Print Issue of July 13, 2017 (Volume 46, Number 40) by Chicago Reader

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2 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

THIS WEEK

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EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR VINCE CERASANI CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS STEVE HEISLER, KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK SENIOR WRITER MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI FILM LISTINGS COORDINATOR PATRICK FRIEL CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, MATT DE LA PEÑA, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, ANDREA GRONVALL, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, MICHAEL MINER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, BEN SACHS, DMITRY SAMAROV, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS LIBBY BERRY, PORTER MCLEOD, EMILY WASIELEWSKI ---------------------------------------------------------------VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT NICKI STANULA VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES FABIO CAVALIERI, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com

P I TC H F O R K MUSIC F E S T I VA L

A PITCHFORK PRIM ER

I N P RAI SE OF T H E B LUE STAGE

What you need to know before you head to Union Park

Pitchfork’s shady corner lets you see the likes of Arca, Dawn Richard, Mitski, Survive, and Pinegrove before they’re too big to get close to.

BY LEOR GALIL 17 CHICAG O SUM M ERS ACCORDING TO THE CHICAG OA N S AT PITCHFORK Jamila Woods, Derrick Carter, Mike Kinsella, and more on the city’s best summer music

BY LEOR GALIL 18

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PITCHFORK LOV E S T V, SO PITCHFO RK LOVES SURVIVE

The retro horror-synth group from Stranger Things get a boost from the site’s eagerness to court the prestigetelevision audience.

BY LEOR GALIL 19 ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION BY JASON WYATT FREDERICK. FOR MORE OF HIS WORK, GO TO JWFREDERICK.COM.

4 Agenda The exhibit “The Rise of Hate” at Uri-Eichen Gallery, the ﬁlm A Ghost Story, the comedic play Hitch*Cocktails, the lecture Everything I Know About Bioethics I Learned From The Golden Girls, and more goings-on about town

CITY LIFE

7 Street View Barbie Roadkill’s Anna Raﬀerty elevates thrift-store ﬁnds. 7 Sure Things Mystery Science Theater 3000 and more best bets for every day of the week 8 Joravsky | Politics The governor has emerged from the budget crisis with a convenient cudgel. 10 Transportation The O’Hare express train proposal is becoming even more far-fetched as the Emanuel administration entertains Elon Musk’s “electric sled” concept.

ARTS & CULTURE

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IN THIS ISSUE

BY KEVIN WARWICK 21 D I Y GAD F LY JEF F ROSE N STO C K C LI M B S I N TO T H E B E LLY OF T H E B E AST What is the guy who led Bomb the Music Industry! for a decade doing at Pitchfork?

BY SEAN NEUMANN 23 P I TC H F ORK WA N TS YO U TO PART Y WI T H OUT I GN ORI N G GUN VI OLEN C E The Beats Over Bullets partnership uses the festival to bring new converts to Everytown for Gun Safety, Mothers

Against Senseless Killings, and the Wear Orange Campaign.

BY LEE V. GAINES 25 SO LAN G E SUP P ORTS B LAC K C H I CAG O C RE AT I VE S AT P I TC H F ORK AN D B EYO N D Her Saint Heron collective’s festival installation and oﬀ-site events show oﬀ the depth and richness of the city’s black cultural expression.

BY TIFFANY WALDEN 27 P I TC H F ORK’S VE T ERAN ACTS CON F RON T T H E T RAP OF T H E C ROWD FAVO RIT E LCD Soundsystem, PJ Harvey, and Ride have had mixed success evolving past the sounds that made them famous.

BY ANNIE ZALESKI 29

11 Theater Hir is Steppenwolf’s latest, funniest victim-impact statement. 11 Dance Thodos Dance Chicago bows out after a ﬁnal New Dances. 12 Theater How to Be a Rock Critic, a one-man show about Lester Bangs, has no psychotic reactions. 13 Lit The Sarah Book, Scott McClanahan’s latest, is a “ﬁctional” account of the dissolution of a marriage. 14 Visual Art “Then They Came for Me” is a powerful, deeply relevant exhibit about Japanese-Americans and internment camps. 16 Movies Medieval nuns own their pleasure in the farcical comedy The Little Hours.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

30 Shows of note Waxahatchee, Matthew Sweet, Chicago Open Air, and more

FOOD & DRINK

35 Restaurant review: Daebak The K-pop is awesome, but the tabletop Korean barbecue isn’t exactly a big success. 36 Beer Ancient Chinese brewing methods inspire a collaboration between the Field Museum and Oﬀ Color.

CLASSIFIEDS

38 Jobs 38 Apartments & Spaces 39 Marketplace 40 Straight Dope How did bread come about? 41 Savage Love Dan advises a doc in training and a “really angry gal.” 42 Early Warnings Jay-Z, Marilyn Manson, and more shows you should know about in the weeks to come 42 Gossip Wolf Featherproof and Moniker publish a memoir by outsider punk J.T. IV, and more music news.

JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 3

AGENDA GALLERY CLOSING

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b ALL AGES

F chy it hardly qualiﬁes as double entendre, the next Tom, writing under his real name, Thomas Dorsey, pens one of seminal gospel tunes, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand.” (Dorsey is often called the father of Chicago gospel.) It’s hard not to wish playwright and director McKinley Johnson had written a clearer story, but there’s nothing wrong with his song choices or his powerful three-person cast. Fania Bourn, in particular, proves herself to be quite the chameleon, able to impersonate famous blue musicians like Ma Rainey and still reach the heavens with her strong gospel voice. —JACK HELBIG Through 7/23: Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Open Door Repertory Company, 902 S. Ridgeland, Oak Park, 708-3420810, opendoorrep.org, $25.

George Ritzlin Antique Maps & Prints 1937 Central Street, Evanston 847-328-1966 • maps@ritzlin.com Closing out our antique print inventory. After 41 years our gallery will close and we’ll move to an ofﬁce where we will sell maps only.

50% off 16-19th century prints including views, natural history, portraits, vintage ads, satire, genre, fashion plates, reference books, more Tue - Sat: 10 - 5. Also Sundays July 2, 9 and 16: Noon - 4

SALE IN-STORE ONLY ALL SALES FINAL • LAST DAY JULY 22

RELOADED & Reopened ! Celebrating our

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ANNIVERSARY just steps from the Dempster “L” stop est. 1967

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847-475-8665

801 Dempster Evanston 4 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

The Amish Project ò MELANIE KELLER

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater The Amish Project The story behind Jessica Dickey’s somewhat R ﬁctionalized account (names changed, a

few details altered) is horriﬁc: a troubled middle-aged armed man invades a oneroom Amish school with a vague plan to molest young girls and ends up shooting eight of them, killing ﬁve, before killing himself. But Dickey is after more than shock theater. Her solo show is a riveting meditation on evil, recovery, and the myriad paradoxes of the human psyche. Lydia Berger Gray, directed by Melanie Keller, portrays everyone in the story with remarkable range and power—the shooter, his victims, and the many poor wretches who had to carry on their lives afterward (including his emotionally wrecked widow). —JACK HELBIG Through 7/30: Sat-Sun 4 PM, Oak Park Festival Theatre, Austin Gardens, Forest & Ontario, Oak Park, 708-445-4440, oakparkfestival.com, free-$22.50. The Best Western This Side R of Mississippi Public House’s production of this pint-size western

(it’s just an hour long) written by Travis Marsala and Adrienne Teeley blends parody and politics. Set in the town of Goldandsilverton, whose copper mines are at risk of takeover by the infamous Kid the Kid (John Wilson), the story follows bumbling hero and town sheriﬀ Tex McDreamy (Jesse Kendall) and his band of sidekicks as they scramble to save the day. The town’s water supply is in jeopardy, as is the life of local cabaret star, Clammy Jane (Stephanie Murphy). Kendall is a fun, dopey version of Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson, deftly overdoing his John Wayne facial expressions and one-liners to loads of laughs. Patrick Hall is a strong foil as old-timer Deadwood, the town drunk and a con gone straight. —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 7/29: Sat 10 PM, Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark, 800-650-6449, pubhousetheatre.com, $10. The Cubs Show: Next Year Is Here . . . But Last Year Last season, for six

glorious days, Chicagoans basked in celebrating the passing of one milestone during a blissfully ignorant interval before the shit hit the fan in November. With a little bit of hindsight, a comedy troupe at Wrigleyville’s Public House Theatre takes a look back at what the Cubs’ World Series victory meant for the city from locals’ perspectives. Most bits fall along perfunctory lines even for a low-key late-night sketch show: Theo Epstein brings his stats prowess into the bedroom; Budweiser and Old Style reps duke it out. As emcee Harry Caray, though, Dave Karasik engages in creative, funny crowd work, and a modiﬁed “Superbowl Shuﬄe” ventures into some welcomely unexpected territory. —DAN JAKES Through 7/28: Fri 10 PM, Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark, 800-6506449, pubhousetheatre.com, $10. Hamlet Given the structural, R linguistic, and psychological complexity of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s

curious so many companies stage them each summer in neighborhood parks, where myriad distractions and unampliﬁed performers easily render the proceedings opaque. Midsommer Flight director Beth Wolf’s sledgehammer approach to staging this particularly intricate play outdoors is, in a sense, apt, with front-and-center actors throwing everything into high relief, often declaiming their lines as though their only motivation is to be heard. It makes for an admirably clear production (aided by cutting the play to 100 minutes) that tends to exhibit only two energies: antic and fraught. In the end, the show has little to say beyond “This is most of what happens in Hamlet.” But it’s still a heck of a good story. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 8/27: Sat 6 PM, Sun 2 PM, Touhy Park, 7348 N. Paulina, 773-262-6737, midsommerﬂight.com. F

It Don’t Just . . . Shake Oﬀ Chicago was hot in the 1920s. That’s one of the takeaways from this sometimes sizzling, sometimes just messy musical biography of Chicago bluesmen Tampa Red and Georgia Tom. Another takeaway is that the line between the sacred and the profane can be razor-thin: one minute Georgia Tom and Tampa Red record a hit song, “It’s Tight Like That,” so raun-

The Nance Douglas Carter Beane’s 2013 play is a tribute to burlesque, an exploration of gay life in 1930s New York, and a portrait of a man living at the intersection of both of the above. In this Pride Films & Plays production directed by John Nasca, the tribute is fun and the exploration informative, but the portrait is nowhere near as compelling as it might be. Chauncey Miles is the “nance”—a comic whose onstage specialty is prancing caricatures of eﬀeminate men. The script goes to considerable lengths to suggest that everything Chauncey does—including his acts of heroism—is animated by profound self-loathing. There’s potential for something powerful in that (reminiscent of what Bill Murray achieved as Tommy Crickshaw, the ventriloquist in the 1999 movie Cradle Will Rock). Though Vince Kracht ingratiates himself as Chauncey, he never lays the character bare. The result is stretches of tepid drama relieved now and then by cool vintage shtick. —TONY ADLER Through 7/30: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 5 PM; also Wed 7/19 and 7/26, 7:30 PM, the Broadway at Pride Arts Center, 4139 N. Broadway, 800-737-0984, prideﬁlmsandplays.com, $10-$40.

DANCE Cirque Italia Using water as inspiration for myriad horizontal and vertical

dance positions, Cirque Italia refuses to neglect the Z-axis, including bodacious BMX ollies worthy of Stüssy. 7/14-7/16: Fri 7:30 PM; Sat 1:30, 4:30, and 7:30 PM; Sun 1:30 and 4:30 PM, Orland Square Mall, 288 Orland Square Dr., Orland Park, 708-349-7822, cirqueitalia.com, $10-$50. Rhythm World 27 Feel the beat as Rhythm World faculty (and special guests) take the stage for the opening night of this annual celebration. Paired with a jazz trio, dancers will perform tap, rhythm, and jazz styles. So, essentially, regimented, regimented, and “whatever maaaaaaaan.” Mon 7/17, 7:30 PM, Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth, 312-3600234, jazzshowcase.com, $15-$30.

COMEDY The Comedy Get Down Cedric “The Entertainer,” Eddie Griﬃn, D.L. Hughley, and George Lopez come together for a night of stories, stand-up, and group laughs. The performers boast varied and legendary careers, including TV, comedy specials, and the vaunted Beverly Hills Chihuahua trilogy. Fri 7/14, 8 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison, 312-455-4500, unitedcenter.com, $29.50-$90. Fuck You, John Lennon The R ghost of John Lennon could, theoretically, haunt whomever he wanted.

His sons Sean and Julian? His wife Yoko Ono? Former bandmate Paul McCartney so he could ridicule the perfectionist for writing only one good song, “Yesterday” (as he did before on the passive-aggressive “How Do You Sleep?” oﬀ Imagine)? If you guessed the character May in this sketch comedy, an unknown artist wrestling with what success actually looks like, you read the news about this sketch comedy show detailing Lennon’s posthumous attempts to artistically cock block her pursuits, oh boy. 7/14-8/12: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Cornservatory, 4210 N. Lincoln, 773650-1331, cornservatory.org, $15.

Hitch*Cocktails You know how R the old Hollywood thrillers would get mangled to death in the cutting room? Scenes transposed, whole plots

Hitch*Cocktails ò ANTHONY YOON

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of July 13

rendered incoherent, unresolved loose threads everywhere? It was an era of many classics, but please explain to me what happens in The Lady From Shanghai. In this drunken two-act, now in its third year at the Annoyance, the same eﬀect is brought about organically, by design, as eight actors with an onstage wet bar (they have to drink whenever a scene partner says so) get gradually more and more sloshed, lose track of the Hitchcock-style suspense story they’ve been improvising, and make hay with whatever plot points they’ve been thrown, preshow, by a randomly selected audience member. It’s good, wholesome, liver-debilitating fun. And Jason Stockdale makes a sensationally sleazy ringleader. —MAX MALLER Through 8/25: Fri 10 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance. com, $20, $15 students. Moon! Prism! Power! A Sailor Moon Musical Parody Epishow 3 Otherworld Theatre parodies the manga series. Sun 7/16 and 7/30, 7 PM, Public House Theatre, 3914 N. Clark, 800-650-6449, otherworldtheatre.org, $12 suggested donation. Murder Mystery Dinner The audience must uncover the murderer in this devilishly funny thriller about a wedding gone wrong. Blood will be shed onto rigatoni, rigatoni will be eaten, blood will erupt from stomachs, ambulances will be called, lawsuits will follow, lawsuits will settle out-of-court, rigatoni will be eaten. Fri 7/14, 7-10 PM, Salvatore’s, 525 W. Arlington, 773-528-1200, salvatores-chicago.comd, $60. My Son the Waiter: A Jewish Tragedy Brad Zimmerman remounts this show, detailing how hard it can be to make it as an artist amid Jewish guilt. Fiction, of course. 7/13-8/13: Thu 2 and 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 PM and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie, Skokie Blvd., 847-6736300, northshorecenter.org, $51-$61.

VISUAL ARTS Art on Clark Sculptures will adorn Clark between Fullerton and Diversey, and this kick-off party pulls off the sheet—so to speak—on the ten of them that will find a happy home on the street for the summer. One appears to be a vagina. Tue 7/18, 6 PM, Gaslight Bar, 2450 N. Clark, 773-929-7759, gaslightbar.com. Balm of Body, Spice of Flesh Gregory Jacobsen’s paintings resemble characters from the Guess Who? board game if those people simultaneously punched each other with Play-Doh. His work is a fascinating look at, well, what we can look at without judgment. Eh, maybe a little. Opening reception Fri, 5:30. TueSat 10 AM-5:30 PM. Zg Gallery, 300 W. Superior, 312-654-9900, zggallery.com. Distortion Opening as part of River North’s Midsummer Art Walk, this

about our “gut biomes” (home to 80 percent of your immune system and 100 percent of your beer) and the importance of recruiting more women into the food processing industry. Thu 7/13, 7 PM, Quimby’s Bookstore, 1854 W. North, 773342-0910, quimbys.com. Everything I Know About R Bioethics I Learned From The Golden Girls To celebrate the

Gregory Jacobsen, Courtney, part of “Balm of Body, Spice of Flesh” at Zg Gallery

exhibition questions reality with abstract and unconventional work. (Stay away from drugs, kids.) Contributing artists include Richard Gibbons, Beth Foley, and Christopher Klein. 7/14-8/25. Tue-Fri 10 AM-5:30 PM, Sat 11 AM-5 PM. Gallery Victor Armendariz, 300 W. Superior, 312722-6447, galleryvictor.com. 2:2:2 Exchange Kind of like a foreign exchange, Chicago imports Houstonbased painter Gabriel Martinez, an advocate for art as a means to uplift impoverished communities. We’ll be sending oﬀ the well-traveled Edra Soto, who specializes in outdoor installations, to the epicenter of humidity. 7/13-8/30: Mon-Thu 9 AM-8 PM, Fri-Sat 9 AM-5 PM, Sun noon-5 PM. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, 773-324-5520, hydeparkart.org. The Rise of Hate It’s been 100 years since Ell Persons was lynched very publicly in Memphis. The mood was festive as Persons, awaiting trial for statutory rape and murder, was burned to the ground, had his ashes strewn about town, and his head tossed into a large group of black Americans. This brutality and complete lack of respect for the Justice Department is examined by Johnny Milano’s series “White Pride Worldwide” and Christian Picciolini— author of Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an American Skinhead—with artifacts from the white supremacist movement. Expect eerie and terrifying parallels to modern times. Opening reception Fri 7/14, 6-10 PM; closing reception Thu 8/3, 7-9 PM; by appointment otherwise. Uri-Eichen Gallery, 2101 S. Halsted, 312852-7717, uri-eichen.com.

30th anniversary of The Golden Girls, Elizabeth Yuko explains how the hit sitcom addressed numerous bioethical issues such as disease, HIV stigmas, and cryopreservation. Whether or not Betty White can get in on that last one is TBD. Fri 7/14, 9 PM, the Lincoln Loft, 3036 N. Lincoln, second ﬂoor, 773-362-5324, lotcchicago.wordpress.com. Two Cookie Minimum To celebrate its seventh anniversary, the stalwart reading series serves up work from Liz Mason, Scott Roberts, Logan Kruidenier, Sean Gandert, and Eric Barholomew. Feel free to take more than two cookies. That’s just the minimum. Me? I’ll be reading from the box of Entenmann’s. Serving size: three cookies. Calories: 140. Me: sugar hangover before sugar high. Wed, 7/19, 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, 773-709-1401.

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS The Commune In the early 70s, a swaggering college professor in Copenhagen (Ulrich Thomsen) inherits a large suburban home, and his wife (Trine Dyrholm), a TV newscaster, persuades him to turn it into a commune for them, their teenage daughter, and their bohemian friends. All goes well at ﬁrst, but then the professor announces to his wife that he’s fallen in love with a student, and the wife suggests that they welcome his young woman into the household. Thomsen, Dyrholm, and writer-director Thomas Vinterberg all worked together on The Celebration (1998), the inaugural ﬁlm of the Dogme 95 movement, and this 2016 Danish drama reminds one

that, for all the technical restrictions imposed on those ﬁlms, their true virtue lay in their commitment to social realism and ensemble acting. Unfortunately The Commune turns out to be a fairly predictable exercise in neoliberal backlash, as a bunch of free-love radicals crash on the rocks of their own enlightenment. In Danish with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 111 min. Fri 7/14, 8 PM; Sat 7/15, 3 PM; Sun 7/16, 5 PM; Mon 7/17, 8 PM; Tue 7/18, 6 PM; Wed 7/19, 8 PM; and Thu 7/20, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center A Ghost Story This supernatural R mood piece unfolds from the perspective of a dead musician (Casey

Affleck, who spends most of the picture under a sheet) haunting the east Texas home he once shared with his wife (Rooney Mara). For the first half of the film, writer-director David Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Pete’s Dragon) patiently considers the mundanity of being a ghost, Affleck looking on impotently as Mara engages in household chores and other banal activities. (In one dramatic highlight she spends several minutes silently eating a pie.) In the second half, Lowery speeds up the pace and introduces a few curveballs involving time travel and multiple realities, as well as a memorable shaggy-dog monologue from Will Oldham. The unconventional narrative structure seems more beguiling the more you think about it—this is a film designed to expand in your memory. —BEN SACHS R, 92 min. Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21

Nowhere to Hide In 2011 docuR mentary maker Zaradasht Ahmed gave a video camera to Nori Sharif, a

nurse working in the central Iraqi city of Jalawla, and asked him to record his life over the next few years as Iraq moved from U.S. occupation to self-rule. µ

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A Ghost Story

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AGENDA B Sharif’s footage became the basis for this powerful and wrenching film (2016), which provides a ground-level perspective of the country’s descent into sectarian violence and the subsequent refugee crisis. Ahmed emphasizes the struggle of ordinary Iraqis to maintain a semblance of everyday life amid kidnappings and suicide bombings, and Sharif, who is intimately acquainted with most of the people he profiles, reveals his subjects’ courage and humanity. The film stresses perseverance, so it isn’t entirely despairing, yet it offers little hope for Iraq’s future. In Arabic with subtitles. —BEN SACHS 86 min. Fri 7/14-Thu 7/20. Facets Cinematheque

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The Teacher Set in Slovakia in the early 1980s, this 2016 Czech drama from the team of director Jan Hrebejk and writer Petr Jarchovský (Up and Down, Divided We Fall) hinges on a devious middle-school teacher (Zuzana Mauréry, fantastic) who uses her Communist Party connections to intimidate her students and their parents. When they realize that the teacher is punishing or rewarding the students based on their and their parents’ fulfillment of her many after-school favors, four dissenting parents summon the rest to discuss the matter with the principal. This meeting, intercut with ominous flashbacks to the start of the school year, serves as a microcosm of Czechoslovakia in the last years of the Eastern bloc, divided into vocal supporters of the regime, who demand loyalty; objectors, who demand fairness; and submissives—the largest group—who remain silent. Though flecked with dark humor, the film is a chilling reminder of what people can get away with, and what can become normal, if one consents to an oppressive system. In Slovak with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 98 min. Sat 7/15, 5:15 PM and Thu 7/20, 8 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

