, SQL, MATLAB and Excel. Send resumes to LGIMA at katie.edeus@lgima.com
SAP Security Architect/ Release Coordinator
release coordination; & (iv) 2 yrs exp working w/ Redwood Cronacle tool in batch job creation, maintenance, & issue resolution. Exp may be gained concurrently. Apply online at www. bakermckenzie. com/en/careers
HOUSING ADULT SERVICES
ASSISTANT RESIDENT ENGINEERS ASSISTANT RESIDENT ENGINEERS Chicago IL area. Overseeing the daily activities of the inspection staff and seeing to it that they complete detailed & thorough reports. Accepting or rejecting the contractor’s work. Travel to project sites throughout the Chicago metro area. Send res to: Infrastructure Engineering Incorporated, hr@infra-eng.com.
IT Project Mgr. Req: Bach deg in Bus. Admin or Comp. Sci. & 36 mo. exp in data manipulation/analytical support. Job Site: Schaumburg, IL. Send C.V. + cover letter to: American Society for Dermatological Surgery, Attn: HR 1933 N. Meacham Rd Ste 650, Schaumburg, IL 60173.
– Mid (Multiple Openings) Chicago, IL. Susquehanna International Group, LLP. Autnmsly prtcipt in all phases of th entire sftwre dvlpmnt lfcycle frm intial rquirmnts gthrng thrgh final ulty assrnce, implmntation & subsqunt enhncmnts & supprt of th prdct. Req: Bach deg, or for equiv, in Comp Sci, Comp or EE, Math or rel or its for equiv, + 5 yrs progrssve exp devlping SW apps in either C++, C#, Java or Python in Unix, Linux, or Windows. Will also accept Mast deg, or for equiv, in Comp Sci, Comp or EE, Math or rel or its for equiv, + 2 yrs exp devlping SW apps in either C++, C#, Java or Python in Unix, Linux, or Windows. Email resume to: applytoSIG@ sig.com and incl. ref. job code 20237
Project EngineerReview construction project design drawings, vendor drawings, install instructions & interference issues. Manage project plans. Prepare estimates. Manage RFIs & submittals. File construction reports. Report drawing change orders. Assist w/ subcontract agreements & POs. Coordinate safety & compliance. Maintain project schedule. Prepare project start-up/
DePaul University seeks Systems Engineers for Chicago, IL location to participate in the dev of COL related systems & apps. Bachelor’s in Comp Sci/Comp Eng/ any Eng field/related field +2yrs exp req’d. Skills req’d: .NET, C#, JavaScript, MySQL, Linux, Windows Server, Mac OS & Ghost Solution Suite. Apply online:https:// offices.depaul.edu/ human-resources/ careers, REQ: 1048
Quantitative Analyst
Quantitative Analyst sought by Legal & General Investment Management America (LGIMA) in Chicago, IL to provide market-leading analytics for the firm’s suite of investment solutions; leverage knowledge in finance to develop models that assess the risks of employing different investment strategies. Position requires a US master’s degree, or a foreign degree equivalent, in Financial Mathematics, inance or a related field and 2 year of professional experience performing implementation testing and back-testing analysis for quantitative financial models and cash flow models used in credit ratings; assisting in developing and maintaining CIR model to simulate interest rate
SAP Security Architect/ Release Coordinator, Baker & McKenzie LLP, Chicago, IL. Maintain & drive global technology strategies & roadmaps within SAP Security & GRC; plan & coordinate resources for release activities; perform root cause analysis; propose, implement, test & track structural solutions; design, develop, & deploy SAP security solutions for all SAP core modules utilizing SAP Security; develop security architecture of the technology including user provisioning/deprovisioning, password management, multifactor authentication, & data access control utilizing SAP GRC; perform security configuration including SAP Security authorizations, concepts, transactions, & tables for SAP BW, BOBJ, Solution Manager, & related SAP Applications; define & implement the application security solution including security roles, segregation of duties analysis rules, security role provisioning, security workflow, business process controls, security analytics & GRC; support the security administration function to ensure SAP security object changes are appropriately incorporated into SAP access administration processes; manage & utilize Redwood system to plan, design, develop, test, execute, & monitor the job chains in SAP & non-SAP space; validate change requests in all SAP instances & execute change management processes. Requires a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related, plus 5 yrs exp w/ architecting & designing SAP security solutions. Of exp required, must have the following concurrent experience: (i) 5 yrs exp working w/ application security; (ii) 5 yrs exp designing, building, implementing, & supporting SAP security roles rofiles to all environments, including SAP, ECC, FIORI, BI/ BW, BOBJ, BPC, GRC, & Solution Manager; (iii) 4 yrs exp w/ Service Operations, including
Software Engineer 3, Middleware Chamberlain Group seeks a Software Engineer 3, Middleware to work in Chicago, IL to work using Agile methodologies such Scrum to develop middleware. Will analyze requirements, collaborate with architects and senior engineers to produce thoughtful software designs of moderate scope and complexity.
