Chicago Reader print issue of July 18, 2024 (Vol. 53, No. 24) by Chicago Reader

THIS WEEK

05 Op-ed Are ﬁlm and TV studios exploiting writers?

FOOD & DRINK

06 Feature It’s Bayan Ko for breakfast.

07 Reader Bites Roasted chicken and red pepper relish sandwich at Sfera Sicilian Street Food

NEWS & POLITICS

08 Feature A traﬃc engineer dispels the myth that streets are designed to be safe.

10 Brown | CPD Northwest-side neighbors push CPD to ﬁre cop with ties to far-right group.

ARTS & CULTURE

11 Review Arts + Public Life’s newest exhibition highlights the work of Elizabeth Catlett alongside three south-side artists who carry on her legacy.

CITY LIFE

14 Street View Pitchfork Music Festival fashion over the years

THEATER & DANCE

16 Reid | Preview Reminiscent Circus’s Way Home examines place and memory.

20 Plays of Note Pegasus Theatre Chicago’s Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea, Haven Chicago’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Northlight’s 2 Pianos 4 Hands, and more

FILM

22 Feature Find ﬁlm fests at ChicagoScreens.org.

23 Moviegoer She has “It.”

24 Movies of Note Fly Me to the Moon is an underwhelming space race ﬁlm, Longlegs is as dumb as it is scary, and My Spy the Eternal City is a poorly conceived sequel.

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

25 Ludwig | Feature The PRF BBQ sustains the heart of DIY.

27 Gossip Wolf New Morality Zine boosts local hardcore with a Rumble preshow, From the ’Go Fest tops its biggest bill yet with a Vic Mensa set, and more.

28 The Secret History of Chicago Music Avondale Electric built lifelong friendships playing psychedelic rock.

CHICAGO READER |

30 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Common with the Grant Park Orchestra, hardcore festival the Rumble, and Brandee Younger

CLASSIFIEDS

33 Jobs

34 Professionals & Services

34 Auditions

34 Marketplace

34 Matches

OPINION

35 Savage Love Catching the feels for a fuck buddy

ON THE COVER: CHRISTINA RAMBERG’S HAIR, 1968. COLLECTION OF JOEL WACHS, NEW YORK. ©THE ESTATE OF CHRISTRINA RAMBERG. PHOTOGRAPHY BY KRIS GRAVES. “CHRISTINA RAMBERG: A RETROSPECTIVE” IS ON VIEW AT THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO UNTIL AUGUST 11, ARTIC.EDU/EXHIBITIONS/9723/CHRISTINARAMBERG-A-RETROSPECTIVE. COVER PULL QUOTE IN THIS WEEK’S “MOVIEGOER” BY KAT SACHS, P.23.

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ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA

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Reader Letters m

Re: “The CTA’s missing riders,” written by Reema Saleh and published in the July 4 issue (volume 53, number 22)

The idea that the market would sustain CTA isn’t how public transit works anywhere. It must [be] substantially subsidized and expanded, then the ridership will follow. —Patrick Brosnan, via X

At the Logan Square Blue Line station we just waited 37 minutes for a westbound Diversey bus. This is why we stopped taking CTA on the regular. —Blanche Kolaczek, via X

Re: “Eighty-six the Italian beef,” written by Lauren Coates and published in the July 11 issue (volume 53, number 23)

Watched episode three last night and it was a cross between a symphony and the movie Inside Out, but set in a restaurant. Thrilling and beautiful television. —Sheila Quirke, via X

The shark has been jumped on this show. —Lon Marvin, via Facebook

No sugar coating here: I’m six episodes in and it’s nowhere as good as the previous season. Also, the whole John Cena “haunting” dialogue was a complete waste of time and is a brain cell killer. —Niko Flores, via Facebook

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

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

m letters@chicagoreader.com

EDITOR’S NOTE

Bottom: dining room and dishes at Bayan Ko on Montrose

In this issue we bring you points to ponder from all over the map, including an interview with an author studying some worrisome aspects of urban planning and traffic engineering (p. 8) and a report from an exhibition currently on view in Washington Park featuring a Black woman artist with Chicago ties who is getting some long-deserved respect now, 12 years after her death.

These are just two of the heady concepts we’re hopeful that you’ll dive into this week. You can think of the Reader as kind of a

summer school: valuable information will be delivered, but we’re also cognizant that there is some beachy weather out there to enjoy—so consider heading out to events like music festivals (p. 14, p. 25) and live theater (p. 16). Chicago is better when it’s not just where you hang your hat but where you live and thrive. We’ll see you out there in the wild and encourage you to start conversations, take chances on culture, and keep reading. v

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

CORRECTIONS

The Reader has updated the online version of Jennifer Smart’s July 11 print feature “Explore the city’s ‘more-than-human soundtrack,’” about an auditory installation hosted at Millennium Park’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion this summer. The story was amended to clarify that the organizations Experimental Sound Studio and AntennaeProject are copresenting the exhibition. v

Top: patrons enjoy “Of Her Becoming: Elizabeth Catlett’s Legacy in Chicago” at the Arts Incubator on Garﬁ eld Boulevard

Studios violate contracts, unions look the other way

Are

ﬁlm and TV studios exploiting writers and actors by not sharing in the YouTube wealth?

By RICH TALARICO

Studios are exploiting the makers of sketch comedy/variety shows like Saturday Night Live and Key & Peele by cutting the show archives into short segments and distributing them on platforms like YouTube— accumulating billions of views and paying writers and actors nothing for that use. With expert estimates valuing ad-generated revenue averaging $10,000 per million views, the studios are engaging in wage theft on a massive scale while the unions turn a blind eye.

The promotional exemption is a provision within the Minimum Basic Agreement (MBA), the contract that governs pay for Writers Guild of America (WGA) writers. The promotional exemption allows Hollywood studios (Paramount, NBCUniversal, Fox, etc.) to use excerpts of a writer’s work for promotional purposes without the writer receiving any compensation. Ideally, this helps generate interest and viewership, which earns royalties for writers.

Trailers, teasers, or promotional materials generally fall under this exemption. The industry deﬁnition of an excerpt has long been established as “bits to entice,” i.e. sample fragments to inspire viewers to pay to watch the full content. The promotional exemption has certain limitations and guidelines. Excerpts must be limited in duration (under ﬁve minutes) and should not exceed what is reasonably necessary for promotional purposes. Additionally, the promotional use should not damage the commercial value of the work.

It’s important for Chicago’s next generation of comedians to understand how their work will be used so, hopefully, the new crop can avoid exploitation. I got my start in Chicago (Second City and ImprovOlympic, now known as iO Chicago) alongside many well-known comics like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Jack McBrayer, Adam McKay, Jordan Peele, and Keegan-Michael Key.

I wrote, produced, and served as WGA show

captain for the Emmy Award–winning Key & Peele ( K&P ), the successful sketch show that aired on Comedy Central from 2012 to 2015 and yielded 57 episodes and nearly 300 individual sketches. I was responsible for the sketch “Substitute Teacher (‘Ay-Ay-Ron?’)”, which in 2024 was added to the Smithsonian. I was also the writer behind the sketches “Black Ice,” “Obama Greets,” “Hatz,” “Racist Zombies,” “Speaking After MLK,” and more. The majority of our sketches are under five minutes and have been uploaded and seen billions of times on YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms. The views resulted in no compensation for writers under a bogus “promotional” rationale. These promotional uploads were Paramount’s way of chopping up the entire series and calling it “promotion,” stealing royalties from writers.

Worse, I believe that the WGA, which represents the writers’ interests, has failed to respond appropriately to this issue. By not calling out these violations and failing to provide open communication, meetings, and clarity on potential solutions, the union has contributed to the problem.

Early in K&P’s run, Comedy Central began uploading full series sketches to YouTube, (purportedly) for promotional purposes. By the end of 2013, Comedy Central had uploaded nearly 100 full K&P sketches to YouTube and Facebook. As WGA show captain for K&P , I had concerns that this saturation of free clips would displace paid consumption of the show (it eventually did). Uploading is so rampant that audiences did not even seem to know we were a TV show. Comedy Central ultimately responded by adding interstitials on the uploaded clips, which self-effacingly informed viewers, “We’re on TV.”

In 2015, Paramount concertedly shifted more of its made-for-TV programming for reuse in the online space. The studio seemed to realize that they could reap a financial

windfall by monetizing so-called promotional clips for themselves while sharing none of the revenue with the writers responsible for the content.

This rapid uploading of supposed “promo” clips caused writers deep financial losses to their compensable markets. K&P had reached worldwide popularity, yet writers saw zero returns from DVD and Blu-ray sales and deaths to markets where they could be paid through EST (Electronic Sell Through) and syndication. Writers for K&P and similar shows have lost hundreds of millions in potential returns. Why would any audience pay to watch what Paramount is already giving them for free?

K&P only had 300 or so sketches, but by December 2020, there were over 350 full sketch uploads from the studios on YouTube. Currently, the amount of “promotional” clips and compilations available on YouTube and Facebook far exceeds the actual amount of available K&P material available for sale. Neither the WGA nor the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) have ﬁled grievances on this issue after being made aware. If the contract allows “excerpts” to be used royalty-free, then unions must argue that once 51 percent or more of a show is available in promo form, those uploads can no longer qualify as excerpts.

Taking the entire show in excerpt form is a clear violation. The unions are participating in the studios’ ﬁction by not calling foul when entire shows are exhibited as unpaid “promo clips.” Shockingly, with billions of views, K&P showrunners are told every year that K&P has yet to make a profit and they do not receive any back-end payment. So, if the show doesn’t make any money, why keep promoting at such a furious rate?

A former YouTube employee, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity, says that studios collect ad-generated revenue on these YouTube “promo” uploads, estimating that every one million views earns at least $10,000. The numbers in the chart in the next column came from YouTube’s public API data.

Among just three shows, this outlines nearly $150 million in lost revenue from YouTube alone. I believe all a ected writers and actors need an immediate investigation into this activity—which has ﬁlled the studios’ purses and left writers with nothing for the billions of views these “promotional” clips receive—and back pay for revenue they have never seen.

The point of promotion is to entice, not

CASE STUDIES OF PROMOTIONAL (YOUTUBE ONLY) UPLOADS

AS OF AUGUST 1, 2023

Key & Peele (at least) 593 promo uploads

4,644,135,000 (4.6 billion) total views

$46.4 million in missed revenue

SNL 5911 promo uploads 8,436,724,001 (8.4 billion) total views

$84.3 million in missed revenue

The Daily Show (with Trevor Noah) 2807 promo uploads 1,237,687,493 (1.2 billion) total views

$12.4 million in missed revenue

merely satisfy, the viewer. Analogous to a Panda Express visit where the manager o ers chicken on a toothpick to entice a purchase, studios should avoid flooding potential customers with endless free samples without paying talent. Such practices deter viewers from paying for the full menu. The enticement in the case of promo clips is not to purchase the content but to just watch more free promo clips. Writers were hired to create TV shows, not endless web content masquerading as promotion.

These numerous promotional uploads turn the sampled excerpts into actual content that also discourages paid consumption. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA must name this as a violation of the promotional exemption. Only through collective action and transparency can the union fulfill its responsibility to protect the rights and livelihoods of those it represents. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Rich Talarico is currently running for WGA’s West Board. Rich is an award-winning writer/ producer known for his work on Key & Peele. He also wrote for MADtv, SNL, and The Tonight Show and is an alum of Chicago’s Second City and ImprovOlympic (iO Theater).

FRANK OKAY/UNSPLASH

FOOD & DRINK

REVIEW

It’s Bayan Ko for breakfast

Raquel Quadreny and chef Lawrence Letrero’s Cuban Filipino mom-and-pop returns bigger and better.

By MIKE SULA

Eggs and co ee are the two most essential elements on a proper breakfast diner menu. Add to that potatoes, pork, and toast. What else do you need?

I propose garlic rice. Speciﬁcally, sinangag, the aromatic, allium-imbued grains of a genuine Filipino breakfast.

Jasmine garlic rice is the bewitching perfume in the air at Bayan Ko Diner, the new all-day cafe from Raquel Quadreny and chef Lawrence Letrero, the mom (Cuban) and pop (Filipino) duo that first lit up this Ravenswood block in late 2018 with an axiomatic union of two island cuisines. When I wrote about it back then, I was besotted by the surprising affinities between Cuban and Filipino food—and that it took their marriage to figuratively slap me on the forehead and make me see it for the first time.

Five years later, amid an enduring Filipino

restaurant renaissance encompassing everything from the nearby casual Boonie’s to Michelin-starred Kasama, the couple has relaunched the original Bayan Ko as a fivecourse, prix ﬁxe tasting menu with wine pairings and broadened their original vision to overhaul the space once occupied by the late Glenn’s Diner just a few doors to the west. There are eggs for days— every day—on the menu at Bayan Ko Diner, from 9 AM to 3 PM, and no balut in sight (though I’d love to see what Letrero would do with those). Most notably, their fried sunny-side up eggs, over that garlic rice, in a quartet of silogs: the fundamental Filipino Silogs: sunny-side up eggs over garlic

breakfast, with a choice of sweet tocino (basically unsmoked Filipino bacon), longanisa (similarly sweet pork sausage), soy marinated ribeye tapa, or fried milkﬁsh.

But puncture those cackleberries, and as you wait for the yolk to ooze into the rice, take a peep around the dining room. Many folks are likely hunched over personal-size cast-iron skillets, intently addressing the restaurant’s sisig shishito hash. Here, Letrero skips the pig-face parts typically found in this classic snout-to-tail, vinegar-spiked sizzler in favor of pork belly, mined with a figurative roulette of variably spicy chilies and crispy, smashed purple potatoes. Again, eggs crown the dish, and garlic rice absorbs every precious drop.

adding nothing but a drizzle of garlic aioli. My usual impulse to douse egg-potato combinations in hot sauce never once arises.

There’s a pair of breakfast burritos representing the Philippines (eggs and longanisa) and Cuba (eggs and ropa vieja) and a few American-style breakfast presentations, but as the menu moves into lunch territory, it offers a few memories of the old a la carte Bayan Ko and hints at what’s to come when the diner opens for dinner service sometime next month.

There are eggs for days— every day—on the menu at Bayan Ko Diner.

Another pinnacle in the restaurant’s egg-play is a singleserving expression of the classic, deceptively simple tortilla Española, a three-ingredient omelet requiring precise execution. Normally served at room temperature, Letrero seasons and conﬁts thinly sliced potato, along with caramelized onions, then builds the supporting egg structure to order,

The long, hot, crackly pork-packed lumpia have made the jump. There’s also a plate of the Cuban-style ham croquetas, their exterior crunch yielding on a rich, soft interior farce.

A pork belly version of Letrero’s adobo appears, the iconic sweet and sour soy-vinegar braise a variant of the chicken recipe he once contributed to the Reader’s pandemic cookbook (the garlic rice recipe is in there too), as well as the exemplary Cubano sandwich built upon larded pan Cubano, parbaked and shipped north from Tampa, Florida. And one dish hints at a promise of new

Jasmine garlic rice is the bewitching perfume in the air at Bayan Ko Diner. SANDY NOTO FOR CHICAGO READER

things to come. A roasted half chicken inasal, uniformly juicy and stickily lacquered in soy, begs to be torn apart by hand—by now you know the drill—allowing its juices to seep into the rice below.

A stack of Grimace-colored ube pancakes or a sticky ensaymada—a white cheddar-topped brioche bun with cinnamon butter and whipped cream cheese—are among the sweet showstoppers, none more dramatic than the three-scoop halo-halo sundae (go for pandan, ube, and mango by nearby Milky Milky Ice Cream), garnished with turon (aka banana lumpia) and texturized with puffed rice, red beans, coconut, and ﬂan.

Letrero says more Bayan Ko favorites are coming back with dinner. I’m particularly excited for the return of his pancit palabok— sa ron-stained rice noodles with jiggly scallops, shrimp, and uni. He’s also promising a bar, and, in a nod to the late seagoing Glenn’s, an oyster program, with on-point touches like calamansi mignonette and banana ketchup cocktail sauce.

Not that he’s not already doing more than enough with eggs and rice. v

m msula@chicagoreader.com

One of my survival strategies includes going to the beach year-round, particularly in the winter months when the sky is the same color as the sidewalk and when everything else, including my complexion, is gray. It’s easier to love the beach (and yourself) when the sun is out and the water is warm, but the gnarly majesty of a Great Lake in January reawakens in me an appetite for life—and an appetite, in general, which has been happily sated on my walks to or from the lake in every season by the roasted chicken and red pepper relish sandwich from Sfera Sicilian Street Food.

FOOD & DRINK

It’s airy but strong enough to hold—rather than disintegrate under—a healthy smear of basil pesto and the red pepper and almond relish chicken salad, lightly dressed with arugula, which lovingly sits between the sandwich’s pleasingly square slices. The combination is alchemical. It has the power to transform my day.

You can have it cold or warmed up—I prefer it warm, but the time you wait for it to toast varies mysteriously (in my experience, between ﬁve and 20 minutes).

