Chicago Reader: print issue of July 28, 2016 (Volume 45, Number 42)

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY | K I C K I N G A S S S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | J U LY 2 8 , 2 0 1 6

Gaming Pokémon Go gives rise to the latest moral panic. 8

Arts & Culture The school that became a theater that became a school. 16

Can

The Chicago rapper publicly supports Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights, among other progressive causes— which makes him an interesting fit for a festival that tries to please everyone.

Vic Mensa

By LEOR GALIL 26

RADICALIZE Lollapalooza?

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THIS WEEK

C H I C A G O R E A D E R | J U LY 2 8 , 2 0 1 6 | V O L U M E 4 5 , N U M B E R 4 2

TO CONTACT ANY READER EMPLOYEE, E-MAIL: (FIRST INITIAL)(LAST NAME) @CHICAGOREADER.COM

EDITOR JAKE MALOOLEY CREATIVE DIRECTOR PAUL JOHN HIGGINS DEPUTY EDITOR, NEWS ROBIN AMER CULTURE EDITOR TAL ROSENBERG DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS FILM EDITOR J.R. JONES MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS KATE SCHMIDT, KEVIN WARWICK, BRIANNA WELLEN SENIOR WRITERS STEVE BOGIRA, MICHAEL MINER, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS LEOR GALIL, DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, AIMEE LEVITT, PETER MARGASAK, JULIA THIEL SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI EDITORIAL ASSISTANT CASSIDY RYAN CONTRIBUTING WRITERS NOAH BERLATSKY, DERRICK CLIFTON, MATT DE LA PEÑA, MAYA DUKMASOVA, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, DMITRY SAMAROV, KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS APRIL ALONSO, JESSICA KIM COHEN, SARA COHEN, MARC DAALDER, KT HAWBAKER-KROHN, FARAZ MIRZA, SUNSHINE TUCKER, ANNA WATERS

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE

4 Agenda Arc Theatre’s As You Like It, Cook County Social Club, the Moth Grandslam Championship, the film Dragon Inn, and more recommendations

CITY LIFE

ARTS & CULTURE

The school that became a theater that became a school

22 Visual Art The petcoke problems of the southeast side hit the Museum of Contemporary Photography.

24 Movies A veteran improv troupe falls prey to jealousy, rivalry, and professional despair in Don’t Think Twice.

FOOD & DRINK

8 Politics Scenes from the Democratic and Republican National Conventions 8 Gaming Pokémon Go gives rise to the latest moral panic.

Albany Park Theater Project’s latest production takes over a shuttered building in order to re-create the Chicago high school experience.

BY AIMEE LEVITT 16

36 Restaurant review: Honey’s The plates look sweet, but the food lacks depth.

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12 Politics Mayor Rahm proposes school budget cuts while the city’s TIF accounts are flush with money.

14 Transportation In the absence of other options, the far south side gets around primarily by bus.

VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES FABIO CAVALIERI, ARIANA DIAZ, BRIDGET KANE MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD

ARTS & CULTURE

40 Brewery tour Dovetail Brewery serves up a potent look at the art of making craft beer.

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DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com

42 Jobs 42 Apartments & Spaces 43 Marketplace

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ON THE COVER: PHOTO OF VIC MENSA BY JAKE OSMUN

MUSIC

Can Vic Mensa radicalize Lollapalooza?

The Chicago rapper publicly supports Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights, among other progressive causes—which makes him an interesting fit for a festival that tries to please everyone.

By LEOR GALIL 26

20 Theater Douglass dulls two American greats.

20 Comedy Hari Kondabolu makes America laugh about America.

21 Dance The Going Dutch Festival celebrates female-centric dance, performance, visual art, and more.

21 Lit The Bughouse Square Debates: Come for the used books, stay for the fringe opinions.

44 Straight Dope What’s the deal with the pileup of empty shipping containers?

45 Savage Love Is it unethical not to disclose an intersex condition?

46 Early Warnings Death From Above 1979, Guided by Voices, the 1975, and more shows in the weeks to come 46 Gossip Wolf Township hosts the anti-gun-violence benefit Drop Your Weapons, and more music news.

JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 3

AGENDA R

READER RECOMMENDED

P Send your events to agenda@chicagoreader.com

b ALL AGES

F extent reflects Lewis’s own wry, understated account of his religious beliefs.

Still, passion smolders behind Lewis’s diffidence—a passion wholly missing here. —JACK HELBIG Through 8/14: WedThu 7 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Tue 7 PM, Mercury Theater, 3745 N. Southport, 773-325-1700, mercurytheaterchicago.com, $55-$59.

As You Like It ò AMANDA DE LA GUARDIA

THEATER

More at chicagoreader.com/ theater Ad Hoc [Home] Thirteen members of the About Face R Youth Theatre Ensemble, aged 14-24,

Never miss a show again.

EARLY WARNINGS chicagoreader.com/early 4 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

present an hour-long theatrical collage of autobiographical reflections about growing up queer. Developed by the ensemble members themselves through improvisation and writing workshops, the devised performance piece employs monologues, scenes, and choral speaking passages addressing the challenges and triumphs of being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and genderqueer.

Some of the coming-out/coming-of-age stories have a familiar ring—parents who tell their kids that their discomfort with gender norms is "just a phase," for example. Other pieces are stark reminders of the uniquely tumultuous times this generation of youth lives in, such as Da Shona Johnson's powerful, rapid-fire soliloquy referencing the mass murder in Orlando and the campaigns by state legislators to exploit "bathroom bills" for political purposes. There is humor here too, and a tenderness rooted equally in strength and vulnerability. The cast—who set a standard for diversity in terms of race, gender, and physical type that professional stages would do well to emulate—are poised but not "polished"; their unaffected honesty is engaging, illuminating, and inspiring. —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 7/31: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 2:30 PM, Claudia Cassidy Theater, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, 312-744-6630, aboutfacetheatre.com. F

As You Like It Usually local R theater companies, from the most acclaimed to the least recognized, approach Shakespeare’s plays as though they’re towering mountains to be climbed, resulting in lots of actors straining against every natural impulse, not to mention common sense, to manufacture something of extrahuman scale. Arc Theatre takes the opposite approach in this refreshingly life-size production. On a slab of dull concrete in a dinky Evanston park, director Mark

Boergers’s endearing cast dispense with all pretense of grandeur—a wise move when you’re easily upstaged by a nearby swing set full of kids—and play Shakespeare’s scenes for their simple comedic truth. Rarer still, they make perfect sense of everything they’re saying. Even the kids on the swings came by to watch for a while. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 8/14: Sat-Sun 7 PM, Ridgeville Park, 908 Seward, Evanston, 847-869-5640, arctheatrechicago.org. F The Awake Playwright Ken Urban’s The Awake is a cutthroat psychological thriller that crams an action-movie’s worth of torture cells, helicopter rescues, and tearful hospital scenes into a play less than two hours long. How does it manage to muster such excitement, and how does First Floor Theater pull it off on a shoestring budget? By having the actors narrate everything that happens to them rather than trying to show it happening. Granted, this solution put a third of the audience to sleep—theater, especially small theater, is a “show don’t tell” kind of art form. But while talk is cheap, pyrotechnics are expensive. By far the best scenes come in the show’s last half hour, when people—exciting, living people—start to emerge from their intricate webs of association and actually do something, even if it’s just talking to each other. —MAX MALLER Through 7/31: Wed-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Berger Park, 6205 N. Sheridan, 773-7610376, firstfloortheater.com, $10.

C.S. Lewis Onstage: The Most Reluctant Convert Playwright, actor, and codirector Max McLean’s one-hander about the amiable, mildly witty English writer C. S. Lewis looks wonderful.

The set, replete with rich hardwoods, perfectly creates the feel of a fussy Oxford don’s office. And McLean’s costume (scarf, coat, tweed jacket, vest, tie, slightly rumpled trousers) screams tweedy, hobbit-like, and emotionally cold. But there’s little drama in this drama. McLean underplays the major crises in Lewis’s life, most notably his battlefield traumas in WW I, while repeating Wikipedia style the key facts of the writer’s biography. Even Lewis’s conversion from atheism to Christianity lacks fire. True, this choice to some

The Dead Boy Scout Musical It’s hard to imagine an institution more ripe for parody than the Boy Scouts. Think of the oaths, the uniforms, the homosocial bonding, the snacks! The Dead Boy Scout Musical at the Annoyance tells the story of a trip to New Mexico’s Philmont Scout Ranch gone horribly wrong. Easy target notwithstanding, it’s a genuinely hilarious spoof, and the level of detail is astonishing—there are things in the script that I suspect only an Eagle Scout would know, and sure enough, the writing and direction are credited to recipients of that illustrious honor.

With a few exceptions (notably Bruce Phillips), these guys can’t really sing, but that almost makes the production better. This is the third show I’ve seen at Annoyance this year, and the comedy theater has yet to disappoint. —MAX MALLER Through 9/10: Sat 8 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $20, $15 students.

Desert Cool “Yeah, I’m a R detective,” drawls our hero, Mick Delahunt of the LAPD, on his

way to alienating yet another potential girlfriend. He’s also a probable alcoholic with a pronounced animus for actors and a crying need for psychotherapy.

But Delahunt knows when something stinks. So he deputizes a young film nerd and a fucked-up movie star and goes looking for a killer. Starring its coauthors (Mark Denny as Delahunt, John O’Toole as the star, and an engagingly quirky Caleb Fullen as the nerd) this goof on Hollywood noir is casual as hell yet far from dumb. The writers cleverly work their conceit, neither pushing it too hard nor turning it—as most of their peers might—into an armature for dick jokes.

The result is a breezy, funny, likably absurd 60 minutes. Through 8/19: Fri 8:30 PM, iO Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury,

ioimprov.com/chicago, $14.

Direct From Death Row: The Scottsboro Boys After six years in prison on false charges of raping two white women in 1931, four of the Scottsboro Boys briefly joined the vaudeville circuit, reenacting scenes from the trial that destroyed their lives. A savvy playwright might find emotional and psychological complexity in this turn of events. Mark Stein, in his hypersatirical, surface-skipping overview of the four Scottsboro trials and their aftermath, gives the episode barely a passing mention. Instead he paints the patently racist, anti-Semitic, xenophobic trials in broad, semicomic strokes to show how patently racist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic they were.

All the heightened buffoonery and ironic song-and-dance numbers, alternately inspired and perfunctory in this Raven Theatre production, can’t make these two exhaustingly ardent acts accomplish much beyond restating the obvious.

—JUSTIN HAYFORD Fri-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Raven Theatre, 6157 N. Clark, 773-338-2177, raventheatre.com, $42, $37 seniors, $18 students and military.

Now. Here. This. A trip to a natural history museum is more like a trip down memory lane in Now. Here. This., a slapdash musical by Jeff Bowen that received its debut at NYC’s Vineyard Theatre in 2012, billed as a journey exploring life’s big questions. It’s about four young friends trying to reconcile themselves to the present by sifting through past ordeals. Unfortunately, too many of these have a tendency to come across as trivial and one-dimensional: dealing with high school cliques, living up to the family name, and the death of an older relative, to name a few.

Energetic performances by the cast members help to redeem this show from Brown Paper Box Co., but one wonders what might have been if life’s so-called big questions weren’t so darn small. —MATT DE LA PEÑA Through 8/21: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Rivendell Theatre, 5775 N. Ridge, 773-334-7728, brownpaperbox.org, $25.

The Portrait Gustav Klimt, the revered and reviled Austrian Secessionist, welcomes a wealthy bride-to-be into his

Maks and Val: Our Way Tour ò MICHAEL ROSENTHAL

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Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of July 28

studio, where she’s auditioning him for her marriage portrait. She’s invisible, as per the dreadful convention of so many one-person shows, so Klimt, played by jovial, inquisitive Cameron Pfiffner, talks to the air for 80 minutes about anything that passes through his mind: he believes in free love, he thinks critics don’t understand his work, he likes Jews, he has many cats. Occasionally the lights get moody, he faces a different direction, and he starts reciting letters about a failing love affair. Nothing comes to much of a head, and while Pfiffner is an engaging performer, playwright-director Susan Padveen rarely moves his monologue beyond the grandly bland.

—JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 8/14: WedSat 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-4047336, greenhousetheater.org, $42-$48.

Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) Jake Baker plays a remorseful, socially inept man named Thom Pain in this Pulitzer-nominated 2004 solo show by Will Eno, presented by Dear Stone Theater Company. Unresolved issues from childhood and the lingering effects of a bad breakup have left Pain incapable of meeting life’s challenges; his sole worldly possession is a dictionary. Baker’s performance is fluent, even charming, but the play itself is so painfully awkward that it ends up feeling akin to a hostage situation. Like lots of lonely people who suddenly obtain a captive audience, Pain doesn’t know how to stop talking once he starts—his sentences run away from him, and any jokes he attempts dwindle away before their punch lines. Thom Pain may pretend to be about the fundamental emptiness of life, but it’s really a play about feeling alone and needing to talk. And talk. And talk. —MAX MALLER Through 8/6: ThuSat 7:30 PM, Sun 3:30 PM, Heartland Studio Theatre, 7016 N. Glenwood, 773791-2393, dearstonetheater.org, $15.

DANCE

Maks and Val: Our Way Tour R The brothers from Dancing With the Stars bring their tour to Chicago,

sharing the story of their lives through dance. Fri 7/29, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, 175 N. State, 312-462-6300, thechicagotheatre.com, $30-80.

COMEDY R

Cook County Social Club Chicago-born improvisers Greg Hess, Bill Cochran, Brendan Jennings, and Mark Raterman return from LA to perform their popular show at home once again. Thu 7/28, 8 PM, iO Theater, the Mission Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, 312-929-2401, ioimprov.com, $15.

R

Show & Tell Second City, iO, Annoyance—Chicago’s improv institutions are schools as well as theaters. But so far as I know, nobody has combined the two functions in a single entertainment until now. This series allows improvisers to, as the tagline goes, show you what they do and tell you how they do it. My experience will probably differ from yours. For one thing, the ensemble I saw comprised performers from various teams, so they weren’t necessarily used to playing with one another; future installments will feature established teams. And the audience I sat with included lots of improv students, whose questions skewed the conversation toward technicalese; that may change as more civilians take part. What will likely remain the same is a format where players perform scenes, from duets to longform Harolds, following each with a Q and A. If you’re as lucky as I was, you’ll see energetic, creative bits and learn something too. —TONY ADLER Open run: Tue 8 PM, iO, Mission Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, ioimprov.com/chicago, $12.

by Austen Brown, Alex Calhoun, and Angela Davis Fegan. Through 8/11, MonThu 9 AM-5 PM, Fri 9 AM-noon, 217 N. Carpenter, 312-491-8887, chicagoartistscoalition.org.

LIT

For Those Who Can’t This stoR rytelling event features artists of color presenting narratives about racial

injustice. Proceeds benefit the Healing Corner. Sun 7/31, 9 PM, Under the Gun Theater, 956 W. Newport, 773-270-3440, undertheguntheater.com.

Jesse Jordan ò PAUL PETROWSKY Jesse Jordan The local author R reads from his novel This Is Not the End, the story of a reluctant teenage antichrist. Thu 7/28, 7 PM, Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln, 773-293-2665, bookcellarinc.com.

Nick Vatterott ò MINDY TUCKER

R

Nick Vatterott The Lincoln Lodge hosts the former Chicagoan for a night of stand-up. Wed 8/3, 8:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-2274433, hideoutchicago.com, $15.

Very Last I Shit You Not Michael R Sanchez and Seth Davis host the last iteration of their acclaimed monthly

Moth Grandslam Championship R Storytelling show the Moth hosts its Grandslam Championship. Mon 8/1, 8 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6860, athenaeumtheatre. com, $27.

Newberry Book Fair For the R 32nd year, this four-day sale offers a mix of used books, movies, and records. 7/28-7/31: Thu-Fri noon-8 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-6 PM, Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton, 312-255-3700, newberry. org.

storytelling series, inviting Catharine Savage, Ilana Gordon, Mike Gifford, Ryan Miera, Zach Peterson, Tanya Freseth, and Kristin Ross to share their personal fecal tales. Thu 7/28, 8 PM, Township, 2200-2202 N. California, 773384-1865, ishityounotshow.com, $5.

Poetry Block Party The first R ever Chicago Poetry Block Party features music, art, community activities,

and poetry readings by the likes of Nate Marshall, Eve Ewing, Fatimah Asghar, Porsha Olayiwola, Sarah Kay, and José Olivarez. Sat 7/30, 2-8 PM, 3700 S. Wabash, poetryfoundation.com.

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS Dragon Inn American moviegoers R may be most familiar with this 1967 martial arts classic as the feature

being watched in a crumbling movie palace by an assortment of lost souls in Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003). Here’s your chance to experience its pop grandeur unadulterated, in a new digital restoration. During the Ming dynasty, a wicked eunuch of the imperial court kills the defense minister and orders the man’s grown son and daughter exiled to a remote outpost, where assassins at the title inn await their arrival and a heroic soldier traveling incognito hopes to save them.

Director King Hu makes kinetic use of the widescreen frame: the action is dominated by gonzo knife throwing, and arrow fire has seldom felt so lethal. The balletic, rhythmically thrilling swordplay and Hu’s novel employment of the daughter as a fearsome combatant would strongly influence such millennial martial-arts dramas as Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers (2004). In Mandarin with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 111 min. Sat 7/30, 3 PM; Tue 8/2, 7:45 PM; and Thu 8/4, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

RSM

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The Shallows

The Fits In this debut feature by R writer-director Anna Rose Holmer, an 11-year-old tomboy (Royalty Hightow-

er) joins an all-girl dance team at her local community center and watches as a mysterious illness, dubbed “the fits,” infects the older girls on the team.

The illness seems to be a metaphor for menstruation, and though Holmer never reveals its exact cause, she demon- µ

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VISUAL ARTS Arc Gallery “Strata+Sphere,” Rochelle Weiner’s multimedia exhibition is inspired by Milwaukee’s East Side neighborhood. Through 8/13, Wed-Sat noon-6 PM, Sun noon-4 PM, 2156 N. Damen, 773252-2232, arcgallery.org.

Chicago Artists Coalition “A Fine Line,” group exhibition featuring work

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JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 5

Evanston Lakeshore Arts Festival August 6-7 Saturday & Sunday 11a.m.-6 p.m.

Dawes Park, Sheridan Rd. at Church St. Free Admission For more information: 847-448-8058

www.cityofevanston.org/lakeshore

Presented by the City of Evanston and partially supported by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

6 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

AGENDA B strates a shrewd understanding of girls’ interior lives. She and cinematographer Paul Yee infuse the community center, in and around which the entire film takes place, with elements of magical realism to accentuate the protagonist’s passage from childhood into adolescence. The neutral color palette and the primal motions of the boxing gym, where the girl finds sanctuary, contrast with the garish glitter and ritualistic movement of the dance class, an exercise in feminine conformity. —LEAH PICKETT 72 min. Fri 7/29, 2 and 8 PM; Sat 7/30, 7:45 PM; Sun 7/31, 5 PM; Mon 8/1, 8 PM; Tue 8/2, 6:15 PM; and Thu 8/4, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center For the Plasma With this 2014 feature, indie filmmakers Bingham Bryant and Kyle Molzan aim for a pastoral drama along the lines of Kelly Reichardt’s early features, but with a dash of conceptual sci-fi; their idea ought to work, but they lack Reichardt’s skilled touch with amateur actors and the dialogue scenes are uniformly awful. Rosalie Lowe, the most experienced performer, plays a forest-fire lookout in northern Maine who monitors the wilderness on CCTV screens all day; Anabelle LeMieux, floundering in her first screen role, is the old friend who comes to visit her; and Tom Lloyd, as a weirdo neighbor who bursts into their home in the middle of the night, seems like a refugee from The Room. The movie’s sole attraction is an odd, exceptionally potent electronic score by Japanese pop musician Keiichi Suzuki. —J.R. JONES 94 min. Fri 7/29, 6:15 and 7:45 PM; Sat 7/30, 6:30 and 8:30 PM; Sun 7/31, 1:30 and 7:30 PM; and Mon 8/1–Thu 8/4, 6:15 and 7:45 PM. Facets Cinematheque Nerve This teen-oriented thriller warns against the dangers of blind conformity, which would be more credible if it didn’t open with a string of product placements (Google, Spotify, Huffington Post).

A responsible high school senior (Emma Roberts) joins an online gaming community called Nerve to test her mettle; its anonymous “watchers” pair her up with a stranger (Dave Franco) and dare them to execute increasingly dangerous stunts for cash. The story is intriguing, and the heroine’s backstory is developed enough to explain her suddenly reckless behavior. But the film has a fatal messaging problem: it lambasts online group-think and “hiding behind screen names” while also glamorizing the game. By winning, the teens get everything they want and more. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman directed; with Juliette Lewis, Emily Meade, and, from Orange Is the New Black, Samira Wiley and Kimiko Glenn. —LEAH PICKETT PG-13, 96 min. City North 14

Weiner Right Now, Wrong Then Will Hong Sang-soo ever get laid? In such dramas as Night and Day (2008), Woman on the Beach (2006), and Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors (2000), the Korean director has carefully rendered the patient seduction of delightful young women by desperately horny young men, mining their elaborate dance for social satire and moral insight.

