Chicago Reader print issue of July 11, 2024 (Vol. 53, No. 23) by Chicago Reader

CHANGING HABITS

The Second City Sisters aren’t typical nuns. But they’re here to serve.

by Kayleigh Padar , P. 6

CHICAGO READER | JULY 11, 2024 | VOLUME 53, NUMBER 23

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LETTERS

04 Readers Respond 04 Editor’s Note Serendipity FOOD & DRINK

05 Reader Bites Duck fat corn dogs at Ramova Grill and Taproom

NEWS & POLITICS

06 Cover story | Drag Nuns Meet the newest sisters of the Second City.

COMMENTARY

10 Isaacs | On Culture Chicago’s illustrious American Academy of Art has closed.

12 On Prisons A pretextual traﬃc stop led to a tragedy.

ARTS & CULTURE

14 Comic Edra Soto at Comfort Station

15 Exhibition Conversations about place and belonging in Art Design Chicago’s “Opening Passages: Photographers Respond to Chicago and Paris”

THEATER

18 Preview The Physical Theater Festival turns 11.

20 Review Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil brings a funny, juicy spin to the story.

FILM & TV

21 Review Season three of The Bear focuses on ﬁne dining and form over story and character.

22 Movies of Note Mother, Couch ends without satisfaction, Last Summer is complex and provocative, and more.

23 Moviegoer Just my op-Minion MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

24 Feature Experimental Sound Studio presents “the urban+nature sonic pavilion,” an immersive auditory exhibition.

27 Gossip Wolf Mages Guild bring live electronic music to the Music Box Theatre, the International Latino Cultural Center upli s Pan-Latino music, and more.

28 City of Win Demetruest wants to help you slow down.

30 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Heliacal Rising of Sothis, the Chosen Few Picnic & Festival, Julie Byrne, and Redd Kross

CLASSIFIEDS

33 Jobs

34 Professionals & Services

34 Housing

Auditions

34 Matches 34 Marketplace OPINION

35 Savage Love Advice from Dan Savage for fake tops

Reader Letters m

Re: “Broken glass and sticky ﬁngers,” written by Andy Vasoyan and published in the July 4 issue (volume 53, number 22)

Generally loathe when an establishment pours my wine into a tumbler without asking and even though stemmed glasses can be seen elsewhere in the place. And don’t assume that I’m “Lisa from Temecula” with regard to my steak and ﬁsh preferences!

—Christopher Leon Gray, via Facebook

Half of my glassware is stolen from bars and I’ll never feel guilty about it for a second. Guess I’m built diﬀerent. —scuderia_deaner, via X

Re: “Ediﬁce complex,” written by Miles MacClure and published in the June 6 issue (volume 53, number 18)

Let Nike or another outﬁt buy them [a stadium]. Why should taxpayers? They’re barely good enough to play on the local high school ﬁeld.

—John Hanson, via Facebook

Not one tax dollar.

—Jamiana Antonia, via Facebook

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

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

EDITOR’S NOTE

Helpers come in all kinds of packages, and in a world where the conversation about drag performance and costuming is increasingly marred by those who wish to conﬂate drag with criminal behavior, charitable groups like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a welcome balm.

The Sisters use humor, protest, and creativity in its highest form: shining a spotlight on issues of sexuality, morality, and gender while fundraising for marginalized people and their causes. Chicago has had an o cial chapter since at least 2009, and Kayleigh Padar does a deft job of introducing (or, perhaps for some of you, reintroducing ) the newest amalgam of siblings for this issue. Check it out starting on page six, along with wonderful photography by Reader contributor Yijun Pan. It’s hardly ever a quick and easy feat to schedule, style, and set up portraits of Chicagoans, and our art director James Hosking had a bit of a time with it this issue. The concept was clear and immediate: ﬁnd a sacred place with some stained glass, gather the Sisters, get a great photographer to shoot the photos. However, one progressive church was already booked. Another couldn’t respond to our calls

on time.

Enter serendipity, or perhaps some sort of otherwordly intervention: James happened upon a blog post (from Jesus in Love, a blog dedicated to “LGBTQ+ spirituality and the arts” detailing the art of longtime Chicagoan Doyle Chappell. Chappell created a series of works around what he calls “Cosmic Christ,” including a series of 15-foot “windows” constructed in 2015 for aChurch4Me Metropolitan Community Church, which celebrates their worship services in various north-side sites (most recently at Center on Halsted).

The aChurch4Me windows were created using watercolor paper, which was painted with glaze and stuck onto clear acetate to create the e ect of stained glass. You can see them in Pan’s photographs and also on the cover of this issue. And in case you didn’t know, the Metropolitan Community Church itself was created in California (just like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence) in order to make space for a positive ministry for and by LGBTQ+ people.

From the Second City Sisters to an experimental sound installation in Millennium Park (see page 24) to the more than a decade-old Physical Theater Festival (page 18), we’ve in-

cluded a bunch of ways to see something new in the city throughout this issue. And heck, we even threw in a take on that new Bear season that everyone seems to either want to watch or refuses to watch (see page 21 and let Lauren Coates help you make up your mind). Thanks for making us part of your weekly reading! v

—Salem Collo-Julin, editor in chief m scollojulin@chicagoreader.com

CORRECTIONS

The Reader has updated a recent online Make It Make Sense column, “Prison death, scrap metal permit, mask ban,” written by Shawn Mulcahy and S. Nicole Lane and originally published June 28. A previously published version of the column incorrectly stated that Chicago Department of Public Health commissioner Olusimbo “Simbo” Ige said that measured emissions from Pilsen scrap metal business Sims Metal Management were above standard. Ige said that Sims’s emissions were within health standards. The story was also updated with additional information from the EPA about Sims’s emissions. The Reader regrets the error. v

Le : some of the Second City Sisters. Right: Doyle Chappell

YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

Color rules at Color Factory Chicago

Courtesy

Color Factory

Immersive art exhibition invites visitors of all ages to step into an exciting, colorful adventure

Everyone loves a splash of color. In fact, last year Psychology Today reported that color is an important stimulus for the brain, and can enhance mood and memory, lower blood pressure, and more. But in a recent study of data from the 1800s through today, researchers discovered that the world is losing its color, as shades from across the rainbow are traded for a neutral palette. In an increasingly monochromatic world, Color Factory— voted USA Today’s #1 Immersive Art Experience this year—oﬀers vibrant color experiences for all ages that inspire and delight.

Founded in 2017, Color Factory is an immersive, multisensory experience that boldly embraces the joy of color through imaginative, whimsical art and design. Its three permanent exhibitions—located in Chicago, New York City, and Houston—are created in collaboration with artists, institutions, and nonproﬁts, and maximize inclusivity, relevancy, and fun. Each location features more than a dozen room-sized installations with themes steeped in the color palettes and cultural touchstones of its home city. In that way, Color Factory provides an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind welcome to outof-town visitors while fostering a deep sense of hometown pride.

Nestled in the lower level of Willis Tower, Color Factory Chicago takes guests on a journey to experience color through all ﬁve senses. Fourteen exhibitions open eyes, hearts, and minds to the possibilities of color. Visitors play in piles of confetti in the shades of the city ﬂag and slide into a 2,600-square-foot ball pit brimming with mint green balls—a hue inspired by the color of the Chicago River during the city’s annual Saint Patrick’s

Day celebration. Elsewhere, guests discover the colors of their birthdate and gain insight into their personality in a “color horoscope” room, created with astrologer Michele Bernhardt, and partake in guided partner exercises designed to forge connection and spark imagination. But ﬁrst they must pass through “Perspective Party,” a gorgeous, playful installation by esteemed postmodern artist Camille Walala, which invites visitors to further shed their inhibitions and embrace their inner child.

Color Factory guests are encouraged to leave everyday distractions at the door, and simply live in the moment. To that end, the space is outﬁtted with digital photo stations, so everyone can keep their phones in their pockets. At the end of their visit, all photos are delivered via email free of charge. And if that wasn’t enough, throughout the journey, guests can indulge in colorful, edible treats like macarons, jellybeans, and ice cream, plus pick up exclusive prizes. Color Factory is committed to sharing color outside its walls too; guests also have access to a complimentary digital Color Map, which guides them to colorful hot spots throughout Chicago’s neighborhoods.

Color Factory is family friendly, ADA compliant, and welcomes groups of all sizes for birthdays, ﬁeld trips, bachelorette parties, and more. The full space can also be rented for corporate functions and other special events.

If you’re up for a colorful adventure this summer, look no further than Color Factory Chicago. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit colorfactory.co today.

FOOD & DRINK

As a sucker for junk food staples reimagined in an elevated setting, curiosity gets the best of my taste buds when I see something like three corn dogs for $12 on a restaurant menu. How much can you improve the humble corn dog?

Turns out, the duck fat corn dogs at the Ramova Grill and Taproom, housed within the recently renovated and reopened Ramova Theatre in Bridgeport, ranks among the best dishes I’ve eaten this year.

ﬂoats around the hot dog, allowing for the perfect amount of time to register the aerated shell as a singular experience before taking in the dog and the shell together.

The accompanying aioli is ﬂavored with the traditional toppings of a Chicago-style hot dog, turning a conventionally fatty sauce into a rich, tangy, acidic spread to complement the sweet and salty corn dog.

The corn dog is admittedly not the most photogenic dish out there, but it doesn’t need to be. I recommend washing it all down with their housemade radler; the fresh, bright, grapefruit-fueled drink pairs excellently with the corn dog and aioli duo. —MILES MACCLURE RAMOVA GRILL AND TAPROOM 3520 S. Halsted, $12, ramovachicago. com v

The initial bite is a sweet and airy exterior shell, thicker than a conventional corn dog and closer to a shaving of cornbread. It

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

Duck fat corn dogs at Ramova Grill and Taproom

NEWS & POLITICS

CHANGING HABITS

The Second City Sisters aren’t typical nuns. But they’re here to serve.

By KAYLEIGH PADAR

When Sister Luna GlitterTits saw a bunch of ladies in drag and nun habits walking through a casino in Florida more than a decade ago, she felt like she had to ask them what they were doing. She had no idea that the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an international order of queer nuns, would soon become a constant in her life. But shortly after that first interaction, she donned the nun outfit and white makeup. Although she felt out of her element at first, she joined the sisters in their e orts to spread joy, eliminate shame, and support the queer community— and she never looked back.

For the past 13 years, Sister GlitterTits has worked alongside sisters in Florida and

Michigan. While employing playful humor and wit in all they do, the international network of groups regularly fundraise for local organizations, educate people about safer sex, and protest injustice. Somewhere along the way, Sister GlitterTits also grew into herself. The Sisters were always there, she says, and she found strength and camaraderie within a group of queer people dedicated to making the world a safer, more accepting place.

“What I love most about being a sister, for me, is making people realize that, yes, I’m glamorous, but I’m not here for show,” she says. “I’m here to actually do the work, and I’m here if you need somebody to talk to—about safe sex or about anything. We love dealing

with people, we love having a good time, but above all, we’re here for the community.”

Now, Sister GlitterTits is taking her talents to Chicago, where she and 18 others have come together to form the Second City Sisters, an aspiring chapter of the international order of LGBTQ+ nuns that aims to engage with and uplift the city’s queer community outside the bounds of capitalism. (A previous Chicago chapter folded during COVID.) Their work lives “at the intersection of protest and performance art,” says Sister Merry Mae-King, and mostly involves simply showing up, “holding space for people, being an ear to listen, and helping anybody who needs help.”

“We present the way we do—as these fab-

ulous, queer-looking nuns—to hold space for other people. If we can look like this, it gives you space to be in the world as who you are with joy for your life and freedom from guilt and shame,” she says. “The religious iconography mixed with the element of drag signiﬁes the sacred nature of what we do. But it also says, ‘We’re safe for you, and you have space with us.’”

In 1979, three men grew bored of San Francisco’s conformist atmosphere. They walked the streets dressed in full, traditional Catholic habits. They carried a machine gun for protection and were met with shock and amazement, according to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence website. They founded the order as a way to channel that energy for positive change, with a mission “to promulgate universal joy and expiate stigmatic guilt.”

“It started with, ‘We’re bored. It would be funny if we did this. Oh my gosh, people are really reacting to this. What should we do with that?’” says Melissa M. Wilcox, who’s researched the order for decades and interviewed hundreds of sisters. “So it really formed from the ground up, bringing a sense of snark and critique, and at the same time, very genuine engagement, which profoundly queers religion.”

They soon took their e orts international as two new orders were founded in Sydney, Australia, in 1980 and Toronto, Canada, in ’81. There are now more than 80 houses worldwide, each with its own distinct identity that reﬂects the culture of the larger community it serves.

In October 1980, San Francisco saw its ﬁrst fundraiser “with Sisterly flair,” when the group raised more than $1,500 for gay Cuban refugees. So many people came to the disco bingo beneﬁt that the sisters had to throw together a second seating area to accommodate everyone. The Sisters hosted the first fundraiser for the inaugural 1982 Gay Olympics (now called the Gay Games), in which they won a baseball game against the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus by getting them drunk in the eighth inning and scoring 40 runs. In the following decades, the Sisters would go on to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for LGBTQ+ causes.

As the AIDS epidemic became more prevalent in San Francisco during the early 80s, the Sisters were on the frontlines, organizing resources and educating people on how to

Sister Foxxxy Moron with the art of Doyle Chappell YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

DRAG NUNS

Sister Kenya Nott YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

protect themselves at a time when little information was available. In 1982, two registered nurses, Sister Florence Nightmare and Sister Roz Erection, created Play Fair! , a safer sex pamphlet that used sex-positive language, practical advice, and humor.

As the Sisters grew in popularity and number, they continued to push for creative

solutions to challenges queer people faced. In 1989, amid a rise in violence in San Francisco, particularly hate crimes, Sister Roma introduced the Stop the Violence campaign, which distributed window placards to property owners to mark safe homes where people could run if they were attacked or felt threatened.

Throughout the 90s, the Sisters’ presence also grew at protests.

“If we can look like this, it gives you space to be in the world as who you are with joy for your life and freedom from guilt and shame.”

Two nuns were photographed ramming a barricade through the glass doors of San Francisco’s California State Build-

ing during a protest against Governor Pete Wilson’s veto of a 1991 bill that would have protected LGBTQ+ people from employment discrimination. The 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation discouraged drag, though one million protestors sought civil rights for LGBTQ+ people and demanded increased funding for HIV and AIDs treatment and prevention. But the Sisters ﬂew to D.C. and marched with pride anyway. During the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, in 1994, they helped lead the New York City Drag March, chanting, “The Pope wears a dress and so will I.”

The Sisters frequently received pushback from some Catholics, and they faced altercations with police as well as a plethora of angry letters to the editors. In 1999, San Francisco city officials attempted to revoke a permit for their Easter celebration, though they ultimately prevailed on a 9–2 vote. The archdiocese condemned the group in its newspaper, arguing that allowing the Sisters to celebrate the holiday was the same as “allowing a group of neo-Nazis to close a city street for a celebration on the Jewish feast of Passover”—a move the group says granted them an estimated $1 million in free publicity.

Sister Starr Gazer YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

NEWS & POLITICS

In their book, Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody , Wilcox argues the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence simultaneously “camp” and “claim” the role of the nun. “Drawing on the image of the drag queen as fun, sexy, sassy, and gay, and the image of the nun as a compassionate, spiritual, selfless provider of healing, education, and service to the community, the Sisters use camp to meld the two into their unique practice: the serious parody that creates twenty-ﬁrst century queer nuns.” Their e orts both “sincerely emulate” what they consider to be the best qualities of traditional nuns and simultaneously critique oppressive religious institutions’ homopho-

bia, misogyny, and trans-antagonism.

“The ﬁrst reaction a lot of people have to the Sisters is that they’re sticking it to the Catholic Church. Whether they think that’s o ensive or wonderful, that’s the ﬁrst reaction,” Wilcox says. “The second reaction is, ‘Well, they can’t be real nuns.’ And my question has increasingly been, ‘Why not? Who says? Who gets to say?’ People are working o a very particular, narrow idea of what a nun is, and I’m far more interested in thinking about how the Sisters invite us to open our minds about who nuns are and can be.”