This is a dangerous sandwich. It’s too easy for me to get—it’s walking distance from my apartment, $12 (not the cheapest but far from the most I’ve paid for a sandwich in this town), and generously sized. But it’s not just convenience or a good deal that keeps me coming back. The focaccia, made in-house, is a salt-kissed delight, oily without being greasy, crispy but soft.

No matter; like going to the beach in all weather, the pleasure of this sandwich has become part of the spell I weave to hold myself together. I eat it on a bench nestled in the lakefront grass with out-of-town friends in the fall. I eat it with my spouse while we sit inside the tiny cafe and watch the winter dusk descend on Edgewater through foggy windows. I eat it while sandy and lazy, lying on my belly on the beach under a 90-degree sun. “Still thinking about that sandwich,” a friend texted a week after I took him there in April. Buddy, me too. —KATIE PROUT SFERA SICILIAN STREET FOOD 5759 N. Broadway, $12, 773-739-9128, sferachicago.com v

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

NEWS & POLITICS

ROADS TO NOWHERE ROADS TO NOWHERE

Q&A

One traﬃc engineer shatters the delusion that science underlies street safety.

By JOE ENGLEMAN

Afew weeks ago, I was driving on S. Ashland Avenue near Swap-O-Rama on Chicago’s southwest side. Ashland’s four lanes feel like a highway there. Back in 2017, the Chicago Tribune identified Ashland—particularly the stretch between 43rd and 87th—as the deadliest street for pedestrians. It’s not uncommon to see people trying to cross without a crosswalk or stoplight, despite the dangers. (You can even see a person’s perilous journey in Google Street View.) There’s no crosswalk for almost half a mile between Pershing and 42nd Street. You must traverse several parking lot entrances to get to the closest crosswalk (on either side of the street). Once you add in the temperature, limited shade, and public transit unreliability, a desperate dash across Ashland begins to make sense.

These factors could be considered when designing streets like Ashland (both here in Chicago and across the country). But often, they aren’t. And when they aren’t, it makes you wonder if pedestrians are simply an inconvenient afterthought. As pedestrian and cyclist deaths surge nationally, and the cost of crashes mounts, tra c engineers (the people who design streets) are receiving increased scrutiny.

If you’re unfamiliar with how streets are designed and built, Wes Marshall’s new book, Killed by a Tra c Engineer: Shattering the Delusion That Science Underlies Our Transportation System, may radicalize you. Marshall, a professional engineer who teaches at the University of Colorado Denver, is calling for “an enlightenment” in tra c engineering. His book answers the question: What if Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses were about road design and brimming with pop culture references? Across almost 350 pages, he dispels the notion that safety has ever been at the center of the street design regime and argues that many of the sacrosanct theories of tra c engineering are rooted in “pseudoscience.”

For decades, he writes, “traffic engineers

Wes Marshall COURTESY

designed and built a system that incites bad behaviors and invites crashes. . . . Most deaths and injuries are the predictable, systemic outcomes that tra c engineers inadvertently caused.” Marshall sees it as his mission to try to undo the damage that’s been done. He’s concerned that even recent transportation approaches, like Vision Zero, that explicitly mention safety and casualty reduction are still just “business as usual under a new slogan.” Marshall’s work covers a lot of ground, making it essential reading whether you’re focused on one street in your neighborhood or your pastime is arguing with tra c engineers at public meetings.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Joe Engleman: What do you want people to understand about how roadways are designed?

Wes Marshall: When [traffic engineers] want to design something, they study it for a year, put together construction drawings, and the ﬁnal design goes out on the street.

To me, design is an iterative process. That’s how it is in so many other disciplines. It should be in our ﬁeld, too. Before we put in a protected bike lane, why don’t we test it with cones to understand how it works, where it works well, and where it doesn’t? Instead of studying the “final and best design” on our computer screen, study it out there.

Tra c engineering is based a bit too much in theory. We [engineers] came up with these theories that make perfect sense [on paper], but transportation is counterintuitive. It’s useful for the public to know that you can argue with an engineer. Engineers will shut down conversations using technical jargon by saying, “We have to use our standards.” But these aren’t standards, for the most part; they’re guidelines. Engineers will say they ran tra c models, give you their alternatives, and even argue that it will make things safer, but this isn’t based on safety. Engineers have a lot more leeway—what’s called engineering judgment—than they lead you to believe.

I recently took an Illinois Department of Transportation survey which asked you to identify the three most pressing safety issues in your area. You could choose from 15 preselected responses. Ten answers related to how drivers are educated

(e.g. “seat belt usage” or “lack of understanding laws”) or how trafﬁc laws are enforced (e.g. “need more roadside safety checks”). Only a few responses related to how streets are designed. Why is there so much focus on education and enforcement rather than engineering?

Engineering is the most expensive—and it means doing something, right? The research shows that education doesn’t work, but telling drivers to be safer or pedestrians not to jaywalk is easier and makes you feel like you’re doing something. Enforcement pawns the problem off on the police, which doesn’t work in the long-term, and there are issues with racial proﬁling. We all want to take a more datadriven approach to safety, but our crash data tells us it’s either one road user or the other: someone was at fault, speeding or jaywalking.

In many cases, the onus comes back to the traffic engineer and transportation planners. When engineers build an overly wide road and somebody speeds on it, yes, we want to hold them accountable. But we can do better. When somebody jaywalks and the nearest crosswalk is half a mile away, you start to realize that they did a very rational thing. We pawn it o as being a human error problem—which is useful for the insurance companies and the police—but it takes away the feedback loop for traffic engineers. We can’t get better when we treat crashes that way.

When I was a consultant in New England, I worked in places with a town center out of a Norman Rockwell painting, where a highway, managed by a state department of transportation (DOT), runs through it. The DOT is not going to allow a bike lane there, even though it’s the sort of village that should have one. There’ve been cases of towns and cities taking back control of that short stretch of road. But that’s sort of a cop-out because there’s no reason the state DOT can’t design a better road.

Vision Zero [a strategy to eliminate tra c deaths and severe injuries] cities are creating high injury network maps which tend to show that 50 percent of fatalities are happening on 5 percent of your streets. Most of these streets are run by state DOTs. Those are the most traffic-engineered streets in our cities. And there’s something fundamentally wrong when, the more traffic engineering we do, the more likely we are to kill people.

You point out that cities taking safety seriously can still end up being reactive. Would you talk a bit about what a proactive or systemic approach could look like?

Marie Kondo suggests you take all the clothes that you own and put them in one place so you can see the scale of the problem instead of repeating the same mistakes. Instead of playing Whac-A-Mole, we should think about one issue holistically and comprehensively.

seen by people in bigger cars. We could do these things proactively instead of waiting for a kid to get hurt or killed. That’s what I want to shift us to. If we think the whole system is unsafe, we can prioritize within that as opposed to waiting for bad things to happen.

A recent report found that Chicago loses an estimated $6.1 billion annually due to congestion. You raise a provocative point about the value of time saved in the book. Would you talk about that?

I understand why the federal government, insurance companies, and tra c engineers put a dollar value on a life or the time wasted in tra c, but I have a hard time with it. Maybe it’s a moral thing. Those numbers aren’t apples to apples. If you get to work two minutes faster, you don’t make more money. If you think that way then you can say, “If we can save everybody one minute a day, we’re OK killing somebody,” because the value of that one minute multiplied by everybody is worth more money than what we say a life is worth. It doesn’t make any sense, and you wouldn’t want to do it, but if you think about it holistically, we’re building our transportation system around those numbers. Anybody with a logical moral compass will say, “What? Are you sure we should prioritize this over that?” It’s shocking when you see it for the first time. But for engineers, adding numbers to everything removes us from moral questions and keeps us above the fray.

What are the most important things you want people to understand about the history of trafﬁc engineering and where it’s at today?

A signiﬁcant number of people have been killed or injured in recent months on Pulaski Road, a street that’s under the State of Illinois’s design jurisdiction. Would you talk a bit about the role of federalism in road design?

In the book, I start o with kids. Well, where do kids go? Kids go to schools, kids go to parks. Where do kids live? We can design our streets and intersections to be safer for kids and where they’re going. We can do di erent things than we do now: we know kids don’t cross the street at the typical three-and-a-half feet per second, so we could give kids more time to cross. We could set the stop bar further back because kids are shorter and can’t be

Doctors and medicine have been around for 5,000 years, and you could argue doctors probably killed more people than they saved for the first thousand years. Traffic engineering is around 100 years old, and we’re killing more people than we save. It’s not on purpose. We’re trying—we’re doing what we’ve been taught. We’re doing the best we can in a lot of cases, but we need to get back to being an empirical science so we can do better. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

NEWS & POLITICS

Extremists with badges

Community members push the CPD to ﬁre cops with ties to the farright Oath Keepers.

By DMB (DEBBIE-MARIE BROWN)

Have you checked to see if any police o cers assigned to your neighborhood were among the eight whose names were found in a membership directory for a far-right extremist group?

Neighbors in Chicago police district 14—an area that spans Logan Square, Wicker Park, and Humboldt Park—are pushing to keep Sergeant Mike Nowacki under scrutiny after he, along with seven other members of the Chicago Police Department (CPD), appeared alongside 38,000 individuals in a hacked Oath Keepers membership roster in 2022. The Oath Keepers are a loosely organized group of farright, anti-government extremists who played a key role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol.

After months of phone calls, email blasts, and community organizing by the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR), northwest-side neighbors finally compelled 14th District commander Melinda Linas to hold a meeting on June 27 for residents to raise concerns.

On July 9, the Office of Inspector General (OIG) published a letter to the CPD’s Bureau of Internal A airs (BIA) in which the city watchdog writes that the department’s investigation into o cers with ties to the Oath Keepers is “materially deﬁcient” and recommends the investigation be reopened. The CPD declined to do so.

Logan Square resident Faayani Aboma Mijana has organized with the CAARPR since 2020, ﬁghting to free people from a prison system “ﬁlled with white supremacists” and advocating for community control of the police. But this is his first time working with CAARPR to oust people with explicit ties to far-right extremists from their city jobs. “All [the CPD] did was interview the o cers, and I think the longest interview was 42 minutes. They asked the o cers to turn over their emails,” Mijana

says. “That was all the investigation they did.”

The Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability (CCPSA), the city’s public police oversight board, unanimously approved a CPD policy in 2023 prohibiting officers from associating with extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. Subject to that new policy, the CPD’s internal affairs bureau took up an investigation into the leaked Oath Keepers roster.

The Oath Keepers allow anyone to join,

February 2024, o cers gave mixed responses about why their information was found in the leak. Officer Matthew Bracken said the Oath Keepers’ mission statement spoke to him because it was nearly verbatim the oath sworn by members of the military, according to police records. Another officer, Bienvenid Acevedo, said he joined more than a decade ago at a training for protests during the 2012 NATO summit, where several officers were passing out Oath Keepers pamphlets.

Nowacki denied ever being a member of the Oath Keepers and said he doesn’t know how his information came to be included in the leak. He attributes his lack of memory to medical procedures that have left him with memory issues. Nowacki says after his name appeared in an investigation by WBEZ and the SunTimes, he checked his spam folder and found hundreds of emails from the far-right group. He told investigators he “didn’t really look

but their recruitment is tailored toward law enforcement, military, and first responders past and present. Many of their members have faced legal repercussions for criminal activities related to threatening public o cials, ﬁrearms violations, and conspiracies to impede federal workers.

“We cannot ask people to trust a police department whose members are allowed to dabble in hatred and extremism.”

The cache of data linked to the Oath Keepers includes records from private group chat rooms, emails, and membership information for more than 38,000 people, including full names, home addresses, and phone numbers.

According to BIA interviews conducted in

through” the emails because they were about politics and “he does not follow any of that.”

The investigation found that Nowacki’s emails contained information about events, legislation, unspeciﬁed discounts, calls to action, and membership. Nowacki told his interviewer the allegation made him extremely upset because he’s served active duty in the military since he was 17 years old, and it “makes him sick to his stomach to be called a terrorist.”

The CPD requested assistance from the OIG to properly collect and thoroughly assess evidence, but the two agencies lacked an active memorandum of understanding that would’ve allowed them to jointly investigate. Ultimately, investigators said they didn’t have enough information to determine the extent of the o cers’ involvement, and none of the charges

against the eight o cers were sustained. Since then, Chicago residents in District 14 have taken it upon themselves to push members of newly created police district councils to fire the officers. “ There are known white supremacists in the ranks,” Mijana says. “And we need them ﬁred.”

Sally Hamann, 76, has lived in Logan Square for more than 40 years and has attended community policing beat meetings for decades. Hamann says Nowacki’s statements to internal affairs investigators “really concern me because they didn’t address the questions. He just said, ‘I don’t know.’”

After a series of email blasts and phone calls to neighbors—which spurred a conversation between 14th District Council member Ashley Vargas and Linas—the long-awaited community meeting took place on June 27 at the Haas Park ﬁeld house.

“We sent emails to [Linas] to the point where she couldn’t refuse anymore,” Mijana says.

Hamann tells the Reader that, at the meeting, Linas didn’t answer a lot of our questions. “It was a little frustrating. But at least she was there.” Hamann and Mijana both said Linas committed to meeting with residents when requested.

The same day 14th District neighbors voiced their concerns to the CPD, the CCPSA held its ﬁrst meeting with a newly appointed commission to discuss sharing those same concerns with Chicago police superintendent Larry Snelling.

“At every point of interaction with the powers that be, we’re organizing people to push these demands,” Mijana says.

In addition to recommending the CPD reopen their investigation into cops with ties to the Oath Keepers, the OIG advised Mayor Brandon Johnson to create a “comprehensive, whole-of-government approach to preventing, identifying, and eliminating extremist and anti-government activities.” In response, the mayor’s office reiterated their commitment to rooting out extremism among police but did not accept OIG’s recommendation or commit to taking any specific action.

“We cannot ask people to trust a police department whose members are allowed to dabble in hatred and extremism,” said Inspector General Deborah Witzburg in a press release. “Words are no longer enough. We can do better.” v m dmbrown@chicagoreader.com

Faayani Aboma Mijana speaks during a meeting with the CPD on June 27, 2024. CAELI KEAN

R“OF HER BECOMING: ELIZABETH CATLETT’S LEGACY IN CHICAGO”

Through 8/31: Thu-Sat 1 PM– 5 PM, Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield, artsandpubliclife.org/elizabethcatlett, free

VISUAL ARTS

Etched in stone

The legacy of Elizabeth Catlett in Chicago

By DELANEY EUBANKS

In the summer of 1941, the artist Elizabeth Catlett enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to study ceramics. While Catlett’s time in Chicago was brief, her time on the south side was eventful. The previous year she won first place in the Chicago American Negro Exposition, or the Black World’s Fair, for her limestone sculpture of Negro Mother and Child, which was created for her master’s thesis at the University of Iowa. And while in Chicago, she and her then-husband, noted south-side artist Charles White, shared space with other great artists like Eldzier Cortor and Dr. Margaret Taylor-Burroughs. It was also at the South Side Community Art Center that Catlett studied lithography, her primary printmaking medium.

Though the pieces featured were not made at the time of her residency in Chicago and span from 1949 to 2004, Arts + Public Life’s latest exhibition, “Of Her Becoming: Elizabeth Catlett’s Legacy in Chicago,” explores the work of the Washington, D.C., native and the inﬂuence Chicago had on the then-young artist. Curated by Sheridan Tucker Anderson, the associate director of exhibitions and residencies, “Of Her Becoming” tells the story of Catlett’s inﬂuences, rise, and impact, and includes additional work from south-side artists Krista Franklin, Angela Davis Fegan, and Rebel Betty.

Elizabeth Catlett’s work is political and was created as part of her belief that “Art is only important to the extent that it aids in the liberation of our people.” It only makes sense then to feature her work in a city known for its politics and public art. Though Catlett’s work is very much enshrined in the Arts Incubator space on East Garfield, the exhibit explores themes of her work as a predominantly public arts–focused artist. On the outside of the building, posters are displayed much like street art to convey that Catlett’s work was meant for the public.

It’s also a nod to her work with Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), or People’s Graphic Arts Workshop, in Mexico City, where Catlett spent most of her adult life, having moved to Mexico with White in 1946 after winning a

ARTS & CULTURE

mediums vary. Rebel Betty collages images of revolutionary women, roses, the Black Panther symbol, and gra ti. Krista Franklin’s work is a range of collages, letterpress on cyanotype, and mixed media.

Catlett’s work is sharp and detailed. Her skill in lithography and linocut printmaking is evident. The image-etched stone or linoleum coming in contact with a surface makes for high-contrast images that leave little room for mistakes. Using these processes makes sense—Catlett’s subjects almost pop off the page and appear three-dimensional, like sculptures.

of people, struggling people, to whom only realism is meaningful.” Catlett’s success as a Black female artist during her lifetime doesn’t negate the pressure and stress of her work and her endeavors at making a living as a Black woman. What I get most from the pieces in “Of Her Becoming” is the struggle to survive against all odds.

