Print Issue of July 26, 2018 (Volume 47, Number 42)

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ACTING DEPUTY EDITOR KATE SCHMIDT CREATIVE DIRECTOR VINCE CERASANI DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JAMIE RAMSAY CULTURE EDITOR AIMEE LEVITT FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS STEVE HEISLER, JAMIE LUDWIG SENIOR WRITER MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, PETER MARGASAK SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI FILM LISTINGS COORDINATOR PATRICK FRIEL CONTRIBUTORS ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, ANDREA GRONVALL, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, MONICA KENDRICK, BILL MEYER, MICHAEL MINER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, LEAH PICKETT, JAMES PORTER, BEN SACHS, DMITRY SAMAROV, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS MATTHEW HARVEY, DAVID NORTH, KATIE POWERS, TYRA NICOLE TRICHE, ANNA WHITE ---------------------------------------------------------------ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER BEST SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA ---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 30 N. RACINE, SUITE 300 CHICAGO, IL 60607 312-222-6920 CHICAGOREADER.COM ----------------------------------------------------------------

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE

The Makers Issue

CITY LIFE

T

hey are stay-at-home mothers who want to be there for their families but also feel productive and want to contribute to their household budgets; they are men leaving behind meaningless jobs and trying to help the communities where they live; they are people working long nights and multiple jobs to pursue a dream; they are makers. In a world of fast consumption, inhumane manufacturing practices, and shortsighted ways of creating wealth, these Chicagoans are doing it right.

—ISA GIALLARENZO

ARTS & CULTURE

Good with their hands

The idea workshop

Five local artisans on their chosen paths and handmade wares

The Chicago Public Library Maker Lab gives everybody free A few of the most access to some amazing toys. interesting DIY classes

BY KATIE POWERS 17 the city has to offer.

BY ISA GIALLARENZO 10

You, too, can be a terrarium builder

BY MATT HARVEY 19

Sole searching

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Sara McIntosh teaches shoemaking as a first step toward self-reliance.

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BY JAMIE RAMSAY 14

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Captain Underpants If you have a deep-seated need to sew your own undies, Amy Taylor is here for you.

BY DEANNA ISAACS 18

20 Theater In Manual Cinema’s The End of TV, two women help each other rediscover their humanity.

21 Theater MPAACT’s Summer Jams provide a stage for young black performers.

22 Theater The Color Purple and six more new stage shows, reviewed by our critics 24 Movies The weekend festival “Welcome to Castle Rock” proves there’s no formula for adapting a Stephen King novel.

25 Movies In Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, online culture becomes a breeding ground for teenage anxiety.

26 Movies En El Septimo Dia and more new releases, reviewed by our critics

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

30 In Rotation Aby Ngana Diop, Sampha, the Internet, and other current musical obsessions 31 Shows of note Negative Scanner, Lil Baby, Kraus, and more of the week’s best

FOOD & DRINK

34 Restaurant Review: Lost Larson Andersonville is once again home to a happy place for pastry.

CLASSIFIEDS

35 Jobs 35 Apartments & Spaces 36 Marketplace

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

Whitne y J o hnso n dri fts free o f th e k no w ab le as Ma t chess ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY JEREMY HAYES, STYLIST: MATTHEW ANCER, LEATHERWORK: JAMIE RAMSAY. FOR MORE OF JEREMY’S WORK, GO TO JEREMYHAYESPHOTOGRAPHY.COM.

4 Joravsky | Politics Hey NRA, does the Second Amendment not apply to black people?

5 Segregation A new study finds that aldermanic prerogative is worsening Chicago’s segregation problem.

6 Transportation The CPD gets slammed for continuing to ticket black cyclists disproportionately: “It’s about the police harassing people.”

The Chicago violist, singer, and organist completes the Matchess Trilogy with the occult healing songs of the new Sacracorpa.

BY PETER MARGASAK 27

37 Savage Love Quick hits on ball busting, pegging, DTMFAing, bottoming, and more 38 Early Warnings Jim Messina, Pond, Graham Coxon, and other shows to look for in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf Abraham Levitan of Shame That Tune and Baby Teeth dusts off his singing-in-public shoes, and more music news.

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 3

CITY LIFE Police and protesters confront each other the day after the shooting of Harith Augustus on July 15. é COLIN BOYLE/SUN-TIMES

POLITICS

The silence is deafening

Amid the uproar over the fatal police shooting of Harith Augustus, who was legally carrying a firearm, the NRA and other gun-rights groups have remained uncharacteristically mum. Does the Second Amendment not apply to black people?

By BEN JORAVSKY

W

ith all the attention focused on the police shooting of Harith Augustus in South Shore, the silence coming from the gun rights groups is deafening.

I mean, just about everyone else has weighed in, one way or the other, on the July 14 shooting, including Black Lives Matter activists, Mayor Rahm, and the Fraternal Order of Police.

But not a word from the normally loquacious spokespeople for the National Rifle Association like Dana Loesch, Oliver North, or Wayne LaPierre.

And it’s weird, ’cause if ever there were a case tailor-made for the NRA to join—or even lead—it would be this one.

Consider what we know from the footage released by Chicago police.

It’s Saturday evening. Augustus is standing on the sidewalk outside the barbershop where

4 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

he works, on 71st Street near Jeffery Boulevard in South Shore.

Several police officers approach him. We still don’t know what they’re saying because there’s no sound in the body camera footage released by the police department.

It looks as though one officer is asking Augustus for an ID. Augustus reaches for his wallet. Another police officer reaches for his arm, as if to handcuff him. Augustus breaks for the street. As he turns, his shirt lifts, revealing what looks to be a handgun holstered at his waist.

It’s then that he’s shot by a probationary officer, who hasn’t been identified.

Defenders of the police say Augustus was reaching for his gun, so the cops had no choice but to shoot him before he shot them.

Putting that matter to the side, the great unknown is why the police approached Augustus in the first place.

I mean, he was doing nothing wrong. He was bothering no one.

He wasn’t a known offender. He had no record apart from “three minor arrests” dating back years ago, as the Tribune put it.

The official police explanation, offered by spokesman Anthony Guglielmi, is that Augustus was “exhibiting characteristics of an armed person.”

But that’s no crime—owning a gun. In this case, Augustus even had a firearm identification card.

Furthermore, it’s not hard to understand why he would own a gun. He’s a barber—a cash-heavy business—in a relatively highcrime area.

It’s at this point in the discussion where the NRA’s voice is noticeably absent.

Because as Loesch, North, and LaPierre never tire of saying, there’s nothing wrong with owning a gun.

Quite the contrary, as they see it, it’s a fundamental right, enshrined by the founders in the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which of course states: “A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

I’ve heard NRA members invoke this sacred right every time anyone calls for gun control, even in the aftermath of horrific mass murders. Such as when . . .

Adam Lanza shot 26 people, including 20 children, in Newtown, Connecticut, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012.

Or Dylann Roof shot nine people during a prayer service at the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

Or Stephen Paddock shot 58 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas in 2017.

And so on.

The right to bear arms is championed by all the leading Republicans in the land, including Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, the judge he’s just nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In fact, a few years ago, one Chicago police officer caused a stir when he allowed himself to be photographed holding an American flag and standing behind a sign that read: “I stand for the Anthem. I love the American flag. I support my president and the 2nd Amendment.”

And yet the police approached Augustus as he stood on the sidewalk, bothering no one, because they thought he was “exhibiting characteristics of an armed person.”

This case should boil the blood of any self-respecting Second Amendment advocate.

Indeed, Loesch, North, and LaPierre should be marching with the Black Lives Matters activists in their demonstrations for justice.

But you know how it goes. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s anti-union Janus decision, it’s obvious that Republicans think the First Amendment is only supposed to protect the speech of conservatives—certainly not football players, like Colin Kaepernick, who kneel during the National Anthem.

And apparently, the NRA thinks the Second Amendment only applies to white people. v

m @joravben

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CITY LIFE Aldermen Anthony Napolitano (41st Ward) and Nicholas Sposato (38th) at a 2017 City Council meeting.

Napolitano recently invoked aldermanic prerogative to block an affordable housing proposal in his northwestside ward. é BRIAN JACKSON/ SUN-TIMES MEDIA

SEGREGATION

R edlining, th e Cit y Co u ncil w ay

A new study shows that the long-standing custom of aldermanic prerogative is worsening Chicago’s segregation problem.

A

By DAVID NORTH

new study published by the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance claims that “aldermanic prerogative”—a customary practice that isn’t articulated anywhere in city law—is being used to reinforce the boundaries of Chicago’s historically segregated communities.

Aldermanic prerogative is a longstanding tradition: If a local alderman objects to a development in her ward, other aldermen will reject that development as well. The same is true when an alderman champions a particular development in his ward. According to the study, aldermen can use this power to make their ward unappealing for affordable housing development and ultimately reject inclusive housing proposals.

“It’s not just influence, it’s the power to kill a project.” says Kate Walz, vice president of advocacy at the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law and a contributor to the study. “[Developers] said it wasn’t even

worth the effort in many wards because there’s a high cost associated with planning and it can be quickly scuttled by the alderman.”

The report also highlights aldermen’s power to “downzone” in their wards. Downzoning occurs when an area is assigned a lower development density than previously permitted, meaning developers can only propose housing within that limit. Downzoning constrains the number of housing units that a property could bring to the ward, thereby “artificially [limiting] the supply of dwelling units, inflating both housing and land costs in a neighborhood and eliminating the financial feasibility of affordable housing on a broader basis,” the study claims. Walz adds that once an area gets downzoned, “developers are put back into the aldermanic machine.”

Local zoning committees created by aldermen and made up of homeowners in the ward can also limit and revise proposed plans for affordable housing, forcing developers to

invest in new architectural plans and zoning requests. The study argues that aldermanic control over zoning policy has resulted in the disproportionate use of downzoning in predominantly white wards, citing that 55 percent of all downzonings since 1970 have happened in 14 majority-white wards.

“Since 1970, the average majority-white ward has downzoned or landmarked 0.46 square feet of space for every remaining foot of multifamily zoning in their wards,” states the study, whereas “wards with a majority-black and/or Latinx population have downzoned 0.09 square feet for every remaining foot of multifamily zoning [in] their wards” over the same span of time. The use of downzoning in predominantly white and low-poverty wards has created a hostile environment for inclusive housing proposals— particularly affordable family housing—the study claims.

Developers who want to build apartments below market rates thus focus their attention

on the few wards that are “safer bets—areas where affordable housing has previously been approved.” In segregated Chicago, this means housing suitable for lower-income families is concentrated in lower-income black and Latinx wards.

“On its face, this does not seem problematic,” says Patricia Fron, executive director of the Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance, “but when we look at it from a historical perspective, it is very clear that the prerogative has been used to restrict access to white communities out of anti-black racism.”

The study claims that at the heart of aldermanic prerogative is political reputation.

Whether it’s dealing with developers, constituents, or even the mayor, aldermen must “navigate a clamor of interests . . . compelling many aldermen to do not what is best for the city of even their ward but what will least damage their . . . chances of reelection.”

In a July 17 letter to the Chicago Tribune, Michael Sullivan seemed to confirm this point when he argued against the study’s claims. He writes that aldermanic prerogative helps homeowners keep their alderman accountable. “No one should have any zoning authority in my neighborhood except my alderman,” Sullivan writes, “Let my alderman wear the collar for the zoning decisions in my ward. Then I can reward or punish him at the ballot box.”

The study also claims that the result of constituent influence over zoning and development through aldermanic prerogative is “a culture where aldermen in predominantly white and low-poverty areas erect barriers to affordable housing to preserve the status quo.”

Meanwhile, other wards have to build more than their equitable share of affordable housing “because, if it is not built in their wards, it will not be built at all.” Fron adds that this struggle to accommodate affordable housing means “the city is unable to fulfill its civil rights obligations.”

“This is a matter of constituents controlling the look of the neighborhood, the racial makeup,” says Walz. “There is a practice here of essentially not voting, of deferring to the vote of one alderman out of 50. It is depriving the city of Chicago of a fair and objective process. It is allowing one person, or someone under the influence of their constituents, to make that decision, and that appears to be an unlawful delegation of power over land use and zoning in the city of Chicago.” v

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 5

CITY LIFE TRANSPORTATION

Co p s slamme d fo r t ick et ing b lack cy clists: ‘ It’ s ab o u t th e po lice har assing peo ple ’

African-Americans and Latinos are still being ticketed at far higher rates than whites for biking violations.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

T

he weather was gorgeous last Thursday around sunset, and there were plenty of people with bikes on Roosevelt near Pulaski in North Lawndale. Johnny Harris, 60, was cycling home on a Gitane road bike, while Thomas Chatman, 56, wore a straw fedora as he stood on the sidewalk with his hybrid, which had unfortunately caught a flat.

This location lies within the Chicago Police Department beat that’s arguably the worst place to ride a bike in the city. In addition to having a high incidence of violent crime, beat 1011—bounded by Roosevelt, Central Park, 15th, and the western boundary of the city—saw more tickets written for biking on the sidewalk than any other beat during both of the past two years. According to ticketing data provided by CPD via a Freedom of Information Act request, police wrote 124 sidewalk-riding citations last year, up from 112 in 2016.

Harris received one of them. He normally bikes in the street but said last year he’d steered onto the sidewalk to avoid potholes on a stretch of Roosevelt a couple blocks west of Pulaski when he was pulled over, searched, and hit with a $50 ticket. He said he was unable to pay his fee, and as a result now has to go to a court hearing to resolve the situation.

Chatman told me he tries to follow the rules of the road and hasn’t received any

6 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

Thomas Chatman stands with his bike in North Lawndale, which saw the most tickets issued for riding on the sidewalk in both 2016 and 2017. é JOHN GREENFIELD

citations, but he’s often witnessed officers stopping and frisking people on bikes in the neighborhood. “I think it’s about the police harassing people,” Chatman told me.

In March 2017, Tribune reporter Mary Wisniewski uncovered massive bike ticketing discrepancies between majorityAfrican-American and majority-white neighborhoods. Despite city officials’ promises to address the lopsided enforcement practices, this past February Wisniewski reported that little had changed. About 56 percent of bike tickets—the vast majority of which were issued for sidewalk riding—were written in black communities in 2017, while only 18 percent were written in white neighborhoods.

Strikingly, that year police wrote 397 bike tickets in North Lawndale while—for the second year in a row—only five tickets were issued in Lincoln Park.

Black bike advocates have blasted the exponentially higher ticketing rates in communities of color as a major social justice issue, which discourages cycling among demographics that stand to gain the most from its health, mobility, and economic benefits.

At the June Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Council meeting, CPD director of public en-

gagement Glenn Brooks Jr. discussed a recent police analysis of 3,300-plus tickets for sidewalk biking. There he acknowledged that the numbers suggest police are using bike tickets as well as motor vehicle stops as a strategy to help intercept illegal guns and drugs in high-crime neighborhoods. He noted that that in each of the predominantly black and/ or Latino areas with high ticketing rates, “we had a disproportionately high number of violent incidents,” according to a report by Streetsblog’s Igor Studenkov. Brooks added, “In communities that have a higher violence concentration, part of our violence-reduction safety strategy is vehicle enforcement.”

Brooks argued that he doesn’t believe racial profiling is an issue because the demographics of the people stopped by police reflect the ethnic makeup of the communities.

He added that he doesn’t see anything problematic about police enforcing traffic laws more aggressively in high-crime areas than in low-crime neighborhoods. In a follow-up e-mail, Brooks told me officers cannot do a search based on a traffic stop alone.

“An officer has to have probable cause in order to conduct a search,” Brooks said.

Alex Wilson, director of the education

center West Town Bikes, was at the meeting.

He said using bike ticketing as a strategy to conduct searches could “further animosity and mistrust towards the police” on the part of the communities they serve: “Many of our youth already feel that they are profiled for being black or Latino, so this strategy only increases resentment towards the police.” He suggested that a better approach to fighting crime and improving community relations would be more beat cops patrolling on foot and bike. “When police are out of their cars and more approachable, they grow trust and confidence in the community,” said Wilson.

Active Transportation Alliance advocacy director Jim Merrell, who was also present at the meeting, said his group “strongly condemns any use of traffic enforcement to target specific members of our communities . . . . Active Trans supports the important work of organizations engaged in police reform efforts and looks to their leadership on the best way to address this critical issue.”

Sout h-side c yc l i n g advocate A n gela Ford was upset by Brooks’s statement at the meeting that police used bike enforcement to facilitate searches, and said Mayor Rahm Emanuel should be held accountable

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just steps from the Dempster “L” stop The maps show the number of tickets written for biking on the sidewalk in Chicago Police Department beats. North Lawndale’s beat 1011 abuts the western border of the city. é CHICAGO POLICE DEPARTMENT

during next year’s mayoral election. “This ad m i n ist rat ion’s a ggressive at tack on African-American communities starts at the top. . . . Black Chicagoans have come to realize these completely racist policies will be the practices of all city departments until we have a new mayor.”

Aditi Singh, a staff attorney with crimina l justice reform group the Chicago Appleseed Fund for Justice, said the police department’s bike enforcement tactics don’t appear to be unconstitutional, but they are bad public policy. “The fact that they’re admitting to enforcing the law differently in different kinds of communities is shocking,” she said. “It does appear that the police are allowed to make pretext traffic stops, but what they’re admitting to is disproportionate minority contact.”

Singh noted that a recent ProPublica report found that Chicago automobile ticketing practices disproportionately impact AfricanAmericans on the south and west sides, often sending residents into a spiral of fines, late fees, driver’s license suspensions, loss of employment, and loss of income. While bike tickets don’t lead to a license being revoked, she added that when police target cyclists in communities of color, there are other negative outcomes besides financial hardship.

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that your every move is being watched and that you’re getting in trouble for things other people aren’t.”

Darryl Heard, 52, who works at a tire repair shop, is at risk for such enforcement.

When I met him last week near Roosevelt and Kostner, which falls within beat 1011, he was biking to a convenience store to play the lottery, riding on the wrong side of the road.

This practice is illegal and puts cyclists at risk for head-on collisions. But Heard said he’s ridden this way ever since December 2015, when a motorist fatally struck Robert Blount, 55, from behind at 15th and Kostner.

Biking against traffic allows him to see oncoming cars.

Heard said he narrowly avoided a bike ticket recently when he was biking on the sidewalk, spotted a squad car, and quickly transferred to the street. I explained that statistics suggest that, as a North Lawndale resident, he’s about 80 times as likely to be ticketed for wrong-way biking or sidewalk riding than a person who lives in bikefriendly Lincoln Park, where such infractions are also common. “That ain’t fair,” he replied.

“That’s just messed up.” v

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

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

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You could say that Alexis Bouteville, owner of Hyde Park Records, discovered Chicago by way of Paris. Alexis had a record store in his native France and was going on frequent buying trips in the United States to keep the store stocked. Chicago always had the best selection of unique vinyl, and it wasn’t long before he fell in love with Hyde Park and the whole South Side area.