War for the Planet of the Apes Thank God people can’t really travel into the future, as they do in Planet of the Apes, because then moviegoers from 1973 might land in our time, discover that one of the summer’s biggest releases is a remake of the lamebrained Battle for the Planet of the Apes, and die of shock. The idea of rebooting the Apes franchise by revamping the last two installments of the original series worked well enough in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), when the talking ape Caesar (Andy Serkis in a motion-capture performance) pulls away from his human family and marshals his simian pals against humanity. At this point, however, the apes have formed their own society in the forest, communicating through captioned sign language; the more engrossing intraspecies relationships have

Nowhere to Hide disappeared, and the simian ones lack the verbal wit that animated the original series. Matt Reeves directed. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 133 min. Block 37, ArcLight, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, Lake, New 400, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, 600 N. Michigan, Webster Place Wish Upon This horror ﬂick is so predictable it feels not raw but antiseptic. A high school wallﬂower (Joey King) is transformed socially after her father (Ryan Phillippe) gives her an antique Chinese music box that grants its owner seven wishes, but she discovers there’s a blood price each time. In lockstep rhythm those close to her die one by one, though their fates are more choreographed than gory, director John R. Leonetti cutting away quickly from the splatter victims. Writer Barbara Marshall might have injected some mocking self-awareness of genre conventions; instead her screenplay is devoid of any spark, and death brings no terror. —Andrea Gronvall PG-13, 89 min. Ford City, River East 21 REVIVALS Hard-Boiled John Woo’s R violent crime thriller (1992) stars Chow Yun-fat as a tough

Hong Kong cop who loses his best friend and partner in a teahouse shoot-out and joins forces with a hired killer (Tony Leung) who appears to operate on both sides of the law. Choreographically stunning like most of Woo’s work, especially before he headed west. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 132 min. 35mm. Fri 7/14-Sat 7/15, midnight. Music Box

Le Jour se Leve The most R celebrated example (1939) of the doom-laden, darkly shadowed

“poetic realism” that ﬂourished in France in the years leading up to World War II. Jean Gabin is the honest, timid workingman who, hiding from the police in an attic room,

spends the night remembering the events that led him to murder. The screenplay is by Jacques Prevert, the most accomplished dialogist of the period, and the famous sets, with their overtones of German expressionism, are by Alexander Trauner. Only the direction, by Marcel Carne, seems less than it could be; there’s a lack of imagination and suppleness in the images that pulls the film down. With Jules Berry, Arletty, and Jacqueline Laurent. In French with subtitles. —DAVE KEHR 85 min. Sat 7/15, 5:15 PM and Mon 7/17, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Looney Tunes on 35mm Three hours of Warner Bros. cartoons, including the celebrated Chuck Jones films What’s Opera, Doc?, Duck Amuck, and Duck Dodgers in the 24-1/2th Century. 180 min. 35mm. Screens as part of the Summer on Southport festival. Sat 7/15Sun 7/16, 11 AM. Music Box F SPECIAL EVENTS Dim the Fluorescents An actress desperate for a break (Claire Armstrong) and a playwright (Naomi Skwarna) living off checks from her dad funnel all their untapped creative passion into writing and performing instructional skits for corporate seminars. As in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, there’s something funny and charming about amateur artists investing a modest theatrical exercise with immodest creative ambitions, and Daniel Warth, who cowrote this Canadian comedy with Miles Barstead, manages to score laughs off his hapless protagonists without ever sullying their dreams. Warth edited the movie too, though apparently he’s unfamiliar with the concept of editing stuff out; the second half slows appreciably as the heroines gear up for a make-orbreak gig, and a tense countdown to the performance is staged not once but twice, from different perspectives. —J.R. JONES 126 min. A Q&A with the cast and crew follows the screening. Wed 7/19, 8 PM. Arclight v

CITY LIFE Street View

ò ISA GIALLORENZO

It takes a Village Discount

AT A GLANCE it’s hard to believe that every piece in Anna Rafferty’s polished look was thrifted. Her statement-print kimono, for example, set her back a mere $3 at a Village Discount Outlet in Little Village. The self-described “modern maximalist” started a vintage clothing shop on Etsy dubbed Barbie Roadkill to tide her over while she looked for a “real” job, but it turned out to be so successful that it became her full-time gig. Raﬀerty recently began selling her ﬁnds at Festive Collective, a new party goods and design store in Logan Square owned by her friend Angela Wator. “She asked me to curate a rack of party-caliber vintage to go with the colorful, sparkly aesthetic of the shop. I change up the products featured there every month, depending on the season,” she says. “Right now I’m on the hunt for metallic lamé tops and tartan-plaid skirts for early fall.” —ISA GIALLORENZO See more Chicago street style on Giallorenzo’s blog chicagolooks.blogspot.com.

SURE THINGS Ñ

Keep up to date on the go at chicagoreader. com/agenda.

SUNDAY 16

M Mystery Science Theater 3000 Patient zero for hilarious commentary over bad films, the Mystery Science Theater team will be mocking yetto-be-announced movies with panache. If you want to pay close attention to the movie, do not come. And your taste in film is questionable at best. 5 and 8 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield, 773-472-0449, victheatre.com, $49.50-$299.

THURSDAY 13

( Chanté Moore If you know Moore only from TV One’s R&B Divas LA, you’re seriously doing yourself an injustice. Head out to hear this chanteuse’s syrupy pipes. For more, see page 30. 7 and 10 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. West, promontorychicago.com, $22-$36.

MONDAY 17

J That’s Weird, Grandma: Attack of the Phantom of the BBQ It’s closing night for this humorous, surreal, and often heartfelt variety show inspired by stories written by Chicago Public School students. 8 PM, Neo-Futurarium, 5153 N. Ashland, 773-2755255, neofuturists.org, $12, $6 for children under 12.

FRIDAY 14

ã Bikes and Brews Get some great bike riding in, followed by a hefty control+Z to the calories you lost thanks to local craft beers. Presented by the Beverly Area Planning Association. 4:30-10 PM, 107th and Longwood, bapa.org. F

TUESDAY 18

( Four Letter Words This young Chicago jazz trio features tenor saxophonist Jake Wark, wielding a rich, fullbodied tone marbled by biting vibrato. His sobs are punctuated by lower-register honks as he unfurls epic improvisations. 9:30 PM, Whistler, 2421 N. Milwaukee, whistlerchicago.com. F

SATURDAY 15

Ô David Leggett: Drawings Last chance to see the vaunted artist’s work, with pieces such as a circumcised penis with breasts and wings perched on a pencil above the words “2017 the year you decided to become a political artist.” 11 AM-6 PM, Shane Campbell Gallery, 2021 S. Wabash. F

WEDNESDAY 19

F Activism Series: Women Employed Women Employed, a Chicago-based nonprofit seeking economic equality for working women, details active steps we can all take to get everyone, regardless of gender, on the same playing field. 7 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, 773769-9299, womenandchildrenfirst.com. F

JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 7

CHICAGO RARE BOOK CITY LIFE CENTER

50% OFF

all open shelf stock Books, maps, prints, records, ephemera New books will be added throughout the sale! Shelves and ﬁxtures are for sale, too!

Chicago Rare Book Center 703 Washington St. Evanston, IL 60202

POLITICS

Rauner takes a hike

The governor has emerged from the budget crisis with a convenient cudgel.

ò G-JUN YAM/AP PHOTOS

GOING OUT OF BUSINESS BOOKSTORE SALE!

Read Ben Joravsky’s columns throughout the week at chicagoreader.com.

By BEN JORAVSKY

847-328-2132

http://www.chicagorare.com/ Open Tuesday through Saturday 11:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. or by chance or appt.

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8 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

n July 5, the day before the Illinois house at last ended the state’s historically protracted fiscal stalemate by voting to override Governor Bruce Rauner’s budget veto, Rauner came to the far southeast side to play populist in the manner of Donald Trump. Sounding off like a regular guy—droppin’ g’s left and right—the billionaire governor made like his unwillingness to compromise with Democrats on a budget was about taking a stand for the little guy. “The tax hike is like a two-by-four smacked across the forehead,” Rauner said during a press conference held in a tavern in Hegewisch. “The people of Illinois don’t want more taxes in their lives.” As absurd as it is, Rauner’s going to be flogging that anti-tax rhetoric in the run-up to the 2018 election. Which means Democrats either have to figure a way to defuse it or—gasp!—Illinois is looking at another four years of this lunacy. On the surface, populism is a hard sell for Rauner, a passionately anti-union billionaire who was raised in the north suburbs, attended private schools, and went on to make his fortune as a venture capitalist. But his anti-tax rhetoric resonates with swing voters who might ordinarily vote Democrat. Hell, I almost always vote Democrat, and I can tell you anti-property-tax talk kind of resonates with me—especially now, having just paid my property tax bill. That’s why Rauner came to Hegewisch, a predominantly white and Latino community

just across the border from Indiana that’s relatively fertile country for Republicans—Trump won roughly 35 percent of its vote compared to about 12 percent citywide. In his press conference, Rauner railed against the tax hike, promising to do “everything possible” to prevent the veto override. When reporters pointed out that Wall Street would lower our bond rating to junk status if the state didn’t pass a budget, Rauner scoffed. “Don’t listen to Wall Street,” he said. “Don’t listen to a bunch of politicians who want power and to stay in power like they’ve been for 35 years. Listen to the people of Illinois.” Rauner was trying to claim that he was standing up for the little guy against Wall Street in this budget battle. Of course, it’s the other way around. His veto would actually increase Wall Street’s proﬁts, because a lowered rating means higher interest rates. And higher interest rates mean less money for necessary services for Illinoisans and more money for bankers. As everyone should know by now, the reason property taxes are so high in Illinois—aside from waste, boondoggles, corruption, TIFs, etc—is that our state relies on those dollars to fund our schools. If Illinois had a progressive state income tax, we might be able to wean ourselves off the dependence on the property tax. In fact, this was the argument put forth by the late, great Dawn Clark Netsch in her 1994 gubernatorial campaign. Her opponent, Governor Jim Edgar, painted her as a tax-andspend liberal. Forced to choose between a

politician who tells the truth about taxes and one who doesn’t, the public went with the BS, as it does almost every time, and Netsch lost in a landslide. The house’s reversal of Rauner’s veto raised the state income tax rate from 3.75 to 4.95 percent, which should help generate almost enough money to start paying the state’s $14.7 billion backlog of bills. I’m cheering because government raised my taxes. But were I a politician on the stump, that would be a lousy hand to have to play against a shark like Rauner. The conventional wisdom is that the governor emerged from the budget battle with the best of both worlds. No thanks to him, he momentarily avoids getting labeled as the governor who drove Illinois into bankruptcy. But thanks to the tax hike, he now has a hammer to use against Democrats—and still has a ton of campaign money to do the hammering. So look for him to make return trips to Hegewisch, as he talks about hard-hit families and shell-shocked businesses running to Indiana to ﬂee the tax increase. When Rauner does return, he’ll be encroaching on the territory of his diametric opposite, the Tenth Ward’s Sue Sadlowski Garza, one of the most progressive aldermen in the City Council and a proud member of the Chicago Teachers Union. Garza has a lot to say about the governor using her ward as a backdrop for his campaign to destroy everything she believes in. “To hell with that,” she says. “I don’t want him in my ward—he’s doing nothing for us. Rauner stands for everything I’m against. And have been against my whole life. This is a working-class ward of unions: ﬁremen, police, teachers, ironworkers, carpenters, painters— you name it. And Rauner’s a union-busting Republican who finances his campaign by writing $50 million checks, and he’s not doing shit for working people.” But what about the property tax hike? “Yeah, our property taxes are too high. If Rauner wants to help us with property taxes, let’s get a progressive income tax to help pay for education,” Garza says. “But you never hear him talking about that—because he doesn’t want to tax his rich friends, even if it means our schools go broke.” Gee, I’m starting to think Garza should run for governor. v

v @joravben

JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE TRANSPORTATION

Tunnel vision

The O’Hare express train proposal is becoming even more far-fetched as the Emanuel administration entertains Elon Musk’s “electric sled” idea. By JOHN GREENFIELD

Model of an “electric sled”; Elon Musk has said such sleds could shuttle passengers at 125 mph through a tube to the airport ò THE BORING COMPANY

ayor Rahm Emanuel’s scheme to create expensive express rail service to O’Hare has always been a dubious proposition. Involving tech mogul Elon Musk—of Tesla electric car and SpaceX rocket fame—and his fantasy of digging a new tunnel to the airport for high-speed “electric sled” travel, as the Emanuel administration recently expressed interest in doing, would almost certainly make the project worse. Establishing an O’Hare express train has long been a bee in the bonnet of Emanuel and his predecessor Richard M. Daley, who squandered about $250 million building a “superstation,” which now sits abandoned under the Loop’s Block 37, to accommodate the planned service. In 2015 Emanuel and his aviation commissioner, Ginger Evans, announced that building the nonstop rail route is a top priority, arguing that it would ease congestion on the Kennedy, create jobs, and generate tax revenue. Evans has projected that an O’Hare express trip would likely take about 20 or 25 minutes, compared to the current 40 to 45 minutes on the Blue Line (which could be shortened by up to five minutes by the CTA’s in-progress “Your New Blue” renovation project). She estimated that the premium tickets will cost between $25 to $35—many times more than the current $2.25 el fare to the airport and $5 return ticket.

10 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

Last year the city awarded a $2 million contract to the engineering firm Parsons Brinckerhoff to nail down potential routes, station locations, and a cost estimate. A 2006 CTA business plan estimated the price tag at $1.5 billion. The Emanuel administration has said its goal is to avoid spending public money on the project, which would almost exclusively serve affluent people and business travelers, but it hasn’t ruled out the possibility. The Active Transportation Alliance says it won’t support the project unless there’s a guarantee that no taxpayer money will be used, and argues that the city should instead be focusing on improving transit access in Chicago’s neighborhoods. Talk of the O’Hare express took a turn for the weird late last month with news that Musk may get involved. Greg Hinz of Crain’s reported that Emanuel’s staff is in talks with the 46-year-old entrepreneur about using his much-ballyhooed but largely hypothetical proprietary tunneling technology to dig a route from the Loop to the airport. Musk, who’s donated $55,300 to Emanuel’s election campaigns, claims that the new tube would accommodate miniature shuttles that could zoom across the northwest side at 125 mph. After catching wind of the O’Hare project, the tech magnate offered the services of his new excavation business with the winking name the Boring Company. He claims his technology will speed up the digging process

14 fold as compared to conventional methods and cut costs by up to 90 percent. This new system, Musk says, could pave the way for using another of his still-theoretical technologies, the “Hyperloop,” a scheme to use vacuum-sealed tunnels to propel vehicles at more than 600 mph. Last month Chicago deputy mayor Steve Koch traveled to Los Angeles to discuss the O’Hare tunnel idea with Musk, and it sounds like the administration is taking this laughable idea seriously. Moreover, it’s a potentially wasteful distraction from real solutions to our city’s transportation challenges—namely better el and bus service. Musk seems to have started the Boring Company on a whim less than eight months ago. (He ﬁrst tweeted out his idea of digging tunnels to bypass congestion in December 2016 while stuck in a Los Angeles traffic jam.) He’s since boasted that he will dig a passageway from LAX airport to Santa Monica that will shorten the trip to ﬁve minutes via electric sled. But so far all Musk has done is to begin digging a 50-foot-long testing trench at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, south of LA. Meanwhile there’s no evidence whatsoever that he’ll be able to magically decimate the cost and duration of urban excavation. Recent municipal highway tunneling projects in Boston and Seattle devolved into massively expensive and time-consuming boondoggles, which should make Chicago think twice be-

fore enlisting Musk to dig a much longer route to O’Hare. And as Streetsblog USA’s Angie Schmitt recently pointed out, while there are no realworld examples of the purported Hyperloop vacuum-tube technology, Musk’s pipe dream is already threatening to divert public resources. His $130 million Hyperloop One start-up has built a 1,640-foot test track in the desert outside of Las Vegas, but the company apparently doesn’t yet have a vehicle to shoot through it, let alone one that’s safe for human cargo. That hasn’t stopped numerous government agencies and organizations from lining up to promote Musk’s vacuum-tube fantasy. Hyperloop One says it can build a tube from Columbus, Ohio, to Chicago that will shorten the trip to 29 minutes, and the regional planning commission there has submitted an application promising to dedicate staff time to the corridor’s planning as well as to help raise private capital for the project. While many groundbreaking transportation ideas, from rail travel to aviation, were first dismissed as crazy, taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be spent to pursue what’s still at this point one overconfident entrepreneur’s fever dream. Similarly, it’s a waste of resources for the Emanuel administration to devote staff time to Musk’s O’Hare tunnel proposal. After all, his claims of a superfast, supercheap tunneling method and Jetsons-esque electric sled propulsion are still mostly speculative. In addition to curbing their enthusiasm for Musk’s illusory notions, Chicago officials should reconsider the airport express plan. The Blue Line is already a practical, if unsexy, way to get to O’Hare that could be made even better through further investment. A new CTA study notes that the Blue Line’s frequency and crowding issues could be addressed by expanding the line’s Forest Park rail yard so that there are more trains to work with, as well as adding higher-capacity articulated rail cars. The trip to O’Hare for air travelers could also be improved via simple changes such as better wayﬁnding signs and installing luggage racks in the cars. There are lots of practical ways the city can make transportation to the airport more convenient and pleasant. Let’s not trust the solution to a guy who doesn’t seem to know a high-speed transit tunnel from a hole in the ground. v

John Greenfield edits the transportation news website Streetsblog Chicago. v @greenfieldjohn

ARTS & CULTURE

R READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

DANCE

Thodos Dance Chicago bows out after a ﬁnal New Dances

THEATER

Oh dad, poor dad, Taylor Mac’s hung you up on meds . . .

ò ALEX GORDON

By TONY ADLER

Ty Olwin and Francis Guinan ò MICHAEL BROSILOW

“Be kind to your parents / though they don’t deserve it” —From the 1954 Broadway musical Fanny

he hits just keep on coming—along with the jabs, slaps, smacks, and finger flicks. Between Straight White Men, Pass Over, and now Taylor Mac’s Hir (pronounced here, not her), the second half of Steppenwolf Theatre’s current season feels like the dramatic equivalent of a victim-impact statement, testifying to the traumas wrought by hetero white American male perps on pretty much everybody else. In Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, one of the title characters has been brought to a state of spiritual paralysis by guilt over his privilege. Set in an urban ghetto, Antoinette Nwandu’s Pass Over features not only the requisite brutal white cop but also a satanic Caucasian in a nice suit, who tempts two poor young black men with goodies out of the picnic basket of the American dream. Hir has both of them beat, though, when it comes to indicting the powers that have so far been. As directed by Hallie Gordon, it’s far funnier too—at least until it’s not. Picture the living/dining/kitchen area of a chintzy, working-class tract house somewhere in the Central Valley, that vast chunk of inland California where celebrities don’t live. The ﬂoor is covered in dirty laundry. Household goods are piled up against the front door like concertgoers after a scare. Over in the corner, his ﬁst around a spoon, sits an older gentleman in a big red yarn wig and a lady’s nightgown, eating mush. His bearded face is

covered in grease paint, clown style. That’s Arnold. A former plumber with rage issues, he had a mild stroke a while back, and wife Paige formulated a novel approach to nursing him. She administers all his meds once daily, in an estrogen-laced smoothie she calls a shaky shake. Now Arnold wanders the house in a jolly monosyllabic stupor, barely able to negotiate a doorknob. Rage issues solved. Paige has formulated novel approaches to most problems, it seems. “We don’t do places anymore,” she tells her eldest son, Isaac, when he wonders why the Crisco isn’t in its usual spot in the cupboard. “We don’t do cupboards anymore. We don’t do order.” Isaac has only just returned from a hitch in the marines, where he worked in “mortuary affairs,” retrieving and identifying body parts—his gag reflex on a hair-trigger as a result. The domestic patriarchy was healthy, if violent, when he left. Under the new order, his little sister, Max, has come out as genderqueer (pronouns: ze and hir) and sports a tuft of whiskers on hir chin. Paige has started homeschooling Max, and vice versa. Paradigm shifts go off like firecrackers on Independence Day. The central motion of Hir consists in Isaac’s attempts to cope with the constant popping noise. All this sounds fairly extreme, doesn’t it? A wild allegory on the state of the nation. Topsy-turvy day in the gender wars. Yet strange to say, Hir in its early going comes across as obvious and conventionally provocative rather than edgy. Maybe I’ve been too thoroughly prepped by the previous Steppenwolf shows. Or maybe I’ve seen so many Trump-as-clown memes that I’m inurned to the sight of still

another white man looking ridiculous. Or maybe truth really is authentically stranger than ﬁction. Whatever the case, the thrill of mere reversal is gone. It isn’t until later, when Mac (pronoun judy) complicates issues, that things get interesting. It turns out that Paige’s isn’t a simple liberation narrative; she’s as much a part of the problem, in her way, as Arnold. Likewise, Isaac is both more open and retrograde than his backstory might suggest. And Max, the most self-aware of the bunch, bounces among loyalties in ways that are at once surprising, disturbing, and utterly human. Even Arnold finds a way to shock us, first because his humiliation awakens our compassion, then because that compassion is undeserved, and last, because, worthy or not, he personifies the fear that underlies so much of our civic discourse as the boom generation ages, the welfare state fails, and families disengage: What will become of me when I’m helpless? Francis Guinan gives a great performance as Arnold, not so much because of his onstage abandon as because he parlays the appearance of abandon into unexpected subtlety. Amy Morton is blithely, bracingly cruel as Paige. Ty Olwin’s Isaac and Em Grosland’s Max are moving as the default adults in the room. Collette Pollard’s set is powerful, ﬁnally, for the secrets it gives up. v R HIR Through 8/20: Wed-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 7:30 PM (3 PM only Sun 8/6, 8/13, and 8/20), Tue 7:30; also Wed 8/2, 8/9, and 8/16, 2 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$89.

v @taadler

THODOS DANCE CHICAGO has never been about one person alone. Over the last 25 years, the company has hired dancers, yes, but more importantly, it hires dance makers. During auditions for the company, founder Melissa Thodos has consistently looked for people who bring creative intangibles to the studio other than technique—a cornerstone that has made Thodos a local standout. That feeling is never more evident than during the company’s annual New Dances series, one of the city’s longest running in-house choreography incubators and an annual summer showcase that gives current and rising dancers an opportunity to hone new material, almost always different in style and tone. Where one piece might stick strictly to the fluidity of contemporary ballet, another might rumble with the gruffness of hip-hop, or evince the much more grounded, meditative balance of postmodernism in the vein of Merce Cunningham or Trisha Brown. This summer marks the last of New Dances, however. The company announced earlier this year that it plans to modify its mission while on financially solid ground, freeing up Thodos and others to pursue other creative projects. It’s yet another loss for the Chicago dance community, which has seen a slew of companies either hit the reset button or go on hiatus recently (Margi Cole’s Dance COLEctive and River North Dance Chicago are two examples). But at the least, it’s one more opportunity go out with a bang. The final program features eight premieres from eight different choreographers. Fittingly, Thodos herself acts as this year’s guest choreographer. —MATT DE LA PEÑA NEW DANCES Sat 7/15, 7:30 PM; Sun 7/16, 3 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6860, thodosdancechicago.org, $14-$40.

JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 11

ARTS & CULTURE Erik Jensen ò CRAIG SCHWARTZ

THEATER

Just the carburetor dung

By TAL ROSENBERG “John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you’ve made your mark on history those who can’t will be so grateful they’ll turn it into a cage for you.”

his sentence, from “Thinking the Unthinkable About John Lennon,” Lester Bangs’s subversive, caustic, and deadon eulogy for John Lennon—and quoted in Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s How to Be a Rock Critic—could just as easily have applied to Bangs as it did to Lennon. The writer was most famous for various music-related missives in Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, and Creem, where he was also an editor, but he’s often been portrayed as a goofy and effusive exaggeration of a record-collecting nerd in everything from Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous to Jim DeRogatis’s biography Let It Blurt. What Bangs should be recognized for is his colorful, exceedingly conversational prose style and ability, unique among the finest critics, to make his writing seem like one side of an extended dialogue with the reader. For

Bangs criticism wasn’t a consumer report but rather an elaborate and oblique kind of autobiography, composed by an intensely sensitive thinker who was intolerant of bullshit. Both the caricature of Bangs and the format of his craft help to explain why Blank and Jensen thought it might be a good idea to make a one-person stage show out of the writer’s autobiography. How to Be a Rock Critic is a 90-minute monologue—with some improvised audience interaction—in which Bangs (Jensen), alone in his room and office, runs down, in more or less chronological order, his life story (the death of his father; his Jehovah’s Witness mother; his run at Creem; his love of over-the-counter drugs, one of which, Darvon, killed him). The script mostly consists of various excerpts from Bangs’s essays, reportage, and reviews, and anyone with a dog-eared copy of Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (the famous collection of Bangs’s work, compiled by Greil Marcus and released in 1987) will recognize lines from such hits as “James Taylor Is Marked for Death,” “My Night of Ecstasy With the J. Geils Band,” and

the author’s famously moving appreciation of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. The highlight of How to Be a Rock Critic is Jensen’s performance—he conveys all the vulnerability and enthusiasm that infuse Bangs’s words by way of a caterwauling delivery and expressive gesturing, though his sloppy costume and obvious wig feel more like an insult than an homage. But even his acting can’t overcome the play’s ﬂawed conception. The beauty of Bangs’s writing is its messiness—the musings, tangents, anecdotes, and

epigrams that somehow end up addressing the main point of his essay, and the way all this ephemera congeals into a coherent body of work. By compressing it all into an hour-anda-half-long monologue, Blank and Jensen can’t avoid reducing Bangs into a cliche. It’s the very thing he hated most. v HOW TO BE A ROCK CRITIC Through 7/22: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 3:30 and 8 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1700 Theatre, 1700 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $30.

v @talrosenberg

Please join us for

MUSIC

ON THE

GREEN

THURSDAY, JULY 20TH FROM 2:00 PM TO 3:00 PM Come and enjoy a live performance and sing along, while enjoying some fresh air and sunshine all in our beautiful courtyard.

CALL 773-257-7298 TO RESERVE YOUR SEAT TODAY! LIMITED SEATS AVAILABLE. I N DEPEN DEN T L I V I NG | A SSIST ED L I V I NG 4239 N. OA K PA R K AV E. CH IC AG O, I L 60634 WWW.SENIORLIFESTYLE.COM

12 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

CONGRATULATIONS TICKET GIVEAWAY WINNERS! LIT

Seams from a marriage

LOOKINGGLASS THEATRE COMPANY

By DMITRY SAMAROV

“There is only one thing I know about life. If you live long enough you start losing things. Things get stolen from you: First you lose your youth, and then your parents, and then you lose your friends, and ﬁnally you end up losing yourself.”

ith this matter-of-fact statement, Scott McClanahan begins one of the most realistic and believable autopsies of a marriage I’ve ever read. In The Sarah Book, he ping-pongs between recollections of the good times, arguments, warning signs, and eventual collapse of his and his ﬁrst wife Sarah’s relationship in prose so deceptively plainspoken that it feels conversational. Over the past decade, through three story collections, three novels, and, most recently, The Incantations of Daniel Johnston (Two Dollar Radio), a graphic biography of the famous lo-fi musician, McClanahan has honed a distinctly candid and unpretentious prose style. His literary voice is nakedly emotional one minute and brutally funny the next, but it rarely produces a false note. McClanahan has earned many accolades in the indie-lit scene; The Sarah Book should introduce him to the wider audience his work richly deserves. Hewing to one’s own life experiences is always a complicated proposition for a writer, but by calling his books “ﬁction” McClanahan absolves himself of having to keep to strict factual accuracy while giving himself full

license to tell his stories. The ﬁctional McClanahan drives drunk with small children he’s forgotten are strapped into the back seat; he burns a Bible given to his wife on their wedding day, then tries to laugh it off; he tries to win her back by reading her poetry, knowing full well the effort is a lost cause. Throughout The Sarah Book McClanahan portrays himself as an agent of chaos and misery, detailing the ways in which his tantrums, ﬁxations, and paranoias hurt his wife, children, and everyone else he comes into contact with; and yet the reader neither pities nor despises him. The rural West Virginia that McClanahan writes about is rarely represented in mainstream American literature. Too often in books and popular culture, poor country people are portrayed as either ugly redneck caricatures or naive, good-natured simpletons. In McClanahan’s works, no matter the characters’ flaws, they are portrayed as complex and multidimensional, even though they aren’t necessarily admirable. Regardless of how dark his despair might be, McClanahan never stops trying to save the day even when he knows his efforts will be in vain. “I was late the morning of my divorce hearing because I was writing Sarah a love letter,” he writes. “Of course, I’d been telling her for months now that no one would love her like I did. She always laughed and said, ‘Thank god. I sure fucking hope not.’” In the end, years after McClanahan’s marriage to Sarah has ended, despite how grueling the dissolution of their relationship may have been, he can break bread with their children and her new boyfriend and introduce his new girlfriend to her as well. McClanahan shows how everyone we get involved with becomes a part of us forever. The Sarah Book is a testament to how the weight of one’s failings can be borne with grace. v R THE SARAH BOOK By Scott McClanahan (Tyrant). McClanahan reads at the Pitchfork Music Festival Book Fort Preparty, Thu 7/14, 7 PM, the Whistler, 2421 N. Milwaukee, 773-227-3530, whistlerchicago.com. F

TICKET WINNERS Kimberly Mussman Amy Carter Megan Kelleher GRAND PRIZE WINNER Pamela Feldman

THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS AND EVERYONE THAT ENTERED

JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 13

ARTS & CULTURE

VISUAL ART

They could come for you By TAL ROSENBERG

Clem Albers, San Pedro, California, April 5, 1942; opposite: Hikaru Carl Iwasaki, Chicago, Illinois, September 19, 1944 ò CLEM ALBERS;HIKARU CARL IWASAKI

hen They Came for Me: Incarceration of Japanese Americans During WWII and the Demise of Civil Liberties” is the second exhibition hosted by Alphawood Gallery, which occupies a former MB Financial Bank on the corner of Fullerton and Halsted in Lincoln Park. The ﬁrst, “Art AIDS America Chicago,” was a spectacular and affecting collection of works about AIDS. “Then They Came for Me” isn’t quite as vast or impressive as “Art AIDS America,” but the former is equally urgent and moving—a necessary visit for anyone in Chicago during the next few months. Though the internment of Japanese-Americans in the mid-1940s isn’t entirely ignored in studies of American history, the period is often overshadowed by the Holocaust and the bombing

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of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Especially at the current moment, when discussions of domestic civil liberties and immigration are at a boiling point, it’s critical to take a close look at the U.S.’s past behavior, in a tumultuous time when people in power made rash, racist decisions that reflected the worst facets of the American experiment. In just two exhibits, Alphawood Gallery has proved to be one of the most significant art venues in the city. As with “Art AIDS America,” for “Then They Came for Me,” Alphawood, in partnership with the Japanese American Service Committee, has amassed a wide range of artistic, historical, and anthropological material surrounding a single subject, one that reﬂects a group of people maligned by both the American government and American society.

But an equally striking aspect of “Then They Came for Me” is the artists it includes—there are a considerable number of photographs by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, more than I’ve seen outside of a major museum. It should be mentioned that Alphawood Gallery has greater financial backing than most nonmuseum art venues in Chicago—the president of the Alphawood Foundation, the grant-giving private institution responsible for the gallery, is Fred Eychaner, the chairman of Newsweb and a noted philanthropist who donates heavily to the Democratic Party and the arts. Hopefully, he intends Alphawood to be more than a temporary enterprise. The gallery is an invaluable educational resource, one that respectfully and thoroughly highlights important and overlooked chapters in American life.

The gallery is also a worthwhile outlet for local art and history. One of the most instructive sections of “Then They Came for Me” is about Japanese-Americans who resettled in Chicago. From the exhibit one learns that before the war there were only roughly 400 Japanese-Americans in Chicago, but afterward that figure rose to 20,000. Japanese-Americans worked in manufacturing and were often employed at such institutions as McClurg Publishing and the Edgewater Beach Hotel. By the 1950s many Japanese-Americans were entrepreneurs, running businesses all across the city. Hikaru Carl Iwasaki’s photograph Chicago, Illinois shows three Japanese-American employees at a local grocery store, wearing white smocks. Other images display Japa-

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www.BrewView.com 3145 N. Sheffield at Belmont

Movie Theater & Full Bar ﬁght for the United States while their families were locked up in internment camps. A quote from the writer James M. Omura is painted on a wall in the main hall of the gallery. “Has the Gestapo come to America?” he asks. “Have we not risen in righteous anger at Hitler’s mistreatment of Jews? Then, is it not incongruous that citizen Americans of Japanese descent should be similarly mistreated and persecuted?” The irony of that statement could not be more fitting for the present moment, when the Supreme Court could potentially uphold Trump’s travel ban this fall. In a sly touch, one of the artworks featured in “Then They Came for Me” is a fake sign by the LA-based street artist Plastic Jesus, heralding the future site of an internment camp, signed by President Donald J. Trump. It’s bitterly funny, but surrounded by all the evidence of the U.S. government’s transgressions against Japanese-Americans, it’s a painful reminder that this country rarely learns from its mistakes. v R “THEN THEY CAME FOR ME: INCARCERATION OF JAPANESE AMERICANS DURING WWII AND THE DEMISE OF CIVIL LIBERTIES” Through 11/19: Wed-Thu 11 AM-8 PM, Fri-Sun 11 AM-6 PM, Alphawood Gallery, 2401 N. Halsted, 773-687-7676, alphawoodgallery.org. F

nese-American Chicagoans in small factories trying to make baby chickens mate. What stands out most of all about “Then They Came for Me” is its thoroughness. The exhibit begins with Japanese immigration to American in the 19th century and examines virtually every aspect of Japanese life in the States until just after World War II. In the process one can learn about how Japanese immigrants collaborated with MexicanAmericans to create the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association, which protected the rights of immigrant farmers in California, even though several states passed alien land laws that tried to block Japanese-American citizens from gaining long-term leases on land. There are numerous artifacts of wartime paranoia, such as a Life magazine article titled “How to Tell Japs From the Chinese.” One of the great constants in the exhibit is a series of panels from Citizen 13660, a graphic nonﬁction book by Miné Okubo, placed at different points in the

exhibit. The illustrated memoir recounts Okubo’s experiences in the internment camps, and through clever turns of phrase she describes her temporary home’s terrible conditions: “We had to make friends with the wild creatures in the camp,” she writes, underneath a black-andwhite drawing of her trying to get comfortable under a blanket, “especially the spiders, mice, and rats, because we were outnumbered.” The photographs by Lange and Adams might be the central draw for casual art lovers; yet while Adams is most famous for his expansive landscape photography, what’s notable about the works of his featured in “Then They Came for Me” are their intimacy. One photo from a series taken in Owens Valley, California, is a still-life image focuses on pictures and letters from a soldier named Robert Yonemitsu, sent to his father at the Manzanar relocation center. The jaw drops not at the natural world, but the sheer hypocrisy of the American government, which sent young Japanese men to

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Bold Disobedience June 23 – September 2, 2017 Conversation: Youth Power = Vibrant Cities Thursday, July 20, 5 – 7 PM Organized in collaboration with the Chicago Architecture Foundation, this discussion will feature authors of No Small Plans, a graphic novel that follows the neighborhood adventures of teens in Chicago’s past, present, and future.

Weinberg/Newton Gallery 300 W Superior Street, Suite 203 Chicago, IL 60654 312 529 5090 weinbergnewtongallery.com

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ARTS & CULTURE Dave Franco and Aubrey Plaza in The Little Hours

MOVIES

Sisters and their mister By J.R. JONES

t this point, satirizing the sexual hypocrisy of the Catholic church is like shooting fish in a barrel, but at least Jeff Baena, writer and director of The Little Hours, does it with an antique ﬁrearm. Adapting two tales from the Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century compendium of caustic stories, Baena steers a cast of familiar faces—John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, Paul Reiser, Fred Armisen—through a period-dress but colloquially spoken farce about a cloister of lascivious nuns and their randy gardener. When the ﬁlm works, it’s hilarious; when it doesn’t, it’s just another snarky indie comedy with too many Saturday Night Live alums. But Baena deserves credit just for dipping into the Decameron, which opened Italian literature to a more tolerant view of human impulse and, notably, to women characters who were forceful, self-aware, and possessed of their own strong desires. Apart from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s lusty 1971 adaptation, the Decameron hasn’t exactly thrived onscreen, partly because its narrative frame is such a bummer. Boccaccio began the book when the Black Death was sweeping across Europe; by one estimate, it would wipe out 80 percent ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

of the Italian populace in four years. Boccaccio is disarmingly frank as he describes the social breakdown of the plague years: desperate to survive, people abandon their sick friends and family, leaving the afflicted to die alone or be exploited by others. Corpses pile up in the streets and get tossed into mass graves. Amid this carnage, ten pilgrims—three men and seven women—retreat to a country villa and agree to spend ten days regaling one another with ten stories a day. The pestilence helps to explain the storytellers’ impatience with the moral codes of the church, but it’s pretty rough stuff for a comedy. The Pasolini movie opens with a character hauling a body to the top of a cliff, tossing it into the ocean below, and spitting after it for good measure. Baena dispenses with the plague entirely; the tale of Massetto the gardener, which supplies about two-thirds of the action in The Little Hours, is pure bedroom farce. Nuto, gardener for a little convent in the Tuscan countryside, quits in exasperation because the nuns are constantly hectoring him; back in his hometown, he shares his story with the young, virile laborer Massetto, who decides to pursue the job opening, posing as deaf and deprived of speech to win the sisters’ sympathy. Once

ss AVERAGE

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s POOR

•

Massetto is installed as the new gardener, the horny nuns begin leading him out to the orchard or into their bedrooms for sex, convinced that their secret is safe with him, and before long he’s servicing the entire cloister, so exhausted from his nighttime activities that he can barely complete his chores. Baena tweaks this scenario slightly—now Massetto (Dave Franco), ﬂeeing a cuckolded husband in a neighboring town, is recruited for the charade by Father Tommasso (Reilly), the nuns’ priest and confessor—but it still culminates in the bawdy fun of supposedly pious young women clamoring to lose their virginity. Whether or not Baena does right by Boccaccio, he deﬁnitely does right by Aubrey Plaza, his girlfriend and indie comedy’s reigning queen of mean. Plaza’s comic persona is so heartless and sarcastic that no sane producer would place her at the center of a conventional romantic comedy, but as the furious, foulmouthed novice Sister Fernanda, she nearly walks away with The Little Hours. “Why are you making eye contact with us?” she demands of the harried gardener. “Look at the fucking ground, you pervert!” When Massetto, just arrived at the convent, presumes to smile at the sisters, Fernanda flies at him with an ax; informed that he can’t hear or speak, she grudgingly relents, but not before screaming in his ear. Baena turns the sacrament of confession into a running gag, with Father Tommasso underreacting to various squalid revelations, yet Fernanda shows up with nothing on her conscience. Pressed to atone for some small infraction, she turns the situation around so that the priest is the one at fault. Fernanda’s rage powers a story in which the convent begins to feel like a prison of the soul. Sister Alessandra (Alison Brie of AMC’s Mad Men) longs for a romantic relationship with a man, but her father (Reiser), a benefactor of the convent, keeps her cooped up there to avoid raising a dowry. “You’re stuck here with all these bitches, and so am I!” she exclaims to Massetto. Sister Genevra (Kate Micucci of Don’t Think Twice) compulsively rats out her fellow novices to the abbess, Sister Marea (Shannon), but in the course of the movie she discovers that she’s attracted to women (including Fernanda, who spends the night with her and then laughs off their encounter in the morning). All three women listen intently when Fernanda’s secular friend, Marta

(Jemima Kirke), raves about the pleasures of being with a man. Soon afterward, Alessandra hikes up her skirt for Massetto in the orchard, and Marta and Fernanda steal into his hut one night for a forced threesome, Fernanda holding a knife to his throat. If this seems mildly scandalous now, imagine what readers in 14th-century Florence must have thought of Boccaccio’s rutting nuns. The Decameron is full of women acting on their own physical needs, the church be damned. The other, shorter story that Baena attaches to the Massetto tale focuses on the abbess of a convent who polices her nuns for sexual mischief even as she entertains a priest every night in her room. The Little Hours climaxes (so to speak) with Sister Marea bursting out of her quarters and catching her three novices in the hall with Massetto; in her haste she has accidentally donned not her habit but Father Tommasso’s pants. Baena reinforces this sense of sexual independence with his character Francesca (Lauren Weedman), wife of the pitiless Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman in the movie’s second-funniest performance). Francesca can’t keep her hands off Massetto, and as he later reveals in his confession to Father Tommasso, she craves a lot more than the missionary position. The Little Hours comes off as pretty edgy, but it doesn’t edge quite as far out as the Decameron, dropping Boccaccio’s denouement in which the nuns all conspire to keep the scandal quiet and Massetto grows to a ripe old age as the convent’s steward, servicing and regularly impregnating the women. “He generated a large number of little monks and nuns,” Boccaccio tells us, “but the matter was so discreetly handled that no one heard anything about it.” That cryptic statement may be more disturbing in the 21st century, when the church’s abuse of children has become an ongoing scandal, than it was in the 14th, when people were concerned with repopulating Europe. In any case, Baena points the story in a different direction, with Fernanda beginning to explore the occult as an alternative worldview. She may not know what she’s looking for, but as Spike Lee wrote, she’s gotta have it. v THE LITTLE HOURS sss Directed by Jeff Baena. Baena and Plaza attend the 7:20 PM screening on Fri 7/14, and the 5 PM screening on Sat 7/15. Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $11.

v @JR_Jones

WORTHLESS

THE P I TC H F O R K MUSIC F E S T I VA L Read about Solange and the breadth of black cultural expression, Jeﬀ Rosenstock and Pitchfork’s relationship to DIY, Survive and music media’s infatuation with prestige TV, and much more. By LEOR GALIL

he Pitchfork Music Festival has pearances. Headliners LCD Soundsystem and been around a dozen years—or Solange are returning too, and Solange has a baker’s dozen, if you start with climbed to the peak of the festival’s hierarchy 2005’s Pitchfork-curated Intona- since topping Saturday’s Red Stage schedule tion Music Festival. In that time in 2013—she’s now the Sunday-night closer, it’s become one of the most renowned events a spot previously occupied by FKA Twigs of its kind in the U.S., in part because it (2016), Chance the RapPITCHFORK MUSIC insists on an aesthetic of its own rather per (2015), and Kendrick FESTIVAL than simply following trends on the conLamar (2014). Fri 7/14-16, music from Ticket prices, like temporary festival circuit. 1 PM-9:50 PM each day practically all other But while Pitchfork doesn’t tend (gates open at noon), Union Park, 1501 W. to book the same acts that make so p r i c e s, co n t i n u e to Randolph, single-day many other big fests look similar every increase—single-day passes $75, regular summer, it does have its own comfort general-admission three-day passes sold out, three-day +Plus passes are $75 (a $10 zone. Eight of this year’s 41 acts are passes $365 (+Plus repeaters—or 11, counting Vince Stajump over 2016). The upgrade to regular ples (who missed his set two years ago new VIP option, called three-day pass $195), all ages a +Plus pass, costs $365 due to a delayed flight), Madlib (who’s for the whole weekend; appeared with Freddie Gibbs), and Hamilton Leithauser (who’s performed with among other things, it allows you reentry to the Walkmen). Thurston Moore and the Dirty the fest and gets you access to premium food Projectors play almost exactly the same days vendors and cocktails (courtesy of Land and and times as they did on their previous ap- Sea Dept.) and air-conditioned bathrooms.