The most famous image is Catlett’s linocut print Sharecropper (1952). It sits in the bottom

Printmaking is a medium that not only exempliﬁes and codiﬁes language and information but also disseminates it. Catlett’s work is not cutesy. Neither are the works of the other artists featured. Rebel Betty may be using pink, but don’t let that deceive you or detract from the fact that she features the FBI files kept on Catlett in the foreground of her work.

Rosenwald Foundation grant. The TGP was a base of political activism, believing artwork should be accessible, inexpensive, and support social causes. Inspired by the Mexican Muralism movement and artists like Diego Rivera, Catlett worked with the group from 1947 until 1966. Due to her involvement with the TGP, she was barred from entering the U.S. and targeted by the FBI. Her U.S. citizenship wasn’t reinstated until 2002. (That’s another exhibition altogether and one I’d be happy to see.)

“Of Her Becoming” is meant to both introduce Catlett’s work and connect the artist’s practice to contemporary south-side artists. Their works are in conversation within the space: Catlett’s hangs on the far right of the exhibition space across from the Chicago artists featured. All three are artists, like Catlett, explore themes of Black womanhood, but while the themes are similar, their styles and

row of prints displayed between Civil Rights Congress (1949) and There Is a Woman in Every Color (1975). I’m struck by the proudness of the subject in Sharecropper and the etched lines on her face that communicate a world-weariness. I can’t remember when I ﬁrst saw the image, but I feel a familiarity with it every time I see it. Perhaps because I’ve seen that look and know it from everyday life.

There’s a realness to Catlett’s work. She didn’t make work purely for beauty, though her work is beautiful. She wanted to convey the reality of labor. As Catlett herself said, “I learned how you use your art for the service

Chatting with the artist Angela Davis Fegan about the relevancy of Catlett’s work today, I posed the question of why it was important to discuss Catlett’s work on the south side and why now. “It’s like making a daisy chain,” Fegan responded. She noted that it really comes down to the question, “How do you preserve Black women’s legacy?”

Preserving Black female art is an act of revolution and a responsibility passed down from generation to generation. Fegan and the other artists featured serve as contemporary examples of the tradition of Black radical art and imagination that Catlett spearheaded. Catlett spent only two years on Chicago’s south side. Her excellence made itself known: she won contests and was connected to other seminal Black artists of the time. In the 1940s, in a segregated city experiencing the Great Migration—the e ects of which are still being felt—she made a way for herself, as did other Black artists of the time and to this day. “[It’s like] building a ladder between space and time,” said Fegan. It’s exactly what the curator has done with this exhibition. Uniting contemporary south-side artists with Catlett’s work, Anderson has made a “daisy chain” and built “a ladder through space and time.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Installation view of "Of Her Becoming: Elizabeth Catlett’s Legacy in Chicago" NATASHA MOUSTACHE

POETRY CORNER

At Omarion’s Concert, I Made Water

By Kiayla Ryann

I was not told about water or how I would make it one day. I was not taught to fear, but there were those somber pools men in white robes carried bodies out of, wet from washing sins away.

I was at my ﬁrst concert, standing in a sea of swooning teens, swelling anticipation all us, hurling aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhs, like sirens singing Omarion ﬁnally to shore. Before he emerged, his melodies crashed up against me. Waves of sound drowned out oaths made to Mother when I promised her

I WON’T BE OUT HERE BEING FAST.

Amber lights mimicked horizon. I mimicked older girls, looked into their lip gloss for my reﬂection, hoped to see those things they knew, that no one told me yet.

Then, there he was, dressed in bronze, skin splashed into bicep, softened over chest, glistened ‘round a naval trail like a hurricane. All In Sweat. I knew nothing about waterfalls but All Was Wet.

Hot there I began to boil, to steam, to pray, Jesus Wept, to think some holy tears might cool my wish to singe my lips at his hip bone, to catch those raindrops rolling down his neck before they could hide themselves behind his belt buckle. I held my breath, surrounded by screaming bodies fading into sea, a drowning I knew I wasn’t supposed to know yet.

He Sang: Oh, that’s gonna be the sound girl when it’s going down. Your body saying oh. I slipped into ocean, twirled in circles, winded to syncopate.

He Sang: Don’t have to say my name. I split between bodies, spread myself open, swam into currents best to writhe in.

He sang: Girl I’m just glad you came.

Before I could bring my palms together or lift them in praise, my ﬁngers dived behind my zipper to hold back a cascade, to patch water I knew nothing about.

The sea soothed into silhouettes drifted up into bodies washed back into swooning teens now screaming encore.

My untucked fingers slid out from the depths of too-tight jeans and surfaced a brine-red flood. My first blood had come at a concert in a crowd. It was curious.

Cuz I had heard the whispers of tsunami, the curse of woman waded in by wreckage, waged when Eve went for fruit ripe with things she just wanted to know.

I stood there, waiting for damnation, for terror, for shame. But it did not show. Just blood. A tiny river welcomed by serenade, beckoned by bodies chanting the rhythm, the blues I blushed to every time but this night.

At my ﬁrst concert, my blood came as an exhale at surface, as bounty for boundless ocean, as baptism. A sacriﬁcial blood, not for sin but for cleansing things unknown to me. The water broke the dam that held me back from sea, from Woman.

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

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

Summer Hours

Wednesday–Saturday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM

A Bigger Table: 50 Years of the Chicago Poetry Center Celebrating CPC’s ﬁve historic decades, this exhibition will feature 50 broadsides, 50 iconic vintage poetry event posters, archival materials and ephemera, and the premiere of a documentary ﬁlm. Open through September 14, 2024

STREET VIEW

Easy and breezy

The best Pitchfork looks over the years radiated a stylish nonchalance.

By ISA GIALLORENZO

In 2005, the online music publication Pitchfork (then known as Pitchfork Media) was called upon to program Intonation Music Festival, a two-day event at Union Park that featured performances from the Decemberists, Tortoise, Diplo, and Pelican, all for $15 per day. The next year, Pitchfork struck out on its own to create Pitchfork Music Festival, which has continued to grace the park with curated lineups over the years and attracted thousands of fashionable festival attendees.

And (if you follow my math) that means this month marks nearly 20 years of Pitchfork Music Festival! To celebrate, I bring you this miniretrospective featuring some of the best outﬁts I’ve photographed at the fest since 2009 (the year that I started shooting street style).

What most of these looks seem to have in common is a relaxed yet considered attitude. These people all share that hard-to-attain sweet spot between “Look at me!” and “I don’t really care.” I’m also struck by most of the outfits’ timelessness. One can see a speciﬁc trend here and there in the photos, but most of these styles could work as well today as they did years ago. Need ideas for your own duds for the next outdoor summer festival you attend? I suggest something comfortable and roomy in light fabrics that are appropriate for the weather. (If you’re headed to this month’s Pitchfork, check the forecast! So far it doesn’t seem like it, but you might need some rain boots.)

A statement piece or two always adds that extra oomph. And accessories are great conversation starters. A bright bag, a cool hat, or big earrings are easy ways to add interest to an outﬁt.

Shoes must not hurt you. Su ering for fashion is never worth it—and it’s not cute. As for trends, ditch them, so you can enjoy your garments and the photos of yourself in those garments for years to come. Ditch all the rules too, including the ones above. It’s Pitchfork! Have a blast! v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

PITCHFORK MUSIC FESTIVAL FEATURING BLACK PUMAS, UNWOUND, AND MORE Fri 7/ 19 through Sun 7/21, noon-10 PM, Union Park, 1501 W. Randolph, $134 -$754, children ten years and under free with paying adult, pitchforkmusicfestival.com

THEATER

Running home to the circus

By KERRY REID

Back in 2020, I checked in with Shayna Swanson, founder and owner of Aloft Circus Arts, about the company’s virtual programming during the COVID-19 shutdown. Aloft had received its Performing Arts Venue (PAV) license for its converted church space just before the pandemic. “We worked for a long time, and it was really expensive [meeting the PAV requirements], and we did one show and it was over,” Swanson told me at the time. Despite the challenges of going virtual, Swanson also noted that they were still paying performers what they would have made on live shows.

In the past couple of years, Aloft has come back to full strength with performances and classes, though Swanson herself is mostly based out of Berlin these days. And ﬁttingly, the venue is hosting a brand-new show this weekend, Way Home, reﬂecting on the meaning of place in our lives.

Directed and produced by longtime Aloft company member Kristi Alyssa, Way Home is the inaugural o ering of Alyssa’s new company, Reminiscent Circus. The inspiration for the piece came out of a trip Alyssa took to New Orleans in November of 2021 to recharge after the challenges of the pandemic.

within the walls.”

She started working on the concept for Way Home while she was ﬂying back from New Orleans to Chicago. “I wrote all of the characters out, and I wrote a kind of big arc of it. And I was like, ‘I feel like this is the base script. And then I want to hire artists who will infuse their own personalities and their own stories into the script.’”

“It was such a life-changing, beautiful experience that when I was closing the door to the place that I stayed for a month, I was instantly overcome with a feeling that I’ve experienced a lot—of respect and bittersweet sadness for saying goodbye to this place that housed such a formative part of my life,” Alyssa says. “And then I was thinking back to all the other times I’ve had to say goodbye to places that have meant so much to me, like Aloft before we moved into our current building.”

Prior to acquiring the former First Evangelical Church at Wrightwood and Kimball, Aloft, founded in 2005, had operated out of a studio on the near west side. They bought the 6,000-square-foot church building in 2015 after losing their lease on the previous venue and carved out four distinct training and performance spaces, with the high ceilings in the sanctuary and bell tower being particularly adaptable for aerial training and shows.

Alyssa, who has worked with Aloft since 2009, says, “I remember the last day we packed up and closed the door on that studio. Or saying goodbye to my college campus, my first childhood home, my dad’s home. And then I realized that I ﬁnd a lot of spirit and soul in the places of things and what’s contained

and ﬁve members of the Aloft Youth Ensemble. The vision of home reflected in the show isn’t all rosy and nostalgic. “One of the stories that I wrote is one of the most personal to me,” notes Alyssa. “It’s about a person who cannot leave home, so to them, home is like a

“I’ve always loved circus as storytelling, because it’s like athleticism meets art, right?”

“The overarching story of it is that we see an elderly woman who’s in the last day of her life,” Alyssa continues. “And she’s had a well-lived life, a beautiful life. And she’s coming back to say goodbye to her childhood home. As she looks through, as we say, the window of memory—she’s remembering her life within the walls. But then she’s also wondering about everybody who lives there after her, which is an emotion that I feel I tap into a lot.”

Part of the goal for Way Home and for Reminiscent is, as the new company’s mission statement says, “to promote the utmost professional and ethical treatment of performers, to extend the hand of mentorship to aspiring professionals and circus students while creating stories that others may see themselves reﬂected in.” In practical terms, forming the new company as an LLC helped with the fundraising and other logistics for the debut show.

Alyssa, who is Aloft’s director of youth programming and of professional training programs, explains, “I’ve always felt really strongly that I would love to give aspiring circus professionals, or advanced circus students, or even just really dedicated circus students the chance to work in bigger productions and feel what it’s like to be in a professional show or start to dip their toe into that work if that’s what they wanna go into.”

For Way Home, she’s assembled a cast of 14, including Aloft coaches, circus professionals, WAY

prison. So it’s kind of coded that it’s somebody who’s ill and can’t leave the house, which is my mother’s story.” Another segment reflects the experience of LGBTQ+ people who find home is not always welcoming. Poet Raven See, who is also the lighting technician for Way Home, has written new pieces that will be woven throughout the evening. Alyssa notes that See’s work with Aloft has often reflected their experiences as a trans nonbinary person. Alyssa also acknowledges that the circus world can be less than welcoming sometimes. “It’s a performing arts world, so there’s that. It’s cutthroat out there, and there are some companies who will line you up and cut you, just based on your looks, before you can even do a single performance for them. One thing that I’ve always loved about Aloft is that we strive to be really inclusive, and I have always wanted to look at each individual student and meet them where they are and not with any preconceived expectations.”

She adds, “I’ve always loved circus as storytelling, because it’s like athleticism meets art, right? So you’ve got this element of danger, this element of, like, big wild tricks. But then you also can infuse dance and theater behind it. And that’s why I think contemporary circus is beautiful and storytelling is beautiful.” v

m kreid@chicagoreader.com

The “window of memory” plays a role in Reminiscent Circus’s Way Home. KRISTI ALYSSA

Laila Ruangpan (le ) and Camille Swi in Way Home KRISTI ALYSSA

Help support

individuals experiencing housing instability and homelessness with your purchase of a “$200,000! Bingo Tripler Instant Ticket” from the Illinois Lottery

In 2019, the Illinois Lottery launched a new speciality Instant Ticket to help fight housing insecurity and homelessness throughout the state. In collaboration with the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS), 100 percent of profits from ticket sales are designated for a program that distributes grants to nonprofit organizations throughout Illinois through their homeless prevention program, supportive housing program, and emergency and transitional housing program. To date, the ticket has raised $6 million dollars to help some of Illinois’s most vulnerable residents. In 2024, the Illinois Lottery introduced their joint specialty ticket, the $200,000! Bingo Tripler Instant Ticket, where a portion of the profits raised go to grants for local agencies and organizations working to reduce housing insecurity and homelessness, along with nine other worthy causes. The ticket, which has a bright sunshine-yellow color that’s perfect for summer, costs $5 and is available for purchase at more than 7,000 Illinois Lottery retailers throughout the state. Visit the Illinois Lottery website for more information.

Homelessness and housing insecurity are o en stereotyped as issues that predominantly impact urban and low-income communities. But in the United States, where the National Low Income Housing Coalition reported that in 2023, the average minimum wage worker would have to work 104 hours per week to aﬀord a modest two-bedroom rental home (or 86 hours to aﬀord a one-bedroom rental home), they are nationwide crises that touch every state and county.

“Housing instability impacts everyone, whether you don’t have a place to stay, so you’re staying outside or in a shelter, or if you just cannot pay your rent and are living unstably from month to month,” says Katie Eighan, Continuum of Care Planning Director at the Alliance to End Homelessness in Suburban Cook County. “At the core of homelessness is a lack of housing—or a lack of aﬀordable housing—and we see that in urban, suburban, and rural settings.”

Established in 1997 as the Task Force on Homelessness, the Alliance was oﬃcially incorporated under its current name in 2004. The organization oversees homelessness prevention strategies, collects data, and manages funds for homelessness

response services for 40+ agencies across 30 suburban townships and 131 municipalities that comprise the Cook County Continuum of Care—one of Illinois’s 19 Continuum of Care jurisdictions, as designated by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Every January, each Continuum of Care conducts an annual census called the Point-in-Time Count to gain insight into the prevalence of homelessness within their jurisdiction. “It’s supposed to capture a snapshot of—on one night—how many people are experiencing homelessness. For us in the suburbs, this January there were just shy of 1,200 people experiencing homelessness on one night,” Eighan says.

That staggering ﬁgure represents just one piece of a bigger picture. “That’s speciﬁcally people who are staying in a shelter or people who are staying outside,” Eighan says. “It doesn’t capture all the people who are paying 90 percent of their rent each month, and are in perilous situations concerning their housing.”

According to Bankrate’s 2024 Annual Emergency

This sponsored content is paid for by Illinois Lottery

Courtesy Alliance to End Homelessness in Suburban Cook County

Data supplied by IDHS. Infographic by Amber Huﬀ

Savings Report, 59 percent of Americans are uncomfortable with their level of emergency savings and more than one in four have no emergency savings at all. For millions of families and individuals, that means an unexpected medical bill, work leave, or other ﬁnancial hurdle could render them insecure.

The funding the Alliance receives through the Illinois Lottery’s joint ticket program allows them to better serve that population. “There are really three critical parts to a response to homelessness,” Eighan says. “One is preventing it at the onset. Then, we have crisis housing for those who need shelter because they have nowhere else to go. The third and most important piece is connecting people with the housing and services. So the Lottery grants go speciﬁcally to that ﬁrst really critical part of our system—which is preventing homelessness.”

The Illinois Lottery grants are disbursed to each Continuum of Care through the Illinois Department of Human Services’ Homeless Prevention Fund. The lead agency in each jurisdiction then distributes those funds to select organizations in their geographic area that provide direct support and emergency funding to those at risk of losing their homes.

“In suburban Cook County, we’ve seen tremendous growth [of our programs] in the last couple of years, in part due to the Illinois Lottery grant,” Eighan says. “Especially during the pandemic, when there were a lot of those temporary programs for rental assistance, we just saw an enormous need. And our nonprofit partners really rose to the occasion, staffed up, and assisted thousands of households with rental assistance so that they could keep the housing they had and prevent them from becoming homeless in the first place.”

For many of the households served by the Alliance’s partner organizations, a one-time boost can make a world of diﬀerence. Eighan shares a recent example of a single mother and her two children who were at risk of losing their home a er an unexpected medical issue forced the mother to take two months oﬀ of work. When she was cleared to return, Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) policies and database errors within the company prevented her from receiving her full paycheck—which resulted in her falling four months behind on her rent.