In 2011, Alexis took over the existing Hyde Park neighborhood record store that had been there since the 1970s ñ Second Hand Tunes ñ and renamed it as Hyde Park Records. Located at 1377 E. 53rd Street, the store is always listed as one of the best independent record stores in the city. Thrillist referred to it as ì Ö everything a neighborhood record shop should be. With live DJs, a chummy community vibe, and a banginí selection of wax never short on hip hop or international fl air, thereí s always something happening at this crate diggerí s paradiseÖ If anyone tries to tell you all record stores are the same, a visit here provides for an unimpeachable rebuttal.î Alexis explains that Hyde Park Records ì Ö specializes a lot in older music and vinyl, and especially R&B, blues, and jazz. We also sell a lot of tapes so everything vintage is really coming back.î The store also buys used records, and on any day you can see Alexis expertly (and very quickly!) fl ipping through collections to fi nd the rare records he knows his customers want, as the owners look on hopefully.

A recent Chicago Reader article noted that local rapper Vic Mensa counts Hyde Park Records as one of his favorite neighborhood hangouts from when he was a young kid. He started coming to the store when he was just 11 or so and it ì Ö helped (him) develop his diverse musical taste.î And Mensa is not the only one. Hyde Park Records is more than just a record store ñ ití s an important part of the

neighborhood, ingrained in so many music loversí lives. Alexis says, ì The store is also a great place for people to meetÖ to talk and share about music, musicians, DJs, (and) producers ñ people need a place like this. The community interaction aspect is one of his favorite parts of being a small business owner in the neighborhood, and Alexis adds, î To go further south is different, further west is different, further north is different. (Hyde Park) is really a little town within Chicago.î

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Ití s not uncommon to fi nd customers making buying trips from as far away as Europe and Japan. Well≠ known hip hop producers DJ Spinna, Pete Rock, and Large Pro are regular customers from New York, as well as DJ QBert from San Francisco.

The store is a part of major local events such as the recent Silver Room Sound System Block Party, held on July 21, hosting Mr. JayToo, DJ Marbll, Erica Kane, Brian Reaves, James Vincent, and DJ Mikey Mike. WGFMí s annual Soul Reunion takes place every spring and summer, and the store hosts a monthly ì All Vinyl Seriesî with visiting DJs. In addition to records, Hyde Park Records stocks CDs, DVDs, books, and vintage Ebony and Jet issues.

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1377 E. 53rd Street 773-288-6588 hydeparkrecords.com

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

Good with their hands Five local artisans on their chosen paths and handmade wares

By ISA GIALLORENZO

Bergen Anderson of Lilla Barn Clothing Catch these artisans at the Made in Chicago Market on Sunday, August 5, from 11 AM to 5 PM at the Chicago Plumbers Hall, 1340 W. Washington. General admission is free; VIP admission is $15 and includes an on-site class hosted by Dabble. For more see chicago. suntimes.com/micm.

10 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

B

ig, bright, and bold. That’s how Bergen Anderson, 39, describes the aesthetic of Lilla Barn, the children’s clothing company she founded in 2011.

“I was pregnant with my daughter and just couldn’t find the baby clothes I wanted,” she says. “Since I’ve always been a maker—my mom taught me how to sew as a child—I decided to make clothes for my baby. The idea to start Lilla Barn grew organically out of that decision.”

Bergen enlisted the help of her textile-expert mother, Anne Anderson, and graphic designer sister, Liv Anderson, to create gar-

ments for babies and kids that go way beyond pink and blue. “The Nordic aesthetic plays a large role in our design since it’s such a significant part of our lives,” says Bergen, who’s

of Norwegian and Swedish ancestry and says she’s always been in touch with her roots— “the Scandinavian-American experience is huge in the midwest.” So it’s no surprise that Lilla Barn’s designs are suffused with primary colors and lively geometric motifs, printed on unique fabrics she often sources on her family’s trips abroad.

“We mostly use 100 percent cotton fabric for our woven garments, and 95 percent cotton with 5 percent spandex fabric for our leggings and other knit pieces,” Bergen says.

“We also have linen and bamboo garments.

Everything needs to be soft—everyone should wear soft clothes!” She adds that sustainability is a core value for her company: “We use as much of our fabrics as possible and then donate scraps to quilters and other crafters.”

So far Lilla Barn’s greatest hits have been its “ninja pants” ($29-$39)—drop-crotch pants that allow for bulky diapers and plenty of movement—and leggings ($25), which feature gender-neutral prints. And even though children’s clothes continue to be Lilla Barn’s main focus, the company has recently started a women’s line as well as a home goods department—all handmade by the Andersons, who also collaborate with other local artists and brands to create one-of-a-kind products that feel as great to look as they are to touch.

LILLA BARN CLOTHING, lillabarn.com.

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Katherine Duncan of Katherine Anne Confections

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at chocolates, little girl; Eat chocolates!

Believe me, there is no metaphysics in the world other than chocolates; Believe me, all the religions together do not teach more than the candy shop,” wisely wrote the late Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. His words came to me after I entered the Logan Square storefront of Katherine Anne Confections. The salted-caramel iced drinking chocolate ($5, with a flight of three for $9) obliterated any further considerations from my mind. It was just me and chocolate, its sublime taste both powerful and subtle, with just the right amount of sweet.

I’m not the only disciple. Katherine Anne’s salted-caramel drinking chocolate mix ($24) has taken prizes at the Specialty Food Association’s prestigious Sofi Awards, and was declared one of the top 15 places in the U.S. for hot chocolate by Fodor’s. But the confectionery is best known for its truffles ($2.75 each, with boxes starting at $10), which they make in quantities of up to 10,000 a week and sell at Whole Foods and other local markets.

An experienced chocolatier, Katherine Anne’s owner, Katherine Duncan, has been selling her sweets since the tender age of 14. “I grew up making truffles and caramels with my family over the holiday season, and sold caramels at my dad’s work for 25 cents each—or five for $1, so savvy! After I moved to Chicago in 2002 and started giving them out for the holidays, people went wild for them. I did some research and found out there weren’t a lot of artisan, small-batch confectioners in Chicago, so decided to give it a try and see what happens,” says Duncan, 33, who started her business in 2006. These days she employs nine staff members in addition to her husband (and father of her two young children), Frank Duncan, who works for the business full-time.

One of the secrets of their success seems to be in the sauce: “To make a stellar product, you have to start with stellar ingredients, so sourcing is at the top of the list,” says Katherine, who makes everything she sells from scratch. “Honey is used in place

Carla Miles of Popped Handmade

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of corn syrup in all items, and comes from Sunny Hill Honey out in Harvard, Illinois.

Cream comes from Kilgus Farmstead in Fairbury, Illinois—they have a herd of 120 Jersey cows that produce incredibly rich, decadent cream. Stone fruits and berries are from local farms—we love Seedling, Ellis, and Hardin’s, which are from Michigan and Wisconsin. Even ingredients that we use sparingly are sourced locally—our sunflower oil (for our vegan truffles) comes

from an organic farm in Wisconsin; our teas are blended on the south side of Chicago by SenTEAmental Moods artisan teas; curry powder comes from the western burbs.”

Her goal? “To make each product the best version of themselves,” she says. “Generally, we aim for intense, powerful flavors where tasters know what they’re enjoying before we tell them.” Mission accomplished. KATHERINE ANNE CONFECTIONS 2745 W. Armitage, 773-245-1630, katherine-anne.com.

ust a few weeks before Carla Miles’s first vendor event, tragedy struck: at 19 weeks pregnant with her second child, she found out her baby had a fatal birth defect and wasn’t expected to survive. “I put all of the frustration, anger, and hurt I was feeling into really hitting the pavement and promoting my products,” Miles says. “Since Popped Handmade was birthed out of the loss of my son, it’s even more important to me to give it my all and use it as a tool to help others.”

Miles, 29, started her artisanal skin-care line after realizing that many cosmetics labeled natural include questionable ingredients and synthetic fragrances—besides often being ridiculously expensive. “I started experimenting with recipes for my own lotions, and eventually started selling them in the J

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 11

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fall of 2015 to people with sensitive skin who were looking for gentle yet effective products,” she says. Miles specializes in facial oils ($7-$17), solid body-butter bars that melt once in direct contact with the skin ($14), and whipped body butters ($18$28)—a combination of melted butters and oils that have been cooled and whipped together into a creamy moisturizer.

“It contains no water, which makes it possible to keep it free of any synthetic preservatives that water-based moisturizers need to have,” she explains. Her all-natural formula includes premium and responsibly sourced ingredients such as kokum and

12 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

shorea butters, which aren’t usually found in products at the price point she offers.

“Affordability was important to me from the beginning because I know what it’s like to have a tight household budget,” says Miles, who in addition to overseeing her business and making all her products in her south-side kitchen also works as a real estate agent and takes care of her family. (She’s married and has two daughters: Frances, a cheerful five-month-old, and London, a four-year-old whom she homeschools.) “I need to wear so many hats that I have to continually learn how to manage my time more effectively in order to meet goals,” says the self-described “solopreneur.”

“When you’re growing a business, your to-do list is always expanding—but don’t forget to write out your accomplishments in addition to the tasks that you need to do,” Miles advises. “It can be hard to see progress when you’re in the trenches, but don’t be afraid to track even the tiniest of wins.”

One of Miles’s biggest wins is having come up with a product that both feels soft on the skin and fully restores it. It transforms the tedious experience of moisturizing into a pampering ritual. POPPED HANDMADE , poppedhandmade.com.

Allison Mooney of Allison Mooney Design

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inimal. That’s the word that Allison Mooney’s jewelry brings to mind, but it’s not the only one. Her work is both delicate and edgy, no-frills yet extremely light and feminine, and contemporary to the core.

“I love midcentury designs—the clean lines and use of simple materials,” she says. “And I love when there’s an odd shape thrown in here and there. I don’t want to do anything ornate, and I often try to see how minimal I can make something.”

Mooney, who’s 47, utilizes sterling silver and 14-carat yellow and rose gold fill to create durable pieces that quietly stand out. Less is definitely more for her: there’s a double finger

ring ($48) with a surprisingly comfortable single hole and a hairpin ($20) made of a simple metal string that can hold the heaviest of buns. Her geometric necklaces ($108) have no fasteners at all.

“I love to see how few solder joins I can get away with—it’s like a personal challenge,” she says. Her elegant designs have been picked up by stores such as Nordstrom, but currently Mooney prefers the intimacy of local markets.

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“I had thought I wanted to pursue a large retailer again when I moved to metalsmithing,” she says, “but I have found I much prefer selling on my own. I enjoy sharing my work with people, and usually have a great time doing it. There is such a wonderful community of makers in Chicago that I get to spend my day with—and there’s usually wine!”

The busy mother of two young girls also uses her practice as a way to make some time for herself, working at the metalsmithing studio Benches on Division in the evenings. Mooney says she tries to pass on to her daughters the DIY ethos she picked up from her art-teacher mother: “We would see something and she’d say, ‘Let’s try making it,’ and we’d head out to the art store. And she’s still the same!”

Mooney’s enterprise seems to have helped her accomplish her goals: “I want to be able to be home with my girls but still have a business. I want to make something you will love, I want to show my girls you can do anything you set your mind to, I want to support my family, and I want to have some adult time that hopefully involves wine.” ALLISON MOONEY DESIGN , allisonmooneydesign.com.

George Schaefer and Leigh-Anne Riebold of Norman Leigh Design

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his used to be [part of ] a barn near Springfield,” says George Schaefer, one half of the duo behind Norman Leigh Design, pointing at a piece of wood. “Look at this nail,” he says, reaching into a box. “You can’t find this anymore.”

Both Schaefer, 40, and his partner in life and business, Leigh-Anne Riebold, 36, feel strongly about preserving history and the environment—something they do masterfully with their pieces of home decor.

“Coming from a construction background, I’ve always worked with wood, and it’s what I know the most about,” Schaefer says. “I specifically had an interest in working with reclaimed wood someday, because for years while renovating houses I watched so much material get thrown away and wasted. When Leigh and I first started building our vision for Norman Leigh [the name is a combination of his middle and her first name], using reclaimed materials when possible was very

important to both of us for a number of reasons—including keeping lots of usable material out of the landfill and also preserving the history of the material we are salvaging.”

The couple find many of their materials in dumpsters, and often hit up contractors they’ve gotten to know. “It’s a win-win because we get material to use and the contractor doesn’t have to pay to empty his dumpster as often,” says Schaefer.

The bulk of their work comes from custom projects, but for those on a tighter budget they have products such as plant stands, serving trays, and wall art ranging from $20 to $300.

Even though the duo get their materials from the past, their aesthetic is decidedly con-

temporary: “Something that is important to us is that our pieces feel current and have a modern/refined edge to them as opposed to feeling too ‘rustic,’” says Riebold. They’re clearly a hit with the local market: “Our business has grown incredibly, especially over the last three years,” she adds. One of the reasons we love being in Chicago is that people here have a real appreciation for the maker movement and the work and time that goes into our craft.” NORMAN LEIGH DESIGN 3641 S. Morgan, first floor, 312-857-4733, normanleigh.com.

m @chicagolooks, chicagolooks@gmail.com JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 13

Sara McIntosh, founder of the Chicago School of Shoemaking, at her Ravenswood studio and school

Sole searching

McIntosh cuts the pattern pieces for a new pair of sneakers from a navy-blue leather hide.

Sara McIntosh teaches shoemaking as a first step toward self-reliance.

Instructor Yohance Lacour explains leather hardware to students Kathy Engstrom and Maureen Smith. Like McIntosh, Lacour taught himself leatherworking by dismantling bags and re-creating them. Now, under the mentorship of McIntosh, he’s started up his own line of leather sneakers, called Motif.

By JAMIE RAMSAY

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s a young woman in the 70s, Sara McIntosh, founder of the Chicago School of Shoemaking in Ravenswood, was a part of the back-to-the-land movement. She built a log cabin, bought a cow, grew her own food, and started bartering for goods and services.

“Massage, pottery, counseling, help with building a home, photography, sculpture, clothing—I even traded for an echocardiogram once,” she says.

To develop her self-sufficiency, McIntosh started shoemaking, dissecting old boots to gather patterns and to figure out how they were crafted. Before long what started as a service for family and friends blossomed into a vocation and a small business, and in 1976 she opened a shoemaking shop in her hometown of Bloomington, Indiana.

“I just wanted to make things, to not be accountable to anyone but myself and my bank account,” McIntosh, who’s 67, says. “There wasn’t a lot of competition in those days, no Internet to find schools or teachers. It was actually very liberating.”

Shoemaking afforded her the freedom to work on her own wherever she wanted, and in subsequent years she moved to Minnesota with her daughter and lived in Wisconsin, Col-

14 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

orado, and New Mexico. In 2007—10,000 pairs of hand-crafted shoes later—she returned to the midwest and opened the Chicago School of Shoemaking to help others learn what she’d taught herself.

CSOS classes include leather-working basics and more advanced instruction on turning materials into bags, belts, and sneakers. McIntosh recently developed a 240-hour leather technician certification program, and she’s currently mentoring one of the instructors at her school, Yohance Lacour, as he launches a start-up leather sneaker line called Motif.

On a weekend in July, six novices arrive ready to learn the process of building a pair of shoes. The environment resembles a summer camp; students bond as they help each other form the uppers and are guided through using an industrial sewing machine for the first

time. They share doughnuts while waiting for sole glue to dry.

There are few opportunities to learn cobbling in the U.S., and McIntosh’s classes draw interest from across the country, many having learned about the school and its programs on the CSOS website. This particular session is all out-of-towners, with students hailing from North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin, Florida, and Canada.

“It’s like an arts and crafts class when you’re old,” says student Christina Hamada, a programmer from Madison, Wisconsin. “I make things at my job, but it’s less concrete, more nebulous.” After two days, Hamada has created a one-of-a-kind pair of black leather desert boots with a snakeskin accent along the back.

McIntosh takes pride in instilling selfsufficiency in her students as well as in passing

on her craft. “I am one of the few people in [America] who makes custom-fit shoes and boots from scratch, by hand,” she says, flipping through a binder of thank-you notes and hand-drawn measuring guides from throughout her career. She has assisted elderly folks with swollen feet and people with high arches.

She chokes up when she comes across a letter from a mother whose child had clubfoot and was unable to wear most shoes until McIntosh custom-made her a pair.

The philosophy of CSOS is summed in a twist on a traditional aphorism: “Buy a pair of shoes and you cover your feet for a year or two. Learn how to make shoes and you can shoe yourself, family, and friends for a lifetime.” v

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McIntosh focuses more on the school than on fulfilling orders these days, but she still makes custom shoes on occasion. At left is a pattern for a pair she’s crafting for an elderly man whose swollen feet make it difficult to find commercially available shoes that fit.

Kyle Hunter of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, roughs the back of the midsole for gluing. Hunter is a self-confessed “shoephile” and wanted to learn to make his own.

CHICAGO SCHOOL OF SHOEMAKING AND LEATHER ARTS Classes year-round, evenings and weekends, 3717 N. Ravenswood, #113, 773-242-7436, chicagoschoolofshoemaking.com, $89-$1,200; see website for details.

Joanne Bell carefully aligns her assembled uppers with their leather soles.

Bell, a native of Orlando, Florida, cuts the pieces of her shoes from patterns. Her father worked in the shoemaking industry in the 60s, and since his passing, she’s decided to carry on the tradition.

Christina Hamada of Madison, Wisconsin, connects the sole to the shoe by gluing it, then hammering it over an anvil.

McIntosh helps students learn to sew the uppers to the midsole.

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 15

McIntosh shows Bell how to stretch and form the toe box while Lorraine Jones of Vancouver, British Columbia, chooses laces. Jones needs orthotics in all her shoes.“CSOS was the only place I found that had what I was looking for,” she says.

McIntosh instructs her shoemaking students in using the industrial sewing machines to begin making the heels of their boots.

Wooden lasts, acquired from a Detroit shoemaker, show the late cobbler’s notes and wingtip designs. CSOS students start with nonlasted shoes.

Hamada and McIntosh finish sanding the shoe sole.

McIntosh trims the midsole and outsole on the bandsaw.

When McIntosh started going home from work with headaches in the mid-70s, she created a ventilation system out of cardboard and took it to a sheet metal fabricator to have the above exhaust system made. “I’ve met shoemakers who’ve stood over glue pots for years, and their minds don’t work,” she says.

A pair of completed desert boots made by Bob Strawn of College Station, Texas, finish drying in the sun. The leather is fully wet for the final stages of the process, in which the toe box is rounded out by hand.

16 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

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One of the Maker Lab’s 3-D printers

A laser cutter é CITY OF

é CITY OF CHICAGO PHOTOGRAPHER

CHICAGO PHOTOGRAPHER

Maker Lab librarian John Christensen showing a patron an item that was made with the 3-D printer é CITY OF CHICAGO PHOTOGRAPHER

The idea workshop The Chicago Public Library Maker Lab gives everybody access to some amazing toys.