Like Virgin, this 2015 feature turns on a metaphysical gimmick: in the first half a famous filmmaker in Suwon for a university speaking gig (Jeong Jae-young) tries to reel in a pretty amateur painter (Kim Minhee), but their romance crumples once she learns that he’s married; in the second half the same events repeat but the filmmaker takes a more forthright approach to the woman and they establish a more promising relationship. Hong is quietly preoccupied with the value of living authentically; you have to give him credit for continuing to find new angles on a story he’s told ad nauseam. In Korean with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 121 min. Fri 7/29, 7 and 9:15 PM; Sat 7/30, 5:30 and 7:45 PM; Sun 7/31, 1 PM; and Mon 8/1–Thu 8/4, 7 and 9:15 PM. Facets Cinematheque Star Trek Beyond J.J. Abrams, who directed Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), has beamed up to the ship, leaving us stranded on the planet’s surface with Fast and the Furious auteur Justin Lin. This third installment in the millennial Star Trek reboot races along without an idea in its head, often recalling the silly, monster-driven final season of the 60s TV show. (Among the screenwriters is Simon Pegg, who plays Mr. Scott onscreen but also scripted such lowbrow favorites as Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead.) The 2009 movie held out the promise that the familiar old characters might be taken in new directions, but Lin makes good on that only once, with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Mr. Sulu meeting his gay lover on shore leave; needless to say, there’s plenty of stale comedy between the obtuse Mr. Spock and irascible Dr. McCoy. —J.R. JONES PG-13, 122 min. For showtimes see chicagoreader.com/movies.

As brutal and R Weiner compelling as a car-crash

video, this documentary by Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg records the 2013 New York mayoral run of Anthony Weiner, a fire-breathing liberal Democrat who had been laughed out of Congress two years earlier for accidentally posting a photo of his penis on Twitter. Weiner throws himself at the mercy of his fellow New Yorkers, dutifully eats shit for his past behavior, and makes a dignified plea to be readmitted to the public debate. Before long he’s polling in the mid-20s alongside three other major contenders, but then comes the revelation that his online sexual adventures continued even after he’d resigned from Congress, and his candidacy collapses. Weiner gave the directors nearly unlimited access, and there are gripping scenes of him and his loyal wife, Huma Abedin— whose own political career has been stymied by her husband’s scandals—reckoning with his past behavior as a fresh wave of public humiliation sweeps over them.

—J.R. JONES R, 96 min. Fri 7/29, 6 PM; Sat 7/30, 7:45 PM; Sun 7/31, 3 PM; Mon 8/1, 6 PM; Tue 8/2, 8:15 PM; Wed 8/3, 6 PM; and Thu 8/4, 8:15 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

SPECIAL EVENTS Female Filmmakers Night Short films, from premieres to festival favorites, all directed by midwestern women. Screens as part of Midwest Independent Film Festival, a monthly networking event for local indie filmmakers. Tue 8/2, 7:30 PM. Landmark’s Century Centre Open screening A free-form assortment of films, either completed, excerpted, or in progress. Work should be “family friendly” and run 20 minutes or less; DVD, Blu-ray, and electronic files accepted. Sat 7/30, 8 PM. Chicago Filmmakers F West Side Story Decent 1961 adaptation of the Bernstein-Robbins musical, if you can handle Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood in the leads. Robert Wise directed, with no songs in his heart. With Russ Tamblyn, Rita Moreno, and George Chakiris. —DAVE KEHR 151 min. Tue 8/2, 6:30 PM. Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park v

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JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE Gaming ò PHOTOILLUSTRATION BY PAUL JOHN HIGGINS

Pokémon Go gives rise to the latest moral panic

By RYAN SMITH

O Politics

Breaking with convention “THESE EVENTS ARE ESSENTIALLY big propaganda showcases,” says photographer Joeff Davis, who spent the last two weeks documenting the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. “In my best photographs I turn the propaganda back on the creators and create an inner truth about the message.” Davis captures the feverish cocktail of fear, anger, absurdity, and desperation among the candidates, political elites, delegates, celebrity attendees, and protesters. In his shots, eyes bulge, mouths are agape, sweat beads on foreheads. An eerie uncertainty looms. Check out all of his convention photos at chicagoreader.com.

n a recent Sunday afternoon, a crowd only slightly smaller than the one a few miles west at the Pitchfork Music Festival formed around the Bean in Millennium Park for a Pokémon Go meet-up that made the days of PacMan fever resemble a mild cough.

More than 9,000 people RSVP’d to the event’s Facebook invite, but on-the-ground estimates ranged from 3,000 to 5,000 fans, from teens to the middle-aged, some clad in bright yellow Pikachu hats and furry Pokémon-themed costumes.

They roared at the sight of homemade color-coordinated banners representing the game’s three competitive teams and sang in unison to the anime cartoon’s theme song like a Wrigley Field crowd warbling along to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

The event’s organizers had dreamed up a Game of Throneslite version of the game in which three teams would battle for half of downtown (complete with a Pokémon-themed map of the Loop), an ambitious plan foiled when the overloaded online servers crashed ten minutes later. Attendees were stuck staring at error messages on their smartphones instead of tracking virtual animals. Still, many left inspired by the solidarity of what became essentially a Pokémon Go pep rally.

For those already firmly on the bandwagon of the mobile-gaming juggernaut, events like Chicago’s massive meet-up represent a new social wrinkle to an already surprisingly communal experience. But to those outside the game’s augmented reality, the collective spectacle is

just another sign of the Apokélypse.

I spent the rest of the day at Pitchfork in Union Park, where my every mention of the earlier Pokémon Go meet-up was met with sanctimonious disgust: “Don’t people have better things to do with their time?”

(A member of the band Twin Peaks who was bartending in the VIP section claimed total ignorance of the gaming sensation.) The common refrain of naysayers seems to be “Get a life.”

Certainly Pokémon Go can be an addictive distraction (take it from me—I’m level 18), and it’s more than a little annoying that corporations are leaping into the fray with Pokémon-themed marketing. But does this game really deserve the kind of fear and loathing usually reserved for the Donald Trump J campaign?

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 28

FRIDAY 29

SATURDAY 30

SUNDAY 31

MONDAY 1

TUESDAY 2

WEDNESDAY 3

× Fiest a del Sol A Pilsen Neighbors Community Council fund-raiser featuring food from vendors like Juanita’s Mexican Food and Taqueria La Ciudad plus live music from Orgullo Guerrerense and Grupo Ideal de Tlapehuala Guerrero. Through 7/31: Thu 5-10 PM, Fri-Sat 11 AM-11 PM, Sun 11 AM-10 PM, 1400 W. Cermak, fiestadelsol.org. F

K B i tes , Blooms , and Bordeaux Walk through the zoo’s gardens, observing and learning about its flora and fauna while enjoying wines paired with plates prepared by Tigerlily, Mon Ami Gabi, Intro Chicago, Wolfgang Puck Catering, and Vanille Patisserie. 6-9 PM, Lincoln Park Zoo, 2200 N. Cannon, lpzoo.org, $79.

¿ CLLAW XXV: Th e Summer Showdown The Chicago League of Lady Arm Wrestlers hosts its annual championship benefiting Sideshow Theatre Company and the Chicago Women’s Health Center. 9 PM-midnight, Logan Square Auditorium, 2539 N. Kedzie, cllaw.org, $15, $10 in advance.

M Chicago Ma rgarit a Festival This year’s two-day margarita festival features outdoor Jenga and beach volleyball, food trucks for sustenance, and plenty of margaritas available for tasting.

Sat 7/30-Sun 7/31: noon-8 PM, South Shore Cultural Center, 7059 S. South Shore, chicagomargaritafestival.com, $15.

Slow Chicago Po p Up Slow Fashion meets Slow Food at this pop-up shop. Handmade leather goods from designer Dieter Kirkwood and preserves made from locally sourced, in-season produce by Susie Kirkwood are available for purchase. Through 8/1, Boombox, 1260 N. Milwaukee, slowfoodchicago.org. F

× Peruvian Feast Tanta hosts a four-course family-style dinner from chef Jesus Delgado paired with cocktails and wine to mark the anniversary of Peruvian independence. A copy of Gastón Acurio’s Peru: The Cookbook is included. 6 PM, Tanta, 118 W. Grand, tantachicago.com, $150.

Ô Ci rque Du Soleil : To ruk The newest show from Cirque Du Soleil draws inspiration from Avatar and melds trippy lighting, acrobatics, and film. 8/3-8/7: WedFri 7:30 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 1:30 and 5:30 PM, United Center, 1901 W. Madison, 312455-4500, unitedcenter.com, $42-$587.

8 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

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JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE Pokémon panic continued from 9

CHICAGO FLAGSHIP STORES 56 E A S T WA LT O N S T R E E T 3 1 2 - 2 0 2 -7 9 0 0

10 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

The backlash was perhaps inevitable. In the first week of its release in mid-July, Pokémon Go’s popularity exploded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, gaining more users than Tinder and Twitter respectively, an estimated 9.5 million daily. It’s uncharted territory for a game, a sweeping, society-consuming phenomenon that for technophobes must feel like Nintendo upending and reordering society at Super Mario’s whim.

The media certainly hasn’t helped us properly evaluate the Pokémon phenomenon.

Within hours of the game’s release, the horror stories steamrolled social media feeds: Hordes of players taking over formerly tranquil public spaces that had been turned into PokeStops, others being lured into armed robberies or discovering corpses while hunting rare creatures like Jigglypuffs. Distracted players have crashed their cars, even fallen off bluffs.

“What the hell is this thing? I hear it’s not safe!” exclaimed a coworker when Pokémon Go came up in conversation.

All of the panicky pearl clutching makes Pokémon Go a classic example of a moral panic—irrational hysteria that tends to descend on some new cultural product popular with “the kids.” Moral crusaders and the media have fanned the flames of plenty of these panics over the last century: jazz, Elvis’s hips, marijuana, heavy metal, comic books, Dungeons & Dragons and—most closely related to Pokémon Go—violence in video games.

“We need to treat violent video games the way we treat tobacco, alcohol, and pornography,” said Hillary Clinton in 2005 while promoting the Family Entertainment Protection Act, a bill the then-senator introduced that eventually died in committee.

In an era when high-minded moralizers now lament the decline of reading, it’s ironic that even the novel was a source of moral panic in the 18th century. The sudden spread of mass media in the form of written fiction had cultural commentators labeling them “fevers” that might lead readers to lose touch with reality and identify with characters to the point where they’d adopt their behavior.

Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was blamed for a series of suicides.

Three centuries later, it’s a puffy yellow avatar instead of foppish young artist causing an uproar. Moral panics never die, they just change mediums.

It’s true that there’s something unsettling about how Pokémon Go invites people to see

A few thousand Pokémon Go players gathered in Millennium Park on July 17. ò RYAN SMITH

shared spaces—our parks, offices, barrooms— as virtual playgrounds. Millions of gamers glued to their PlayStations in their own living rooms is one thing. Masses of players shambling down sidewalks to collect cyber monsters on their phones is quite another. But in my three weeks playing the game, I’ve interacted with dozens of strangers I otherwise never would’ve met or chatted with. Pokémon Go is an oddly effective way to meet people— even if the conversation mostly hovers around egg-hatching tips and the best places in the city to find a Ponyta.

For all of the hand-wringing about the “augmented reality” of Pokémon Go, our reality was augmented long before the game premiered. A vast population already walks around gripping digital devices like talismans, white earbuds jammed into their heads. We’re constantly listening, watching, swiping. We’ve grown accustomed to the sight of people in public hunched over screens because it happened gradually over the course of a decade.

It’s the suddenness of Pokémon Go’s ubiquity that’s jarring. Bystanders not involved in the game suddenly feel like they’ve swallowed the red pill and have realized that a large portion of humanity is plugged into Nintendo’s version of the Matrix.

Sorry, Neo, it’s too late. We’re all trapped in the simulation. v

v @RyanSmithWriter

l

CITY LIFE A few thousand Pokémon Go players gathered in Millennium Park on July 17. ò RYAN SMITH

Pokémon panic continued from 9

CHICAGO FLAGSHIP STORES 56 E A S T WA LT O N S T R E E T 3 1 2 - 2 0 2 -7 9 0 0

10 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

The backlash was perhaps inevitable. In the first week of its release in mid-July, Pokémon Go’s popularity exploded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, gaining more users than Tinder and Twitter respectively, an estimated 9.5 million daily. It’s uncharted territory for a game, a sweeping, society-consuming phenomena that for technophobes must feel like Nintendo upending and reordering society at Super Mario’s whim.

The media certainly hasn’t helped us properly evaluate the Pokémon phenomenon.

Within hours of the game’s release, the horror stories steamrolled social media feeds: Hordes of players taking over formerly tranquil public spaces that had been turned into PokeStops, players being lured into armed robberies or discovering corpses while hunting rare creatures like Jigglypuffs. Distracted players have crashed their cars, even fallen off bluffs.

“What the hell is this thing? I hear it’s not safe!” exclaimed a coworker of mine when Pokémon Go came up in conversation.

All of the panicky pearl clutching makes Pokémon Go a classic example of a moral panic—irrational hysteria that tends to descend on some new cultural product popular with “the kids.” Moral crusaders and the media have fanned the flames of plenty of these panics over the last century: jazz, Elvis’s hips, marijuana, heavy metal, comic books, Dungeons & Dragons and—most closely related to Pokémon Go—violence in video games.

“We need to treat violent video games the way we treat tobacco, alcohol, and pornography,” said Hillary Clinton in 2005 while promoting the Family Entertainment Protection Act, a bill the then-senator introduced that eventually died in committee.

In an era when high-minded moralizers now lament the decline of reading, it’s ironic that even the novel was a source of moral panic in the 18th century. The sudden spread of mass media in the form of written fiction

had cultural commentators labeling them “fevers” that might lead readers to lose touch with reality and identify with characters to the point where they’d adopt their behavior.

Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was blamed for a series of suicides.

Three centuries later, it’s a puffy yellow avatar instead of foppish young artist causing an uproar. Moral panics never die, they just change mediums.

It’s true that there’s something unsettling about how Pokémon Go invites people to see shared spaces—our parks, offices, barrooms— as virtual playgrounds. Millions of gamers glued to their PlayStations in their own living rooms is one thing. Masses of players shambling down sidewalks to collect cyber monsters on their phones is quite another. But in my three weeks playing the game, I’ve interacted with dozens of strangers I otherwise never would’ve met or chatted with. Pokémon Go is an oddly effective way to meet people— even if the conversation mostly hovers around egg-hatching tips and the best places in the city to find a Ponyta.

For all of the hand-wringing about the “augmented reality” of Pokémon Go, our reality was augmented long before the game premiered. A vast population already walks around gripping digital devices like talismans, white earbuds jammed into their heads. We’re constantly listening, watching, swiping. We’ve grown accustomed to the sight of people in public hunched over screens because it happened gradually over the course of a decade.

It’s the suddenness of Pokémon Go’s ubiquity that’s jarring. Bystanders not involved in the game suddenly feel like they’ve swallowed the red pill and have realized that a large portion of humanity is plugged into Nintendo’s version of the Matrix.

Sorry, Neo, it’s too late. We’re all trapped in the simulation. v

v @RyanSmithWriter

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JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 11

CITY LIFE

ò PAUL JOHN HIGGINS; GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCKPHOTO

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

POLITICS

The TIF game

Mayor Rahm proposes school budget cuts while the city’s TIF accounts are flush with money.

By BEN JORAVSKY

O

n July 21, Mayor Emanuel broke the bad news to Chicago Public School parents, teachers, and students: Sorry, but we have no money, so I’m going to have to cut another $140 million from our schools—even with all the hype over the so-called bailout deal in Springfield.

Coincidentally, at about the same time, Cook County clerk David Orr was telling the mayor: Yo, Rahm, looking for millions for CPS? I know where you can find it—right there in the city’s good old TIF bank accounts.

Every year Orr prepares a report that reveals just how much property tax money the county will deposit into the city’s TIF accounts. And according to this year’s report, the county will be sending Chicago TIFs $461 million.

So here’s the big question: How many millions will Emanuel cut from the schools before he grudgingly takes Orr’s advice and turns TIF money over to CPS? Yes, folks, it looks like the time has come for

12 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

me to take another deep dive into the fecund swamp known as our tax increment financing program.

And that means I’ve come to that point in the story where I have to explain—for, like, the millionth time—how this sucker works. I’m starting to feel like a high school math teacher in Governor Rauner’s hometown of Winnetka trying to explain the joys of algebra to a class filled with ninth-graders who’d rather be doing something else.

The TIF tax is effectively a surcharge the city adds to your property tax bill. Eventually, the money is distributed to one of 146 bank accounts—corresponding to the number of TIF districts in the city—controlled by the mayor.

Why, you might ask, is the county clerk involved in these shenanigans? Good question.

In our convoluted system, the mayor doesn’t have the authority to directly deposit property taxes into the TIF accounts, even though he controls the money once it’s been deposited.

Instead, we follow a scenario that works like this: You, the property owner, send your

property taxes to the county treasurer. And the county clerk tells the treasurer where that money will go.

Thus, the clerk ordered the treasurer to deposit the aforementioned $461 million into the TIF accounts.

I guess you could say that Orr is sort of an enabler in this scam—not unlike the bartender who serves one last drink to a drunk.

Of course, Orr has no say in the matter, and he’s one of the few officials who dare to criticize the mayor’s TIF program.

Clearly, Orr doesn’t want to be blamed for a program that robs from the poor to feed the rich while accruing more power for a mayor who already has too much power to begin with.

So every year he prepares his report. Really, it should be coming from the mayor’s office, but the mayor wouldn’t reveal how much extra we’re all paying in taxes unless you yanked out his wisdom teeth without Novocain.

So thank you, Clerk Orr. Among the revelations in Orr’s report: Once again the biggest winners in the TIF game are those relatively wealthy areas in and around the Loop, even though the program’s intended to improve blighted communities.

For instance, just one downtown TIF district, the LaSalle Central TIF, will receive $26.7 million.

In contrast, the three TIFs in Englewood— one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods—will receive about $7 million total.

This year the city’s TIF districts generated 24 percent more money, or $89 million more, than they did last year.

Now I get to explain why that’s so. Lucky me.

If you own property, your tax bill is calculated by multiplying the citywide tax rate by the value of your property. The higher the tax rate or the more valuable your property, the more you pay in taxes.

This year taxpayers were hit with a double whammy. Their properties rose in value while the mayor raised the tax rate to fund past-due payments to the police and firefighters’ pension funds.

I applaud the mayor for finally making good on the city’s financial obligations.

But by jacking up the tax rate, he also added another $25 million to the TIF slush fund, according to the clerk’s report.

These millions have nothing to do with police, firefighters, or pensions. But that won’t stop the mayor from trying to hoard it.

If I were the mayor—yes, I know, utter fantasy—I’d figure some way to get most of the

$461 million to the schools. That way, principals wouldn’t be told to use special education money for basic classroom expenses, as the mayor’s currently commanding.

Apparently the mayor has a different perspective on education. So my bet is that he’ll let the treasurer quietly deposit that $461 million into those TIF bank accounts while pretending the money’s not even there.

That way he gets to use it for stuff like redeveloping the South Loop parcel known as Rezkoville—currently my favorite potential TIF boondoggle.

But that’s where you, the people, come in.

Apparently, all these years of pounding the TIF drum have had some results. Most

How many millions will Emanuel cut from the schools before he grudgingly takes Orr’s advice and turns TIF money over to CPS? of you have mastered the most rudimentary understanding of this scam. That is, when you see TIF you think it’s bad news. Beyond that, you’re a little shaky. Still, if enough of you raise a stink over that $461 million, the mayor will have no choice but to share the wealth, so to speak.

You watch: He’ll call a press conference to announce that, through his command of the budgetary process, he’s magically discovered a surplus in the TIF fund that he’ll kick back to the schools.

At which point his supporters in the city will fall to their knees and proclaim: Oh, thank you, bwana!

Thus he’s free to continue siphoning TIF money from the schools and spending it on luxury developments.

And so the TIF game continues.

I hope a time comes when it’s more than just a relatively small number of parents and officials (and one crotchety old reporter) who’ve caught on to this scam.

Unfortunately, that will be too late for those unlucky students currently attending the dead-broke schools in Mayor Rahm’s Chicago. v

v @joravben

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JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 13

ò COURTESY CHICAGO TRANSIT AUTHORITY

CITY LIFE

TRANSPORTATION

Not-so-rapid transit

In the absence of other options, the far south side gets around primarily by bus.

By JOHN GREENFIELD

C

hicago’s el system, with its iconic train cars, relatively fast speeds, and occasionally breathtaking views, is the sexier side of the CTA. But the city’s grid of 130 bus routes is really the meat and potatoes of our transit network, with 274.3 million boardings in 2015 compared to the el’s 241.7 million trips.

Bus service is especially important on the far south side, where access to other forms of public transportation is limited; although the city extends as far south as 138th Street, the Red Line terminates at 95th, and the Divvy bikeshare coverage area currently stops at 79th.

To get a sense of what it’s like riding buses on the far south side—and whether residents are satisfied with the level of service or feel that improvements are needed—last week I rode the entire route of the 87th Street bus, the southernmost bus line to cover a continuous east-west path across the entire width of the city.

The #87 runs ten miles, from Cicero Avenue in the quaintly named southwest suburb

14 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

Hometown (near Oak Lawn) east to Buffalo Avenue in the hardscrabble South Chicago neighborhood. On the return trip the route dips south on Buffalo to 91st Street, heads west to Commercial Avenue, then back up to 87th. The route connects with the Red Line as well as Metra’s Rock Island and Electric District lines, which contributes to the route’s popularity— an average of nearly 13,000 people ride the 87th Street bus each weekday, according to the CTA. Except for Hometown, which is 97 percent white according to the U.S. Census, and South Chicago, which is about one-fifth Latino, just about all of the communities served by the bus line are solidly African-American.

I started my bus excursion around 5:30 PM on a Tuesday at the 87th Street Red Line stop, which was renovated in 2013 as part of the Red Line South reconstruction. Eighty-seventh Street’s narrow sidewalks were crowded with CTA customers waiting for buses.

I buttonholed one westbound young woman to ask about her commute. She declined to give her name, but explained that she com-

mutes from her home near 87th and Ashland in Auburn-Gresham to her job as a downtown security guard. She takes the #87 to the Red Line, then rides north to her job near State and Lake. The journey takes about an hour, she said, and overall she’s satisfied with the bus.