Eighan describes the family’s story as “very common.” And thankfully, the emergency funding and support they received from the Alliance and their network allowed them to have a happy ending. “She’s healthy, she’s back at work, she’s receiving the regular paycheck, and they’ll be able to pay their rent going forward,” Eighan says.

The positive results of the Homeless Prevention Program has led the state of Illinois to increase its funding, even a er the temporary pandemic-era programs expired last year. “The Homeless Prevention Program is now funded at $27.2 million, where just two years ago it was funded at about 10 million. So it’s such a part of the importance and the success of [the Alliance’s] program,” Eighan says.

That means that with every purchase of a $200,000! Bingo Tripler Instant Ticket from the Illinois Lottery, you can play a vital role in ensuring Illinois residents are able to stay in their homes. “[Housing insecurity] is very relatable,” Eighan says. “It’s your neighbor. It’s your mom, it’s your friend who fell behind on rent for whatever reason, and this one-time assistance is the diﬀerence between them keeping their housing or becoming homeless.”

To ﬁnd out more about the Alliance to End Homelessness in Suburban Cook County or to make a donation to the Alliance or one of their partner organizations, visit suburbancook.org.

If you or someone you know is at risk of becoming homeless, help is available. For those in suburban Cook County, contact the Alliance at 877-426-6515 Monday through Friday from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM or visit myentrypoint.org. People living in Chicago, please call 311.

Courtesy Alliance to End Homelessness in Suburban Cook County

THEATER

OPENING

RThe waves of history

A contemporary Black family is haunted by the Middle Passage in Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea

The ocean is an obsession for 18-year-old Dontrell Jones III (Blake Dupree) of Baltimore, a high school graduate mere weeks from starting his full ride to Johns Hopkins, with the vastness of his last summer at home and the vividness of uncanny dreams tempting him with impulse to adventure. “Future generations,” he intones episodically into a voice recorder, documenting a captain’s log of his journey, which takes him from body to body of water: the aquarium where his cousin Shea (Aja Singletary) tells visitors daily, “Prepare to be amazed”; the pool where he meets lifeguard/love interest Erika (Emma Wineman); the shore of the Chesapeake Bay; and beyond.

An ancestor is calling from the ocean’s depths, a spirit haunting generations of Joneses from the Atlantic, his chosen destination before the slave ship carrying him and the seed of his descendants lands in a colonized America. How each Jones metabolizes his message becomes their story—a repressed father (David Goodloe), a forbearing sister (Aundria TraNay), a mother (Maya Jahan Abram) who just really, really wants Dontrell to make it to college. Flickering between poetry and realism, Nathan Alan Davis’s Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea, directed by ILesa Duncan, brings a family trying to get by in the present into confrontation with a past that refuses to be forgotten. Pegasus Theatre Chicago’s outstanding cast brings the dynamics of the family and the text to life as a chorus in excellent rhythm. Projections by Eme Ospina-López bridge worlds with ghostly images of the sea. —IRENE HSIAO DONTRELL, WHO KISSED THE SEA Through 8/18: Fri 7 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; Chicago Dramatists, 798 N. Aberdeen, pegasustheatrechicago.org, $30 ($22 West Town residents, $15 students)

RA last hurrah for Haven Hedwig and the Angry Inch bookends the company’s Chicago history.

Haven Chicago is going out the way they came in 11 years ago—sweaty, sexy, sinuous, and unapologetic. In 2013, the company announced their presence with a production of John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch (first produced off-Broadway in 1998 and later turned into a film in 2001, both starring Mitchell as Hedwig). Since then, they’ve produced several glorious music-infused shows, like Stew and Heidi Rodewald’s The Total Bent in 2019 and Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die in 2017. Now the genderqueer East German singer returns to help the company say goodbye.

Hedwig has not been without detractors: as Arielle Cottingham argued in a 2021 piece for Indie, “Today, Hedwig [the character] reads as a cringeworthy symbol of the fears cis gay men have about their proximity to trans people under the heteronormative gaze.” Haven’s current revival (their ﬁnal production) perhaps inoculates against those charges by having a trans nonbinary director (the amply gi ed JD Caudill) and nonbinary actors as Hedwig (Tyler Anthony Smith) and Hedwig’s lovelorn bandmate, Yitzhak (Ismael García), rather than the cis performers who have played them in the past (including Neil Patrick Harris and Lena Hall, who won

Tony Awards for the 2014 Broadway revival). It’s a riotously fun time, and Smith in particular—a celebrated writer-director-performer in their own right—works the crowd with devil-may-care insouciance and quick improvisational chops, occasionally dropping in references to queer Chicago institutions like Steamworks. (You can ﬂip the cards on your cabaret table to indicate your level of comfort with audience participation if you’re in the front row.) The backup band under Harper Caruso’s musical direction keeps the tempo and the volume in synch in the cozy venue, and Lolly Extract’s puppets for “The Origin of Love” add a poignant touch to the ballad. And at a time when trans people continue to be threatened, even an imperfect messenger like Hedwig feels like a welcome “fuck you” to the gender police. —KERRY REID HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH Through 8/4: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; industry night Mon 7/22 7:30 PM, understudy performance Wed 7/31 7:30 PM; Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-3830, havenchi. org, $36 (reserved $46, students and industry $21)

R Comfort food

The Last Wide Open is familiar yet fresh.

In the tradition of rom-coms like the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors, Audrey Cefaly’s The Last Wide Open uses the conceit of what-ifs to take us through a missed-it-by-that-much romance. But Cefaly’s play, directed at American Blues Theater (ABT) by Gwendolyn Whiteside, oﬀers something that feels more rooted and real. That’s thanks to its working-class perspective and (in this new adaptation just for ABT by Katarzyna Müller) its Polish ﬂavor.

Billed as “a love song in three acts,” the play unfolds in three diﬀerent times at the same Chicago Polish diner, Jana’s. (The note-perfect environmental setting by Grant Sabin and Marcus Klein may make you think you’ve wandered into a multiverse version of Wicker Park’s Podhalanka, and is also an inspired way to inaugurate ABT’s new studio theater.) Mikolaj (Michael Mahler) is a Polish immigrant, and Lina (Dara Cameron) is an U.S.-born waitress. The ﬁrst scene takes place two

years a er Mikolaj arrives, the second 48 hours a er he lands in Chicago, and the ﬁnal “movement” takes place a er he’s been in the U.S. for 15 years. In each scene, we see the attraction between the two thwarted by circumstance and their own inability to grab what’s in front of them. Lina is seemingly cynical about love, while Mikolaj is wounded but still optimistic about its power.

The chemistry between Mahler and Cameron isn’t forced—they’re married in real life, and that lived-in comfort goes a long way toward selling the premise. So does Whiteside’s direction, which lets key moments unfold unfussily, without turning the recurring stories in each section (a man dying in Lina’s building, a woman throwing a plate of mushroom pierogies at a man) into portents. There is always a certain level of contrivance in stories of this sort. But the wistful songs commenting on the action (lyrics by Cefaly, music by Matthew M. Nielson) and the performances (including J.G. Smith as a stagehand who Cameron’s Lina describes at one point as “the nurse to my Juliet”—leading to a perfectly timed wordless reaction from Smith) carry us through with warmhearted charm. —KERRY REID THE LAST WIDE OPEN Through 8/18: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 4:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; also Wed 7/24-7/31 2 PM; American Blues Theater, 5627 N. Lincoln, 773-6543103, americanbluestheater.com, $35-$45 (reserved $45-$55, seniors $30-$40, students $25-$35)

Struck out

The Lightning Thief at Otherworld needs more attention to actor safety.

It was the unsecured, random bundle of cords that first caught my eye at Otherworld Theatre’s The Lightning Thief: A Percy Jackson Musical. They were slung around the railing to the audience’s right-hand side; I was closest to it in the first row. Periodically, I’d glance over worriedly, knowing that one of the times the actors bounded down the stairs, someone would trip. It finally happened partway through act two. The actor caught themselves, thankfully, narrowly avoiding a direct face-plant into the sharp edge of a platform. A er waiting through a whole scene for someone from the crew or cast to fix the

cable, which was now ﬂung directly in front of the stairs, I just tossed it out of the way myself.

Strike one.

Before that, somewhere in act one, the delightful Valerie Cambron (who plays Percy Jackson) fell and scraped both her knees open. Rather than giving momentary pause in the show, she persevered through the rest of the act with bloody knees. When intermission ended, she returned with gauze padded up and held together with small Band-Aids. No way that was going to work—one almost immediately started peeling.

Strike two.

A ridiculous amount of running around and falling happens in this show. You see cast members bounding, full tilt, down the stairs constantly. Ordinarily, you may think nothing of it. But it’s concerning when an actor can’t even get proper Band-Aids at intermission, suggesting the company doesn’t have a complete ﬁrst aid kit on hand. That’s an unacceptable oversight when there is so much physicality.

I found myself more concerned about the well-being of the cast than anything else in this show.

Strike three.

It’s a shame that so much of this review had to focus on the glaring safety concerns that cropped up during the press preview. There genuinely are some standout performances to be seen here. Besides Cambron, who is clearly tough as nails, you have Mollie Menuck playing everyone’s favorite satyr bestie, Grover. Menuck exempliﬁes the anxious sidekick persona.

Don’t even get me started on Justin Grey McPike and Jake Blonstein. Between McPike’s Mrs. Dodds and Blonstein’s Mr. D, you may never stop smiling. As a big fan of Dionysus, I’d like to think Blonstein captured that je ne sais quoi of theater’s Grecian patron.

Despite the well-cast roles, a few were vocally miscast. It was clear that a few of the performers were not singing in their actual vocal range, straining their voices in an attempt to hit certain notes in Rob Rokicki’s score. (Joe Tracz wrote the musical’s book.) On top of that, some of the multiple casting harms the production itself—and potentially the actors in the process.

The constant scrambling to different places feels unnecessary. There is no reason an ensemble member playing a tree has to dash off, use a squirrel puppet, and then dash back onstage to resume being a tree. I suspect these casting choices, in addition to the codirection by Tiffany Keane Schaefer and Collin Borisenko, are partly to blame for how o en everyone barrels around the space.

The show, based on the 2005 YA novel by Rick Riordan, centers Percy and his friends, who are the children of mortals and Greek gods. Although the cast plays demigods, they aren’t actually demigods. No magic is in place to protect them from the reality of mortality. Hades knows that no matter what show you’re producing, the actors’ safety must always come ﬁrst.

—AMANDA FINN THE LIGHTNING THIEF: A PERCY JACKSON MUSICAL Through 8/18: Fri-Sat 7 PM, Sun 2 PM; Otherworld Theatre, 3914 N. Clark, otherworldtheatre.org, $40 (limited number of paywhat-you-can tickets available each performance)

RPet project

The Swan explores claustrophobia vs. freedom in relationships.

Claustrophobia versus freedom—it’s a theme of sorts in this dramatic fantasy by Elizabeth Egloﬀ (billed as a

Dontrell, Who Kissed the Sea ANTHONY ROBERT LA PENNA

psychosexual thriller, directed by Erin Sheets, produced by Theatre L’Acadie).

An actual fourth wall, albeit just the framing, makes the set feel like a cramped Chicago apartment, with three characters trapped in the world’s strangest love triangle. Each is somehow held captive, Dora (Brandii Champagne) most of all. She’s been in three loveless marriages and is now a reluctant kept woman to the milkman. To her, freedom only seems feasible through a man’s love, but the betrayals have le her wary.

A wild swan (Kevin Blair) crashes through her window one night, alleviating her loneliness in the way only a pet can. But as she nurses the creature back to health, he slowly transforms into a man whose feelings of love and gratitude are at odds with the desire to escape his captivity. Milkman Kevin (Jordan Gleaves) wants to be free of his own marriage and make a nice, cozy nest for Dora and him. But his jealousy of Bill the swan and his deep insecurity about Dora’s feelings for him turn him possessive.

As the fantasy home life begins to poetically unravel, Dora’s mental health follows. Without her being the rock to these frail male human and bird egos, their lives disintegrate into chaos and violence.

This play hits the mark. It crosses over neatly from the comfortable life of a nurse with a pet project into the grotesque underbelly of toxic romance that exposes the paradox of self-imposed captivity. Sound (Santiago Quintana), set (Champagne), lighting (Sam Anderson), and Sheets’s staging support that immersive and unsettling journey. The size of the theater itself, so intimate

as to create a feeling of captivity even among audience members, is perhaps an intentional move on the part of Theatre L’Acadie.

But with no escape route through walled frames, and with diminishing peaceful/playful interludes, the crescendo of the plot comes crashing forth, sometimes overpowering the poetic allegory the dialogue attempts to balance it out with. Fortunately, the fascinating dynamics between Dora, Bill, and Kevin keep this metaphorical tale as riveting and intoxicating to observe as any barroom brawl—until the moment of truth, when freedom is the only option.

—KIMZYN CAMPBELL THE SWAN Through 7/27: Wed-Sat 8 PM; Facility Theatre, 1138 N. California, theatrelacadie.com, pay what you can (suggested donation $20)

RThe keys of life

Northlight’s 2 Pianos 4 Hands is a tour de force.

Being a musician can be a lonely business. Want even a wisp of a prayer of making it into one of the world’s professional classical orchestras? Be prepared to spend ﬁve hours or more a day—from the time you’re around 12 or so—by your lonesome, obsessively memorizing the treacherous ﬁngering of Liszt’s “Mephisto Waltz No. 1,” running through hundreds (and ultimately thousands) of arpeggios and scales, while normal kids are at parties or movies or any other social activity kids get up to. So it goes for Richard (Matthew McGloin) and

Ted (Adam LaSalle), young men of prodigious talent in Richard Greenblatt and Ted Dykstra’s two-person, four-handed 2 Pianos 4 Hands, last produced at Northlight roughly 20-odd years ago.

Directed with acute musicality by Rob Lindley, the production veers between the soul-smashing agonies and the euphoric ecstasies of trying to turn an extraordinary talent into a career in a ﬁeld where 90 percent of the workforce is under- or unemployed.

From piano bars full of drunken patrons to concert halls where taskmasters condemn everything from your dynamics to your work ethic, 2 Pianos captures the grueling toil of becoming—or even almost becoming—a professional concert pianist.

The show requires actors who are also musicians that can make the trolls in Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” come to life and let the intricacies

of J. S. Bach’s Concerto in D minor soar with eﬀortless drama. As they make their way through works by Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, Liszt and the occasional Elton John tune, LaSalle and McGloin prove they are the rare pair that can pull that oﬀ.

On a stage bare but for two gleaming black pianos and massive musical notations dangling from the ﬂy space, 2 Pianos tells a story and delivers music that’ll have you utterly in your feels.

—CATEY SULLIVAN 2 PIANOS 4 HANDS Through 8/11: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2:30 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM; no shows Wed 8/7; open captions Fri 7/26, open captions and audio description with touch tour Sat 7/27 2:30 PM; Northlight Theatre, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, 9501 Skokie Blvd., Skokie, 847-673-6300, northlight.org, $49-$89 ($15 students) v

Find ﬁlm fests at ChicagoScreens.org

The new website from the Chicago Alliance of Film Festivals consolidates information for attendees and fosters collaboration between local fests.

By JONAH NINK

Nearly 40 local ﬁlm festivals have joined together to create ChicagoScreens, a new website envisioned as a one-stop destination for streamlined festival promotions and information. Also—wow, did you know that Chicagoland has nearly 40 di erent ﬁlm festivals?

“ChicagoScreens.org is the o cial website of a new alliance formed last year, the Chicago Alliance of Film Festivals [CAFF],” says Facets executive director Karen Cardarelli. “This is our ﬁrst big public-facing project.”

The CAFF’s origin traces back to 2017 when festival organizers from the Chicago Feminist Film Festival, In/Motion Dance Film Festival, One Earth Film Festival, and Full Spectrum Features met to discuss ways to support each other through mutual struggles.

Full Spectrum Features coexecutive director Eugene Sun Park says that despite dozens of film festivals operating in Chicago and surrounding suburbs, no real public support system for festivals has existed.

“We discussed, for instance, ways that we could cross-promote each other’s festivals, build a shared festival calendar, or share operational knowledge and skill sets,” says Park. “There was a tremendous opportunity to build something even more impactful if we adopted a much bigger collective mindset.”

A multiyear grant through the Arts Work Fund, an o shoot of the Chicago Community Trust, allowed Park and company to organize and hold the ﬁrst Chicago Film Festival Symposium in 2019 at the Chicago Cultural Center. Festival organizers from across Chicago shared ideas and industry gripes (and probably more than a few Letterboxd handles). Momentum and excitement for the new com-

munity grew in tandem, and new collaborative projects were planned for 2020.

“Then the pandemic hit,” says Park. The projects were shuttered, but symposium attendees continued to meet virtually. “The community we had built around the symposium was perhaps the most valuable and most lasting outcome.”