By KATIE POWERS

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ith the rise of the maker movement in the mid-2000s came the creation of “maker spaces,” places where people with shared interests and ideas could come together to create and engage with tools and technology and learn from each other. In July 2013, the Harold Washington Library opened the first publicly accessible maker space in Chicago, the Harold Washington Maker Lab. Chicago Public Library librarians Sasha Neri and John Christensen have worked in the Maker Lab from the time of its founding. Neri splits her time with adult services, but Christensen is in the Maker Lab full-time. Before they started working there, neither of them had any knowledge about maker technology.

But their background as librarians aided their transition into the maker world. “It helps to be a librarian because you know how to find information and sort through the good information and the bad information,” Neri says. “With the maker ecosystem, everyone is really happy to be like, ‘Oh, you want me to come to the library and show you this thing? Sure, why not?!’”

The Maker Lab offers a wide range of technology, including a 3-D printer, electronic and laser cutters, and a CNC router, a computer-controlled machine that can carve wood and plastic. Users can explore the space and

equipment through two-hour classes led by Maker Lab librarians. Classes are free and typically revolve around the high-tech materials the space offers. But there are also some classes that teach skills such as cupcake decorating, flower arranging, and calligraphy.

The Maker Lab also offers open shop hours where makers can use the space for personal projects. There’s no need to sign up in advance, but all equipment must stay in the lab. “We’ve had some people come in that are prototyping projects they want to develop and we’ve had people come in and make stuff to sell at craft fairs or shops,” Christensen says.

The Maker Lab was initially envisioned as a six-month-long pop-up project to explore the role of maker labs in public libraries, but the feedback from the community was overwhelmingly positive. “When the six months came, we were doing really good here, and it was very popular,” Christensen says. “So I think it’s going to remain an ongoing thing for the library.”

The welcoming, friendly environment of the library makes the space accessible to people who are interested in maker technology but have little experience and might feel intimidated by maker spaces full of experts.

“Here you can come in and you can try this

curtains were expensive. So she knew we had a sewing machine and came in and sewed curtains. An everyday hero.”

One regular at the Maker Lab is Judi Chow, who is in her 60s and lives a short walk away from the library. She first started visiting after noticing the space by chance and signing up for a class. But after several of them, she started to work on independent projects. So stuff and we’ll help you with every step,” far, she’s made earrings and keychains to give Christensen says. away, and she’s currently using the laser printAlong the wall just inside the entrance of er to work on a larger project, an engraving the Maker Lab there’s a display of old projects that will eventually be a wedding gift. “I really created by visitors. Among them is a 3-D print- enjoy it,” she says. “You’re creating things, ed model of a partial skull, one of the most and they are very friendly and knowledgeable notable projects completed at the lab so far. here. I really appreciate that the library has “Some doctors from a local teaching hospital the Maker Lab.” came to us and they were going to do surgery But for Neri and Christensen, the role of on a child that had a skull defect,” Christensen the Maker Lab in the community is an exsays. “They had the tension of the role scans, but they wanted of the public library. a physical model that “Libraries have always HAROLD WASHINGTON MAKER LAB could actually fit the been a workshop for Mon-Thu 1-8 PM, Fri-Sat 10 AM-4 PM, plate before doing ideas where people go Harold Washington Library Center, surgery. So we took and learn things and 400 S. State, 312-747-4300, chipublib. those scans, converted apply them,” Chrisorg. Class enrollment begins 15 minthem to a file that could tensen says. “This is utes before scheduled start time. F be printed on the 3-D a workshop for ideas printer, and printed the in physical form. You entire skull. It actually did help them with the have an idea and you make into an object. It’s surgery, and they decided to get their own 3-D an extension of digital literacy.” printer to have in their lab.”

“Our role has always been in lifelong But some of the most memorable maker learning,” Neri says. “People see a library as projects have had much lower stakes. “This a place that they should be able to learn. It’s woman came in between workshops to make such a beautiful fit to have a community based curtains,” Neri says. “She was talking about around different skills people can obtain.” v how she moved into a place that had a bunch of windows, but she went to the store and the m @kmpowers01

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 17

é AMY TAYLOR

Amy Taylor and underpants in progress é DEANNA ISAACS

If you have a deep-seated need to sew your own undies, Amy Taylor is here for you.

By DEANNA ISAACS

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es, Donald Trump’s in the driver’s seat, and the world’s careening like a bumper car from one potential disaster to another, but it’s summer, glorious summer—time to turn our attention to something equally global in scope but more immediate and personal; something that is, in fact, at this exact moment, affecting you in a very intimate way.

It’s not your cell phone.

I’m speaking here of underwear. Bloomers, boxers, tighty-whities, thongs—virtually nonexistent until the 18th century but ubiquitous now.

You’re wearing, right? Then you ought to know about Lillstreet Art Center’s five-week, Friday-night BYOB course, Sew Your Own Underwear, taught by self-proclaimed “underpants extraordinaire” Amy Taylor.

Taylor’s an SAIC graduate and textile artist, practicing, she writes on her website, at “the intersection of art and science, as well as the female form.” She also teaches dyeing and screen printing courses at Lillstreet Art Center and runs her own business, Ms. Amy Taylor,

18 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

é AMY TAYLOR

Captain Underpants

where she sells her handcrafted, Shibori-dyed cotton jersey underpants for a jaw-dropping $30 to $50 a pair.

Which might be one reason why you or I— who can purchase a six-pack of Hanes hipsters online for $10.25 or splurge on a Victoria’s Secret lace cheekini for $16.50—would shell out $195 ($190 for Lill Street members) to take her five-week course and learn how to make our own lifetime supply of something more special.

That’s not the answer that sprang to Taylor’s lips, however, when I asked her why anyone would pay so much for underpants or take the time to make their own.

People who buy them, she said, are supporting a local female-run business with an environmentally friendly product free of toxic dyes and made to last. They’re opting out of the fast-fashion industry, where bargain prices depend on exploited labor in other parts of the world.

But people who take the class often tell her something simpler and deeper: “They’ve just

had a desire to sew their own underwear for a I trekked up to Lillstreet’s third-floor long time,” she said. “I get that response a lot. sewing room to meet with Taylor, and she And it’s specifically underwear that they want whipped up a bikini cut as we talked, laying a to make.” butcher-paper pattern on a scrap of purpleBesides fulfilling this instinctive urge to and-gray striped fabric, holding it down with stitch your own dainties, underwear has pattern weights, and carving the shapes with another advantage: “It’s really accessible,” a rotary cutter.

Taylor said. “You can put together a pair pretIf you’re female, the undies you’re wearing ty quickly once you get the hang of it. And this almost certainly consist of just three main class is a great way to learn some higher-level pieces: a front, a back, and a liner for the sewing skills: how to work with stretch fab- all-important and somewhat tricky crotch.

(Underwear’s almost the rics, how to thread and only garment I can think sew with a serger.” of that’s more compliIf you’ve never come SEW YOUR OWN UNDERWEAR cated if you’re male: the face-to-face with a serger, 7/27-8/24: Fri 6:30-9:30 PM, briefs require six pattern I can tell you that it’s an Lillstreet Art Center, 4401 N. Raparts and the use of bias intimidating brute of a venswood, 773-769-4226, lillstreet. tape.) machine, topped by four com, $195, $190 members. The Threading a serger large cone-shaped thread class will also be offered in the means mastering a maze spools and armed with fall session, which starts Fri 9/14. of hooks and loops before a lightning-fast, razorapplying some old-fashedged automatic fabric ioned spit, but the rest slicer. It does a great job on fabrics like the stretchy 90 to 95 percent of the project—at least in Taylor’s hands—is cotton jersey that Taylor uses, but it’s part of a whiz: the right side of the liner gets stitched the reason that you need a few notches on your to the wrong side of the back; the liner’s side edges get serged to the front; picot elastic, sewing belt before enrolling in this class.

The prerequisites for Sew Your Own Under- lightly stretched, is zigzag stitched along the wear are two lower-level sewing classes at Lill- leg openings. Then one side seam is serged, a street or equivalent experience. If you’re able lacy white elastic band is stitched to the waist, to thread a home sewing machine and have the second side seam is serged, and presto!— used it for anything more complicated than a you’ve got underpants.

As for a tiny glitch on the back end of the hem, you’ll qualify. In any case, not to worry: “Everyone comes in with different levels of ex- liner? “If anyone’s critiquing the stitching perience,” said Taylor, who as recently as 2011 on your underwear while you’re wearing it, they’re focusing on the wrong thing,” Taylor was a sewing newbie at Lillstreet herself.

Taylor provides the fabric for the first pair said.

Dutiful about research, I took that spiffy of underpants students make; after that, they can bring in their own material (which, I’m purple-and-gray bikini home and wore it the guessing, would generally be the point). She next day. I’m happy to report that it’s most offers three basic patterns: bikini cut, hip comfortable pair of undies I’ve ever had, alhugger, and briefs (men are welcome and have most as good as not wearing any.

I don’t think Taylor wants it back. v enrolled). And if you’ve got a pair of undies you particularly like, she can show you how to re-create them. m @DeannaIsaacs

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key ingredient

é ONE STRANGE BIRD

COOK-OFF COCKTAIL

You, too, can be a terrarium builder

challenge

Here are a few more of the most interesting DIY classes the city has to offer.

By MATT HARVEY Robot Date Night Robot City Workshop allows couples to choose from more than 12 different DIY kits while snacking on complimentary beer and popcorn served by a robot waiter. By appointment:

Thu-Sat 7-9 PM, Robot City Workshop, 3226 N. Sheffield, 773-281-1008, robotcityworkshop. com, $25 per person.

Winemaking Instructors at Bev Art will take you through the hands-on, step-by-step process of making your first varietal wine, from chardonnay to estate-grown cabernet (in order to make a wine you like, be sure to order your ingredients in advance). Through 11/28: times vary,

see website, Bev Art, 9030 S. Hermitage, 773233-7579, shop.bev-art.com, $125 per couple plus ingredients.

Be Your Own Perfumer Create your own signature scent in this twohour course at one of Chicago’s only perfumeries. A brief overview of perfuming technique and vocabulary is followed by samplings of fragrance families such as citrus, floral, fruity, and spicy. Wed 8/8, 10/10, and 12/12, 6-8 PM,

Chicago Discovery Center, 4318 N. Elston, 773-348-8120, discoverycenter.cc, $39 plus material fees.

Simple Stitches Learn how to weave beads in between strips of leather using the ladder stitch to make leath-

er and silk wrap bracelets. Thu 8/9, 6-8 PM, Beadniks Chicago, 1937 W. Division, 773-2762323, beadnikschicago.com, $20.

GIF animation workshop Lillstreet Art Center instructor Aaron Brandt will teach you how to use Photoshop to create your own animated GIFs out of photographs, Web images, or your own illustrations. Sun

8/12, 2-6 PM, Lillstreet Art Center, 4401 N. Ravenswood, 773-769-4226, lillstreet.com, $95, $90 members.

Baby Bib Sewing Workshop Artist Rachel Wallis will teach students how to sew a cloth baby bib and customize it with embroidery and applique designs. No prior sewing experience necessary. Tue 8/28,

1:30-3:30 PM, Maker Lab, third floor, Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State, 312-7474300, chipublib.org. Register in person at the Maker Lab. F Build Your Own Terrarium In this two-hour class, the folks at handmade arts and crafts store One Strange Bird will teach you the basics of how a terrarium works and how to maintain one, then guide you through designing one of your own. Oh yeah, and it’s BYOB. Fri 8/31, 6:30-8:30 PM, One

Strange Bird, 2124 W. Division, 773-276-4420, onestrangebird.com, $45. v

Travel the world with your favorite Chicago Chefs and Mixologists at Key Ingredient Cook-Off & Cocktail Challenge, as you savor the flavors of the globe and vote for your favorites. Inspired by our award-winning James Beard series, this is the perfect pairing of two of our most popular events.

FRIDAY

08.24.18

6PM – 9PM

5pm VIP pre-access Galleria Marchetti 825 W. Erie St, Chicago

TICKETS

chicagoreader.com/kico-cocktail

MUST BE 21+ PLEASE DRINK RESPONSIBLY

m @MatttheMajor JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 19

A R TS & CU LTU R E

R READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

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older woman’s photographs and keepsakes, which appear to the audience as a montage on the screen. She sees her as a young Rosie the Riveter building tanks, sees her raising a daughter, and finally comes across a newspaper story about that daughter’s premature death in an auto accident. The industry that has employed both women is also the source of much of their sorrow.

THE END OF TV Through 8/5: Thu-Sat 7 PM, R Sun 3 PM; aftershow Sat 9:15 PM,

Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, manualcinema.com, $30, $20 students and seniors.

Jeffrey Paschal and fellow Manual Cinema cast member-puppeteer Vanessa Valliere film a sequence for The End of TV, projected on the screen above them. é JUDY SIROTA ROSENTHAL

THEATER

The End of TV and th e indu st ri al age In Manual Cinema’s latest production, two women help each other rediscover their humanity.

By DMITRY SAMAROV

I

n an unnamed midwestern city sometime in the early 90s, an elderly white woman lives out her days entirely through her television, while a young black woman struggles to get by in a faltering economy. Their stories echo and intertwine in The End of TV, Manual Cinema’s transfixing new multimedia show, which is receiving its Chicago premiere at the Chopin Theatre. It’s a beautiful thing to look at and listen to, with enough real empathy for our country’s living conditions to give it contemporary resonance.

Four agile performers run a continuous relay between a bank of overhead projectors and the two screens they illuminate. They interact with silhouettes of puppets and ever-changing backgrounds to present an

20 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

overlapping narrative of youth and aging in a world increasingly dominated by screens and hucksters rather than nature and authentic human connection. The larger screen shows the internal and external lives of both women, while the smaller screen is devoted to an often nightmarish array of TV shows, dominated by the QVC shopping network, which the elderly woman watches religiously. The only speech in the piece is supplied by ghoulish TV talking heads and a song cycle performed by a talented seven-piece ensemble sitting stage left.

The old woman obsessively orders products after she sees them advertised on TV; her house fills up with boxes of things she doesn’t need. Periodically, she’s transported into a disturbing TV world in which the Jolly Green

Giant steps away from hawking canned vegetables to talk directly to her. Whether these scenes are a manifestation of her advancing dementia or just an escape from the isolation of her day-to-day existence, this is clearly no way to live.

The young woman’s life is shown through vignettes that jump in time between her girlhood and her working life as an adult. She grows up with a father who’s an avid gardener; she finds him in the yard one day, fallen dead.

She works at the auto plant just as he did but is laid off and forced to take a job delivering Meals on Wheels. The old woman is on her route, and she goes out of her way to help her because the older woman’s confusion and helplessness is so evident. As she does so, her life gains new meaning.

The soullessness of factory work and television are contrasted repeatedly with the nurturing qualities of growing plants in the soil, the implication being that industrial society has alienated humanity from nature both literally and figuratively. The older woman has withdrawn entirely into the shadow play of her TV screen, while the younger one has gone about her life like an automaton since losing her father, from home to work and back.

In one of the most affecting sequences of the program, the young woman looks through the

By sticking to these two particular lives, Manual Cinema is able to tell a universal story of contemporary alienation and loneliness.

The only slightly false note in the production, strangely enough, is the song cycle that was its genesis. With titles such as “Love & Mortgages,” the songs are often ploddingly on the nose when the rest of the show is airy and evocative. They spell out the critiques of capitalism that are much more poetically demonstrated by the puppets and performers. It’s almost as if Kyle Vegter and Ben Kauffman, who wrote the show and perform in the band, didn’t trust the audience to make sense of what’s in front of them and insisted on handing out a bunch of Cliff’s Notes, even though the action onstage is more than enough to get their message across.

Thankfully, the words are often drowned out by the music and thus easy to ignore.

One of the great joys of any Manual Cinema production is to watch the madcap, kinetic activity of the performers as they make a movie come into being in front of our eyes. I found myself often looking away from the action to the tabletops cluttered with wigs, mannequin heads, and piles of puppets awaiting their turn. The genius of this company is the ability of its members to animate the most inert object. The lowliest paper cut is granted agency in the world they’ve created.

The end of TV, the show’s basis, is unfortunately, as we all know too well, also the birth of the Internet. So while there’s a moment of hope toward the end when the young woman cultivates the garden that has lain fallow since her father’s death, that hope dims when a PC is delivered to her house and its ominous screen illuminates the room and eclipses the world outside. v

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Closet(s) é COURTESY MPAACT

THEATER

V ari et y p ack MPAACT’s Summer Jams provides a stage for young black performers.

SINCE ITS FOUNDING, Ma’at Production Association of Afrikan Centered Theatre (MPAACT) has produced large- and smallscale performances and original music and education programs centered on the spirit of collaboration and in celebration of African theater traditions. Now MPAACT is preparing

to host Summer Jams, a weeklong festival featuring 17 different acts showcasing the work of primarily black artists around Chicago.

The festival’s lineup offers a wide range of entertainment, exploring diverse content through a wide range of mediums, including music, sketch comedy, spoken word, and theater and performance. “How Summer Jams works is you get a slot and then you can do pretty much anything creative you want to,” says Razor Wintercastle, longtime MPAACT collaborator and producer of two Summer Jams musical tributes, Prints of a Diva and Regina Peters—Gina to Nina Simone.

Some acts are lighthearted and lend themselves to a laid-back atmosphere where drinking is encouraged, like Check This Sh!t Out: An Adult Variety Show featuring comedians, hip-hop artists, and drag queens, and Platonic Life Partners, a sketch-comedy performance.

But other acts are grounded in more serious, reflective content. The theater performance Closet(s) “A Vivid Exploration of Queer Voic-

A R TS & CU LTU R E

es” examines traumas experienced by black individuals who identify as queer. A Black Body in Space & Time, a one-woman show by actress Tia Jemison, explores her experience as a black woman, inspired by adversity she experienced during her time as a student at DePaul.

SUMMER JAMS

Mon 7/30-Sun 8/5: various times, see website, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, greenhousetheater.org, $25.

Wintercastle says she’s grateful to MPAACT and Summer Jams for creating a platform for artists who haven’t had one before. “I love the fact that they don’t shy away from new work,” she says. “They’re willing to take a chance, and a lot of companies don’t do that.” —KATIE POWERS

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 21

A R TS & CU LTU R E THEATER AND IMPROV

R ‘Can we get an appetizer?’

The cast of Anarchy improvises a fullfledged rock musical.

One night, the cast of the improvised rock musical Anarchy receives the suggestion “Applebee’s.” The ensemble members step out one by one to sing a verse, each ending with “Can I get an appetizer?” As the stage fills, the refrain becomes more harmonic. The appropriately named Mike Gospel concludes by belting the phrase at a powerful volume. His vibrato echoes through the theater, and the show kicks off on that strong, heightened note that makes it clear: this is an improvised musical, not musical improv that aims for cheap rhymes and cleverness.