The crowd during Blood Orange’s set at the 2016 festival ò KRISTINA PEDERSEN

The groundlings still have access to lots of exciting nonmusical attractions, though, including Flatstock, the Book Fort, the CHIRP Record Fair, and Renegade Craft Fair (replacing the Coterie Chicago Craft Fair, whose loyal Chicagoan vendors might not all return). As usual, local nonproﬁts also have a seat at the table, among them the Chicago Area Peace Corps Association, Girls Rock! Chicago, and reproductive-rights advocates Illinois Choice Action Team. Pitchfork has historically done a fine job showcasing local artists, but this year’s bill features relatively few. A record-setting nine Chicagoans performed in 2016, but only four will appear this weekend—five including American Football, who have two of their four members in the area. (I’m not counting Angel Olsen, who moved away to North Carolina in 2013.) But Pitchfork is still distinctively Pitchfork: few other festivals would book Brooklyn indie-rocker Mitski alongside George Clinton & Parliament Funkadelic. And it’s the one

Chicago fest to feature Australian collage artists the Avalanches, emo-country standardbearers Pinegrove, and Oakland hip-hop stylist Kamaiyah all in the same weekend. Pitchforkmusicfestival.com has plenty of information about the layout of the grounds, the location of bike parking, and what you can and can’t bring into the park. It’s usually best to take no more than what will ﬁt in your pockets, plus ample cash for food, but you can also rent an on-site locker via the festival’s website before you arrive. If you can’t bike or walk to the park, your best transit options are the Green and Pink Lines, which stop right by the Ashland entrance. Avoid driving if at all possible. The crowd tends to create more of a crush on the el at the end of the night, so you might want to try the number 9 Ashland bus if you’re heading north (there’s usually a ﬂeet of them waiting) or even walking east to catch a train on a less congested line in the Loop. v

v @imLeor JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 17

P I TC H F O R K M U S I C F E S T I VA L

C H I C AG O SUMMERS ACCO R D I N G TO T H E C H I C AG OA N S AT P I T C H F O R K Jamila Woods, Derrick Carter, Mike Kinsella, and more on the city’s best summer music By LEOR GALIL

he Pitchfork Music Festival has been around for long enough that by now it’s probably somebody’s favorite thing about summertime in Chicago. But the city has so much to offer between June and September that I decided to ask the locals performing at this year’s Pitchfork fest what they like best about music in Chicago in the summer. JASON BALLA Guitarist and vocalist in Ne-Hi

2:30 PM Sunday on the Green Stage My favorite thing is going to DIY shows in the summertime. I particularly like when it’s a cool bash. There’s always somebody throwing some show where there are ten bands. Just recently Bunny [bassist Alexa Viscius and front woman Jessica Viscius] hosted an event where ten bands played for the two sisters’ birthday. The nice element of those kind of events is the vibe—it’s really laid-back and it’s about the music. But it’s also

18 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

Top to bottom: Ne-Hi, Derrick Carter, Joey Purp, Jamila Woods, American Football ò PHOTO CREDITS: BRITTANY SOWACKE, COURTESY DERRICK CARTER, CORY POPP, BILL WHITMIRE, ANDY DE SANTIS

JOEY PURP

4 PM Sunday on the Blue Stage Honestly, all the music festivals. Chicago’s really big for music festivals—there’s a ton of them here. Every single summer for the last, like, I don’t know how many years—maybe close to ten, or seven, or something like that—I’ve been in a music festival or two or three, or one of my friends played one. Chicago’s a great place for music in the summer. JAMILA WOODS

6:30 PM Sunday on the Blue Stage

about hanging out and community— and having a nice, sometimes grassy space. This was in their backyard, so there’s tons of green trees. DERRICK CARTER

2:45 PM Sunday on the Blue Stage It’s really not summer until West Fest. Memorial Day’s all right—everybody’s happy, you can wear white again, shit like that. But West Fest, I’ve been doing it for a few years now—maybe nine? Ten, maybe? Eight? I forget. I always close it, so to me that’s special anyway. The people that I see there are a lovely group, a lovely mix of old friends and new friends, various age groups—people come out with their kids and their dogs. I live in the neighborhood, so I like my neighborhood to be hot. I don’t want to have to go to River West, Lincoln Park, or these other places where other people can celebrate in their locales. West Fest is mine. It really is the quintessential version of a Chicago street festival.

I haven’t done this in a while: going to Rainbow Cone. My family used to all go, open my dad’s minivan, and blast music while we had ice cream. I just like using cars as speakers—pulling over somewhere and listening to music that way, with some kind of Chicago food. It would be, like, my parents’ music. This is kind of embarrassing, but—Bruce Hornsby. Stevie Wonder—I can stand by that. Maybe Will Smith, Willennium. . . . Kind of an eclectic mix. MIKE KINSELLA Guitarist and vocalist in American Football

7:45 PM Sunday on the Blue Stage

’Cause the kids are off [school], we just have dance parties in the kitchen with, like, Taylor Swift and their favorite music. It’s a lot of Taylor Swift; there’s a little Bieber in there. I throw in a little Nicki Minaj sometimes, and I get some faces—I sneak it in there. The doors are open, which they haven’t been open all winter—the patio doors—and all that. v

v @imLeor

P I TC H F O R K M U S I C F E S T I VA L

P I T C H F O R K L O V E S T V, SO P I TC H F O R K LOV E S S U RV I V E

Survive ò ALEX KACHA

The retro horror-synth group from Stranger Things get a boost from the site’s eagerness to court the prestige-television audience. By LEOR GALIL

n the morning of July 15, 2016, building a following in their hometown of Austhe first day of last year’s tin, and they’d made fans in important places: Pitchfork Music Festival, Net- Survive contributed two tracks to the 2014 flix debuted the horror/sci-fi cult thriller The Guest (which impressed the drama Stranger Things. With- creators of Stranger Things, brothers Matt and in a couple weeks the eight-episode show had Ross Duffer), and in early 2016 the group landed become an inescapable part of the pop-culture a deal with venerable metal indie Relapse. But churn. Somebody even set up a website where the success of Stranger Things has become Suryou could create your own version of its title vive’s whole story to most of the world, eclipscard—big, bold neon-red lettering (the font is ing their contributions to the Austin scene even “Benguiat”), bracketed with horizontal lines as it gives them a supersize career boost. Surand overlaid on the midnight blacks and blues vive have skipped several steps in the ordinary of a barely lit forest scene. Because Stranger life cycle of a band, becoming a staple of the Things follows a group of kids (and their festival circuit almost overnight—they’ve alfamilies and neighbors) fighting ready played Coachella, Moogfest, SURVIVE supernatural forces in small-town and Primavera Sound, and later this Sat 7/15, 7:45 PM, Indiana in the early 80s, everybody month they’re scheduled for FYF Blue Stage seemed to want to compare it to Fest and Panorama NYC. At Pitchfilms from that decade that inspired it—in- fork they headline the Blue Stage on Saturday, cluding The Goonies, Halloween, and E.T., all one of their highest-proﬁle bookings so far. of which are much better. Pitchfork no doubt sought out Survive beStranger Things has its strengths, though, cause the site has recently succumbed to the especially its nerve-wrackingly patient pac- cultural gravity of prestige TV, whether the ing, tense mood, and expert evocation of a shows are music related or not. A popular new Reagan-era suburban utopia corrupted by HBO or Netﬂix series has an audience that only vile darkness. All these traits also manifested the biggest indie artists can hope to rival— themselves in the show’s atmospheric score, Pitchfork needs to maximize its Web traffic to composed by Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein, support itself, and emerging bands have much longtime collaborators in a four-piece synth less to offer (even if that sort of coverage is group called Survive. Since 2010 they’d been more traditionally on brand).

Pitchfork has undoubtedly undergone changes in editorial direction since media powerhouse Condé Nast bought the site in October 2015. At that point, Condé Nast chief digital officer Fred Santarpia told the New York Times that his company valued Pitchfork’s “passionate audience of millennial males,” which suggests a misreading of the publication’s actual readership and history. Since then Pitchfork has shuttered its print quarterly (the Pitchfork Review, to which I contributed) and published proportionally more videos and feature-length lists—advertisers love the former, regardless of what audiences want, and the latter get a steady stream of clicks from people searching on Google. I’ve also seen an uptick in sponsored or unbylined posts: “SoundCloud Go Brings the Next Wave to Austin,” which recapped the streaming service’s SXSW 2017 parties, was “produced by Pitchfork,” and the inexplicably bland “16 Best Band Shirts to Wear This Summer” was allegedly written by “Pitchfork.” Amid these shifts, coverage of TV shows has become a bigger part of Pitchfork’s output, and sometimes its posts don’t even mention the reason a music site might be paying attention in the ﬁrst place: the presence of a tastemaking score, for instance, or the involvement of a noteworthy musician. It makes you wisftul

for the late-2015 interview that former Pitchfork writer Jeremy Gordon did with Master of None creator Aziz Ansari and music supervisor Zach Cowie, which took as its entire premise the show’s eclectic soundtrack. In May 2017, when actor Michael Cera appeared on Showtime’s Twin Peaks reboot, Pitchfork published a news item that linked to pieces about the original series’s musical legacy but didn’t say anything about the home-recorded Bandcamp album Cera released in 2014. And that same month, when Broad City creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer announced a 25th-anniversary live reading of the Wayne’s World script in San Francisco, Pitchfork posted a news brief that said nothing about the music in the movie— not Crucial Taunt, not the Shitty Beatles, not even the famous “Bohemian Rhapsody” scene in Garth’s tricked-out Pacer. Pitchfork seems to be finding its footing with TV. It focuses on a handful of shows that “passionate millennial males” presumably already know—Atlanta, Twin Peaks, Master of None—but doesn’t reliably cover programs that would serve its core mission of talking about cutting-edge music. When news broke last month that HBO would adapt Chicagobased webseries Brown Girls for TV, the site let it slide—even though soul singer Jamila Woods, a 2017 Pitchfork festival performer, recorded its theme song and appears on the show (which is based on her friendship with cocreator Fatimah Asghar). Survive gives Pitchfork plenty of excuses to write about Stranger Things, because Dixon and Stein worked alongside the show’s creators to develop its music. But in June the site found the limits of those excuses with a news piece about forthcoming Stranger Things action figures—given such a flimsy pretense to discuss the show, the piece mostly pointed readers back to previous stories about Survive. Let’s hope those action ﬁgures are more convincing. v

v @imLeor JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 19

Chicago forever.

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EARLY WARNINGS

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P I TC H F O R K M U S I C F E S T I VA L

Mitski (left) and Dawn Richard both play the Blue Stage at this year’s Pitchfork. ò MITSKI PHOTO BY EBRU YILDIZ, DAWN RICHARD PHOTO COURTESY THE ARTIST

IN PRAISE OF T H E B L U E S TA G E Pitchfork’s shady corner lets you see the likes of Arca, Dawn Richard, Mitski, Survive, and Pinegrove before they’re too big to get close to. By KEVIN WARWICK

he layout of the Pitchfork Music Festival is logistically pleasing. There are just three stages (count ’em, Lolla: one, two, three), and each is close enough to the others that you can scoot from one set to the next without hustling so hard you have to skip out on a serendipitous photo op with Carly Rae Jepsen. As an arbiter of cool, Pitchfork has served itself well by keeping its ﬂagship event relatively small, confining it to Union Park for its entire history rather than allowing it to bloat to ﬁll the biggest space available. This modesty has helped the festival focus on bookings that make it seem in the know—a crucial branding approach for the iron fist that controls the hype. Pitchfork’s authorities require themselves to stay ahead of the curve, and they appear to hope that festivalgoers

will chase that same feeling. That’s where Pitchfork’s third stage comes in. Formerly the Balance Stage (and in the fest’s early years left out of Friday’s schedule), it’s been called the Blue Stage since 2011, and for its entire history it’s deﬁned itself as the incubator within the incubator. The Blue Stage is the spot to camp if you want to catch the likes of Bon Iver (2008), Matt & Kim (2009), and Grimes (2012) before celebrity vaults them through the stratosphere. At the Red and Green Stages, the sweaty, sun-toasted throng of humans in front of you can be too daunting to weave through, but at the Blue you’re afforded the opportunity to see music on a stage rather than on a giant TV screen. Hell, Kendrick Lamar and FKA Twigs played it on separate occasions before going on to headline the

whole damn festival just two years later (in 2014 and 2016, respectively). The Blue Stage is Schubas before the Aragon, the Empty Bottle before the United Center. Plus its lineup is an excellent grab bag. While the two main stages often keep to picnic-appropriate big-name indie rock and party-time hip-hop and dance music, the Blue Stage presents rising locals, outside-the-box DJs, experimental acts, and what have now become sorely missed ﬂavors at the fest: metal and hardcore-punk bands. It’s the Best New Music that you scroll past before you know you need to know about it. If you’d hung around the Blue Stage all weekend in 2013, for instance, you would’ve caught Angel Olsen, Trash Talk, Andy Stott, Metz, Julia Holter, Parquet Courts, Low, KEN Mode, Blood Orange, Sky Ferreira, Waxahatchee, and DJ Rashad. Not too shabby.

Perhaps most important, the area around the Blue Stage is at least partly shaded by trees. Tucked away in the southwest corner of the grounds, it offers a decently laid-back midafternoon respite for anyone fried and weary from the rest of the festival. The portable toilets can be a bit “fresher,” and the grind of the day is a little less burdensome. To get to the stage you have to shuffle through a bottleneck created by the beer booth, but it opens up on patches of grass where you can spread out your knockoff Navajo blanket and relax as the ambient electronics of Oneohtrix Point Never melt in the air overhead. And if you feel like taking a gamble, go ahead and nod off for a nap—maybe you’ll wake up during the set of someone you’ve never heard of before. v

v @kevinwarwick JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 21

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SPECIAL GUEST: BETA PLAY THIS FRIDAY! JULY 14 • VIC THEATRE

SPECIAL GUEST: LIZA ANNE JULY 26 • LINCOLN HALL

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 12 • PARK WEST

Billy Bragg – Roots, Radicals & Rockers Book discussion, signing, and Q&A In Szold Hall

FRIDAY, JULY 21 10PM

THE CHURCH

Okkervil River

with special guest Jesse Hale Moore

OCTOBER 10 VIC THEATRE

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Soundtrack of the City

Gospel and The Freedom Trail

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SATURDAY, AUGUST 5 2PM

Soundtrack of the City

The Rise of Duranguense Music

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Inside/Out with Cerqua Rivera Dance Theatre In Szold Hall

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BUY TICKETS AT 22 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

P I TC H F O R K M U S I C F E S T I VA L

D I Y G A D F LY J E F F R OS E N STO C K C L I M B S I N TO T H E B E L LY O F THE BEAST What is the guy who led Bomb the Music Industry! for a decade doing at Pitchfork? By SEAN NEUMANN

f you recognize Jeff Rosenstock’s name, you might’ve been surprised to see him on the lineup for this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival. Rosenstock led staunchly DIY punk collective Bomb the Music Industry! from its formation in 2004 till its dissolution in 2014, operating in an ecosystem that barely overlapped at all with the festival circuit: the group distributed its music for free through its website, gave away stencils and paint so fans could make their own band T-shirts, and made a point of playing all-ages shows that cost $10 or less. In October 2016, the Long Island musician released “Festival Song” (on his third solo album, Worry.), a three-minute indictment of the corporatization of music festivals and their pernicious habit of cozying up to and co-opting DIY fans and artists. “They wouldn’t be your friend if In June, Rosenstock played “Festival it wasn’t worth it,” he sings in the chorus. “If Song” at the event that inspired it, the Northside Festival in Brooklyn. And when he you didn’t have something they could take.” Rosenstock says he plans to play “Festival plays it at Pitchfork, he’ll be intertwining his Song” at Pitchfork. “I feel like I’m in own history with DIY culture and JEFF the oddly parallel history of the a really unique situation to be able ROSENSTOCK institution that’s hosting him. to comment on what is happening Sat 7/15, 1:45 PM, literally at that moment,” he says. “It’s funny,” he says. “It’s a snake Red Stage “We don’t play festivals very often. eating its own tail.” But in those few situations, we actually get Rosenstock didn’t expect to play any sumto play a song that’s about the thing—that’s mer fests to support Worry. Though he’s startabout the bad parts—instead of just doing ing to actually sell his music, he acknowledges what we usually do, like, ‘Yeah man, this is that the new album (out on SideOneDummy awesome, we’re having a good time!’” Records) is hardly a surefire commercial or

critical success. Its 11 songs run together, making it more difficult to market singles. It uses the word “hashtag” in a lyric. And it includes a ska song—a genre even Rosenstock refers to in the past tense. “It was surprising to be asked,” he says of his invitation to Pitchfork. But while Pitchfork Media can hardly claim to be DIY these days— especially since its acquisition by publishing giant Condé Nast in 2015—its music festival continues to celebrate artists with roots in that culture. The 2017 lineup includes Rosenstock and the Dirty Projectors, who both built their careers with a slow burn across several

Jeﬀ Rosenstock has a problem with music festivals—but not that big a problem. ò AMANDA FOTES

albums rather than breaking out in an explosion of hype. Also on the bill are second-wave emo favorites American Football, who found their audience after breaking up—they almost never played to more than two dozen people before reuniting in 2014. Rosenstock still does tiny shows like that, he says. Sometimes he plays to a crowd of hundreds, sometimes to a handful. After his Pitchfork set, he has dates booked at small record stores and community arts centers, as well as at a dimly lit bar in Bloomington, Indiana, that’s actually underground. The Pitchfork Music Festival continues to grow, in ambition if not in scope, and it has a lot of power to uproot DIY-bred artists and propel them onto bigger stages. It’s also a fair target for plenty of the criticisms Rosenstock makes in “Festival Song.” Ticket prices have risen far faster than inflation: single-day passes now cost $75, up from $15 at 2005’s Pitchfork-curated Intonation Music Festival. And this year the Pitchfork fest offers amenities such as air-conditioned bathrooms (part of the new +Plus pass) or a three-night stay at Virgin Hotel Chicago (for winners of the +Plus Summer Weekend contest). But artists have to choose to take what the festival is offering, and by booking Rosenstock, Pitchfork got a selfaware referee with a skeptical eye trained on the collision of big business and underground music—someone whose presence could help make sure the fest’s artists keep playing on a Blue Stage rather than a Bud Light Stage. “What that song is about is just the very pervasive advertising that’s surrounded by this good thing that has all this emotional resonance for you,” Rosenstock says. “You’re watching these bands you love, and at the same time you’re seeing ads everywhere. I feel like that’s unhealthy. A lot of people just say, ‘That’s capitalism and the system we live in and just deal with it,’ but I think it certainly deserves acknowledging at the very least. Bands playing these festivals are saying counterculture shit and it’s kind of like, ‘OK, I think we should burn the prisons down, and I should get a Caleb’s Kola!’ The cognitive dissonance there is crazy to me. It’s bonkers.” v

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P I TC H F O R K M U S I C F E S T I VA L

P I T C H F O R K WA N T S Y O U T O PA R T Y WITHOUT IGNORING GUN VIOLENCE The Beats Over Bullets partnership uses the festival to bring new converts to Everytown for Gun Safety, Mothers Against Senseless Killings, and the Wear Orange campaign. By LEE V. GAINES

ike Reed says summer in Chicago means two things: music festivals and gun violence. “It’s kind of a brain fuck,” says Reed, who’s not just a drummer, promoter, and venue owner but also the founding director of the Pitchfork Music Festival. Because last year’s spike in shootings contributed to the city’s highest murder tally in nearly two decades, this year the festival is acknowledging Chicago’s gun violence—and trying to raise awareness of organizations that are doing something about it. Pitchfork has joined an initiative called Beats Over Bullets (often styled “Beats > Bullets”), a two-pronged partnership with Chicago organization Mothers Against Senseless Killings (MASK) and national nonproﬁt Everytown for Gun Safety. As part of the initiative, the festival encourages attendees and artists to participate in the Wear Orange campaign, a movement born from the 2013 murder of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old King College Prep student shot in a Kenwood park one week after performing at Obama’s second inauguration. The Wear Orange campaign emerged two years ago in collaboration with Everytown, says Nza-Ari Khepra, a friend of Pendleton’s who cofounded the youth-led group Project Orange Tree after her murder to discuss the structural causes of the city’s epidemic of shootings. Everytown, which advocates for gun control and violence prevention, has designated June 2—Pendleton’s birthday—as National Gun Violence Awareness Day.