“During rush hour it’s pretty frequent—although when I get off late the buses only run every 15 or 20 minutes,” she said.

When the next westbound bus appeared, I piled on with about a dozen other people, including a young man with dreads listening to headphones, an older woman with two young children, and a smiling middle-aged guy in a blue suit who clasped palms with the driver in a soul handshake. Soon we were rolling down the broad lanes of 87th Street, passing big-box stores, bungalows, and apartment buildings.

Over the next two miles the bus emptied out. I chatted with 41-year-old passenger Carol Smith, who told me she was on her way home to 87th and Damen from her job as a receptionist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Smith usually drives to work, she said, despite the fact that garage parking in Streeterville costs about $20 a day. But her car was in the shop at the time, so that morning she’d taken the #87 to the Red Line to Chicago Avenue and walked the rest of the way. The total commute took about an hour and 15 minutes, she said.

As we talked, we realized that the bus had been stopped at Wood Street for an inordinately long time for no apparent reason.

Almost ten minutes went by before we finally started moving again. When I asked about the delay, the driver explained that he’d stopped because he was running ahead of schedule and didn’t want to cause “bus bunching,” the annoying phenomenon in which customers wait an eternity for a ride only to have two or more buses show up at the same time.

The rest of the westbound trek was uneventful. We climbed one of Chicago’s few hills on the portion of 87th Street that bifurcates Dan Ryan Woods before heading to the route’s western terminus at the Market Place shopping center in Hometown. After we headed east again and arrived back at the Red Line, the bus filled up once more and we continued east into Chatham.

Fifty-year-old passenger George Adams was on his way home to 87th and Blackstone in Calumet Heights from his job at a phone book distribution company in Rosemoor. Adams’s commute involves two buses and a train: in the morning he catches the #87 west to the Red Line, rides south to 95th Street, then takes the #103 bus a mile and a half southeast to his

workplace. He said the morning trip only takes about 30 minutes, but evening rush hour traffic stretches his travel time to 45 minutes.

“Mornings it’s great, but in the evening— and you can quote me—it sucks,” he said.

In South Chicago, 87th turns into a relatively quiet two-lane street. The community fell on hard times after U.S. Steel’s South Works plant closed in 1992. But the neighborhood’s Commercial Avenue retail strip—also served by the #87—is still fairly vibrant, with a full range of mom-and-pop businesses. (One notable shop is La Fruteria, a destination grocery store that stocks African, Caribbean, and Mexican goods.)

I got off the bus at the east end of the route, across the street from the South Chicago Velodrome. My ten-mile journey from the city’s western border to the shores of Lake Michigan had taken a little over an hour, about the same pace as a leisurely bike ride. While the trip wasn’t excruciatingly long, it made clear to me that the far south side would benefit from more and better public transportation options that don’t involve stopping every block or two and slogging through rush-hour car traffic.

There are several proposed improvements on the table. Some, like Divvy’s planned expansion to 87th Street later this summer, are well under way. Others remain somewhere between hopes and fantasies: • The CTA is tentatively planning to extend the Red Line to 130th Street, but that project could cost more than $2 billion and would require significant land acquisition.

• A coalition of groups is pushing for the Metra Electric commuter rail line to be operated on a rapid-transit-style schedule, which could provide fast, frequent service to some of the same communities the Red Line extension would serve.

• The city is mulling bus rapid transit on Ashland Avenue from 95th to Irving Park Road. The corridor is projected to nearly double current bus speeds, making the trip up Ashland roughly as fast as the el. But the proposal has faced stiff resistance, and is now on hold.

Let’s hope the city can get its act together and figure out how to put at least one of these measures in place. The far south side deserves as many good mass transit options as the rest of the city. v

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

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JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 15

The school that became a theater that became a school Albany Park Theater Project’s latest production takes over a shuttered building in order to re-create the Chicago high school experience.

By AIMEE LEVITT

Actress Maria Velazquez in the library of Ellen Gates Starr High School, an instance of heightened reality on the set of Learning Curve ò LIZ LAUREN

16 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

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Learning Curve

Cast members of Learning Curve ò LIZ LAUREN

I

n a lot of ways, Ellen Gates Starr High School in Logan Square isn’t much different from other CPS neighborhood schools. Enrollment and funding are down, and the school is on probation: the results of standardized tests from this year, currently in session, will determine whether it stays open. Teachers know they’re in danger of layoffs, and that the news will probably arrive in an e-mail in the middle of a school day. Students worry about what they’ll do after graduation; the ROTC office, where they can play video games, drink pop, and chill with the recruiter, looks much more inviting than the cramped and closet-size guidance department.

But daily life goes on. Ms. Torres’s English students are reading The Great Gatsby and have pushed their desks into a circle for a discussion called “The American Dream: Fiction or Possibility.” Kids sneak whiskey and kiss in the stairwells and have revelatory conversations in the bathroom. The clock still moves too slowly

when they’re sick of sitting in class and too fast when they’re trying to finish a math test.

The only difference between Starr High and other schools—and, yes, it’s a pretty big one—is that Starr High doesn’t really exist.

The building, formerly Saint Hyacinth Basilica School, a parochial school that closed in 2015, has been converted by the Albany Park Theater Project into the set of Learning Curve, its newest production, opening this weekend.

Like other APTP shows, Learning Curve is a collaboration between teenagers in the Albany Park neighborhood and adult directors who construct plays around social issues, based on interviews with people in their community.

Past shows have explored immigration, the financial crisis, and food, subjects that are part of the students’ daily lives. Given that APTP is a youth theater company, education seemed like a natural fit. But at first, cofounder and artistic director David Feiner was reluctant.

“We wanted to make sure we had something

LEARNING CURVE

Through 11/19, various days and times, Ellen Gates Starr High School, 3640 W. Wolfram, 773-8660875, aptpchicago.org, $40, $18 for CPS students, faculty, and staff.

significant and transformative to add to the conversation,” he says. “Then we thought, What if the audience comes into a school building for a show and the first thing they see is a metal detector?”

That is exactly what happens when the audience walks into Learning Curve. The conceit is that the audience, limited to 40 people at a time, will spend a school day at Starr High, from first bell to the last—or an abbreviated two-hour school day anyway. They’ll wander the halls, they’ll go to class, they’ll talk with teachers and students, all played by members of the APTP ensemble. Not every audience member will see every scene. Some, like Ms. Torres’s English class’s discussion of The Great Gatsby and the American dream, are central to the piece, but other bits in stairwells or in bathrooms need to be discovered. Some scenes are intended for a full classroom, while others will be strictly one-on-one.

“The great thing about the way one-on-one works,” Feiner says, “is that, when it’s ideal, you feel like it’s an exchange. You’ve made a connection with a person. You’re part of a strange and beautiful experience.”

Just don’t call it interactive theater.

“We’re crafting an experience for the audience,” Feiner explains. “This is at the core of what we do: We give the audience an experience and take them on a journey and bring them into a world. The audience members need to understand that they have a place in this world and that they’re significant in the world of the show. The world would not continue if they were to walk out.”

Creating a believable world is the first and most important goal of any theatrical production. But the immersive quality of Learning Curve provides an additional challenge. The actors can’t just learn their lines. They also have to learn to talk with audience members in a natural way and guide the conversation along to its intended conclusion and then guide the audience to the next destination without breaking character. Canned responses destroy the illusion that audience members are participating in something real—they might as well be interacting with robots.

In order to help the young actors learn this kind of theater, APTP partnered with Third Rail Projects, a company from Brooklyn that specializes in immersive, site-specific performances. Jennine Willett, cofounder of Third Rail, has made five trips to Chicago since September to lead workshops and help APTP’s 31 actors and eight directors build the various scenes in Learning Curve. She compares each scene to a wire frame. “It can be vastly J

JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 17

Learning Curve Paola Rico in Learning Curve ò LIZ LAUREN

Learning Curve continued from 17

different from one person to the next,” she says. “We work with where people are. Some audience members want to be part of it, others want to hold back. You need to be present and nonjudgmental and open. But knowing the marker points allows you, the actor, to think on your feet. The performers know all the pathways a scene can take.”

The element of surprise makes it more fun for the performers too. “When we were working on a scene and we never knew what would happen, the work was fun,” says Maria Velazquez, who also helped create the show.

“When you say the same thing, the answers always lead to the same thing.”

So if you wander into the JROTC office, Abraham “Kito” Espino, who plays the recruiter, will greet you warmly, offer you a drink from his minifridge, and invite you to play a round of darts. Then he’ll settle in behind his desk, a sign that he’s about to get down to business, and signal that you should take the other chair. He’ll ask you questions about your interests, your future plans, your family.

Do you like to travel? How many push-ups can

18 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

you do? Even if you admit you can’t do any push-ups at all, he’s undaunted: “Do you like challenges? I knew as soon as I saw you you were one of my people!”

In other scenes, the audience takes a more traditional spectator role while the APTP performers create a different, more heightened sort of reality through dance or percussion or musical elements. For the past several months, Velazquez has been working with Willett on a dance-centered piece about a teacher who has been laid off. Velazquez based some of the scene on interviews she and other APTP performers had done with teachers at Roosevelt High School in Albany Park.

“We started with the movement,” Velazquez says. “There was no context, no why or what.

We just knew the teacher had been laid off, and her movements would be slow and dragging.”

Eventually they decided they would show the exact moment when the teacher learns she’s been laid off, from a colleague outside the classroom door, and that she won’t even be allowed to finish the day. This is a particularly enthusiastic and engaged teacher: she teaches social studies or history, and

We wanted to make sure we had something significant and transformative to add to the conversation. Then we thought, What if the audience comes into a school building for a show and the first thing they see is a metal detector?

—David Feiner, artistic director of Albany Park Theater Project

she’s decorated her walls with posters highlighting the achievements of women and African-Americans, people most history books ignore. The audience becomes a classroom of her students, sitting at their desks, watching her devastation.

“Imagine you’re in ninth grade and you’ve just bonded with this adult,” Feiner says. “It’s hard work. And then that adult is taken from you.”

If Learning Curve is to have any sort of emotional impact on its audience—and naturally, its creators hope it will—a lot of it will come from tapping into audience members’ own memories of high school. (No one younger than 14, high school age, will be allowed in.)

Or, as Feiner puts it, “You can be yourself and be present as a student in this world, and you experience this moment and you experience your teachers of the past. We want to make you feel like your favorite teacher—mine was Meg Smith—might walk up to you again, or you can be with her urban 2016 counterpart.”

“There’s something about a tactile, multisensory experience that evokes memories,” Willett adds.

The Starr High building itself evokes memories, not all of them as pleasant as time with your favorite teacher. The halls are painted the same drab beige you probably remember from your own school, and the classrooms are filled with the same uncomfortable little desks. It has the same dusty school smell. (For added verisimilitude, the school shows up on Google Maps.

Feiner discovered that if enough users vet a place, Google can be convinced that it exists.) There’s a reason many people don’t have fond memories of high school. It feels a little bit like jail. But, like the scenes, the set design has its moments of surreality as well.

Inside the labyrinth of bookshelves (filled with donated books) that makes up the library, a few volumes hang suspended from the ceiling, flapping like birds or some of the more magical books at Hogwarts. Even in a troubled CPS school, it seems to say, marvelous things can happen.

And that is the magic of theater, at least theater the way APTP does it. Learning Curve is not about a story, it’s about a building and the people in it, including the audience.

“One of the things we do well,” Feiner says, “is creating a performance where the audience is aware that something is happening that is real. It’s not the verisimilitude of fiction. It’s real, and it’s happening right now.” v

v @aimeelevitt

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WORLD PREMIERE

in the MAN RING ELECTRA BY

MICHAEL CRISTOFER

CHICAGO PREMIERE

BY SOPHOCLES TRANSLATED BY NICHOLAS

RUDALL

HARD HARVEY PROBLEM The BY

TOM STOPPARD

BY

MARY CHASE

BLUES for an

ALABAMA SKY BY

PEARL CLEAGE

Flexible Season Packages starting at $35 per show— on sale now!

CALL 773.753.4472 WWW.

CourtTheatre.ORG

5535 S ELLIS AVE – HYDE PARK

2016/17

SEASON

PHOTO OF KAMAL ANGELO BOLDEN, SANDRA MARQUEZ, CHAON CROSS, AND TIMOTHY EDWARD KANE BY JOE MAZZA.

JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 19

READER RECOMMENDED

b ALL AGES

F ò COURTESY HARI KONDABOLU

ARTS & CULTURE

R

De’Lon Grant ò EVAN BARR

THEATER

American Spartacus

By TONY ADLER

I

n the era of Trump and Cruz and the rest of them it’s difficult to call anybody a great American with a straight face.

That’s what Frederick Douglass was, though. And so was William Lloyd Garrison.

Douglass rose up out of slavery to become a speaker, author, publisher, theorist, and all-around icon, not only in the abolitionist cause but in the struggle for women’s equality as well. A white Massachusetts man with a printing press, Garrison was even more of a firebrand than Douglass. He made himself notorious for burning copies of the U.S. Constitution, calling it (and the nation founded on it) irredeemably racist.

After Douglass escaped his master in 1838, he started reading Garrison’s weekly, The Liberator, with a passion. The two men became allies and more than allies—mentor and protege. Garrison talked up Douglass’s oratory and published his work; he even violated his own prohibition against ransoming slaves out of slavery by endorsing a fund-raising effort to end Douglass’s runaway status.

Yet, as Thomas Klingenstein notes in his earnest, disappointing new play Douglass, there came a falling out.

Why? Theories abound. What we know for sure is that the two men got into a disagreement over doctrine, Douglass having concluded that the Constitution wasn’t so ir-

20 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

redeemable after all. That it could be turned into an abolitionist tool.

Everything beyond that is speculation. Did Douglass’s own periodical, The North Star (later, Frederick Douglass’s Paper), get on Garrison’s nerves by cutting into his readership? Maybe, but Garrison also praised The North Star in the pages of The Liberator. Did Garrison become jealous as Douglass’s fame outstripped his own, frustrated as his acolyte became his equal—an especially delicate business given the black/white, slave/master dynamics that would inevitably come into play—and stopped taking orders? Seems probable to me.

Klingenstein mentions all of the above. But in the end (and I do mean the end, so here’s your spoiler alert), his explanation for the rift between the two men is that Garrison, prodded forcefully enough, turned out to be an old-fashioned bigot himself. To which any thinking person would have to respond, “Well, duh.”

The problem isn’t that Douglass fiddles with the legacy of a fierce, life-long abolitionist agitator—a man who had a price on his head in the south and was once bound with rope, dragged through Boston, and all but lynched by a proslavery mob. The problem is that it treats the idea that Garrison may have harbored racist tendencies as some kind of revelation. Indeed, as the revelation. It

isn’t. There’s a powerful play—a tragedy—to be written about Douglass and Garrison, attempting to be free people in the context of a society whose poisoned air they couldn’t help but breathe and share. Douglass misses the chance to be that by making a centerpiece of an insight that should’ve been among its basic assumptions.

Well, by doing that and a few other things.

Presented by the American Vicarious at Theater Wit, the play is more diorama than drama. The long, formal, and dullish first act is all setup, conflicts coming into play only after intermission. And even once those conflicts are engaged, they’re treated more as episodic moments than as elements in a coherent narrative. The show falls down especially hard when it comes to Douglass’s relationship with Julia Griffiths, a white British abolitionist, who followed him back to the U.S. from one of his European jaunts and worked with him at The North Star. Though willing to acknowledge what Garrison charged outright at the time—that there were adulterous goings-on between Griffith and Douglass—Klingenstein and director Christopher McElroen seem too regardful of Douglass’s dignity actually to explore the possibilities onstage.

Although Saren Nofs-Snyder makes some valiant noises as Julia, the scene between her and De’Lon Grant’s Douglass appears specifically designed to invest the affair with as little passion as possible.

In fact, most of Douglass seems designed for passion-draining purposes. The production reads overall like some dutifully hagiographic educational pageant, for which Grant is all too suitable. Stolid and physically vague, he expresses none of the inner tension, outer strength, or sheer brilliance you might expect from an American Spartacus. Mark Ulrich is more animated as Garrison, but to no better effect. And Kristin E. Ellis is given nothing to do but be pissed off as Douglass’s first wife, Anna. The only interesting performance comes from Kenn E. Head, playing black nationalist Martin Delany, who definitely deserves a history play of his own. Delany is the only character permitted a sense of humor, and Head makes fine use of it. v DOUGLASS Through 8/14: Wed-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, theaterwit.org, $25.

v @taadler

COMEDY

Hari Kondabolu makes America laugh again EVEN THOUGH INDIAN-AMERICAN comic Hari Kondabolu was born in Queens, xenophobes frequently tell him to go back to places like Iraq, Afganistan, and Libya. “Whatever nation our country is bombing, I’m told to go back there at the worst time to go back,” he says. But in Denmark, during a particularly awful performance, he was told to go back to America. Maybe that was a sign of how bad things have gotten here in the States, or maybe it was a sign that Kondabolu had finally proven himself as a Mainstream American Comic (Kill Rock Stars), the sarcastic title of his new album.

Kondabolu’s comedy is politically observant—he’s not getting on a soapbox and forcing his beliefs on the crowd, he’s just starting a conversation about topics he thinks the entire country should be talking about, like health care, sexism, and racism. And it seems like he has successfully contributed to activist efforts through his comedy—an image on the comic’s Tumblr shows a protest sign featuring a joke from his first album, Waiting for 2042: “Telling me I’m obsessed with race in America is like telling me I’m obsessed with swimming while I’m drowning.”

On Mainstream American Comic Kondabolu contends with his distaste for Bobby Jindal and the phrase “all lives matter,” but without ever getting too serious. And among the album’s lighter moments he tells a story about getting a photo taken with Joe Biden just for the social media likes; breaks into a Doc Brown impression (the only one he’s got); and discusses the dissonance between the phrase “nocturnal emissions” and the act it describes (“Nothing is more mainstream American than a come joke!” Kondabolu declares).

It’s this combination of his political point of view and casual silliness that makes Kondabolu the important new kind of everyman comic America needs. —BRIANNA WELLEN R HARI KONDABOLU Sat 7/30, 7 and 10 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, hideoutchicago.com, $15.

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ARTS & CULTURE Cook County commissioner John Fritchey, then a state representative, speaks at the Bughouse Square Debates in 2008.

DANCE

A female-centric fest of dance and much more

ò CATHERINE GASS/NEWBERRY

By TONY ADLER

LIBRARY

LIT

Come for the books, stay for the fringe opinions

By JESSICA KIM COHEN

B Atlanta’s Zoetic Dance Ensemble at last year’s Going Dutch Festival ò ROBERTO MARTINEZ

A

video survey of Side Street Studio Arts’ 2015 season starts with two women in the backseat of a car, making fart noises into their arms and laughing. You think, Uhoh. But what follows is a pretty impressive collection of images showing performances, concerts, gallery shows, and crowds.

The Elgin-based SSSA brings its combination of arts and brrraappps to Wicker Park this weekend, partnering with Core Project Chicago on the Going Dutch Festival. Next year SSSA is expected to take over the female-centric festival entirely.

According to Erin Rehberg, a founder of both SSSA and Core Project and one of the laughing ladies in the video, “Going Dutch was originally developed . . . to address the underrepresentation of female choreographers in the dance world. As the idea grew into a festival over the years, it expanded to include the work of self-identified female artists working in music, theater, site-specific, and visual art as well as dance.”

Along with an 11-artist exhibition, the 2016 Going Dutch is presenting a roster of more than 30 performing individuals and companies. Most deal in dance, but there’s

an opening reception (Thu 5:30 PM) with music by the Jades and Beach Bunny. And the Friday 9:30 PM show is all burlesque; Storybook Heroin offers off-color versions of Disney staples like Cinderella as part of an evening (Sat 7 PM) that also features interesting local choreographers Megan Beseth and Shanna Fragen.

If I were you I’d also look out for Detroit’s Kristi Faulkner Dance (Sat 8:30 PM), Atlanta’s Zoetic Dance Ensemble (Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, and Sat 8:30 PM), and another act from the south: sisters Babette Beaulieu and Becky Beaulieu Valls, doing an iteration of their ongoing family saga Memoirs of the Sistahood (Fri 8 PM, Sat 8:30 PM). Rehberg will be represented as well (Thu 7:30 PM, Sat 8:30 PM)—not blowing into her forearm this time but staging her latest, The Boys Could. v GOING DUTCH FESTIVAL 7/287/30: Thu 5:30 and 7:30 PM; Fri 7, 8, and 9:30 PM; Sat 4, 5:30, 7, and 8:30 PM, Collaboraction, 1579 N. Milwaukee, $8-$10. Also, site-specific performance at a location to be determined, Thu 7:45 PM and Fri 7:30 PM. F

v @taadler

etween Bernie Sanders’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton and the conference Socialism 2016, which concluded in Chicago earlier this month, left-leaning residents might need a new outlet for their fix of noncapitalist rhetoric. The annual Bughouse Square Debates—the 30th edition takes place on Saturday, July 30—is an attempt to reconnect citizens to the city’s radical roots.

For this event, the Newberry celebrates Washington Square Park’s history as a freespeech refuge. In the early 1900s, “Bohemians, socialists, atheists, and religionists of all persuasions” spoke their minds in the park, according to the Newberry’s website. The rowdy, freewheeling debates earned Washington Square Park the nickname “Bughouse Square,” a reference to the slang term “bughouse,” meaning a mental health facility.

“It had a reputation similar to Hyde Park in London or Greenwich Village in New York,” says Karen Christianson, the Newberry’s director of public engagement.

From the 1910s to approximately the mid-1960s, Bughouse Square was the “most celebrated outdoor free-speech center in the nation,” according to the website Encyclopedia of Chicago. The speakers openly embraced far-left politics—many orators were associated with groups like the Proletarian Party or the Industrial Workers of the World.