The new collaborative effort officially adopted the Chicago Alliance of Film Festivals title in 2023. Through Facets, which focuses on film education and events for youth and adults, Cardarelli played a key role in consolidating all of the CAFF’s pre-COVID ideas into what would become ChicagoScreens.org. It ﬁnally launched in the summer of 2024.

Cardarelli says the site primarily acts as a streamlined home for festival schedules and information. It’s modeled after the League of Chicago Theatres site ChicagoPlays.com, which fulﬁlls a similar role of providing users with show information for theatrical productions. From the outside, it seems basic, but to the CAFF, the streamlined site is a godsend. Chicago had ten ﬁlm festivals in April alone, and there can be around three to five in any given month.

“I don’t think Chicago is built on competition. I believe very much that Chicago is built on collaboration.”

The site serves as a members’ space for the CAFF, allowing for festivals to share and update information, and Cardarelli says that the CAFF is also considering adding resources for filmmakers looking to enter their work into festivals. But for now, the site is primarily a resource for the public.

“It [was] a bit limiting trying to get the information out, even if you have a robust marketing team,” says ReelAbilities codirector Grishma Shah. “Competition was not working.”

She continues, “It’s undeniable that Chicago is a really culturally rich city.” But without direct access to Chicago’s cultural conversation, Shah says, many talented people aren’t able to reach their highest potential.

Film festivals are a vital part of the film ecosystem and are often the only ways for up-and-coming ﬁlmmakers to showcase their work in front of large audiences. Some festivals also do work beyond just showcasing new films; the Chicago Palestine Film Festival has served as an integral touchpoint for Palestinian cultural education in the midst of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, for example.

In a fitting coincidence, ChicagoScreens launched officially the day before Sundance

Institute x Chicago, a new local iteration of the iconic ﬁlm festival.

“Sundance Chicago gave us a large platform to really get the word out. We screened an ad before every single Sundance screening; we had a table at all of the venues,” says Cardarelli.

The CAFF will also have a table at the Millennium Park Summer Film Series. The organization hopes to have 1,000 sign-ups for ChicagoScreens by August 31.

Shah adds, “I don’t think Chicago is built on competition. I believe very much that Chicago is built on collaboration.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

From top: Beloit International Film Festival; Cariño Festival de Cine; Chicago Palestine Film Festival PEER CANVAS; CARIÑO FESTIVAL DE CINE; CHICAGO PALESTINE FILM FESTIVAL

Cinema, for those who play, is ultimately a game of connections. Each film begets seemingly infinite others to explore and consider. It’s never-ending, really, so despite being unlikely ever to “win” (i.e. see all the movies ever made, God willing), you’ll sure have a lot to play with.

von Sternberg, though he and others have denied that piece of lore). Really, it’s Bow’s film; as a shopgirl with her sights set on the handsome son of the department store’s owner, she’s both spunky and sexy. She’s the same in Mantrap , so it’s no wonder this led to her becoming the ﬁrst “It girl.”

Often I’ll watch a ﬁlm and it’ll lead me down a path of exploration. Most often, it’s a director whose ﬁlmography I want to begin or continue exploring. Sometimes it’s more niche, like a historical time period or an artist or writer whose work inspired a film I admire. (A somewhat recent example is John Farrow’s 1948 noir The Big Clock. After learning that an eccentric artist character was based on real-life artist Alice Neel, I quickly fell in love with her paintings and story.) Sometimes it’s an actor, though not frequently—I was more preoccupied with movie stars as a teenager, and as such have felt as if I’ve passed that stop on this game of cinema. (I guess now I’m comparing it to Monopoly ? Do not pass Go. Do not spend $200 million on a Marvel monstrosity.)

Naturally, there are exceptions, and two made themselves apparent to me this past week. The ﬁrst is Clara Bow, star of Victor Fleming’s 1926 silent ﬁlm Mantrap, which the Chicago Film Society screened with live piano accompaniment on Sunday at the Music Box Theatre. I watched it prior to the screening to write up for Cine-File; I’d known who Bow was beforehand, of course, but I was quickly taken with her natural e ervescence and eager to learn and watch more.

I then took the opportunity to catch up with her 1927 silent film It , directed by Clarence Badger (and, for supposedly one scene, Josef

Loosely adapted from pioneering British author Elinor Glyn’s novel of the same name—Glyn wrote the adaptation and also makes a cameo in the film— It centers on the titular premise, that indeﬁnable quality that sets one apart for often indescribable reasons. And it’s more than just mere beauty. As explicated in the ﬁlm, “‘It’ is that peculiar quality which some persons possess, which attracts others of the opposite sex. The possessor of ‘It’ must be absolutely unselfconscious, and must have the magnetic ‘sex appeal’ which is irresistible.”

All subsequent It girls thus owe their titles to Glyn and Bow. Coincidentally—and sadly—last week saw the loss of unconventional 70s (and eternal!) It girl Shelley Duvall. If anyone possessed that indefinable quality that attracted people, it was her. Those eyes (Bow had entrancing eyes as well; perhaps that’s where the It-ness emanates from), that voice, the presence. In her honor, I watched Robert Altman’s (1977) in which Duvall is at her most complex.

I’d recommend any of Duvall’s collaborations with Altman for those looking to appreciate the singular actress.

Until next time, moviegoers.

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

A still from Mantrap (1926)

MUSIC BOX THEATRE

By Richard Greenblatt and Ted Dykstra

Directed by Rob Lindley

Matthew McGloin and Adam LaSalle,

photo by Je Kurysz

FILM

NOW PLAYING

Fly Me to the Moon

Conspiracy theories are rarely accurate, yet when examined, they can provide important context and insight into the general public’s fears. “The government faked the moon landing!” is something that a conspiratorial uncle might yell at Thanksgiving, but for the new romantic comedy Fly Me to the Moon, it’s a launch pad.

It’s 1969 and the space race is rapidly losing civilian support following the failed Apollo 1 mission. As the unpopular Vietnam War rages on and civil unrest continues to build, the chance of reaching the moon before the end of the decade feels more out of reach than ever. That’s why Kelly Jones, a clever advertiser played by Scarlett Johansson, is hired by the Nixon administration to sell the mission to the public.

The Don Draper-esque Jones is an expert at manipulation and knows that in order to get what she wants, she will need some tricks up her sleeve. The straitlaced NASA launch director, Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), fundamentally disagrees with everything about Kelly. He believes in integrity to a fault, leading him and his new coworker to fight—or flirt—for control of the NASA image. Eventually, it’s revealed that Kelly’s highly classified assignment, Project Artemis, will fake the moon landing on a soundstage for broadcast, directed by the eccentric Jim Rash, as a fail-safe for Apollo 11.

The movie, directed by Greg Berlanti, can’t quite decide if it’s a comedy, romance, or drama, and the outcome of this mishmash of tones ends up feeling like emotional whiplash. Cole earnestly believes in space exploration and feels that Kelly’s method of making NASA a product for sale weakens its credibility. But from Kelly’s perspective, without the funding and public investment, there is no mission. The tension between these two modes of thinking makes for a wealth of conﬂict that remains underwhelming.

Faking the moon landing plays into the fear of “fake news” and a lack of trust in both media and government. But as Kelly says, the truth is still the truth, even if no one believes it. —KYLIE BOLTER PG-13, 132 min. Wide release in theaters

Longlegs

Every serial killer movie wants to be Silence of the Lambs, but few stick the landing. To his credit, Oz Perkins—newly crowned horror It boy and eldest son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins—nearly pulls it oﬀ with his long-hyped fourth ﬁlm, Longlegs. The framework is familiar: FBI rookie Lee Harker (scream queen Maika Monroe at her career best) is assigned to track down elusive serial killer Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), who is two decades into a seemingly random killing spree of young girls and their families.

Agent Harker, like Jodie Foster’s Clarice Starling before her, is obsessive and unflinching in the face of inhuman evil, and her procedural investigation that makes up the first hour of the movie is practically a masterclass in sustained dread. It’s scary in a queasy, paranoid way; every composition has slightly too much negative space for comfort, to the point that I found myself nervously scanning the edges of every shot for shadowy figures lurking in the kitchen or the woods or outside the window.

Things start to go awry once Longlegs is finally shown onscreen. Nic Cage’s extremely Nic Cage-y performance (think Face/Off levels of Cageiness) doesn’t belong with the otherwise quietly tense movie around it, and for that matter, very few of the actors besides Monroe seem to know what tone they’re going for. I started to realize the quality had dipped when Kiernan Shipka, in a mystifying southern accent, flatly calls Harker a “dirtsy flirtsy angel bitch.” I’ve seen the movie twice and I’m still unpacking that one.

It’s stunning how quickly it unravels into mediocrity a er that interaction, how frantically it tries to scrub away any trace of mystery with ﬂashbacks and voiceovers explaining Longlegs’s dastardly plan. As Perkins lays more of his cards on the table, it becomes clear that the line between this and straight-

down-the-middle horror like Smile is very, very ﬁne. It’s too bad, really: the scariest movie of the year also happens to be the dumbest. —JOEY SHAPIRO R, 101 min. Wide release in theaters

My Spy the Eternal City

Peter Segal’s My Spy (2020) was a close-to-perfect, mindless, kid-friendly action-comedy. Dave Bautista as CIA superspy J.J. and Chloe Coleman as precocious preteen terror Sophie multiplied their goofy, cutesy charisma, and the surveillance-gone-wrong plot held together just enough to not distract from the main point, which was seeing Bautista fall on his butt while trying to navigate ice skates.

The good news for the sequel, My Spy the Eternal City, is that Chloe Coleman is still a ﬁne foil for Bautista, even though she is now a teen rather than a preteen. The bad news is . . .

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

Well, basically everything else. The plot—involving a school choir trip to Italy which turns into a Bond-esque loose nuke threat—is too convoluted and too actionheavy. No one is tuning into a My Spy sequel to see scenic Italian landscapes, or to watch an endless volley of middle-drawer action sequences. They’re tuning in to see J.J. and Sophie mug for the camera as J.J. falls on his butt while trying to navigate ice skates. There is a little of that energy—the Hitchcockian finch attack is kind of fun, and J.J. pushing his sugarless muffins on his CIA colleagues is the right level of adorable. But those moments are few and far between, and the script can’t figure out how to replicate the hate/love adversarial dynamic between J.J. and Chloe that made the first movie sing and snicker and pratfall its way into streaming gold.

The point of the sequel, of course, is to have something else for all those eyeballs to watch right a er they get done with My Spy. I understand the calculus; I even support it. I just wish someone had bothered to write a script for it that didn’t suck. —NOAH BERLATSKY PG-13, 112 min. Prime v

Longlegs

Fly Me to the Moon DAN MCFADDEN/SONY PICTURES

PRF BBQ 2024 (INSTAGRAM.COM/PRFBBQ)

Thu 7/18, 7 PM, Color Club, 4146 N. Elston, $20, $15 in advance, all ages

Fri 7/19, 8 PM, Reed’s Local, 3017 W. Belmont, $20, $15 in advance, Fri-Sun pass $50, 21+

Sat 7/20 and Sun 7/21, 2 PM, Fallen Log, 2554 W. Diversey, $30 per day, Fri-Sun pass $50, all ages

Sun 7/21, 11 AM, PenRF readings of original fiction, poetry, and essays at a private residence, free, all ages

The PRF BBQ sustains the heart of DIY

The underground rock community brought together decades ago by the message board of Steve Albini’s studio continues to build on his ethos of independence, generosity, and hard work.

By JAMIE LUDWIG

On a sweltering summer day in 2010, I stepped o the Chicago Avenue bus in front of a nondescript building on the west side. My friend Jim Donaldson had invited me to a cookout because he’d be playing music there as Jimmy Two Hands, his solo banjo project. I didn’t know anything else about the event, but I’d made my way over.

From the sidewalk, though, I couldn’t see or hear any evidence of a party. I even had trouble ﬁnding the building’s front door. After a few confused text messages and calls, I got directions to walk around the block and head inside through the alley.

As my eyes adjusted from the daylight, I realized this wasn’t a regular cookout—it was more of a DIY music festival. The building, a former church, looked like an art space that had been transformed into a venue for the occasion. Walking into it felt like discovering a secret clubhouse from a kid’s daydream of grown-up life with no parents and no rules.

Bands playing noise rock, punk, garage, rockabilly, and less categorizably wild music took the stage in quick succession by using a shared back line. The crowd spanned generations, from early 20s to pushing 60, and a few folks had kids in tow. The drinks were ﬂowing, and a snack table was loaded with goodies for the taking. There were no discernible sta , but everyone seemed to be pitching in where they could, whether by keeping an eye on the door, running sound, or replenishing bags of chips. Someone was grilling outside.

Upstairs, a woman was getting a tattoo— someone had set up a professional-looking studio—and nearby a large group had gathered around a table for an intense game of poker. I recognized one of the players immediately: Chicago musician and recording engineer Steve Albini, who was behind the sound of many records that had been permanently altering my brain since I was 12. The plumbing

in the bathroom was busted, which was especially gross thanks to the heat, but the jokes about it became part of the fun.

Many people clearly knew one another (even those I learned had traveled from hundreds if not thousands of miles away), but even though I’d showed up as a total outsider, they made me feel welcome. What was this fantastical place?

time and formed such a strong community bond that we’ve kept it going ever since.”

Donaldson says “we” because the PRF BBQ is a group effort undertaken by a tight-knit, mutually supportive community of friends. Only a few people involved in the event have what you could call “o cial” roles, but at least a couple dozen pull together to make it happen (and that’s not even counting the bands).

MUSIC

dead of winter. Northern Michigan University student publication the North Wind has called the latter “one of the most important music events in the Upper Peninsula.”

“The coolest part about it is that it’s an online forum that turned into an annual hangout with real people from around the world,” says musician Calvin Fredrickson, who began attending the PRF BBQ in 2014 and took over as its lead organizer in 2019. “People ﬂy in from England, west coast, east coast, and beyond. People who met each other online in their 30s or 20s or 40s are now best friends ten to 20 years later.”

The online forum in question arose from Albini’s studio Electrical Audio, which he’d opened in Avondale in 1997. Electrical established the forum in 2003, intending to provide a place where people could ask recording questions and trade tips about music and gear. The community that gathered there soon took on a life of its own, and the message board got a nickname too: the Premier Rock Forum. The “premier” part was always a joke, and the PRF BBQ website points out that “PRF” might as well stand for anything. “Whatever!” it says. “The name isn’t important, the quality of bands and people are.”

“I think it was Steve’s idea for there to be a message board where basically anytime you had questions you could just post them,” says musician Neal Markowski, who joined the forum in 2009. “Like, ‘How do I record this?’ ‘Tell me about this microphone,’ and so on and so forth.” Markowski has been a gear wrangler and organizer for the PRF BBQ since 2014, and this year he joined Fredrickson and PRF fan and musician Anne Hensley to curate the festival.

As I soon discovered, I’d accidentally accepted an invitation to the PRF BBQ, then in its second year. “It was mind-blowing to me that we had bands coming in from all over the country to play a set for their friends, without any guarantee of getting paid, and people coming in from all over the world just to hang out for the weekend—especially in such a weird location that was less hygienic than any club or punk-house basement,” Donaldson recalls. “And that everyone had a good enough

Once among the Chicago concert scene’s best-kept secrets, the PRF BBQ has become an underground institution. Every year, its long weekend of bookings brings together newbies

The PRF BBQ’s commitment to DIY values runs deep, often extending to who tends bar, cleans, cooks, works the sound and AV equipment, schleps gear, and makes the posters.

with fans who’ve been there since day one, coming from near and far. Spin-o events have sprung up in Louisville, Oakland, Durham, Denver, New York City, and even as far away as London. Michigan hosts two regular PRF fests: the PRF Campout in Mattawan each autumn and PRF Thundersnow in Gladstone in the

In the early 2000s, social media platforms were embryonic: MySpace launched in 2003, at which point Facebook was still years away from opening to the public. Internet communities like the Premier Rock Forum were still a niche phenomenon, but even then its members could have gathered with like-minded people on some other gear-nerd board. “What was di erent about [PRF] was that people wanted to share knowledge,” Markowski says. “People actually wanted to share information on how to make a recording at home and what kind of gear to buy, which is not dissimilar to a lot of the ethos that you saw with Steve in the studio back then.”

As the community grew, its members got more comfortable with one another. Their conversations got more personal too. “There was this weird, almost LiveJournal element to it, but with all these rocker dudes,” Markowski

Steve Albini participates in a poker game at the 2013 PRF BBQ. ALEXA CHERMAK

MUSIC

continued from p. 25

says. “At a certain point, folks just realized, ‘You know what, we’re all playing in these bands. We should start playing shows together, right?’”

By the mid-2000s, PRF bands had begun booking shows together at local clubs, eventually ﬁnding an uno cial home base at Union Rock Yards—a DIY venue near North and California run by Mark Oster and Rich Fessler in the basement of a Payless ShoeSource. “We had PRF bands playing Union Rock Yards pretty consistently from [the] jump, and by the end of our run it was more or less all we were booking,” says Oster. Fessler lived upstairs, and both of them have subsequently played PRF events and served on and o as festival organizers.