Must have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or a related field of study and 4 years of e erience in o offered or related occupation.
Must have exp: (1) Agile methodologies and Scrum (2) Microsoft technology stack, including .NET, C#, SQL, Azure (3) Visual studio, GIT (4) Understanding of OOP, SOLID, and RESTful services
(5) Understanding of dependency injection and cloud development
(6) Ability to work cross functionally with front end and quality engineers (7) Ability to debug, troubleshoot, and self-diagnose issues in software development
(8) ability to interface with scrum team, product owners, and scrum masters for ticket/ issue management. Telecommuting & remote working allowed. Apply online at https://www. chamberlaingroup. com/careers/ Refer to Job ID AZ23.
TranSmart, LLC seeks Civil Engineer, Transportation in Chicago, IL to design ITS & traffic control lans, collect tra c data, conduct tra c analyses create reports w/ graphs. Requires bachelor’s in civil engineering w/ emphasis in transportation, IL driver’s license & knowledge of tra c systems analysis ITS; using HCS, VISSIM, Synchro software. Travel throughout Chicagoland area, as needed. Send CV to cli@transmartinc.com. Use job code CET123.
(Oak Brook, IL)
Streamline Healthcare Solutions LLC seeks Senior Project Manager-Data Analytics & Compliance Services w/bach or for deg equiv in CIS, CS, Health Inform or Bus Adm & 2 yrs exp in job offer or in sys anal incl exp w/complex
WANT TO ADD A LISTING TO OUR CLASSIFIEDS? Go to classifieds.chicagoreader.com
prob solv; DB user I/F & query S/W - MS SQL
Svr, MS Access; Access
S/W-Citrix; Ntwrk/ VPN Sec S/W- Sophos, Shrew soft; D/B Rprt
S/W-MS SQL Svr Rprt
Svcs & med s/w. Occas dom trvl req. Apply to: HR, 1301 West 22nd St, Ste 305, Oak Brook, IL 60523 or online https:// streamlinehealthcare. com/careers/
TranSmart, LLC seeks Civil Engineer, Drainage in Chicago, IL to design highway alignments, drainage systems tra c control plans; manage utility relocations. Requires bachelor’s in civil engineering or related, IL driver’s license & knowledge of hydrologic & hydraulic modeling & floodplain mapping; using HEC-HMS, HECRAS & SWMM. Travel throughout Chicagoland area, as needed. Send CV to cli@transmartinc.com. Use job code CED124
IT Manager Skyway
Concession Company is seeking an IT Manager in Chicago, IL. Direct the information and data integrity of the Company and its business units. Must live within normal commuting distance of worksite. Apply via email to jobs@ chicagoskyway.org and reference Code 99304 in subject line of email..
Have you had an unwanted sexual experience since age 18? Did you tell someone in your life about it who is also willing to participate?
Women ages 18+ who have someone else in their life they told about their experience also willing to participate will be paid to complete a confidential online research survey for the Women’s Dyadic Support Study. Contact Dr. Sarah Ullman of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Criminology, Law, & Justice Department at ForWomen@ uic.edu, 312-996-5508. Protocol #2021-0019.