Anarchy runs a tight hour, trimmed by an opening act; the night I attended, the talented comedic singersongwriter Becca Brown performed. There is little time for needless banter, so the cast skims over chatter to quickly arrive at the scene-closing musical numbers that move the plot along. When one Applebee’s employee tells his parents he’s leaving their small town in pursuit of a lasting legacy, a song immediately begins. Dad wishes his son would play center for the Indiana Pacers; Mom expresses fury that she’s being abandoned. The underlying score, improvised by a guitarist and a pianist, hits minor keys, casting a plaintive tone to punctuate the parents’ disappointment.

The production quality remains high, thanks to musicians and behind-the-scenes technicians who alternately follow the lead of the improvisers or steer the proceedings with lighting changes. The isolated Applebee’s restaurant always appears dim, which obscures facial expressions and contrasts with the brightness of more cathartic scenes. Anarchy also includes a painter off to the side who works on crude portraits and landscapes throughout the show. He’s a distraction when the ensemble musical numbers should be stealing the show.

—STEVE HEISLER ANARCHY Through 8/18: Sat 8 PM,

Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $20.

Happy 65th, Big Daddy!

Drury Lane brings the family drama to dinner theater with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Well, this comes as a surprise. In a season that will go on to feature Mamma Mia!, Little Shop of Horrors, and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, at a suburban theater where the usual nonmusicals are chestnuts like The Gin Game and Deathtrap, somebody thought to revive Tennessee Williams’s wonderfully lurid 1955 drama of family dysfunction, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

The cat of the title is Maggie, wife of former football hero Brick and daughter-in-law to the formidable Big Daddy, a self-made man whose Mississippi Delta farm holdings comprise, as he loves to say, “28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile.” All three of them are in the crises of their lives. Although still a beautiful specimen at 30, Brick has become a determined drunk. Big Daddy is fending off mortality and the vulture-ish kinfolk who hope to inherit his empire.

And Maggie, made fierce by the deprivations of her shabby-genteel upbringing, is ready to hiss and purr and burn her paws on that scalding roof if it means keeping what’s hers. Under the circumstances, Big Daddy’s 65th birthday party promises to be quite an event.

22 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

Williams’s script contains some of the richest characters and plot convolutions this side of King Lear.

And under Marcia Milgrom Dodge’s direction, on Kevin Depinet’s evocative set, such cast members as Matt DeCaro (Big Daddy) and Anthony Bowden (Brick) take fascinating advantage. Cindy Gold, particularly, brings tragic gravitas to Big Daddy’s much-abused wife, Big Mama. Which makes it all the more disappointing that Genevieve Angelson never quite latches on as Maggie.

The explicitly acknowledged life force of the play, she comes off as merely plaintive. —TONY ADLER CAT ON

A HOT TIN ROOF Through 8/26: Wed 1:30 PM, Thu

1:30 and 8 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 5:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM, Drury Lane Theatre, 100 Drury Lane, Oakbrook Terrace, 630-530-0111, drurylanetheatre. com, $50-$65, $67-$105 with meal package.

R Sisterhood is powerful

Adrianna Hicks’s Celie owns the musical adaptation of The Color Purple.

This Tony Award-winning touring revival, presented by Broadway in Chicago and based on Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, projects intimacy, authenticity and power. That’s no small feat in the sizable Auditorium Theatre, and it’s a testament to a commanding cast and carefully spare staging and music. Adapted for the stage

by Marsha Norman, with music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray, the musical tells the story of a group of African-American women in the 1930s south. It’s dark and it’s messy, and highlights issues like domestic violence in ways that ensure the audience feels their raw pain and immediacy. Under John Doyle’s direction, nothing distracts from these women’s journeys. Their transformations from disenfranchised side characters to protagonists of their own stories is spellbinding.

As the main character, Celie, Adrianna Hicks evolves charismatically over the course of the two acts. Deftly using body language to convey more than words, she plays teenage Celie with a heartbreaking mix of fear and steely resolve as she questions God. As her traumas, from lost babies to an abusive marriage, multiply, her shell hardens almost completely. Enter two strong female influences: musician and nomad Shug Avery (Carla R. Stewart) and opinionated and independent Sofia (Carrie Compere). Shug and Sofia’s paths were no easier, but their strength, confidence, and love, punctuated by Stewart and Compere’s room-shaking vocals, teach Celie to write her own path forward. When Hicks finally straightens her shoulders and looks other people in the eye, Celie is unrecognizable in the most satisfying way. —MARISSA OBERLANDER THE COLOR PURPLE:

THE MUSICAL Through 7/29: Wed 2 PM and 7:30

PM, Thu-Fri 7:20 PM, Sat 2 PM and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Tue 7:30 PM, Auditorium Theatre, 50 E. Congress, 800-982-2787, broadwayinchicago.com, $24-$100, $25 tickets available through an online lottery.

R The war at home

The Hero’s Wife shows that the violence doesn’t end when the fighting stops.

Aline Lathrop’s deft two-hander, codirected by Ann Filmer and Miguel Nuñez and currently receiving a joint premiere production (with Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theatre) at Berwyn’s 16th Street Theatre, tackles the timeless theme of how war damages soldiers and makes it hard for them to adjust to life after war.

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A R TS & CU LTU R E Rick Stone, or from his iconic 1975 film debut as the stick-up kid Rick Stone in Cooley High. Stone’s main role at the Black Ensemble Theater, where he’s been performing for 30 years, is himself—and Howlin’ Wolf, whose blistering voice he channels without parody. Tonight, over the course of 90 minutes that are not exactly a play, not a concert, not church, but a mixture of the three, Stone will sing the real down-and-dirty blues with total absorption. “Hey, Dwight,” he’ll say. “Remember when blues was king in Chicago?” —MAX MALLER RICK

STONE: THE BLUES MAN Through 8/26: Fri 8 PM,

Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Black Ensemble Theater, 4450 N. Clark, 773-769-4451, blackensembletheater. org, $49.50-$65.

L et’s sing one for the G ipper

Something in the Game is more than a musical tribute to Knute Rockne: it’s hagiography.

The Color Purple é MATTHEW MURPHY

But Lathrop makes one simple and less frequently employed adjustment that makes all the difference: she tells the story from the wife’s point of view. The choice gives Lathrop an opportunity to explore more sides of a sadly familiar story. It also gives her tale a tighter focus; everything we learn about the returning soldier is through his wife’s eyes. This gives the play a subjectivity that makes its more intense scenes—the returning soldier experiences violent night terrors—all the more terrifying.

Aaron Christensen makes a great returning soldier; he’s quite convincing as a strong, damaged man desperate to hide his deep personal problems. But the play really belongs to Alex Fisher, who over the course of a taut 80 minutes displays a full range of emotions, from sweet, emotionally open wife, happy to have her man back, to guarded, psychologically armored woman coping with life in the same house as a trained killer with a hair-trigger temper. In less adept hands, such a story could lapse into mere melodrama or, worse, didactic preachiness. But Lathrop’s writing has a disarming honesty about it; she presents the facts of the case and lets us draw our own conclusions. —JACK HELBIG

THE HERO’S WIFE Through 8/18: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM,

Sat 4 and 8 PM, 16th Street Theater, 6420 16th St., Berwyn, 708-795-6704, 16thstreettheater.org, $22.

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br eath of fresh air

The Arc’s outdoor Merry Wives of Windsor is an antidote to superserious and incomprehensible Shakespeare.

Is it just me, or do you often walk out of a significantly bankrolled (and thus terribly important) Shakespeare production, one over which a preponderance of critics has raved, and think to yourself, What on earth was all that? Did those actors understand anything they were saying? Who told them to get perpetually worked up over everything? And for God’s sake, why did no one on that stage remind me of anyone I might encounter in real life?

After 30-plus years covering the local performance scene, where Shakespeare’s plays are rendered humorless and incomprehensible with dispiriting regularity,

I should dread the Bard by now. Then along come scrappy little troupes like the Arc Theatre, who treat Shakespeare’s texts as scripts to be played rather than masterworks to be exalted. Everything in the Arc’s decidedly low-budget outdoor summer productions, plunked down on an unforgiving patch of concrete in Evanston’s Ridgeville Park, operates on a recognizably human scale, the actors making effortless sense of intricate Elizabethan language. Even without amplification, amid the acoustic clutter of traffic, airplanes, and children, everything is astonishingly clear.

And astonishingly fun this year, as director Mark Boergers transplants this shameless crowd-pleaser (an excuse to revive the drunk, overweight lech Sir John Falstaff from the Henry plays) to the Windsor Country Club, where idle white people have nothing better to do than scheme their ways in and out of love. It’s regularly laugh-out-loud funny, especially when Teddy Boone as jealous Master Ford displays his noteworthy comedic chops. —JUSTIN HAYFORD THE MERRY WIVES OF

To say that book writer Buddy Farmer and composer Michael Mahler’s newish biomusical respects its subject, legendary 1920’s Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, would be downplaying the sheer extent to which it venerates the guy. No doubt his contributions to university athletics and Hoosier pride at large are worthy of song, but sweet Jesus, this painfully earnest and often schlocky tribute plays out like the sort of show an autocrat in a banana republic would commission about himself.

Over the course of two hours plus, Something in

the Game chronicles Rockne’s journey from young, hard-working inspiration to everyone around him to older, harder-working inspiration to everyone around him. (“Slow down, don’t be a jerk,” sing his lazy colleagues at the post office. “Screw that,” sings back a precollege Rockne. “I’m here to work!”) The stakes aren’t exactly ESPN 30 for 30 material, but there’s some conflict in the difficulty Rockne (played by Stef Tovar, who originated the role a decade ago) has managing time between his star player, George “the Gipper” Gipp (Adrian Aguilar); an unamused university official (James Rank); and his own neglected wife (Dara Cameron in a thankless role, though her extraordinary voice elicits goosebumps no matter the material).

As a product of Northwestern’s American Music Theatre Project, director, choreographer and lyricist David H. Bell’s production showcases Equity actors alongside some truly extraordinary Northwestern University student talent, which is more evident in the few numbers that escape the locker- and dorm-room boys’ club. In particular, when Mahler’s score moves away from a gentle Americana-like sound to jazzier numbers at the Jimmy the Goat nightclub, Something achieves the vitality that in so many other scenes feels bronzed over. —DAN JAKES SOMETHING IN THE GAME

Through 8/5: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Josephine Louis Theater, 20 Arts Circle Dr., Evanston, 847-491-7282, wirtz.northwestern.edu, $35-$50, $30 seniors and educators, $10 students and children. v

WINDSOR Through 8/12: Sat-Sun 7 PM, Ridgeville Park, 908 Seward St., Evanston, 847-869-5640, arctheatrechicago.org. F

G etting down and dirty

Rick Stone: The Blues Man, starring Rick Stone as Rick Stone Dwight is in the cut sipping whiskey. Rhonda figures you can’t win the lottery if you don’t play. Young Theo has a new gospel record out that they’ve been spinning a lot on the radio, “especially in the south.” Sure, Theo. Tell it to your girlfriend nobody’s ever met.

These are the regulars at Ricky’s Place. They’ll take turns singing later on because they feel like it, as good a reason as any, and because they’re in a play about people at a decadent blues bar who do nothing but sing old songs all night and sit around wearing satin, a reason that’s not so great. The house band’s warming up behind them. Check out Robert Reddrick, the drummer; dude’s ripping. Why are blues bands always funkiest during sound check? Oh, hey. Ricky just got here. Hi, Ricky. How are you?

Rick Stone you might know from real life as the actor

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 23

WELCOME TO CASTLE ROCK: A STEPHEN KING FESTIVAL

A R TS & CU LTU R E

Fri 7/27-Sat 7/28. Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $12 per film, passes $40.

Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone

MOVIES

K ing fo r a day o r t w o

The weekend festival “Welcome to Castle Rock” proves there’s no formula for adapting a Stephen King novel.

By KEITH PHIPPS

W

hat makes a good Stephen King adaptation? The question has no easy answer, though not for lack of a sizable sample. At this point King has more than 250 writing credits on the Internet Movie Database. That number is slightly inflated by his practice of letting aspiring filmmakers license some of his stories for $1 on the condition that their work won’t be sold. But even so, there have been a lot of movies and TV shows inspired by King’s stories over the years, a trend that shows no sign of abating thanks to the recent success of It. Shakespeare and the Bible may have him beat, but they should watch out.

This weekend Music Box and the Chicago-based website Consequence of Sound will offer an immersive course in the rewards and pitfalls of adapting King. “Greetings From Castle Rock,” an eight-film Stephen King festival, coincides with the premiere of Hulu’s new, King-inspired series Castle Rock and

24 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

largely features films set in and around King’s fictional small town in Maine. No selection of King adaptations could be called representative, but this one comes close, ranging from classics like Stand by Me (1986) to the less acclaimed Needful Things (1993). It also proves that there’s no formula for adapting a Stephen King story. Some faithful adaptations work brilliantly, some fall flat. Some adaptations work best when filmmakers bend themselves to the material, some benefit from the stamp of a distinctive director.

David Cronenberg’s 1983 adaptation THE DEAD ZONE (Sat 7/28, 2:45 PM) falls squarely into the latter category. Christopher Walken stars as a Castle Rock schoolteacher who develops psychic powers after a car accident. As in Cronenberg’s preceding films (Videodrome, Scanners), the hero’s powers are more of a curse than a gift, wearing him down and alienating those around him. But thanks to King (and to Walken’s performance), Cronenberg

finds an emotional depth, unseen in his previous work, that has served him well in the years since.

The Dead Zone hit theaters in a year rich with memorable King adaptations, including John Carpenter’s Christine and Lewis Teague’s CUJO (Fri 7/27, 9:15 PM). Teague (Alligator, Navy SEALs) makes this 1983 release one of the best early King adaptations in part because he keeps its aspirations modest. The novel has a simple premise—a mother and child are trapped in a car by a rabid Saint Bernard—and Teague sticks with it, recognizing that a compelling setup and suspenseful execution can be all a thriller needs. But in building up to that crisis, Teague also retains much of what makes the novel (and many of King’s best efforts) so vital, with scenes of marital discord and domestic abuse that ground the fantastic story in the real world.

Reconciling the real with the bizarre can be hard work, as Mary Lambert demonstrates with PET SEMATARY (Sat 7/28, midnight), her 1989 adaptation of one of King’s bleakest novels. A doctor moves to rural Maine to take a teaching job, only to find that a nearby pet cemetery brings dead people back to life.

Working from King’s own script, Lambert stays true to the plot of the novel and creates some truly unnerving images, but she loses most of the book’s thematic subtext about the dangers of denying death (less-than-memorable lead performances from Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby don’t help). By contrast, Fraser C. Heston’s NEEDFUL THINGS (Sat 7/28, 9:30 PM) suffers from a shortage of scares but benefits from Max von Sydow’s colorful performance as an antiques dealer, newly arrived in Castle Rock (and possibly the devil incarnate), who turns the townspeople against each other.

Tonally it’s all over the place, and Heston, like Lambert, neglects the thematic possibilities lying just beneath the story’s surface.

King’s name will always be synonymous with horror, though he’s frequently strayed from the genre. For STAND BY ME (Fri 7/27, 7 PM), Rob Reiner turned to “The Body,” a novella included in King’s 1982 collection Different Seasons. Both the story and the film, about

four boys who embark on a daylong hike to confirm rumors of a body lying in the woods, prove that King can deliver the goods without a ghoul or killer car anywhere to be seen. Reiner moves the action from Maine to Oregon and scoots the year up from 1959 to 1960, but otherwise he respects the simplicity of the source material. The film is driven by reflection more than action, exploring the bonds of childhood friendship and the consequences of parental neglect and abuse, subjects King has returned to repeatedly throughout his career.

CREEPSHOW, (Fri 7/17, 11:30 PM), on the other hand, is all horror. With this anthology film, King and director George A. Romero (Night of the Living Dead) pay tribute to the gory morality tales of Tales From the Crypt and other EC Comics titles from the 1950s that made a deep impression on them in their youth. Some of the episodes King adapted from his own short stories, others he concocted for the movie; as with all anthology films, some segments work better than others (the one starring King as a yokel in bib overalls works least of all). But the nostalgia covers up some of the rough spots, even if the movie ends up feeling like a heartfelt homage more than an original statement.

Anyone seeking a shorter crash course on adapting Stephen King might want to focus on the two films from writer-director Frank Darabont: THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (Sat 7/28, 11:45 AM), his beloved 1994 adaptation of another Different Seasons entry, and THE MIST (Sat 7/28, 7 PM), his 2007 film in which a handful of small-town Maine residents find themselves stranded inside a grocery store by an impenetrable fog and the Lovecraftian creatures emerging from it. Where Shawshank is grandiose, sweeping, and grounded in humanistic hope, The Mist is gritty, scary, and misanthropic, approaching the edge of nihilism. Each is terrific in its own way, but both retain King’s idea of characters clinging to what makes them human, against overwhelming forces. King’s works don’t always translate to the screen, but these two movies show why so many filmmakers keep trying. v

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Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

EIGHTH GRADE ssss

Directed by Bo Burnham. R, 94 min. For listings visit chicagoreader.com/movies.

A R TS & CU LTU R E Elsie Fisher in Eighth Grade

S o cial med ia, b u t no so cial life

In Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, online culture becomes a breeding ground for teenage anxiety.

B

By CODY CORRALL

o Burnham’s stunning indie comedy Eighth Grade opens with a YouTube advice video shot by shy 13-year-old Kayla (Elsie Fisher) on her laptop.

Her topic is “being yourself,” but it contrasts with her wish to be anyone else.

She stumbles over her words, stopping and starting, professing how important it is to be who you really are even though she has no idea who she is yet. Burnham showcases universal eighth-grade experiences: there are shots of kids messing with their braces, huffing highlighters, and suffering romantic crushes. But Eighth Grade also comments on how instant access to social media can amplify teenagers’ awkwardness and anxiety.

This is evident in Kayla’s morning routine: she wakes up, checks her phone, and follows a makeup tutorial on YouTube before a mirror decorated with such Post-it affirmations as “Go get ’em” and “Small talk practice.” Once she’s done with her makeup, she goes back to bed, where she takes heavily filtered Snapchat ssss EXCELLENT

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photos of herself and sends them with the caption “I woke up like this, ugh.” At night Kayla scrolls endlessly through social media. Instagram posts, Facebook feeds, slime videos, and Buzzfeed quizzes are juxtaposed onscreen with her face, lit only by her phone. An entire montage shows her taking selfies in her backyard, scrolling through the rows of photos, and choosing one for her Instagram profile.

Kayla needs social media because she has no social life. In assembly, during the annual class awards, she’s embarrassed when she wins Most Quiet. She stands off to one side in band rehearsal, playing the cymbals, and has no core group of friends or even a best friend.