Many LGBTQ+ people have been traumatized by organized religions that have historically rejected them. But the Sisters of Perpet-

ual Indulgence reclaim religious iconography by combining it with queer aesthetics. “For a lot of people in the gay community, religion is associated with how being gay is a sin,” Sister GlitterTits says. “We didn’t have a place we could go for a home. We didn’t have anything safe. Sisters were really built to be that, for there to be people who say, ‘Hey, we’re here to love you and care for you.’”

The Second City Sisters sincerely consider themselves to be nuns because they’re joining efforts to help others without seeking personal gain. They “revere nuns’ selﬂess service to others” and live by similar values, Sister Mae-King says. “Nuns are often voices of protest. They fundraise, they help people on the

ground in their communities. We know what it means to do that hard work only for the love of your fellow community members. With what our community’s been through, we’re here to hold a little bit of that pain and do it with joy. Those are things nuns do, regardless of whatever form of nun they may be.”

When Sister GlitterTits heard a group of sisters were trying to build a presence in Chicago, she knew she had to get involved. Although the group isn’t o cially part of the international organization, they’re in the process of joining. Prospective chapters must host or attend a certain number of events and demonstrate

Sister Malört Tisha YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

Sister Peg M. Hardt YIJUN PAN FOR CHICAGO READER

continued from p. 7

that they’ll be able to comply with the legal regulations for a nonprofit, says Sister Mae-King.

Sister GlitterTits sees the group as “the sword and shield for the community.” The aspiring house, which launched in February, is made up of sisters who practiced in other states as well as people who are new to the practice, all of whom are “coming together to create something,” Sister GlitterTits says.

“The way I boil it down for people is that we help people get over their shit and have some fun,” says Sister Foxxy Moron, a licensed therapist who became a sister more than a decade ago. “How do I do that? Well, I put on white face and dress crazy and have fun and help people to enjoy the lighter parts of life.”

The sisters try their best to help people in any way they can. Sometimes that looks like chatting with someone who’s going through a breakup and sending them o with a sprinkle of glitter and a few words of affirmation, called a glitter blessing. Other times, it looks like organizing fundraisers, handing out free condoms, or educating people about safer sex.

see that this person is here doing good work.”

People often feel guilt and face societal stigma based on their gender, sexual orientation, income, or body type. But the Second City Sisters encourage people to live in a way that aligns with their spirit and brings them joy, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. They acknowledge it can be hard for queer people to feel happy in an oppressive world, but they try to help people experience moments of “radical

people to do the same. “We don’t look like anybody else. We look so damn weird,” says Sister Tisha. “We take up that role of being the ones who look like they don’t belong, so it’s hopefully easier for others to take up space.”

Society has become more accepting of some LGBTQ+ people who can conform to certain heteronormative standards, as seen in the corporate pinkwashing of Pride celebrations. But the Sisters remind people there’s “a radical

NEWS & POLITICS

racism and transphobia in the contemporary moment and we see it as our job to get people to talk about it.”

A tangible sense of joy and love for the LGBTQ+ community is at the center of the Sisters’ work. When they’re all dressed up and out on the town, it feels like “having a party with the loudest, most in-your-face members of the queer community,” says Sister Tisha.

Dressing as a nun in drag helps people immediately identify the sisters as queer public servants. And it gives them an aura of anonymity that makes them more approachable. “If I walk in there as me—in shorts and a T-shirt—you’re not going to walk up to me,” says Sister Moron. “If I walk in there with white face and gems glued all over my face and glitter and whatever else, it opens up a dialogue, and now we’re talking. You don’t really know who’s under the makeup. You just

joy” despite dire circumstances, says Sister Malört Tisha.

Sister GlitterTits remembers a safer sex event from her time in Florida, when a young person lingered by the table for hours, just to chat. “They ended up explaining to me they were on their way home to commit suicide and they didn’t because we were there that night, showing them love and encouraging them to keep continuing on. That was the ﬁrst time I felt like, wow, we’re helping people just by being around for them to talk to.”

A tangible sense of joy and love for the LGBTQ+ community is at the center of the Sisters’ work.

By dressing as queer nuns and joyfully presenting themselves, the sisters demonstrate that there are countless ways to shamelessly exist in this world and permit other queer

side of queerness that will never be accepted and is worth ﬁghting for,” through their unconventional appearance, rejection of capitalism, and commitment to building community networks of support, says Sister Tisha.

“The Sisters always try to remember the little people,” she says. “The Sisters remind us we need to be mindful of our community practices and fi nd ways to meet people who don’t have access to all the for-profit LGBTQ+ spaces opening up. Our queer politic is antiracist and rooted in liberation. It refuses genocide and the gross wealth inequity we’re seeing today. We definitely are paying attention to modern, radical politics. We have our eye on more than just the traditional queer community. We’re aware of the growth of

“It’s crucial to have that presence and to let people know, ‘Here we are, and you can be a part of this too,” she continues. “It was very powerful for me to join the Sisters and meet others who want to be part of the change they want to see in the community. It’s a really beautiful connection you can foster with somebody.”

The Second City Sisters are still solidifying their rules and processes, but they say it’s easy to get involved. In general, joining the group involves self-exploration paired with learning to embody the sisters’ values.

“You’ll deﬁnitely get out of your element being around us,” says Sister GlitterTits. “You’d be surprised how much you can learn about yourself by being part of the Sisters. For me, the Sisters helped me ﬁnd myself, and they were there for me through many years of hard times.”

People can find the Second City Sisters walking around LGBTQ+ bars, events, and fundraisers throughout Chicago. “Come say hi to your sisters,” Sister GlitterTits encourages. “We don’t bite—well, not that much. We’re all about making sure the community knows we’re here. It takes a lot of strength to not only try to survive in this world but also to make it a better place for others. It’s about knowing you can pass on that love and unity from your energy and give it to someone else.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

The Second City Sisters march in the Chicago Pride Parade on June 30, 2024. DANIEL STARR

COMMENTARY

Paint it sad

Chicago’s illustrious American Academy of Art is closing.

By DEANNA ISAACS

It’s not like we needed another disturbing example of how change and age can destroy a once vibrant entity, but we got one last week.

In 2023, Chicago’s storied American Academy of Art—training ground for some of the nation’s most inﬂuential commercial artists— celebrated its 100th birthday. Last week, a statement posted on the Academy website announced that the college is closing, e ective immediately. “The Academy regrets that, after more than 100 years, it lacks ﬁnancial viability to continue operations,” the unsigned statement said.

Faculty, students, sta , and alumni had been notiﬁed a few days earlier by an email from the college president and former owner, Richard Otto.

The announcement blamed the pandemic and sought to frame the school’s demise in a

broader context of falling student numbers:

“The decision to close comes in response to a significant decline in enrollments following the COVID-19 pandemic, a challenge faced by many educational institutions,” it said.

Arrangements are being made that will allow Academy students to continue their degree programs at Columbia College Chicago. Columbia spokesperson Lambrini Lukidis confirms that “we do have a formal transfer agreement for current students.”

It’s a sad end for a once-beloved institution with a proud history. The American Academy of Art was founded in 1923, when advertising, especially print advertising, was a burgeoning industry and Chicago was its bustling hub. The founders were Frank H. Young, author of a widely used textbook on advertising layout, and popular magazine illustrator Harry L. Timmins. Already partners in a Chicago de-

sign agency, they set it up as a privately owned business. In 1970 it was sold to another successful Chicago ad man—and 1937 Heisman Trophy winner—Clinton E. Frank.

Those were glory years for the Academy, which became known for its rigorous traditional art education, with an emphasis on fundamental skills and a focus on portfolio development. A brochure published for the centennial recalled the work of some of the exceptional artists who either trained or taught there, from Haddon Sundblom, who created the red-cheeked, twinkling-eyed Santa Claus featured in Coca-Cola ads globally for decades, and Gil Elvgren’s lushly idealized calendar pinups, to Thomas Blackshear’s postage stamp portraits, Alex Ross’s Superman, and, most recently, Shawn Michael Warren’s Smithsonian-commissioned Oprah.

In 1992, the Academy was sold to Otto, who continued to run it as a private business until 2015, when it converted to a nonprofit, with Otto maintaining his presidency. Located at 332 S. Michigan, it is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission.

Former Reader photographer Robert Drea was recruited to create the Academy’s photography major in 2007 and has taught there ever since. He says peak enrollment during his time there was about 425, but, especially since the pandemic, the number has dwindled.

graduates.

“I valued and enjoyed every day that I was there,” Drea says. “It was a really great environment to work in. There was a family feel to it, a great deal of camaraderie. And it was that way until the end, there was still that really positive vibe, even with the specter of ‘Wow, what’s going to happen? There’s so few students.’”

“It was a really great environment to work in. There was a family feel to it, a great deal of camaraderie.”

“We had a President’s Award day in March 2020,” Drea says. “That very day the dean and the registrar came into all the classrooms and said we can’t do this gathering, can’t have that number of people together in one room. I mark that as being the watershed. I’d say from that point, the enrollment was on a downward spiral . . . empty classrooms and far fewer students.” At this year’s spring commencement ceremony in May, there were only 14

News of the closing prompted former student David Becker to post a video, where he notes that some of “the best teachers” left when the Academy was accredited because they didn’t have the proper teaching degrees, but also that, back in the day, “It was a great portfolio[-building] school,” which is what got him early career jobs at major agencies like J. Walter Thompson and Foote, Cone & Belding. “You worked your butt off” at the Academy, Becker says, but “it was probably the best four years of my life.”

The same sentiment lights up the screen on a public Facebook page maintained by alumni and friends of the American Academy of Art. With word of the closing, it’s a palette of nostalgia, regret, and love. v

m disaacs@chicagoreader.com

Exterior of American Academy of Art MX. GRANGER

Gil Elvgren as a student

COMMENTARY

ON PRISONS

Pulled over into tragedy

Pretextual traﬃc stops are a poor policing strategy; one such stop led to Chicago police killing Dexter Reed in March.

By ANTHONY EHLERS

This column was edited for length in order to ﬁt in our print edition. The full column is readable at our website.

On March 21, Chicago police o cers shot and killed yet another Black man, Dexter Reed. This wasn’t regular officers in a squad car with flashing lights. These were five plainclothes officers who were part of a tactical unit in an unmarked car. They pulled up, jumped out, and surrounded Reed’s SUV, yelling profanity-laced commands at him to roll down the window and exit the vehicle.

Police say Reed shot first, injuring an o cer in the wrist. Four of the o cers returned fire. A lot of it. They fired a total of 96 shots—at one person. Ninety-six shots means that at least some of the o cers emptied their guns, reloaded, and fired until their guns were empty again. A witness who called 911 described it as “shooting like they’re having a Vietnam War.” There was no intention to subdue Reed, get the situation in hand, or wound him and take him in; their intention was to kill him. They did that. Police expect their commands to be obeyed at all times, which is reasonable in a highly charged situation. However, it’s not even clear that Reed knew they were officers. Andrew M. Stroth, attorney for Reed’s family, said it was an unconstitutional police stop by plainclothes officers who did not announce they were police.

In Chicago, carjackings are out of control. Even if someone says they’re the police, unless they’re in uniform, you can’t trust them. However, if they don’t announce themselves as police at all, Dexter Reed is well within his rights to defend himself. How does he know who these people are?

So why was he stopped? He had to be a hardened criminal, right? They had to have caught him doing something , right? Wrong. They surrounded him with guns drawn, shouting and cursing at him, allegedly because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The o cers who

shot Reed said they confronted him over a seat belt violation. However, all of his windows were heavily tinted, leading to questions about whether the o cers were even able to see if Reed had his seat belt on.

We have so many questions. How does a seat belt violation end with 96 shots and a man dead? Why is it police go guns drawn, shouting profanities, clearly threatening to shoot someone for a seat belt violation? Why is a ﬁve-man tactical team even pulling over people for seat belt violations? With all the crime in Chicago, is this how a tactical team should even be used?

To ﬁnd answers, we need to begin with Chicago Police Department (CPD) superintendent Larry Snelling. In October of last year, Snelling said, in response to criticism that police are apparently powerless to stop crime, that police needed to be more aggressive. “There is a way to stop [crime], and that approach is to be more aggressive, and I intend to do that,” he said. “It takes a little more aggressive behavior from our police o cers to stop it.”

In the Civilian O ce of Police Accountability’s (COPA) letter, which WGN obtained in April, they also question the validity of the tra c stop and recommend those o cers be stripped of their police powers. Superintendent Snelling has refused to do that. He backs his “aggressive o cers.” He fails to back the community.

This also shines a light on Chicago’s use of pretextual stops. The CPD often chooses to use “a minor tra c violation as an excuse to pull someone over and search for signs of other criminal activity that they do not have reasonable suspicion of; this is called a pretextual stop,” according to Impact for Equity’s Chicago 2023 Tra c Stops Data Report. “These minor tra c violations are tra c o enses that typically do not present a danger to others on the road,” the report continues. These pretextual stops are a legal loophole that CPD exploits. It allows for o cers to pull

anyone over, to question and investigate the person. It’s Chicago’s version of “automotive stop and frisk.” The police use these stops to ﬁsh, to hope that by pulling people over they will ﬁnd criminal activity.

Superintendent Snelling continues this shameful practice, even though it targets people from Black and Brown communities. According to Impact for Equity’s report, between 2015 and 2021, tra c stops were concentrated on the south and west sides. Almost 20 percent of all tra c stops took place in two CPD police districts: District Seven, which includes Englewood, and District 11, which includes North Lawndale. These are neighborhoods of Black and Brown communities the CPD is targeting. It gets worse.

In majority-white areas like those on the north side, Black and Brown people are stopped at disproportionate rates. Black drivers are at least twice as likely to be stopped than white drivers. In neighborhoods like Lincoln Park, Logan Square, and Portage Park, Black drivers are six to ten times more likely to be stopped than white drivers.

Some might say this isn’t so bad if it catches criminals and helps stop crime. The problem is that data shows that pretextual stops are not an e ective way to ﬁnd criminal activity. In 2023, only 3.7 percent of all stops resulted in a citation, and just 2.2 percent of all tra c stops resulted in arrests. What does this tell us? It tells us that these pretextual stops are not in response to dangerous activity, and they are also ine ective at uncovering criminal activity.

Last year, just 0.75 percent of all stops resulted in any contraband (including alcohol, drugs, or weapons) at all, according to Impact for Equity’s report. Only 0.5 percent of all trafﬁc stops resulted in recovery of a gun, and only 0.3 percent resulted in the discovery of drugs.

Not only is this an ine ective strategy, but at its core, it’s lazy and wrong. It’s a total waste of the taxpayer’s money to pull random people over hoping you ﬁnd something you can arrest them for. This is exactly the kind of strategy that erodes the trust of communities of color.

Impact for Equity’s report found that in 2023, Black drivers were 51.2 percent of all people pulled over. This is despite Black people making up less than 30 percent of the city’s population. Compare this to white drivers: Over 32 percent of Chicago’s population is white, yet only 13.6 percent of stops were white drivers.

The arrest numbers are also mind-boggling. White drivers were 13.6 percent of those

stopped and only 5.5 percent of those arrested. Black and Latine drivers account for 92 percent of tra c stop arrests. If you’re white and get pulled over, you won’t go to jail. However, if you’re Black or Brown and get pulled over, you’re virtually assured of going to jail for something. Black drivers were also subject to over 85 percent of the uses of force, and Latine drivers were subject to nearly 11 percent of uses of force stemming from a tra c stop.

These are the things that Black and Brown communities have been saying for years. Now this data backs them up. The CPD has strong policies banning racial proﬁling in its policing, but the data shows clearly that these policies are having no impact. The data shows this isn’t just a few bad apples in the department. It’s systemic.

Snelling seems to be doing what he wants to. He backs this racist brand of policing, he calls for police to be even more aggressive, and he ignores COPA’s recommendations to strip the police in Dexter Reed’s death of their police powers. Snelling did say that he would submit pretextual stops to the consent decree. However, this was a political move designed to quiet critics because the CPD does not honor the consent decree in any meaningful way. As of March, the CPD was fully compliant with just 6 percent of the consent decree. Those were empty words.