Sunny Andersonville Sunny Andersonville two BR with den, modern kitchen (dishwasher)/ bath, oak hutch, mini blinds, hardwood floors, washer/dryer, garage option, storage, no dogs. $1245. 708482-4712. Available immediately. NO EMAIL
Free audition notices! The Chicago Reader is offering free auditions in our classifieds through Aug. 1. Create an account and your listing
at chicagoreader.com/ auditions
Improv Audition Audition, Tellin’ Tales Theatre Improv Team for performers with and without disabilities. Tuesday rehearsals with performance run at iO in July. Sign-up https:// www.signupgenius.com/ go/10C0949AEA72EABFAC43-improv1
NWaC’s Auditions
JUNE 15 & 17 6205 N
SHERIDAN That Thing in the Bathroom by Cal Walker Sofa King Queer by Kevin Sparrow The Kasha of Kaimuki by Hannah Ii-Epstein Casting@ NothingWithoutaCompany org
Auditions for the Classic Musical Bye Bye Birdie July 9 & 10. Click for information: GreenMan Theatre Troupe. Runs Sept. 15 - Oct. 8.
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
All romantic dates women wanted All romantic fun dates all requests 24.7 Call (773) 977-8862 swm
MJM DOM 52 SEEKS SUB MJF MJM DOM 52 SEEKS SUBMISSIVE MJF AND WILL TRAIN BONDAGE ORAL PLEASURE SPANKING AND PUNISHMENT CAN HOST-224-292-9899.
MWM DOM 52 SEEKS SUB FEMALE MWM 52 SEEKS SUBMISSIVE FEMALE 50+ AND WILL TRAIN BONDAGE SPANKING PUNISHMENT ORAL PLEASURE CAN HOST-224-292-9899.
Hot Couple ISO Hot Singles! Hot Couple successful 55 yrs young with
fit physiques, ISO Beautiful Uninhibited people to eXplore New Horizons. Lakefront, Sailing, Nude Sunbathing, Biking. Intrigue us with a hot reply!
Looking for a friend and possibly more 64 [M4F], River North. Looking for a new friend, maybe more.I’m into to yoga, fitness training, meaningful conversation, hiking and getting lost in foreign countries. Plant based. Calm, supportive, evolved and liberal. I’m known as stable and successful.Be kind, honest and authentic. I don’t resemble my age group peers and am open to meeting women irrespective of age, race and religion.
58 MWM seeks 40-60’s S/D/MWF for Tender Moments Nice Guy,fun, with a creative mind seeks the same in a female. Looking for someone into cuddling, touching etc
MWM 52 SEEKS MATURE FEMALE MWM 52 SEEKS FEMALE 50+ FOR WEEKEND PLAYMATE
LIKES ANTIQUES MALLS FLEA MARKETS HOT OIL AND ORAL MASSAGES
SPANKING-224-292-9899
Looking to transition. Male 53 looking to transition MtF. Looking for someone to talk about it who has already done it. Am willing to talk over coffee, lunch or dinner my treat.
Free audition notices!
The Chicago Reader is offering free auditions in our classifieds through Aug. 1. Create an account and your listing at chicagoreader.com/ auditions
RightWay, helping you rebuild your credit & drive a car (Midloathian) Buying is easy at
RightWay with low down payments & affordable for you to get in a vehicle regardless of your credit. Over 50,000 satisfied customers & extra benefits other dealerships doesn’t offer. Comprar es facil en RightWay con pagos iniciales bajos, y asequible para usted obtener un vehiculo independientemente de su credito. Mas de 50,000 clientes satisfechos y beneficios adicionales incluidos que el concesionario promdeio no ofrece. Ask Luciano (708) 389-4264.
FTM4M, 35 Seeks M4M Gym Partner Hi, I’m looking for a gym partner to spot with, and to be safe in the gym with while working out. NOT LOOKING FOR A HOOKUP. I’m fat, FTM (trans man), Mexican who is very shy and very introverted. NO TRANSPHOBES NEED APPLY, ESPECIALLY CIS STRAIGHT MEN. Must have Planet Fitness card. Text only 872-529-0333. noise rock band seeking bassist fledgling noisy/post-hardcore band consisting of lead/ rhythm/drums seeks motivated bassist influences: albini stuff, first hole album, moss icon, nation of ulysses, black eyes, townes van zandt we’re ages 23-26 and in the avondale/logan square area. text: (412) 275-0545 :)