When forum member Jonah Winnick came up with the idea for the PRF BBQ in 2009, Union Rock Yards was the natural venue. Fessler o ered up the space. “If you have the ability to help someone, you should just do it,” he says. “That was my feeling, and why I asked Mark to start Union Rock Yards with me in the ﬁrst place.”

The three-night showcase was the ﬁrst concert o cially identiﬁed as a PRF event. “Jonah did most of the brainstorming and planning,” Fessler says. “The guy is a madman and a hero. The community owes that guy a lot.”

The inaugural festival was a smashing success, but it taught everyone involved just how much blood, sweat, and tears it took to pull o such an endeavor. “We wound up taking the summer off after the event and would only do one more show before moving out,” Oster says. “But it serves as a fantastic culmination of what we did with URY, and I love that we have a claim to that legacy.”

From then on, the PRF BBQ has roamed around Chicago, occupying DIY art and music

spaces, local watering holes, and for one memorable year a pizza parlor. This year’s event runs from Thursday, July 18, through Sunday, July 21, beginning with nighttime concerts at Color Club and Reed’s Local and ending with two daylong showcases at Fallen Log.

The fest’s relationship with Electrical Audio remains so strong that Oster describes it as “inextricable.” The PRF BBQ’s commitment to DIY values runs deep, often extending to who tends bar, cleans, cooks, works the sound and AV equipment, schleps gear, and makes the posters (local artists such as Jay Ryan and Renee Robbins have contributed original pieces). I’ve attended PRF BBQs where volunteers home-brewed the beer and made the sausages by hand.

Volunteering is also a great way to connect with people, especially if you’re new to the community. “I hate going to events, especially if I don’t know anybody,” Fredrickson says.

“I want to work and get to know people. That feels a bit more natural to me instead of just standing around.”

At Color Club on Friday, Nick Louie will provide free hot dogs to the ﬁrst 30 fans who want one. The next night at Reed’s, Bob Farster will give away 30 pulled-pork sandwiches. Both cooks are longtime PRF members, and in the mid-2010s the PRF BBQ raised money for Louie’s cancer treatment.

Tickets to the Fallen Log shows include a vegan dinner each day from Kitchen 17, beer from Spiteful Brewing, canned water from Liquid Death, and cider from a local maker still being conﬁrmed. Frederickson is Spiteful’s account manager, and the company is donating 40 cases of beer.

The PRF BBQ’s emphasis on independence, hard work, and community spirit can make you feel like you’re on another planet, but the

community also acknowledges the hardships of the real world. The festival doubles as a fundraiser that beneﬁts a di erent cause each year, whether a nonproﬁt organization such as Intonation Music or a PRF member grappling with medical or adoption expenses.

“I think it’s a matter of scale, like recognizing the amount of money that we can give and what’s the size of the organization,” says Hensley. “We want to funnel everything into one place where it might actually make a di erence.”

This year’s beneﬁciary is Ascend Justice, a nonproﬁt Chicago-based legal advocacy group for people a ected by gender-based violence and the child welfare system. The money donated by the PRF BBQ all comes from ticket sales and the festival’s ra e—organizers give away every dime, after covering production costs. Out-of-town bands get travel stipends, but otherwise none of the musicians gets paid.

Everyone knows it’s a charity event going in, and anyway, they can count on selling plenty of merch to a devoted crowd.

Steve Albini passed away unexpectedly on May 7 at age 61. His death shook underground rock fans everywhere, but it hit the PRF community especially hard. Albini not only had many close friends and colleagues there, but he’d also impacted the lives of everyone involved. “I had so many conversations with people [after Steve’s death] that went along this path of, ‘Had it not been for the forum, we never would have met,’” Markowski says. “There would be no forum without Electrical Audio; there would be no Electrical without Steve. Steve, indirectly, is responsible for thousands of friendships, and probably hundreds of bands and bandmates being able to meet.”

The organizers of the PRF BBQ say that online chatter and ticket orders have made it clear that many regulars who might otherwise have skipped this year are coming out because of Albini’s death. That said, the fest isn’t planning any sort of traditional tribute.

“To honor that legacy and honor that work, we’re gonna do what we’ve always done,” Markowski says. “It’s gonna be four days of kickass bands and buds hanging out. We’re going to talk about it, and that’s going to be great. I think the best thing we can do is just keep on doing what we always have—to change anything would be disingenuous on our part.”

“Steve was a powerhouse, a workaholic, and an extremely charitable person,” Fessler says. “I think that the PRF strives to follow in that example, not because he led things in any way but because similar people tend to gravitate towards each other. He only [provided] the platform for like-minded people to get shit done.”

The three main organizers of this year’s PRF BBQ all hope that other people will take inspiration from the event and “get shit done” in their own music communities.

“Anyone can do this, right?” says Markowski. “If you have a handful of folks that you have that shared interest with—don’t do it by yourself—you can ﬁnd those people, and then it can just continue to expand.”

Of course, you might not feel like you have your own music community. You’re always welcome to check out the PRF BBQ—with the caveat that you might end up a bigger part of it than you expect. “Outsiders or new people who show up, eventually they may end up in a [PRF BBQ] band,” Hensley says. “We have so many new bands playing this year. New people showing up just keeps the community alive.” v

m jludwig@chicagoreader.com

Heather Smith of Bone and Bell performs at the PRF BBQ in 2013. ALEXA

Ryan Duncan (aka Transmontane) ran Sick Room Records. ALEXA CHERMAK

Randall Murphy of Whales and Lindsey Charles of the Cell Phones ALEXA CHERMAK

Mark Oster plays bass with Cmn Ineed Yr Hlp at the 2015 PRF BBQ. ALEXA CHERMAK

A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

NICK ACOSTA STARTED publishing New Morality Zine in 2014 and launched a record label, also called New Morality Zine (NMZ), in 2018. Since then the label has attracted a cult following among fans of hardcore, altrock, and shoegaze. In 2022, NMZ partnered with Texas label Sunday Drive Records for a two-day joint showcase. Madison Woodward, who helps book Los Angeles punk fest Sound and Fury, reached out to Acosta to kick-start the showcase, which was held at Programme Skate & Sound in Fullerton, California , the weekend a er that year’s iteration of Sound and Fury. Ever since then, Acosta has wanted to put together another NMZ concert, and luckily for us, the next one is in Chicago—speciﬁcally at Cobra Lounge on Thursday, July 18.

This came about because Empire Productions owner Shane Merrill wanted an NMZ showcase to be the oﬃcial preshow for Empire’s annual two-day punk and metal festival, the Rumble (see page 30). NMZ has more than 100 releases to date, so Acosta had a lot of bands to choose from—and he decided on a lineup that would strongly rep Chicago. “I know there are going to be so many people from out of town, and so many out-of-town bands,” he says. “I feel like sometimes the bands on the NMZ roster that are from here don’t get the limelight. So I was super excited to stack the bill with hometown heroes.”

Three of the five acts at the Rumble preshow are local and have put out new music within the past year or so. First on the roster are Porcupine, whose debut LP, the June release All Is Vapor , gra s screamo irascibility and metal heaviness onto fire-breathing hardcore. Headliners Si Dios Quiere have most recently dropped Summer Promo ’23 , a steely two-song single that yokes together beatdown hardcore breakdowns, metallic riﬀs, and concrete-cracking vocals. In the middle of the bill, sandwiched by California’s Jinx and Ontario’s Mile End , Chicago posthardcore unit Demo Division combine shoegaze guitar riﬀs, sinewy punk rhythms, and alt-rock melodies on the May EP Sunken Skin

Acosta aligned his booking choices with the Rumble’s emphasis on hardcore, but hardcore is only one of the areas where NMZ excels. Shoegaze is enjoying a resurgence right now, just like hardcore, and the label’s expertise with both genres is serving it well. In February, NMZ released Under Sound , the debut album from Minneapolis shoegaze group Prize Horse , and last month Stereogum named it the 11th best album of the year so far. Acosta has had to evolve the way he runs NMZ as it becomes more successful. “I walk

GOSSIP WOLF

band Demo Division play at the NMZ showcase that

a ﬁne line of being like, ‘I want to stay super DIY,’ or ‘Do I need to level up a little bit to maintain a status?’” he says. “I find myself walking a tightrope act in the middle. So that’s what I’m trying to balance—like, still feeling, seeming, and looking DIY, but making sure I’m supporting and taking care of bands and conducting myself in a way that is leveled up.”

Acosta has recently begun outsourcing publicity, and he’s in the process of transitioning NMZ’s physical inventory to the wholesale distribution operation of Massachusetts label Deathwish Inc.

From a curatorial standpoint, though, NMZ remains the kind of label it’s always been. “NMZ is by and large informative of my tastes,” Acosta says. “I’m sure you can ﬁnd a through line of the bands and releases and be like, ‘Oh, Nick was really into this in 2019. Nick was really into this in 2022.’”

ON THURSDAY, JULY 18, Chicago rappersinger Rich Jones headlines the California Clipper to celebrate Sour Dub, his charming, playful full-length collaboration with Nebraska producer Sinai. Jones has assembled a hell of a lineup for his party. Skech185 , Denmark Vessey , the O’My’s , and Manasseh with Semi-Cycle open; Frances Farlee spins. Tickets are $10, and doors open at 7 PM.

THE FOURTH ANNUAL From the ’Go Fest is nearly upon us. “When we started, we had no idea that it was going to turn into what it is now,” says festival cofounder Zuri Yearwood. During her junior year of high school, she and her best friend, Xiah Bryant , “wanted to create a space where our peers could enjoy our art, celebrate our art, connect with each other, and promote unity amongst the creative community.” At the time, they were

participating in youth programming run by south-side media nonproﬁt True Star, so they brought their idea for a new music festival to True Star founders Na-Tae’ Thompson and DeAnna McLeary-Sherman

“When they came to us with the idea, we were totally shook and afraid, to be honest,” Thompson says, laughing. “In true alignment with our mission, we listened to the young people and said, ‘OK, let’s ﬁ gure it out.’” So far, they’ve been able to figure it out four years in a row, with a growing bill each time. For the 2024 version, True Star tried something new: it held open mikes throughout the year and chose a few outstanding participants to hit the festival stage.

Thompson says she understands the challenges that south-side festivals face as they scale up—in the past couple years, the Silver Room Block Party and Hyde Park Summer Fest have both called it quits due to rising costs. She feels blessed that From the ’Go Fest continues to succeed, and she’s happy that it’s been a safe haven for young Chicago creatives to showcase their art in their own communities. What makes From the ’Go Fest so special, she says, is that “it’s for young people, by young people.” This year’s From the ’Go Fest will be held on the campus of the DuSable Black History Museum on Saturday, July 27. Vic Mensa headlines, and the bill also includes a wide array of local artists and DJs, among them 16-year-old viral sensation Star Bandz. Tickets are free, and to make sure you can get in, you should sign up for yours online. —TYRA NICOLE TRICHE AND LEOR GALIL

a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or email gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC

Avondale Electric built lifelong friendships playing psychedelic rock

They never released any of the ambitious, wideranging tunes they cut in the 80s and 90s, but they came away with something even better than a successful record.

By STEVE KRAKOW

Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

At the Secret History of Chicago Music, I don’t discriminate— underdog artists with large catalogs don’t matter more than teen garage bands who never released a thing. The quality of the music is paramount, and I love naive and untrained players as much as hardworking but unrecognized professionals.

Equally important is a good story, whether it’s about the travails of the music biz or a bunch of friends in neighborhood bands. Avondale Electric belong to the latter category. They never had a proper release, despite playing under various names for a decade or so, but their music was great—they wrote folksy, brainy psychedelic rock with touches of country, jazz, blues, and reggae. I interviewed drummer and vocalist Keith Bell, the band’s historian.

Bell was born in Saint Louis in 1961, and when he was ten his family settled in the north-side Peterson Park neighborhood. He remembers being dazzled by the Beatles’ ﬁrst appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, but his tastes developed quickly, and during his years at Von Steuben High School he was into Frank Zappa, Jethro Tull, and King Crimson as well as fusion acts such as Billy Cobham and Return to Forever. He’d started playing drums, and in art class he met bassist Tracy Suzuki, who worked at the Flip Side Records near Von Steuben on Foster.

Suzuki and singer Jack Nimz had both grown up across the North Shore Channel from Bell in Hollywood Park, and the three of them formed an unnamed band that auditioned for a school talent show. One of the judges, Ray Kawasaki, was a junior and thus a year younger, but he was already a skilled musician—he played first-chair violin in an all-city high school orchestra.

Bell remembers that Kawasaki “laughed during our audition as my cymbal stands crashed to the floor.” But the trio learned that he was also a guitarist (and proficient at cornet, fife, and the martial art kendo), and after the talent show they recruited him into the group.

As a four-piece, they started using the name Holes, and they played a grand total of two shows, both in 1979—one in their school auditorium, the other at the River Park ﬁeld house. “How many bands have a Kawasaki and a Suzuki?” Bell jokes.

I’ve heard a live recording of Holes playing spirited covers of “Paranoid” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and their rockin’ original tune “Von Steuben Blues” had the crowd going wild.

Bell remembers they liked to wear costumes onstage: full-on samurai gear, a Spider-Man outﬁt, whatever they could pull o .

Bell and Nimz went to the University of

Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and they kept jamming (especially back at home over the summers). Nimz took up keys as his main instrument, and he started a project called Taboo with guitarist Aric Simons, a fellow resident of the Allen Hall dorm.

Nimz and Simons became fans of the Grateful Dead and often went to see UrbanaChampaign’s closest equivalent, Captain Rat & the Blind Rivets. Bell describes himself as “half Deadhead,” but he knew Simons because their families attended the same synagogue on Touhy. “I actually played ping-pong with him once as kids at the JCC across the street,” he says.

In 1986, three former Holes (Nimz, Suzuki, and Bell) started jamming with Simons in Bell’s family’s basement; everyone but Suzuki sang. This outfit became known as Good Question, but they gigged just once under that name (in 1988 at the Limelight) before learning of another band called Good Question. As a joke, they played a single show at Weeds as Whale Pud,

“temporarily disguising ourselves as a band from Alaska, which people believed,” Bell says.

The band combined this goofball humor with a freewheeling array of influences, including John Coltrane, Buddy Guy, Jonathan Richman, and Robyn Hitchcock. Now called the Mortals, they added their fifth and final member, guitarist and Long Island transplant Ken Elkins, on Simons’s birthday in August 1989. They gigged hard, and that year they played at Lincoln Park Zoo and a nearby street festival on the same day.

In 1990, the Mortals recorded with engineer and guitarist Victor Sanders, formerly of SHoCM subjects Care of the Cow. “I knew Sanders through the dance community in the 80s, where he was a prolific composer,” Bell says. “My then girlfriend/wife was a professional modern dancer.”

The Mortals started landing bigger gigs and opened for Poi Dog Pondering at an Earth Day concert in Grant Park in 1993. But soon they had to abandon that name too. “In

STEVE KRAKOW FOR CHICAGO READER

1994 we went through a few names after discovering another band called the Mortals,” Bell explains, “brieﬂy identifying as Starved Rock and, in joking moments, as the Sporting Wood-Bees and Fuck My Dick.”

They finally settled on Avondale Electric, after the business downstairs from their practice space and party pad at 2151 W. Belmont. Thankfully that was the band’s last name change, and it came just in time for an epic recording session at Super Sound Studio (now Studio 2020) in Wicker Park. In a single weekend in October 1995, they laid down 35 songs. Avondale Electric recorded several times at that studio (including a couple 1994 sessions as the Mortals), so they have a substantial catalog of unheard music. They created an album- length CD called On Belmont Ave. at local mastering studio Monsterdisc, but they never professionally replicated it or released the music. Luckily, Bell has compiled 66 Avondale Electric tracks at soundcloud.com/ woofus4/sets/avondale-electric. The band had several songwriters, and those old recordings grab you immediately from all kinds of angles: the Magical Mystery Tour–tinged psychedelic

ramble “The Main Thing”; the mournful, soaring instrumental “I”; the Dead-style jam “Out of Control” (the ﬁrst two written by Elkins, the third by Simons).

Avondale Electric would take their love of the Grateful Dead to the next level in 1997. “I reached out to Jam Productions with an idea, since I had just rescued a couple thousand brand-new, shrink-wrapped, official 1996 Grateful Dead calendars from a paperrecycling plant on the south side,” Bell says. “I was working with the plant to develop many of Chicago’s ﬁrst recycling programs.” Jerry Garcia had died in 1995, and Bell considered the calendars collectible. “I o ered 500 calendars to Jam to give away at the concert, in exchange for allowing Avondale Electric to open for the Jerry Garcia Band.”

The days of the week on those 1996 calendars are falling in the right spots again in 2024—which probably helped Bell unload the last copies of the calendar on eBay late last year.

In May 1997, Avondale Electric played in an exhibit called “Performance Anxiety” at the Museum of Contemporary Art—as part of one

of the pieces, musicians could reserve time inside a plexiglass-walled studio built by Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, and patrons could listen to them through headphones. Bell moved to Florida in December 1997, and Avondale Electric carried on for a few years with drummer Dan Yohanna (and a couple substitutions on guitar and bass). No one can remember exactly when they stopped using the name.