Snelling does have a boss, even though it might not seem that way. His boss is Mayor Brandon Johnson. Johnson often talks about making a “better, stronger, safer Chicago.” During his campaign, he talked about investment, lessening police presence in overpoliced neighborhoods, and stopping racial policing. It doesn’t seem like Snelling got the memo. All of this makes me wonder if the mayor is really in charge of the police department. For the CPD to continue this racist failure of a strategy—when it’s the exact opposite of what the mayor says he stands for—is damning. Where is the mayor in this? Where is his leadership? Where is the accountability? Superintendent Snelling does not have the backs of the citizens of Chicago—he’s made that clear. Chicago needs the mayor to have our backs. Where is he? v

Anthony Ehlers is a writer incarcerated at State ville Correctional Center. Find out more about incarcerated journalists through the Prison Journalism Project (prisonjournalismproject.org).

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Care that’s as unique as you.

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

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

ARTS & CULTURE

R“OPENING PASSAGES: PHOTOGRAPHERS RESPOND TO CHICAGO AND PARIS” Through 7/27: outdoors, Experimental Station, 6100 S. Blackstone, experimentalstation.org, free; Through 8/25 : Mon–Sun 10 AM– 5 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, free

EXHIBITION

A tale of two cities

“Opening Passages: Photographers Respond to Chicago and Paris” opens a transatlantic dialogue among ten photographers.

By NICKY NI

Part of Art Design Chicago, the vibrant exhibition and event series that celebrates the city’s flourishing art and design scene, “Opening Passages: Photographers Respond to Chicago and Paris” is a citywide photographic exhibition in which photographers from these two sister cities engage in transatlantic dialogues that revolve around issues such as gentriﬁcation, migrant segregation, and lived experiences of metropolitan residents. The exhibition’s primary site is at the Chicago Cultural Center in the Loop. Satellite exhibits extend to three neighborhoods— Woodlawn at Experimental Station, and nowclosed locations in Edgewater at 6018 | North and Austin at BUILD Chicago—and each host selects works that resonate with its location. Works by ten photographers—five from each city—are featured in these exhibitions. Chicago-based Jonathan Michael Castillo, whose focus is on Americana, presents select pieces from his series “Immigrant Owned.”

The photos portray interiors of restaurants, salons, flower shops, currency exchanges, and tailors, frequently with owners posing at the center. Meticulously lit, subjects are motionless and contemplative, like statues. The maximalist portraits are complemented by photographs that show the neglected, quiet corners of their shops and o -hour spaces that still brim with labor and care.

Castillo’s work forms an intriguing dialogue with that of Tonika Lewis Johnson, another Chicago-based photographer who has expanded her “Belonging” project across the pond thanks to a residency she participated in at Ateliers Médicis in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb of Paris.

Producing in situ portraits where the subjects of the series, Black and Brown teens, pose on stoops, at bus stops, in playgrounds, and similarly common Chicago locations, Johnson’s photographs are annotated with a QR code that directs viewers to a recorded conversation with the subjects. These include accounts of situations where the interviewees felt like they didn’t belong in their environment as much as they should.

In one photograph, Lauren, shown standing in an aisle of a supermarket, talks about how her family was racially proﬁled by a security guard, though the guard himself was African American as well, when they entered the West Loop’s Asian grocery store H-Mart. In another story, Colette, born in Orléans, France, speaks about the lack of transparent racial discourse in French society and how this collective racism under the guise of classism trickles down to aspects of life that she has to internalize on a daily basis. These conversations, unsettling in their casual and matter-of-fact delivery, highlight different modes of racism against African diasporic communities in the two countries—and the alarming degree of social normalization within which racism operates.

uncertainty about the outcomes that these trainings may promise.

Chicago-based, Polish American photographer Marzena Abrahamik uses collage to piece together images and symbols that signify Polish identities and traditions. In her two wallbased collages beneath plexiglass cases at the Cultural Center, clippings of images such as a white-tailed eagle and poppies—the national symbol and national ﬂower of Poland, respectively—are staggered and layered on top of thumbnail pictures from the photographer’s “Return” series. Like nebulae of memories, the images look as though they are free-ﬂoating,

ARTS & CULTURE

This feeling of discomfort echoes in other works that use collage as a metaphor for fragmented or truncated experiences. In “Territoire-Travail” (“Territory-Work”), Paris-based Colombian artist Gilberto Güiza-Rojas overlays vibrant images of manual-labor workers midtask on reduced-saturation photos of built environments to create large installations that engulf the viewer. At the Chicago Cultural Center, these photos are adjusted so that lines of architectural features in both images are aligned or superimposed, creating an illusion that the bottom image is an extended space to the top. They feature workers who undergo training at the French National Agency for Adult Vocational Training, with the subjects’ faces either truncated by the picture frame or facing away from the camera. These staged photos exemplify an astute analogy to the working class’s social invisibility and their

casting shallow shadows on the wall. “Return” is a body of portraits that document Polish Americans who, for one reason or another, decide to return to their home country after spending years in the United States.

Another tactic shared by some members in this show is abstracting nature or capturing urban environments devoid of human presence to scavenge for a kind of strange familiarity—or a familiar strangeness—that encapsulates city dwellers. Eeriness is balanced with serenity in the series by Lyon-based night photographer Karim Kal, in photos in which the camera’s flash exposes what look like features that belong to city alleys: susurrant weeds, obscure back porches and trails, and rear walls. The bone-white brightness of the myopic foreground immediately snaps your attention into a vast background of pitch black. The alienating effect is nightmarish, almost ghostly.

Elsewhere, traces of rose-ringed parakeets are the main subjects of Paris- and

Yerevan-based photographer Rebecca Topakian’s work in the exhibitions. A collection of plumes is arranged idiosyncratically by size and color. What complements the wallbased specimens are silk banners—they hang up high from the ceiling, printed with blurry Instax photographs of these airborne travelers in flight between spatters of leaves. Each banner has a concise sentence: “These species are capable of speaking French, so they are French”; “It’s not their fault, but it’s not their environment”; “We must act before they become too numerous.” Almost like slogans, they can be read as double entendres that satirize the bureaucratic disdain against immigration. Nature is also a cruel witness of human atrocities. The photographs from Chicago-based visual artist zakkiyyah najeebah dumaso’neal’s sublime series “in the open you are here” build upon the idea of how water is central to both Black history and experiences. In these photos, water is a feature of Black spiritual practices, a tool used to commit acts of violence and bloodshed, and a place for liberation and resistance. On the exterior wall of Experimental Station, an enlarged vinyl diptych of the lake—abstracted to a color-field duet against a white background— sticks directly to the red brick wall; the pebbly surface of the wall adds a wrought texture to the gradient that flows from azure to indigo, like a foggy lake at the blue hour. At the Cultural Center, framed photographs are both on the wall and laid flat on low platforms. In one photograph, the artist superimposes a picture of a pair of open arms over a wrinkled aquatic surface, as though someone was asking for an embrace of reconciliation with the water—the treacherous water that devours all but forgets none.

“Open Passages” opens doors to myriad stories hidden behind images like this. Sometimes you do need a passage that becomes a journey through which to feel the weight of an image. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Installation view of "Opening Passages" at the Chicago Cultural Center JULIEN CHATELIN/VILLA ALBERTINE

See me

In spotlight, skin blending brown and amber, harmonic, a crystal child, I was born.

A pyrite, a hot stone for dark ice, a Chicago southern sky, winter sunshine, capricious, melodic, I am.

I must make sound.

My ﬁrst notes came in as a glint; my voice, a deep contralto soft, even as a girl my skin held an unearthed ﬁre, a volcanic itch. While waiting to erupt, I grew, I grew, I grew up tall and into Blues.

I was once swallowed whole by a dark so blinding I became a silhouette, a shadow, midnight dust, reaching for the day I could only remember as a haint a haunting promise Somewhere, there was sunshine.

I was once swallowed whole by a dark, and deep down in its belly, I could only surrender. I learned to sea, I grew into a glimmer, a tiny sparkling on the deep. I surfaced Softer, Sweeter, Warmer than spotlight.

By Kiayla Ryann

Kiayla, a womanist poet, somatic yoga instructor, and performance artist from Chicago’s south suburbs is conducting “ liberation experiments”. She explores how embracing one’s authentic self propels collective freedom. Currently ﬁnalizing her ﬁrst poetry collection, Kiayla is also the co-curator of Poet’s Tea and Pleasure, a popup evening of poetry celebrating the liberating power of pleasure. kiaylaryann.com

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

Summer Hours

Wednesday–Saturday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM

Exhibition Opening: A Bigger Table: 50 Years of the Chicago Poetry Center

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Poetry Center (CPC), this event features a ﬁlm screening, live performances, and an exhibition of historic broadsides, event posters, and treasures from the CPC archive.

Saturday, July 13 at 2:00 PM CT

ART IN MOTION

The Physical Theater Festival turns 11

A lonely clown, a one-man version of Black Brazilian history, and “an inter-genre cinematic caper” take the stage this year.

By JACK HELBIG

Alice da Cunha remembers the day she and her husband, Marc Frost, first came up with the idea of the Physical Theater Festival Chicago in the spring of 2013. “I was three months pregnant with our first child,” she says. She and Frost were just out for a walk in West Loop and had stopped in a co ee shop when Frost got a text on his phone from Links Hall, informing him that they were taking applications for a curatorial residency.

“And he’s like, ‘Let’s apply,’” says da Cunha.

The two of them had been “dreaming that one day [they] would create a physical theater festival,” but that was just a daydream, something they thought they might do “when we retired.” They decided to sit down immediately and start their application. Or, as da Cunha poetically puts it, “In three hours, we dreamt a festival.” They then sent in the application and “didn’t think more about it. And then we got a call saying that the board of directors had unanimously approved it, and that we had to do the festival.”

PHYSICAL THEATER FESTIVAL CHICAGO 7/ 13 -7/21: performances at Theater Wit ( 1229 W. Belmont) and Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio); see physicalfestival.com for complete schedule of shows and workshops. Performances $22 75 ($17 75 artists, veterans, seniors, and students); festival pass (six admissions) $ 85 -$100

passed capacity in the room. It was a huge success, and that’s a brilliant way to ﬁnish year one, right?”

Eleven years later the Physical Theater Festival Chicago is still going strong, packing an amazing amount of theater into nine days of programming. They kick o Saturday with a family-friendly outdoor series of performances running 1–7 PM at Nichols Park (1355 E. 53rd Street) in Chicago, and continue with shows and workshops including artists from around

to make a work completely from scratch with prompts and themes. And every time we were in a group together, we played a romantic couple. For two years we did this.”

The two started dating in the last week of school, and soon after, Frost had to return to the U.S. because his visa ran out. Frost persuaded da Cunha, who grew up in Brazil and Portugal, to join him in Chicago. “The one thing I said to Alice, which I think is true—the winters are awful,” Frosts notes. “There’s no denying that. But I said, ‘Unlike London, you will see the sun shine in Chicago. Even on cold days, you’ll see sunshine.’”

and Sweden, one collaboration from the U.S. and Cuba, and Scratch Night, an evening set aside for artists and theaters to show short pieces or works in progress.

Frost and da Cunha immediately went into panic mode, contacting everyone they knew in order to program a festival that had only been a pipe dream just a short time before. The two had no idea how much work and hubris goes into pulling a new festival together. “We like to describe it as a mixture of ignorance and arrogance,” da Cunha jokes.

Still, they pulled it o . The ﬁrst edition of the festival, held in 2014 and staged at Links Hall, consisted of two shows from the U.S., one from Spain, one collaboration from Denmark

Once they had programmed the festival and arranged getting the performers from overseas to Chicago, they faced another challenge: getting an audience. Da Cunha still remembers her anxiety on the ﬁrst day of the festival.

“At 6:45, there was nobody in the theater. [The show was set to start at 7 PM.] We had sold three tickets. My stomach dropped. We looked at each other, but we couldn’t speak. And then at 6:50, people started getting in the door, and getting in, getting in. And each day, the audience would double. And by the end of that ﬁrst festival, people were at the door, and they had to sit on the ﬂoor of the stage. We

the world, staged mostly at Theater Wit (1229 W. Belmont) and the Instituto Cervantes (31 W. Ohio). There will also be some virtual options.

The love of physical theater is what brought da Cunha and Frost together. They met when they were both studying physical theater in the style of Jacques Lecoq, the famous French physical theater performer, at the London International School of Performing Arts, which is now arthaus.berlin (Brexit forced them to move to Berlin from the UK). They started as friends, and for a long time that’s what they remained.

Da Cunha is animated when she talks about this year’s festival.

“We’ve got three international shows,” she says. “We’ve got a clown show from Mexico. It’s called Perhaps, Perhaps . . . Quizás [July 18–20 at Instituto Cervantes]. And the artist’s name, her clown name, is Chula the Clown.” Da Cunha and Frost have been following her work for eight years. “We’re excited to have her. It’s a beautiful show about loneliness and the search for the right person to be with.” Chula also conducts a workshop, The Clown and the Silence, at Columbia College Chicago on July 17.

“We’ve got a show out of Brazil. It’s called Macacos ,” da Cunha continues. This one-person show, performed by Clayton Nascimento, relates the history of the Brazilian Black experience “from slavery to the present day. He debunks the myths and retells the story,” says da Cunha. In this piece, Nascimento performs alone onstage, telling his story using only “his own body, voice, and lipstick.” The show has shaken things up in Brazil, winning awards and, says da Cunha, inspiring the reopening

“We curate this festival with a lot of thought and care, holding Chicago audiences in mind.”

“But what’s funny,” da Cunha recalls, “is that every week at a Lecoq-style school, you’re working with a group of your fellow students

of “the case of a Black mother that lost her son to police brutality.” Macacos runs July 18–20 at Theater Wit, and Nascimento will teach a workshop, Black Theater: Scenic Experiences From Contemporary Theater, at Columbia College on July 19.

The third international show is The Man

Theatre Y’s Little Carl KARL SODERSTROM

Who Thought He Knew Too Much , conceived and performed by the Voloz Collective, a four-person physical theater company who are also all alums of the renowned L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. The comic piece, described as “Wes Anderson meets Hitchcock meets Spaghetti Western,” is performed without elaborate sets, lighting, or sound design. The collective, in true physical theater style, uses only their bodies—and live music—to tell their “inter-genre, cinematic caper.” That’s also at Theater Wit, July 19–21, and Voloz Collective runs a workshop on “cinematic devising” on July 20 at Theater Wit.

The festival this year will also include several shows pitched to children, including Don’t Make Me Get Dressed by the Boston-based troupe the Gottabees (July 20–21 at Theater Wit). Also on the bill is Scratch Night, a Physical Theater Festival tradition in which local performers show o their works in progress (July 15 at Theater Wit). Chicago-based Theatre Y revives its theatrical confrontation with gun violence, Little Carl , performed by Theatre Y’s Youth Ensemble under the guidance of puppet artist Michael Montenegro and the multitalented Marvin Tate (July 16–17 at Theater Wit).

“We curate this festival with a lot of thought and care,” da Cunha explains, “holding Chicago audiences in mind. Our goal is to offer

programming that caters to different demographics and also to make sure that everyone who comes to our festival feels like they belong here. We are firm believers that art can create more empathy, understanding, and also bring joy to the community. By presenting international, national, and local work, we aim to create a space where artists and audiences create bridges together.”

What started as a mere dream 12 years ago has turned into the main focus of da Cunha and Frost’s lives, second only to parenthood.

“It is like a third child,” da Cunha jokes.

Frost adds, “You know, we’re busting out of our seams. We were at about 90 percent capacity for all the shows last year. We’re at that stage where we’re starting to push beyond nine days in a hundred-seat theater.”

“Each year the festival grows and feels more connected to the city of Chicago,” says da Cunha. “We love building partnerships with other institutions, which also allows us to reach new audiences. We get to showcase more local and national artists and bring more shows from abroad. Each show is so unique. And each year allows us to deepen the conversation with our audience even more: we love hearing what shows people loved, what they want to see more of, etc. Overall, we want the festival to become a staple of Chicago summer.” v

Book by TAYLOR MAC

Music and Lyrics by JASON ROBERT BROWN

Choreography by TANYA BIRL - TORRES

Directed by ROB ASHFORD

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

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

EXTENDED BY POPULAR DEMAND THROUGH AUGUST 11 !