Mainstream American disdain for communism after World War II led to a decline in Washington Square Park’s popularity—until 20 years later, when community members

sought to rejuvenate the park. Since 1986 the Newberry has organized the Bughouse Square Debates event to coincide with the Newberry Book Fair, a four-day sale known for its mix of used books, movies, and records.

This year the Newberry hosts Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Kogan as the event’s emcee, the Heartland Institute’s John Nothdurft and antiprivatization activist Tom Tresser for a debate on Chicago’s budgetary issues, and roughly 15 scheduled speakers, including global-warming denier David Ramsay Steele and Green Party Senate write-in candidate Scott K. Summers.

Additionally, the Bughouse Square Debates’ “open soapbox”—a soapbox crate used as a speaker’s stand—has been the setting for a host of rants from opinionated passersby. In the past there has been some “amiable heckling,” according to Christianson, and speeches about, for example, alien conspiracies.

“In the earlier days, people who were speaking tended to be pretty consistently to the left of center politically and, in recent years, we’ve had a lot more balance in the people who speak,” Christianson says, noting that the event now draws participants from across the political spectrum. “But the spirit of it has remained very similar.” v R BUGHOUSE SQUARE DEBATES Sat 7/30, noon-4 PM, Washington Square Park, 901 N. Clark, 312-943-9090, newberry.org. F

v @jessicakimcohen JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 21

Below: Steve Rowell, production still from the film Midstream at Twilight, 2016 Opposite: Terry Evans, Petcoke filled train moving through a brownfield, former steel mill site in Southeast Chicago, 2014; Oliver Sann and Beate Geissler, Methadone, 2016

ARTS & CULTURE

ò COURTESY THE ARTISTS

VISUAL ART

Petcoke portraits

By IONIT BEHAR

A

s f a r b a c k a s E c c l e s i a s te s 3:20—“All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return”—dust has been acknowledged as an elemental constant in the natural world. However, certain types of the powdery substance aren’t so beneficial to Mother Nature. Take petcoke, or petroleum coke, the dustlike carbon material derived as a by-product of the oil-refining process.

22 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

Around four years ago, Chicago’s southeast-side residents began to notice that the mountains of black dust along the banks of the Calumet River were having a negative impact on air quality and public health.

Transported on trains from the BP refinery in Whiting, Indiana, petcoke was being stored at three sites on the southeast side, only a few hundred yards from residential areas. The exhibition “Petcoke: Tracing Dirty Energy”

at the Museum of Contemporary Photography alerts visitors that petcoke is a local and global hazard. Partnering with the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Southeast Environmental Task Force, curators Natasha Egan and Karen Irvine commissioned new works by eight artists and collaborative teams whose responses to this issue are displayed throughout the three floors of the museum.

Next to the introductory wall text there’s an image by photographer Terry Evans from November 3, 2015, of a march to ban petcoke that took place at Slag Valley in South Deering. Having dedicated her career to the relationship between communities and their landscape, Evans became aware of the petcoke problem in 2013, when the NRDC gave her a tour of the Tenth Ward. She photographed the BP oil refinery and storage sites from a

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ARTS & CULTURE

helicopter. These photographs are paired with portraits and testimonials from activists, located on the second floor.

The artist Brian Holmes, who’s known for his writing on the intersection of artistic and political practice, contributes the highly enlightening interactive map Petropolis.

Starting with stories from the south side, the map expands to metropolitan, continental, and global scale with information on power plants, railroads, pipelines, and ports. Victoria Sambunaris’s Industrial Shipping Vessels, Houston Ship Channel, Texas is similarly geographic: a grid of 45 photographs of ships passing through the route that connects the largest U.S. petroleum port to the Gulf of Mexico. Sambunaris tracked 34 of these ships and pinned them on a map with information about each boat.

Other artists engaged with the problem of petcoke in a more conceptual manner. Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter traveled to places as distant as China for I Can Only See Shadows, a three-channel installation about “the violence in dust” that’s the result of a twoyear investigation. The duo of Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann originally proposed sealing off and insulating one of the museum’s galleries so that the interior would be empty except for 102 grams of petcoke. The MoCP rejected the proposal for obvious reasons—possible damage to the collection, concerns regarding the health of visitors and staff. So Geissler and Sann decided to mount their proposal in place of an installation, framing it on a wall alongside the institution’s response and various newspapers articles. In the gallery there’s also a photograph of what appears to be the same room with a pile of petcoke on the ground; in the middle of the actual space there’s a small sample of petcoke sealed in a Plexiglas case.

In a publication issued for the exhibit, Holmes writes of the petcoke problem that “thanks to the activism of Southeast Chicago residents, this simple but crucial fact began to leave the realm of managed oblivion and enter that of common knowledge.” With “Petcoke: Tracing Dirty Energy,” this environmental plague is not only documented but made more thought-provoking. In other words, the exhibition is activism. v R “PETCOKE: TRACING DIRTY ENERGY” Through 10/9, Mon-Sat 10 AM-5 PM, Sun noon-5 PM, Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan, 312-663-5554, mocp.org. F

JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 23

DON’T THINK TWICE ssss

Producer Ira Glass takes questions at every Saturday screening. Directed by Mike Birbiglia.

R, 92 min. Music Box, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $11.

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE

Tami Sagher, Gillian Jacobs, Kate Micucci, Mike Birbiglia, Chris Gethard, and Keegan-Michael Key in Don’t Think Twice

MOVIES

Off the top of my head

By J.R. JONES

G

ot your back! Got your back!” a troupe of improv actors chant to each other as they prepare to hit the stage in Mike Birbiglia’s incisive showbiz comedy Don’t Think Twice.

Birbiglia, a veteran comedy writer and performer who made his screen directing debut with the stellar rom-com Sleepwalk With Me (2012), frames his second feature as a love letter to the art of improv and its attendant values of trust, openness, and spontaneity. But Don’t Think Twice also exposes the backstage politics of improv and finds beneath the players’ camaraderie an undercurrent of jealousy, rivalry, and professional despair. It has more ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

laughs than any big-studio comedy I’ve seen this year, but it’s dead serious about the difficulty of creating something collectively in a world where everyone’s chasing the spotlight.

The movie also delivers a wicked send-up of Saturday Night Live, portrayed by Birbiglia as the contrived product of a crushingly negative corporate culture. For years the six young players of the Commune have been building a reputation as one of the sharpest improv teams in New York City, but now their longtime venue has lost its lease, and their close friendships begin to fray after producers from the late-night warhorse Weekend Live come to the little theater to scout for fresh talent. When

ss AVERAGE

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s POOR

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one of the players makes the cut, leaving his companions in the dust, Birbiglia follows him inside the organization and offers a thoughtful critique, showing how its values of ruthless competition, cold exploitation, withering sarcasm, and coveted privilege inhibit the sort of creative impulse that a good comedian needs to take chances and get laughs. Everyone rips on SNL, but Don’t Think Twice actually reveals why it’s never funny and never will be.

Birbiglia opens with a little tutorial on improv, the players supplying voice-over to black-and-white clips of the original Second City cast and enunciating three basic principles of the art. First, say yes: as Allison (Kate

Micucci) explains, improv demands openness, “agreeing with the reality your partner creates and then building on that, and then building on that.” Second, it’s all about the group: for her, improv means “working together in the moment to create something that never happened before or will never happen again.” Third, don’t think: for Miles (Birbiglia), who founded the Commune and trained most of its players, improv is “all about getting out of your head.

It’s about impulse.” The improv scenes in Don’t Think Twice are magical, showing how all these values combine to create a good working environment onstage; the actors, trusting each other and themselves, have arrived at a collective point of view that helps them turn random ideas into pointed satire.

All these principles require discipline, but honoring the group turns out to be the toughest, especially once the players’ professional ambitions are introduced. When the Commune’s members learn about the Weekend Live scouts, Miles warns the handsome Jack (Keegan-Michael Key) not to ruin the performance with his showboating as he does whenever important people are in the audience: “You turn into a one-man audition tape.”

Jack promises to behave, but onstage he can’t help himself. An audience member gives them a wonderful story suggestion—that afternoon, she hopped into a cab only to discover that the driver was her estranged father—and the players develop it into a loopy little narrative.

But when they hit a lull, Jack hijacks the performance with his Barack Obama impression, effectively wrecking the story while the others stare daggers at him. As his girlfriend, Samantha (Gillian Jacobs), later tells her improv students, the worst kind of show is one in which “you all sell each other out onstage.”

For most of these characters, Weekend Live is the holy grail—every week they gather around the TV to smoke pot and watch the show, dreaming of the day when they’ll make the big time. (Birbiglia meticulously re-creates SNL’s hot-night-out credit sequence, with its blaring saxophone and cast members doing comic takes as their names are announced.)

Miles, who blew an audition for the show a decade earlier and has since watched one former student leapfrog over him into the

WORTHLESS

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ARTS & CULTURE Mike Birbiglia, left, and Kate Micucci

OFFICIAL SELECTION

“GONDRY HAS MADE HIS MOST SATISFYING MOVIE SINCE HIS 2004 MASTERPIECE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND.” -The Guardian

cast, can barely contain his bitterness. Calling it “the only live sporting event of comedy,” he interrogates the old cliche that the show isn’t as good as it used to be: “It’s the great paradox of Weekend Live—was it good ever, or did we just think that because we were 12?” Their disdain notwithstanding, almost all of them pressure Jack to get them on the show, and as the group’s last performances near, his growing status spoils the creative rapport they’ve enjoyed for so long.

Jack’s experience on Weekend Live lines up pretty closely with the professional environment at SNL as recalled in Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller’s oral history Live From New York. “No one takes you under their wing at Saturday Night Live,” cast member Nora Dunn says. “There are no wings.” From the beginning producer Lorne Michaels has encouraged an office in which people compete for attention and only the biggest egos survive.

“You have a collection of twenty-five sort of damaged people—thirteen writers, you know, twelve performers—and they’re all trying to get on the air,” says Fred Wolf, who wrote for the show in the 1990s. “And the best way to do it is to be competitive and to work really hard and stay up all night and just make sure that you’re in the right sketches and trying to get writers to write for you or write for yourself and figure out how to suck up to the host and do whatever it takes to get on the air.” No wonder the show isn’t funny—the people who dream it up can’t trust each other.

As Jack soon learns, saying yes isn’t a core principle at Weekend Live. Timothy (Seth Barrish), the show’s legendary creator, is a cold and humorless bureaucrat, stingy with praise and mindful of status. “Don’t ever talk to

Timothy about your funny friends,” one of the writers warns Jack. “First year? Just don’t get fired.” Jack launches a new character on the show, an old-time ticket taker, but no sooner has he distinguished himself than Timothy deflates him. “You’re not what we call a pure talent, you’re not a virtuoso,” the producer tells Jack. “You’re the kind of player who should write for himself.” At the same time, Jack’s fame has begun to corrupt what he had with the Commune; when he returns for one of their last shows, audience members single him out for attention, and he winds up taking over the performance with his popular character.

The group has always thrived on spontaneity and discovery, but Weekend Live thrives on familiarity.

Birbiglia has written Don’t Think Twice as an ensemble piece, appropriately, and all six players must come to terms with the idea of the Commune disbanding. Most of the players have been working crappy day jobs for years, and Miles, in particular, needs to move on with his life as he nears 40. He likes to quote Del Close on spontaneity—“Fall and then figure out what to do on your way down”—and ironically, that’s exactly what he’s doing. But Samantha will never quit improv comedy; a true believer, she came to the group as a fan and remembers the day she was asked to join as “the greatest day of my life.” Don’t Think Twice ends with the kind of poignance common to backstage dramas, where time is fleeting and no show can go on forever. Like the sketches dreamed up onstage, the company itself is something that never happened before, and never will again. v

A film by

Michel Gondry

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v @JR_Jones JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 25

Vic Mensa (second from right) stands his ground with protesters who took to the streets of Chicago on November 24, 2015, after the release of the Laquan McDonald dashcam video. ò SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES

Can VIC MENSA

RADICALIZE

LOLLAPALOOZA?

26 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

The Chicago rapper publicly supports Black Lives Matter and LGBT rights, among other progressive causes— which makes him an interesting fit for a festival that tries to please everyone.

By LEOR GALIL

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n July 5, Alton Sterling was selling CDs in front of the Triple S Food Mart in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when he was tackled to the ground and fatally shot by police. A chorus of prominent voices have eulogized the 37-year-old father of five, who many believe died because he was black—among them Chicago rapper and Save Money cofounder Vic Mensa. Within days of the killing, Mensa posted an Instagram photo of Sterling, his face lit up by an open-mouthed smile. He captioned it with a heartfelt plea for us to change the way we see race: “Tell yourself that you don’t need to fear a man just because of the color of his skin.”

That photo of Sterling became the source material for a spray-painted mural that now adorns a wall outside Triple S Food Mart. On Thursday, July 14, Mensa shared an Instagram photo of himself in front of that mural. He’d traveled to Baton Rouge as a spokesperson for Respect My Vote!, a nonpartisan campaign (under the auspices of the nonprofit coalition Hip Hop Caucus) that aims to get people registered and out to the polls. Mensa encouraged locals to participate in the upcoming election—all 12 city council seats and the mayorpresident’s job are up for grabs. He stayed in Baton Rouge to attend Sterling’s funeral on Friday, and I spoke to him just before the ceremony.

Mensa, 23, has plenty to talk about these days. He confronts racial injustice, police violence, and poverty on the ferocious There’s Alot Going On (his debut EP for Roc Nation, released in June), rapping about the poisoned victims and corrupt architects of the Flint water crisis (“Shades of Blue”) and the death of Laquan McDonald at the hands of CPD officer Jason Van Dyke (“16 Shots”). Events since then—the fatal police shootings of Sterling and Philando Castile, the redoubled conservative pushback against Black Lives Matter after the killings of police in Dallas and Baton Rouge, the horrifyingly absurd Republican National Convention—have kept these wounds open.

By comparison, the occasion for my interview with Mensa felt a little trivial: Lollapalooza.

Mensa has performed at Lollapalooza twice before: with Kids These Days in 2011 and on his own in 2014. This year he headlines the Pepsi stage at 9 PM on Saturday night, a time slot that puts him up against Dutch electro DJ Hardwell, English neohouse duo Disclosure (Mensa’s onetime touring partners), and overthe-hill alt-rockers Red Hot Chili Peppers. It’ll be interesting to see how Mensa’s activist hiphop goes over at a giant corporatized festival

Vic Mensa posted these photos to Instagram earlier this month. To the left is Alton Sterling, killed by police on July 5 outside the Triple S Food Mart in Baton Rouge. To the right are Mensa and an unidentified man standing in front of a new mural of Sterling painted on the wall of the store. ò VIA INSTAGRAM

LOLLAPALOOZA

Thu 7/28 through Sun 7/31, noon-10 PM, Grant Park, 337 E. Randolph, lollapalooza.com, sold out, all ages

that seems allergic to any treatment of the issues he raises.

Not that Lollapalooza abstains from activism, of course. Ever since Perry Farrell launched the fest in 1991 as an elaborate package tour and send-off for his band Jane’s Addiction, it’s opened its gates to worthy causes. This year’s edition hosts a dozen nonprofits and activist organizations, most of them well established nationally if not internationally: they include the One Campaign, which U2 front man Bono cofounded to fight preventable diseases around the world; Rock the Vote and HeadCount, which work to increase election turnout; and Syd Rocks, which helps fund research into the treatment of a little-known pediatric cancer called Langerhans cell histiocytosis. Syd Rocks is based in Chicago, as are a few other groups, among them the volunteer-focused Chicago Cares and two transit-centric organizations, Bike 4 Life and Working Bikes.

These are all fantastic causes, but you might notice something about their areas of interest—they’re all comfortably uncontroversial.

I don’t have the highest opinion of Lollapalooza fans—I’ve seen too many of them being assholes to strangers—but I have a hard time imagining even the most despicable concertgoer getting offended by an organization raising awareness of a little-known disease that afflicts children. On the other hand, if Lollapalooza engaged with activist groups addressing issues that tend to start arguments between conservatives and liberals—racism, feminism, LGBT rights—you can be sure a whole bunch of people would be huge dicks about it.

That’s probably why Lollapalooza’s organizers—who like to promote the festival as reflecting Chicago’s vibrant culture—haven’t

given a seat at the table this year to nonprofits dealing with some of the city’s most troubling crises. Conspicuously absent are Center on Halsted, the midwest’s largest LGBT community center; CeaseFire, the violenceprevention group known nationally as Cure Violence; and Black Youth Project 100, the national organization whose strong chapter here has been a major voice in protests against the racist use of police force in Chicago.

This is what happens when good intentions collide with the desire to avoid ruffling feathers so the money keeps flowing in. Lollapalooza’s reluctance to acknowledge racial inequality—an urgently important issue not just in Chicago but in the country as a whole— is almost ironic in light of the performance that closed the festival in its inaugural year, when Ice-T joined Jane’s Addiction onstage for a cover of Sly Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey.” Of course, Farrell thought Lollapalooza would be a onetime thing, so he was more willing to take risks. These days, he’s a spokesperson for Maestro Dobel Tequila (though he’s still attached to the festival, at least for now), and Lollapalooza is an entrenched, corporatized behemoth.

When Blood Orange played Lollapalooza in 2014, the biggest stories to come out of it had little to do with the band’s music. Front man Dev Hynes wore a T-shirt bearing the names of black men killed by police officers, and on-site security personnel allegedly assaulted him and singer Samantha Urbani. (Whether there’s a connection between the shirt and the alleged assault remains to be seen.) In an environment where a shirt like that can raise eyebrows, Mensa will feel downright radical. About his festival set, he tells me, “I’ll have a lot to J

JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 27

Vic Mensa onstage ò THE COME UP SHOW/FLICKR

Vic Mensa continued from 27 say.” But he won’t go into detail: “You’ll have to come and see.”

When Mensa dropped There’s Alot Going On he told Billboard, “I think the idea of activism, more so a revolutionary mindset, is something that has been with me for most of my life, especially since I was about 16 years old.” He says that’s when poet Aja Monet passed along copies of The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Revolutionary Suicide, the memoir of Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton. Activism has been part of his music for the past seven years, he explains—and while that’s definitely true, it’s become much more overt on There’s Alot Going On. Mensa’s first solo EP, 2010’s Straight Up, which he self-released at 17, ends with the mournful “Whispers,” where he raps about the shootings that claim a disproportionate number of young black men: “Black sky / Mother lamenting over her dead son / You ask why / The bullet wound from which a nigga bled run / For hours before the law even decide to show they face / Now they closin’ up the casket like they ’bout to close the case.” The track ends with Monet delivering spoken word over a sweltering trumpet melody from Nico Segal, better known as Donnie Trumpet.

In the band Kids These Days, active from 2009 till ’13, Mensa added subtle commentary on Chicago’s segregation and violence

28 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

to his lyrics. On the sinister “Don’t Harsh My Mellow,” from their final release, 2012’s Traphouse Rock, he delivers the line “I’m Elie Wiesel coming live from out the ghetto.” Later he infused his effervescent breakthrough mixtape, 2013’s Innanetape, with personal-aspolitical storytelling. On the slapping electro track “Yap Yap,” he describes the bleak view that many people like him have of the legal system: “No Scared Straight! Throw children in jail / General consensus is we off the hinges.”

In the two years since his previous Lollapalooza set, Mensa says, the biggest change he’s gone through has been becoming the artist he’s always seen himself as. He’s overtly political now, though he doesn’t much care to work within the system. In an interview on syndicated New York radio show The Breakfast Club in June, he described politics as “all smoke and mirrors, and a lot of time very little truth”—he’s much more focused on bringing “power to the people.”

Mensa says he became a spokesperson for Respect My Vote! this year with the help of Chicago poet and songwriter Malik Yusef, who serves as Hip Hop Caucus’s director of arts and culture. Less than a week after Mensa dropped There’s Alot Going On, he appeared with Hip Hop Caucus founder Lennox Yearwood in a town-hall election discussion cohosted by hip-hop lifestyle site Complex. When asked why marginalized folks who are struggling to

survive should divert any energy at all to voting, Mensa said, “You talk about people stuck outside the building, and they feel like these doors will never open for them. Well, you know what? This is one door you can open yourself.”

For the first month of its release, Mensa offered There’s Alot Going On as a free download to anyone who pledged through Respect My Vote! to go to the polls in the upcoming presidential election. The organization is nonpartisan, but Mensa makes it clear on the EP that he’s on the side of the impoverished, the underprivileged, and people of color—anyone with the odds unfairly stacked against them.

The booming single “16 Shots” is a furious indictment of the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald and the city’s lengthy attempted cover-up. On the song’s repeated hook, he counts to 12—hardly a radio-friendly choice, but it drives home his point about the number of bullets that pierced McDonald’s body (even though he doesn’t get all the way to 16). Mensa rips into Rahm Emanuel (“The mayor lying said he didn’t see the video footage”) and the officer who pulled the trigger (“This for Laquan on sight, when you see Van Dyke / Tell him I don’t bring a knife to a gunfight”).

Despite Mensa’s anger and clear desire for retribution, his response has been peaceful.

He’s been using his rising profile to bring attention to causes he believes in. In November, Mensa joined protests marching through

downtown Chicago after the release of the dashcam footage of McDonald’s death. When Vice’s TV channel, Viceland, profiled Mensa in an episode of the music-centric program Noisey, the show closed with footage of him at one of those marches.

The lyrics to “16 Shots” also refer to that protest experience. Mensa premiered the song at a Justice for Flint benefit concert in February, and in April he performed it during the opening night of “Our Duty to Fight,” an art exhibit honoring Black Lives Matter activists at UIC’s Gallery 400. Since the release of There’s Alot Going On, he’s kept up the fight for what he believes in through collaborations and oneoff tracks. On Towkio’s “G W M,” Mensa rips into Spike Lee’s touristic depiction of Chicago violence in Chi-Raq: “Nigga fuck Spike Lee / City notorious for niggas getting shot / It’s not a movie scene.” And in a fiery freestyle for DJ Semtex’s program for BBC Radio 1Xtra, he condemns the gentrification that’s driven the poor out of Cabrini-Green (“And U-Hauls came and shipped niggas out the projects / And tore the buildings down and then they built a brand-new Target”) and the fear of blackness that caused Alton Sterling’s death (“Now compare that to niggas with guns / You ain’t even gotta reach / They put a clip in ya / Bullets at your fibula / Bystander filmed it on a cellular / Welcome to KKK America”).