Bell is still working in the recycling industry, and from 1999 till 2011 he managed and played drums in Joe Noto’s Jazz Stream. He’s the only long-term member of Avondale Electric who hasn’t stayed in the Chicago area. Nimz, Simons, and Elkins are practicing attorneys, Suzuki is a graphic artist, and Kawasaki is a cardiologist. Yohanna is an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago.

Simons and Nimz continue to jam together to this day, and until recently Elkins played with them. All five of the original Avondale Electric crew keep up a running text-message conversation, and they played a reunion in 2019.

Bell has some deep thoughts about what

MIDGEURE

made Avondale Electric unique. “With us it was mainly uninhibited fun—letting it rip. When a song starts to gel, that’s a pretty good feeling,” he says. “And let’s not forget, some of the saddest songs have happy melodies. That’s rubber soul, a plastic smile, and is the theme of the world’s best art and literature. It’s a yearning known as saudade in Brazil, and a way of life. Maybe Avondale Electric has some of that going for it, driven by a feeling of hope for something that can probably never be.” To me, Avondale Electric’s story is endearing—and more captivating than any Behind the Music–style tale of excess and squandered opportunity—because of the relationships among the band’s members. “I’d like to think we played from the heart,” Bell says. “You can do that when you’re with longtime friends, people you grow to trust and love.” v

The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived at outsidetheloopradio.com/tag/secrethistory-of-chicago-music.

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of July 18

b ALL AGES F

Chicago’s own Common gets the orchestral treatment at an elegant one-night stand

MILLENNIUM PARK IS TURNING 20 this year, and to celebrate the occasion the city is bringing out the big guns. Famed south-side MC Common (born Lonnie Rashid Lynn) is easily among Chicago’s all-time greatest rappers. He began making music in the early 90s and became one of the ﬁrst rappers from “the crib”

I ever saw make an impact on the national stage. His breakthrough album, 1994’s Resurrection—which features hefty production by legendary hometown producer No I.D.—is a certiﬁed classic. Since then, he’s carved out his place in music time and again with his nasal, soulful voice, his finely tuned rhymes, and

COMMON WITH THE GRANT PARK ORCHESTRA

Sat 7/20, 7:30 PM, Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph Fb

his incredible range; he can pull o heartfelt sonnets and battle-tested bar assaults. He’s a Chicago-bred rap Goliath with a poetic, God-fearing, genre-bending sensibility.

Common is a true Renaissance man with massive mainstream staying power. To date, his elite discography consists of 14 studio albums (two entirely produced by Ye), and he’s recently been dropping singles and videos with esteemed hip-hop producer Pete Rock in advance of a collaborative record called The Auditorium Vol. 1 . He’s won three Grammys and nabbed an Oscar for his 2015 collaboration with John Legend, “Glory.” And in 2017 he made history by becoming the first rapper to win an Emmy—specifically a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics that recognized his work with Robert Glasper and Karriem Riggins on the documentary series 13th . (If you’re keeping tabs, he also scored a Golden Globe for “Glory.”) He’s had plenty of acting roles in TV and film, and last year he made his Broadway debut in the Pulitzerwinning production Between Riverside and Crazy. He’s also an accomplished writer who’s published two books, the 2011 memoir One Day It Will All Make Sense and the 2019 selfhelp volume Let Love Have the Last Word This weekend Common will perform a special one-night-only concert with the Grant Park Orchestra, led by guest conductor Anthony Parnther. This is a rare opportunity—a truly one-and-done affair. Anticipate a big crowd and beautiful renditions of some of Common’s best work. I have my fingers crossed he’ll play old favorites—“I Used to Love H.E.R.,” “The Light,” maybe even his feature with former flame Erykah Badu, “Love of My Life (An Ode to Hip Hop)”—as well as something new from The Auditorium Vol. 1. Common has previously performed with the Houston Symphony and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, but this is the first time he’s brought orchestral arrangements of his songs to Millennium Park. I can’t think of a better way to spend a Chicago summer night. —CRISTALLE BOWEN

THURSDAY18

The Rumble preshow See Fri 7/19 and Sat 7/20. See also Gossip Wolf on page 27. Si Dios Quiere headline; Mile End, Demo Division, Jinx, and Porcupine open. 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, $18.54. 17+

FRIDAY19

Hotline TNT Graham Hunt opens. 10 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $18-$22. 17+

Hotline TNT mastermind Will Anderson writes shoegaze songs like he’s in a power-pop band. His melodies combine sweet immediacy with quickand-dirty bluntness, and he supersizes them with the genre’s mandatory phalanx of effects pedals— an approach that has helped this New York group build the kind of buzz that sells out midsize venues. Hotline TNT released their breakthrough album, Cartwheel (Third Man), in November, at the end of a year during which teenage bedroom musicians took shoegaze to the young TikTok crowd by reformatting the guitar atmospherics of My Bloody Valentine for bite-size pop songs. Given the steep upward trajectory of their subgenre, you’d think Hotline TNT would be even more popular. Cartwheel won me over by balancing respect for tradition with lighthearted irreverence. Anderson gives “Spot Me 100” a midsong energy boost with record scratching and speedy drum ’n’ bass loops, and on “BMX” he brings his guitar effects to bear to create the overwhelmingly colossal riffs that have characterized shoegaze from the beginning. Hotline TNT play the Pitchfork festival on Saturday, but I suspect they’ll feel bigger in the relatively intimate confines of Subterranean. —LEOR GALIL

The Rumble day one See also Thu 7/18 and Sat 7/20. Today’s bill features Weekend Nachos, Frozen Soul, Bulldoze, Creeping Death, Gates to Hell, Hold My Own, Morbid Visionz, Two Witnesses, and Discontent. 4 PM, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, $53.05, two-day pass $115.36. 17+

Gentlefolk, start your engines. Hardcore and metal festival the Rumble, launched by Empire Productions in 2010, makes its return this month with two days of mayhem that will spill out into the parking lot of Cobra Lounge, to the great ediﬁcation of the neighborhood. The fest also includes a preshow at Cobra on Thursday and aftershows at Beat Kitchen on Friday and Saturday—the first headlined by local anti-war slam sensation Torture (about whom more in the next item) and the second headlined by Friday’s main attraction (about whom more in the next paragraph). This year’s Rumble features nearly two dozen acts representing various scenes and styles, and though the lineup is of course subject to change, it’s guaranteed to pack a punch.

Local powerviolence powerhouse Weekend Nachos cap the bill on Friday. They continue to be unretired and un–broken up a er reuniting last year, and after this weekend they’ll embark on a tour with dates announced in California, Colorado, and Florida. Sharing the top line of the poster are Dal-

BRIAN BOWEN SMITH

18 years, Tools of Oppression/ Rule by Deception . In these troubled times—especially a er the Supreme Court’s sucker punch to democracy this month—you could see the Rumble as a Bat-Signal calling up these warriors from a former age to provide inspiration to the fans who need them the most. Iowa’s Modern Life Is War and New Jersey’s Waking the Cadaver (both of whom have also broken up and reunited) have likewise heeded the call. They share the bill with rising luminaries such as southside Latine punks Fuerza Bruta and Iowa power trio Glass Ox. As the Rumble celebrates hardcore and metal’s history, present, and future, it also serves as a warning not to underestimate middleaged people in the mosh pit.

—MONICA KENDRICK

las death-metal band Frozen Soul, who will bloody up the pavement with their classic chilly sound. The night also features another reunited favorite, New Jersey beatdown hardcore pioneers Bulldoze, who’ve battled through adversity to be here; a er founding vocalist Kevin “Kevone” Clark died from a heart attack at age 52 in 2022, bassist George Puda stepped up to the mike.

Saturday’s headliners are Boston hardcore stalwarts the Hope Conspiracy, who came out of hiatus last year with the forceful EP Confusion/Chaos/ Misery and in May released their ﬁrst full-length in

Torture Enforced, Prevention, and Spent Case open this a ershow for the Rumble (see previous item). 10:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $20. 17+

If you pay close attention to underground heavy music, I’m probably not the first person you’ve

heard mention Torture, or even the ﬁ h. This antiwar slam-metal project, led by a 24-year-old Chicago drummer and vocalist who goes by K.K., has been putting out music for a couple years. K.K. uploaded Torture’s debut, War Crime: 37 Tracks—37 Homicides , to Bandcamp on July 4, 2022. Torture draws on the aggressive brutality of hardcore and the technical complexity and gore fetishism of death metal to condemn the atrocities committed by the U.S. military in the Middle East a er 9/11, which is obvious from a look at the song titles (“Waterboarding,” “Boy’s Finger Trophy”). K.K. doesn’t write lyrics, instead invoking the inhuman cruelty of war crimes with the sound of his guttural vocals, which is somewhere between a wicked belch and a trash compactor splintering bones. On Torture’s four self-released albums, he recorded every part himself, improvising the drums and fleshing out the rest from there. War Crime sounds viciously nasty—the percussion batters your ears with the metallic clang of a cranked-tight snare drum, and the guitars sound like they’re being played with a machete—but ensuing recordings have cleaned up Torture’s sound and emphasized its gruesomeness. Last year’s “Enduring Freedom” (released on September 11) consists almost exclusively of punishing half-time breakdowns, which depart from the constant blur of noise on Torture’s earliest releases and make it easier to hear K.K.’s skill as an instrumentalist. You can let “Enduring Freedom” jackhammer you into submission, but it’s just as thrilling to focus on the subtle changes he undertakes in every song. Torture probably already had a cult following before March—that’s usually the only kind of audience a slam bands gets—but that month Kerrang! posted a video interview with Knocked Loose front man Bryan Garris that blew the lid oﬀ. Garris

Hotline TNT WES KNOLL

The Hope Conspiracy play as part of the Rumble on Saturday, July 20. JAY HANNAH

Torture COURTESY THE ARTIST

MUSIC

continued from p. 31

calls Torture his favorite new band and singles out “Enduring Freedom” for praise. “It’s so heavy, but it’s so smart and it’s so big brained,” he says, then claims that he and Knocked Loose guitarist Isaac Hale listened to Torture for ﬁve hours of a 12-hour drive to Florida for FYA Fest. The ensuing wave of interest convinced K.K. to put together a full-band version of Torture, and he recruited three of his best friends so the project could play shows. They debuted in Wisconsin in April and had their second gig in May at Casa Cafe in Little Village. The live footage I’ve found doesn’t do justice to the band’s live sound, but it’s easy to see how moshers respond to their seesawing performances—their movements can be just as unpredictable and violent as the music, so keep your eyes open if you’re anywhere near the pit. Torture took their ﬁrst tour in May, and the hype continues to grow; they headline this Rumble a ershow. —LEOR GALIL

SATURDAY20

Common with the Grant Park Orchestra See Pick of the Week on page 30. 7:30 PM, Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph. Fb

Limp Bizkit Bones, N8noface, Corey Feldman, and Riﬀ Raﬀ open. 6:30 PM, Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre, 19100 S. Ridgeland, Tinley Park, $45.65, $167.40 “platinum” seats. b

Trans people love Limp Bizkit. I can only assume that’s how front man Fred Durst ended up with a role in I Saw the TV Glow , one of the year’s most acclaimed films about trans experiences. There’s nothing inherently “queer” about the Florida nu-metal band, but their output—especially their early material—offers a rich cultural lexicon for exploring trans masculinity. Take the name of their 1997 debut, Three Dollar Bill, Y’all . When something’s fake, you might call it “as phony as a three-dollar bill,” but when something’s super homosexual, the proper idiom is “as queer as a three-dollar bill.”

Limp Bizkit consciously situate themselves in an ambiguous misfit territory. Their name isn’t spelled “correctly,” and their sound mixes metal and rap (o en considered trashy in the late 90s). Their breakout single—a cover of the chintzy 1987 George Michael hit “Faith”—went into heavy rotation on MTV’s Total Request Live just months a er the English pop icon was outed as gay in April 1998. Durst’s selling point has always been his ability to embody a certain kind of raw, borderline idiotic masculine aggression with an emotional tenderness that’s more o en ascribed to women. He opens “Faith” with a coy, pop-punkish rumination on wistful desire—confiding his longing, his need to be wanted, and his yearning for intimacy and devotion. He gathers his self-respect to insist that he deserves better than game playing. “Well it takes a strong man, baby / But I’m showin’ you the door,” he sings—and then turns up to 11 to deliver “’Cause I gotta have faith” in a blood-curdling, puffed-chest scream. It’s a wall-punching breakdown that speaks to anyone who feels like a castoff destined to set-

tle for half-assed romance because they’re harder to love—a sentiment that isn’t uniquely trans but that speaks especially strongly to the trans community.

Finding a partner to validate the varied contours of trans masculinity and how they intersect with expressions of sexual desire is challenging! Some of us are attracted to women, and the way people treat you when you’re attracted to women can make us feel like we have one foot in lesbian culture and the other in hetero culture. Some of us are attracted to men, which can make us feel split between straight and gay culture. Some of us have very ﬂuid desires as well as gender presentations. It takes a strong man, baby, but I gotta have faith that someone’s out there for this three-dollar bill.

—MICCO CAPORALE

The Rumble Day two See Thu 7/18 and Fri 7/19. Today’s bill features the Hope Conspiracy, Modern Life Is War, Conservative Military Image, Waking the Cadaver, Outta Pocket, Ingrown, Violent Way, Volcano, Train of Thought, Glass Ox, Fuerza Bruta, No Friend of Mine, and Piss Ant. 1 PM, Cobra Lounge, 235 N. Ashland, $75.71, two-day pass $115.36. 17+

The Rumble day two aftershow See Thu 7/18, Fri 7/19, and Sat 7/20 above. Weekend Nachos headline; Hanging Fortress, Pains, and Degenerate Synapse open. 10:30 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $20. 17+

TUESDAY23

Brandee Younger 5:30 PM, Anne and John Kern Terrace Garden, Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago. Fb

Harpist Brandee Younger has spent her career exploring and reimagining the possibilities of her instrument. Since 2011, she’s released seven fulllength records that blend and twist classical music into fusions with jazz, hip-hop, pop, and more. She’s also lent her talents as a collaborator and session musician to a who’s who of contemporary artists, including Beyoncé, Common, the Roots, and Makaya McCraven. But even as she pushes her instrument into new terrain, she also keeps a ﬂame burning for the adventurous harpists who’ve come before her. On last year’s Brand New Life, she pays homage to Detroit jazz legend Dorothy Ashby with original compositions and interpretations flecked with hip-hop, R&B, and reggae. Younger’s performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art are dedicated to harpist, pianist, and vocalist Alice Coltrane, an icon of avant-garde and spiritual jazz. On the a ernoon of Sunday, July 21, Younger will join Coltrane’s daughter, vocalist Michelle Coltrane, for “An Oral History of Alice Coltrane,” which combines oral history, biographical storytelling, and musical performance to explore Alice’s life and work as part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Music Talk series. And on Tuesday, July 23, Younger will celebrate Coltrane’s work with an al fresco set on the museum’s terrace. Whether you come to one or both, you’ll leave inspired. —JAMIE LUDWIG v

Brandee Younger ERIN O’BRIEN

Limp Bizkit COURTESY THE ARTIST

JOBS

Health Care Service Corporation seeks Business Analyst (Chicago, IL) to work as a liaison among stakeholders to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems. REQS: This position reqs a Bach deg, or forgn equiv, in Tech or Bus Admin or a rel d rs of exp as a proj mgr, sys analyst, or a rel position. Telecommuting permitted. Applicants who are interested in this position should submit a complete resume in English to hrciapp@bcbsil.com, search [Business Anal st 5 . .

Outreach and Administrative Coordinator versee the program and policies regarding Home Care Aide involvement, program requirements, and benefits. Job description at https://www. chinesemutualaid.org/ work-with-us Full-time position located at Chinese Mutual Aid Association, . Arg le t., hicago, . hours wee . alar is 5 , . equires achelor’s Degree in Business or Marketing Please send resumes to: Chinese Mutual Aid Association Attn: ecruitment . Arg le t. hicago, Business Operations Analyst (Chicago, IL) Analyze the Co.’s operational performance, identify issues & make recommendations, assist in implmtn & monitor results. A or ert in Project Mgmt S/ware. Send resumes w/ cover letter to Lakha Enterprise, nc. . evon Ave, hicago, 5 , Attn . aqoob. ef i p . o calls please.

TECHNICAL um onnect LLC is accepting resumes for the following position in A , Senior Android Engineer F uild an Android-based point-ofsale and operations platform that will be a critical tool in tens of thousands of restaurants around the world. p to domestic travel required. Send resume to um onnect um. ecruitment um.com. . ust include REF code.