Voloz Collective’s The Man Who Thought He Knew Too Much JAKE WAKLEY

RMIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL

Through 8/ 11: Tue-Wed and Fri 7:30 PM, Thu and Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; also Sun 7/ 14 7:30 PM and Wed 7/31 2 PM; ASL interpretation Fri 7/ 19, touch tour and audio description Sat 7/27 2 PM (touch tour 12:30 PM), Spanish subtitles Sat 7/27 7:30 PM, open captions Sun 7/28 2 PM; Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312- 443 -3800, goodmantheatre.org, $25 -$175

REVIEW

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is funny and juicy

“Well-rounded performances and amazing songs” ﬁll Goodman’s world premiere.

By CRISTALLE BOWEN

Sex work is hard. As a spectator, I’ve noticed at best it can be filled with perks, and at worst, it’s a thankless, even fatal profession where your humanity is rarely, if ever, considered. John Berendt’s (mostly) nonﬁction, true crime novel, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, was released in 1994 and is centered around a retelling of a crime of passion between a sex worker and his socialite sugar daddy. Characters Danny Hansford and Jim Williams, respectively, had a terrible relationship; Jim would embarrass much younger gigolo Danny, and Danny in turn would become violent. This cycle of violence would continue until they were both dead.

As far as juicy stories go, this is as moist as it gets. Berendt put a little extra sauce on a few time lines and characters in the book, which is also part love letter to Savannah, Georgia. Among the many idiosyncratic characters in the book, Savannah is described as one of

them. Midnight is still one of the New York Times ’s longest-standing bestsellers and is responsible for a huge uptick in tourism in Savannah. It got the movie treatment in 1997, and while it didn’t do well at the box office, scoring mixed reviews, it was a memorable adaptation.

Now, 30 years later, we get a musical version that blows the ﬁlm out of the water. The Goodman Theatre pulled out all the stops for this production, directed by Rob Ashford, with choreography by Tanya Birl-Torres and a score by renowned composer Jason Robert Brown. Book writer Taylor Mac adds great moments of spoken word and dialogue beyond the singing. This updated musical has cultural reverence, relevance, well-rounded performances, and amazing songs.

The opening set looks like a cemetery garden at night, complete with grand statues and draping vines. The Goodman is quickly ﬁlled

with sounds of cicadas and life beyond the dark, and the Mercer House appears behind the garden—Jim’s beautiful, historic home in Savannah. Minerva, a voodoo priestess (sturdily played by Brianna Buckley), appears and begins a spiritual practice that lets us know we are not alone. She chants and communes with the dead and is a protective force. The south has so many ties to African Indigenous spirituality; it takes center stage early and often.

Similar to the book and movie, Jim is an antiquarian who works in the restoration of homes similar to his and is sort of a (wink, wink) homosexual. He never says it outright, but it’s implied, and his ﬂings are witnessed by enough folks to know what’s going on. Mercer House is his pride and joy, where he throws lavish parties for Savannah’s elite while also throwing his weight around. With his status comes power, and he knows it.

In the book and movie, there is a journalist, a man who becomes so enthralled by the Georgian city that he moves from New York to Savannah to pen a book about Savannah, Mercer House, and Jim and his sordid a airs. In the musical, that journalist is us, the audience, which is a smart twist on the overall story, making us an actual part of the dialogue and movement through the musical. Additionally, the cast of characters are a snapshot of the deliciously dark and beautiful makeup of Savannah, but also a look into the “melting pot” of America.

The haves, the have-nots, the queers, the powerful, the downtrodden—they’re all represented. Oh, and let’s not forget the racial tension of the south (which could stand as its own character). Everyone’s here, and by the looks of it, everyone’s drunk and very messy. The entire cast is lovely. And honestly, I don’t remember the book or the movie being this funny. There are so many laughs throughout the production that the almost three-hour running time feels swift. The fashion throughout is colorful and retro (Toni-Leslie James designed the costumes and Matthew Armentrout created the wigs and hairstyles); the dancers are on point; the 12-piece orchestra (led by music director Thomas Murray) plays beautifully; and the ensemble did not disappoint. With so many memorable performers, it’s hard to single anyone out, but just know everyone is at the top of their game.

Jim, played by Broadway vet Tom Hewitt, brings heft, humor, and a damn good tenor to the role. Austin Colby also makes his Goodman debut in the role of Danny Hansford, emerging

shirtless, drinking milk, and showing us why he’s the best piece of ass in Savannah. His voice is surprisingly powerful and emotive and does a great job bringing a bit of sympathy to the role. Shanel Bailey is amazing as Lavella Cole, a Black debutante who becomes more sensitive to her queer neighbors. Sierra Boggess is hilarious as Emma Dawes, famed frenemy of Jim; she brightens up the stage every time she appears. Wes Olivier as Jack the One-Eyed Jill is wonderful as well, packing big moments into a smaller role.

In the interest of word counts and deadlines, I do not have enough room here to say how much I loved the role of the Lady Chablis, masterfully played by Tony Award–winner J. Harrison Ghee. She’s gone from a side character in Berendt’s book to a scene-stealer in the movie to one of the musical’s main attractions. In the movie, she played herself, a sidesplitting trans woman and entertainer who knows the gossip on everyone in Savannah and takes a liking to the journalist. In the musical, she talks to the audience so much she has us blushing. When she first appears onstage, she’s met with rowdy applause before she even says anything. Opening night, Ghee smiled deviously at the crowd and said, “Make me earn it.” And Ghee’s Chablis did. I actually shed tears during her triumphant final song, “Butterflies,” and the accompanying monologue; it felt like I was indeed having a spiritual experience. Those familiar with the Midnight story will come for Jim’s debauchery, but stay for the Lady Chablis.

Midnight is essentially a story about a newly rich white man on trial for the murder of his gay lover in late 1980s Savannah. There’s so much to unpack, but I was truly left feeling heavy emotions about the characters of Danny Hansford and the Lady Chablis. If Danny were treated like a person and not a depraved whore, his fate might have been di erent. Jim’s fate might have been di erent. If Chablis was treated like a person and not some degenerate, she might not have been so amazing as an entertainer. Being steadfast in taking up space, being loud, and overall not letting anyone shit on you for being just who you are, no matter what your background is, was the message I wholeheartedly took from this musical. And if you can’t be loud in life, be loud in death—and haunt the shit out of those who wronged you. The spirits will be there to guide you! v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

J. Harrison Ghee (center) and the ensemble of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil LIZ LAUREN

REVIEW

Eighty-six the Italian beef

Season three of The Bear focuses on ﬁne dining and form over story and character.

By LAUREN COATES

With its ample golden hour shots of the city, mile-a-minute, profanity-laced dialogue, and abundance of Italian beef, few TV shows have brought Chicago to the small screen as authentically (and ferociously) as FX’s breakout hit The Bear, which recently returned for its third season. Though the top-notch ensemble cast continues to deliver powerful, dramatic, and comedic performances across the board, The Bear ’s third outing brings down the heat and delivers a decidedly more introspective, tempered installment.

Season three picks up in the not-too-distant wake of the ﬁery (or rather, frigid) season two ﬁnale, which saw Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) trapped in a walk-in freezer on the opening night of his newly revamped restaurant, the Bear. While season two followed the crew of the Bear (formerly the Beef) as they struggled to make it to opening night, season three puts the restaurant’s staying power to the test, uncovering even more cracks in the tightknit kitchen.

Episode one opens not in the middle of a hectic service (there will be plenty of that) but with a quiet, ruminative entry. “Tomorrow” puts dialogue on the back burner and instead focuses on reacquainting the audience with the crew of the Bear. Written and directed by Park Ridge native and series creator Christopher Storer (who helms seven of the season’s ten episodes), the episode is a stark contrast to everything we’ve come to know as The Bear’s signature.

Gone are the screaming matches and hectic, cramped kitchens. Instead of trying to keep up with a printer endlessly churning out orders for roast beef, Carmy’s now back to agonizing over the way micro herbs and garnishes are staged on immaculate, minimalist plates. As the atmosphere at the Bear transforms from chaotic local joint to Michelin-star material, Storer similarly slows down the pace of the series opener, taking the time to linger with Carmy and the rest of the team as they navigate the emotional fallout of his opening night outburst.

This introspective, pared-down premiere sets the stage for a season three that feels overall less urgent than past installments and decidedly more aimless. White continues to bring the requisite, episode-anchoring intensity and vulnerability as Carmy, but just as Carmy is emotionally isolating him-

translate the inner landscape of Carmy’s mind into the very tone and aesthetic trappings of the series. But in emulating Carmy’s refusal to engage emotionally and interpersonally with the people around him, The Bear is almost too successful, and Carmy ends up feeling adrift and unattached as a protagonist.

It doesn’t help that the Beef (remember back when this show was about an Italian beef restaurant?) has become all but an afterthought. Barring episode six, “Napkins”—a meaty flashback episode focused on Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) that marks Ayo Edebiri’s directorial debut—both the restaurant and its remaining employees (namely Edwin Lee Gibson’s Ebraheim) are all but forgotten. It’s a shame to see that the Beef is squarely in The

Boyce). Instead of exploring Marcus’s life beyond the grief of losing his mother, we’re subjected to scene after scene of Fak (Matty Matheson) pattering back and forth with his increasing volume of brothers, including guest star John Cena. Recurring Fak bits were fun when he was a caricature of a Chicagoan used at least somewhat sparingly, but season three goes all-in on beating the audience over the head with how fast Fak can talk without actually saying anything, which becomes very old very quickly.

But even if The Bear’s third outing puts a few too many chips on the Faks and not enough on the likes of Sydney and Marcus, a few tonal and pacing missteps hardly render season three unwatchable. The dialogue is just as

self from those around him, the character feels somehow disconnected from the rest of the series.

Sure, he’s at the Bear physically, but Carmy’s screen time this season is 50 percent ﬂashback. Whether he’s reminiscing about his time at Chef Terry’s (Olivia Colman) restaurant, reliving the horrors of working under the nightmarish Chef David (Joel McHale), or daydreaming about Claire Bear (Molly Gordon), Carmy’s emotional stando shness and lack of grounding bleeds into the very DNA of the show, leaving the series feeling at times aimless and cold.

It’s a credit to Storer as both a writer and filmmaker that he’s able to so effectively

Bear’s rear view mirror, though “Napkins” is a welcome return to form for those su ering from season one nostalgia.

While Carmy may have all his attention focused on making the Bear into the pristine pinnacle of culinary excellence, Sydney (Edebiri) spends the majority of season three agonizing over whether or not to o cially sign on the dotted line and agree to become a partner. It’s cathartic watching Sydney ﬁnally get the attention from the culinary world that she deserves, but her reluctance to sign becomes one-note rather quickly, and it’s a shame to see Edebiri’s talent so underutilized this season.

The repetitive nature of Sydney’s subplot is an issue that also plagues Marcus (Lionel

whip-smart, the service scenes just as tensionridden, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s Richie is just as much of a delightful scene-stealer as he was in the ﬁrst two seasons.

The Bear has always thrived when pushing the conﬁnes of genre and ping-ponging wildly with tone, but as the series heads into its third season, an apparent desire to put form over story leaves once vibrant characters feeling like shells of their former selves. Too eager to showcase as many famous faces and celebrity cameos as possible, The Bear ’s baffling underuse of its main cast leaves an otherwise solid season feeling unsatisfying. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

A still from The Bear FX

Get showtimes and see reviews of everything playing this week at chicagoreader.com/movies

NOW PLAYING

RHumanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person follows Sasha (Sara Montpetit), an introverted young vampire with a crippling problem: she doesn’t have the stomach to kill. When she befriends the suicidal Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), it seems like the two may be able to solve each other’s problems, but finding the guts to pull off her first kill proves more difficult for Sasha than expected.

Short and sweet (unlike its lengthy title) at around an hour and a half long, Humanist Vampire is relatively tame in terms of both scope and story, opting to follow the antics (or lack thereof) of a painfully uninteresting suburban vampire. The pseudo coming-of-age story is played to bone-dry perfection by writer-director Ariane Louis-Seize, who manages to honor the spirit of Sasha (and Paul’s) teen angst without dropping the ﬁlm’s surreal sensibilities.

At times, Humanist Vampire feels almost too downto-earth for its own good: the simplicity of the story is refreshing, but the vampire subgenre is hardly lacking in new material, and there’s not much in Louis-Seize and Christine Doyon’s script that hasn’t already been done somewhere. But where the story may leave something to be desired, the eclectic costuming and production design, music supervision, and ambitious lighting choices all work in tandem to pepper Humanist Vampire with memorable musical and visual moments.

While Sasha as a character may not be all that special on the page (her sullen, artsy aesthetic is reminiscent of the vampire heroine in 2014’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), she feels anxious and earnest in the most vivid way possible thanks to a pivotal perfor-

arrangements. She’s married to an affluent middle-aged man with whom she has two adopted daughters. Not only does her life seem idyllic, but she also seems to be a good person overall. This makes the affair with her underage stepson all the more shocking, especially contrasted with the film’s ostensibly middlebrow aesthetic, appearing, as it does, like more generic French art house fare, just as Anne seems to be a generic middle-class woman. What’s truly provocative, though, isn’t the situation itself but how it’s posited, less dogmatic about who’s the seducer and who might be a victim, and how it’s finally handled by Anne.

As is her wont, Breillat doesn’t pander to today’s overly prudent mores toward sexuality. If anything, her ﬁlm is all the more shocking precisely because it isn’t necessarily supposed to be. The dull stabbing of such unseemliness is something more subtly trenchant than a cutting examination of midlife and suburban contentment, yet it’s also truer as a result. Breillat gets at more than just the complexities of life and desire, but also the complexity of ﬁlmmaking—and viewing—itself.

—KAT SACHS 104 min. Gene Siskel Film Center

life. There’s a touching glimpse of recognition in the ﬁnal interactions between David and his mother, but the externalization of the family’s traumas receives so much focus that the interior characterizations feel liable to tip over at the slightest breeze. Mother, Couch turns over many cushions in search of change, but it’s an ultimately unsatisfactory experience, even by “the fruitlessness of closure” standards. —DANIELLA MAZZIO 96 min. Gene Siskel Film Center

R Music

mance from Montpetit. With her curt, stilted delivery and perpetually moon-eyed gaze, Montpetit lends Sasha an eerie air that goes a long way to supplement the ﬁlm’s lack of substantial dialogue. Similarly wide-eyed and awkward is Sasha’s young beau, Paul, whose deer-inheadlights expression and chronic lack of a spine make him the perfect unwilling accomplice to a straitlaced young vampire’s night of rebellion. Together, they bumble through the streets, pulling tame pranks and trying to work up the courage to end Paul’s life; it’s a macabre conceit for a meet-cute, but perfectly in line with the ﬁlm’s sense of humor.

Though it may feel less substantial than some of its fellow vampire ﬁlms, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is a paradoxically sweet yet morbid French fantasy with a singular leading lady in Montpetit. —LAUREN COATES 90 min. Gene Siskel Film Center

R Last Summer

I wouldn’t know for sure, but I imagine it hurts more to be stabbed with a dull butter knife than a sharp blade. The obtuseness of the thing makes its impact that much sharper, metaphorically speaking—an assertion that holds true for French provocateur Catherine Breillat’s latest film, her first in ten years. Last Summer is seemingly her most accessible work to date. Her general filmography is among the most transgressive cinema made nowadays and o en deals explicitly with problematic age gaps between lovers. It’s technically a remake of May el-Toukhy’s 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts (though Breillat makes it an altogether different text) and centers on a middle-aged woman who begins an affair with her teenage stepson. The woman, Anne (Léa Drucker), is a lawyer specializing in helping victims of sexual abuse and navigating tricky custody

Mother, Couch

Anyone who’s rummaged for loose coins in the void of the couch cushions understands what a tedious, Sisyphean task it can be. While the geniuses at IKEA may develop a sofa streamlined enough to combat this issue, a tour through the store’s layout is its own maddening chore. Symbolically, the furniture aisle is a purgatory of terse, domestic frustrations and unsatisfying conclusions—the very undercurrent of Swedish filmmaker Niclas Larsson’s feature debut, Mother, Couch

The farce—evolving into dramatic, magic realism—begins as David (Ewan McGregor) puts his precarious life on hold to convince his mother (Ellen Burstyn, withholding as ever) to get up from a couch in a furniture store. Middle child Gruﬀudd (Rhys Ifans) and Linda (Lara Flynn Boyle), the oldest, passively see to the situation, but it’s clear David is desperate to turn Mother’s obstinance into an occasion for their ﬁrst (and only) family meeting.