“Orange came from the color hunters wear when they go hunting, and the idea that it’s the safety color—the color they use to show they’re not the target,” explains Khepra, cocreator of Wear Orange. Everytown press secretary Taylor Maxwell says that during Pitchfork the jumbotrons in Union Park will play a clip of a collaborative film made by Pendleton’s parents and the Wear Orange movement. Festgoers can text an onscreen number to learn what they can do to help mitigate the complex problem of gun violence, which feels horriﬁcally intractable to many Chicagoans. Volunteers will table at Pitchfork to represent the nonprofits involved in Beats Over Bullets and help people learn how to get involved. Maxwell says Everytown decided in 2017 to expand into more music festivals to try to reach a younger audience. Several other local events—among them the North Coast Music Festival, Mamby on the Beach, Ruido Fest, and Riot Fest—have signed on with Beats Over Bullets. Pitchfork has historically encouraged people who buy its VIP passes to donate to a local charity chosen by the festival (last year it raised money for voter-registration efforts), but this year Reed says he approached outgoing Pitchfork president Chris Kaskie about

doing something more. Kaskie suggested partnering with MASK, founded by Tamar Manasseh in 2015 after the shooting death of 34-year-old Lucille Barnes in Englewood. The group consists of volunteers who’ve pushed back against violence by forming a kind of block club and neighborhood patrol; they post up outdoors, grilling hot dogs, interacting with children and families, and making it clear to everyone that they’ve got their eyes peeled. After Pitchfork settled on MASK as its cause, Reed says, Everytown reached out and offered to partner with the festival. Reed and Kaskie were initially hesitant to get involved with a nationwide organization, but they worked with Everytown to ﬁnd a way to tie together the local and the national. “This is the ﬁrst time, and in a massive way, that we’ve gone into something with more of a national purview,” Kaskie says. “We feel like we’re in a position where, having something like a festival, we need to be utilizing it for something good in the community.” Beats Over Bullets has made fund-raising a relatively small component of its work, Reed says, because what Pitchfork does best is promote. By using its festival and website to expose new audiences to MASK, Everytown, and the Wear Orange movement, Pitchfork can

Supporters of the Wear Orange campaign carry ﬂyers honoring the memory of Hadiya Pendleton at a rally in February 2013. ò BRIAN JACKSON / SUN-TIMES

do something for these nonproﬁts that they’d have a hard time doing for themselves. MASK communications director Sarah Ryan also appreciates the moral support. “Having Pitchfork put us out there really tells us and the people frequently left behind in this city that we haven’t been forgotten—there are other people who are a part of the city, as Pitchfork is, who want to try to help,” she says. Ryan is likewise impressed with the festival’s willingness to openly support advocacy work that could raise hackles in the pro-gun community. According to Kaskie, festival organizers didn’t even consider the contentious politics around guns and gun violence when making the decision. Of course, raising awareness is just step one—solutions can seem terribly far away, especially considering the myriad factors that cause gun violence. Maxwell says she understands why so many people feel hopeless about the problem. “What we know from doing this work is there are solutions that can make a huge difference,” she says. “Even in states where you might be frustrated with folks in the statehouse, you’re able to make progress on this issue by calling legislators and speaking out. And I do want young people to know that message.” Because Beats Over Bullets depends on fans and artists to pick up its message and run with it, nobody can say yet whether it’s a worthwhile initiative. Kaskie and Reed acknowledge that they don’t know how or even if anyone at Pitchfork will get involved on the ground. Khepra says she appreciates Pitchfork’s efforts either way, given how easy it usually is for people partying at a music festival to ignore gun violence—especially when it’s not already their day-to-day concern. For viable solutions to emerge, the problem needs to be on people’s minds, and that’s what she hopes Beats Over Bullets will accomplish. “It can’t just be the people on the south side of Chicago who want to change gun violence. It can’t just be people at Sandy Hook or related to Sandy Hook who want to solve the problem,” Khepra says. “It can’t be a select group trying to solve it. It needs to be a bunch of people putting their heads together.” v

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Dawes Park, Sheridan Rd. and Church St. cityofevanston.org/world arts; 847-448-4311

Partially supported by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency

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P I TC H F O R K M U S I C F E S T I VA L Solange Knowles (far right) performs at the 2017 Essence Festival in New Orleans. ò BENNETT RAGLIN/GETTY IMAGES FOR

SOLANGE SUPPORTS B L AC K C H I C AG O C R E AT I V E S AT P I T C H F O R K A N D B E YO N D Her Saint Heron collective’s festival installation and oﬀ-site events show oﬀ the depth and richness of the city’s black cultural expression. By TIFFANY WALDEN

“

don’t know if you can quote this, but artists claim their own seats at the table in this world is fucked,” says Carris hypersegregated Chicago. Adams, program and exhibition manOn Thursday, Saint Heron collaborates ager for south-side cultural incubator with Black Cinema House and Black Radical Rebuild Foundation. Today that’s a Imagination for “Roll Back, Say That,” an artwidely held opinion because, well, Trump, but ist talk and screening with filmmaker Frances the fuckedness of the world has been the only Bodomo. And on Friday, Solange’s collective thing black Americans have known since our hosts a members-only panel discussion with transatlantic voyage. several poets and artists (including Pitchfork “Black people need a place—whether it’s performer Jamila Woods) at Soho House literature, film, art, or a physical space—where Chicago. (The group appears to have pulled they can relax for a minute and be normal and out of Saturday’s Silver Room Block Party not have people stare at them for being there,” aftershow at the Promontory.) At the Pitchfork Adams says. Cultural expression is a vital escape festival itself, Saint Heron features the work of from a world systemically pitted against black contemporary black art makers in an on-site folks. We’ve been forced to endure so much that installation that runs Friday through Sunday. we’ve mastered the craft of transmuting pain “The days of donating money to a white into creativity. It’s why our songs, poems, paint- dude’s cause for black people—shaking hands ings, films, dances, hairstyles, and fashions have and taking a pretty picture—are over,” Adams provided the backbone of so many art forms. says. “It’s the beginning of future steps for ceIt’s also why Solange Knowles isn’t just lebrities and celebrity-adjacent people to really blowing into the Pitchfork start taking stock in their commuSOLANGE Music Festival on Sunday night, nities a little bit differently. It’s one Sun 7/16, 8:30 PM, singing a few songs, and going thing to donate dollars and no one Green Stage home. Like the black experience, knows that you’ve donated, and she’s bigger than a stage and a microphone it’s another thing to create a collective that is in Union Park. Her work spans mediums actually having programming that’s tangible.” sonically, visually, and socially, and she’s Solange and her team weren’t available for parlayed her Pitchfork booking into a holistic interviews, and details of the various collaboweekend of uplifting blackness. rations were still trickling out at publication Solange decisively began her crusade to time. The crew at the Promontory could highlight the expansiveness of black cultural provide a little info, though: venue manager expression with the 2016 release of A Seat at Christina Mighty says Saint Heron will give the Table, and during Pitchfork she’s show- the floor to emerging artists, including Dawn casing the work of black creatives through Richard, the former member of Danity Kane collaborations with her Saint Heron arts who also performs Friday afternoon on Pitchcollective—two of them located on the south fork’s Blue Stage. side, the historic epicenter of Chicago’s black Mighty says the Promontory is inclusive— cultural life. It’s her way of helping these unlike some venues in the Loop and River

“ROLL BACK, SAY THAT” WITH FRANCES BODOMO

Black Cinema House, Black Radical Imagination, and Saint Heron present two screenings of Bodomo’s short films: Boneshaker, Everybody Dies!, and Afronauts. Bodomo gives a talk afterward. Thu 7/13, 6 and 8 PM, Stony Island Arts Bank, 6760 S. Stony Island, free with RSVP

POETS’ PANEL DISCUSSION

Elaine Welteroth hosts a members-only panel discussion with Fatimah Asghar, Safia Elhillo, Eve L. Ewing, and Jamila Woods. Fri 7/14, Soho House Chicago, 113 N. Green

North, it doesn’t exclude people with ridiculous and arguably racist dress codes. Its mission aligns closely with Saint Heron’s, and that’s why the collective chose it to host an event. “We need a space to tell real stories and take control of our narrative as artists, as consumers of nightlife, as citizens of Chicago,” Mighty says. Solange and Saint Heron, she explains, “are kind of like a beacon letting people know that you can come here, view acts here, cut a rug, drink, and express yourself and be in good company with like-minded people.” Solange is in tune with the beautiful black talent brewing in Chicago, and she and big sister Beyoncé have used their international stardom to bring local black artists to bigger stages. Last year Solange caught wind of the avant-garde braiding of Chicago native Shani Crowe, then wore her braided halo during a Saturday Night Live performance of “Cranes in the Sky.” Earlier in 2017, Saint Heron gave Crowe another boost with a live version of her 2016 photography exhibit “Braids,” in which she included Chicago model Imani Amos and

2017 ESSENCE FESTIVAL

clothes by Chicago designer Alex Carter. Beyoncé did the same for Chicago-based graffiti artist turned painter Hebru Brantley when she and Jay-Z spent thousands on his artwork in 2012. Dwamina Drew, cofounder of socially conscious Chicago clothing brand Enstrumental, is a friend of Crowe and Brantley, and he thinks it speaks volumes when a major star invests in local black art. “I deﬁnitely tip my cap to Solange,” Drew says. “She seems to be one of those artists who’s consistent with the culture and not just cool with the culture.” For Kenyatta Forbes, creator of the Trading Races card game, cultivating and sharing stories through art helps demonstrate that there isn’t only one way to be black. In her years as an educator, her students often questioned her blackness because of the way she dressed and talked. “There’s this learned experience of what blackness is at such a young age that boxes folks in,” Forbes says. “I was really interested in exploring but then debunking that.” Chicago clothing designer Sheila Rashid feels the same way. She created the overalls that Chance the Rapper wore at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards, and she says people are often thrown off when they learn that fact. “Being black, lesbian, and a woman, people don’t expect me to make the clothes that I make,” Rashid says. “My goal is to inspire, and whether people know who’s making the art or not, people who are into fashion will respect me because they see not only did I design it myself but I made it from scratch.” Our city has been at the forefront of black American arts at least since the Chicago Black Renaissance, which produced the likes of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Edouard Scott, Mahalia Jackson, and Katherine Dunham. In that spirit, designers such as Drew, Rashid, and husband-and-wife duo Brian and Autumn Merritt at Hyde Park’s Sir & Madame hope to continue evolving their culture. “I do feel like we have a long way to go, but we’re on the right track. People see what Fat Tiger are doing, what Chance is doing, what Sir & Madame is doing, and what Leaders has done,” says Autumn Merritt. “I feel like this whole sense of cultural expression is only going to get greater—and it’ll have an effect on everyone, not just black culture.” v

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P I TC H F O R K M U S I C F E S T I VA L James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, PJ Harvey, Ride ò PHOTO CREDITS: COURTESY THE ARTIST, MARIA MOCHNACZ, EMILIE BAILEY

P I TC H F O R K ’S V E T E RA N AC T S CO N F R O N T T H E T R A P O F T H E C R O W D F AV O R I T E LCD Soundsystem, PJ Harvey, and Ride have had mixed success evolving past the sounds that made them famous. By ANNIE ZALESKI

he Pitchfork Music Festival reliably by re-creating his favorite records. But that books a variety of veteran artists, personal urgency feels muted on “Call the and its 2017 lineup is no exception, Police” b/w “American Dream,” the recent lead with the likes of A Tribe Called single from the band’s forthcoming comeback Quest, the Thurston Moore Group, record, also called American Dream. The New Madlib, Dirty Projectors, Hamilton Leithaus- Order-esque “Call the Police” and the grayer, LCD Soundsystem, PJ Harvey, and Ride. scale electro dirge “American Dream” both This isn’t necessarily a sign that Pitchfork is exceed six minutes, and while that isn’t unusupandering to nostalgia—many of this year’s al for LCD Soundsystem, the songs feel their established acts continue to evolve, despite length, with monotonous, repetitive arrangethe clear fan favorites in their back catalog. ments that quickly become sonic wallpaper. In some cases, this evolution wasn’t exactThe message of Murphy’s newest lyrics also ly a choice: Amber Coffman’s departure from feels garbled. “Call the Police” is a ham-fisted the Dirty Projectors forced the band to recon- assessment of current political divisions, with figure its vocal approach on 2017’s self-titled its few cutting moments (“When oh, we all album. In others, it’s par for the course: start arguing the history of the Jews / You got Moore relishes defiant reinvention, and he’s nothing left to lose”) drowned out by sophbeen remarkably unsentimental omoric, superficial lines (“Well, LCD about Sonic Youth since that band there’s a full-blown rebellion but SOUNDSYSTEM ground to a halt in 2011, playing in you’re easy to confuse / By trigFri 7/14, 8:10 PM, black-metal supergroup Twilight, gered kids and fakers and some Green Stage dabbling in prickly postpunk questionable views”). PJ HARVEY with Chelsea Light Moving, and “American Dream” is slightly Sat 7/15, 7:25 PM, releasing intricate, sprawling solo better. Murphy is spooked by his Red Stage work. Leithauser too has been musical heroes dying, but he turns RIDE content to wall off his output with his solipsism in a productive direcSun 7/16, 5:15 PM, the Walkmen from his current tion: “So get up and stop your comRed Stage solo career, including a recent LP plaining / You know that you’re the with former Vampire Weekend multi-instru- only one who’s been destroying all the fun.” mentalist Rostam Batmanglij. It’s unclear, though, whether the song the song Friday-night headliners LCD Soundsystem intends to indict or lament such aspirations, (who previously played Pitchfork in 2010) because it favors vagueness such as “there’s have suffered from diminishing returns since no going back against this California feeling.” undoing their 2011 breakup a couple years ago. By contrast Murphy’s best observations, Early on, the band’s crisp, percolating synth- whether political or social, get sentimental pop and postpunk seemed to exist in symbio- about specific, relatable things. sis with the jaded-scenester persona of front PJ Harvey, who performs Saturday night, man James Murphy: the 2007 album Sound of has never had an issue with directness. On Silver especially scans like the work of a skep- 1992’s Dry and 1993’s Rid of Me she confronts tical outsider trying to stave off self-loathing a world antagonistic to women, both with her

barbed, blues-punk guitar scrapes and with her lyrics—“Man-Size,” for instance, toys with perspective to illustrate a lust-based dominance differential. The commercially successful 1995 album To Bring You My Love seduces by weaponizing mystery and desire. Harvey has covered a lot of ground since then, with mixed results. The electronicsdusted drift of 1998’s Is This Desire? and the brash, guitar-based rock of 2000’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea command attention with atmospheric nuance and ringing riffs, respectively, and 2007’s slower and more fragile White Chalk is haunted by memory and regret. Perhaps in attempt to avoid being conﬁned by the precedents she’s set, Harvey has occasionally misplaced the intimacy of her most beloved work. That’s most evident on her most recent full-length, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project, a political album inspired by visits to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington, D.C. Like Murphy, Harvey suffers from superﬁciality here: “The Community of Hope” condescends to the D.C. neighborhood it eviscerates (“And the school just looks like a shithole”), and “Near the Memorials to Vietnam and Lincoln” reaches half-heartedly for profun-

dity with images of a boy teasing starlings by pretending to feed them and a man emptying trash. It’s especially frustrating because Harvey’s political commentary on 2011’s Let England Shake is smart and pointed. Ride, who play Pitchfork on Sunday afternoon, learned two decades ago that fans and even critics can be hostile to experimentation. The band became figureheads of the UK shoegaze scene thanks to the distortion vortices and melodic pop of 1990’s Nowhere and 1992’s Going Blank Again. But in a reaction to being pigeonholed, they veered away from that sound, which didn’t go over well: the 60s-pop pastiche of 1994’s Carnival of Light was poorly received, and the fractured rock of 1996’s Tarantula was even more widely maligned. Ride split in 1997 amid personal acrimony and declining sales. When the band started playing shows again in 2014, they didn’t try to erase their polarizing past—Tarantula’s buzzsawing “Black Nite Crash” was a set-list staple—but for the most part they stuck to the cherished parts of their catalog. So it’s a pleasure to hear Ride push themselves on Weather Diaries, their first studio album in 21 years. The title track and “Home Is a Feeling” are tranquil, free-ﬂoating space-rock numbers reminiscent of Pink Floyd or Spiritualized; “Lannoy Point” intersperses waves of pulsating keyboard between candied guitar riffs; “All I Want” uses digitally diffracted vocals as a rhythmic element. Even the songs that nod to Ride’s shoegaze past have updated elements. Andy Bell and Mark Gardener’s sun-baked vocal harmonies anchor the crashing choruses of “Rocket Silver Symphony,” which otherwise sounds like ambient electro. The raucous, noisy “Lateral Alice” sets fever-dream lyrics to Krautrockinspired rhythms: “Someone said ‘smile’ and I turned around / He pulled the trigger and I hit the ground.” After two decades away, Ride took a risk by deciding not to merely mimic their most popular sound—if Weather Diaries had been received like Tarantula, it would’ve destroyed the momentum of their reunion. By instead building on that sound, Ride have opened the door to a promising second chapter. v

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Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of July 13

MUSIC

PICK OF THE WEEK

Once a bedroom-pop poet, Waxahatchee has become an indie-rock force

THURSDAY13 ChantÉ Moore 7 and 10 PM, the Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park, $22-$46. If you know Chanté Moore only from TV One’s R&B Divas LA, you’re seriously doing yourself an injustice. This chanteuse’s syrupy pipes gave black women everywhere a reason to love up on their man with the 90s anthem “Chanté’s Got a Man.” As one of the defining voices in female R&B, Moore later joined forces with legend Ron Isley and the self-proclaimed pied piper of R&B, R. Kelly, to create the 2001 cheaters’ anthem “Contagious,” where instead of singing her beau’s praises, she played the role of a woman whose husband has caught her sleeping with another man in their home. To truly get a feel for old-school R&B that sends listeners into the depths of their feelings, make your way to at least one of the two Moore performances tonight. —TIFFANY WALDEN

Thurston Moore Group Shells open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $20.

ò MICHAEL RUBENSTEIN

WAXAHATCHEE, CAYETANA, SNAIL MAIL

Wed 7/19, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $20-$25, $17 in advance. 17+

THERE’S A BEAUTIFUL thread of stoic cynicism exuded by Katie Crutchfield as a songwriter, not unlike a sardonic country singer who’s as in tune with everyday drudgery as she is weary of it. Under the moniker Waxahatchee, Crutchfield has blossomed from bedroom-pop poet into full-fledged indie-rock force, and the new Out in the Storm (Merge)— on which her twin sister, Allison, contributes percussion and keyboards—is a testament to exactly how far that move has gone. You can still hear faint echoes of her modest beginnings in a triumphant and defiant slow-marching acoustic yarn like “Sparks Fly,” or even in a breezy, chugging rocker like “Silver,” as her wistful lyrics keep to the uncertainty of exactly which landing is the right one to stick. Her fourth full-length isn’t belabored, it isn’t overwrought—no seven-minute epics to be found here—instead, Crutchfield remains sincere, trusting her stark vocal melodies to do the heavy lifting as opposed to relying on crescendo after crescendo. And when left alone out on an island, she’s at her absolute best, working the open space with a simultaneous swagger and vulnerability that feels as real as anything happening in indie rock today. —KEVIN WARWICK

30 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

Over time it’s become clear that Thurston Moore thrives on collaboration, and with the dissolution of Sonic Youth he’s managed to regain his footing as a bandleader with this lean quartet. While he’s been involved with countless side projects over his long career, it’s only now that he has a working band in which the members seem comfortable in their roles. The group’s recent second album, Rock n Roll Consciousness (Harvest/Caroline), reflects a deep ensemble dynamic, guitarist James Sedwards employing a twined attack that conjures the more outwardly psychedelic excursions he took with Lee Ranaldo—in fact, many of the extended solos on the new record reﬂect Ranaldo’s aesthetic more than Moore’s own predilection for noisy chaos. Steve Shelley, who’s worked with the singer for more than three decades, is back on drums, just as My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe, who played on the group’s debut, returns on bass. Lyrics on three of the album’s ﬁve tunes were written with British poet Radio Radieux, who also contributed words to the previous release and represents another grow-

ALL AGES

ing partnership for Moore. It’s a strong record ﬁlled with the sort of honey-drugged melodies Moore has long favored—powered by the precise engine of Shelley and Googe—and the multipartite jams glide effortlessly, ebbing and flowing between serenity and intensity with impressive grace. Still, I do miss the tension that existed in Sonic Youth; his new collaborators are skilled, but they tend to support him when they might be better oﬀ challenging him now and again. —PETER MARGASAK

Matthew Sweet See also Friday. Tommy Keene opens. 8 PM, City Winery, 1200 W. Randolph, $38-$45. b Last month veteran pop auteur Matthew Sweet dropped his first new album in six years with Tomorrow Forever (out on his own Honeycomb Hideout label), which was culled from sessions that produced more than twice as many songs as what ended up on the sprawling 17-track epic. In 2014 Sweet and his wife moved back to their native Nebraska following years away, setting up a home studio where the singer began to stockpile material with the help of trusted colleagues like drummer Ric Menck, bassist-guitarist Paul Chastain, and guitarist Jason Victor; on a few tracks he’s joined by veterans like Rod Argent (Zombies), Debbi Peterson (Bangles), and Gary Louris (Jayhawks). In most ways the new album offers no surprises—and given the sort of guitar-driven pop Sweet has been churning out for three decades, that’s good news. Over taut, loping grooves and seriously meaty guitar riffing, Sweet serves up melodies as tender as they are memorable, drawing inspiration from the Beatles up through the heyday of British pub rock and 70s AM radio hits, with a sound that’s become timeless enough to render such temporal distinctions moot. As usual, most of the songs deal with romantic entanglements and disappointments, but here and there Sweet delves into more vulnerable topics, as with “You Knew Me,” a song he penned following the death of his mother and not long after he returned to Nebraska. The song unabashedly addresses a complicated dynamic, where the singer rues the encounters he failed to have with her: “Won’t you come back to me J Chanté Moore ò MYCHAL WATTS

NEW

LINCOLN HALL + TOTAL MELDRICK PRODUCTIONS PRESENT:

EDDIE PEPITONE

SEP 10

NEW

THE CALIFORNIA HONEYDROPS

SEP 28

NEW

PROTOMARTYR

OCT 08

NEW

Kiss ò THEO WARGO

LÉON

OCT 21

CULTS

OCT 22

RISK! TRUE TALES, BOLDLY TOLD

NOV 09

FESTIVALS

Pitchfork, sure, but metal and barbecue too Chicago Open Air Metal’s past and present come together for this alternative to Pitchfork. Headliners include Kiss, Korn, and Ozzy fuckin’ Osbourne. See page 31 for more. 7/14-7/16, Toyota Park, 7000 Harlem Ave., Bridgeview, chicagoopenair. com, $60-$99 per day, $130-$179.50 for three-day passes. b

TICKETS AT WWW.LH-ST.COM

Metal Threat Fest Enjoy two days of twisted, underground extreme metal, with acts like Antichrist (see page 31), Profanatica, Demona, and Perversion. 7/14-7/15, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, facebook.com/MetalThreatPromotions, $15 (7/14), $20 (7/15), $35 for two-day pass. 17+

THE PURCELLS ‘WORDS CAN’T SAY’

NEW

Silver Room Block Party This block party celebrates its 14th year with R&B, soul, and hip-hop acts (as well as plenty of DJ sets). Shannon Harris, Tall Black Guy, and Shawnee Dez perform, among others. 7/15, Harper Court, 5235 S. Harper, silverroomblockparty.com, donation requested. b

‘HENRY CHURCH’ RELEASE PARTY

JOSEPH CHILLIAMS

AUG 28

NEW

Windy City Smokeout Combining smoked meats and live music continues with a party dedicated to barbecue and country artists like Jake Owen, Lee Brice, and Kip Moore. 7/14-7/16, 560 W. Grand, windycitysmokeout.com, $40 (7/14-7/15), $45 (7/16), $110 three-day pass, children ten and under are free. b

JUL 24

CAMERON AVERY

SEP 17

NEW

Pitchfork Music Festival The tastemaking website celebrates its ﬂagship festival with sets from LCD Soundsystem, PJ Harvey, Solange, and A Tribe Called Quest. Check out our guide on page 17. 7/14-7/16, Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph, pitchforkmusicfestival. com, $75 per day, three-day passes sold out. b

RECORD RELEASE

SAMMUS

OPEN MIKE EAGLE

SEP 22

NEW

TIM JUNG

GROWLER + BIG SADIE

THE WOOKS

SEP 23

NEW

Baritone saxophonist and Chicago native Jonah Parzen-Johnson uses his new album, I Try to Remember Where I Come From (Clean Feed), as a statement of thanks for his artistic roots. He grew up on the south side and became an adherent of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), studying under the great reedist Mwata Bowden, who imparted the organization’s communal sensibility to the young musician. The music Parzen-Johnston now creates in Brooklyn, where he moved in 2006, bears little resemblance to the output of AACM members, but its spirit of creativity and freedom certainly stems from his experiences here. In the press materials he notes that black music in America was developed under horrible circumstances in which art became a crucial tool of empowerment and protection from the oppressive forces surrounding the community. He goes on to acknowledge that the community members he interacted with “shared their traditions, their gatherings, their bandstands, their living rooms, and their musical insights with me in a generous and enduring way.” The new album contains seven tender, minimal original pieces that are built around rustic, folkish melodies— Parzen-Johnson used circular breathing techniques in his saxophone playing and con- J

AUG 02

TERRA LIGHTFOOT

WHITEHORSE

OCT 04

NEW

Jonah Parzen-Johnson Hanging Hearts open. 8:30 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10.