Cloud System Administrator(s) Cloud System Administrator(s) RedMane Technology LLC seeks Cloud System Administrator(s) in hicago, to conﬁgure, maintain, support, upgrade and patch software components and cloud services. Telecommuting Permitted. Email resume

to yourcareer@redmane. com; reference job code -

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

Beyond Finance LLC (Chicago, IL) seeks Data ps ngnr w in nf. st., or related rs exp in ata ngnr, Data Anlst, or related. n lieu of , will accept 5 in same fields. Must have exp in each: 1) Lead ops to automate and maintain wor ow for Fin ps data using Alteryx and SQL and upload data on and now a e databases tili e oo er BI Tool to model data and generate reports and analysis for stakeholders in the fin. svcs. ind. Utilize Python to imp. data modeling for generation of in-house mktg tools for demo and variable correlation. remote work is permitted; position is based out of our office in Chicago, IL. Apply: Send resume to: bllcrecruiting@ beyondfinance.com w/ ata perations ngineer II” in subject line.

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

Beyond Finance LLC (Chicago, IL) seeks Sr Data Engnr w/ MS in CS or related rs exp in ata Engnr or related. In lieu of , will accept 5 in same ﬁelds. ust have exp in each: 1) Designing and dvlping automated tools to solve particular use cases or ing w both struct. (SQL) and unstruct. data o , inc data analysis, transformation, curation, encryption, serialization, and de-seriali ation or ing with h brid cloud environments, inc both batch and streaming use cases. Partial remote work is permitted; position is based out of our o ce in Chicago, IL. Apply: Send resume to: bllcrecruiting@ beyondfinance. com w/ “Senior Data Engineer” in subject line.

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

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

Health Care Service Corporation seeks Sr Data Scientist (Chicago, IL) to collect, integrate, & analyze data from sources related to health status & outcomes for members, characteristics of health care providers, internal business processes, & other domains. REQS a Bachelor’s in Math, Stats, Comp Sci, or related plus rs of related exp. Submit resume to hrciapp@bcbsil.com, reference Sr Data Scientist 5 . .

TheMathCompany, Inc. is seeking a Associate Principal for Chicago, IL office. Manage existing client engagements and drive growth in new technology and accounts. Telecommuting permitted. domestic travel. To apply, send cover letter and to uvaraj.r themathcompany. com. eq. 5

Boat Steward Wanted Help wanted taking care of boats in elmont arbor eed someone to clean, maintain, and learn about boats. ne is a motor yacht, one “go fast”, and a center console. This would be the perfect job for a summer job for a college student who has an interest in boating and wants to learn about taking care of boats. hat a fun wa to spend a summer around the harbor. a hour

Technology Product Manager UBS Business Solutions US LLC

has the following positions in Chicago, IL. Technology Product Manager to co-develop a clear product vision, strategy and roadmap covering the full product development lifecycle (including creation, version and infrastructure upgrades, and eventual decommissioning). equires or rs. exp. as an equivalent alternative. (ref. code(s) 5 . ualified Applicants apply through SH-ProfRecruitingcc@ ubs.com. Please reference 5 .

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

Firewall & Networking Computer Hardware Engineer F A . is looking for a Computer Hardware Engineer to improve the functionality of existing hardware platforms. Req. Bachelor’s degree in computer engineering or a related field. alar , ear. or site hicago, . end resume 5 angamon t, uite , hicago, .

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

Sr Industrial Designer Chicago, IL location. end resume to , , angamon St, Chicago, IL, . Attn . uhalla.

IT Specialist IT Specialist Eight Blessings Plastic Inc. seeks an IT Specialist to install, configure and

maintain the company’s local and wide area network, and provide user support. Req. Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field. age 55, . or site oc ford, . end resume , arrison Ave, nit , oc ford, .

Lead iOS Engineer Position – Fortune Brands Innovations Fortune Brands Innovations Group, Inc. is seeking a ead i ngineer in Deerfield, IL with the following requirements: Master’s or foreign degree equivalent in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Software/ Computer Engineering, or related and ears of experience with mobile applications development achelor s or foreign degree equivalent in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Software/Computer Engineering, or related and 5 ears of experience with mobile applications development. Required skills: Experience above must include ears with i development. xperience above must include ears developing with wift and bjective- . Experience above must include 1 year with mobile databases: Realm and CoreData. Experience above must include 1 year developing UX using Auto Layout and Storyboard. Background developing with REST APIs. Experience above must include ears providing ongoing quality assurance testing. Ability to telecommute with manager approval; can live anywhere in the US. Company headquarters in eerﬁeld, . Anyone interested in this position may apply at https://www.fbhs.com/ careers and search for job ead i ngineer.

Electrical Engineer Position – Fortune Brands Innovations Fortune Brands Innovations Group, Inc. is seeking an Electrical Engineer in Deerfield, IL with the following requirements: Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering or related ﬁeld or foreign equivalent degree ears of related experience achelor s degree in Electrical Engineering or related ﬁeld or foreign equivalent degree PLUS 5 ears of related experience. Required skills: ears of experience providing engineering support to manufacturing team for new and existing products. 1 year of experience using C programming language in embedded s stem content. years of experience with electronic circuit design for consumer products. ears of experience designing for Bluetooth ow nerg , iFi radio physical layer and radio

frequency front end (antennas & transmission line . ears of experience with mixed-signal design: interface with video imaging sensors, passive infrared sensors, infrared light emitting diodes, micro electrical/ mechanical systems devices, and onboard radios. ears of experience in the design of direct current interface in embedded systems. inimum of product PCBAs with embedded system and radio functionality to market while owning the board bringup, plus any rework and revisions. May work from home up to da s per week or more if required; travel required can live anywhere in the US. Company headquarters in Deerfield, IL. Anyone interested in this position may apply at https://www.fbhs.com/ careers and search for job: Electrical Engineer.

Sr. Director, Enterprise Architecture Leader Position – Fortune Brands Innovations Fortune Brands Innovations Group, Inc. is seeking a Sr Director, Enterprise Architecture in eerfield, with the following requirements: Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology (IT), Engineering (Eng.) or related field or foreign equivalent degree. 10 years related experience. Required skills: Determine strategic roadmap for the Digital technology platforms (CMS, CRM, Cloud systems, HRIS, , Automation ntegration) by leading end to end planning, financial budgeting & control, RFP, review, contract negotiations and program execution rs Appl emerging technologies, AI trends to execute an extensive AI business strategy, including leading and mentoring a team of AI specialists engaged in diverse AI projects (1 yr); Run Digital CoE & Digital Factories and prioritize projects based on business impact, resource availability, and ris assessments rs Provide System Analysis, Data analysis, Business modeling using UML (Enterprise Architect), Agile product lifecycle management rs Implement full life cycle in icrosoft . projects including architecting web applications, using A . asp.net , , ntit Framewor , eb Services with C# and Microsoft . framewor s . , .5 and . rs or on the . technology stack including , . , , , F , j uer , , . , F, ,A A rs or on icrosoft SQL Server, Sitecore, SharePoint, Salesforce, i ath, oomi, pen A based business process automation platforms, Azure, and eCommerce

platforms rs . eriodic travel may be required to various unanticipated worksites in the US; individual must live within normal commuting distance of co headquarters in eerfield, . ompan headquarters in eerfield, IL Anyone interested in this position may apply at https://www.fbhs. com/careers and search for job: Sr Director, Enterprise Architecture. Sr. Manager, Enterprise Architecture Position – Fortune Brands Innovations Fortune Brands Innovations Group, Inc. is seeking a Sr. Manager, Enterprise Architecture in Deerfield, IL with the following requirements: Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Information Technology, Information Systems or related field or foreign equivalent degree. 7 years related experience. Required skills: Lead design, build, and complete testing phase of software application development by performing gap analysis on current and future state business processes and align to best practices in work areas related to Integrations, Ecommerce, Enterprise Resource Planning, Automation, Infrastructure, Cloud Computing, , , and Analytics (7 yrs); Design and develop racle application by using PL/ SQL, SQL Plus, Forms, eports, or ow uilder, ublisher, and A Framewor , and A Gateway/Suite, along with configuration and setups for A module yrs); Conducts research into new technologies, including tools, components, and frameworks by producing training and documentation in relation to eb development, Digital Tools, Integration tools, Ecommerce, Enterprise Resource Planning, Automation, Infrastructure, Cloud Computing, , , and Anal tics rs upport design, development and configuration in the following ERP software application Account Receivables, eneral edger, rder Management, Inventory, Purchasing, Trading Community Architecture (TCA), Human Resources Management System (HRMS), Application bject ibrar A , Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), E Commerce atewa , or n rogress and ill of aterials 5 rs . Telecommuting allowed; can live anywhere in the except A, , . Company headquarters in Deerfield, IL. Eligibility for hire in any state except A, , . Anyone interested in this position may apply at https://www.fbhs.com/ careers and search for job: Sr. Manager, Enterprise Architecture.

CLASSIFIEDS JOBS

Manager sought by Ascend Technologies, LLC in Chicago, IL to mng Firewall & Networking Team, assign implementations, & svcs for clients.

Reqs: 6 yrs exp in job

oﬀd or in rltd Firewall or Networking role, 2 yrs which must be in an MSP role. Must also possess exp w/ using MS Visio to create customer or internal N/work / Infrastructure diagrams to document customer or internal envrmts; & etc. 2 yrs mgmt exp leading N/work Engg team; & 2 yrs exp using an ITSM ticketing tool.

Reqs: Certifications w/: NSE 2 & NSE 1 - Fortinet; Assurance Expert (SCAE); CCNA - Cisco Certified Network Associate; Cisco UCCX Administrator; CISCO IP Routing- Implementing Cisco IP Routing; & etc. 100% telecommuting from home allowed from anywhere in the U.S. Apply online at https://teamascend. com/about-us/careers/

Principal Mechanical Engineer Screen emerging tech, demo products/ services in pilot projects, transition findings into measures for natural gas and electric utility. Duties: obtain info needed for emerging tech due diligence process; lead manufacturers, contractors, users in pilots; lead/ assist in design/execution of lab and ﬁeld emerging tech pilots, incl data acquisition/analysis; design mech solutions, incl eval under lab and ﬁeld environments; resolve project level issues; become an expert for emerging tech; develop tech understanding, grasp of economics, and market awareness for emerging tech; coordinate w in-house contracting, purchasing, and accounting. Reqd: MS in Mech Eng w thesis or comp research publication in the energy, thermodynamics, or fluids; 2 yrs exp w instrumentation and data acquisition systems for field demonstrations and audits, analytical assessments and modeling of energy saving tech for res/comm/indust buildings incl HVAC and heat recovery, and project management; 1 yr exp in utility energy efficiency programs focused on IL or CA, incl development and execution of pilot studies and workpaper development. Exp may be concurrent. Must have perm US work auth. Dir inquires to Institute of Gas Technology, 1700 S. Mount Prospect Rd., Des Plaines, IL 60018, Attn: A. Carter, HR.

Director of Advanced Technology Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. in Chicago, IL seeks a Director of Advanced Technology to build and lead engineers in developing advanced software technology solutions for dozens of products created by

Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster.

Must have a Master’s degree in Computer Science or related plus ﬁve (5) years of experience in job the offered, Staff Data Scientist, AI Product Manager, Machine Learning Engineer Lead, AI Architect or related. Must have experience with: (1) Software development principles, best practices, and methodologies is essential. (2) Database technologies, including designing and optimizing database schemas, writing efficient SQL queries, and ensuring data integrity and security. (3) Cloud computing platforms, Amazon Web Services (AWS) or similar.

(4) Strong leadership skills to contribute to the formulation of the technical strategy and roadmap for advanced technologies and effectively lead a team of engineers in the development of advanced software technology solutions including providing guidance, setting goals, managing resources, and fostering a collaborative work environment. (5) All aspects of product development, including requirements gathering, design, implementation, testing, and deployment.

(6) Strong analytical and problem-solving skills to address complex software development challenges and make data-driven decisions.

(7) Lead and actively participate in research projects related to Artiﬁcial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing based upon in-depth knowledge and practical experience with Artiﬁcial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing including the various algorithms, models, techniques, and frameworks used in these domains.

(8) NLP concepts and techniques that includes Natural Language Processing, Natural Language Understanding, Natural Language Generation and evaluation metric. Send resumes to staffing@eb.com, Attn Carmen Pagan

Senior Accountant Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. in Chicago, IL seeks a Senior Accountant to research and apply U.S. GAAP and IFRS technical accounting guidance or other accounting standards to support the accounting treatment of transactions, particularly when these may differ from local/statutory reporting requirements. Must have a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting or related plus 5 years of experience in job oﬀered, accountant or related occupation. Must have experience (1) Consolidating foreign entities with diﬀerent currencies.

(2) Compiling global consolidating financial statements. (3) Knowledge with U.S. GAAP and IFRS technical accounting guidance or other accounting standards.

(4) Preparing global consolidating financial statements with at least 7 different subsidiaries and in at least 5 diﬀerent currencies, including intercompany reconciliations and elimination entries. (5) Reviewing and interpreting Payroll time tracking system data from editorial and product development groups to determine what time qualiﬁes for balance sheet capitalization, including detailed analysis and communication across departments.

(6) Preparing licensing revenue entries including review of the relevant contracts and applying the correct accounting guidance to determine the revenue that has been earned. Telecommuting/remote work allowed. Send resumes to staffing@eb.com

Attn Carmen Pagan Sr Associate, Sr Talent Strategy Consultant I – Mercer (US) LLC (FT; Chicago, IL) Lead client projects to translate HR & organizational data into actionable insights that improve & drive talent decisions. RQTS: Master’s deg or foreign equivalent in Econ, Statistics or a related field plus 5 yrs of exp in the position offered. Alternatively, employer will accept a PhD in Economics, Statistics or a related field plus 2 yrs of exp in the position offered. 5 yrs of exp (or 2 yrs in the alt with a PhD) w/ Executing statistical tables through data visualization in MS Excel, Tableau & Qlik; Performing data transformation & quantitative analysis using large data sets to provide labor market insights.. APPLY: https://careers.marshmclennan.com using Keyword R_275018. EOE

PROFESSIONALS & SERVICES

CLEANING SERVICES

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Professional House Painter Professional Interior/Exterior Painter 28 years experience. Proficient, neat and meticulous. Great work ethic. Extensive references upon request. Flexible scheduling. Flat and hourly rates. Chicagoland Area (primarily North) Christopher Banks CBanks Painting. (773) 504-6440

AUDITIONS

Auditions Alert!

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

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Long-distance relationships can require lots of texting. LINKEDIN SALES

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

Can’t ﬁght the feeling

A growing attachment to a fuck buddy bodes not so well for an open relationship.

By DAN SAVAGE

Q: I’m a 28-year-old woman and I’ve been in a happy long-distance relationship with my boyfriend for ﬁve years. Two years ago, we became nonmonogamous and started having occasional sex with a few friends. We agreed that we shouldn’t have romantic relationships with anyone else.

While living abroad for a year, I started a sexual relationship with a guy. The sex was mind-blowing. He knew about my boyfriend and agreed to be just “fuck buddies.”

I wasn’t worried about getting too attached to him. We have very diﬀerent world views and political ideas, which is a deal-breaker to me in terms of romantic attachment (at least it used to be).

To my surprise I developed an emotional connection with this guy, which he reciprocated. A year later and back home, I still love my boyfriend very deeply. He is one of the most important people in the world to me but I don’t enjoy sex with him as much as I did before.

I fantasize a lot about my former fuck buddy and don’t have any interest in meeting someone new. The few interactions I’ve had with him since I came home were still quite ﬂirtatious. I fear these fantasies are aﬀecting my relationship with my boyfriend and don’t know how to move on.

On one hand, I love and admire my boyfriend, but I don’t feel as physically attracted to him anymore. On the other hand, I struggle

One of the tricks to being contentedly nonmonogamous is not comparing sex with a long-term partner to sex with a new or still newish partner.

Sex with a long-term partner may be less exciting and challenging, but sex that’s familiar and comforting has its perks. Comparison, as they say, is the thief of joy—and in your case, HOTTIE, comparing sex with your current boyfriend and

sex with your former fuck buddy may be screwing with your ability to enjoy the boyfriend.

If you can’t stop comparing the sex you’re having with your boyfriend to the sex you used to have with your fuck buddy—sex that felt transgressive because your fuck buddy had shitty political opinions—you may be missing both the sex and also everything else the fuck buddy was about.

If the fever doesn’t break and your feelings for the fuck buddy don’t fade, that could be a sign things with your boyfriend haven’t just settled into a safe and comfortable routine. It could be a sign that your relationship with the boyfriend is winding down. v

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to let go of my physical attraction for another person whose ﬂaws my brain seems intent on ignoring. Do you have any suggestions? —HEMMING OVER THINGS THAT INVOLVE EMOTIONS

a: Sex with long-term partners often becomes routine, HOTTIE. Routines get a bad rap, especially routine sex (which gets the “rut” label slapped on it), but routines bring order and stability to our lives. What routines don’t bring to us is excitement.

While the contentedly monogamous regard the trade-off (routine and reliable sexual intimacy in exchange for novelty and sexual excitement) as a win, the miserably monogamous seem to regard the trade-off as a loss.

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