Angela Schanelec’s Music takes its inspiration from Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, but the deconstructed nature of this inspiration, eschewing the sensationalism of grand twists and tragic reveals for more structurally intricate events, allows for the movie to breathe with sensitivity and be felt with intensity. From its ﬁrst image of lush green hills slowly being enveloped in a gray mist, to shots of calves, forearms, feet, ears, and eyes inside of a jail cell, to the close-up of a hug between father and daughter on the side of a busy street, the ﬁlm’s quietude allows and trusts the viewer to be perceptive of not just what’s happening in the frame but of their own emotions.

Events occur, but they are not doted on in the traditional narrative manner. There is a deliberate rhythm that beats at an unconventional pace: one moment our protagonist Jon (Aliocha Schneider) kills someone, the next moment he’s in jail, then he and jail warden Iro (Agathe Bonitzer) gradually fall in love, and then immediately they have started a family. The opera that starts on Jon’s Walkman and then becomes

Tensions are flooded by external anxieties and the off-kilter, borderline-omniscient presence of the store’s owners. The camera work and use of the furniture store’s inherent dissonant familiarity emphasize their suffocating circumstances as the family structure at play becomes more apparent. Taylor Russell stands out as Bella, the store owner’s enigmatic daughter who serves as a doula for David’s closure—a gentle but thankless position.

Mother, Couch is strongest when it captures the desperation of the lifetime of questions and regrets that are impossible to resolve at the end of a loved one’s

non-diegetic defines Schanelec’s subtle placement of sounds and images as operating both independently and also together in a greater thematic movement. What tragedy or peril occurs is relayed with solemnity. A simple look, a straight walk into the ocean, a deliberate jump and fall, a car’s light honk and screech—all followed by silence. One could understandably find Music to be stilted in its very European dedication to formal reticence, but it’s a movie that stresses its drama need not be elaborate to be affecting. —SOHAM GADRE 108 min. Gene Siskel Film Center v

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person H264 DISTRIBUTION

Hear me out: the Minions have gotten a bad rap. It’s one of the many things for which I blame Facebook and its facilitation of the Minion meme. The little yellow henchmen have become the uno cial voice of a generation (hint: not mine)—one defined by corny jokes, cringeworthy declarations, and questionable political opinions. (Do Minions have a political party? If anything, I’d imagine gibberish, the Minions’ o cial uno cial language created and voiced by French Indonesian animator Pierre Co n, is apolitical. Interestingly, and apropos of nothing, really, the Three Stooges’ gibberish was largely Yiddish.)

I earnestly love the Minions, not as political spokesmen—spokescreatures?—but as cute things that make funny, unintelligible noises and get into hijinks, and which have a marginal self-awareness that makes their appeal slightly ironic. And not to overjustify my preoccupation with corporate intellectual property designed to propagate itself, but there’s an established history of broad, nonsensical humor in ﬁlm, such as the aforementioned Stooges and the Marx Brothers, of which I think the Minions are worthy descendants.

All this to say, I was excited to see Despicable Me 4 , the latest installment in the franchise, which, in my opinion, pales in comparison to the standalone Minions movies but which mercifully allows for a little more time with the pill-shaped critters. In order to make it easier to watch a children’s movie as a thirtysomething sans kids, I decided to take an edible beforehand, in part hoping to tap into just why I like the Minions so much. Alas, no such enlightenment befell me; it may be beyond my skill set to articulate so subtle a genius with only a weak dose. (Admittedly, I’m a lightweight when it comes to pot.)

But I did take notes, and those provided for some interesting, if—like the Minions—unintelligible insights. Starting o strong are these

two pre-movie notes: “My feet are warm” (socks in a cold movie theater—specifically the AMC River East—are one of life’s simple pleasures) and “Did I imagine the previews?” If I did, I sure made up a lot of crappy movies coming out soon! My ﬁrst note during the movie, upon seeing my little yellow friends, is simple: “SO FUNNY.” All caps. And it’s true, they are.

In a more serious turn, I do wonder at some point if the Anti-Villain League (AVL), the defense force of which Gru and crew are now a part, is anything like the CIA. In denouncing villainy, have Gru and the Minions ended up on the wrong side of history? I can’t say for sure after the fact, but I still trust that the note “Minion party bus” was made in rapturous delight over the Minions being charioted to AVL headquarters for o ce work. Maybe that should’ve just been the movie.

A plot point of Despicable Me 4 involves ﬁve Minions becoming Mega Minions—jacked-up versions of regular Minions but largely just as ineffective. “Can’t improve upon perfection,” I wrote. And it’s true! The Minions need not be iterated upon. At some point, my overall interest in the ﬁlm began to wane, so subsequent notes are less revelatory: “cat playing DDR,” “hairy Min,” and “Keaton Seven Chances rocks rolling” round us out, the latter note likening a certain Minion gag to the famed Buster Keaton sequence from Seven Chances (1925) of him running down a hill whilst avoiding large rolling rocks. Maybe its genius lies in the gibberish. Maybe the less sense it makes, the better these movies can be. Maybe they work better not if you’re actually high, but if you’re just made to feel that way. Anyway. Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

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

A still from Despicable Me 4

ILLUMINATION & UNIVERSAL PICTURES

“THE URBAN+NATURE SONIC PAVILION” Sat 7/13, 1–4 PM, Thu 8/15, 5–8 PM, Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph, free ess.org/esscalendar/sonicpavillion

Explore the city’s ‘more-than-human soundtrack’

Experimental Sound Studio presents “the urban+nature sonic pavilion,” an immersive auditory exhibition.

By JENNIFER SMART

When the Experimental Sound Studio (ESS) takes over Millennium Park’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion this summer, audiences will hear lots of familiar sounds: the beeping of CTA trains, summer cicadas, the bucket boys of Michigan Avenue, and waves from Lake Michigan crashing on the beach. The Pritzker Pavilion is well-known as the home for live music and dance performances during the summer, but performers will be notably absent from the stage during this event, an auditory exhibition titled “the urban+nature sonic pavilion.” Instead, recordings of 14 sonic compositions submitted by artists worldwide will be programmed

and projected through the pavilion’s massive speaker system.

The event marks the sixth time ESS has taken over the pavilion for a summer program of experimental sound and music. This year’s edition is curated by Giovanni Aloi and Chris Hunter of Antennae , an independent publication that explores nature through the lens of contemporary art. Their curatorial vision is driven by a desire to debunk the idea that there is no nature in the city. Each of the compositions explores the city’s “more-thanhuman soundtrack” and the inextricable relationship between urban and natural sound.

A key objective of the project is to leverage the pavilion’s massive multichannel speaker

system. “It’s rare for such a high-quality speaker system to be installed in an outdoor space,” notes Alex Inglizian, ESS technical director and chief engineer. At the pavilion, 24 speakers are positioned throughout the canopy that hangs over the great lawn, and each speaker can be programmed independently so that different sounds are projected in di erent corners of the space. Programming the speakers is a massive technical challenge but also an opportunity: for a project about breaking down boundaries between nature and culture, the multichannel sound experience encourages listeners to inhabit di erent perspectives as they move about the space and hear distinct sounds. It’s an opportunity

each artist will take advantage of in unique ways.

“I love to create situations where people can walk into the sound,” says Beth Bradfish, a composer whose piece, Fanfare with

Their curatorial vision is driven by a desire to debunk the idea that there is no nature in the city.

Singing Insects , will be part of the program. Inspired by evening walks around Lincoln Park’s South Pond, her piece combines recordings of crickets, cicadas, and katydids with the playing of an orchestra. “It starts out with crickets and ends with them,” Bradfish says. “They come in like an invitation, and then the orchestra says in its own way, ‘Can we sing with you?’”

At the pavilion, Bradﬁ sh has designed the piece so that the orchestral sounds will be projected through speakers in the center of the pavilion while the sounds of insects will play through speakers on the pavilion’s outskirts, as though they were swarming around the space. “I am hoping that people will walk through the space and have di erent experiences as they walk through,” she says. “You can make a choice about where you go to listen.”

Bradfish’s is not the only piece in the exhibition to incorporate field recordings, a practice that involves recording natural or other environmental sounds—a door shutting, a dog barking, the clap of thunder. Artists who work with fi eld recordings often alter them slightly or recontextualize them amidst other sounds, encouraging listeners to hear sounds in new ways or “rehear” sounds they might otherwise take for granted.

Toronto-based artist Cole Swanson worked with Pedro Casas, a musician and sound engineer, to produce Baoli , a work that will layer the sounds of Delhi onto those of Millennium Park. Swanson’s piece is composed of recordings he made in and

Jay Pritzker Pavilion’s multichannel speaker system is uniquely equipped for artists cra ing experimental sonic compositions. DAVID ALVARADO FOR CHICAGO READER

ATTENTION

ATTENTION:

If you are a former 10/1/99 CHA leaseholder who has an interest in exercising your right to return, please read the information listed below.

If you listed Lawndale Complex or the Lawndale Community Area on your Housing Choice Survey as a place you would like to permanently live, please read the information listed below.

The Draft Tenant Selection Plan (TSP), Lease, and other documents that will apply to resident occupancy at LeClaire Phase I Residential Draft TSP and Lease are available for review and comment.

MUSIC

continued from p. 24

around an ancient stepwell in the heart of Delhi. Stepwells, deep wells designed to collect water during India’s seasonal monsoons, are regular features of Indian cities. In Baoli , listeners will be taken on a whirlwind journey through time and space as they encounter the sounds of the birds and bats that make the stepwell their home, as well as the din of tra c and the harmonies of Hindi song that surround it. When the piece is played at the pavilion, it will in some ways model the architectural space of the stepwell. When the bats emerge, for example, they will start at one end of the pavilion and move across it as though ﬂying. Swanson and Casas have also played with the frequency of the sounds, moving them up when the bats fly by so that the recordings sound like what Delhi would sound like to a bat.

“We hope people can interact with the sounds as though they were in that space,” Swanson notes. “The shifts of perspective in the piece complicate in really interesting ways how the site might be experienced from different points of view,” both human and non.

The Draft Tenant Selection Plan (TSP) and Lease for Ogden Commons, a mixed-income community is available for review. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) has worked with its development partner to develop a Draft TSP and Lease for use at the private development known as Ogden Commons (previous site of the Lawndale Complex). The units within this development will be used as replacement public housing units for Lawndale Complex and the Lawndale Community area. If you listed Lawndale Complex/Lawndale Community area on your Housing Choice Survey as a place you want to live or maintain a right to return to new CHA replacement housing per the Relocation Rights Contract (RRC), you can comment on the Draft TSP and Lease during the 30-day public comment period.

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The 30-day public comment period will be held for CHA to receive written comments starting April 7 through May 7, 2021. The Tenant Selection Plans (TSP) will be available on CHA’s website beginning April 7, 2021.

In 44.5B-Fps , Gabi Kinlock—a Chicagobased artist who DJs under the moniker Panty—musicalizes the city, sampling and remixing recordings of the laughter of friends, announcements on the el, and downtown street performers, into a piece inspired by the aesthetic of underground electronic and industrial music scenes. The various samples in their piece are tied together by the sound of a shuttering camera, “like I’m taking pictures of the sounds that are in my head,” Kin-

you’re coming from will feel like something you’ve heard before.”

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“It’s a sound program happening outside where there’s already a rich soundscape. So we’re very excited to hear what will happen, all the layers of sound that are unplanned.”

lock says. Despite the variety of sounds present, the piece has a strong sense of rhythm. “It’s really a meditation on this groove I experience both in urban environments and cities as well as in nature,” they note. “I think they’re all sounds that no matter where

Part of what makes “the urban+nature sonic pavilion” such an exciting opportunity for curators Hunter and Aloi and the artists involved is its unpredictability. “It’s a sound program happening outside where there’s already a rich soundscape,” Aloi emphasizes. “So we’re very excited to hear what will happen, all the layers of sound that are unplanned.”

“For all I know, the insects in the park will be louder than the ones in the piece,” Bradfish adds. “Plus, there’s the traffic, the people talking.” But that’s exactly the point: the blurred lines between art and nature that “the urban+nature sonic pavilion” will inevitably create might just remind viewers of the equally blurred lines between humans and nature. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

DAVID ALVARADO FOR CHICAGO READER

IN APRIL 2023, EXPERIMENTAL dance producer and DJ Care launched the Mages Guild label with a 27-track compilation called Midimagick Beta Test . “I started it because it didn’t really feel like there was a platform in Chicago for experimental music that was more dance oriented—or even, a little bit more fun and party oriented, but still experimental,” Care says. Since then, the collective of producers involved in Mages Guild have been so active in Chicago’s underground dance scene that their work caught the attention of the film programmers behind the Music Box Theatre’s Front Row series. On Friday, July 12, several Mages Guild producers will perform as part of a preshow for Front Row’s midnight screening of 2009 sci-ﬁ ﬂick Gamer

Care first became enthralled with experimental dance through CounterStrike frag videos and became hooked by a memorable one featuring an Aphex Twin song. She then fell for Winnipeg musician Venetian Snares and trawled online forums and Bandcamp in search of unfamiliar breakcore. In late 2019, Care met some of her closest friends in the Chicago breakcore community at a show featuring 99Jakes and Laura Les. But a er the pandemic, Care and her friends had a hard time finding events that suited their tastes. “That part of the scene—of breakcore/ hardcore—did not really come back very strong for a while,” Care says. “Before we were calling ourselves Mages Guild, we were one of the first groups back from COVID to start booking stuff like that again.”

Since dropping Midimagick Beta Test, Mages Guild has put out 15 more releases, most recently last month’s Let My Heart Love Again by Seattle breakcore artist Maedasalt . Most of the label’s contributors live in the Chicago area, including techno stylist DJ IBA , ceramicist and noise artist Melon Sprout, and IDM producer Donkey Basketball (aka Lifeguard drummer Isaac Lowenstein); Care aims to have a new release by label stars EasyG0ingTech out soon.

GOSSIP WOLF

July 18, with a free screening of Eric Richter’s 2350 Last Call: The Neo Story at Sulzer Regional Library in Lincoln Square. The library’s assistant director, Yvette Garcia , a Neo patron back in the day, has organized a corresponding exhibit of the club’s history. Shelton, Richter, Cold Waves Festival founder Jason Novak, DJ Scary Lady Sarah, and Neo doorman Brian Dickie will speak on a panel following the screening; it begins at 6 PM.

THE INTERNATIONAL LATINO Cultural Center (ILCC) —aka Chicago’s premier multidisciplinary Pan-Latino organization— has re invigorated its summer music programming for the 2024 season. On Tuesday, July 16, Chilean singer-songwriter, multi- instrumentalist, and Audiotree Live alum Pascuala Ilabaca will grace the stage at Reggies Music Joint with her smooth vocals, her spirited accordion playing, and her feisty band Fauna at 7 PM for $20. Three days prior, on Saturday, July 13, Ecuadorian Latin rock artist Eljuri brings Concerts for Democracy: Amplifying Voices for Social Change to Riis Park, which lets Chicagoans register to vote on-site while enjoying the show. The concert is the latest in the free ten-part Levitt VIBE Belmont Cragin Music Series , which is part of a three-city pilot program (alongside events in Indianapolis and Oakland) that brings diverse music to community destinations.

Mages Guild kicks oﬀ Friday night’s activities in the Music Box Lounge at 10 PM, with sets by Kira600 and Yuritech (aka DJ Magitech and Toxicyurilovetriangle). Care performs with plunderphonics VJ Taylor Dye at 11:30 PM in the Music Box’s main theater.

LINCOLN PARK ALTERNATIVE HAVEN Neo closed in 2015, but its annual reunion continues unabated. On Saturday, July 13,

Metro hosts the Neo Reunion 2024 party to honor the 45th anniversary of the club’s opening. Neo founder DJ Suzanne Shelton , who launched the club in July 1979, has organized a lineup of record spinners from every era of Neo history, and each one will play music they spun during their respective time behind the decks. Shelton brings the sound of the club’s ﬁrst few years to the fore, while Jeﬀ Moyer who played the very last song at Neo—reps its final years. “I want to honor the legacy and all the people who love it,” Shelton says, “because 45 years is kind of unthinkable. For me, doing this reunion gives everybody who loved [Neo] the opportunity to celebrate that.”