She engages with people on social media, either by commenting on Instagram posts or Snapchatting her friends, but she approaches the popular girls at school without making eye contact. Interacting through social media is just easier; she can take her time and control how she’s seen by her classmates— and even herself.

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MOVIES

Despite all Kayla’s ums and ahs, she expresses some surprisingly astute ideas in her YouTube videos. In one, she observes that confidence is something you can pretend that you have until you actually acquire it—the “fakeit-till-you-make-it” philosophy familiar to all anxious teens. Burnham cuts from the video to a birthday party for one of the popular girls at school. Kayla, who’s been invited out of politeness, feels uncomfortable and calls her dad to beg for a ride home as her classmates sing karaoke in another room. But then she heads over to the group and takes the microphone, her video alter ego reminding us in voice-over, “You can’t be brave unless you’re scared.”

Burnham shows a scene of Kayla in sex-ed class, but her real education comes online. She nurses a crush for her classmate Aiden (Luke Prael), a skateboarding heartthrob who won for Best Eyes. Aiden is known around school for wanting nude photos from girls, so Kayla not-so-subtly lets slip that she might have a dirty-photos folder on her phone. Instead of going through the awkward process of dating in person, she googles “how to give a good blowjob” and tries, unsuccessfully, to practice with a banana. After a confrontation with a high school boy in the backseat of his car, Kayla comes home feeling guilty, as if she should apologize for her own hurt feelings.

When she breaks down in her bedroom, Burnham replaces the audio with the countdown clock on her laptop camera, and Kayla declares that she’s going to stop making videos: “I’m always nervous.”

While Kayla serves as the audience’s surrogate for this constant nervousness, it’s felt by all the film’s characters. Kayla idolizes the cool high-schoolers who’ve adopted her, but they’re just as scared and lost as she is.

These older kids argue that Kayla is “wired differently” than they are because she was exposed to social media at a younger age, but they’re forced to perform online just as Kayla is. Eighth Grade is a harrowing portrait of anxiety and acceptance in a post-social-media landscape, showing how all of us cope with an ever-changing, constantly refreshing world. v

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3145 N. Sheffield at Belmont

Movie Theater & Full Bar 0 $5.0 ion s admisthe for ies Mov

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Sat-Sun, July 28-29 @ 4:00pm

Avengers: Infinity War

Sat-Sun, July 28-29 @ 7:00pm Tue-Wed, July 31 - Aug 1 @ 6:30pm

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Sat-Sun, July 28-29 @ 9:30pm Tue-Wed, July 31 - Aug 1 @ 9:00pm

Deadpool 2

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WORTHLESS

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 25

A R TS & CU LTU R E En el Séptimo Día NEW REVIEWS

Dark M oney

To tackle a giant problem, the malign influence of dark money in U.S. politics, documentary maker Kimberly Reed chooses a small stage: Montana, one of the least populous states in the union, which tried without success to limit political donations even after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010.

U.S. senator Jon Tester and others who’ve served in the state legislature testify to the state’s civic-minded tradition, but the real protagonists are investigative reporter John S. Adams, who loses his newspaper job to budget cuts but reinvents himself as an independent journalist, and Steve Bullock, then attorney general of Montana, who indicted Republican state legislator Art Wittich for coordinating attack ads with a dark-money group. According to Citizens United, money equals speech, but as the documentary reveals, conservatives fight like hell to hide the speakers’ identities; it’s called dark money not because it’s evil but because it thrives in the dark. —J.R. JONES 99 min. Fri 7/27, 4 and 8 PM; Sat 7/28, 5:30 PM; Sun 7/29, 3 PM; Mon 7/30, 8 PM; Tue 7/31, 6 PM; Wed 8/1, 8 PM; and Thu 8/2, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

RE

n el Sépt imo Dí a

The first feature in 12 years from American indie director Jim McKay (Girls Town) is a winning slice-of-life drama about an undocumented Mexican immigrant (Fernando Cardona) living in Brooklyn and working to bring his pregnant wife to the U.S. A bicycle delivery man for a fancy restaurant and the best player on his community soccer team, the protagonist is torn between his teammates, who include his current roommates from Puebla, Mexico, and his boss, who hints at a promotion to busboy if he’ll skip the team’s championship game to work a Sunday shift. The narrative spans a week in the hero’s life, building to the climactic weekend, and McKay shows how daily struggles and slights fuel the man’s internal quandary. Cardona grounds the role in quiet dignity, while the other nonprofessional actors who

164 North State Street

Between Lake & Randolph MOVIE HOTLINE: 312.846.2800

EN EL SÉPTIMO DÍA

ìT he summerí s rfi st surprise crowdpleaser.î — Indiewire

July 27 - August 2

Fri., 7/27 at 2 & 6 pm; Sat., 7/28 at 8 pm; Sun., 7/29 at 5 pm; Mon., 7/30 at 8 pm; Tue., 7/31 at 8 pm; Wed., 8/1 at 6 pm; Thu., 8/2 at 8 pm

Director Jim McKay in person Fri≠ Sat≠ Sun

JULY 27 - AUGUST 9 • RBG

DARK MONEY ì he curtain is pulled back, T revealing the machine of dark campaign fin ance burning through money to reshape the whole of American life.î — Ion Cinema

July 27 - August 2

Fri., 7/27 at 4 & 8 pm; Sat., 7/28 at 5:30 pm; Sun., 7/29 at 3 pm; Mon., 7/30 at 8 pm; Tue., 7/31 at 6 pm; Wed., 8/1 at 8 pm; Thu., 8/2 at 6 pm

ìS tirringÖI canít think of a dramatic fil m on screen right now that will make you feel this good, and thatí s a fact.î — LA Times

BUY TICKETS NOW 26 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

at

www.siskelfi lmcenter.org

make up the cast add authenticity to this unvarnished world. In Spanish with subtitles. —LEAH PICKETT 92 min.

Fri 7/27, 2 and 6 PM; Sat 7/28, 8 PM; Sun 7/29, 5 PM; Mon 7/30, 8 PM; Tue 7/31, 8 PM; Wed 8/1, 6 PM; and Thu 8/2, 8 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

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aq uia: W hen the P romised lower Blooms

Most Japanese anime films that win U.S. theatrical distribution are science fiction, fantasy, or coming-ofage stories; this eerie and affecting feature debut from writer-director Mari Okada blends the last two genres.

The heroine belongs to a legendary, sequestered race of ethereal weavers who live for centuries but retain their teenage appearance; after their homeland is invaded, she flees to a quasi-European medieval kingdom, rescuing an orphaned infant boy along the way. An old soul in the body of a chaste girl, she awakens psychologically when she realizes that she will long outlive the humans she comes to love, including her young son. In Japanese with subtitles. —ANDREA GRONVALL 115 min. Music Box.

Mi lada

Regal Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer (Angels & Demons) is the best reason to watch this stirring but somber biopic about women’s advocate and political activist Milada Horakova, who survived the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia but was executed for treason by the Soviets five years later. Horakova and her courageous husband were imprisoned by the Nazis; their daughter was minded

by Horakova’s sister at this time, and also a few years later, when Horakova was arrested and prosecuted by the communists. The girl grew up hardly knowing her mother, which director David Mrnka, a veteran TV news producer, uses as a metaphor for Czechoslovakia’s cultural amnesia (Horakova’s reputation wasn’t restored until 1989, after the Velvet Revolution). —ANDREA GRONVALL 124 min. Fri 7/27 and Wed 8/1, 8 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center.

Mi ssion: I mpossibl e— F allout

One thing you can expect in a Mission: Impossible movie is a yawning wide shot of some exotic cityscape, populated by a sole, tiny figure: producer-star Tom Cruise, whose construction of this monster franchise around himself is a corollary to the image itself. Cruise could never top the previous M:I installment, Rogue Nation (2015), in which he hangs off the side of an airplane (for real) at 5,000 feet, but writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, returning from the last film, honors the series’ perfect formula of a user-friendly plot (anarchists have acquired plutonium; they must be stopped) and epic action sequences. Ironically, the most entertaining element of all may be the star’s advancing age; Cruise, well into his 50s, scores numerous laughs as the increasingly confused and harried CIA agent Ethan Hunt, leaping into one spectacular stunt after another

and then wishing he hadn’t. With Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, and Rebecca Ferguson. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 147 min. ArcLight, Block 37, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Davis, Ford City, Lake, Logan, New 400, River East 21, Showplace 14 Galewood Crossings, Showplace ICON, 600 N. Michigan, Webster Place.

U nfriended: Dark W eb

Tired of watching cinema on your laptop? The Unfriended horror franchise allows you to watch your laptop in a cinema. Like the original low-budget hit (2014), this sequel unfolds entirely on a computer desktop, through video chats, cell phone imagery, text messages, social media posts, and a mysterious piece of Trojan horse software that transports the user up the River Styx.

An extended Skype session, attended by a half dozen attractive young friends for the purpose of gaming, enables us to watch as writer-director Stephen Susco kills them off one by one, as in a slasher film (or perhaps, one should say, a crasher film, since the threat is heightened by the delay of tetchy programs shutting down and needing to reboot). The movie pushes the Windows idiom of modern cinema about as far as it will go, its narrative cleverness offset by the visual tedium of following a mouse arrow around for an hour and a half.

—J.R. JONES R, 88 min. Chatham 14, Cicero Showplace 14, City North 14, Showplace ICON. REVIVALS

The W ild P arty

Clara Bow’s movies have dated in the most charming manner imaginable: no other female star of the 20s tells us as much about flappers, and in their own idiom too. This 1929 feature (her first talkie) bears no relation to Joseph Moncure March’s ribald 1928 poem: the plot, which has to do with Bow falling for her anthropology professor (Fredric March) at a women’s college, benefits from the direction by Dorothy Arzner, a specialist in female camaraderie. Because she spoke with a working-class Brooklyn accent, Bow worried that the microphone would kill her career; though she made only eight more pictures after this one, she handles herself here with admirable aplomb—especially considering that Paramount gave her only two weeks to prepare.

—JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 77 min. 35mm. Wed 8/1, 7:30 PM. Northeastern Illinois University.

SPECIAL EVENTS

A fro- F uturism Short F ilms

Short works drawn from Black World Cinema’s Afro-Futurism Film Competition. Among the artists are Ytasha L. Womack, Janeen Talbott, Cédric Ido, and Adebukola Codunrin and Ezra Claytan Daniels. 98 min. Visit chicagoreader.com/movies for Ben Sachs’s long review, posting Thursday, July 26. Sat 7/28, 7:30 PM. Chicago Filmmakers. v

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hitney Johnson has been ubiquitous on Chicago’s underground music scene for more than a decade. The violist, singer, and keyboardist thrives on collaboration, and she’s worked in a long list of rock bands and experimental projects—though in those roles, rather than emphasize her own talents as a musician and arranger, she focuses on filling out the sound of a group. She played in the 1900s, Via Tania, and the Notes & Scratches before starting the atmospheric, psychedelic band Verma in 2009. She’s worked with Ryley Walker, Bitchin Bajas, Flux Bikes, and Oozing Wound, among others. Since 2013 Johnson has been an instrumental part of Haley Fohr’s Circuit des Yeux. She’s half of Simulation with former Chicagoan Laura Callier (who also performs as Gel Set), she’s developing a duo with Natalie Chami of TALsounds, and she already has one with cellist Lia Kohl of Mocrep.

Johnson does have one project of her own, though—the beguiling Matchess, whose beautifully aqueous, ambient, and elusive sound world she’s been developing for almost ten years. Under that name, she performs frequently in Chicago but rarely tours—Matchess’s west-coast trip with TALsounds last month was a notable exception. Though affable and confident, Johnson doesn’t tend to clamor for center stage or draw attention to her own accomplishments—she seems to have little taste for self-promotion. She conducts her career as though, for her, hard work and beautiful music are their own rewards.

After this Friday, however, when Chicago label Trouble in Mind releases the new Matchess album, Sacracorpa, it will get a lot harder for Johnson’s solo work to go unnoticed. This gorgeously meditative collection represents a quantum leap in her musical development. She celebrates its release with a concert the same night at the International Museum of Surgical Science.

Sacracorpa is the final installment of what Johnson calls the Matchess Trilogy, which Trouble in Mind also drops on Friday as a small-edition three-cassette set. The previous two parts are Seraphastra (released on tape by Digitalis in 2013, then reissued on vinyl in 2014 by TiM) and Somnaphoria (released in 2015, also by TiM). All three feature a murky but lovely blend of viola, voice, Ace Tone organ, primitive drum machine, and tape loops, with everything subjected to copious amounts of delay, reverb, and other processing.

“The Matchess Trilogy moves from outer space to inner space, passing through the corridor of dreams,” Johnson recently wrote of the project. “Each record considers the sound of what can be seen from a different point of view. Seraphastra imagines what we might find beyond the limit of the visible.

Somnaphoria filters that imagination through dream vision.

Sacracorpa grapples with hidden inner realities that can only be seen during a crisis.” Influenced by her interest in the occult, Johnson strongly believes that music is best appreciated by leaving its inherent mystery undisturbed—she doesn’t think it’s either possible or desirable to completely codify the process and substance of her work.

Whitney Johnson drifts free of the knowable as Matchess The Chicago violist, singer, and organist completes the Matchess Trilogy with the occult healing songs of the new Sacracorpa.

By PETER MARGASAK Whitney Johnson believes music is best appreciated by leaving its inherent mystery undisturbed. é MARIA TZEKA

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ohnson, 36, was born in central Pennsylvania, near Penn State University, and moved to Valparaiso, Indiana, when she was six—her father relocated the family after losing his job in the Pittsburgh steel industry. She began studying viola in fourth grade and pursued it with increasing discipline and devotion as she grew older, but by the time she finished college, her appetite for a career as a classical musician had waned.

“I was gradually breaking out of listening to classical music and that world,” Johnson says. “Classical players, especially if you’re on the symphonic track, should be listening to different recordings of different classical pieces all the time, as study.

Part of the process of breaking out of it for me was learning about other things, like listening to punk music.”

After graduating in 2003, she moved to Chicago. Through AmeriCorps, she taught second-grade literacy for Spanishspeaking kids at an after-school program in the arts at Richard J. Daley Academy. The following year the program took her to Boston, where she ran a citizenship-literacy program—she taught English to a small group of Afghani refugee women, translated, and handled intake at a walk-in legal clinic. In 2005

she settled back in Chicago for good and began working with asylum seekers and refugees at the International Refugee Center through the Heartland Alliance. She felt burnout coming on and decided to switch to a more administrative track, which led her to graduate school at the University of Chicago in 2007. By then she’d already begun playing in indie-rock band the 1900s, and in 2009 she earned a master’s degree from the U. of C.’s Harris School of Public Policy, concentrating in cultural policy, international policy, immigration, and quantitative methods.

Johnson also developed an interest in experimental music, including early minimalists such as La Monte Young and Terry Riley. She immersed herself in the city’s DIY scene, which collides and hybridizes genres with playful abandon. “Mortville and the Mopery were really formative for a certain generation of musicians,” she says. “I was hanging out there a ton.” She and her friends listened to punk and to psychedelic music, particularly what she describes as “trippier, dronier” stuff. Those sounds conditioned the births of Verma and Matchess, both of which replaced traditional pop-song forms with amorphous dirges, drones, and blobs of sonic color and texture. She J

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

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says buying an old Farfisa organ on eBay in 2010 was a big turning point—its sound helped give shape to her compositions as Matchess, which she’d launched the year before (though she didn’t perform publicly till 2011).

The development of Matchess since then has been more in degree than in kind. Johnson’s aesthetic has remained consistent while her melodic sensibility has grown stronger and her arrangements have become clearer and more detailed. Her musical network has also expanded steadily—she collaborated with touring experimentalists Lea Bertucci and Sarah Davachi on their recent Chicago visits—and she’s now working in a greater range of styles than ever, as different as her classicalflavored improvisations with Kohl and the synth experiments of Simulation.

“I feel like each collaboration is a different expression of a different aspect of what I want to be doing,” Johnson says.

“The duo I have with Gel Set, Simulation, is bizarre and we wear costumes and it’s more performative. With Natalie it’s very ambient, soothing, and pretty music, which I do really like. I had a thing with Whitney Allen [of Toupee] called Surfactant, which was noise. And so that was fun, to have an outlet for heavier stuff.”

In Matchess, Johnson heightens the tactile, spooky feel of her drifting, droning, richly hued music with lo-fi recording and production techniques. Haunting bits of tunefulness, some of them legitimately catchy, emerge from the hydroplaning din on Sacracorpa. When she performs this material, Johnson takes an exploratory approach. “There are elements that are always there—usually some lyrical content and some harmonic stuff—but I think the pieces change quite a lot from one show to the next. They’re also very unlike the recordings sometimes when I do them live.”

After Johnson made two of the albums in the Matchess Trilogy, life got in the way of the third. A six-year relationship ended in early 2015, and she immediately wrote and recorded the heavier, darker music that became the gorgeous 2016 Matchess album The Rafter (Monofonus Press). “When I was releasing the first one, I imagined how it could fit as three records together. At the time I was to have started recording the third, I needed to do something else, something totally separate,” she says. “It’s super sad. It was just a really bad breakup.”

The music doesn’t much hint at that backstory, though it does clearly shift toward a more brooding, viola-driven sound.

As Johnson finished The Rafter and began work on Sacracorpa, a friend told her about a four-part Japanese narrative form called kishōtenketsu. “It’s not the classic Western trilogy, which is building up to conflict and then having resolution—it’s more about development,” Johnson says. “I thought it was cool that in the midst of this trilogy is this other record that’s separate.

That’s also true about that form—there’s a lot of non sequitur themes. Kishōtenketsu is often used in manga, as I understand, and I was told that in some instances the first two sections are in color but the third non sequitur is in black and white. But it mostly happened because that’s where I was in my life right then.”

When Johnson set about making Sacracorpa in early 2016, she was also recovering from a serious health crisis. “A medical condition from birth came back as an emergency, inverting my perspective from a lifetime low to a wave of overwhelming gratitude to be alive,” she wrote about the album in her recent statement about the trilogy. She calls Sacracorpa a healing record, and the music feels brighter and lighter than Matchess’s earlier material.

28 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

The three albums in the Matchess Trilogy, from left: Seraphastra, Somnaphoria, and Sacracorpa

In this project Johnson’s singing has usually been submerged in the mix, so that’s essentially an additional layer of sound. On the new record her vocals are more prominent, but the syllables she sings carry meaning only below their surface. Inspired by 19th-century British occultist Austin Osman Spare, she adapted a process he called sigilization: to create her lyrics, she reduced each word in a spontaneously imagined phrase to a single syllable, then strung together those syllables into a mantra. Johnson chants those mantras with a beautiful, meditative clarity that reflects her convalescence, and the sigilization process also seems to have opened up new frontiers for Matchess—by unshackling her imagination from the literal content of her lyrics, it’s enriched her already substantial gifts for melody and arranging.