Mensa is willing to push himself out of his comfort zone to tackle themes and issues he cares about, and this emerging fearlessness makes him even more compelling. At the end of June, he released “Free Love,” a song about LGBT rights that features Malik Yusef, New York queer rapper Le1f, genre-blurring pop star Halsey, and based rapper Lil B. Mensa performed it at a Pride party that was part of Smart Bar’s Sunday-night Queen series, and he made a T-shirt whose sales benefited victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando. In a note about the song that he posted on Twitter, Mensa wrote that though he’d long been a supporter of LGBT rights, “I didn’t feel personally attached or really feel like it was my battle to fight.” His indifference dissolved, he explained, after a family member came out to him: “I realize now that as a creature of love, the battles of all people fighting to love are also mine.”

I ask Mensa what people who want to be allies for causes that aren’t theirs can do to help.

The more I see people arguing past each other online, with the bitter divisions between them growing deeper, the more I think everyone should take the rapper’s advice to heart: “Just listen.” v

v @imLeor

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MUSIC

bottom lounge ONSALE FRI 07.29 AT 10 AM ONSALE FRI 07.29 AT NOON

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IN ROTATION

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

Empress Of backstage at Pitchfork ò ORIANA KOREN

SWEET SPIRIT ONSALE FRI 07.29 AT NOON

ONSALE NOW

08.12 TRAINWRECK SYMPHONY POLARIZER / REVOLT CODA

08.13 THE FALL OF TROY ‘68 / ILLUSTRATIONS

08.19 THE HEMISPHERES 08.20 SAVED BY THE 90S 08.27 ENVY ON THE COAST

Chicago punk zine The Gabba Gabba Gazette ran an interview with Joey Ramone in 1977.

NIGHT VERSES

THE PRIVATE CLUB TOUR

09.06 MADEINTYO

ROYCE RIZZY / NOAH WOOD$ / SALMA SLIMS / MYNAMEISPHIN

09.09 THE SHEEPDOGS

QUAKER CITY NIGHT HAWKS

09.15 STICK TO YOUR GUNS

STRAY FROM THE PATH / EXPIRE / KNOCKED LOOSE

REACT PRESENTS

09.16 TROYBOI 09.22 MOVITS!

SIDEWALK CHALK

09.25 ANTHONY GREEN

MAT KEREKES / SECRET SPACE

09.28 TITUS ANDRONICUS WIIL PRESENTS

09.30 AIRBOURNE ONES TO WATCH PRESENTS

10.01 FINISH TICKET

RUN RIVER NORTH / IRONTOM

10.04 NICK WATERHOUSE 10.08 THE AMITY AFFLICTION

BEING AS AN OCEAN / HUNDREDTH / TROPHY EYES / DEADSHIPS

10.12 NF 10.14 RANDY & MR. LAHEY (FROM THE TRAILER PARK BOYS)

10.16 PARTICLE / KUNG FU 10.18 TESSERACT OUTRUN THE SUNLIGHT

10.29 GREEN RIVER ORDINANCE 11.03 JAGWAR MA AN EVENING WITH

11.11 SLOAN 12.15 FOR TODAY www.bottomlounge.com 1375 w lake st 312.666.6775

30 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

Reader associate editor

KEVIN WARWICK

Editor of No Friends zine

RAY MARTINEZ

ALICIA GAINES

The return of John Bender In the early 80s Cincinnati’s John Bender released three obscure cassettes of minimalist, Krautrockinfluenced electronic music and then vanished. Well, not vanished, but pivoted to become a therapist and head for the straight and narrow. Those rare, rudimentary recordings became relics of groundbreaking experimentation in electronic music and have slowly been getting reissued by labels such as Vinylon-Demand and Superior Viaduct. At the Queen City’s inaugural No Response Festival in late June, Bender made his first live appearance in more than 30 years.

Chris Gethard The Chris Gethard Show is probably the most creative and unique program on TV right now. I recently caught him at Thalia Hall, where he did an entire comedy set focusing on his depression, attempted suicide, recovery, and life with mental illness.

It was simultaneously raw as hell and funny as fuck. He also has a podcast called Beautiful Stories From Anonymous People, on which he talks to random strangers about whatever they feel like talking about. On paper, everything this guy does should not work—yet he pulls it all off magnificently.

Xiu Xiu, Plays the Music of Twin Peaks I didn’t think it was possible to make the music of Twin Peaks more unsettling. But Xiu Xiu do just that on this ambitious album of covers, using experimental instrumentation and live-sounding production to capture the immediacy and horror at the heart of the series. It sounds like the sinking feeling in your stomach when you realized what Twin Peaks was all about.

Ceremony, Rohnert Park Let us fondly commemorate the Bridge Nine Records era of Ceremony, before they signed to Matador and watered down their abrasive hardcore punk till it basically sounded like a neutered version of Pissed Jeans. Their best record, 2010’s Rohnert Park, can get so volatile and worked-up it often seems to sputter uncontrollably with fury. Front man Ross Farrar sounds like he’s gargling pieces of his own esophagus atop the band’s chugging SSTbrand rhythms and brittle, tinny guitars. This is where the band found their sweet spot.

Lucking into catching Empress Of at Pitchfork Pitchfork’s Blue Stage fell desperately behind schedule on its final day. That meant I was privy to about 30 minutes of Lorely Rodriguez (aka Empress Of) as she playfully bounced around onstage and pushed out a blend of dreamy synths and charismatic, delicate vocals. A welcome surprise.

Zine holdings at the Harold Washington Library I spend at least one evening a month poring over stacks of bound zines at Harold Washington, both for inspiration and for my sanity. They’ve got every issue of Maximum Rocknroll and tons of classic Chicago punk zines, including The Gabba Gabba Gazette, The Coolest Retard, and Matter. It’s shocking how much DIY and underground zine material they have (though it’s noncirculating). Anyone with a library card and an ID can look, and there’s even a scanner for you to use!

Traitors, “Fuck You I’m a Cop” A departing roommate left a CD of Everything Went Shit in our basement two years ago, and I just found it and have been blasting it nonstop. Great punk lyrics, or greatest punk lyrics? Thirtythree seconds of cynical punk-rock perfection by a criminally overlooked 90s Chicago band who are unfortunately still relevant. ACAB forever. RIP #PhilandoCastile RIP #AltonSterling #BlackLivesMatter

Bassist and vocalist in Ganser

David Rakoff, Half Empty I may know this book by heart. The final essay collection by the late David Rakoff is a warm comforter for pessimistic creatives—albeit one that sometimes turns icy with self-awareness. He casts aspersions without being smug and surprises with warmth and wit. When I write, I remember his advice: “The only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.”

Lower, Seek Warmer Climes Postpunk seems to return in waves, each with favorite sounds and inspirations. But its best feature is its ineffable, tangential quality—it touches on punk, no wave, goth, and more. Lower’s Seek Warmer Climes has been a favorite since its 2014 release (though the band has since split). The Copenhagen group’s angular, muscular sound matches wordy, off-kilter vocals to hooky grooves that churn and change as though uncomfortable in their shape. I hope other bands carry on with Lower’s renewal of the old. Isn’t that what postpunk is about?

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Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of July 28 b

ALL AGES

F

PICK OF THE WEEK

Singer Esme Patterson doesn’t mince words on her unfussy new We Were Wild

Greg Ward ò ZAKKIYYAH NAJEEBAH

THURSDAY28 Bloodshot Bill Johnny & the Jerks and Gentleman John Battles open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $10.

ò DANIEL TOPETE

ESME PATTERSON, AWFUL TRUTH

Wed 8/3, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12.

WE WERE WILD (Grand Jury), the spry, smart new album from Portland singer Esme Patterson, starts with an upper-register burst of guitar skree that harks back to the hyperactive churn of the Feelies classic “Fa Ce La,” though that signpost promptly vanishes once opener “Feel Right” ends. For most of the infectious record Patterson writes with refreshing directness, repeating simple lines that gain resonance with every cycle. On “Feel Right” she admits nobody wants to do things that are painful or uncomfortable, but then asks, “But without feeling wrong / How can we know what feels right?” Amid the charging guitars and her ebullient delivery the song becomes a sprinting valediction to overcoming adversity

or fear. “No River” deploys 60s soul motifs, though Patterson’s sweet warble couldn’t be further from a vintage soul voice—she trots out unfussy words that convey the depth of her empathy while sharing her limitations: “I can’t keep running, I’m no river.”

The airy ballad “Guadalupe” underlines Patterson’s admiration for the easy-on-the-ears phrasing of Feist, though she’s more rustic with how she stretches the pretty melody every which way. As a whole the album quickly worked its way into my brain, with each spin transforming from a pleasant way to spend 40 minutes into something I’ve actively sought out more and more each week.

—PETER MARGASAK

Bloodshot Bill emerged from Montreal in the late 90s with a poisonous take on rockabilly-garage-blues-whatever. Most of the time he’s a solo act, playing Delta licks on the guitar with his bare hands while keeping time on the drums with his bare feet (more than one YouTube video has him in a bathrobe and pajamas with his toes clearly visible). The rest of the time he might collaborate with King Khan as half of Tandoori Knights, or with Jon Spencer and Matt Verta-Ray in Heavy Trash. There’s also a release with Shannon Shaw of Shannon & the Clams due out on Slovenly in September. While Bloodshot Bill does have his share of gimmicks—including a brand of hair pomade that he himself created—it’s been a while since I’ve witnessed “roots rock” sounding so reckless or authentic. Neither overly earnest nor outlandishly campy, Bill brings out the similarities between the blues and pre-psych rock ’n’ roll, and you can get a good taste of his sound on the new album Guitar Boy (Norton). Also on tonight’s bill: a couple of local illustrators who walk down a similar musical road. The brainchild of Johnny Samspon, Johnny & the Jerks combine twangy hot-rod rock ’n’ roll with imagery straight out of classic EC comics and scifi flicks. And then there’s the otherworldly Gentleman John Battles, a lone singer-guitarist who in the same vein as Hasil Adkins stomps on a fuzzbox like it’s just another crack in the street. Some of his most inspired performances have been witnessed at the Big C Jamboree (the monthly rockabilly open mike at Martyrs), making the jitterbuggers stop dead in their tracks while he hammers home scary truths and shocking fantasies. —JAMES PORTER J

JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 31

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

Production still from Lovely Little Girls’ video for “Corpse Thighs Dancing” ò COURTESY LOVELY LITTLE GIRLS

continued from 31 Daniel Levin Quartet Tres Hongos open.

9 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10 suggested donation. b It’s been ten years since cellist Daniel Levin started making Chicago a regular summer destination, and each time he comes he renews ties with some of the town’s best players. This time he’s also reviving the instrumental lineup that’s performed his most distinctive work. Since 2003 Levin has led a quartet with vibes, brass, and bass that combines attuned interaction with lyric soloing and an unflinching penchant for flinty textures. The New York version of the quartet recently exchanged Nate Wooley’s trumpet for Mat Maneri’s microtonal viola, so it falls on this version—featuring Jason Adasiewicz on vibes, Joshua Abrams on bass, and Josh Berman on cornet—to re-create the ensemble sound heard on last year’s excellent CD Friction (Clean Feed). The group will also perform some pieces already recorded for the quartet’s next album, slated for release on Clean Feed early in 2017. Tres Hongos, the trio of trumpeter Jacob Wick, pianist Marc Riordan, and drummer Frank Rosaly, opens. —BILL MEYER

The 1975 See Friday. Part of Lollapalooza.

7:30 PM (set time), Grant Park, Columbus and Jackson, sold out.

FRIDAY29 Greg Ward & 10 Tongues See also Saturday. 9 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, $15.

O ve r t h e l a s t d e c a d e a l t o s a xo p h o n i s t Greg Ward has made his name as a remarkable improviser, blending exquisite technique, a bright and cutting tone, deep soulfulness, and profound lyrical instincts.

He’s occasionally led some of his own projects—like

32 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

the fusion band Fitted Shards or the hyperactive trio with bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Damion Reid he put together during a six-year stint in New York—but none of that work matched what he could do as a sideman. That changed with great fanfare last year when Ward put together the fantastic tentet that appears on the recent Touched My Beloved’s Thought (Greenleaf), a stunning nine-movement suite inspired by the 1963 Charles Mingus classic The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.

The piece was commissioned for the city’s now-defunct Made in Chicago series and created as a collaboration with Chicago choreographer Onye Ozuzu—though the music can stand on its own (the Green Mill performances will take place without dancers). There are only fleeting quotations and references to the Mingus work—Ward dispatches with the flamenco flourishes—but the rich compositions and dense arrangements of Touched My Beloved’s Thought are clearly related, and retain a strong sense of the blues in the lush contrapuntal horn playing. Ward’s searing alto lines provide the dominant improvisational voice, but the band is packed with some of city’s finest players, all of them operating at peak level: saxophonists Tim Haldeman and Keefe Jackson, trombonists Christopher Davis and Norman Palm, trumpeter Russ Johnson, cornetist Ben LaMar Gay, pianist Dennis Luxion, bassist Jason Roebke (subbed for by the capable Matt Ulery), and drummer Marcus Evans. —PETER MARGASAK

The 1975 See also Thursday. Dua Lipa open.

11 PM, House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn, sold out.

17+ The 1975 is the kind of rock band Fall Out Boy wants to be: one that can blend genres without overextending itself or obstructing the music’s emotional subtleties. On this year’s chart-topping I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware of It (Interscope) the British boys’ glitzy 80s synth-pop sheen augments their arena-rock ambition while reflecting the plastic distractions of modern life Matthew Healy sings about in acerbic detail. A magnetic front man with a sense of

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what makes pop music sweet and sorrowful, Healy understands how to deliver loquacious lyrics that contain multitudes. He doesn’t shy away from singing about his sudden fame or the effect it’s had on his ego, and he also understands the struggles of young people hoping to connect to strangers, all while being glued to their Instagram feeds. I can’t think of a song that better shows the connection between social media and a fraying relationship than the sumptuous, somber “A Change of Heart.”

On it Healy sings, “You said I’m full of diseases / Your eyes were full of regret / And then you took a picture of your salad / And put it on the Internet.”

—LEOR GALIL

SATURDAY30 Child Bite S.N.A.F.U., Den, and Mine Collapse open. 8 PM, Burlington, 3425 W. Fullerton, $7 suggested donation.

When you see a Housecore Records logo on the back of an LP sleeve, you need to know what you’re getting yourself into: the New Orleans-based label is run by polarizing Pantera front man Philip H. Anselmo, and it specializes in all sorts of oddball extreme metal, ranging from the brutal one-man industrial onslaught of Author & Punisher to the swampy stomp of sludge pioneers Eyehategod. But Detroit’s Child Bite, who released their new record Negative Noise via Housecore earlier this year, come from a different angle. These zany punks kneel at the altar of Dead Kennedys, with singer Shawn Knight channeling Jello Biafra’s eccentricities—right down to his wobbly, strained yowl—while guitarist Brandon Sczomak does his best East Bay Ray by refusing to let any twangy guitar chord stay put for too long.

It’s refreshing to hear a band eschew expectations so loudly and proudly, going for spazzed-out circus punk rather than the damaged bite of its labelmates. And if it’s the 80s-era Alternative Tentacles sound you want, these are the guys to get it from— Child Bite are by far a better act to catch than the current, Jello-less version of Dead Kennedys hitting the road these days. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

Greg Ward & 10 Tongues See Friday. 8 PM, Green Mill, 4802 N. Broadway, $15.

SUNDAY31 Jeb Bishop, Tomeka Reid, Joshua Abrams, and Hamid Drake 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10.

Relocation is a fact of life, and plenty of Chicago’s finest musicians have been pulled away from the city. That doesn’t make the loss of trombonist Jeb Bishop any easier to accept. When he took off four years ago he left a huge void, as we lost his jaw-dropping technique, lyric improvisational style, and gorgeous, full-bodied sound. So it’s always special when he rolls back through, especially considering his recent visits have found him leading a group with percussionist Hamid Drake and J

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Lollapalooza Lollapalooza expanded to four days for its 25th birthday, and festival passes once again sold out before headliners were announced.

They include LCD Soundsystem, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, and J. Cole. 7/287/31, Grant Park, Columbus and Jackson, lollapalooza.com, sold out.

Fed Up Fest This three-day DIY festival celebrates queer and transgender voices in the punk community. It’s headlined by local art-punk band Ono and also features Mother Moon Goddess, Tigress, Rifle Diet, and Vile Creature. Workshops included. 7/29-7/31, Auxiliary Arts Center (3012 W. Belmont) and Black Couch Gallery (4200 W. Diversey), fedupfestchicago.com, $15 suggested donation, two-day pass $35 suggested donation.

MEYHEM LAUREN 08/28

KHRUANGBIN 09/12

CALIFONE 09/23

SUUNS 09/25

Chicago Domination Fest Extreme metal hits the near suburbs, with a slew of delightfully named acts like Brodequin, Lividity, Malignancy, Dehumanized, and Extremely Rotten. 7/29-7/30, Wire, 6815 W. Roosevelt, Berwyn, chicagodominationfest.bigcartel. com, $30, $55 two-day pass.

BAD BAD MEOW 08/10 MADAILA 08/12 HUNNY X THE FRIGHTS 08/13 EZTV 08/15

PSYCHIC TEMPLE 08/18 WEAVES 08/22 FATAI 08/23 FAMOUS OCTOBER 08/24

JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 33

4544 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG • 773.728.6000

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Hot Tuna Acoustic THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8 8PM

Haas Kowert Tice In Szold Hall SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 8PM

Iain Matthews and Plainsong featuring Andy Roberts SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 7PM

The Handsome Family with special guest Anna & Elizabeth

Daniil Trifonov ò DARIO ACOSTA

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 8PM

Sara Watkins THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 8PM

The Pines In Szold Hall FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 8PM

Mike Peters of The Alarm

Spirit of '86 tour • In Szold Hall

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 7PM

Jim Kweskin / Geoff Muldaur In Szold Hall SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8 7PM

Sonny Landreth THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13 8PM

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with special guest Frances Luke Accord

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15 8PM SUNDAY, OCTOBER 16 7PM

Nick Lowe with guest Josh Rouse ACROSS THE STREET IN SZOLD HALL 4545 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL

8/6 Laketown Buskers 9/10 Erwin Helfer / Barrelhouse Chuck with Billy Flynn / Gospel Keyboard Masters: The Sirens Records CD release show for all 3 artists!

9/24 The Gentle Shepherd A Scottish Folk Tale

34 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

continued from 33

bassist Joshua Abrams, players he’s worked with in various contexts for decades. This last April during a performance at Experimental Sound Studio, Bishop demonstrated a deep connection with the two musicians: the several extended improvisations felt like exhilarating journeys marked by dynamic peaks and valleys that occurred as if mandated by nature itself. The music grooved, meditated, levitated, and exploded, with Bishop’s fat tone and lithe lines adapting to each shift in rhythm and intensity with quicksilver agility. For this visit the trio expands to a quartet with the presence of cellist Tomeka Reid, who promises to multiply the melodic splendor of the music as well as add harmonic richness.

—PETER MARGASAK

MONDAY1 Lovely Little Girls Bobby Conn, Walking Bicycles, and Chorus of Shadows open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. F Prog rock has a reputation for being cerebral, chaste, and stuck inside the head, with little reference to the body. Lovely Little Girls would like nothing more than to ruin that idea forever. The core duo, artist Gregory Jacobsen and bassist Alex Perkolup, create elaborate, challenging, ever-changing musical structures with grotesque themes of slimy, suppurating, oozing, tumescent bodily horror. Not since Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band’s more flatulent emissions has art rock been so fast ’n’ bulbous. Their fourth full-length, Glistening Vivid Splash (Skin Graft), finds the duo holding court with a vast array of collaborators (their usual stage number is in the realm of nine) to create a full, lush sound full of slipperiness and unpredictable, rug-yanking twists and turns. A new LLG album is a long-term pleasure, because you never quite step in the same river twice. Their release parties are spectacles not for the faint of heart: artist and sculptor Jacobsen really lets his freak flag fly (you can see his

work in the video for “Corpse Thighs Dancing”), and an eager posse of collaborators floods the stage with living Grand Guignol cabaret. Jacobsen told me some of tonight’s special treats might include a Celtic Frost cover in four-part harmony—with members of Toupee and Cheer-Accident pitching in—and a possible assist from opener and longtime supporter Bobby Conn. —MONICA KENDRICK

TUESDAY2 Faun Fables Jaye Jayle and Horizon of Darkness open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $8.