At this year’s reunion, Shelton will share her set with Metro and Smart Bar founder Joe Shanahan ; he was an early Neo regular and felt compelled to open his own club a er spinning at Neo in late 1981. “I’ve been wanting to have him be part of this reunion in a DJ capacity for a long time,” Shelton says. Shelton also recruited memoirist Steve Silver (former Exit doorman and Pigface and Naked Raygun tour manager) to read during the party. “He’ll do a ten-minute story about what the club scene was like back in the early days of Neo,” Shelton says.

The festivities continue on Thursday,

The Chicago edition is held at Riis Park every Saturday from 2 to 4 PM. It has already featured Argentinian tropical punks Kumbia Queers and Brazilian jazz and samba stars Silvia Manrique and Marcel Bonfim, among others. Future bookings will include HaitianCanadian singer-songwriter Wesli and Indigenous Guatemalan songwriter Sara Curruchich , who sings in Spanish and the Kaqchikel Mayan language. The ILCC is no stranger to releasing a flood of Pan-Latino theater, music, dance, ﬁlm, literature, and culinary arts to the Belmont Cragin neighborhood, which the Chicago Recovery Plan reports is 79 percent Hispanic and Latino. On the music side last year, ILCC put on 33 concerts at 18 venues and hosted Chicago’s first-ever Latino Dance Festival . “There are very few cultural options [in Belmont Cragin]. It’s pretty much a cultural desert,” ILCC deputy executive director Mateo Mulcahy says. “And so the idea was to bring music to communities that don’t have those types of options.” —DMB (DEBBIEMARIE BROWN) AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

Kira600 is among the Mages Guild acts performing at the Music Box. JOSUÉ DIAZ

Demetruest wants to help you slow down

Their newest in a trilogy of EPs, They All Kept Moving, While I Stood Still is about persevering through the good and bad of it all.

By ALEJANDRO HERNANDEZ

that I do is all about vulnerability.”

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.

“I’m trying to get people to slow down and realize that they deserve to take the time to explore their feelings,” says singer-songwriter Demetruest. They’re ex-

plaining the thesis of their upcoming EP, They All Kept Moving, While I Stood Still, the ﬁnal piece of their EP trilogy. “I think we’re constantly in a go, go, go hustle mentality. I think a lot of times it’s not, ‘How are you doing?’ It’s, ‘What are you doing, and how good are you at that thing?’”

Demetruest was born and raised on Chicago’s south side, moving to different neighborhoods every few years. They grew up in an environment that fostered their creative

they experienced setbacks that would alter the course of their life.

“So after my freshman year, I was put on acting probation, and that was kind of soul-crushing for me at the time just because I grew up kind of being a perfectionist,” they explain. “This program was really breaking me down and getting me to really look in the mirror. So after my sophomore year, I did another [acting] assessment, and after that, I was redirected from the program. So . . . my major changed from musical theater to theater.”

This experience of being “redirected” by the school led Demetruest to transfer to Roosevelt University in Chicago. After a year, they decided they couldn’t take no for an answer from Millikin and transferred back to the school, where they continued to endure the trials and tribulations of the demanding theater program. Upon graduating, they were inspired to write about their experiences persevering through the good and the bad of it all, naming their ﬁrst EP in the trilogy Redirected, bringing full circle the previously dispiriting moment of changing theater programs.

“I wanted to write about how traumatic of an experience being redirected was and questioning my own talents and my own value and worth as an artist,” they say. “Redirected was the ﬁrst one, and then, I wanted to play o of that with [my second EP], Direction , which was me taking all of the good [and] the bad, and choosing what path I wanted out of all of this, which was music—and it is still music.”

Taking so much inﬂuence from the world of theater, Demetruest believes their experiences telling stories on the stage have only helped improve their storytelling in songs. Their lyrics poetically strike at the core of human vulnerability, with themes centered around love, mental health, and self-identity.

ambitions from an early age. After overhearing their singing voice as a young child, Demetruest’s father (a DJ himself) built a makeshift studio in their grandmother’s guest bedroom. They later honed their vocal talents at the Choir Academy of Chicago, where they enrolled at 12 years old with the full support of their parents. As they grew older, their love for stage acting also emerged, and they enrolled in Millikin University in 2010 to study in a rigorous musical theater program, where

On their single with Eddie Burns, “Check In,” they croon about the importance of being there for your loved ones with simple, straightforward lyrics: “Check in your loved ones / They need you to pull them through / What you gonna do? / We need you / I need you.” Soft, hazy production from Burns, Demetruest’s close friend and frequent collaborator, complements the choir-like harmonies of the song.

Their most recent single, “Failure,” is a sonically minimalist master class in examining the feelings of anxiety and doubt that come from failing. The lyrics and production, again assisted by Burns, are sparse and hollow, echoing “Sierra Leone” by Frank Ocean, who Demetruest credits among their influences.

As an artist, Demetruest aims to embody love and wants listeners to really slow down and self-reﬂect with their music.

“It’s important for me because growing up, once I realized that I was queer, and that was also a part of my identity, I think it was something that I didn’t really want to be true,” says Demetruest. “The south side of Chicago, it can be a rough place to grow up,” they added. “So I think once I came to terms with who I am—a Black queer artist from Chicago—I think the next step was just focusing—focusing on my own voice. What do I want to say? And you know, everything that I do is all about vulnerability. It’s about not being afraid to do that shadow work, look at myself in the mirror, and say, ‘What can I do to be a better version of myself today than I was yesterday?’” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

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JULY 21 311 WITH AWOLNATION AND NEON TREES

JULY 20 SAD SUMMER ..... FAIRGROUNDS FESTIVAL

JULY 26 ALL TIME LOW .... FAIRGROUNDS WITH GAMES WE PLAY

JULY 27 STILL WOOZY .... FAIRGROUNDS WITH MICHELLE

JULY 30 STICK FIGURE .... FAIRGROUNDS WITH SOJA

JULY 31 LABRINTH .......... . THE SHED WITH RIOVAZ

AUG 1 BLADEE ............ . THE SHED AUG 2 JUNGLE ............ . THE SHED ON SALE NOW

Recommended and notable shows and releases with critics’ insights for the week of July 11

b ALL AGES F

Adam Zanolini’s Heliacal Rising of Sothis pays tribute to Chicago jazz great Kelan Phil Cohran

Tue 7/16, 5:30 PM, Anne and John Kern Terrace Garden, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. F b

KELAN PHIL COHRAN (1927–2017) was a Chicago musical institution. He played trumpet and zither with the Sun Ra Arkestra on some of its classic albums (including 1965’s Angels and Demons at Play), he was a founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), and he led the Artistic Heritage Ensemble. His experiments with electriﬁed kalimba inspired Maurice White to incorporate the instrument into the sound of Earth, Wind & Fire.

Chicago group Heliacal Rising of Sothis carries on Cohran’s legacy today. Led by multi-instrumentalist and Elastic Arts director Adam Zanolini, the ensemble features cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, saxophonist Fred Jackson Jr., pianist Sharon Udoh, and drummer Naydja Bruton. (Zanolini, Gay, and Jackson are current members of the AACM.) Heli-

acal Rising of Sothis does not play Cohran’s compositions; instead, as Zanolini told the Reader by email, “We perform music that was inspired by what [Cohran] taught, since he was adamant that we should each create our own music that reflects our own study and investigation.” While the band usually focuses on Zanolini’s work, at this MCA performance they’ll also play compositions by Udoh and by vocalist-composer Yaw Agyeman, who’ll join them for the occasion. As befits any heir of Cohran, Heliacal Rising of Sothis doesn’t fit easily into a single genre or box; the band can shift from abstract contemplative ambience to righteous hard-bop grooves, and its spiky melodies are always open to energetic dissonance. It’s music filled with the joy of reimagining jazz past for an exciting future. —NOAH BERLATSKY

FRIDAY12

Julie Byrne Angel Bat Dawid opens. 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $23. 17+

Julie Byrne’s music is rooted in connection and care. The Buﬀalo-born singer-songwriter (and onetime Chicagoan) first picked up the guitar at age 17 when her father, a ﬁngerstyle guitarist, could no longer play his beloved instrument due to complications from multiple sclerosis. Over the past decade, she’s released three full-length records of intimate, heartfelt folk music accented with sparse synths, most recently last year’s The Greater Wings, which she began writing in 2018. She started recording the album in late 2020 with producer Eric Littmann, her longtime musical soulmate and former romantic partner, but put it on hold for several months a er Littmann passed away in 2021. Eventually her current label, Ghostly International, connected her with producer and multi-instrumentalist Alex Somers (previously of Jónsi & Alex with Sigur Ros front man Jónsi Birgisson). Joined by producer Jake Falby (who also played strings and synths) and harpist Marilu Donovan, they completed the remainder of the album. The elegant, synth-sprinkled “Summer Glass” simmers with nostalgia for lost love, while “Death Is the Diamond” (written after Littmann’s passing) summons yearning and grief in a single turn of phrase: “Blue dawn of night, go on / I’ve been missing you now with my whole life.” And on the vulnerable, confessional “Flare,” she admits to wanting company on her emotional roller-coaster until she’s ready to begin anew. If you find something to relate to in The Greater Wings , that just means you’re human. Byrne’s “in the round” show at Thalia Hall should provide a space for catharsis and healing. —JAMIE LUDWIG

SATURDAY13

Chosen Few Picnic & Festival

The day’s bill consists of the Chosen Few DJs, Timmy Regisford b2b Joe Claussell, Jihad Muhammad, Sundance, Neil Pierce, Fast Eddie, Julie McKnight, and Jasper Street Company. 9 AM–10 PM, Jackson Park, 63rd St. at Stony Island and Hayes, $80 general admission, VIP sold out, parking passes sold out, 12 and under free. b

Over the past couple decades, Chicago’s summer festival calendar has gotten cartoonishly overstuﬀed. This weekend, the 34th annual Chosen Few Picnic & Festival is one of five big outdoor music events. The others include two of the city’s largest street festivals—Square Roots and West Fest— each with three days of music that rival the bills at big-ticket attractions. As the Chosen Few Picnic sets up camp in Jackson Park on Saturday, July 13, Miche Fest will kick oﬀ two days of Latine music on Oakwood Beach and the Windy City Smokeout will begin day three of its huge country bash in the United Center parking lot. But even with all this competition, the Chosen Few Picnic has continued to grow and thrive, in part by remaining true to its roots. As big as it is, it’s still basically a cookout attached to a concert, and it still doubles as an occasion to

HELIACAL RISING OF SOTHIS WITH SHARON UDOH AND YAW AGYEMAN

Adam Zanolini SOUTH AFRICAN STATE THEATRE

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reunite the beloved collective of house-music DJs who gave the event its name.

Wayne Williams founded the Chosen Few as a high school student in 1977. Several DJs had passed through the group by the time he recruited his stepbrother Jesse Saunders later that year, and soon the other core members came aboard: Tony Hatchett in ’78, Alan King in ’80, and Tony’s younger brother, Andre, in ’81. The Chosen Few helped shape house music as a grassroots youth movement and citywide phenomenon, but in the early 80s members began leaving Chicago for college. The Hatchett family hosted reunions around the Fourth of July, gathering behind the Museum of Science and Industry to barbecue and hang out, and in 1990, the rest of the Chosen Few showed up to spin. That ﬁrst reunion

was so informal that the DJs set up their turntables on top of garbage cans, but it became an annual tradition and evolved into a seasonal ritual that tens of thousand of people plan their summers around. By 2007 the Chosen Few Picnic was drawing a crowd of 10,000, and in subsequent years that number more than quadrupled. The event’s organizers built out an infrastructure commensurate with that size: it became a ticketed, gated event (it was free till 2010) with a massive stage for performers, a towering sound system, and a jumbotron for dancers in the back. Thankfully, the Chosen Few Picnic has little else in common with other major fests. It’s the only one I’ve ever been to where attendees are at their liberty to set up elaborate campsites and barbecue grills on most of the grounds.

Julie Byrne TONJE THILESEN

Chosen Few DJs Terry Hunter, Tony Hatchett, and Andre Hatchett KAY COOKSEY/COURTESY OF CHOSEN FEW DJS LTD.

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continued from p. 31

The main musical draw at the picnic will always be the Chosen Few. They now number seven, with the addition of Terry Hunter in 2006 and Mike Dunn in ’12, and every member spins an hour-long set. The collective always brings out special guests too, and this year they include former WBLS DJ Timmy Regisford (who cofounded New York nightclub Shelter in 1991) performing back-to-back with Spiritual Life Music label founder and producer Joe Claussell. Hip-house pioneer Fast Eddie is among the handful of live performers, alongside vocalist Julie McKnight and gospel-house group Jasper Street Company.

I’m increasingly leery of for-profi t festivals that take over public parks. Is losing access to Grant Park for weeks a good trade-off for the opportunity to spend hundreds of dollars on tickets to Lollapalooza so you can see the bland new Chicago band you’re supposed to care about because Baz Luhrmann hired their front man? But I don’t put the Chosen Few Picnic in that category, not least because it lets people use the park like a park. It seems to me like an important event worth fighting for, because it still enjoys grassroots support from the community that helped build it. It’s not just a reunion of the Chosen Few but also a reunion of the regulars who give this huge event the intimacy of a family affair, and in my experience it’s by far the friendliest outdoor music event in Chicago. Maybe the euphoric mood of house music gets people feeling magnanimous, but I also think at least some of that friendliness comes from the culture of house. It’s not just about the people spinning records onstage, it’s also about all the folks who come out to dance—the love travels in all directions and connects everyone. —LEOR GALIL

MONDAY15

Pocketboy Solid Truth or Consequences New Mexico and Midcentury Llama open. 7:30 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $15, $13 in advance. 18+

The three folks in new Chicago indie-rock group Pocketboy Solid seem like they’d be fun hangs. I base this largely on their new self-titled album and the whimsical, piano-led single they dropped in early April, “Close Encounters of the Richard Kind.” The song’s video follows front man Joe Baughman as he wigs out in a lime-green jumpsuit—with his beard and glasses, his outlandish outﬁt makes him look like a cross between Jim Henson and one of his Muppets, and all his movements feel like interrobangs. Baughman acts in silly sketches that tease out the song’s central metaphor, about playing so many characters that you can only ever have a minor role in anyone’s story, and the video alternates his exploits with footage of Pocketboy Solid playing in the empty aisles of Woodie’s Supermarket in Bremen, Indiana. Baughman’s bandmates— Bridget Stiebris, Haley Blomquist, and guest pianist Bryan Lewis—complement his frenzied energy with head-bobbing cool, making it clear that they could get on his level in a ﬂash.

Stiebris and Blomquist were on Baughman’s wavelength even before they played in the same band. They hired Baughman to work on a couple

music videos for their sharp emo group, OK Cool (2022’s “Time and a Half” and 2023’s “Nissanweekends”), and those jobs provided the seed for their collaboration. Baughman also has his own band, the Righteous Few, and he’s developed a nervy, soulful yelp that puts the Few’s poppy, colorful indie folk in conversation with scrappy 2000s indie rock from the likes of Okkervil River. In 2022, Will Sheﬀ of Okkervil River released a video for “The Spiral Season,” and it’s directed by (you guessed it) Baughman. As Baughman told music site Scummy Water Tower last month, he struck up a friendship with Sheﬀ, who contributed vocals to the closing track on Pocketboy Solid , “November Nights.” But the scene-stealer on that song is the vocal cameo from actor Richard Kind, who learned about the band from their song with his name in its title. Kind’s arch, theatrical performance, delivered from a TV that’s replaced someone else’s head, dovetails perfectly with the ambitious whimsy that makes Pocketboy Solid so much fun.

—LEOR

GALIL

TUESDAY16

Heliacal Rising of Sothis with Sharon Udoh and Yaw Agyeman See Pick of the Week on page 30. 5:30 PM, Anne and John Kern Terrace Garden, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. F b

Redd Kross Dale Crover (DJ set) opens. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $25. 18+

Redd Kross are one of those righteous “band’s bands.” This long-running Los Angeles outﬁ t, legends in the worlds of punk and power pop, casually inﬂ uenced the burgeoning Seattle scene in the late 80s (though lore has it that Kurt Cobain once told Melvins drummer Dale Crover that they were

“too happy”). Brothers Jeﬀ and Steven McDonald formed the band in 1978, while Steven was still in middle school, and they famously made their live debut at an eighth-grade graduation party that also featured Black Flag. As Crover told Westword in 2017, Redd Kross carved out their own style early on. “They could be into Kiss and the Germs at the same time,” he said. “Punk rockers were dumbfounded by that stuﬀ. . . . [Steven’s] the punkrock-Paul McCartney bass player.”