The back of the record’s sleeve includes the line “Dedicated to the healing power of women,” and it’s not just lip service to solidarity. “Women made all of the visual aspects of all of my practice,” Johnson explains. “I feel like there’s a really special bond between femme people. It’s a different social position, and we can relate on another level. A big part of what draws my closest friends together is experiencing the femme side of life together.”

MATCHESS, ULLA STRAUS Fri 7/27, 7 PM, International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 N. Lake Shore Dr., sold out, all-ages

Many of Johnson’s collaborators feel the same way about her. Chami bonded with her immediately when TALsounds and Matchess first toured together in 2016. “We spent two weeks straight with each other after only having spent a few tour-planning days with each other before that,” she says. “It truly was a magical tour. We get along so well and are super supportive of each other, and I think our music really complements each other.

“It wasn’t until our friend Mike Sugarman asked us to play a duo set for a show when we got back that we were like, ‘Ooh . . . we should do that!’ Whitney came over and we improvised together, and just like touring, playing together felt so easy. Our personalities are actually pretty different, but we mesh really well. I think our musical aesthetic, our love for academics and music and arts and improvising, are all really similar. But

like our friendship, when we play together I think we take on specific roles and lean on each other in interesting ways. We support each other as totally different structures, making us super tight and comfortable when we’re together.”

Fohr is just as effusive about Johnson as a collaborator in Circuit des Yeux, as a sounding board, and as a friend. “When we’re playing music together and coming offstage, to see how we felt about what just transpired, we’re always looking for same answer,” she says. “‘Feeling free’ is the number one goal in our trajectory, both near- and farsighted. In a more practical sense, I’ve come to know the Whitney ‘sound.’ I’m always taken back by her ability to stack and create her own tiny symphony.

Even if we’re exploring a small idea, she always puts her whole heart into the endeavor.

“She’s often the final missing ingredient. What’s the difference between a bowl of things and a salad? What’s the difference between ‘just fine’ music and great music? I think Whitney is often the determining factor in these equations. She is the detail and carefulness that all things require to become wonderful. Whitney is also my neighbor and close friend, and a great listener. She has helped me level through the ups and downs, all of which become artistic material sooner or later, and to me, that is the most valuable kind of collaborator.”

Earlier this spring, after eight years of work, Johnson completed a PhD in sociology at the University of Chicago, for which she examined the disjunctions between music and sound art. One of her main areas of inquiry was language—including the fact that it’s much more likely to be used to explain the workings of sound art than of music. This has made her much more aware of the role the occult plays in Matchess.

“The tradition in music has been not to use language, usually, to describe sound, but to let people make their own internal network of references of other things,” Johnson says. “You understand it as ‘This kind of sounds like this’ or ‘This might be speaking to this and modifying it,’ or it’s a hybrid of these things, but it usually happens in people’s minds. It’s also written out, like in liner notes, but people don’t tend to stand up and say, ‘This piece is about this thing.’

“It’s always described that way in sound art—this is this piece, this is the conceptual orientation, and it could be personal, like, ‘I made this based on a memory of a lake in Minnesota, and these are the sounds of the loons on that lake.’ That stuff is usually pretty clearly spelled out in the art world and less so in the music world, so that was the question: Why is that?

I was kind of reporting back what people said, and I got a lot of different answers. Now that there’s a new medium of sound rather than vision, it requires some extra support by people

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who are primarily visually oriented artists.

They’re used to looking at a work and understanding it, sometimes with that internal system of references but also with some sort of conceptual framework—and that’s carried over into sound art. But that hasn’t been the history of music. Talking about music hasn’t been the way it becomes valuable.”

Johnson’s research has helped her understand why she relishes the lack of codification and analysis in music—especially in the underground scene. She embraces what’s undefined and undefinable about it. “It often comes up in interviews about this metaphysical or occult or ritualistic quality in my music, and I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why I’m drawn to this stuff,” she says.

“Social science is very much about the Enlightenment mind, and this is the opposite thing,” Johnson continues. “In sociology, people talk a lot about the demystification of life under modernity, making things more rationalized, more bureaucratic, or more scientific. I think I’m trying to remystify life any way it can happen. I feel like so many people deal with anxiety and depression and problems from this strict demystification of life,

because you know too much. I think focusing on the unknown is a good mental process— it’s good for your spirit. There’s something relieving about it, that you don’t have to have it all figured out. And there’s something fun too—it’s enchanting, and I like to let my mind wander away from the knowable.”

This fall Johnson will keep a relatively low profile—she won’t be performing much, because she’ll be teaching multiple classes at the School of the Art Institute and the University of Chicago. During the spring semester, though, she’ll get onstage more. That’s when she finally plans to tour in support of Sacracorpa. “I’ve been pursuing these two lives, neither one of which has many possibilities for a career,” she says. “It’s like I want to be a professor and a musician, and those are two of the hardest jobs to get. And I’m at this point where they’re both building up and competing for time with one another, and I’m just going to see how it goes. I would love to have some kind of job and tour a lot more and play a lot more. I would also love to have a normal professor job—that would be great.” v

m @pmarg

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 29

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EVERY TUESDAY (EXCEPT 2ND) AT 8PM OPEN MIC HOSTED BY JIMIJON AMERICA

IN R O TA TIO N PHILIP MONTORO

Ibeyi é DAVID UZOCHUKWU

Reader music editor

Aby Ngana Diop, Liital Jim Magas’s Twitter feed just reminded me that I own this amazing record—a 2014 Awesome Tapes From Africa reissue of a 1994 cassette by Senegalese griot Aby Ngana Diop. The label claims it’s the first commercial recording of a traditional female taasukat (“taasu” is a form of oral poetry) backed by modern mbalax, with its synthesizers, programmed percussion, and tumbles of galloping, bubbly sabar and tama drums.

The hypnotic songs don’t have much melodic or harmonic motion (taasu has been cited as a precursor to rap), but Diop’s commanding voice could carry an album with even less.

The cover of Aby Ngana Diop’s Liital

Body Void, I Live Inside a Burning House Will Ryan, singer-guitarist for this sludgy Bay Area doom band, came out as queer and nonbinary a few years ago, and the songs on Body Void’s first full-length address depression and gender dysphoria in wrenching, visceral language. The music often moves so slowly it’s nearly drone, with agonized shrieking, sparse but concussion-inducing drumming, and guitars that sound like a down-tuned chain saw.

Thankfully, just when you’re about to lose your will to live, it’ll crank up into a crunchy riff with a double-barreled dose of “fight back” in it.

Percussion workshops at the Old Town School I just went to my first one, during the Square Roots Festival, but I had such a fine time that I’m comfortable recommending them all. It was almost enough fun to make up for the visa-related cancellation of Nigerian fuji star King Wasiu Ayinde Marshal, scheduled to play the fest the same afternoon.

LUCY LITTLE

Violinist and composer Sampha I can’t remember how I first learned of Sampha, but his 2017 album Process may be one of my favorites of all time—I listen to

30 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

A Reader staffer shares three musical obsessions, then asks someone (who asks someone else) to take a turn.

it constantly. It’s personal, political, beautiful, and lyrically and musically brilliant. “Blood on Me” makes you stop whatever you’re doing and just listen. It’s gut-wrenching and important—so vital to hear in the type of world we live in today. “Blood on Me” and “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano” may be my favorite songs, but the whole album is a masterpiece.

Ibeyi Ibeyi make gorgeous, fierce, powerful music, and I am so in love with them. The French-Cuban twins sing in English, French, Spanish, and Yoruba, and their music is driven by a rhythm that makes it nearly impossible not to move. They’re still being discovered in the States, so when they announced a small U.S. tour last year, a friend and I drove all the way to Detroit just to see them live—and it was entirely worth it. Both their albums are fantastic, but start with the self-titled Ibeyi— and definitely watch the video for “River.” Ólafur Arnalds I’ve been listening to Icelandic minimalist composer and pianist Ólafur Arnalds since 2008, when I discovered his first album, Eulogy for Evolution. Arnalds creates music that paints grand landscapes in your mind and makes you breathe deep breaths of sadness, joy, and wonder. I recently saw him perform at Thalia Hall, and it was the first concert I’ve been to in a long time that made me cry. He’s back at Thalia in February—I highly recommend this show.

Nai Palm, Needle Paw I find Nai Palm’s Needle Paw, released almost a year ago, impossible to walk away from. On her full-length solo debut, the Hiatus Kaiyote front woman layers her smoky vocals over bare-bones guitar to create an intimate collection of songs, in sharp contrast to her louder work with the band. Recorded in the Australian desert, this record feels like warmth and mysticism in a dusty, endearing little log cabin. It also features Australian Aboriginal singer Jason Guwanbal Gurruwiwi, whose performance is like nothing I’ve heard before—spiritual and transporting.

The Internet You know when you hear a song that sounds like it was written just for you?

That’s how I feel about every song by the Internet. They’re a super group of musicians who are brilliant beyond measure. They are neosoul, they are jazz, they are R&B, and— judging by their three latest singles—they are funkadelic pop. The 2015 album Ego Death is probably their most accessible; their earlier work is more experimental. Start with their sexy party track, “Special Affair.”

JORDANNA

R&B and pop artist

Kari Faux Like a lot of the music I listen to these days, I discovered Kari Faux through HBO’s Insecure soundtrack. She sing-raps in a laid-back, I-don’t-care-about-you-becauseI’m-an-amazing-bitch kind of way, while also spitting vulnerable (and sometimes political) realness. Listening to her feels like getting a manicure after very casually burning down the patriarchy. Her 2016 full-length debut, Lost en Los Angeles, is my favorite.

Kari Faux é JUSTIN HIGUCHI

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Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of July 26 b

ALL AGES

M U S IC

F Gia Margaret é RACHEL WINSLOW

PICK OF THE WEEK

Chicago up nk s N egat iv e S canner so u nd as fu ri o u s as ev er o n ht eir b list eri ng new N os e P i c k er

TH U R S D A Y2 6 Christopher Dammann’s Restroy 9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10. b

é VITA PHOTO

NEGATIVE SCANNER, WARM BODIES, DEODORANT, PORNOGRAPHY GLOWS

Fri 5/27, 6:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $12. b

THREE YEARS CAN be an eternity in the course of a young, razor-sharp punk band, but on their bristling new album Nose Picker (Trouble in Mind) Chicago’s Negative Scanner sound almost as if they’ve been on ice since the release of their blistering self-titled 2015 debut. I mean that as a compliment; the sense of fed-up fury in the vocals of the intensely charismatic lead singer Rebecca Valeriano-Flores sounds undiminished in their intensity and indignation. Though that would certainly makes sense given the current state of the world, her songs focus more on personal disappointment than on politics. The album opens with Valeriano-Flores demanding “Is there anybody there?” in a piercing postpunk snarl before the band rips into the jackhammer

stutter of “T.V.,” in which the singer dispatches a “Doc Marten PhD” for being lost in his own head. On the title track she excoriates a fickle soul who’s “picking sides like you pick your nose.” Though she can channel the bite of Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker, when she digs down and drops her pitch on “Shoplifter” she does an awfully good job at evoking the drone of Johnny Rotten on Sex Pistols classic “Problems.” There’s nothing on Nose Picker that the band hasn’t done plenty of times before, but slashing, wiry guitars, spastic yet locked-in rhythms, and laser-edged concision can sound fresh in the right hands, and drummer Tom Cassling, bassist Nick Beaudoin, and guitarists Valeriano-Flores and Matt Revers keep it all inspired. —PETER MARGASAK

Bassist Christopher Dammann may have spent the last eight years in Charlottesville, Virginia, but musically he’s a Chicagoan. He got his schooling at Northwestern University and on the bandstand of the Velvet Lounge, and subsequently founded two bands he’s kept in play even when he’s had to commute across state lines in order to join them.

Both his groups Restroy—whose self-titled second album was just released by local 1980 label—and 3.5.7 Ensemble combine musicians from his cohort with veterans old enough to be their mentors.

On the new Restroy record members of the two ensembles pull together to lend gravitas to Dammann’s compositions. On opening track “A Line and a Point,” trumpeter James Davis blows a graceful, Iberian-tinged melody while Dammann’s resonant double bass and Kevin Davis’s (no relation) fuzzbegrimed cello churn up sonorities that cross rock distortion with a trance-inducing Moroccan pulse.

Rising new-music pianist Mabel Kwan and seasoned keyboardist Paul Giallorenzo weave electronic tones into a gauzy harmonic veil on the ballad “Thread,” and Giallorenzo’s propulsive synthesizer locks grooves with master drummer Avreeayl Ra to kick the uptempo “Apart” into overdrive. The combo’s amalgamations of acoustic and electronic textures scratch the same itch as Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor’s Chicago Underground Duo without ever sounding like an imitation. —BILL MEYER

LIL BABY Part of the WGCI Summer Jam. Big Sean headlines; Trey Songz, YFN Lucci, Money Bagg Yo, Lil Baby, Coot Honcho, Queen Key, Kash Doll, and Famous Dex open. 7:30 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison, $45-$140. b

The gatekeepers of hip-hop will tell you Atlanta is the culture’s spiritual home, and rapper Lil Baby, who was born there in 1994, has been reap- J

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 31

M U S IC continued from 31

ing its benefits through osmosis. He grew up in the same neighborhood as Pierre “Pee” Thomas, one of the cofounders of Quality Control Music (Migos and Lil Yachty), before the latter launched the now celebrated indie hip-hop label. When Baby decided he wanted to give music a try, after serving two years of a five-year sentence for selling drugs, QC picked him up. “I’ve been rapping for like 13 months,” he told the Fader in May, a handful of days after QC dropped his debut album, Harder Than Ever. “I ain’t even gonna say that I found my style or sound yet because I’m still liable to switch it up.” His newness to the craft may also be why he gets a little lost on the album. While the good stuff is solid, in its worst moments his music feels like club Muzak— it’ll do in the background, but it’s hardly remarkable.

Baby’s best turns are cold, and his rat-a-tat delivery of the hook on the gargantuan hit “Yes Indeed” nearly erases Drake’s contribution to the song from my memory every time I listen. —LEOR GALIL

Gia Margaret Advance Base and Brendan Losch open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $10. 21+

The songs on Gia Margaret’s new debut album, There’s Always Glimmer (Orindal), glow with the warmth of a flashlight hidden in a blanket fort. She understands how to use music to portray the complexities of intimacy, and her wispy vocals, delicate guitar strumming, gentle piano melodies, and pitterpattering electronic percussion suggest she’s the kind of bedroom artist who’s at her creative best within the cozy confines of her home. Indeed, at the beginning of her career six years ago, it seemed like her material might well remain locked in her bedroom—Soundcloud was the only public repository for her lo-fi self-recorded demos. Then last year Margaret launched a Kickstarter to help fund the production and release of There’s Always Glimmer. And while I don’t blame anyone who donated enough for an extra treat ($150 for a personalized lullabye ain’t a bad deal), these songs are a real reward on their own. Margaret’s aching vocals come through sharp and clear on the polished version of “Smoke,” which she’s given new life to withChristopher Dammann’s Restroy é JACOB HAND

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

out sacrificing the deep melancholy of her singing on the reverb-laden demo; producer and engineer Doug Saltzman’s soft touch and tender percussive flourishes enhance the track further. He’s one of nine contributors, along with guitarist and vocalist Brendan Losch, vocalist Quinn Tsan, and cellist Molly Rife, who helped Margaret realize her vision— as always, intimacy is best shared with the ones who understand you. —LEOR GALIL

FR ID A Y2 7 Lonney Holley Animal Collective headlines.

7:30 PM, the Vic, 3145 N. Sheffield, sold out. b Self-taught Atlanta musician and visual artist Lonney Holley has accrued ardent supporters since he dropped his first recordings earlier in the decade. Tonight he rolls into town with Animal Collective as the supporting act on their national tour.

Due from Jagjaguwar in September, Holley’s new album MITH was cut in various sessions around the globe—from New York and Atlanta to Cottage Grove, Oregon, and Porto, Portugal—over the last five years. The diverse cast of stellar musicians who join him speak to his appeal; rediscovered new age icon Laraaji, folk duo Anna & Elizabeth, saxophonist Sam Gendel, and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily are among his helpers, but Holley is utterly front and center. He sings and plays piano in a highly intuitive way while his guests shuffle around his performance in complementary fashion. Holley’s pitch-challenged singing draws upon soul and gospel traditions in stream-of-conscious meditations on his youth and the disturbing state of our culture—“I Woke Up in Fucked-Up America” leaves little doubt about his perspective—and the essence of his existence. There’s a bit of Bill Withers’s rasp in Holley’s instinctive delivery, which he abundantly peppers with eccentric trills (a la Billy Stewart in “Summertime”) and a descending wordless Sam Cooke affectation that he drops into nearly every song like some kind of Duchampian readymade, while his presence and persona veer closer to Sun Ra. —PETER MARGASAK

Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail é COURTESY THE ARTIST

Negative Scanner See Pick of the Week, page 30. Warm Bodies, Deodorant, and Pornography Glows open. 6:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $12. b Snail Mail Part of Wicker Park Fest. 6:30 PM (music starts at 1 PM), Milwaukee between North and Paulina, $10 suggested donation. b In a recent feature published in the New York Times Lindsey Jordan, who makes music under the name Snail Mail, said of the material she wrote for her debut full-length Lush (Matador), “The songs all had to have that moment for me where I feel like when I was playing live I could cry.” Though she’s only 18, her musical prepossession and clarity, cool precision, and depth as a singer would suggest someone older. Her heart-on-sleeve vulnerability shines through in leanly constructed indie pop songs that hark back to the 90s—especially early Liz Phair—in their unfussy directness, though Jordan’s melodic instincts feel tailor-made for Top 40 radio. Most of the tunes revel in her youth and lack of life experience (and seemingly fulfill her aim in writing them, as far as the feelings they convey) but there’s enough universal detail that they could generate emotional memories for almost anyone listening. In “Heat Wave” she obsesses over an unrequited love, yearning for something she knows isn’t going to happen: “Tell me that I’m the only one / And I hope I never get a clue.” Snail Mail hasn’t exactly carved out fresh territory yet, but considering Jordan’s intelligence, confidence, and skill, it’s only a matter of time. —PETER MARGASAK

S A TU R D A Y2 8 Greg Fox Hujo opens. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $10. 21+ Drummer Greg Fox has been duly celebrated over the last decade for his mind-melting work with a range of heavy projects including Liturgy, Zs, Man Forever, and his own Guardian Alien. Now Fox has

32 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

let his curiosity take him beyond his rock chops into different sound worlds. He takes part in an immersive process invented by Tlacael Esparza called “sensory percussion,” which utilizes multiple sensors to capture drum vibrations to turn an entire kit into a MIDI controller. The electronic sounds on Fox’s 2014 solo album, Mitral Transmissions, were developed after encounters with the singular avant-garde jazz percussionist, herbalist, healer, and thinker Milford Graves, who developed MIDI software that uses the rhythm of a person’s biological data—namely, the heartbeat—to trigger virtual instruments; Graves read and recorded Fox’s heartbeat, and gave him the score generated by the program to use for his new album. For his more listenable follow-up, The Gradual Progression (RVNG), he’s turned back toward conventional instrumentation—his own rigorous kit drumming along with well-placed melodic and harmonic material by saxophonist Maria Grand, guitarist Michael Beharie, bassist Justin Frye, and singer Curtis Santiago. Fox has explained that the various melodies and timbres he uses in his sensory percussion are designed to let the body and its functions lead to sonic discovery and help explore emotional states. For this rare solo performance he’ll use this process in a more stripped-down setting, and earlier in the day he’ll lead a workshop on sensory percussion at Experimental Sound Studio. —PETER MARGASAK

Oneida Cave opens. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12. 21+ In March, days before the launch of a tour planned to support his band’s 12th album, Romance (Joyful Noise), Oneida drummer Jon Colpitts—better known by his stage name, Kid Millions—was hospitalized following a serious car accident in Los Angeles. The tour was canceled, and though his Oneida bandmates announced that he was expected to make full recovery, I didn’t think the group would be back in action this summer. In recent years, Kid Millions has ascended as a new-music dynamo, but he’s remained staunchly devoted to Oneida since it formed in 1997. The wild Brooklyn crew have fanned out from their heavy postKrautrock beginnings—when they adopted absurd monikers such as Hanoi Jane, Barry London, and yes, Kid Millions—to become a polystylistic force that never allows the furious drive of their cofounders to ebb. Here again, Romance takes lots of different paths, but each one features serious propulsion.