In the new video for “Ydun,” a song from the latest Faun Fables album, Born of the Sun (Drag City), the duo of Dawn McCarthy and Nils Frykdahl frolic in the woods with their children, resembling something between a nomadic family of Ren Faire extras and an off-the-grid commune of five. The children make dream catchers from yarn while Frykdahl hides behind a hooded burlap cloak playing a wooden flute. The couple aren’t acting a part. They’ve been putting their own spin on mystical psych-folk for nearly two decades—none of the so-called freakfolk figures have lived it like this pair—and Born of the Sun arrives as their most committed case for leaving modern civilization behind. On “Goodbye” McCarthy sings, “So we walk this road to the future’s door / Not knowing who’ll we see anymore,” reinforcing an inexorable movement toward a more bucolic, honest existence. “Wild Kids Rant” features the couple’s girls shouting along with them, “We never shower, we never shave / We just swim in the river and we never bathe,” and though the lines are partly tongue in cheek, they also act as an anthem. Beyond the back-to-the-land ethos lie loads of pretty melodies, most of them sung by McCarthy with plaintive, full-bodied beauty. I have trouble with Frykdhal’s brand of over-enunciated theatrics, but McCarthy’s singing functions as a balm in more ways than one. —PETER MARGASAK

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Daniil Trifonov 8 PM, Ravinia Festival, 200 Ravinia Park Rd, Highland Park, $10-$75. b The classical-music world turns out prodigies with such consistency that it’s hard not to be skeptical when some new whippersnapper emerges from the crowd to breeze through a masterpiece with technical assurance but little personality. In recent years Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov—now at the ripe age of 25—has separated himself from that class. On last year’s striking Rachmaninov Variations (Deutsche Grammophon) he erases any lingering doubt that he’s just a technical wizard, performing the music with not only breathless precision but humor and personality as well. The CD also includes the pianist’s own “Rachmaniana,” a solo suite he composed in homage to the composer while adjusting to his new home in the U.S. as a late teen. For this evening’s performance Trifonov will join the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a rendition of Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. The 1845 work by the influential Romantic is his only of that format, and interestingly enough, it provided the model for Edvard Grieg’s own piano concerto—which was subsequently employed as a model by Rachmaninov for his first foray into the form. The program is rounded out by Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 (“From the New World”) and the overture of Weber’s Der Freischütz.

—PETER MARGASAK

WEDNESDAY3 Esme Patterson See Pick of the Week on page 31. Awful Truth open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $12.

Planning for Burial Magick Potion and Varaha open. 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 2105 S. State, $12, $7 in advance. 17+ Thank goodness for San Francisco label the Flenser, which specializes in the kind of experimental metal most orthodox fans would tell you isn’t metal. The label has released black metal that puts misanthropes in a tizzy and experimental LPs that veer toward pop—it’s all heavy, but it’s also categorically diffuse. Thom Wasluck, who eight years ago began recording mystifying, gloomy, and endless bedroom tracks as Planning for Burial, joined

the Flenser fold in 2014 with a full-length called Desideratum. Levitating shoegaze melodies and barely audible whispers gracefully float through the five-track LP, and Wasluck allows his affection for the heaviness of doom and goth to seep into the pores of the songs. Despite this, tracks aren’t punishingly loud—though the glacial-paced “Desideratum” presses down with massive force, it acts like it could evaporate at any moment. Wasluck isn’t married to any one label, and his Bandcamp page is stuffed with one-off singles and collections. Sure, you can no longer buy a lathe-cut version of June’s “As a Lover” single, but you can still stream the throbbing postpunk number all you want—though I recommend taking plenty of breaks for some sun, lest the coldness get to you.

—LEOR GALIL

3855 N. LINCOLN

martyrslive.com

THU, 7/28

GRATEFUL STRING BAND, RIVER VALLEY RANGERS FRI, 7/29

STAMPY, THE SELECTONES SAT, 7/30 - 3PM

FLATTS AND SHARPE ALL AGES ROCK SHOW SAT, 7/30

SUSPICIOUS FIRES, SMIDGEN, CURIOUS GRACE & BLACK RABBIT, VAN GO, OUR FATHERS

Wye Oak Tuskha open. 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport, $20-$23, $18 in advance. 17+ Over the course of Wye Oak’s five albums, all released by Merge, guitarist-vocalist Jenn Wasner and drummer-keyboardist Andy Stack have groomed and fattened the once frail, budding indie-rock sound of their first two albums, If Children (2007) and The Knot (2009). That fact no doubt pairs very nicely with the title of their newest record, Tween, which will be used as the crux/hook for quick-hit music blog posts the Internet wide. But while Wasner’s eerie, humid vocals echo those of Beach House’s Victoria Legrand—she also now plays “guitars” rather than just “guitar”—and an ethereal track like “Better (For Esther)” can feature a nearly danceable synth-girded breakdown, there are welcome fossils of a more tempered sound buried within Tween. The album’s best track, “Too Right”—tense but graceful in its stroll, and with a never-ending backdrop of feedback—is cut from the same cloth as the two aforementioned records with its chilling and side-shuffling guitar riff coming at you in subtle waves and Wasner’s voice remaining forceful without losing an ounce of its vulnerability. The first Chicago show I attended after moving here in 2008 was a Wye Oak show at the Hideout; they played to about 25 people, and it was intimate and kinda ramshackle but fun (at the end Wasner said, “That’s it, those are all of the songs we’ve written”). It somehow feels affirming to see the Baltimore duo now headlining Thalia Hall. I suppose that means I’ll stay put. —KEVIN WARWICK v

MON, 8/1

Never miss a show again.

KILGUBBIN BROTHERS, THE BLACK HORSE PIKES WED, 8/3

TRIBUTOSAURUS BECOMES… SUPERTRAMP THU, 8/4 - 7PM

THE DONNIS TRIO

THU, 8/4 - 9:30PM - NO COVER

BIG C JAMBOREE… 13 TIKIS FRI, 8/5

EARLY WARNINGS chicagoreader.com/early

DRUMMING ALL STARS FEATURING VIRGIL DONATI, MARK GUILIANA + VINNIE VALENTINO, BARON BROWNE, CHRISSI POLAND & STU MINDEMAN SAT, 8/6

GROOVE WITNESS, JETDRIVER, JESSE SANTOY JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 35

FOOD & DRINK

HONEY’S | $$$$

1111 W. Lake 312-877-5929 honeyschicago.com

NEW REVIEW

The plates look sweet at Honey’s But the food lacks depth.

By MIKE SULA

O Scallops in an approximation of white gazpacho; desserts like the baked Alaska tend to be more memorable than the savory side of the menu. ò JAMIE RAMSAY

36 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

ne evening at Honey’s, in the Fulton Market district, chef Charles Welch appeared at my table to drop off the mains: a spit-roasted pork chop and half rotisserie chicken. After the former Sepia executive sous chef ran down the dishes’ respective attributes, he bid us good eating, and then spun around into a support post with a startled “Whoa!” It was a harmless spot of slapstick that rendered the genial chef all the more genial.

But it was also emblematic of the sometimes bumbled executions of fussily plated dishes I encountered during my visits to the restaurant, which inhabits a former machine shop on a decreasingly industrial stretch of Lake Street.

Brining meat as a seasoning technique as well as a safeguard against overcooking is smart in the context of a busy commercial kitchen. But if the beasts spend too much time in the pool, everything ends up with a generic Acme Meat texture. I couldn’t differentiate between the perfectly cooked pork chop and

the overcooked chicken. Despite accompanying artful arrangements of white beans and escarole, and ratatouille and thick green-olive jus, respectively, both seemed like the ham versions of themselves.

With a name that makes it sound like barbecue or fried chicken is on the menu, Honey’s is instead trafficking in what’s described as Mediterranean-inspired food. It’s food that’s assembled elaborately, painterly, with precise strokes of delicate, if overmanipulated garnish and glistening patches of sauce. It’s food that in some ways reminds me of the gorgeous platings of Curtis Duffy at Grace. It’s expensive food that looks pretty but too often fails to resonate beyond the table.

While Welch’s compositional skill is easier to appreciate in the airy sky-lit environs of the front bar, it can be more difficult to perceive in the darker interior dining room, where small, sweet seared bay scallops disappear in a viscous approximation of white gazpacho—traditionally a bread- and almond-based slurry garnished with J

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THU

$4 Lagunitas drafts, $4 Absolut cocktails, “Hoppy Hour” 5-8pm = 1/2 price IPAs + pale ales

50% off wine (glass & bottle) and salads.

Happy Hour 5-6:30pm: half off appetizers, $5 pints of bud light, and $6 shots of Jameson

$6 Firestone Walker Opal pints, $6 Finch Vanilla Stout 16 oz. cans, $7 house wines, $8 Few Spirits

FRI

“Hoppy Hour” 5-8pm = 1/2 price IPAs + pale ales

$6 Jameson shots, $5 Green Line; 50% off chicken sandwich.

Happy Hour 5-6:30pm: half off appetizers, $5 pints of bud light, and $6 shots of Jameson

$6 Firestone Walker Opal pints, $6 Finch Vanilla Stout 16 oz. cans, $7 house wines, $8 Few Spirits

S AT

$6 Jameson shots $3 PBR bottles

Brunch 11am-2pm, Bottomless Bloody Mary’s & Mimosas $15 w/food purchase, 50% off nachos and $15 domestic/$20 craft beer pitchers. Happy Hour 5-6:30pm: half off appetizers, $5 pints of bud light, and $6 shots of Jameson

$6 Firestone Walker Opal pints, $6 Finch Vanilla Stout 16 oz. cans, $7 house wines, $8 Few Spirits

SUN

$4 Temperance brews, $5 Absolut bloody mary’s

Brunch 11am-2pm, Bottomless Bloody Mary’s & Mimosas $15 w/food purchase, 50% off appetizers & $3 Bud Light pints. Industry Night 10% off all items not discounted.

Happy Hour 5-6:30pm: half off appetizers, $5 pints of bud light, and $6 shots of Jameson

$6 Firestone Walker Opal pints, $6 Finch Vanilla Stout 16 oz. cans, $7 house wines, $8 Few Spirits

MON

$4 Half Acre brews, FREE POOL, “Hoppy Hour” 5-8pm = 1/2 price IPAs + pale ales

all beer 50% off, $5 burgers.

Happy Hour 5-6:30pm: half off appetizers, $5 pints of bud light, and $6 shots of Jameson

TUE

$2 and $3 select beers

WED

1/2 price aliveOne signature cocktails, $4 Goose Island brews, “Hoppy Hour” 5-8pm = 1/2 price IPAs + pale ales

MONTI’S

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Happy Hour 4-6pm, $2 off all beers

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$4 Hell or High Watermelon

Bombs $4, Malibu Cocktails $4, Jack Daniel’s Cocktails $5, Tanqueray Cocktails $4, Johnny Walker Black $5, Cabo Wabo $5, PBR Tallboy cans $2.75

Happy Hour noon-6pm, $2 off all beers

Moosehead pints $3.75, Hamms cans $2.50, Special Export Bush Longneck bottles $3, Foster Big cans $5

$5 Stella, $3 mystery shots

Wine by the Glass $5, Jameson $5, Patron $7, Founders 12oz All Day IPA Cans $3.50, Mexican Buckets $20 (Corona, Victoria, Modelos)

Moosehead pints $3.75, Hamms cans $2.50, Special Export Bush Longneck bottles $3, Foster Big cans $5

$3 Corona and $3 mystery shot

Heineken Bottles $4, Bloodies feat.

Absolut Peppar Vodka $5, Original Moonshine $5, Corzo $5, Sailor Jerry’s Rum $4, Deschutes Drafts $4, Capt. Morgan cocktails $5

$4.75 Bloody Mary and Marias

Moosehead pints $3.75, Hamms cans $2.50, Special Export Bush Longneck bottles $3, Foster Big cans $5

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Buckets of Miller & Bud Bottles (Mix & Match) $14, Guinness & Smithwicks Drafts $4, Bloodies feat, Absolut Peppar Vodka $5, Ketal One Cocktails $5

CLOSED

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Moosehead pints $3.75, Hamms cans $2.50, Special Export Bush Longneck bottles $3, Foster Big cans $5

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all specialty drinks 1/2 off, White Rascal $5, PBR and a shot of Malort $4, $2 tacos. Happy Hour 5-6:30pm: half off appetizers, $5 pints of bud light, and $6 shots of Jameson

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Happy Hour 4-6pm, $2 off all beers

Moosehead pints $3.75, Hamms cans $2.50, Special Export Bush Longneck bottles $3, Foster Big cans $5

$4 Founders All Day IPA

Jim Beam Cocktails $4, Jameson Cocktails $5, Cabo Wabo $5, Malibu Cocktails $4, Corona Bottles $3.50, PBR Tall Boy Cans $2.75

50¢ wings (minimum 10), selection of 10 discounted whiskeys. Happy Hour 5-6:30pm: half off appetizers, $5 pints of bud light, and $6 shots of Jameson

$6 Firestone Walker Opal pints, $6 Finch Vanilla Stout 16 oz. cans, $7 house wines, $8 Few Spirits $10 classic cocktails

Happy Hour 4-6pm, $2 off all beers

Moosehead pints $3.75, Hamms cans $2.50, Special Export Bush Longneck bottles $3, Foster Big cans $5

$2 PBR, $5 wine

Stoli/Absolut & Soco Cocktails $4, Long Island Iced Teas $5, Herradura Margaritas $5, Stella/ Hoegaarden/Deschutes Drafts $4, Goose Island 312 Bottles $3.50

$5 Martinis, Lemon Drop, Cinnamon Apple, Mai Tai, French, Cosmo, On the Rocks, Bourbon Swizzle, Pomegranate Margarita

OUR READERS LOVE GREAT DEALS! CONTACT A READER REPRESENTATIVE AT 312.222.6920 OR displayads@chicagoreader.com FOR DETAILS ON HOW TO LIST DRINK SPECIALS HERE.

PHOTO: ALEXEY LYSENKO/GETTY IMAGES

JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 37

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38 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

continued from 36 grapes, here bedecked with grilled peaches, compressed cubist apple excisions, and tart baby sorrel leaves. A $17 lamb tartare doesn’t appear (or taste) raw at all but is somehow seared gray and devoid of any lamb fat or funk that might make it interesting.

Many components of the dishes at Honey’s take a spin on the kitchen’s rotisserie, which gives them an appealing flame-kissed character seemingly at odds with the complex platings. But that’s not an issue with a simple grilled romaine Caesar tossed with pickled shallots, though the smoked giardiniera with the spit-roasted cauliflower threatens to overwhelm an otherwise lovely vegetable plate.

Concision takes charge at the center of the menu with a pair of pastas and two raw shellfish offerings, the latter’s condition obscured by a surfeit of garnish: bloody Mary mignonette, celery leaf, and horseradish camouflaging a tiny littleneck clam, while cucumbers, melon, basil, apple vinegar, and crushed macadamias completely overwhelm the oyster selection. The pastas, on the other hand, are the most promising offerings on the menu. A perfectly spooled coil of buckwheat chitarra is draped with morels that nonetheless get bullied by an excess of thyme butter and crunchy bread crumbs that interfere with the delicate texture of the pasta. Meanwhile squid ink “orecchiette” bear no resemblance to the ear-

shaped southern Italian pasta, but rather to stubby, ridged cavatelli. It’s a head-scratching misnomer for an otherwise tasty bowl tossed with calamari, shrimp, octopus, pesto, mint, and pine nuts.

Among the entrees, sea creatures fare a bit better than those from land. A rainbow trout fillet cooked in a sarcophagus of salt and ash remains flaky and moist, flanked by piles of roasted corn succotash, while swordfish steeped in the Middle Eastern marinade chermoula, arranged with panzanella, shaved radishes and squash, and charred tomato vinaigrette, comes across as one of the most vibrant-tasting dishes on the menu.

Desserts by pastry chef Alison Cates (another Sepia vet) are a bit more memorable than the savory side of the menu, especially a baked Alaska swirled with raspberry puree mounted on olive oil cake and a shredded, mildly curried cake with coffee mousse, goat-milk ice cream, and the nutty Egyptian spice mix dukkah.

Beverages span the usual range of bespoke cocktails, microbrews, and a largely old-world wine list with a few bottles under $50.

With servers in white jackets and Vans running plates, Honey’s seems to be striving for a binary attitude of irreverence and stiff formality. The food, though, seems firmly rooted in the latter. v

" @Mike Sula

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SMALL BATCH BOURBON A W A R D - W I N N I N G

F L A V O R

at

T UE SDAY · AUGUS T 9, 20 16 · 6:30-9:30PM 1400 N WELL S · CHIC AGO 4 - C OUR SE PR I X F I X E ME NU WITH C OCK TA IL PA IR ING S FROM W OODF OR D R E S E R V E FIRST COURSE

Fried Green Tomato with Marinated Strawberry, Woodford Balsamic Reduction, Goat Cheese

paired with NYQUEST: Woodford Reserve, Strawberry Preserves, fresh grapefruit juice, garnish with strawberry and mint SECOND COURSE

D I S T I L L E R ’ S

S E L E C T

Woodford Reserve is crafted in small batches to ensure the proper time and care is taken to customize each of the five sources of flavor. This batch process creates the distinct taste and crisp, clean finish that sets Woodford Reserve apart from other bourbons.

94 POINTS, EXCELLENT HIGHLY RECOMMENDED Ultimate Spirits Challenge Awards 2015

GOLD MEDAL

Whiskeys of the World Awards 2014

GOLD MEDAL

Scallop with Woodford Aioli, Pickled Vegetable, Fried Leek

San Francisco World Spirits Competition 2014

THIRD COURSE

Double Oaked is twice barreled to produce a rich flavor with purposeful emphasis on sweet aromatics. Uniquely matured in separate charred oak barrels – the second with a lighter char and deeper toast to extract additional soft, sweet oak character.

paired with SADDLE AND STIRRUPS: Woodford Rye, Campari, Grand Mariner, fresh grapefruit juice, ginger syrup, garnish with an orange twist

Filet Medallion with Potato Puree, Boozed Brussels, Woodford Demi-glace, black pepper and parmesan butter

paired with WOODFORD OLD FASHION: Woodford Double Oaked, Angostura Bitters, Orange Bitters, Demerara syrup, luxardo cherry and orange twist garnish DESSERT

D O U B L E

O A K E D

95 POINTS, EXTRAORDINARY ULTIMATE RECOMMENDATION Ultimate Spirits Challenge Awards 2015

DOUBLE GOLD MEDAL

Bread Pudding paired with CHERRY BOURBON ANGLAISE

San Francisco World Spirits Competition 2015

PURCHASE TICKE TS AT CHICAGORE ADER.COM/RESERVE YOURSE AT

WOODFORDRESERVE.COM

$65 PER PERSON · INCLUDES TAX AND GRATUITY

Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, 45.2% Alc. By Vol., The Woodford Reserve Distillery, Versailles, KY ©2015

JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 39

BREWS

Find hundreds of bar suggestions at chicagoreader.com/barguide.

Bottoms up!

FOOD & DRINK

BLUES —AND—

Dovetail in Ravenswood offers a brewery tour on Saturdays. ò COURTESY DOVETAIL BREWERY

WITH THE ORIGINAL CHICAGO BLUES ALL-STARS MONDAY NIGHTS ALL SUMMER LONG

NO COVER · 6-10 PM CHECK WEBSITE FOR DATES

MOTORROWBREWING.COM 2337 S MICHIGAN · CHICAGO 312.624.8149

BREWERY TOUR

A potent look at the art of making craft beer

By JULIA THIEL

A

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

40 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

water tasting on a brewery tour would usually seem beside the point—the point, of course, being to drink beer. But when you’ve already got a lager in one hand and a hefeweizen is on its way, drinking a little water doesn’t sound so bad.

As it turns out, the water tasting is one of the most interesting parts of a tour of Dovetail Brewery in Ravenswood. Beer is 95 percent water, co-owner Hagen Dost explains, so of course the water you use affects the beer you produce. Dovetail uses a reverse osmosis system to try to re-create the water of Pilsen— not the Chicago neighborhood, but the city in Bohemia where pilsner originated. After tasting Chicago tap water, with its distinctive notes of chlorine, as well as neutral-flavored charcoal-filtered water, we tasted the reverse osmosis water with which Dovetail brews most of its beer. Far from neutral, it’s mineral in flavor and so funky that it’s off-putting. The beers made from that water, though, are a different story entirely.

Dovetail’s taproom launched last month with three beers, all European styles: a lager, a

hefeweizen, and a rauchbier, a German smoked beer; still to come (in two years, once it’s done aging) is the brewery’s lambic-style beer.

Noticeably absent from the list is the most beloved and ubiquitous style in craft brewing: pale ale. Dost and co-owner Bill Wesselink are more interested in German and Belgian beers.

And while “lager” might call to mind tasteless macrobrews, Dovetail proves that the style can be much more.

I’ve always thought that describing a beer as “drinkable” is damning it with faint praise, but Dovetail’s lager changed my mind. It’s straightforward, crisp and a touch creamy, with more malt flavor than expected and a bit of caramel. I’ll be ordering it whenever I see it on a tap list for the rest of the summer.

T h e h e f e w e i z e n i s a n o t h e r go o d warm-weather beer, with plenty of citrus that balances out the sweet banana and spicy notes of clove and cinnamon. The rauchbier is full-bodied but not heavy and smells remarkably like smoky bacon—which might suggest pandering to the undying bacon trend if rauchbier weren’t a couple thousand years old.

Ten-ounce pours of all three beers are

included in the $15 price tag for the brewery tour—which happens to be exactly what you’d pay for the beers if you ordered them at the bar, but you drink them while strolling instead of sitting. It provides an informative, interactive explanation of what goes on behind the scenes of a brewery; you can taste pilsner malt and smell Tettnang hops pellets by rubbing them between your palms to release citrus aromas (don’t try eating these) and see some of the equipment that makes Dovetail unusual, like its open-top fermentation tanks (which are exactly what they sound like), aging barrels of lambic, and another fermentation vessel called a coolship.

The coolship—a large, shallow stainless-steel tank that takes up most of the room it occupies—is a crucial part of lambic production, allowing the introduction of wild yeasts and bacteria that will ferment the beer.

Native microflora can vary dramatically, so while Dovetail’s wild beers are being made in the same way as lambics produced in Belgium (the only country where the style can be made, which is why Dost was careful to point out that they’re making lambic-style beers, not lambic), they’re likely to taste completely different. It’s still not a particularly common style in the U.S., and as far as I can tell, Dovetail’s coolship is the first in Chicago (though Whiner Beer in Back of the Yards is having one built).