Decades later, love for the Beatles remains present in Redd Kross’s music. While Steven recalls McCartney with his melodic singing and stri-

dent bass playing, Jeff often channels John Lennon’s nasal but tuneful sneer. His powerful pipes are in ﬁne form on the band’s self-titled new double LP, starting with the fuzzed-out lead track, “Candy Coloured Catastrophe” (whose title nods to their love for the groovy 60s). The album’s songs encompass influences from throughout Redd Kross’s history, and it feels like a reﬂ ection on their whole career. The sitar-adorned “Emanuelle Insane” has a heavy psychedelic vibe, and “The Witches Stand” name-drops the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones and mentions “summer daytime trips.” The snappy organ-led garage rock of “Lay Down and Die” would make the McDonalds’ west-coast rock heroes the Seeds proud, while the propulsive, jangly beat pop of “What’s in It for You” combines a catchy melody with synth squiggles and brainy lyrics about paradigm shifts. MC5-style shouter “Stunt Queen” displays the group’s aggressive side with paint- peeling guitar solos, and “Terrible Band” conjures their 90s alt-rock days. (Was there a better grunge-pop single than 1993’s “Lady in the Front Row”?) Album closer “Born Innocent,” which shares a title with Redd Kross’s 1982 debut fulllength, retains all the punk urgency of their earliest recordings.

Redd Kross are on tour for their 45th anniversary, and Steven McDonald tells me their set list will feature a song or two from every record in their catalog, along with “a heaping spoonful of the new album.” This fall they’ll release the band biography Now You’re One of Us: The Incredible Story of Redd Kross , written by the McDonald brothers with former Chicagoan Dan Epstein. Consider the book alongside last year’s documentary, Born Innocent: The Redd Kross Story , and it’s beginning to look like they might ﬁnally be getting their due. As a bonus, Crover (whose solo album Glossolalia is due in September) will join the band on drums and DJ between sets. “Come prepared to have a good time,” Steven says, “or you might get left behind.” —STEVE KRAKOW v

Redd Kross WARD ROBINSON

JOBS

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

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

Sr. Technical Lead Sr. Technical Lead (Master’s w/ 3 yrs exp or Bach w/ 5 yrs exp; Major: Info. & Communications Tech (Concentration: S/W Design & Programming), or equiv.) – Chicago, IL. Job entails working w/ & reqs exp incl:Selenium, Java, Python, JavaScript, Groovy, JUnit, TestNG, Docker, Jenkins, TeamCity, Eclipse, IntelliJ, Git, Bit-Bucket, SharePoint, Putty, Mind Term, Cucumber, Spira, Jira, Agile, WaterFall, Confluence, Appium, Android SDK, AccelQ, X-Code, AWS, Fiddler, Postman, ReadyAPI, JQuery, Oracle, SQL Developer, XML, HTML, JSON, Protractor, Tosca, Apache Tomcat, Anaconda Navigator, PyCharm & NumPy. Analyzing & developing applications. Various Worksites - Relocation & travel to unanticipated locations within USA possible. Send resumes to WindyCity Technologies Inc., Attn: HR, 3601 W. Devon Ave, Ste. 306, Chicago, IL 60659.

Sr Marketing & Operations Analyst sought by Chowbus, Inc. in Chicago, IL to dvlp quantitative analysis, tools, & models to support city operation & mktg planning. Reqs: Master’s in Bus. Communications,

Mktg Analysis, or rltd Social Sci field. Must possess course work or work exp w/ Consumer Behavior, Precision Mktg & Mktg strategies, Operation Mgmt, Cost & Mgmt Acctg, Enterprise Resource Planning, & etc. 100% telecommuting from home allowed from anywhere in U.S. Apply at: https://www. chowbus.com/ careers

Outreach and Administrative Coordinator

Oversee the program and policies regarding Home Care Aide involvement, program requirements, and benefits. Job description at https://www. chinesemutualaid.org/ work-with-us Full-time position located at Chinese Mutual Aid Association, 1016 W. Argyle St., Chicago, IL 60640. 40 hours/week. Salary is $51,688. Requires: Bachelor’s Degree in Business or Marketing

Please send resumes to: Chinese Mutual Aid Association Attn: Recruitment 1016 W. Argyle St. Chicago, IL 60640

Thoughtworks seeks Lead Data Engineer (Professional Services) to work in Chicago, IL & various unanticipated U.S. locations to develop modern data architecture approaches for largescale, custom-designed, enterprise-level business intelligence and analytics projects using software development languages, such as Python and Java, and cloud-based data management technologies. Must have Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Computer or Electrical Engineering, Information Systems, or related ﬁeld. Must have 5 yrs exp in the job oﬀered Consultant, Software Architect/Engineer, or related IT position. Must have at least 36 mos: (1) Participating at all stages of the software delivery life-cycle, including analysis, development, testing and deployment; and (2) Leading a team of software and data engineers to oversee project activity, manage project deliverables and progress, prioritize plans for future iterations, and manage team performance. Must have at least 24 mos: (1) Developing applications that are cloud ready/ cloud-native using at least one of the primary cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure). Must have at least 12 mos: (1) Using Agile development methodologies including Continuous Integration, Extreme Programming, Continuous Delivery, Test-Driven Development and pair programming; and (2) Coaching and mentoring junior devel-

opers and data engineers in all aspects of data solution development, including Agile development methodologies. At least 80% travel across U.S. Email resume to ijobs@thoughtworks.com w/ Job ID LDEVS-2024.

Huron Consulting Services, LLC,Inc has an opening for Salesforce Consulting Associate in Chicago, IL. Job duties include: Shape and create user friendly, interactive, and cutting-edge web applications from the ground up based on the Salesforce Platform. Administer, configure, customize, and develop applications within Salesforce. 80% travel to unanticipated worksites throughout the U.S. Telecommuting allowed when not traveling. Individuals may reside anywhere in the U.S. and will report to U.S. headquarters. To apply, email resume to apply@hcg.com. Must reference job 21756.15.4

RISK MANAGERS

Chime’s Chicago, IL office has multiple openings for RISK MANAGERS (various types/ levels) Make recommendations to limit risk. Must be available to work on projects at various, unanticipated sites throughout U.S. Telecommuting permitted. Starting base salary range is $186,600 - $233,300; salary is one part of competitive package; oﬀers based on can didate exp & geographic location. TO APPLY: Email resume to apply@ chime.com & indicate job code JS0040. Proof of U.S. work authorization req’d if hired. Chime is an Equal Opportunity Employer & fully supports afﬁrmative action practices.

Thoughtworks seeks Lead Infrastructure Consultant (Professional Services) to work in Chicago, IL & various unanticipated U.S. locations to lead the design, planning and execution of complex technical implementations for Infrastructure projects. Must have Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Computer or Electrical Engineering, Information Systems, or related ﬁeld. ill accept a single degree or any combination of degrees, diplomas, professional credentials or professional experience determined to be equivalent by a qualiﬁed evaluation service. Must have 5 yrs exp in the job offered, Consultant, Developer, or related IT position. Must have at least 3 yrs: (1) Automating infrastructure in at least one of the primary cloud providers (AWS, GCP, or Azure). Must have at least 1 yr: (1) Playing a leading role

in the design, planning and execution of complex technical implementations for Infrastructure as Code. (2) Setting up key delivery infrastructure across the entire lifecycle of software, including Continuous Delivery pipelines and Observability tooling for production operations; (3) Coaching and mentoring junior developers in all aspects of software development, including Agile development methodologies; and (4) Working on projects with distributed teams, including coordinating across countries and time zones. At least 80% travel across U.S. Email resume to ijobs@ thoughtworks.com w/ Job ID LICER-2024.

(Naperville, IL) Phoenix Instruments Inc seeks Operations Engineer w/ Mstr or for deg equiv in Ind Eng, PE, Eng Tech, EE or rltd fld & 1 yr in job oﬀer or in prod proc. Must have exp in eng tech, prod/oper mngmt. Apply to adnan.javed@ phoenixinstruments.com or to HR, 2368 Corporate Ln Naperville IL 60563

Technical Project Manager Technical Project Manager: Manage complex projects involving all areas of technology & trade. Initiate, plan, schedule, control, & execute info tech projects. Direct & oversee the work of project engineer team, incl Comp Software Engineers & Web Application Developers. Maint & upgrade both the security of the networks as well as info security of clients. $83000/ yr. Reqd: Mstrs deg in Comp Sci, Comp Engg, or rel. fld. Resumes to: Americaneagle.com, Attn: HR, 2600 S. River Rd., Des Plaines, IL 60018 Quality Assurance Engineer/Tester Quality Assurance Engineer/ Tester: Develop & execute test cases, procedures, & expected results, to identify problems, causes, & solutions in applications in E-commerce Dept. Analyze biz & tech docs, & conduct functional, regression, & system integration testing. Maint logs, track & verify resolution software & specification defects, & communicating test results to Project managers & Web Application Developers. $66K-$83K/yr depending on exp. Reqd: Bach’s deg in Comp Sci, Comp Engg, or rel. fld. or 36 mnths exp in Comp Sci, Comp Engg or rel. ﬂd. Resumes to: Americaneagle.com, Attn: HR, 2600 S. River Rd., Des Plaines, IL 60018

Director of Rooms , aciﬁc Langham Chicago Corp., Chicago, IL. Manage & motivate all

Rooms Div. managers w/daily supervision to include staﬃng training disciplines, scheduling, visual monitoring, performance & adherence to all standards. Req. bach. deg. (or work and/ or educ. equivalent of a Bach. deg. as determined by a professional evaluation service) in Hotel Adm., Hotel Mgmt., Hospitality Mgmt. or rel. field + 5 yrs. exp. in hotel ops. & and 2 yrs. exp as Director of Rooms in luxury/upscale hospitality operation. To apply, email resume to christine.wilsek@ langhamhotels.com

ABN-AMRO Clearing USA, LLC seeks Associate, Settlement Processing Oﬃcers for Chicago, IL location to research & perform deep-dive analyses & determine solutions for scalable course of action. Bachelor’s or foreign equivalent in Finance/Accounting/ related field+2 yrs exp req’d. 2 yrs exp must incl: Handling Salesforce, Tableau, & SQL; Handling exchange, clearing & regulatory sys portals incl Depository Trust Clearing; Using Confluence apps; Working in a Project Mgmt based role/ initiative; Reviewing trade details on highly regulated trade allocation & clearing process; Documenting standards & procedures for dealing w/ client issues; naly ing ﬁnancial info to proactively dev solutions to reduce risk; Reporting monthly & quarterly key risk indicators to Mgmt Team; & Reviewing & confirming trade allocation process for tax reporting. Remote work may be permitted w/in a commutable dist from worksite Apply Online: https://www. linkedin.com/jobs/ view/3891343172, REQ ID: 3891343172

ABN-AMRO Clearing USA, LLC seeks Compliance Officers for Chicago, IL location to perform compliance tasks incl providing reg advice, drafting & implementing policies & procedures, communicating w/ regulators & conducting compliance testing & reporting. Bachelors or foreign equivalent in Accounting/Econ/ related field +5yrs exp req’d. Must have 5 yrs exp w/ Securities & commodities reg bodies & dif reg regimes in a global financial services firm; identifying reg change, conducting impact analysis & communicating w/ the business; Designing & implementing revised processes in response to reg change; mgmt of reg & exchange inquires, Testing & monitoring of compliance controls; Dev

of compliance training plans & courses, Drafting & implementation of Written Supervisory Procedures, Supervisory Control Procedures & Standard Operating Procedures in alignment with global policies, Conducting reg reviews and/or risk assessments, Coordinating a firm’s compliance w/ its record keeping (Books & Records) obligations; & Reviewing client onboarding files & monitoring client activities. Apply online: https://www. linkedin.com/jobs/ view/3895277307 REQ: 3895277307

Manager, Statistics Manager, Statistics, AbbVie Inc., North Chicago, IL. Responsible for design, analysis and reporting of clinical trials and other scientific research studies. Develop protocols, statistical analysis plans, and/or product safety analysis plans/ integrated summary of safety analysis plans/ analysis plans for GMA evidence generation with details for programming implementation. Implement statistical methodology in scientific investigations. Identify scientifically appropriate data collection instruments. Identify and report data issues or violations of study assumptions. Provide programming specifications for derived variables and analysis datasets. Partner with Data Science in preparing for database lock. Perform statistical analyses per the analysis plan. Collaborate with Statistical Programming to ensure the delivery of high-quality outputs according to timelines. Conduct experimental and RWE study design, descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, statistical modeling, and statistical programming . Identify and anticipate issues in the study design, and conduct and propose scientifically sound approaches. Evaluate appropriateness of available software for planned analyses and assess needs for potential development of novel statistical methodology. Perform statistical analyses including, but not limited to, ANOVA, statistics inferences, survival analysis, logistic regression, linear regression, and categorical data analysis . Develop strategy for data presentation and inference. Collaborate in publication of scientific research. Ensure accuracy and internal consistency of reports and publications, including tables, listings, and figures. Ensure

that study results and conclusions are scientifically sound, clearly presented, and consistent with statistical analyses provided. Collaborate with multifunction teams. Clearly explain statistical concepts to non-statisticians. Provide responses to questions, and pursue analyses suggested by data. Support communications between assigned product teams and functional management. Build/drive crossfunctional relationships and collaboration. Collaborate with cross functional team for beneﬁt risk planning and assessment. Contribute to cross-functional development of output speciﬁcations to address both preplanned safety analyses and ad hoc requests. Develop analysis datasets and perform statistical analyses to ensure that protocol objectives are achieved . Collaborate/ lead within the Safety Statistics Group to implement strategic initiatives that address processes related to interpreting, monitoring, assessing, and reporting safety data to characterize the safety profile of products, improve efficiencies, and provide consistency across therapeutic areas. Collaborate with GMA, Clinical Statistics, Data Sciences, Statistical Programming and other stakeholders to evaluate existing databases, both clinical studies and real-world databases, conduct feasibility assessment to identify fit-for-purpose data sources to address research questions, and develop detailed and actionable analysis plans for evidence generation to deliver high quality, patient-centric evidence and insights to drive decisions. Must possess a PhD degree or foreign academic equivalent in Statistics, Biostatistics, Mathematics, or a highly related field of study with an academic or industrial background in: (i) experimental and RWE study design, descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, statistical modeling, and statistical programming; (ii) performing statistical analyses including, but not limited to, ANOVA, statistics inferences, survival analysis, logistic regression, linear regression, and categorical data analysis; and (iii) developing analysis datasets and performing statistical analyses to ensure that protocol objectives are achieved. Apply online at https:// careers.abbvie.com/ en. Refer to Req ID: REF26523R.

CLASSIFIEDS JOBS

PROFESSIONALS & SERVICES HOUSING AUDITIONS

Northwestern Memorial Healthcare seeks Sr. Analytics Developers for various & unanticipated worksites throughout the U.S (HQ: Chicago, IL) to deliver solutions by writing ETL packages.

Bachelor’s in IT/Info Sys/ related field +4yrs exp req’d. Req’d: 4yrs w/ SQL for data extraction, manipulation, & reporting; 2yrs: SQL Server DB: create complex queries & stored procedures; Tableau/PowerBI/ CrystalR/SSRS. Exp must incl: SSIS, SSAS; SSMS; gather & scope req’s & rec analytical solutions to meet business needs; mentor/train junior staff on analytics tools & solutions; serve as analytics subject matter expert; Agile environment; solution analysis, design, dev & support; structured programming. May telecommute. Background check & drug screen req’d. Apply online: http:// jobseeker.nm.org/ Req ID: REF66828O

Quantitative Developer HTAA Holdings LLC Chicago, IL

Responsibilities: Develop portfolio analytics and integrate new data and models into a low/midfrequency trading system. Perform statistical analyses to verify and optimize innovations and enhancements to portfolio models. Design and implement deployment integration and unit testing pipeline to ensure the quality of update and iterations of the trading system. Optimize and refactor existing execution algorithms with emphasis on compliance with FINRA rules and regulations. Maintain and manage linux environment. Design and optimize risk monitoring system. Design and enforce best-coding practices to supervise and improve the overall code quality of the system. Review code from others. Research on and adapt newer technologies that increase development eﬃciency. Remote work is allowed 40% of the time. Must have a Master’s degree in Financial Mathematics, Financial Engineering or related ﬁeld. Must have a Series 24 license. Must have one (1) year of experience as a Junior Financial Engineer. Must have one (1) year of experience in Spiderrock, Grafana Dashboard Tools, Rundeck Monitoring Platform and Python Supervisor Monitoring platform. Qualified candidates should send their resumes to resumes@hulltactical. com and reference job code QD1403.