There’s a stuttering intensity to the motorik groove of “All in Due Time,” where Millions intones the melody as if he were channeling pioneering psych musician Kevin Ayers with a case of acute stage fright.

“It Was Me” eschews a simple groove, but Millions holds it all together, swapping between explosive spasms like a drunken polka band and tight cymbal patter where he keeps time like a bebopper. The maniacal “Cockfight” might seem like a punk-rock jam if not for the rhythmic fluidity behind its jackhammer tempo. Though increased technical ability can dull the edge of bands that already balance their structural ambitions with furious performances, Oneida have masterfully pulled it off, perpetually adding greater complexity without sacrificing their characteristic rowdy exuberance. —PETER MARGASAK

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Oneida é JEFFREY BRANDSTED

M U S IC

only if the shoes in question were the otherwordly stomping boots of the gods. That said, Deafheaven don’t hold back from showing their gentle side on the album’s quiet intro, delicate interludes, or the eerie ballad “Night People,” where the very witchy Chelsea Wolfe assists. That’s all bolstered by four long-form tracks that seethe and pummel and never stand still. Each of them, particularly “Honeycomb” and “Glint,” sounds like a microcosmic manifesto; you’ve experienced a guided tour of the band’s whole palette by the time you reach their satiating conclusions and gather yourself for the next flight.

—MONICA KENDRICK

S U N D A Y2 9 Susan Alcorn See also Monday. Susan Alcorn & Ryan Packard headline; a trio of Alcorn, Jim Baker, and Anton Hatwich opens. 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10 suggested donation. 21+ Baltimore pedal-steel guitarist Susan Alcorn occupies a world unto herself in numerous ways that make the sounds she creates unlike anything else out there. Thanks to her parents, she was surrounded by music during her childhood in Florida, and she eventually took up the guitar. During a stint in Chicago in the mid-70s she became transfixed by the pedal steel after hearing it in a local country band. She picked up one herself, and after relocating to Houston, Texas, in 1981 she began playing it in a number of country bands. Though most folks imagine that’s the only where the lap steel belongs, Alcorn had other ideas—which she’s explored over the last two decades. She’s inventively adapted the music of mercurial French composer Olivier Messiaen as well as tango nuevo master Astor Piazzolla for her instrument in wholly unexpected, melodically ravishing ways, while simultaneously developing a rigorous free-improvisation practice. Due to her unique talent and versatility, she’s been able to find space for all of these interests. I’ve heard few things over the last several years that are more beautiful and lyric than her 2015 album Soledad (Relative Pitch), a sumptuous homage to Piazzolla’s music. Alcorn deftly concentrates his dramatic contrapuntal gems for the woozy, liquid sprawl of pedal steel, and the emotional pulse of the tango fights through the gorgeous glissandos, melodic curves, and sonic swells she unleashes with breathtaking concision. “Suite for Ahl” deviates a bit, with Alcorn teaming up with bassist Michael Formanek for an improvised duet that pushes the general tone into abstraction and mild turbulence without breaking the spell. In recent years Alcorn has also excelled in avant-garde contexts, working with saxophonist Ellery Eskelin and serving as a potent foil for guitarist Mary Halvorson in her fantastic octet.

Last year Alcorn appeared on jazz bassist Max Johnson’s In the West (Clean Feed), deftly filling nooks and crannies in the rhythmic motion of the leader, pianist Kris Davis, and drummer Mike Pride, and serving up poignant solos with a mixture of tangled dissonance and tuneful tendrils. For this rare Chicago visit Alcorn will improvise in a trio with pia-

nist Jim Baker and bassist Anton Hatwich as well as a duo with percussionist Ryan Packard. On Monday she performs solo, followed by a conversation with Ken Vandermark. —PETER MARGASAK

M O N D A Y3 0 Susan Alcorn See Sunday. Alcorn plays solo, followed by a discussion with Ken Vandermark.

7:30 PM, Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 N. Ravenswood, $10, $8 members and students. b Deafheaven Drab Majesty and Uniform open.

7 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $23, $21 in advance.

18+ Genre-bending California five-piece Deafheaven have just about perfectly mastered the art of harnessing metal ferocity to a shimmering, shifting, rolling sound that’s perversely relaxing and soothing, at least as much as anything with howling and blastbeats can get. The band’s fourth full-length, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (Anti-), is a sweeping, epic master class in what could be called shoegaze

TU ES D A Y3 1

Summer is more fun with Old Town School

Kraus Nolife and Daysee open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $12, $10 in advance. 18+ Last year Will Kraus, who records full-bodied, blistering shoegaze songs under his last name, talked to Pitchfork about his ambiguous lyrics. “It’s about half just kind of saying stuff into the microphone and half words,” he said. “I don’t feel like good enough of a writer right now to really have too many lyrics be front and center.” Though he hasn’t improved much on that front with his second album, March’s Path (Terrible), his glum, echoing vocals and crestfallen lyrics come through much more clearly on that record than on his charming 2016 debut, End Tomorrow. But Kraus’s approach is not without its strengths; when his crushing guitars, ecstatic drums, and samples deploy melodies that cut through the atmosphere like a foghorn on “Big Blood,” his vocal caterwauling just adds more strength to the muscular track. Kraus continues to do well at keeping his ideas—and words—as intangible as possible; I can’t make out a damn thing he says on the weightless, near-ambient closer, “Mostly,” and I’m not mad about it. —LEOR GALIL v

Music • Dance Art • Theatre Wiggleworms®

Browse our class schedules online at

oldtownschool.org

Deafheaven é CORINNE SHIAVONE

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 33

FO O D & D R IN K

LOST LARSON | $ R 5318 N. Clark 773-944-0587

é ALISHA SOMMER

lostlarson.com

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Tar t ar t and hear t y b ro t is t he S w edish w ay at Lo st Lars o n Andersonville is once again home to a happy place for pastry.

By MIKE SULA

T

he people of Chicago need to come to terms with the fact that they do not know almost anything about the art of pastry.” That’s what Natalie Zarzour told me in 2011, shortly before shutting the doors for good on Pasticerria Natalina, her superlative but notoriously dear Sicilian pastry shop. Among the dupes she lumped all but two professional pastry chefs in town and a handful of food writers, me included.

Her rant at the time was a defense of the prices at her little Andersonville storefront—

34 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

her critics failed to appreciate the high cost of research, labor, and proper ingredients; the neighborhood was so fucking cheap. But if that attitude imparted a palpable bitterness to the cassatines, the neighbors could hardly be blamed, could they?

Cassatines—little green marzipan cakes— were, along with cannoli, something of a signature at Pasticerria Natalina, and I still mourn the day they disappeared along with it. Then last year Andersonville lost another signature green-marzipan torte when the

neighborhood’s 88-year-old Swedish Bakery closed. Zarzour probably thought that place was bullshit too, but Swedish Bakery had earned the love of the people though decades of customer service and relatively affordable crowd-pleasing sweets, particularly its signature prinsesstårta, “princess cake,” a traditional torte with whipped cream and fruit preserves layered atop sponge cake in a mammary-shaped dome covered with a vivid jacket of green marzipan. The prinsesstårta was said to be a favorite of the Princesses

Margaretha, Martha, and Astrid of Sweden, but at Swedish Bakery it was there for all who wanted to feel a little bit like a princess.

Wouldn’t you like to feel like a princess?

Here’s how: Some midafternoon when you can sneak away from whatever soulsmothering drudgery extorts your time and energy, take a seat at a sunlit table in Lost Larson, a new bakery in Andersonville that somehow captures the separate essences of what made both Swedish Bakery and Pasticerria Natalina special. In particular, treat yourself to a cup of coffee or tea and a duchess cake, which is what pastry chef Bobby Shaffer calls his tribute to Swedish Bakery’s beloved prinsesstårta.

Shaffer—who led the pastry department at Curtis Duffy’s late, lamented Grace and then at upstate New York’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns—builds upon his sponge with raspberry jelly with whole raspberries and white chocolate marzipan mousse set in an almond-milk mousse, sprayed with green-tinted cocoa butter, and crowned with jewels: a perfect rubyred raspberry set on a marzipan blossom, with a glimmer of gold leaf. A mouthful of it is a silky-soft cloud of gentle, creamy sweetness that is just the reward you deserve.

In Sweden this sort of afternoon (or morning) break is known as fika, a respite with coffee or tea and some kind of life-affirming indulgence from the bakery. It needn’t be as fancy as a duchess cake. Shaffer offers a wide range of sweet and savory pastries, among them open-faced sandwiches constructed on an assortment of hearty, tangy sourdough loaves. Warthog Hard Red Winter and Glenn Hard Red Spring Wheat Berries along with Brassetto rye from downstate are ground daily on the massive granite mill positioned in full view at the rear of the shop. A long fermentation unlocks the nutrition in the bran and produces an exceptional tang in all varieties of these dark, hearty loaves.

The counter at Lost Larson buzzes with activity. White-clad pastry chefs and counter servers—among them Shaffer’s sister Bree, the general manager—hustle the goods, explaining, plating, or boxing the various pastries under the glass. There are likely to be piles of glistening cinnamon and cardamom buns, the latter another Scandanavian standard: twists of sweet burnished dough

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Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $775/ month. Heat included. Available 9/1 (773) 761≠ 4318

STUDIO OTHER

EAST CHICAGO - Harborside Apartments accepting applica≠ tions for SECTION 8 1 & 2 Bed≠ room Apartments. Apply Wednes≠ days ONLY from 12pm to 4pm at 3610 Alder St. Applications are to be filled out on site. Adult appli≠ cants must provide a current pic≠ ture ID and SS card.

GARY NSA ACCEPTING appli≠ cations for SECTION 8 STUDIO AND ONE BDRM Apartments. Ap≠ ply Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am to 2pm ONLY at 1735 W 5th Ave. Applications are to be filled out on site. Adult applicants must provide a current picture ID and SS card.

LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378≠ 8888 CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

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

û NO SEC DEP û 6829 S. Perry.

1BR. $530/mo HEAT INCL 773≠ 955≠ 5105

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air.

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200

1 BR UNDER $700 NEWLY REMODELED UNITS

61st & King Dr. 3 Bd/2Ba, Washer/ Dry Hook≠ up, Alarm, 61st & Racine ≠ 1Bd/1Ba, 1 year Free Heat.

Chicago Heights 4 Bed, 2 Full baths, SFH. Other locations available. Approved credit receive 1 month free rent.

For More Info Call 773.412.1153

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca≠

bly Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park.

Laundry & Security on Premises.

Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Avail≠ ability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773≠ 288≠ 1030

MIDWAY

AREA/63RD

KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All modern oak floors, appliances, Se≠ curity system, on site maint. clean & quiet, Nr. transp. From $445. 773≠ 582≠ 1985 (espanol) PRE-SPRING SPECIAL - CHICAGO South Side Beautiful Stu≠ dios, 1,2,3 & 4 BRí s, Sec 8 ok. Also Homes for rent available. Call Nicole 312≠ 446≠ 1753; W≠ side loca≠ tions Tom 630≠ 776≠ 5556;

JULY 26, 2018 | CHICAGO READER 35

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

1 BR UNDER $700 CHICAGO: VICINITY OF 108th & Wabash, Lrg 3BR, newly rehabbed, 1st flr, quiet, clean 2-flat bldg, Sec 8 welcome. $950/$1100.

773-510-9290 CHATHAM 7105 S. CHAMPLAIN, 1BR. $6 40.

2BR. $775. Sec 8 OK. Heat & appl.

Call Office: 773-966-5275 or Steve: 773-936-4749

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

773-637-5957

1 BR $800-$899 SMOKE FREE BUILDING!!!

SOUTH SIDE 5 rooms, 1BR deluxe. 101st/King Dr. well maint.

appls/heat incl, no pets. $820/mo. plus sec. Mr. Ben. 312-802-9492.

OAK LAWN, SPACIOUS 1BR, appliances, heat incl, close to Christ

Hospital, $840/mo. 708-422-8801

1 BR $900-$1099 ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT near Loyola Park. 1337 1/2 W. Estes.

Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $950995/month (heat included). Available 9/1. 773-761-4318.

1 BR $1100 AND OVER

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SUMMER IS HERE!!!

HEAT, HW & CG PLENTY OF PARKING 1BDR FROM $785.00 2BDR FROM $1025.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000*** 6748 CRANDON & 7727 COLFAX MOST BEAUTIFUL APARTMENTS! 1 & 2BR, $625 & UP. OFF STREET PARKING. 773-947-8572 / 312-613-4424 CHICAGO - BEVERLY, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, Hdwd Flrs, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $795-$1040/mo. Call 773-2334939 1924 W 78TH St, Chicago, 1BR, 1BA no din rm, 1 living rm, 2nd f 1$600 and 1BR, 1BA 3rd fl $650, din rm/liv room. 312-401-0911

NEWLY REMOD 1BR & Studios starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St., 773-619-0204

LOOKING TO MOVE ASAP? Remodeled 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Apts.

Heat & Appls incl. Sec 8 OK. Southside Only. 773-593-4357

4BR, 2BA- 98th & Throop: LR,

DR, full bsmt, no utils incl, $1500/ mo $1200 non refundable move in fee, No sec. dep. 773-406-0604

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

AUSTIN - 1BR GARDEN APT, utilities not included. $650/mo + 1 month security deposit. Section 8 Welcome. Call 773-317-1837

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

NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $133/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970 6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2

BR $735, Includes Free heat & appliances & cooking gas. (708) 424-4216 Kalabich Mgmt

Forest Park: 1BR new tile, energy efficient windows, lndry facilitities, a/c, incls heat - natural gas, $895/ mo Luis 708-366-5602 lv msg NEWLY DECORATED 3 Rms, 1BR $600, 5800 S Wabash, Lambert Realty 773-287-3380 917 E. MARQUETTE 2Bd $900

1 Month Free & No Security, Section 8 Welcome. Niki 773-808-2043 108th & PRAIRIE: Studio (BR, kit, Ba) $595, Newly decorated, heat & appls incl. Section 8 ok. 888-249-7971

1 BR $700-$799 CHICAGO SOUTHSIDE 81ST & Clyde 1 BR, 4 rms, 3rd Floor Newly Decorated Stove/Frig, $600/mo + 1 mo sec, 773-268-2796

ALSIP: UPDATED 2BR APT,

1.5BA. $950/mo & 1BR apt, 1BA, $750/mo. Appls, laundry, parking & storage. Call 708-268-3762

ADULT SERVICES

THIS IS A very spacious 1 bedroom apartment in South Loop. $1700/ Month. 408-634-7385/ rentalhousing60@gmail.com.

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT NO MOVE IN FEE 1, 2, 3 BEDROOM APTS (773) 874-1122

1 BR OTHER

AVAILABLE NOW. ROOMS for rent. Utilities incl’d. Seniors Welcome. $500/mo. Call 773-431-1251

FELLOWSHIP MANOR Affordable Housing For The Elderly. Applications are being accepted at Fel-

lowship Manor, 5041 South Princeton Avenue, Chicago IL, 60609 for one bedroom apartments.

Applicants must be at least 62 years of age, and must meet screening criteria. Contact the onsite management office by phone at (773) 9245980, or Via postal mail. This institution is an equal opportunity provider.

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SUMMER IS HERE!!!

MONST UNITS INCLUDE..

HEAT & HOT WATER STUDIOS FROM $495.00 1BDR FROM $545.00 2BDR FROM $745.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL

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

2 BR UNDER $900 Chicago, 9121 S. Cottage Grove, 2BR apt. $1050/mo Newly remod, appls, mini blinds, ceiling fans, pkng Sec 8 OK. Free Heat 312-915-0100

2BR $795

FREE HEAT & COOKING GAS Newly decorated, carpeted, stove, fridge, dining rm, laundry, elevator.

NO APP FEE. 7100 S. Jeffrey. near Metra, bus, & shopping.

1-773-919-7102 or 1-312-802-7301 BEAUTIFUL 2BR APT NEAR 83rd and Paulina, nicely decorated, nice lawn, heat incl. $725/mo.

NO PETS! 773-783-7098 63RD/THROOP. New Renov 2BR in secured bldg. Lrg LR, DR, kitch, nr CTA Green line. $800.

Tenant pays heat.

Call 773-629-0314

8943 S. ADA. Safe, secure 2-3BR,

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799

separate heating, school & metra 1 blk away, $875 & Up. Section 8 welcome. Call 708-465-6573

2 BR $900-$1099 CHICAGO, 9305 S. Saginaw, Newly rehabbed, 2BR, carpet, stove & fridge, heat not incl, $950/ mo. Sect 8 welc. Mr. Johnson, 773294-0167 MAYWOOD: AVAIL NOW, 2BR w/DR incl appls, gas & heat, tenant pays elec. $1000/mo + sec dep & app fee, no pets. 708-450-9137 GRESHAM: REHABBED 24BR, heat included, close to transportation. $1250/mo. Sec 8 ok or cash. Call 708-263-8214

75 S.E. YATES -Renovated 2BR,

FR, 1.5BA, LR, DR, Eat in Kitc., 3 flat, tenant heated, $950/mo. No rent increases for 4 years. 773-375-8068

2 BR $1100-$1299 HYDE PARK - 2BR $1195, 1BR

$1095. Newly decorated, hdwd flrs, stove & fridge incl, Free Heat & Hot water. Sec 8 welcome. Free credit check, no application fee, laundry facilities. 1-773-667-6477 or 1-312-8027301

BEAUTIFUL REMOD 1, 2 & 3BR Apts, hdwd flrs, custom cabinets, granite cntrs, avail now. $1000$1200 /mo + sec. 773-905-8487.