The tour ends in the tasting room, where you can finish your last beer—and, if three beers on a Saturday morning isn’t enough for you, order more. Dovetail also offers radlers: Filbert’s lemon-lime soda mixed with the lager or hefeweizen, and in a more unusual combination, Filbert’s root beer combined with the rauchbier. The food is limited to giant pretzels, landjaeger sausage, and, incongruously, alfajores (sandwich cookies made with dulce de leche), but you can also order in. And there are worse places to while away a Saturday afternoon drinking beer and listening to the Metra trains rumble by than Dovetail’s sunny, dog-friendly taproom. v Dovetail Brewery 1800 W. Belle Plaine, 773-683-1414, dovetailbrewery.net. Wed-Thu 4-10 PM, Fri 2-10 PM, Sat 11:30 AM-10 PM. Tours take place Saturdays at 11 AM; call for reservations.

v @juliathiel

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JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 41

JOBS

SALES & MARKETING TELEMARKETING FLEXIBLE HOURS. Telemarketers wanted.

Experience a plus, but not necessary.

Paid training. Starting salary $10/hr. with substantial bonus on sales and appointments plus additional incentives for performance. This is a full or part-time position, days or evenings.

If you are a self-motivated, goal orientated person looking to be part of a growing team; APPLY NOW! Please call for interview or send a resume to GM Goldman & Associates, Inc., 847-675-3600. Lincolnwood, IL. Touhy &Cicero, beisen@gmgoldman. com

TELE-FUNDRAISING: HOT SUMMER CASH! Felons

need not apply per Illinois Attorney General regulations.

Start ASAP, Call 312-256-5035

food & drink KAMA INDIAN BISTRO is hiring

chefs with 5+ yrs exp. in upscale Indian fusion restaurant.Culinary degree a plus,contact info@kamabistro.com

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

is hiring 20 farmworkers, apple Orchard from 9/1/2016 to 10/7/2016: 40 hrs/ week. Workers activities include picking, weeding, cleaning, grading, sorting, packing and loading apples and pumpkins, general apple orchard tree and trellis maintenance on occasion and perform any other orchard related duties. Must be able to lift 50 lbs. $12.02/hr. (prevailing wage). Guarantee of 3/4 of the workdays. All work tools, supplies, and equipment furnished without cost to the worker. Free housing is provided to workers who cannot reasonably return to their permanent residence at the end of the workday. Transportation and subsistence expenses to the worksite will be provided or paid by the employer, with payment to be made no later than completion of 50% of the work contract. Send

Resume or contact Illinois Department of Employment Security, Migrant/Farm Workers Programs, 33 State Street, 8th Floor, Chicago, IL 60603, (312) 793-1284, (312) 7931778 FAX, or your nearest State Workforce Agency and reference job order 1908371.

Senior Accountant II for Ecolab Inc. at its facility in Elk Grove Village, IL. Duties: Prepare financial reports and examine documentation for conformance with accounting principles and requirements. Requires a Master’s degree in Accounting or Finance and three (3) years postbachelor’s progressive experience in Accounting or Finance.

Experience must include two (2) years post-Master’s progressive experience in cost accounting.

Experience must also include: Utilizing standard costing systems, including bills of material; Utilizing advanced spreadsheets, databases (to include Excel and Access, HFM and EPM), financial systems and ad hoc reporting; Working with labor variance reporting; Facilitating physical inventory counts; Capex reporting experience with financial reporting and analysis, budgeting and forecasting, and accounting theory and practice; Requires CPA certification. Apply at www.ecolab .com/careers, Req. 63147BR. Must have legal authority to work in the US. EOE. VISUAL THERAPIST NEEDED

(with or without experience) Seeking a college educated individual for a permanent part-time employment in Evanston working with children and adults in a Behavioral Vision Training program with Dr. Jeff Getzell, O.D. Experience preferred but not required for the right individual. Dr. Getzell is willing to work with an individual at an entry level, should there be no previous medical experience.

Requirements: -Exceptional problem solver -Bright -Curious -Open minded Work schedule: -Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays 2pm-6pm -Saturdays 8am-12pm Please note that the employment hours are not flexible.

MARKETINGASSOCIATE MANAGER MARKETING We are looking for a self-motivated marketing manager with experience in digital and print media. This role will manage critical initiatives to support the growth of print, digital and experiential products.

Essential Functions: - Develop communication materials and programs to support: marketing initiatives, promotional advertising, audience/subscription development, advertising sales presentations and partnerships - Create presentations for meetings either from scratch or using existing templates - Print/bind materials for the sales/advertising team - Manage trade process including contract review, submission for approval, communication between parties, and management of trade assets - Event support as needed (may require some evenings or weekends) - Manage relationship with media data services (SRDS, NDX, etc.)

- Analyze and maintain information on team and individual performance to goal for Sun-Times Media products - Work cross departmentally to collect and analyze advertiser campaign data, prepare wrap-up reports for account executives to share with clients - Ensure quality and delivery of marketing initiatives, reporting, and budget management - Coordinate projects and events that may involve multiple departments (editorial, audience/circulation, sales, marketing, 3rd parties) - General support for all marketing team personnel including but not limited to: * Basic audience requests involving information requests in the Scarborough and Nielsen Claritas systems * Basic analytics reporting using the Google Analytics interface - Other duties and projects as assigned Qualifications: Education and Experience - College degree, preferably in marketing or related field - 2-3 years professional office experience Skills: - Proficient in Microsoft Powerpoint, Excel, and Word - InDesign, Scarborough, Google Analytics familiarity is a plus - Ability to handle multiple projects with strict deadlines - Excellent written and spoken communication skills for customer service, presentations, and coordination between internal and external stakeholders - Strong organizational skills - Analytical mindset with ability to deconstruct complex problems and conceptualize solutions Resumes can be mailed, emailed or faxed to the following address: The Chicago Sun Times Attn: Human Resources – Marketing Manager 350 N. Orleans, 10S Chicago, IL 60654 Fax: (312) 321-2288 Email address: hr@suntimes.com – Please note Marketing Manager in the subject line.

The Chicago Sun Times is an Equal Opportunity Employer

42 CHICAGO READER | JULY 28, 2016

Resume submission options: -behavioraloptometry@gmail.com -Fax: 847-866-9822 No phone calls please.

BANKING JPMORGAN CHASE & Co. has

an opening for a Senior Business Analysis & Reporting Analyst position in Chicago, Illinois. Perform database design, data integration, stored procedure writing, reporting development, and data analytics to create management reporting in support of global Commercial Banking Business Services. Limited travel may be required to work on projects at various, unanticipated sites throughout the United States.

Please fax your resume to (312) 732-7830 with following job ID clearly indicated: [160068554].

JPMorgan Chase & Co. supports workforce diversity.

DATABASE ADMINISTRATOR

(POSTGRESQL).

Admin./ test/impl. Postgresql databases. Rea d/understand Java-based ETL processes. Support/enhance APIs. U.S. Bach. deg. or foreign equiv. in Electronics Engineering or Comp. Sci. req’d. Min. 1 yr. exp. in Database Developer &/or Database Admin. pos’n(s) involving Postgresql databases req’d. Prior exp. must incl. exp. designing Java-based ETL processes. PowerReviews, Inc., Chicago, IL. Resumes to: Recruiting, PowerReviews, Inc., 180 N. LaSalle, 5th Floor, Chicago, IL 60601.

MEDLINE INDUSTRIES, INC. has the following openings: (A) Technical Business Analyst (MS CRM Dynamics) to custom’z SFA sys utilz’g MS CRM Dynamics app., etc. (Job site: Chicago, IL).

This job reqs on-call support in non-bus hrs 1 wk/8 wks & during migration; and (B) Web User Interface (UI) Developer to create & dvlp web-based UIs (Job site: Mundelein, IL).

No trvl; no telcomm.

Mail Resumes to: ATTN: Mike Richardson, Medline Industries, One Medline Place, Mundelein, IL, 60060.

EJM ENGINEERING, INC. seeks Electrical Engineer in Chicago, IL. Under sup., plan, design, draw & provide install support of electrical equip for highway, rail & transit projects. Review & modify elec. eng. plans; review specs for lighting, telephone & fire systems. Reqs.

Bachelor’s in Elec. Eng. or rltd.

Mail CV to J. Berry, EJM, 411 S. Wells St., Ste. 1000, Chicago, IL 60607 EOE

G REAT

Opportunity

Railyard Careers.

Drivers, Groundman Operators Needed for local rail yard. Experience preferred. Please apply in person at 3000 Centerpoint Way, Joliet, IL 60436.

SENIOR PROGRAMMER, NAPERVILLE, IL: Limited domestic travel and/or occasional relocation to multiple client locations nationwide to write code using Java, JSP, JavaScript. Work with JIRA, Sharepoint technologies. Utilize Ag ile/Waterfal methodologies. Reply to: Candor Group, Inc., 2272 95th St, Ste 200, Naperville, IL 60564 NUTS ON CLARK POPCORN

Stores now hiring in Chicago for all locations...Earn $ while working with a team. Get paid while training.

Jobs Available Now Midway/O’Hare Airports. Apply in person @ corp. office: 3830 N. Clark St. Chicago.

9am-10am Mon-Fri. Must bring ID’s and Social Security Card to apply.

ARE YOU A care provider looking

for job? Careproviderlounge.com is the solution, with the vast numbers of contacts we get from families seek-ing for nannies and elder caregivers we can get you a job in 48 hou rs.Send your resume to John via info @careproviderlounge.com

OFFICE COORDINATOR: operate office equip., handle corresp., maintain files & calendar. HS dipl. & 3 mo exp. req. Mail res: Wood Structure Company, 2671 Longmeadow Rd Northbrook IL 60062 BRIDAL CONSULTANT: HELP clients choose wedding dresses.

HS dipl. & 2y exp. req. Weekend work req.Mail res: Laurel Bridal Gallery, Inc, 3701 N Harlem, Chicago IL 60634

ARE YOU HIV+? Aged 18-64? Interested in Research? Call Jake at 312-996-0745

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $600-$699 ROGERS PARK! 7455 N .

Greenview. Studios starting at $625 including heat. It’s a newly remodeled vintage elevator building with on-site laundry, wood floors, new kitchens and baths, some units have balconies, etc. Application fee $40.

No security deposit! For a showing please contact Samir 773-627-4894 Hunter Properties 773-477-7070 www.hunterprop.com ROGERS PARK! 1357-67 W

Greenleaf. Studio starting at $695 including heat! Close to transportation, laundry on premises, beautiful courtyard building. One block to Loyola Beach! $40 application fee. No security Deposit. For a showing please contact Samir 773-627-4894 Hunter Properties 773-477-7070 www. hunterprop.com

EDGEWATER!

1061 W. Rose-

mont. Studios starting at $625 to $675, All Utilities included! Elevator building! Close to CTA red line train, restaurants, shopping, blocks to the lakefront, beaches and bike trails, laundry onsite, remodeled, etc. For a showing please contact Jay 773835-1864 Hunter Properties, Inc. 773-477-7070 www.hunterprop.com

MARQUETTE PARK: 6315 S California Studios from $600. Free heat and appliances. Free application fee. Call +1(312)208-1771 7500 SOUTH SHORE Dr. Brand New Rehabbed Studio & 1BR Apts from $650.

Call 773-374-7777 for details.

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

773-637-5957 CHICAGO, HYDE PARK Arms

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

CROSSROADS HOTEL SRO SINGLE RMS Private bath, PHONE,

CABLE & MAIDS. 1 Block to Orange Line 5300 S. Pulaski 773-581-1188 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $130/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

1 BR UNDER $700 QUALITY

APARTMENTS,

Great Prices! Studios-4BR, from $450. Newly rehabbed. Appliances included. Low Move-in Fees. Hardwood floors. Pangea - Chicago’s South, Southwest & West Neighborhoods. 312-985-0556

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

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

Laundry & Security on Premises.

Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030

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

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

SUMMER SPECIAL $500 To-

79TH & WOODLAWN 1 B R $650-$700 2BR $775-$800; 76th & Phillips: 2BR $775-$800.

Remod, appls avail. Free Heat.

Sec 8 welc. 312-286-5678 Chicago, Beverly/Cal Park/Blue Island Studio $575 & up, 1BR $665 & up, 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Prkg.

708-388-0170 FREE HEAT 3113 W. 62rd St. 3BR, 1.5BA, private entrance, $1000/mo.

Steadman Rlty. 773-284-5822 After 5pm 773-835-9870 WEST PULLMAN (INDIANA

Ave) Nice, lrg 1 & 2BR w/balcony.

1BR $550, 2BR $650. Move-In Fee $300. Sec 8 Welcome. 773-995-6950

8324 S INGLESIDE: 1BR, 2nd flr, newly remod., lndry, hdwd flrs, cable. Sec 8 welcome.$660/mo.

708-308-1509, 773-493-3500 û NO SEC DEP û 6829 S. Perry. 1BR. $520/mo & 1431 W. 78th St. $2BR. $600/mo HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

CALUMET HEIGHTS & Chatham:

2 1BR apts w/DR, hdwd flrs, lndry in bsmt, $725/mo heat incl. Also avail Bronzeville 2BR. Call 312-683-5824

1BR 1ST FLR apt, newly rehab, hdwd flrs, spac, appls, lndry facility, Quiet bldg. Sec 8 ok. $650/mo. 773-344-4050 BRONZEVILLE 4520 S King Dr.

Studio & 1BR Apts, utils incl. $635 & $ 750/mo + sec & application fee. M-F 9a-6p. 773-268-3725

BRIDGEVIEW AREA- LARGE

furnished Room in a single home. No drugs/alcohol. Deposit required 708-458-8610 or 708-436-4043

CHATHAM 8642 SOUTH Maryland 1BR, modern with appliances, off street parking. $600/mo + sec. 773-618-2231 CHICAGO - SOUTH SHORE Large 1BR, $660/mo. Free heat.

Near Transportation. Section 8 Welcome. Call 708-932-4582

97th & Oglesby 3BR, 2BA $1200/month plus 1.5 mo sec, background ck, no pets 773-660-9305

1 BR $700-$799 PLAZA ON THE PARK 608 East 51st Street. Very spacious renovated apartments. 1BR $722 - $801, 2BR $837 - $1,009, 3BR $1,082- $1,199, 4-5BR $1,273 - $1,405. Visit or call (773)548-9300, M-F 9am-5pm or apply online at www.plazaonthepark apts.com Managed by Metroplex, Inc

1 BR $900-$1099 Hyde Park West Apts., 5325 S. Cottage Grove Ave., Renovated spacious apartments in landscaped gated community. Off street parking available. Sutdios $950, 1BR $1150 - Free Heat, 2BR $1400 - Free heat; 4BR Townhome, $2200 Call about our Special. Visit or call 773-324-0280, M-F: 9am-5pm or apply online- ww w.hydepark west.com. Managed

by Metroplex, Inc

319 & 321 E. 80TH ST. - Very large, comp renov 1BR apts w/ formal DR & custom features throughout. A/C, stove, fridge & vented microwave incl. $900$1000/mo+$500 non ref-undable move in fee. 773-981-2731

1 BR OTHER BRONZEVILLE FAMILY APARTMENTS PHASE I & II

400 EAST 41ST STREET, CHICAGO, IL SUBSIDY WAITING LIST FOR 2, 3, AND 4 BEDROOMS WAITING LIST OPEN FOR 5 DAYS ONLY! OPENS MONDAY, JULY 25 ,2016 10:00 a.m.

CLOSES FRIDAY, JULY 29, 2016 at 10:00 p.m.

TO APPLY APPLICANTS MUST GO TO WWW.PGSAPT.COM CLICK ON THE LINK FOR BRONZEVILLE FAMILY APARTMENTS WAITLIST REGISTRATION. APPLICANTS MUST AGE QUALIFY MAXIMUM INCOME LIMITS APPLY ONLY ONE APPLICANT PER HOUSEHOLD ALLOWED NO PHONE CALLS!!

3 BDRM, OFFICE, 1 full bath, Liv-

ing rm/dinning area kitchen /stove /re-frigerator & fenced backyard in 91st & Cottage grove Chicago. $975.

00 per month plus sec deposit Tenant pays utility. Call 312 5220600

Wrigleville 2BR, 1400sf, new kit/ deck, FDR, oak flrs, Cent Heat/ AC, prkg avail. $1495 + util, Pet friendly, 773-743-4141 www. urbanequities.com RAVENSWOOD 1BR: 850SF, great kit, DW, oak flrs, near Brown line, on-site lndy/stor., $925$1075/heated 773-743-4141 www .urbanequities.com HOMEWOOD- SUNNY 900SF

1BR Great Kitc, New Appls, Oak Flrs, A/C, Lndry & Storage, $950/mo Incls heat & prkg. 773.743.4141

1 BR $1100 AND OVER 451 W. ST. JAMES PL. 2500N. Available August 1. $1500/mo.

Large 1 bedroom, updated, vintage condo, features old world charm, oak & hardwood throughout, walk-in closet, formal dining room, rent includes bike room, storage shed, laundry facility & heat. 773-750-6338 LOGAN SQUARE BLVD Carriage

House, 2-story LR with fireplace, loft, 1 bedroom & sitting room, modern kitchen & bath, utils included. $1250/ mo. Non-smoking. 773-235-1066

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MANAGEMENT & Investment Ltd. SUMMER IS HERE BUT IT WON’T LAST! OUR UNITS INCLUDE HEAT, HW & CG Patio & Mini Blinds Plenty of parking on a 37 acre site 1Bdr From $750.00 2Bdr From $925.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** CALL FOR DETAILS APTS. FOR RENT PARK MANAGEMENT & Investment Ltd. SUMMER IS HERE BUT IT WILL SOON BE GONE!!

Most Include HEAT & HOT WTR Studios From $475.00 1Bdr From $550.00 2Bdr From $765.00 3 Bdr/2 Full Bath From $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** CALL FOR DETAILS

LARGE ONE BEDROOM apart-

ment near Warren Park and Metra, 6802 N Wolcott. Hardwood floors, Heat included. Laundry in building.

Cats OK. $795-$825/ month. Available 9/1.

773-761-4318, www. lakefrontmgt.com

CHICAGO- VICINITY 73RD/ STONY Island xtra lrg 1BR, garden apt., newly remod, lndry fac.

Clean/quiet/well maint bldg. Start at $750, all utils incl. Sect 8 ok 773-510-9290 SOUTH SHORE 1BR apt, newly renovated apt. hdwd flrs throughout, laundry, secure bldg w/surveillance system & wrought iron fencing. $740. 773-880-2414, 773-580-7797 PULLMAN - NR 108TH & KING DR. Very Spacious 1BR. DR, Heated.

Laundry Fac. Quiet Bldng. $720 + Sec. 773-568-7750

RIVERDALE - NEWLY decor,

2BR, appls, heated, A/C, lndry, prkng, no pets, near Metra. Sec 8 ok. $795.

630-480-0638

THE LATEST ON WHO’S PLAYING

AND WHERE THEY’RE PLAYING

EARLY WARNINGS

WEEKLY E-BLAST GET UP TO DATE. SIGN UP NOW.

110TH & VERNON. Large 1 & 2BR,

Quiet Building w/ many long term tenants, Heat/appls, LR, $700$875/mo no sec, 312-388-3845

ward Rent Beautiful Studios 1, 2, 3 & 4 BR Sect. 8 Welc. Westside Loc, Must qualify. 773-287-4500 www. wjmngmt.com

2BR 1BA GREYSTONE 2FLT

CHICAGO SOUTH - YOU’VE tried the rest, we are the best.

Apartments & Homes for rent, city & suburb. No credit checks.

773-221-7490, 773-221-7493

WEST HUMBOLDT PK 1 & 2BR

73RD AND JEFFERY BLVD. Large 1BRs, heated, hardwood flrs, laundry room, appls, near trans. $700 and up. 773-881-3573

1 BR $800-$899 LAKESIDE TOWER, 910 W Lawrence. 1 bedrooms starting at $895-$925 include heat and gas, laundry in building. Great view! Close to CTA Red Line, bus, stores, restaurants, lake, etc. To schedule a showing please contact Celio 773-3961575, Hunter Properties 773-4777070, www.hunterprop.com

quiet block nr 69th & King Dr Appliances Incl’d, Electric Incl’d garage avail. email me: onyxjoints@aol.com

CHICAGOREADER.COM

Apts, spacious, oak wood flrs, huge closets. heat incl, rehab, $775 up to $875. 847-866-7234

702 WEST 76TH STREET, 1BR Apt Available now, heat included. Starting at $750/mo.

Call 773-495-0286

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CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large 2 room Studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $650-$975/mo. Call 773-233-4939

AUGUSTA/SPRINGFIELD. Large 2 bedrooms, $750 per month plus security, tenant pays heat.

Call 312-401-3799

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

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

CHICAGO, 73RD & King Dr. Beautiful 2BR Apt. Newly remodeled, new cabinets, $750/mo + heat. MUST SEE! Irma, 847-9874850

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

CHICAGO

NO SECURITY DEPOSIT No Move-in fee! No Dep! Sec 8 ok.

MOVE IN SPECIAL B4 the N of this MO. & MOVE IN 4 $99.00 (773) 874-3400

ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled.

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

1, 2 & 3 Bdrms. Elev bldg, laundry, pkg. 6531 S. Lowe.

Call Ms. Williams. 773-874-0100

LARGE SUNNY ROOM w/fridge & microwave. Near Oak Park, Green Line & Buses. 24 hr Desk, Parking Lot $101/week & Up. (773)378-8888 PULLMAN AREA, Newly remodeled 111th St., East of King Dr. $450-$550. Close to shopping & 1/4 block to metra. 773-468-1432 SOUTHSIDE - 8535 S. Green, 1 & 2 BR Apts, well maintained, hdwd floors, $625-$750/mo, security deposit required Call 773874-8451 9143 S. ASHLAND. storefront, Beverly.1200sf Heavy Traffic, A /C, Open Layout, Clean, Secure, Bath, Trans. $1050/mo.