Specialist w/ McKinsey & Co, Inc. US (Chicago, IL) Design & implement

ETL pipelines leveraging modern data eng architecture patterns. Telecommuting permitted. Reqs Bachelors in Applied Maths, Comp Sci or rel, or foreign degree equiv & 2yrs of exp developing data analytics solutions. Email your resume to CO@mckinsey.com and refer to Job # 7124826

Research Specialist

The Dept of Medicine, at the Univ of IL Chicago, located in a large metropolitan area, is seeking full-time Research Specialist to assist the department with the following responsibilities: Under direction and supervision, contribute to design and delivery of research projects and collaborate with researchers to develop, execute, and investigate and interpret research projects; Implement reﬁned and/or new research approaches as needed; Formulate and conduct research studies related to Public Health, specifically in study protocols that investigate lifestyle and behavioral health interventions for adults with chronic diseases; Develop and implement processes and procedures for participant recruitment and retention; Maintain and enforce IRB guidelines related to the study’s participants for quality control processes; Collect and process data; Evaluate and monitor projects’ processes and propose changes as needed; Other University service and duties as applicable. No travel is required for this position. This position minimally requires a Bachelor’s degree or its foreign equivalent in Public Health or related field of study and 3 yrs of Behavioral Lifestyle research experience. For fullest consideration, please submit CV, cover letter, and 3 professional references by July 23, 2024 to Dept of Medicine HR, University of IL Chicago, 840 S Wood St, Suite 1020S (MC 787), Chicago, IL 60612 or via email to medicineHR@ uic.edu The University of Illinois System is an equal opportunity employer, including but not limited to disability and/or veteran status, and complies with all applicable state and federal employment mandates. Please visit Required Employment Notices and Posters (https://www.hr.uillinois. edu/cms/one. aspx?portalId=4292 &pageId=5705) to view our non-discrimination statement and find additional information about required background checks, sexual harassment/ misconduct disclosures, and employment eligibility review through E-Verify.

DER - JULY 11, 2024

The university provides accommodations to applicants and employees. Request an Accommodation (https:// jobs.uic.edu/requestand-accomodation/)

TECHNOLOGY ServiceNow Inc is accepting resumes for the following positions in Chicago, IL: Sr Information Security Engineer (3834846): Architect, design, develop, and implement identity management solutions. Telecommuting permitted. Annual salary $177,368-$207,368. Email resume to servicenowresumesUS@ servicenow.com. Or mail resume to ServiceNow Inc, Attn: Global Mobility, 2225 Lawson Lane, Santa Clara, CA 95054. Resume must include job title, job ref. #3834846, full name, email & mailing address. No phone calls. Must be legally authorized to work in U.S. without sponsorship. EOE.

Accurate Group, Inc. seeks Project Engineers II for Lincolnshire, IL location to independently create CADD sheets for roadway & structural projects. Bachelor’s in Civil Eng/related field +1yr exp req’d. Req’d Edu/exp w/ MATLAB, AutoCAD, Solid Works, CADD drawings & Sign panels, SAP 2000, Revit, Microstation. Send resume to: A. Ramos, hr@accgi.com, REF: SUR

Sr. Data Engineer I Cars.com d/b/a Cars Commerce Inc. seeks Sr. Data Engineer I in Chicago, IL. Build, deploy and support data pipelines and ML models into production. Telecommuting permitted. Apply: https:// www.jobpostingtoday. com/ Ref # 53897.

Business Operations Analyst (Chicago, IL) Analyze the Co.’s operational performance, identify issues & make recommendations, assist in implmtn & monitor results. MBA or MBM + Cert in Project Mgmt S/ware. Send resumes w/ cover letter to Lakha Enterprise, Inc. 2244 W. Devon Ave, Chicago, IL 60659, Attn: M. Yaqoob. (Ref BizOp). No calls please.

TECHNICAL Yum

Connect LLC is accepting resumes for the following position in CHICAGO, IL: Senior Android Engineer (REF7212387): Build an Android-based pointof-sale and operations platform that will be a critical tool in tens of thousands of restaurants around the world. Up to 30% domestic travel required. Send resume to Yum Connect LLC Yum.Recruitment@ yum.com. EOE. Must include REF code.

Cloud System Administrator(s) Cloud System Administrator(s) RedMane Technology LLC seeks Cloud System Administrator(s) in Chicago, IL to configure, maintain, support, upgrade and patch software components and cloud services. Telecommuting Permitted. Email resume to yourcareer@redmane. com; reference job code D7038-00116. E.O.E.

Sims Group USA Holdings Corp . seeks a Busnss Anlyst in Chicago, IL to build, implemnt, & suppr Global SAP SuccessFactors deploymnt. Reqs Master’s in Engr Mgmt., Sys Engr, or rel’d + 3 yrs exp in job oﬀr’d or in Business/IT Sys analystrelated occupation. May telecommute. Apply: https:// careers.simsltd.com

Beyond Finance LLC (Chicago, IL) seeks Data Ops Engnr II w/ MS in Inf. Syst., CS or related + 2 yrs exp in Data Engnr, Data Anlst, or related. In lieu of MS+2, will accept BS+5 in same fields. Must have exp in each: 1) Lead ops to automate and maintain ETL workflow for FinOps data using Alteryx and SQL and upload data on SSMS and Snowflake databases; 2) Utilize Looker BI Tool to model data and generate reports and analysis for stakeholders in the fin. svcs. ind.; 3) Utilize Python to imp. data modeling for generation of in-house mktg tools for demo and variable correlation. 100% remote work is permitted; position is based out of our office in Chicago, IL. Apply: Send resume to: bllcrecruiting@ beyondfinance.com w/ “Data Operations Engineer II” in subject line.

Quality Assurance Engineer Amount, Inc. seeks a Quality Assurance Engr in Chicago, IL** to work closely with the Sr Directors, the Head of Quality Assurance, and Engg team to enhance and expand functionality and testing of our apps, systems and infrastructure. ** Position is 100% remote. Apply at jobpostingtoday. com/ Ref #99604.

Beyond Finance LLC (Chicago, IL) seeks Sr Data Engnr w/ MS in CS or related + 2 yrs exp in Data Engnr or related. In lieu of MS+2, will accept BS+5 in same fields. Must have exp in each: 1) Designing and dvlping automated tools to solve particular use cases; 2) Working w/ both struct. (SQL) and unstruct. data (NoSQL), inc data analysis, transformation, curation,

encryption, serialization, and de-serialization; 3) Working with hybrid cloud environments, inc both batch and streaming use cases. Partial remote work is permitted; position is based out of our office in Chicago, IL. Apply: Send resume to: bllcrecruiting@ beyondfinance. com w/ “Senior Data Engineer” in subject line.

Health Care Service Corporation seeks Senior Manager of Data Science (Chicago, IL) to lead a team of data scientists and data engineers and accountable to delivering production scores, building out and maintaining pipelines of data as inputs to advanced statistical models. REQS: This position requires a Bachelor’s degree, or foreign equivalent, in data science, economics, physics, engineering or a related field plus 5 years of experience as a data scientist or related occupation. Telecommuting: Telecommuting permitted 2 days a week. Applicants who are interested in this position should submit a complete resume in English to hrciapp@ bcbsil.com, search [Senior Manager of Data Science / Reference # R0032531. EOE].

ReFED, Inc in Chicago IL seeks a Senior Communications Manager to produce & communicate data and insights on the issue of and solutions to food waste. 5% domstc trvl. WFH. Send CV: jobs@refed.com

Health Care Service Corporation seeks Sr Data Scientist (Chicago, IL) to collect, integrate, & analyze data from sources related to health status & outcomes for members, characteristics of health care providers, internal business processes, & other domains. REQS a Bachelor’s in Math, Stats, Comp Sci, or related plus 3 yrs of related exp. Submit resume to hrciapp@ bcbsil.com, reference Sr Data Scientist /# R0032527. EOE.

TheMathCompany, Inc. is seeking a Associate Principal for Chicago, IL office. Manage existing client engagements and drive growth in new technology and accounts. Telecommuting permitted. 10% domestic travel. To apply, send cover letter and CV to Yuvaraj.r@ themathcompany. com. Req. #6756366

Boat Steward Wanted Help wanted taking care of 3 boats in Belmont Harbor! Need someone to clean, maintain, and

learn about 3 boats. One is a motor yacht, one “go fast”, and a center console. This would be the perfect job for a summer job for a college student who has an interest in boating and wants to learn about taking care of boats. What a fun way to spend a summer around the harbor. Pay = $20/hour

Technology Product Manager UBS Business Solutions US LLC has the following positions in Chicago, IL. Technology Product Manager to co-develop a clear product vision, strategy and roadmap covering the full product development lifecycle (including creation, version and infrastructure upgrades, and eventual decommissioning).

Requires M or B+2yrs. exp. as an equivalent alternative. (ref. code(s) 001257). Qualified Applicants apply through SH-ProfRecruitingcc@ ubs.com. Please reference 001257. NO CALLS PLEASE. EOE/M/F/D/V. #LI-DNP.

Project Manager Project Manager (Chicago, IL): Responsible for providing project management support during all phases of large, complex concrete shoring, formwork, and scaffolding projects and helping facilitate long term improvements in the procurement and management of projects. Domestic travel 10% of time. BS in civil or mechanical engg or related engg ﬁeld + 2 yrs ex. Apply to recruiter@ peri-usa.com. PERI Formwork Systems, Inc.

Firewall & Networking Manager sought by Ascend Technologies, LLC in Chicago, IL to mng Firewall & Networking Team, assign implementations, & svcs for clients. Reqs: 6 yrs exp in job offd or in rltd Firewall or Networking role, 2 yrs which must be in an MSP role. Must also possess exp w/ using MS Visio to create customer or internal N/ work / Infrastructure diagrams to document customer or internal envrmts; & etc. 2 yrs mgmt exp leading N/work Engg team; & 2 yrs exp using an ITSM ticketing tool. Reqs: Certiﬁcations w/: NSE 2 & NSE 1Fortinet; Assurance Expert (SCAE); CCNACisco Certified Network Associate; Cisco UCCX Administrator; CISCO IP Routing- Implementing Cisco IP Routing; & etc. 100% telecommuting from home allowed from anywhere in the U.S. Apply online at https://teamascend. com/about-us/careers/ Computer Hardware Engineer INFI USA

INC. is looking for a Computer Hardware Engineer to improve the functionality of existing hardware platforms. Req. Bachelor’s degree in computer engineering or a related field.

Salary: $78,770/year. Worksite: Chicago, IL. Send resume: 159 N Sangamon St, Suite 200, Chicago, IL 60607.

Senior Solutions Consultants Senior Solutions Consultants, Rosemont, IL. Respond to detailed Requests for Proposal (RFP) questionnaires released by prospective customers that request detailed information about Zycus, Zycus’ products, implementation, and support. Create review product proposal documents. Identify the customers’ current landscape, process pain areas, process improvement opportunities, potential Return on Investment (ROI), and project Key Performance Indicators (KPls)/ success. 20% travel throughout the U.S. to work locations and customer sites. Some duties may be performed from home. Send res to: Zycus, Inc., Michelle Castro, US Administrator, michelle. castro@zycus.com

Sr Industrial Designer Chicago, IL location. Send resume to: MNML, LLC, 170 N Sangamon St, Chicago, IL, 60607. Attn: M. Puhalla.

IT Specialist IT Specialist Eight Blessings Plastic Inc. seeks an IT Specialist to install, configure and maintain the company’s local and wide area network, and provide user support. Req. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field. Wage: $55,848. Worksite: Rockford, IL. Send resume: CEO, 2020 Harrison Ave, Unit B, Rockford, IL 61104.

PROFESSIONALS & SERVICES

CLEANING SERVICES

CHESTNUT ORGANIZING AND CLEANING SERVICES: especially for people who need an organizing service because of depression, elderly, physical or mental challenges or other causes for your home’s clutter, disorganization, dysfunction, etc. We can organize for the downsizing of your current possessions to more easily move into a smaller home. With your help, we can help to organize your move. We can organize and clean for the deceased in lieu of having the bereaved needing to do the preparation to sell or rent the deceased’s home. We are absolutely

not judgmental; we’ve seen and done “worse” than your job assignment. With your help, can we please help you? Chestnut Cleaning Service: 312-332-5575. www. ChestnutCleaning.com

HOUSING

Intentional Community Interested in voluntary simplicity in response to climate change and hyper-consumerism? Consider the affordable residency of GreenRise in Chicago at Uptown: www.ica-usa.org/live

AUDITIONS

Auditions Alert! Aspiring Actors Bey Productions is holding auditions for aspiring actors for an upcoming stage play. Registration fee $10.00 text name to 773 558-1891.

MATCHES

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

MARKETPLACE

Three Puppy Golden Labradoodles Looking for their 4ever PAWrents Born 3/25/24 3 sweet GIRLS. Multigen Doodles Home-raised. Received 1st shots/ meds/deworming and vet checked. $1200. Text/Call 773.414.6808. Serious Inquiries Only.

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

I’m not on top

My wife doesn’t know what I really do with other dudes.

By DAN SAVAGE

Q : I’m one of those basic heteroromantic bisexual dudes attracted to women sexually and romantically, but only attracted to men sexually. I did the right thing and came out to my wife very early in our relationship. (I credit years of reading you for coming out about being bisexual.) She broke up with me at ﬁrst, then we got back together, and a er two years, she gave me permission to have sex with other men so long as all outside sex was as safe as I could make it (condoms, PrEP on-demand, DoxyPEP). Her only other rule: just men, no other women. Everything is out in the open except one thing: My

wife thinks I’m a top. Years a er giving me the okay, she confessed—during sex—that she thinks about me penetrating other men when she masturbates. She thinks me topping other men is hot because it makes me an even bigger stud. (Her word, not mine.)

Thing is, I’m almost always the bottom with men. On the rare occasion when I do top someone, it’s a dominant bottom twink and I am his sub top. My wife has gone from not wanting me to have sex with other men to wanting to hear about my experiences to tentatively suggesting she might want to watch me penetrate one of my “skinny twink bottom boys”

killer for her. But seeing as your wife went from not wanting to hear about you fucking other men to wanting to watch you fuck another man in front of her, BBB, it’s possible your wife’s erotic imagination is expansive enough to incorporate the bottom you actually are into her erotic mental image of you. So, I think being honest with her is the best way to go here. But you should test the waters by bringing up vers

guys you’ve played with and talking about how studly they were. And since she’s curious about watching two men have sex, you could show her some gay porn featuring a dominant power bottom being served by a sub top and then talk about a few of the studly bottoms you’ve encountered.

It is hot to think about keeping the lie going by recruiting a dominant vers bottom to play the sub in front of the wife in exchange

for him getting to destroy your ass later—full disclosure: I spent a little time thinking about it—but involving someone else takes this from easily forgiven passive deceit to harder to forgive active deceit. So, as hot as that suggestion might be, maybe don’t do it.

P.S. Is that what she said? Well, fuck her then. v

Podcasts and more at the URL savage.love. m mailbox@savage.love

at some point.

The guys I’m typically into are bigger, stronger, older, and very into dominating me. I’ve played along with my wife’s assumption that I’m a top for years, Dan. What do I do here?

P.S. She doesn’t read your column. I tried to get her into your column and podcast, but she felt you were crude and used more profanity than you needed to in order to get your point across. —BASIC BISEXUAL BOTTOM

a: If your wife is erotically invested in this mental image of you as a dominant top, knowing you bottom for other men could be a libido