TEMPLES

DECLAN MCKENNA

KAITLYN AURELIA SMITH

OCT 26

NEW

It’s been six years since this stalwart Swedish thrash band’s last full-length, and the new Sinful Birth (released by Sweden’s I Hate Records), the long-awaited follow-up to 2011’s Forbidden World, delivers an even more solid wall of riffage that never stops rising. There’s such a purity to their studied 1980s post-Slayer thrash that a listener could be forgiven for thinking this is a band of crusty old guys who’ve been playing for 30 years—when in fact this is only Antichrist’s second full-length. Churning cyclical riﬀs and brutal beating drums power tracks like “The Entity,” “Savage Mutilations,” and “The Black Pharoah,” each one a slightly varied, self-contained permutation of a theme. Later Antichrist settle in for the long haul on the ten-minute instrumental “Chernobyl 1986,” showing off their endurance while testing yours. —MONICA KENDRICK

JUL 28

TRAVIS LINVILLE

FRIDAY14 Antichrist Demona, Nuke, and Lethal Shock open. 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, $15. 17+

BOB SCHNEIDER

NEW

/ I’ll tell you everything.” It’s a decent eﬀort, though in the end it all feels a bit bloated, with too many midtempo jams dominating the proceedings. But I can’t really point to any subpar songs, and heard individually, every tune holds up. He’s joined by Menck, Chastain, and Victor. —PETER MARGASAK

NEW

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

WE’RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE TOUR

DAVID RAMIREZ

DEC 02 JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 31

MUSIC continued from 31

trolled the simple analog synthesizer counterpoint with foot pedals of his own design. The synthetic pulses, bloops, and vibrato-rich long tones engage beautifully in a close dance with his grainy baritone, which occasionally sounds like it’s oﬀering to complement the electronics. Whatever improvisation exists on the record is deeply entwined in the hypnotic, uninterrupted melody lines he blows on each piece. —PETER MARGASAK

Chicago Open Air See also Saturday. Kiss, Rob Zombie, Megadeth, Meshuggah, Dillinger Escape Plan, and others perform. 11:50 AM, Toyota Park, 7000 Harlem Ave., Bridgeview, $60$99 per day, $130-$179.50 three-day pass. b You should always take lists with a grain of salt, but when Rolling Stone tackles one focused on genre, it’s typically as engaging and thoughtful an overview of a sound as you’re likely to get from an outlet serving both mainstream and niche tastes. (Full disclosure: I’ve helped write one such Rolling Stone list.) The magazine’s recent “100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time” won’t please everyone, but it’s a decent snapshot of a genre’s entire history as it appears in this moment. Speaking of which, the second annual Chicago Open Air features acts that recorded more than a fifth of the albums on the list, seven of them helmed by Sunday-night headliner Ozzy Osbourne. The festival also captures the breadth of the genre while leaving itself open to people with only scant knowledge of metal. It ain’t a bad place to get first-hand experience with some of the biggest names who’ve made the heaviest records: three of the “Big Four” thrash titans, Slayer, Megadeth, and Anthrax (Metallica is the fourth); those that have launched entire subgenres (Meshuggah, Korn); plenty of propagators of 2000s radio pap (Godsmack, Stone Sour); and lots of bands playing popular contemporary pap (hi, Suicide Silence). The latter half of Friday offers the best lineup for any festival that day (slight shot at Pitchfork), beginning with the soon-to-be-extinguished Dillinger Escape Plan and wrapping up with hillbilly-horror hero Rob Zombie and the inimitable Kiss. True, it’s not the original Kiss lineup, but anyone who takes umbrage probably won’t get much from a trip to Toyota Park this weekend. —LEOR GALIL

Matthew Sweet See Thursday. Tommy Keene opens. 8 PM, City Winery, 1200 W. Randolph, sold out. b Carl Weathersby Band See Saturday. 9:30 PM, B.L.U.E.S., 2419 N. Halsted, $10.

SATURDAY15 Chicago Open Air See Friday. Korn, Godsmack, Seether, Clutch, Steel Panther, Body Count, and others perform. Noon, Toyota Park, 7000 Harlem Ave., Bridgeview, $60-$99 per day, $130-$179.50 three-day pass. b

32 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

Ty Money ò RYAN LOWRY

Carl Weathersby Band See also Friday. 10 PM, Rosa’s Lounge, 3420 W. Armitage, $15-$20. This show is part of what Carl Weathersby is calling his “I’m Back Again” tour. That said, the bluesman hasn’t really been absent—he’s recently been heard and seen as part of Pierre Lacocque’s Mississippi Heat. All the same, considering that his last album under his own name, I’m Still Standing Here, was released eight years ago, this could be viewed as something of a comeback. Like several blues performers active since the 70s, Weathersby shows the influence of Albert King—during the latter’s years on the Stax label, he had a way of mixing straight blues with soulish rhythms that seems to have affected everybody from Son Seals on down the line. But Weathersby brings a soul singer’s vulnerability to the table, and while the covers on Still Standing (which include at least one King composition as well as songs made famous by the Temptations and Teddy Pendergrass) are fairly audacious, it’s the originals and lesser-known material that really shine. Equal time is given to Weathersby’s guitar work, but instead of sounding like a solo that never ends, it comes off as a second voice echoing what his heart feels. The sublety hits you like a brick. —JAMES PORTER

SUNDAY16 Ty Money Valee, Weasel Sims, Chimeka, and Marvelous open. 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $15, $10 in advance. 18+ Put Ty Money’s recent Cinco De Money 3 mixtape on shuﬄe and right away you’ll ﬁnd out what makes the Harvey rapper one of the most exciting voices to recently emerge in the local scene. Following 2016’s solid but inconsistent second installment in his Cinco De Money series, this release is taut and focused, and leaves lots of room for Money to make each beat his plaything. Without fail I return to “Intro,” which isn’t so much a great song as a platform that allows Money to display the depth of his skills in the amount of time it takes to microwave a burrito. About 30 seconds into the track, he completely shifts gears while describing where he shot

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Find more music listings at chicagoreader. com/soundboard.

Re-Tros ò COURTESY THE ARTISTS

meet & greet / signing hosted by RECKLESS RECORDS after their Pitchfork set at the CHIRP record fair. 6:45pm AND...

a rival, landing on each word (hip, groin, arm, leg) so that it fills the space of an entire line. It’s as though he’s slicing through a fleeing enemy with a katana; his lines are swift, exacting, and merciless, and every movement allows us to peek at the insides of the song even as it’s moving. Money is tough, but part of what makes him hit so hard is his ability to portray his own multitudes—he’ll show care for others in the same breath as he vanquishes enemies. A large chunk of “Intro” features shout-outs to some of the toughest female MCs in Chicago, including Chella H, Queen Key, and Chin Chilla Meek. Chicago, in turn, has shown love to Money: Cinco De Money 3 includes a recording of Twista extolling his skills, and the single “Yes or No” features the first postprison appearance by the legendary Bump J. —LEOR GALIL

Chicago Open Air See Friday. Ozzy Osbourne, Slayer, Stone Sour, Lamb of God, Amon Amarth, Behemoth, and others perform. 11:15 AM, Toyota Park, 7000 Harlem Ave., Bridgeview, $60-$99 per day, $130-$179.50 threeday pass. b Re-Tros Bur open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $20, $15 in advance. 18+ After releasing a couple of albums surveying the tundra of postpunk—full of wide-open spaces, instrumental lunges, and feral howls—Beijing three-piece Re-Tros are pivoting toward a minimalism that draws people in rather than making them scurry away. During the best tracks on their forthcoming third album, Before the Applause (Modern Sky USA), Re-Tros condense the frisson of their past work into momentary bursts that fit neatly into a newfound Krautrock pulse. On recent single “8 + 2 + 8 II” they fill in large spaces that previously would have been left empty with a low-humming, cyclical synth melody that offers a gleaming, endless horizon for the band’s hypnotic pattern of handclaps. At its heights “8 + 2 + 8 II” is a dance track, operating as a reminder of Krautrock’s influence on techno while allowing us to find new routes to music’s future. —LEOR GALIL

MONDAY17 Angela Hewitt 7:30 PM, Martin Theatre, Ravinia Festival, 200 Ravinia Park Rd., Highland Park, $10-$60. b In the liner notes for her dazzling new recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (Hyperion), Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt details each of the 28 pieces with casual erudition, dispatching technical observations with an easy familiarity that bleeds into something more personal. She writes of how with every onset of the 22nd Variation she gets “a feeling of rebirth,” also explaining how much energy and focus variation 26 requires right after “emptying everything from inside yourself in Variation 25.” She ﬁrst performed the masterpiece when she was just 16—she’s 58 now—and the work was instrumental to her early career after she won a 1975 competition playing it. As she writes, “The best moments in a performer’s life come when a piece is so much a part of you that you can forget the mechanics of it and find total freedom,” and indeed, that’s the feeling she transmits with the new recording as she balances crisp rhythmic alacrity with a wonderfully gentle touch. It’s her second version of the work—an achievement calling to mind her fellow Canadian, the great Glenn Gould, who set the standard for this cycle (twice)—and almost four minutes longer than the one made 16 years earlier, as though she’s savoring the music now more than ever. I remain a novice when it comes to European concert music, but the Goldbergs get me every time, and Hewitt has served up one of the best new spins I’ve encountered in the last few years. She’ll tackle the complete cycle during this rare local visit. —PETER MARGASAK

WEDNESDAY19 Waxahatchee See Pick of the Week (page 30). Cayetana and Snail Mail open. 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $20-$25, $17 in advance. 17+ v

Be sure not to miss her at Pitchfork fest! 3855 n lincoln ave.

chicago

SAT JULY 15

FRI JULY 28

MAURICE BROWN W/ TALIB KWELI

2 RECORD RELEASE SHOWS! 7PM - ALL AGES 10:30PM - 21+ WITH

CHRIS TURNER & J.IVY SECRET COLOURS ALBUM RELEASE!

for complete listings, tickets, and social updates... martyrslive.com facebook.com/martyrslive @martyrslive JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 33

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SUMM

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A curated event spotlighting unique local giftable craft, art, jewelry, apparel, housewares, and food and drink.

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34 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

FOOD & DRINK

DAEBAK | $$$

2017 S. Wells 312-631-3913 daebakkoreanbbq.com

Marinated beef short rib ò ZAKKIYYAH NAJEEBAH

RESTAURANT REVIEW

The K-pop is awesome at Daebak But the tabletop barbecue isn’t exactly a big success. By MIKE SULA

’ve lately fallen into a K-pop K-hole, listening to Spotify’s K-Pop Daebak playlist. The Korean word daebak can mean different things in different contexts: “surprise!,” “big success!,” or “awesome!” It’s also the name of a new Korean barbecue restaurant on the second ﬂoor of the once desolate eastern corner of the Chinatown Square mall. Daebak is owned by a woman named Namhee Kim, who a few years ago, drawn by an untapped market of K-pop-loving Chinese teenagers, opened the K-Pop of Chinatown store on nearby Wentworth. Hoping to further lasso a particularly Chinese appreciation for all things Korean, Kim opened Daebak three months ago. Its most prominent feature is a strategically placed television the size of a small car that broadcasts a stream of music videos starring synchronized groups of impossibly beautiful and talented automatons singing about ice cream

cake, love dust, and “boombayah.” It’s difficult to fully focus on mounds of sizzling beef and pork mere inches from your face while the rapper Jimin struts on the screen above your table snarling “You a freaking puss puss,” but Daebak’s environs make an concerted effort to distract. The gleaming aluminum retractable exhaust fans that dangle over the tables block some sight lines, but at least they efficiently vacuum the meaty vapors from the gas-powered grills. Shortly after you order your meats, a domed grill grate with a trio of trenches on the perimeter is installed over the burner, which is then set alight. These are filled with raw onions, yellow corn smothered in white cheese, and a diluted egg mixture poured from a brass teapot. As the grill heats up, the egg eventually solidifies into something that can be scrambled by chopstick, the corn-cheese mixture transforms into a molten mass, and the onions

sweat until they’re sweet. These built-in sides mitigate the somewhat conservative selection of more traditional banchan (including a pair of nicely punchy cabbage and radish kimchis), which are of varying quality. Free side dishes also tend to soften the criticism most frequently lobbed at any given Korean barbecue joint—that the meat is too expensive. This certainly appears to be the case at Daebak, where a thinly sliced boneless rib eye or ten scraps of boneless short rib top out the menu at $32.99 per order. But these are of decent quality, and the act of griddling morsels of ﬂesh, dredging them in salted sesame oil and the funky soybean-paste ssamjang, topping the bits with spicy scallion salad, and carefully wrapping it all in lettuce or daikon is a methodical endeavor utterly unlike tearing away at a dino-size porterhouse. The process gives the body time to digest, until it realizes it’s had quite enough meat.

The pork side of the menu is a degree less expensive and features some craveable cuts as well, such as thick slices of jowl laced with delicate formations of fat, and sweetly marinated shreds of collar that caramelize and char in seconds on the grill. The thin frozen curls of pork belly and brisket that feature so prominently on Korean barbecue menus are never a solid bet, and that rule applies at Daebak; the amount of shrinkage and mealiness inherent in such cuts simply isn’t worth the price or the effort. The same goes for a grainy potion of skirt steak that sells for nearly $28. Daebak offers a number of standard dishes to accessorize your barbecue experience. Three large versions of the savory pancake known as pajeon are especially enticing, particularly the variety made with thin, crispy, blood-orange-colored kimchi and a thick, extracrispy seafood house-special version that nonetheless could use more sea creatures. It’s unseemly to ﬁnish a session in a Korean restaurant without soup, but the common varieties here are a particular disappointment. The stock of a short-rib bowl is so watery one wonders if the meaty bones therein had just entered the liquid at service. The normally spicy shredded beef soup yukgaejang was so similarly bland that I wondered if Daebak was targeting invalids rather than the cool kids of Chinatown. Daebak’s inconsistent approach to seasoning is no more apparent than in its presentation of buldak, a plate that seems made to quell the drunken munchies, and one that often attempts to douse the flames of blazingly spiced boneless grilled chicken bits with a thick blanket of melted cheese. You can experience this dish in its ﬁnest expression at the great Lincoln Square bar Dancen, but Daebak’s insipid, barely spiced version resembles something more like a Denny’s skillet. If you approach Korean barbecue with the expectation that you’ll feast on cheap meats until you fall from your chair, and that you won’t pay much for it, then Daebak isn’t for you. (May I suggest San Soo Gab San?) But the place does have its charms. It’s slick and it’s new, and it’s not staffed by frowning ajummas who’ve worked harder in a week than you will all year. Friendly, chatty young servers frequently stop by to assist with the grillwork, leaving you plenty of time to take in the daebak K-pop idols on the TV screen above. v

v @MikeSula JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 35

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QingMing, a collaboration between the Field Museum and Oﬀ Color Brewing ò JULIA THIEL

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36 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

lot of the history of brewing is the history of regulatory headaches,” says brewer John Laffler of Off Color. It’s a legacy that continues today: Laffler faced bureaucratic setbacks while brewing QingMing, a collaboration beer with the Field Museum inspired by brewing techniques and ingredients from ancient China. For example, because there’s evidence that hemp was used as a filtration mechanism, Off Color was planning to replicate the technique. “We talked to the feds and they were like, ‘If you get this documentation that all these hemp seeds don’t have any THC [you can do it],’” Laffler says. But the supplier of the seeds dragged its feet on responding, and by the time Off Color got the approval it was too late, Laffler says. “We said screw it. We substituted alfalfa.” QingMing is the second historically inspired beer that Off Color has brewed with the Field Museum; the ﬁrst, Wari Ale, was informed by chicha brewed by the Wari people of what’s now southern Peru. Made with purple corn and molle berries (also known as pink peppercorns), it was released last March as a one-off but proved so popular that Off Color is going to brew and release it for a second time later this summer. (The Field Museum’s house beer,

a lager called Tooth & Claw, is also brewed by Off Color.) To come up with the recipe for QingMing, Laffler sat down with Field Museum curator of anthropology Gary Feinman, who explained the brewing processes of ancient China. The ingredients and techniques used in making the beer come from source materials discovered at archaeological sites from the Late Shang/ Western Zhou dynasties (1600-722 BCE). The types of alcohol produced at two archaeological sites during that time period, Laffler says, “fell into three camps”: li, jiu, and chang. “For us, the chang sounded the most interesting. Li was more like a wine, jiu was more like a beer. Chang was kind of like the two of them together, a stronger version of li, which was a semisweet rice- or millet-based fermented beverage, 3.5 percent ABV.” What fascinated Laffler most about the production of alcohol in ancient Asia was the way starch was converted to sugar (a process called sacchariﬁcation) in the rice that was commonly used in alcohol production at the time. “I think China’s really interesting because it has mold-based saccharification as opposed to enzyme-based sacchariﬁcation, where the enzymes come from the grain itself,” Laffler says.

HOP TO IT: RELEASE OF QINGMING BY OFF COLOR BREWING Thu 7/13 6-8:30 PM, Field Museum, 1400 S. Lake Shore, 312-922-9410, ﬁeldmuseum.org, $40, $35 museum members.