Section 8 Ok SECTION 8 WELCOME. NO SECURITY DEPOSIT. 718 W 81st St, 5BR, 2BA house, appls incl., $1300/mo. 708-288-4510

2 BR $1500 AND OVER LARGE BRIGHT LINCOLN PK

2Bd, 1Bth, In Unit W/D, Roof Deck, Back Porch, HVAC, Fireplace, DW, Hardwood Floors, Available Immediately. $2000-$2900. Call: 773-4725944

2 BR OTHER ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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

CHATHAM CHARM - Vintage,

newly rehab, 2 BR, h/w flrs, sec alarm, SS appls, heat & hot water incl, laundry, Sec 8 & Seniors Welc. Call for appt (773)418-9908

2BR APT, GRESHAM area, lrg LR, eat-in kit. tenant pays utils. $600 /mo. + security. No pets. Call Anna, 773-476-6979, Mon-Fri 9am-3pm.

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled.

Rent is based on 30% of annual income. For details, call us at 847-546-1899 ∫

CHICAGO, 89th & Blackstone, avail now! 6.5 rms, 2BR, 3rd flr, heat incl, need appls, $850/mo + move-in fee. Call 773-375-9842, 1pm-6pm

RIVERDALE: Great Value!

3BR, newly decor. Carpet, nr metra, no pets. $900/mo + sec. Avail Now 708-829-1454 or 708-754-5599

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

ADULT SERVICES

CALUMET CITY large 3 BR, 2 BA, appl, A/C, laundry, hrdwd flrs, patio, parking. $1100 per mo + 1 mo sec. he at/ water incl 312-841-4556

CHICAGO 5842 S. Shields, Unit 1, 3BR, 1BA, newly refurbished,new carpet, 1st flr, no pets, fridge, stove. $800 + utils.

773-752-8328 11257 S. Emerald. 3BR, 1.5 BA, wood burning fireplace. Avail. immed. Section 8 welc. 773-2208803, 773-881-1416 and 773488-0034

144 S SACRAMENTO, 3BR &

5BR, 1BA, hardwood floors, ceramic tiles, stove & refrigerator, 1st floor, Recently decorated. 773-261-8840

LARGE 3 BEDROOM, one bath room apartment, 4423 N. Paulina.

Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $1790/ month. Heat included. Available

CHICAGO, 6111 S. Normal 2BR apt, stove/refrig., 6101 S. Normal 4BR T/H apt, newly decor. Sec. 8 9/1. Parking space available for $75/ welc. Call 773-422-1878.

month. (773)761-4318.

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499

CHICAGO, 3BR home + bonus room & built in back porch, full unfinished basement. Stove & fridge included. 630-747-3246 CALUMET PARK, Freshly Remodeled, 3BR, 1BA, quiet block, $1300/mo + security.

Contat Rob, 708-789-0567 SOUTHSIDE NEWLY REMOD, 5BR, 2BA, finished bsmt, huge fenced-in backyard with parking, SS Appls & W/D. 773-908-8791

Chicago: 4314 W Lexington St , 2nd fl spacious 3 BR, 2 BA, new remod, tenant pays utilities.

Sec 8 OK. $1175+ move in fee. 773457-7963 FREE HEAT DELUXE 3BR Apt, large living rm, dining room and kitchen, 7 255 S. Campbell. $1150/mo

cox, Quiet & secure, 3rd flr, 3BR, recent renov, appls incl. $1200 + 1 mo sec. Sec 8 OK. 708-935-8621

BRONZEVILLE: SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit.

4841 S Michigan. 4BR $1300 .

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

708-288-4510

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 80th & Drexel , 3BR, 2BA, $1200. 79th & Aberdeen, 2 BR Garden Apt, $750. Ten pays utils.

Sec 8 OK. Hdwd/cera tile.

773-502-4304

LAKEVIEW 3 BR Apartment steps

to Wrigley Field, transit, restaurants and shopping situated in quiet location in the center of one-way historic mid-block of W Newport Ave. Hardwood Floors, new paint throughout and deck. $2250/month. Heat included. Washer/dryer in common area. Bike storage included. Available August 1st. Call 608-279-6398

3 BR OR MORE

MARKETPLACE

GOODS

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

Austin, 3BR, 1st floor of 2 flat, quiet neighborhood, near school & trans. Heat, appls & C/A incl.

Tenant pays elec. 708-850-6054

HEALTH & WELLNESS

GENERAL

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

+ 1 mo sec. 614-804-3977

GARFIELD PARK. 4251 W. Wil-

SOUTHSIDE - 1514 W Garfield 55TH & Ashland, Clean Rooms, use of kitchen and bath. Available Now. Call 773-434-4046

Pines of Edgewater Apartments

Section 8 Waitlist Open Edgewater neighborhood.

Unit types available: 1 bedroom senior/disabled 1, 2 & 3 bedroom family Apply online at www.thepinesof edgewater.com July 30th to August 13th Please call the property with questions at 773-728-5009.

Managed by The Habitat Company

OTHER

FULL BODY MASSAGE. hotel, house calls welcome $90

ADULT SERVICES I DON’T DO Computers! Spanish Gentleman seeks a petite lady to share drinks and conversation. Tuesdays at 5. Rob (312)271-0009.

NOTICES

MORGAN PARK/ WEST PULLMAN

LOST JACK RUSSELL TERRIER

{ {

64TH & LANGLEY, 3BR, 1 BA, liv, din room, all appliances incl. microwa ve/dishwasher, w/d on site. Sec 8 OK ,.$1350+move in fee 312-813-0392 3-4 BEDROOM TOWNHOME,

Great Neighborhood. Tier 1 School, Section 8 ok. Call 312-501-0509

Newly decorated 3-4BR, 1.5Ba, Single Family Home, Appls incl.

Section 8 ok. 847-606-1369

SUMMER SPECIAL, SECTION 8 Ok, 3, 4 & 5 BR houses avail.

South Side: 773-287-9999, West Side: 773-287-4500.

roommates

CHICAGO, near Chicago State, to share with a senior.

Good parking. $150 a week, references required. Call 773629-6105

OAK PARK/DAKIN MALE, NEUTERED, MICRO-CHIPPED 4 1/2 YEARS 28 LBS TYPICAL TERRIER FEATURES WHITE BODY BLACK EARS AND FACE WITH CARAMEL ACCENTS DOCKED TAIL CALL NIKY 773-887-3271 OR 7733272

R U O Y AD E R HE

REACH OVER 1 MILLION PEOPLE MONTHLY IN PRINT & DIGITAL.

CONTACT US TODAY! | 312-222-6920 36 CHICAGO READER | JULY 26, 2018

l

l

S A V A G E LO V E

HOT GIRL

By Dan Savage

In w hich D an S av age r u ma

BODY RUBS

ges th ro u gh his file cab inets . . .

Quick hits on ball busting, pegging, DTMFAing, bottoming, and more Q : I’ve been faithfully

reading your column in the Chicago Reader for years, and now I’m reaching out to you about my own problem.

I’ve been dating this guy for almost a year. Everything is great, except one thing: He wants me to kick him in the nuts. It really bothers me, and I’m not sure what to do.

He’s very serious about it, and he brings it up every single day. It makes me really uncomfortable that this is some sort of fetish of his and I need help taking steps forward. —TO KICK OR NOT TO KICK

PS: I play soccer and I kick hard.

A : It’s a kink called ball

busting, TKONTK, and as long as you don’t kick him full force—or even half force—you’re unlikely to do permanent damage. That said, childless guys who are into ball busting are often advised to freeze their sperm just in case. And while it’s not a hugely popular kink, it’s common enough that ballbusting porn exists, and ballbusting Tumblrs, ball-busting blogs, etc. Take it slow at first, particularly if your guy has only fantasized about this and not experienced it.

PS: A guy who brings up his kink every single day deserves to be kicked in the nuts—unless he’s into ball busting, in which case he doesn’t deserve to be kicked in the nuts.

Q : Hi Dan, I am getting in

touch because I thought you might be interested in the following article: “Getting to the Bottom of Pegging.”

For open-minded people who are open to butt play, pegging is a great way to spice things up in the bedroom. But what exactly is pegging and why is it a thing now? Sex and relationships

expert, Tami Rose, knows how important it is to try new things in the bedroom.

She would be able to provide an article explaining what pegging is and tips for your more adventurous readers who want to give it a go. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. —[REDACTED] PR AGENCY

A : Pegging? Never heard of it. Wait—what’s that, Wikipedia? “Pegging is a sexual practice in which a woman performs anal sex on a man by penetrating the man’s anus with a strapon dildo . . . The neologism ‘pegging’ was popularized when it became the winning entry in a contest in Dan Savage’s Savage Love sex advice column [in 2001].”

Q : I’m in a six-year

relationship with a guy you will probably deem DTMFAworthy but I deem roundup-able to The One. My kids already regarded him as their stepdad before we moved in together about eight months ago. That’s when I learned he’s an addict: He drinks, smokes weed, and jerks off to porn for about two hours every day. He has been this way for more than 20 years, and I have zero delusions he will change for me. Recently he told me he has very little sexual desire for me, that he knows my pussy in and out and it’s boring, but he loves my companionship. How do I deal with this so we can move forward together as an incompatible couple? —SEX ADDICT PARTNER

A : A romantic partner who

says something as cruel and negating as what this man has said to you, SAP, either wants out of the relationship or is grooming their partner for much worse treatment

to come. If he wants out of the relationship, the verbal and emotional abuse will escalate until you finally leave him. If he doesn’t want out, the verbal and emotional abuse will escalate a bit more slowly, so that, like the proverbial frog in the pot of boiling water, you don’t realize exactly how bad it’s getting and how much damage it’s doing to you—and your kids.

I know it’s not what you wanted to hear, SAP, but I’m going to say it anyway: DTMFA.

Q : What’s the fairest way to determine who should get tied up? —BONDAGE BOTTOM BOYFRIENDS

A : Whoever was tied up last time does the tying up this time and vice versa.

Q : Do you ever wear

panties, Dan? Would you post a picture of yourself in panties online? I think you would look good in panties.

$40 w/AD 24/7

REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN.

224-353-1353 Discreet Billing

Try FREE: 773-867-1235 More Local Numbers: 1-800-926-6000

please recycle this paper

Ahora español Livelinks.com 18+

&$!#%&" !! #$!%#"! !!

—PANTIES ARE NICE TO YOU

A : While I have no particular aversion to wearing panties, PANTY, and while I will not deny the allure of the models at xdress.com, I’ve never worn panties and have no plans to start. As a consequence, I won’t be able to post a picture of myself in panties online to delight you and horrify everyone else.

$2"- # 1,#+!/(!

.,#0 7,1 (. !+ 1 +&15*+3"-).1 477%2 $76/6'' ' 0 %)' *! &3 '. !/'!+

Q : How much sex is too much sex? —NUMB OVER NUMBERS

A : “Enough is as good as a feast.” —MARY POPPINS

v

Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net.

Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast.com. m @fakedansavage

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS

chicagoreader.com/early

JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 37

b Bozo Vreco 10/27, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 7/27, 8 AM b Wrekmeister Harmonies 9/8, 8 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 7/27, 8 AM b Your Smith 9/22, 9 PM, Sleeping Village, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM Mike Yung 10/29, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 7/27, 9 AM, 18+

U P CO M IN G

Pond é MATT SAV

N EW Acid King 9/22, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Amigo the Devil 11/2, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM Marc Anthony 11/30, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM Jay Aston’s Gene Loves Jezebel 9/13, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Authority Zero 9/27, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Black Oak Arkansas 8/5, 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Crystal Bowersox 10/8, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/26, noon b Trina Broussard 9/3, 7 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/26, noon b Avi Buffalo, Haunted Summer 10/19, 9 PM, Hideout Caamp 12/7, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Michael Christmas 9/21, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Counterparts, Being as an Ocean 9/28, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge b Graham Coxon 9/21, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM, 18+ Cutout 11/9, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Davido 8/29, 7:30 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM, 18+ Demolition Hammer 9/8, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Devotchka, Orkesta Mendoza 10/4, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Dopethrone, Blunt, Plague of Carcosa 8/18, 8:30 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Billie Eilish 10/28, 7 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM b Elvis Hitler 9/22, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint

English Beat 10/23, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM b and 10/24, 7 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/26, noon b Fisher 11/17, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Steve Grimmett’s Grim Reaper 10/7, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Hanson String Theory 11/5, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM Hercules & Love Affair 9/21, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Hot Sardines 9/15, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 7/27, 8 AM b Christoph Irniger Pilgrim 10/10, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Iron Chic, Spanish Love Songs 9/25, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Joyce Manor, Vundabar 10/20, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Juiceboxxx 9/24, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle F Eryn Allen Kane 9/27, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM, 17+ Korpiklaani, Arkona 11/5, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Lany 11/1, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM b Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears 10/4, 7 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM Lido 8/1, 7:30 PM, Lincoln Hall b Lone Bellow 12/8-9, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 7/27, 8 PM b Lost Dog Street Band 10/3, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Loud Luxury 8/18, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Mannheim Steamroller 12/15, 8 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM

38 CHICAGO READER - JULY 26, 2018

Maxwell 12/2, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM Jim Messina 10/21, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/26, noon b Mac Miller, Thundercat 12/3, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM, 17+ Mothers 10/26, 10 PM, Schubas, 18+ Mustasch 9/14, 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Nonpoint, He Is Legend, Letters From the Fire 9/22, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Peach Kelli Pop 10/21, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Pile, Spirit of the Beehive 10/6, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Pond 10/25, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM, 17+ Psymbionic 9/8, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 18+ Red City Radio 10/14, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge Roosevelt 12/12, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 18+ Matt Simons 11/18, 7 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM, 17+ Sloppy Jane 8/23, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Vienna Teng 12/16, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/26, noon b Tennis 11/7, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM, 17+ Tiger Trio 10/18, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Tlen-Huicani 11/3, 7 PM, Szold Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 7/27, 8 AM b Pat Travers Band 9/15, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Mark Turner & Ethan Iverson 9/15, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Vamps 9/27, 6:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 7/27, 10 AM b

Alestorm, Gloryhammer 9/21, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Lily Allen 10/31, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Nicole Atkins 8/10, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Babys 9/27, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Basement 8/3, 10 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Beach House 8/18, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre Call Me Karizma 8/19, 7 PM, Schubas b Car Seat Headrest, Naked Giants 9/7, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Phil Collins 10/22, 8 PM, United Center Davina & the Vagabonds 9/12, 8 PM, City Winery b Dead Sara 9/29, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 18+ Destroyer 10/17, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Dwele 11/29, 9:30 PM, City Winery Dying Fetus, Incantation 9/23, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Roky Erickson 11/9, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Alejandro Escovedo & Joe Ely 8/24, 7 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b 50 Cent 9/6, 8 PM, Ravinia Festival, Highland Park Foxing 9/30, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b Eleanor Friedberger 10/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Ghost 11/1, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b A Giant Dog 8/13, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Godflesh, Harm’s Way 8/24, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Helloween 9/10, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Highly Suspect, Cleopatrick 8/2, 11 PM, the Vic, 18+ Mason Jennings 8/17, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Joey Purp 9/22, 9:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ King Buffalo 8/15, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Mark Kozelek 9/11, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Lo Moon 10/6, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Jeff Lynne’s ELO 8/15, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EA R LY WA R N IN G S

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Matisyahu 10/28-30, 8 PM, City Winery b The Men 8/25, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Mock Orange 8/25, 9 PM, Subterranean Mt. Joy 9/6, 8 PM, Thalia Hall b Niki & Gabi 8/7, 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b Nothing, Culture Abuse 9/12, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Of Montreal 10/30, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Oh Sees, Timmy’s Organism 10/12, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Ozzy Osbourne, Stone Sour 9/21, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park Pallbearer, Tribulation 9/18, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Paper Kites 11/21, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Pedro the Lion 8/24, 9 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ A Place to Bury Strangers 10/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Post Animal 8/4, 10 PM, Empty Bottle Restorations 10/13, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Lucy Roche 9/5, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Saint Etienne 9/13, 7:30 PM, Park West b Ty Segall, William Tyler 11/2, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Set It Off, Chapel 8/30, 7 PM, Subterranean b Shannon & the Clams, Escape-ism 10/31, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Simulacrum, John Zorn 8/11, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Sleigh Bells 8/17, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Sting, Shaggy 10/2, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom Subhumans 9/8, 7:30 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Swearin’, Empath 10/18, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Tacocat 8/10, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Tune-Yards, U.S. Girls 10/27, 7:30 PM, Park West b KT Tunstall 11/1, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Twenty One Pilots 10/17, 7 PM, United Center Vaccines, Regrettes 8/4, 11 PM, Schubas, 18+ Venom Inc. 8/31, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Kurt Vile & the Violators 12/22, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Wailin’ Jennys 10/26, 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b v

G O S S IP WO LF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene FORMER SHAME THAT TUNE cohost, Nerds on Tour podcaster, and Baby Teeth front man Abraham Levitan just wrote Gossip Wolf to say he’s getting back onstage—it’s been five years since he played a full show. He admits he might be having a midlife crisis, and says he’s been writing “insanely specific” songs about fatherhood that could “yank the term ‘dad rock’ into a strange and awkward new dimension.” He’s also hoping to re-form Baby Teeth! On Wednesday, August 1, at the Hungry Brain, Levitan plays two sets of “mostly solo glam piano and vocal, some karaoke-style with backing tracks— I’ll essentially be live-auditioning new material for once and future bandmates.”

For now, Levitan is performing as simply Abraham: “unadorned, biblical, and terrifying.” But this wolf doesn’t expect he’ll “sacrifice” quality by playing alone!

It’s hard to believe Neo closed three years ago this week—Chicago’s after-hours club scene hasn’t been the same without its haven for bat-dancing with fellow freaks. On Friday, July 27, Metro hosts a Neo reunion and homecoming, including appearances from former staff and DJs Carrie Monster, Scary Lady Sarah, Suzanne Shelton, Glenn Russell, and Jeff Moyer; also on the bill is a screening of Eric Richter’s feature-length documentary 2350 Last Call: The Neo Story.

After hibernating for years, experimental R&B duo The-Drum have reemerged.

Member Brandon Boom hit Gossip Wolf’s inbox to deliver a new EP, Aura Bath, and an hour-long mix called The Transformation of Things. The palpitating footwork bass and harmonizing assortment of ghostly vocal samples on the EP’s title track prove The-Drum are as great as ever!

Last week Chicago rapper-producer Encyclopedia Brown and beat maker Diaz Millenia dropped Art Never Spoils (the material was written between 2006 and 2009), an album for fans of syllablepacked raps and lackadaisical boom-bap.

—J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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JULY 26, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 39

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