Because barley (the most common grain used for brewing in Western countries) has a seed, the malting process involves essentially tricking the seed into sprouting, which releases enzymes that break down starch in the grain into sugar. Rice is a little different. Ancient Chinese brewers would add a fungus called aspergillus to the rice; the spores release enzymes that break down starch into fermentable sugars. The technique is still in use in modern China and other parts of the world: both the fungus and the inoculated rice are called koji in English, and it’s the starting point for soy sauce, miso, and sake, among other products. Koji is not, however, particularly common in brewing. For this reason, Laffler says, fermenting the rice was the hardest part of the process from a technical standpoint. “I started making it in my little apartment. You basically cook rice, add the mold spores—we cooked rice 24 different ways before figuring it out. It was a lot of playing around with my little Instapot trying to figure out the right measurements, time periods [for fermentation].” Then there was the process of scaling up to making 200 pounds of koji at a time. “Fortunately we have a culinary steam generator we use to sterilize our kegs,” Laffler says. “We were able to repurpose that with tubing and some ingenuity to make a large rice steamer.” Once the process of making the koji was nailed down, the trickiest part of making QingMing was getting approval from the federal government for the ingredients that they wanted to use. There’s evidence that both osmanthus and chrysanthemum flowers were used to make alcoholic beverages in ancient China, but while both flowers are approved for food preparations in the U.S., they haven’t been tested with alcohol. “We’d have to prove that it’s food safe in alcohol,” Laffler says,

“because alcohol extracts things that water doesn’t. [The federal government is] not saying that it’s not safe, just that someone needs to prove it. And for a brewery of our size, we don’t have the time and resources.” So both osmanthus and chrysanthemum were out— but jasmine, another flower found at one of the archaeological sites, was allowed. So were several other ingredients: honey, peaches, plums, and jujube fruit, also known as Chinese dates. The name “jujubes” couldn’t go on the label, though; according to Laffler, the government said they had to change it to “dates” for reasons that remain unclear. One silver lining emerged from all the bureaucratic hassles: in the process of getting legal approval for the techniques and ingredients used to make QingMing, Laffler learned that he could also legally make sake (with a slightly different license than the one he now holds). “Now we have some idea of how moldbased saccharification works,” he says of Off Color’s mind-set, “let’s push it forward and see where that leads us.” In the meantime, QingMing is set to be released July 13 at the Field Museum’s Hop to It event, and will be available thereafter at the museum’s Field Bistro and at “select retailers” in Chicago. It’s an unusual beer, Laffler says. Besides weighing in at a muscular 9.5 percent ABV, it’s more fragrant and floral than most people think of when they imagine beer: “It’s very perfumed. There’s a lot of fruit and floral character in the beginning.” As for the finish, he says, “It’s very high in alcohol, so that helps to dry everything off your tongue. As it evaporates, you get all this interesting sake character, fancy perfumed rice—and that’s the best part.” v

v @juliathiel

BARRA

L ATE NIGHT NIG HT DINING DININ G ’TIL ’ TIL 1AM 1AM / OPEN O PEN6PM-2AM 6PM -2AM //2977 297 7N.N .ELSTON EL S TO N/ CHICAGO / CHICAGO/ 773-866-9898 / 7 7 3-86 6- 9898 / N - BAR CHI CAGO.CO M LATE / BARRANCHICAGO.COM

JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 37

JOBS

General Landscape Designer (MULT openings) Design Workshop, Inc. Chicago, IL REQ: MS in Landscape ARCH or Related & 6 Months EXP. Duties: DOC PROJ work for a variety of purposes (Market PROP’s, TECH memos, Internal Publications, award Submission & image file); DEVE & contribute in PROJ DEVE; PERF ASGMT for various phases of PROJ’s using Legacy Design Process & tools; PREP & maintain drawings, site ANLYS plan studies, CONST DOC’s, portal wikis, hand & COMP files; conduct research & gather data on PROJ; ANLYS of data for the PROJ; PERF TECH studies & INV for a variety of conditions; PART on CONST site visits; Assist in PREP of REP’s & PRESNT’s; PART in office design review; actively pursue 5 year plan to guide PROFESS DEVE; Actively pursue PROF licensure; DEVE career plan that ID’s & Accelerates KNOWL in area of interest & PROF growth; Assist in TECH training of new employees; Actively recruit from alma mater; Maintain Average billable %; DEVE PROG MGMT Principles; PREP of proposal submittals & PREP & delivery of PROJ interview; BUSS DEVE & Marketing OPP’s. Apply: Mail resume to: ATTN HR, 120 E. Main Street, Aspen, CO 81611.

the worksite will be provided or paid by the employer, with payment to be made no later than completion of 50% of the work contract. Send Resume or contact Illinois Department of Employment Security, Migrant/ Farm Workers Programs, 33 State Street, 8th Floor, Chicago, IL 60603, (312)793-1284, or your nearest State Workforce Agency and reference job order 2110417.

TRANSUNION,

LLC

SEEKS

Consultants, Analytics for Chicago, IL location to consult w/clients to apply mathematical, statistical & analytical methods. Master’s in Statistics/ Analytics/Applied Mathematics/ Economics + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Statistics/Analytics/Applied Mathe matics/Economics + 5yrs exp. req’d. Must have 2yrs statistical programming and analytics modeling experience w/risk fields & response models, client-facing presentations of stat istical/analytics concepts to nonstatistical audience, & w/ segmentation analyses, logistic & linear regression modeling, Multivariate and Bayesian models, constrained optimization, gradient boosted trees, random forests & w/R, SAS, SQL, Uni x/Linux, Xeno/Fico Model Builder, CHAID segmentation, clustering neural network, survival analysis, optimization & time-series forecasting, and machine learning. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: HL, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661.

TRANSUNION,

LLC

SEEKS

Consultants- Information Technology for Chicago, IL location to design, expand & improve web sw applications. Master’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. Eng. + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci./ Comp. Eng. + 5yrs exp. req’d. Req’d. skills: 2yrs exp. w/Java, J2EE, Spring, Hibernate, Web Services, Tomcat, Oracle, PL/SQL, AJAX, JSF, Oracle ADF, ADF Faces SOA, Big Data, Hadoop, Jenkins, Stash, GIT, Agile/ Scrum, must hold Sun/Oracle Certification on Java platform. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: AS, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

Eagle Market Makers seeks Senior Trading Systems Engineer in Chicago, IL to: Dvlp nw smltn envrnmnt to dply mrkt rsrch. Req BS in Comp Sci, finance, math or rltd + 18 mo exp in rltd occptn. Req 18 mo exp w/ Linux CentOS 6.5; C++; SQL; C#.NET; FIX; TC P/IP. Mail resume to Tim Lewis: 601 S LaSalle St #400 Chicago IL 60605.

VEOLIA WATER TECHNOLOGIES, INC. in Plainfield, IL seeks Sr. Process Advisor to design and review the design of large scale industrial process systems. Reqs. PhD + 4yrs exp., MS + 6yrs exp. or BS + 8yrs exp; For further reqs. & to apply visit www.veoliawatertechnologies. .com, Req ID 77309.

FERGUSON’S MORNINGSIDE ORCHARD, LLC, in Eau Claire, WI

is hiring 38 Farmworkers, Apple Orchard from 8/23/2017-10/31/2017: 40 hrs/week. Workers activities include picking, weeding, cleaning, grading, sorting, packing and loading apples and pumpkins, general apple orchard tree and trellis maintenance on occasion and perform any other orchard related duties. Must have one month experience. Must be able to lift 50 lbs. $12.75/hr. (prevailing wage). Guarantee of 3/4 of the workdays. All work tools, supplies, and equipment furnished without cost to the worker. Free housing is provided to workers who cannot reasonably return to their permanent residence at the end of the workday. Transportation and subsistence expenses to

TRANSUNION, LLC SEEKS Sr.

Consultants for Chicago, IL location to provide architectural framework for sw applications & info. system development, maintenance & enhancement efforts. Master’s in Comp. Sci./ Comp. Eng./any Eng. field + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. En g./any Eng. field + 5yrs exp. req’d. Req’d skills: AbInitio (Query>IT, Control Center), BRE, Express>IT/ACE development, DMF framework, Oracle, Unix/Linux, shell scripting, Autosys, SQL Developer, Postgre SQL. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: GS, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

Retail

BINNY’S IS HIRING!

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $500-$599

STORE ASSOCIATES Full Time and Part Time

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

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

STUDIO OTHER LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888

Please apply online at: www.binnys.com/careers

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms. 24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air. Low rates daily/weekly/monthly. South Side. Call 773-376-5200

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

CHICAGO - HYDE PARK 5401 S. Ellis. Studio. $470/mo. û CALL 773-955-5106 û

1 BR UNDER $700 SUMMER SPECIAL: STUDIOS starting at $499 incls utilities, 1BR

$550, 2BR $599, 2BR $699, With approved credit. No Security Deposit for Sec 8 Tenants. South Shore & Southside. 312-446-3333 or 773-2879999

NO MOVE IN FEE. Move In NOW!!!

Studios - 1 Beds Hyde Park. Call Megan 773-285-3310

Ave) RENT SPECIAL: Pay 1st month rent only - No Security dep req’d. Nice lrg 1BR $575; 2BR $699 & 1 3BR $850, balcony. Sec 8 Welc 773995-6950

SECTION 8 WELCOME Newly Decorated 74th/East End. 1BR. $625. 77th/Drexel. 2BR. $700. 773-874-9637 or 773-493-5359

CHICAGO, 4 ROOM APARTMENT, 1BR, vicinity of 79th & Blackstone. $600/mo. Call 773-407-3143 NEWLY REMOD 1BR & Studios starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/ hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St., 773619-0204

4 BR Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. 773-287-4500 www.wjmngmt.com

HYDE PARK- 53rd St Nr Maryland. Cozy 1BR $675 hdwd floors, Sec 8 ok. Heated, w/ Laundry facilities. 773-859-0169 76TH/SAGINAW UPDATED

1-3BR Apts, spacious w/hdwd flrs & more. $630-$1020/mo. Heat Incl. Must See! 773-445-0329

HOMEWOOD- 2BR NEW kitchen, new appls, oak flrs, ac, lndry/ stor., $1195/mo incls ht/prkg, near Metra. 773.743.4141 Urban Equities. com

1 BR $1100 AND OVER DELUXE BRIDGEPORT LOFT ,

1 BR $700-$799 10815 S. KING DR., updated, hdwd flrs, 0/mo. Tenant pays Credit check req’d. 484-9250

3BR, C/A. own Call

2BA, $110 heat. 773-

WOODLAWN 66TH and ELLIS,

4 Rooms, 1BR, Hdwd flrs, heated. $700/mo. No Sec Dep. Section 8 OK. 773-859-0169

WEST PULLMAN (INDIANA

CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up. 773-637-5957

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

38 CHICAGO READER | JULY 13, 2017

bly Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park. Laundry & Security on Premises. Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030

SOUTH SHORE AREA Newly remod Studios. Near Metra & CTA, appls incl. $500-$525/mo. Steve 312-952-3901

CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, maid, phone, cable ready, fridge, private facilities, laundry avail. Switchboard. Start at $ 160/wk Call 773-493-3500

BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

SUMMER SPECIAL $500 Toward Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 &

We are seeking energetic, customer-oriented individuals to perform a variety of store functions. Qualiﬁed persons must be over 21 years of age, able to lift 40-50 lbs. and available to work ﬂexible hours. Previous retail experience a plus with cashier or stock experience preferred. Candidates must be able to work nights & weekends.

EOE

gas incl. 2-5BR start at $650 & up. Sec 8 Welc. Rental Assistance Prog. for Qualified Applicants offer up to $ 400/month for 1 yr. (773)412-1153 Wesley Realty

Chicago, Beverly/Cal Park/Blue Island Studio $575 & up, 1BR $665 & up, 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Prkg. 708-388-0170

STUDIO $600-$699

Binny’s Beverage Depot is the Midwest’s largest upscale retailer of ﬁne wines, spirits, beers and cigars, and due to our continued growth, we are now looking for dedicated individuals to join our team at our Portage Park location.

SUMMERTIME SAVINGS! NEWLY Remod. 1 BR Apts $650 w/

BURNHAM NICE SIZE 1BR, heat & water incl. 1st & 2nd flr apt w/ balcony in very quiet bldg. $755/mo. Credit check req’d. 708-372-4141

8322 S INGLESIDE, 1BR, $660/ mo, newly remodeled, hrdwd floors, cable, laundry, Sec. 8 wel-

come. 708-308-1509 or 773-4933500.

NEWLY REHABBED

6642 S. Evans 1 & 2 Bedroom apartments. $700-$800/month + security. SS appl. Tenant pays util. 773-858-3163

735 N. LOREL. 4rms, 1BR, Fresh rehabbed, new appliances, new heat and water incl. $750/mo + 2 mo sec. 847-451-1669 AUSTIN AREA 1-2 BR apts, $800-$1050, heat & appliances incl .Section 8 OK, close to transportation 708-267-2875 77TH/LANGLEY

4RM,

1BR

Custom Beamed Ceilings, Marble Fireplace, Large Sundeck, Washer/ Dryer, appliances, $1,395 Per Month, $25 credit check 773-373-7368

ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled. Rent is based on 30% of annual income. For details, call us at 847-546-1899 ∫

CALUMET CITY 158TH & PAXTON SANDRIDGE APTS 1 & 2 BEDROOM UNITS MODELS OPEN M-F, 9AM-5:30PM *** 708-841-5450 ***

EAST EDGEWATER LANDMARK 2BR Plus new kit, oak flrs, sunrm, near Red Line/lake, lndry $1 650/heated 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com

MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENTS! 6748 Crandon, 2BR, $875. 7727 Colfax, 1 & 2BR, $625-$875. 6220 Eberhart, 2 & 3BR, $850-$1150. 773-947-8572 or 312-613-4424

EDGEWATER GLEN 1000SF 1BR: new kit, SS appls, quartz ctrs, built-ins, oak flrs, lndry, $1250/ heated 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com

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

HYDE PARK Luxury 1BR Condo, gorgeous ceramic Kit/BA, appls, crpt, A/C, heat, cbl, pool, 24 hr sec, Metra. $1 200/mo. 312-305-3362

HUGE Chatham 900 SF , 1BR, 1BA, newly remod, spac, dining and LR, quiet blk & bldg, nr trans & shops. Won’t Last. Section 8 Welc. Call 312-519-977

1 BR OTHER

RIVERDALE New decor, 1 & 2BR, appls, new crpt, heated, A/C, lndry, prkng, no pets, nr Metra. Sec 8 ok $675-$800. 630-480-0638

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. Ltd. IT’S MOVING TIME!!! OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG Plenty of parking 1Bdr From $775.00 2Bdr From $925.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000*** APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SPRING HAS SPRUNG!! MOST UNITS INCLUDE.. HEAT & HOT WTR STUDIOS FROM $475.00 1BDR FROM $550.00 2BDR FROM $745.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000**

CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE Beauti-

ful Studios, 1,2,3 & 4 BR’s, Sec 8 ok. $500 gift certificate for Sec 8 tenants. 773-287-9999/312-446-3333

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

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT NO MOVE IN FEE 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM APTS (773) 874-1122 ROYALTON HOTEL, Kitchenette $135 & up wk. Free WiFi. 1810 W. Jackson 312-226-4678

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

APT, 1st flr, newly remod, heat & hot water, ceiling fans, & appls incl. $725 /mo + 1 mo sec. 708-641-1227

1448 w 92nd #3 $750, large 1BR, 1BA, living room, eat in kitchen, hdwd floors, Heat & water inc, no sec dep. Call Pam 312-208-1771.

1 BR $800-$899 LARGE ONE BEDROOM near

the lake. 1335 W Estes. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. $850-925/month. Available 8/1. 773-761-4318.

4 1/2 RM apt., 1BR, 1BA, LR/DR, kitc, hdwd flrs, 2nd flr, nice area, $85 0/mo., 1 mo rent_+ 1 mo security, Call btwn 9-5, 773-603-0617 ask for Ethel

CHATHAM - 7105 S. Champlain, 1BR. $640/mo. Sec 8 OK. Heat & appl. Call Office: 773-9665275 or Steve: 773-936-4749 MARQUETTE PARK: 6315-19 S . California, 1 Bedrooms from $675, 2 Bedrooms from $825. Heat included. Call 312.208.1771

ONE BEDROOM NEAR Warren

Park and Metra. 6804 N. Wolcott. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Heat included. Laundry in building. $925/ month. Available 8/1. 773-761-4318.

SECTION 8 WELCOME SOUTHSIDE, Recently renovated, 1 BR Apts. FREE HEAT! $800-$1000/mo. Call Sean, 773-410-7084

N. LAWNDALE 3450 6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

û NO SEC DEP û 1431 W. 78th St. 1BR. $500/mo. 6829 S. Perry. Studio/1BR. $465$520. HEAT INCL 773-955-5106 Newly updated, clean furnished rooms in Joliet, near buses & Metra, elevator. Utilities included, $91/wk. $395/mo. 815-722-1212 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $130/wk & up. 773-275-4442

W. Lexington. 4rm Apt, fridge stove,blinds & heat included $800/mo. Credit check required. 773-374-8316

1 BR $900-$1099 319 E. 80TH St 1BR, 2nd flr. $1040/

mo. & 324 E. 80th St. 2BR, 1st flr. $124 0/mo. Both Very lg, comp renov formal DR & cust features throughout., stove, fridge & vented microwave incl both non-ref move in fee req. 773.981.2731

RAVENSWOOD DLX 3/RM studio: new kit, SS appl, granite, French windows, oak flrs, close to Brown L; $1050/heated 773-7434141 www.urbanequities.com

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

2 BR UNDER $900 SANGAMON/ 119TH 2BEDROOMS apartment with for-

mal living, dinning room, laundry room in unit, new hardwood floors throughout, Section 8 Welcome! 773-260-2631

CHICAGO SOUTHSIDE BRAND new 3BR-4BR condos. Exc. neighborhood, near transp/ schools, Sec 8 Welc., For details call 708-774-2473 PARK MANOR, Large, beautiful 2BR Apartment. Move in ready, A/C, quiet, safe building. $800/mo. Call 773-8444917 FREE HEAT 94-3739 S. BISHOP.

2BR, 5rm, 2nd floor, appls, parking, storage & closet space, near shops/ trans. $900 + sec. 708-335-0786

75TH & GREEN 2BR, 1st flr, heat/ hot water incl., newly deocrated & carpeted, free credit chk. $825/mo + 1 mo sec. Avail now. 773-8461140 SECTION 8 WELCOME 54 W. 109TH St. 2BR, 2nd flr,

new remod, ceiling fans, appls, ner Elementary School. $775/mo + 1 mo sec. 708-641-1227 Call 12p-7p

SOUTH SHORE: 76TH & KENWOOD, 2 BED, 1 BATH, $850. HEAT INCLUDED. CALL 847.630. 6030

2 BR $1100-$1299 ROGERS PARK, 7400N & 1900W. Newly Decor 2BR, free gas & heat.

no pets, no smoking or drugs. $1100 + dep. Sec 8 welc. 847-4772790 NR 84TH/INGLESIDE, nice 23BR, mod kit & BA, C/A, laundry hkup. $1100. 1 mo rent + 1 mo sec. No Smoking Call/text 708-721-0006

BRONZEVILLE, BEAUTIFUL REMOD 1, 2 & 3BR Apts, hdwd flrs, custom cabinets, avail now. $1000-$1200 /mo + sec. 773905-8487. Sect 8 Ok ELMHURST: Dlx 1BR, new appl, new carpet, AC, balc. overlook pool, $925/mo. incl heat, prkg, OS Laundry. 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com 73RD & DORCHESTER, 2BR, refrig & stove, lndry hookups, off street prkg, enclosed yard, $975/ mo. No security dep. 773-684-1166

2 BR $1300-$1499 WEST RIDGE 2BR: new kit, SS appls, granite ctrs, FDR, lndry, new windows, near Metra $1295-$1350 heated 773-743-4141 urbanequitie s.com

2 BR $1500 AND OVER

8200 S. DREXEL XL 2BR $995/ mo & Quiet area 1140 E. 81st Pl. 1BR. $670/mo. Heat & appls incl. Living & dining rm, newly remodeled. No Sec Dep. Sec 8 OK. 312-915-0100. 2111 E. 67TH ST. 2BRM, 1BA, hdwd flrs, SS appls, central heat and air, dishwasher and W/D in unit. $1050/mo. Call 773-495-0286 CHICAGO 6654 S. UNIVERSITY

2BR,1BA Condo Apt, all utilities incl, Sec 8 OK. 1BR Voucher OK. $1000/mo. Call Jerry, 773-699-5774

7530 S. LANGLEY, 2BR, 1BA Apt

hdwd flrs, 1st flr, updated kitchen and Bath, heat incl. Sec 8 Welc. $950+. 773-383-4718

9424 S LAFLIN #2s, 5rm 2BR,

1BA, $1080, central air and heat, Dishwasher, hdwd floors, no sec dep. Call Pam 312-208-1771.

SOUTH SHORE , 8230 S. Merrill, Quiet Large 2 BR, remod, hdwd floors LR, DR, heat incl, $1050+ 1mo sec 708-951-4486

70TH AND DORCHESTER. 2BR available for a janitor on 3rd flr, $475/mo + security. Tenant pays utilities. Call 773-744-4603

WICKER PARK-SUNNY, LARGE 2 bedroom/ 1 bath-Includes stainless steel kitchen with dishwasher, central heat and air, laundry in basement. Oakley and Division. $1600. 773-706-0138

EAST LOGAN: 2BR + den/1BA. Remodeled 2nd floor unit; new kitchen w/SS appliances, updated bath, new hardwood floors, freshly painted. laundry in building, EZ parking, separate utilities. No smoking. No pets. $1650 + one month security. Available now. Call 773-879-2430

SECT 8 OK, 2 story, 4br/2ba w/ bsmt. New decor, crpt & hdwds, ceiling fans, stove/fridge, $1465. 11243 S. Eggleston, 773-443-5397

car gar, fully rehab w/ gorgeous finishes & hdwd flrs. Beautiful bkyd. Sec 8 ok $1150-$1350. 510.735.7171

8222 S. MARSHFIELD 3BR, 2nd Fl. Showing Sat only 11AM–2PM $925. + Sec, Tens. Pay utils, Phone calls not necessary 773-426-0280

1 BA, includes heat, Sec. 8 OK. $1,050/mo. 773-802-0422

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

3 BEDROOM AND 1 bathroom

condo with stainless steel appliances included at 422 south Homan Avenue in Chicago for $1290. Call 773-7446770 to inquire.

BRICK 4BRS/1.5BA 62nd & Winchester. $1300/mo & 8955 S. May. $1550/mo. Move-in Fee, Sec 8 Ok. 773-720-9787 or 773-483-2594 4221 S ELLIS 1s 6 room 3BR, 1BA,

$1300 heat and water included, No security deposit. Call Pam 312-2081771.

WASHINGTON PARK, NEWLY remod 3BR duplex, 2BA, LR, DR & den. Hdwd flrs, appls incl. ample prkg. Near trans/schools. 773-241-0619

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799

MARKHAM HOME FOR RENT 4-5BR. Section 8 preferred. Call 708-296-6222

CHATHAM: 7234 S PRAIRIE beautiful rehabbed 5BR house, hdwd floors, fin bsmt, granite ctr tops, SS appls, $1700/mo. 708288-4510.

CHICAGO S: Newly renovated, Large 3-5BR. In unit laundry, hardwood flrs, very clean, No Deposit! Available Now! 708-655-1397 CHICAGO HOUSES FOR rent.

BELMONT CRAIGIN: BEAUT. 2-flat 1200sf 2BR new kit/appl, oak flrs, lndy, stor/prkg, $1200/ mo + util 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com HUMBOLDT PK 2BR: Sunny corner unit, New eat-in kitc., new appl, new carpet, Lndry, $925/mo + util., 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com

CALUMET CITY 3-4BR , 1.5 BA 2

3BR, 1BA, hdwd flrs, heat included, quiet building, street parking. $925/ mo + 1 mo sec dep. 312-550-2647

HUMBOLDT PK, 3BR/2BA Duplex: new kit & appl, oak flrs, lrg master suite deck, prkg, lndry, $15 95/+ util 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com EVANSTON 1BR, GREAT kit, new appls, FDR, vint. built-ins, oak flrs, near Red Line, lndry $1095/ heated 773-743-4141 urbanequities .com BRONZEVILLE DLX 1/BR: new kit, private deck & yard, SS appls, FDR, oak flrs, new windows, $1075 /heated 773-743-4141 urbanequitie s.com WRIGLEYVILLE LANDMARK 3 B R Plus: new kit/appls, vint. built-ins, oak flrs, sunrm, lndry, $21 00/mo heated 773-743-4141 urba nequities.com ALBANY PARK 3BR: new kit, SS appl, granite cntrs, oak flrs, French drs, $1500+ util 773-7434141 www.urbanequities.com

Section 8 Ok, w/app credit $500 gift certificate 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail. 312-446-3333 or 708-752-3812

GENERAL 101ST/MAY, 1br. 77th/Lowe. 1 & 2br. 69th/Dante 3br. 71st/Bennett. 2 & 3br. 77th/Essex. 3br. New renov. Sec 8 ok. 708-503-1366

FOR SALE NEAR 4800 S. Lake Shore Dr. Lrg 3BR end unit Condo w/spac closets, on the 22nd flr, 2 Full BA, MB, spectacular views of Lake Michigan, 2 indoor garage spaces, full amenity building. $289,900. Call Sid. Maner Realty . 773-783-6474 PAXSON PROPERTIES.

Own your house. Seller finance, $2500 down. Mo payment cheaper then rent. Buyer must be approved (no bank). N & NW Ind. Mike 847-280-1204 WI, CRIVITZ AREA, home on 40 wooded acres by Caldron Falls, 1800 SF, 3BR, 2.5BA, whirlpool tub, walk out basement, 2 car garage. $450k. Appt, 920-737-6160 MAKE UP TO

$60,000 per deal Guaranteed Financing Real Estate Audio Seminar Free info call 773-340-3151

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non-residential

SERVICES

SELF-STORAGE CENTERS. T W O locations to serve you. All

DOHERTYCRIMINAL.LAWYER

units fully heated and humidity controlled with ac available. North: Knox Avenue. 773-685-6868. South: Pershing Avenue. 773-523-6868.

roommates SOUTH SHORE, Senior

Discount. Male preferred. Furnished rooms, shared kitchen & bath, $550/ mo. & up. Utilities included. 773-710-5431

MARKETPLACE

HEALTH & WELLNESS FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

special. Russian, Polish, Ukrainain girls. Northbrook and Schaumburg locations. 10% discount for new customers. Please call 773-407-7025

GREAT OUTDOOR PATIO RUMMAGE SALE!

@ The CORNER of at 56th Street & Hyde Park Blvd. Directly across street from the Museum of Science & Industry. (Follow the balloons) SATURDAY, JULY 15th, 9-5. (In the event of rain, the Rummage Sale will be held on July 16, 2017) Designer Clothing - St. John suits. gowns, furs, coats, dresses, etc… Vintage Clothing, glassware, hats, shoes, handbags, JEWELRY, bric-abrac, furnishing & LOTS MORE!

MASSAGE TABLES, NEW and

used. Large selection of professional high quality massage equipment at a very low price. Visit us at www. bestmassage.com or call us, 773764-6542.

ENGLISH BULLDOG PUPPIES , GCHB CH Sired Show Dog, Excellent Pedigree/show potential, 618-335-2586 for pics & info

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Unity Players announes AUDITIONS for 4 new plays by local playwrights ! August 5th - 10:00 a.m. - 12:00 p,m. and 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m... August 6th 12:30 p.m. -2:30 p.m. 1212 West Balmoral, Chicago Call HANK at 773-275-5124 for further information Production - last two weekends in September

legal notices NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-

MUSIC & ARTS

GOODS

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

ACTORS NEEDED !!

suant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D17151342 on July 7, 2017 Under the Assumed Business Name of BEHOLD INTERNATIONAL SALON with the business located at: 1824 W 79TH ST, CHICAGO, IL 60620. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner(s)/partner(s) is: CHICTOWA WEATHERSPOON 3447 W 137TH BOX 1163, ROBBINS, IL 60472, USA

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-

MAMA AFRICA.. YEMI ALADE

WITH HER OVERSABI BAND WILL BE PERFORMING LIVE IN CHICAGO SAT JULY 15TH AT THE JC MARTINI CLUB AT 3124 N CENTRAL AVE, CHICAGO, IL 60641... TICKETS START AT $40... GET YOUR TICKETS AT EVENTBRITE KEYWORD YEMIALADEINCHICAGO... OR AT THE DOOR

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suant to "An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State," as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D17151337 on July 7, 2017 under the Assumed Business Name of Joyride Organics with the business located at 331 W Armitage Ave, Chicago, IL 60614. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner( s)/ partner(s) is: Danielle Marie Ostrowski, 526 Hampshire Lane, Bolingbrook, IL 60440, USA.

ADULT SERVICES

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499 W RG PARK: 2BR, New Constr., grand kit, new appl, oak flrs, lndry, storage, prkg. $1300/+ util 773743-4141 urbanequities.com

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

SECTION 8 WELCOME Chicago, 11526 S Harvard 5BR/2BA, $1600. 255 W. 111th Pl., 6BR/3BA $1700. Call 773-793-8339, ask for Joe.

2 BR OTHER ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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

ENGLEWOOD 2-4BR unit apts in 2 unit gated bldgs, hdwd flrs, pets OK, no sec dep, W/D & appls incl, tenant pays own utils 773-715-1591

CHICAGO - 1206 E. 82nd St. 2E. 2BR, newly remodeled, carpet, security bar doors, heat incl. CHA tenant welcome. 708-957-9004

7904 S WABASH: Unit 3A - 1

bedroom, $745.00, Free heat, GRANITE COUNTER TOPS, Call 312-2081771

Move-in fee $275. Call 773-548-7286 for application

SOUTHEAST LOC 3RD flr apt,

2BR, 1st flr, carpet, ceiling fans & mini blinds. $785/mo + security. HEAT INCLUDED. 773-374-9747

2 BR $900-$1099

BRONZEVILLE - 4310 S. King Dr. 1BR. $550/mo. Heat i ncluded

CHATHAM-3BR 1.5BA, stove/ heat incl, laundry in bsmt, 7900 block of Langley, Sec 8 Ok. $1000/ mo. Mr. Johnson, 630-424-1403

9112 S. YATES, Great location.

CHICAGO 7600 S Essex 2BR $599, 3BR $699, 4BR $799 w/apprvd credit, no sec dep. Sect 8 Ok! 773287-9999 /312-446-3333

ROSELAND: 2 & 3BR, hdwd flrs, appls incl., alarm system, $800/ mo, tenant pays utilities, quiet block, Call 312-420-2765.

SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo. 708-288-4510

SECTION 8 WELCOME! 7410 S. Vernon 2BR, 1st flr, remod, hdwd flrs, appl & heat inc, laundry on site $815+ Zoran 773.406.4841

age. $665. 5246 S. Hermitage: 3BR, 2nd fl, $625 & 2BR bsmt $400 1.5 mo sec req’d. 708-574-4085.

JOLIET W BELLARMINE. Beautiful townhome, 3BR, 1.5BA, remod., Close to I-80, tenant pays util. $980/mo 815-302-5729 or 708-422-8801

WOODLAWN COMMUNITY (CLOSE to U of C campus) 3 BR,

SECTION 8 WELCOME! 4950 S. Prairie. 1BR. $680+. remod, hdwd flrs, appl inc, laundry on site. Zoran 773.406.4841

CHICAGO 3BR 5258 S. Hermit-

70TH & ARTESIAN, H u g e 3BR, eat in kitch, large pantry + bonus rm,1st fl lndry rm, sep heat. hdwds $850/mo Section 8 Welcome 630-4121612

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 East 115th St, 3 BR/ 2BA, full bsmt, all appliances, encl yard, security system, tenant pays util $1175+move in fee 773-817-4680

ADULT SERVICES

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

224-223-7787

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS Find a concert, buy a ticket, and sign up to get advance notice of Chicago’s essential music shows at chicagoreader.com/early. JULY 13, 2017 | CHICAGO READER 39

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Of medical fetishes and the ‘degradation pool’ Dan advises a doc in training and a “really angry gal.” Q : I’m a gay medical student with a medical fetish, and I can’t even open up to my therapist about this. I think it started when I was young; I was once in the hospital and given a suppository for a fever. Then one time I was given a Fleet enema. I don’t think the “butt stuﬀ” turned me gay, but my fetish may stem from the aspect of being controlled. I grew up in a very conservative religious household. I’ve never been in a relationship, and I don’t know that I could have one while hiding what turns me on. In my profession, we have to be conﬁdent and even sort of “dominant” in our roles as providers, but underneath I’m incredibly submissive. I didn’t go into medicine for this reason. We have very strict professional boundaries and ethical expectations, and I have no problem with that. I expect my job to be very clinical and boring. But outside of work, I feel like my sexual desires need some kind of outlet. —DILEMMA OF CONSCIENCE

A : “Someone can have one persona at work and another at home,” said Eric the Red, a Florida nurse and a fellow medical fetishist. “DOC can be conﬁdent and dominant at work and then ﬁnd someone to spend his life with who brings out his submissive side and gives him the balance to make him feel like a whole person.” In other words, DOC, when you do start dating and having relationships, you’re going to want to be open about your kinks. They’re nothing to be ashamed of, and there’s no point in hiding your sexual interests from your future partner(s). You want a sex partner who meets your needs, not one you have to hide your needs from. So long as you keep things

professional at work—which shouldn’t be hard, since it’s being the patient and not the doctor that turns you on—you have nothing to feel conflicted about. “The one practical problem he will encounter is that since he actually knows how to give a physical, he may have less patience with fetishists who are not medical professionals in real life and don’t really know what they are doing,” said Eric. “Over the years, I have trained nonprofessionals who want to play doctor to give semi-realistic physicals, insert and irrigate catheters, use sounds, and otherwise have enough technical expertise to do a medical scene that’s realistic enough that I can enjoy being their patient without screaming, ‘No, that’s not how it’s done!’ He may find himself doing the same.” The good news? “DOC won’t have any trouble finding like-minded people,” said Eric. “Medical fetishists are well organized online; just spend a few minutes on Google and he’ll find them.”

Q : As a 56-year-old, 95

percent straight woman, I’d like to think all y’all gay men can enjoy blow jobs without that dip in the degradation pool straight men always take. Maybe you could gaysex talk some sense into stupid straight men. On PornHub recently, I watched a fearless young woman use a dildo ﬁve ways and come at least ten full symphony times. This new generation of women! Impressive! But then I watched an 18-year-old Russian woman with an equally beautiful black American man. She sucked away on his dick and swallowed 12 times in ﬁve minutes! I kept thinking: She’s gonna get a break now? Maybe a hug? A

beer, a joint, a pay raise? Something?!? Nope. She even apologized for spilling some come at one point. Now I’m SAD. It’s the exact same shit I faced when I started in ’73. Y’all gay men do blow jobs without degradation. Tell straight men how it’s done! —REALLY

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A : There’s nothing inherently

demeaning about giving someone a blow job, and plenty of people—gay, straight, bi, pan, demi, sapio, etc—give and receive blow jobs without splashing around in the degradation pool. That said, RAGING, gay men are just as likely as straight men to “dip in” when they’re getting blow jobs— particularly when a blow job is being filmed. Head over to the gay aisle at PornHub. You’ll find lots of videos where the guys giving blow jobs are degraded—called names, roughly handled, made to apologize for come spillage—and you’ll be hardpressed to find one in which the word “cocksucker” isn’t tossed around. But don’t feel bad for all those gay cocksuckers, RAGING: For many gay men, the taunts we feared most in high school become the dirty talk that gets us off in adulthood. As for the video you saw—a Russian interfering with an American erection—there must have been breaks that were edited out (no guy can come 12 times in five minutes), so hugs, beers, and joints may have been made available when the cameras weren’t running. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. v @fakedansavage

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b Lizz Wright 11/1-2, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/13, noon b

UPDATED Sabrina Carpenter, Camila Cabello, Jacob Sartortius, Alex Aiono 8/13, 2:30 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont, moved from Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre

UPCOMING

Frankie Cosmos ò GROUND CONTROL TOURING

NEW

Herb Alpert & Lani Hall 11/6-7, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/13, noon b Tori Amos 10/27, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM Authority Zero, Supervillains 9/2, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Cameron Avery 9/17, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM, 18+ Band of Heathens 10/20, 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 7/14, 11 AM California Honeydrops 9/28, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 7/14, noon Jim Campilongo Trio 10/25, 8 PM, Green Mill, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM Chicano Batman, Khruangbin 9/30, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM, 17+ Joseph Chilliams 8/28, 7 PM, Schubas b Johnny Clegg 10/29, 7 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM b Couch Slut, Coordinated Suicides 9/6, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Cults 10/22, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM Dark Star Orchestra 10/13, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM, 18+ Antoine DuFour & Ian Ethan Case 9/7, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM b Echosmith, Banners 11/3, 8:30 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM b Elaine Elias 9/8, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM b Kurt Elling 11/25-26, 5 and 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/13, noon b

End of the Ocean 8/3, 6 PM, Township b Fey, OV7, Aleks Syntek 11/7, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM Frankie Cosmos 9/30, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 7/14, 11 AM b Joel Futterman & Ike Levin 8/25, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ A Giant Dog 9/17, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Mike Gordon 10/6, 8 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM, 18+ Kevin Griﬃn 8/19, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM b Trevor Hall 9/22, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Niall Horan 11/15, 8 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont, on sale Sat 7/15, 10 AM Incognito 10/16, 7 and 9:30 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/13, noon b Inquisition 9/10, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club Jay-Z 12/5, 8 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM Lany 10/21, 7 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM b Leon 10/21, 8:30 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 7/14, 9 AM b Tony Lucca 9/27, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM b Michelle Malone Band 9/10, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM b Marilyn Manson 10/10, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM, 18+ Mastodon, Brain Tentacles 9/9, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Metz 9/25, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM, 17+ New Lionel Hampton Big Band with Jason Marsalis 8/4, 8 PM, the Promontory b

42 CHICAGO READER - JULY 13, 2017

Nots 9/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Oz Noy & Ozone Squeeze 9/19, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Papadosio, Dirtwire 12/16, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM, 18+ Partner 9/28, 7 PM, Township, 17+ Pededjet 8/6, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Pelican, Grails 10/13, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM Willy Porter & Carmen Nickerson 10/8, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM b Protomartyr 10/8, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM, 18+ Rezz 10/14, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Thu 7/13, 10 AM, 18+ Rodriguez 10/10, 7:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM, 18+ A. Savage, Jack Cooper 11/2, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Sextile 9/12, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Shivas 8/22, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Signals Midwest, Pacemaker, Throw Shade 8/5, 8 PM, Township, 17+ Slackers 12/1-3, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith 10/26, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 7/14, noon, 18+ That 1 Guy 9/17, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ We Banjo 3 8/29, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/13, noon b Weepies 10/12, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM b The Weight Band 10/7, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM b Wooks 9/23, 9 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 7/14, 10 AM

Actress, Elysia Crampton 8/24, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Afghan Whigs, Har Mar Superstar 9/22-23, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Against Me!, Bleached 9/30, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b Avett Brothers 11/9-11, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Bad Suns 10/20, 7:30 PM, Metro b Belle & Sebastian, Julien Baker 8/16, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Boris, Helms Alee 10/23, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Jackson Browne 8/13, 7:30 PM, Copernicus Center Cattle Decapitation, Revocation 10/27, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Paula Cole 10/11, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Deep Purple, Alice Cooper, Edgar Winter Band 9/6, 6:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Depeche Mode 8/30, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Earth, Wind & Fire; Chic 7/26, 8 PM, United Center Father John Misty, Weyes Blood 9/20, 8 PM, Auditorium Theatre Fleet Foxes 10/3-4, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Good Old War, Twin Bandit 7/25, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Growlers 10/6, 9:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Guns N’ Roses 11/6, 8 PM, United Center Helena Hauﬀ 7/29, 10 PM, Smart Bar Hirax 7/29, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ J. Cole 7/24, 8 PM, United Center Jeﬀ the Brotherhood 7/29, 10 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Paul Kelly 10/10, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard 9/24-25, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall Lemon Twigs 8/4, 11 PM, Schubas, 18+ Arto Lindsay 10/20, 8 PM, Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago b Lords of Acid, Combichrist, Christian Death 10/31, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

Never miss a show again. Sign up for the newsletter at chicagoreader. com/early

Male Gaze 8/27, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Melvins 7/25, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Neurosis, Converge, Amenra 7/28, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Of Montreal 9/14, 8 PM, Logan Square Auditorium, 18+ Pears 10/11, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Picture This 9/16, 8 PM, Schubas b A Place Both Wonderful and Strange 8/20, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Quicksand 9/27, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Rancid, Dropkick Murphys, Bouncing Souls 8/8, 6:30 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion Frankie Rose 10/7, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Saint Pe, Crocodiles 10/12, 9 PM, Hideout Shakira 1/23, 7:30 PM, United Center Slow Dancer 9/29, 9 PM, Hideout Slowdive 11/5, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Stiﬀ Little Fingers, Death by Unga Bunga 9/20, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Temples, Declan McKenna 8/2, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Toadies, Local H 10/10, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ UFO, Saxon 10/8, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Ultimate Painting 7/25, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Venom Inc., Goatwhore, Toxic Holocaust 9/8, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Verite 8/28, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Wage War 8/12, 5:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b Martha Wainwright 10/15, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Wand, Darto 9/30, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ War on Drugs 10/19, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Washed Out 8/25, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ The Weeknd 11/2, 7:30 PM, United Center Paul Weller 10/12, 9 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Widowspeak 9/13, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Dan Wilson 9/23, 8 PM, City Winery b Wire 9/16, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Victor Wooten Trio 11/5, 5 and 8 PM, City Winery b Wray 8/18, 8:30 PM, Beat Kitchen Rachael Yamagata, Joshua Radin 7/29, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene GOSSIP WOLF FIRST heard the immaculate vocals of Sacha Mullin in avant-weird band Lovely Little Girls (where the Reader’s Philip Montoro noted his “exalted and almost alien” sound) and in long-running prog-pop outfit Cheer-Accident (where he still sings). On Saturday, July 15, Mullin self-releases his second solo album, Duplex, whose oddly tuneful songs sound a bit like George Michael fronting far-out jam band Gong in a Broadway-style revue. That’s not a surprise, considering that the session musicians on Duplex include current and former members of CheerAccident and the similarly uncategorizable American Draft and Guzzlemug. Also on Saturday, Mullin celebrates the album with a Cafe Mustache show featuring Dougie Poole, Ted Tyro, and Double Morris. In 2008, Robert Cole Manis worked with Drag City imprint Galactic Zoo Disk to release the compilation LP Cosmic Lightning by forgotten outsider punk J.T. IV (aka John Henry Timmis IV), who’d died in 2002. This week, in conjunction with Featherproof Books, Manis’s Moniker Records label publishes Timmis’s From the Inside, a short autobiographical work that focuses on his adolescent experiences at a Kansas mental health facility. Gossip Wolf loves Assembly, the 2015 album by Arvo Zylo’s colossal experimental group Blood Rhythms—“colossal” describes both its ominous sound and its shifting lineup, which has included up to 15 people (including five drummers). The group has been pretty quiet since Assembly, though the Bandcamp page for Zylo’s label, No Part of It, lists two Blood Rhythms releases uploaded last year—a reissue of the 2009 live cassette Cutting Teeth and a compilation called Heuristics. On Thursday, July 13, Blood Rhythms return to the stage at Logan Square dive the Mutiny, joined by Gas Mask Horse, Spare Change, and Silver Abuse. Zylo says this may be Blood Rhythms’ ﬁnal Chicago show—he’s moving away! The noise starts at 9 PM. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

BRING IT! LIVE FRIDAY, JULY 28

ALPHAVILLE CHICAGO DEBUT FEATURING MARIAN GOLD & BAND SUNDAY, AUGUST 6

LYLE LOVETT & HIS LARGE BAND

MARY J. BLIGE

SATURDAY, JULY 29

WITH SPECIAL GUEST LALAH HATHAWAY SUNDAY, JULY 30

VAN JONES

BELLE AND SEBASTIAN

WE RISE TOUR TUESDAY, AUGUST 8

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 16

GET ACCESS TO

CHASE PREFERRED

SEATING

AVAILABLE TO CHASE CREDIT AND DEBIT CARDMEMBERS.

For more info, visit Ticketmaster.com or

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The Chicago Theatre provides disabled accommodations and sells tickets to disabled individuals through our Disabled Services department, which may be reached at 888-609-7599 any weekday from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Debit cards are provided by JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC Credit cards are issued by Chase Bank USA, N.A. © 2016 JPMorgan Chase & Co.

JULY 13, 2017 - CHICAGO READER 43