312-914-8967 CHICAGO - CLEAN, NEWLY remod, 1BR, 1st floor Apts, oak flooring. Ready Now! 722 E. 89th St. FREE HEAT. 708-951-2889

58th & Campbell, 1 & 2BR, modern kitchen & bath, dining room.

Starting at $650/mo & up. Heat included. Sec 8 ok. 847-9091538 CHICAGO SOUTH SIDE Beauti-

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

W. AVALON, 1 & 2BR Newly decor. 8059 Ellis & 11200 S. Vernon.

Hdwd floors, heat & appliances incl, $585 & $685. 708-406-2718 71ST/HERMITAGE. 3BR. 77TH /LOWE. 1 & 2BR. 69th/Dante, 3BR. 71st/Bennett. 2 & 3BR. New renov.

Sec 8 ok. 708-503-1366

6944 S. GREEN. Modern 2BR apt, walk-in closet, modern kitchen w/new appls. new bath, background check req’d. 773-203-8491

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms.

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

Low rates daily/weekly/monthly.

South Side. Call 773-376-5200 ACACIA SRO HOTEL Men Preferred! Rooms for Rent. Weekly & Monthly Rates. 312-421-4597

2 BR UNDER $900 2, 3 & 4 BR/2BA on Douglas & Independence: 10 min from Dwntn: Move-In Special: 1 mth-Free Heat & Lights, Stove, Fridge & Blinds Incl.

A/C, Ceramic tile in Kit & BA: Laundry Rm, Tenant Pkng: Hdwd Flrs: Sec 8 OK: $775-$1000. To View Call 773-733-7681

SUMMER SPECIAL: STUDIOS starting at $499 incls utilities. 1BR $550, 2BR $599, 3BR $699. With

approved credit. No Security Deposit for Sec 8 Tenants. South Shore & Southside. Call 312-446-3333

1117 N CENTRAL PARK 2ND fl, 2 deluxe BR, $850/mo. Must sign 6 month lease. Must be employed. credit check. Simmons 773-2782028 CHICAGO, 650 W. GARFIELD BLVD., spacious 2BR with LR & DR, 2nd floor, heated, quiet bldng.

Great trans. $750/mo. 312-7203671.

NR 87TH & STONY: quiet, 2BR, LR, DR, appls, a/c, c-fan, crpt, ten pays heat, nr shops & trans. No sm oking/pets. $825 + sec. 773-3744399 NEW REHAB 2BR, 2nd flr, walk in closet, lrg kitchen, gated bldng, no pets. Near public trans. Tenant pay utils. $750/mo+sec. 773-4716007 RENOVATED 2BR APARTMENT 66th & Washeenaw $700.

Heat not incl 773-905-4567

MORGAN

PARK

2BR, 1.75 BA, near grocery, bus line to Rock Island, $860, heat incl, street parking only, no pets, Sec req. 773253-8768

7757 S. Yates #3. Spacious two bed, hardwood floors, updated cabinets. $650 a month no utilities included. Contact Pam at 312208-1771 or 847-975-0345.

CHICAGO SOUTHSIDE BRAND new 2, 3 & 4BR apts. Excel-

lent neighborhood, nr trans & schools, Sect 8 Welc., Call 708-7742473

AVAI:

2

BEDROOM+1

Bath,separate dining,all wooden floor.Must See at 7038 S Talman ave,chicago,IL.Bob (847)274-4540 CHICAGO 7600 S Essex 2BR

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

1401 W 80TH, Auburn Gresham

2BR from $895, Free heat and appliances. tel:773.916.0039 or 312.593.

1677.

BEAUTIFUL 2BR BRICK BUNGALOW, hdwd floors throughout, finished basement, freshly decorated, laundry room, $1000/mo.

Available now. Near 127th & Union. 773-964-8325 SOUTHSHORE - LARGE 2+ BR Apt, 1 bath, carpeted, new appliances. Laundry available. Heat included. $925/mo. Call 708-2042182 BELLWOOD 2BR APT, 2nd flr East, no pets, W/D in bsmt, tenant

pays elec & gas. Avail Now. $900.

Michael Britton 773-297-7755

2 BR $1100-$1299

2 BR OTHER

4300 BLOCK OF August a, 2BR, 2nd floor, laundry facility on site, $1125/mo, utilities incl. Section 8 ok. No pets / no smoking.

773-418-0195

CHICAGO, PRINCETON PARK HOMES. Spacious 2-3 BR Townhomes, Inclu: Prvt entry, full bsmt, lndry hook-ups. Ample prkg. Close to trans & schls. Starts at $844/ mo. w w w . p p k h o m e s . com;773-264-3005

CHICAGO - 2BR, 1ST flr, $975/ mo, appls/heat, A/C, carpeting, blinds incl. near 91st/Cottage Grove. Sec 8 ok. No Pets. Smoke Free bldg 773-429-0274

EVANSTON 2BR, 1100SF, great kit, new appls, DR, oak flrs, lndry, $1250/mo incls heat. 773743-4141 www.urbanequities.co

nets & Kolher prod., tenant pays heat, 8632 Escanaba, $600/mo + security. Call 773-415-4970

BLUE ISLAND, 2 BR, DR, lndry fac, refs reqd. no pets. $795/mo plus dep. & util. Option: Attic, 2 rooms, 1/2BA. $295 + Dep. 708-481-5212

LINCOLN

SQUARE

CHATHAM BEAUTIFUL REMOD 2 & 3BR, hdwd flrs, custom

Elmhurst: Sunny 1/BR, new appl, carpet, AC, Patio, $895/incl heat, parking. Call 773-743-4141 www.urbanequities.com

2 BR $1300-$1499 2ND FLR 2 BEDROOM + BALCONY + DEN.

Heat, cooking, appliances including dishwasher & microwave, mini blinds, hardwood floors. Great location: walk to lake shopping and transportation.

773/561-4128

2 BR $1500 AND OVER

2 BR $900-$1099 AREA.

4Rm, 1BR No smokers.

No dogs. Credit checked. pics online. $945 heated. 773-725-1505

NR 87TH & STONY ISLAND, 3BR Apt, $1000 + heat, 2 mo sec + 1 mo rent, rec renov ba & kit, gar space avail. Not Sec 8 reg 773771-0785

view. Living room, dining room, Central air, in-unit washer/ dryer. Walk to restaurants, Brown Line. August 1st. $1500 includes heat, electric. 773510-6896.

2Bd, 1Bth, In Unit W/D, Roof Deck, Back Porch, HVAC, Fireplace, DW, Hardwood Flrs, Available Immediately. $2000-$2500 Call: 773 472 5944

CHICAGO - SOUTH SHORE Newly remodeled Studio Apts.

Near Metra, appls incl. $500/mo. Ray 312-375-2630

2BR W/ CARPET, cherry kit cabi-

NONSMOKING TWO BEDROOM garden apartment. Lake-

AUSTIN AREA, 2BR Apt, carpet, small newer building, $700/mo.

Tenant pays heat and elec. Section 8 Welcome. Call 773-457-2284

cabinets, avail now. $1100-$1200/mo + sec. 773-905-8487 Sec 8 Ok

Loc nr Augusta & Laramie.

No Pets, tenant pays utils. $850 & $900 + sec. 630-816-9957

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

LARGE BRIGHT LINCOLN PK

DOLTON: 2BR, 2ND floor in 4 unit building. Heat included, appliances, no pets. $795/mo.

Also 3br, $1095. 708-426-3214

AUSTIN NEW DECOR 2 & 3BR.

LARGE TWO BEDROOM, two bathroom apartment, 3820 N Fremont. Near Wrigley Field. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. Laundry in building.

Available 10/1. $1775/ month. Parking available. $150/ month for single parking space. $200/ month for tandem parking space. 773-761-4318, w ww.lakefrontmgt.com

SAUGANASH AREA : Pulaski & Peterson, 2.5 bedrooms, 1 bath, hardwood floors, 1st floor, quiet building. No smoking. Heat incl. $1500/mo. 773-316-0833

BEAUTIFUL NEW APT! 7649 S Phillips Ave 1, 2 & 4BR 741 S. Evans 2BR. Stainless Steel!! Appliances!!

Hdwd flr!! marble bath!! laundry on site!!

Sec 8 OK. 773- 404- 8926 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 CHICAGO, 42ND & Cottage Grove, Rehabbed Condo Available. 2BR, 1.5BA, parking included. Section 8 Welcome. Call 773263-6473 MATTESON, 2BR, $990$1050; 3BR, $1250-$1400.

Move In Special is 1 Month’s Rent & $99 Sec Dep. Sect 8 Welc. 708-748-4169

CHICAGO 5246 S. HERMITAGE: 2BR bsmt $400. 2BR 1st floor, $525. 3BR, 2nd floor, $625.

1.5 mo sec req’d. 708-574-4085.

CHICAGO 5114 W. KINZIE 4 rooms, 2 bedroom, carpeting, quiet building, close to train, $675 / month + security. 708-865-8903 CHICAGO, DR, c-fans, pays utiles.

Now. 8128 619-7983

REMOD 3BR, LR, hdwd flrs. Tenant $900/mo+sec. Avail S. Marshfield. 773-

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

708-288-4510 6437 S. NORMAL 3 Bedrooms 2 full baths,hardwood floors stove/ fridge Heat, fireplace, Din rm. $875/ Mo +sec 708-653-0119 55TH GARFIELD BLVD and

Honore, 3BR, Hdwd flrs, 2nd flr, safe block, no appls. Free Heat. $900/mo neg. 773-221-6385

6343 S. ROCKWELL - 3BR, incl heat. hdwd flrs, lndry facility, fenced in bldg, fireplace, appiances

$995/mo. Sec 8 ok. 773-791-6100

6641 S WABASH Newly Rehab

3-Bedrooms, Sec 8 OK, No Sec Deposit, $1,190/mo, Move in Now 312576-6443 Chicago, 120th and Normal. 5BR, 2BA, hardwood flrs, full finished basement, island kitchen. $1150/mo + sec. 708-369-3997

QUIET & SECURE, 3rd flr, 3BR, recently renov, appls incl. 4251 W. Wilcox, Garfield Park Community. $850 + 1 mo sec. 708-935-8621

CHATHAM 2BD AVAIL Newly Updated. heat incl, hdwd floors, enclosed back porch, intercom, Mr. Rick 773-994-7562

WEST SIDE, 3BR, 2nd floor, cen-

SOUTHSIDE LOVELY 5 room apt: living rm, din-

STONY ISLAND & 69th Place , 2 & 3 brms, newly remodeled, hdwd flrs, sec. 8 welcome. $750 - $850.

Call 773-758-0309

ing rm, Kitchen, BA, 2BRs. heated, hdwd flrs 773-264-6711

tral air, enclosed back porch and yard, carpeted, stove & fridge supplied, $1000 month, 708-841-8123

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 SECT 8 WELC. 1414 S. Hamlin, 2nd flr greystone, 3BR, newly decor, new appls. NO move in fee!

Sec dep neg. Priv rear porch. Ten pays utils. $1300/mo. Avail now.

Call btwn 9am-5pm, 773-616-3067 CHATHAM 3BR, 1BA, newly

remod, LR & DR w/recessed lighting, hdwd flrs, C/A, indiv heat & alarm system. $1250/mo. 773-491-8438 MARKHAM, 1500 BLOCK OF W. 163RD ST. 3BR, brick ranch, Sec 8 OK, no Bsmt, 2 car gar, side drive, $1200-$1350/mo + sec. 708715-0441

South Shore - 6815 S. Merrill,3BR 2 full BA, 3rd fl,c-fans, cent heat & air, hdwd, $13 00 + 1 mo sec. Ten pays utils. Credit check. 773-643-1970 SEC 8 3BR voucher! Markham 3br/

1ba Ranch 2 car det gar no bsmt; AC & super clean! $1400/-month 708267-0011

XL 2ND FLR APT., 78th & S. Sangamon St., 3BR, 1BA, $1000/ mo + sec. Heat incl. No pets, sec 8 OK. 773-874-0524, before 9pm.

4341 S GREENWOOD 1N $1395 large 4BR, 1BA, all updated, Heat and water incl., no sec dep. Call Toni 773916-0039 or Pam 312-208-1771

5BR House 2 full BA, full bsmt, kitchen appls included, Section 8 Welcome, $1400/ month 708-957-7319

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799 CALUMET CITY, Freshly painted, 3BR, 2BA, eat in kitchen, fridge /stove incl. C/A, hdwd flrs, newly remod bsmt, storage lndry room w / W/D, 2.5 car gar, sec sys avail. $1200 + utils. 708-846-3424 3BR 2 CAR GAR, fin bsmt, hdwd flrs, c/a, all vouchers welc, $1500/ mo. Also 3BR apt for rent, 2BR voucher accepted $1050/mo. 708800-2562

S. Holland’s Finest $1700/ month located near 166th & Cottage Grove Ave ,6 rm home, formal din rm, liv rm, w/ full finished bsmt Call C. J. 773-865-4741 4356 S LAKE Park $1375 3BR w/

Prkng, All Updated, Sep Utilities, Central Air & Heat, No Sec Dep, Pam 312-208-1771

NEW DECOR 5BR, nr Harrison &

Laramie, laundry hkup, gated yard, $1600. Tenant pays utils. No pets 847 .720. 9010

PARK MANOR: 7532 S Vernon, Beaut rehab 3BR, 2BA house, granite ctrs, SS appls, whrlpl tub, fin bsmt, $1475/mo. 708-288-4510 76TH AND CALUMET

5BR, 2BA, Fenced yard, nr transportation,avail 8/1/16. $1550/mo. Bernard 312-721-5692

3 BR OR MORE $2500 AND OVER SAUGANASH 8RM 3BR Non-

Smoking. Lg rms Eat-in Kitch w/ granite & SS. Lg lot & yard. Family Rm+ Office. Credit checked. Pics online. (773) 315-6490

3 BR OR MORE OTHER

CALUMET CITY, If you see it, you’ll want it. Everything brand new 3BR, 2.5 BA, kit w/ new appls, fin bsmt, fully A/C, 2.5 car gar, 524 Hirsch Ave. Sect 8 welc.

773-317-4357 CHICAGO S: Newly renovated, Large 3-4BR. In unit laundry, hardwood floors, very clean, No Deposit! Available Now! 708-6551397 CHICAGO HEIGHTS 3BR, 1BA, NEWLY REMODELED, APPLS INCL , SECTION 8 OK. NO SEC. DEPOSIT. 708-8224450 RIVERDALE 13923 MICHIGAN.

Newly Decorated 3BR, 1BA, range, fridge, dryer, sec 8 OK. Call Gordon 708-868-0873

SECTION 8 WELCOME WEST PULLMAN 255 W. 111th Pl, 6BR, 3BA, $1620. Newly remod, appls incl, full bsmt, garage. 5BR Voucher Accepted. 773-793-8339 MATTESON, SAUK VILLAGE &

UNIVERSITY PARK. 4, 3 & 2BR, House/Condo, Section 8 ok.

For information: 708-625-7355

CHICAGO 2707 E 93rd St. 56BR apartment, 1st & 2nd flr, 2 or 3BR voucher ok; Sec. 8 Welcome.

847-926-0625

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JULY 28, 2016 | CHICAGO READER 43

STRAIGHT DOPE

By Cecil Adams Q : For the past year or so, steel shipping

A : Past year? Buddy, empty shipping containers have been piling up for decades. Not just in the lot across the street, incidentally, but also on the ocean floor, which gets littered with thousands of the steel boxes annually— they fall off boats in bad weather, etc. This has risen to the level of a capital-P problem, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Atmospheric Administration publishing a 2014 study of the containers’ effects on aquatic ecosystems. Short answer? Not great.

But that’s a question for another day. Back on land, the reasons for the glut of intermodal cargo containers, as they’re called, are neither mysterious nor particularly complicated.

Take the relationship between the U.S. and China. The relative strength of the American dollar, paired with the weakness of the Chinese economy, means we’re currently buying a lot more stuff from them than they are from us. So a ship laden with iPhones crosses the Pacific to the Port of Los Angeles, unloads, and . . . then what? It either takes the empties back, or it leaves them behind. Extrapolate this over the vast, intricate web of various international economic relationships—and consider that moving those empties around the globe accounts for 5 to 8 percent of shippers’ operating costs, maybe $20 billion a year all told—and you’re looking at a whole lot of accumulated empty containers.

Speaking of which, let’s pause for a brief appreciation of intermodal containers.

Prior to their invention, things were basically thrown onto boats willy-nilly, which as you can imagine wasn’t ideal for business—for one, it took forever to load a ship that way.

In 1956, a North Carolina trucking-company owner named Malcom McLean started moving freight in stackable containers that could be transferred straight from truck to boat. It made so much sense that a mere five years later, the federal government announced it’d give subsidies only to ships configured to carry such boxes. International sizing standards soon emerged, resulting in the Legolike multicolored stacks of eight-foot-wide containers, mainly in lengths of 20 or 40 feet, seen on cargo ships today. This was such a boon for efficiency that within 20 years the 44 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

SLUG SIGNORINO

containers seem to have been piling up on every vacant commercial lot in every town in America, offered for sale or lease. What’s up?

Is there a new, better way to ship and deliver bulk cargo? Or has there been a decrease in shipping due to the worldwide recession?

Could shipping containers provide a low-cost housing alternative? —BRENT MCGREGOR

cost of shipping from North America to Asia dropped by half; the Economist has argued that containerized shipping has been more important to globalization than 50 years of trade agreements.

OK, yay for American ingenuity and all that. But what the hell do we do with all the empty ones? You’re not the first to suggest they could be used as dwellings; this is one of those trendy ideas that the media marvels over every few years, and it’s been tried here and there. Containers could house the homeless, the thinking goes, or provide temporary lodging in the wake of natural disasters.

There’s a catch or two, though, as pointed out in a 2011 article at the architecture website ArchDaily. Designed to stand up to all sorts of weather, shipping containers come coated with some pretty toxic stuff—think lead-based paint—that has to be stripped off before they’re inhabitable, and their plywood floors contain things like arsenic to keep pests away. “The average container eventually produces nearly a thousand pounds of hazardous waste before it can be used as a structure,” ArchDaily notes. “All of this, coupled with the fossil fuels required to move the container into place with heavy machinery, contribute significantly to its ecological footprint.” However unsexy, it’s often greener and cheaper to just build a new wood-frame structure than to repurpose a container.

Housing aside, another proposed solution to the empty-container problem is the “gray box”: moving away from the current practice of companies owning and labeling their own containers and toward a coordinated system where everybody draws from a collective pool, the boxes reassigned as needed.

But any comprehensive fix will be a heavy lift, trying to get all the shippers, regulators, et al. in sync, meaning you’ll have to put up with the eyesore a while longer, I’m afraid. Hey, though, better in your front yard than banging into the Great Coral Reef, right? v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

l

l

PRESENTS

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

An intersex woman’s dilemma

Is it unethical not to disclose the condition? Plus: a porn/real-life mismatch

Q : I’m 28 years old and live

in the midwest. I’m intersex, but I identify as female. I’m not out about being born intersex. Due to surgeries and hormones, I look like a fairly attractive female. I’ve been hanging out with a chill hetero guy, and things are getting very flirty. Is it unethical of me to not disclose my intersex-ness to him? —IN NEW TERRIFIC EROTIC ROMANCE

A : “We all have to make

decisions about what we disclose to partners or potential partners and when we disclose it,” said Alice Dreger, historian of medicine and science, sex researcher, and author of Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice, among other works.

Dreger, for readers who may not be familiar with her, is a former Northwestern University bioethicist who’s now the founding board chair of the Intersex Society of North America. “Intersex,” for readers who may not be familiar with the word, is an umbrella term covering dozens of different inborn conditions.

“They all involve someone having something other than the ‘standard’ male or ‘standard’ female body,” explained Dreger. “There are lots of different ways to be intersex, including some so subtle that you might never even know you had that particular variation of development.”

So that chill hetero boy you’re thinking about disclosing your intersex-ness to, INTER? He could be intersex himself and not know it. But you do know it. Does that obligate you to disclose?

“Lying is a bad idea, of course, but she’s not lying by presenting herself as a woman and identifying as a woman,” said Dreger. “She

is a woman, just one whose body came with some parts that aren’t common to most women, or maybe lacking some parts that are common to most women (depending on her particular intersex condition).”

Dreger suggests making a mental list of the things a long-term partner might want, need, or a have a right to know about your history and your body. Then using your best judgment, INTER, decide what to share with him and when to share it.

“For example,” said Dreger, “if this chill hetero guy talks about wanting kids someday, and the letter writer is infertile, she might want to mention sooner rather than later that she was born with a condition that left her infertile.

Do her genitals look or work differently than he might be expecting? If so, she might think about when it would be best to give him some guidance about how her body is a little different and what works best for her.”

Each of us has to balance our partner’s legitimate right to certain information, INTER, with our right to medical privacy as well as our physical and emotional safety.

“There’s no reason for her to feel like she has to announce, ‘I’m an intersex woman.’ She could opt to say, at some point, ‘I was born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia,’ or ‘I was born with androgen insensitivity syndrome,’ or whatever her specific condition might be, and then answer his questions,” said Dreger. “If the label ‘intersex’ were part of her core identity—a critical part of who she feels she is— then she might want to tell him early on. But otherwise, she can disclose things just like non-intersex people do with regard to fertility, sexual health, sexual preferences,

!

I ! r P C I t COM s

AUGUST 18-19-20

etc—at a pace and in a way that promotes a good relationship and makes you feel honest and understood.”

$6+2 (3)62!.* /68!/ 13, '!290 67 - 0.3'*0"""

Q : My husband looks at

porn . . . porn of women with a body type almost the polar opposite of mine. Example: big boobs and tattoos . . . Does that mean he’s no longer attracted to my body? I’m so confused . . . He says I’m hot and sexy, but what he looks at does NOT make me feel that way. —PERSONALLY

OFFENDED REGARDING NUDES

A : Is it possible your partner

is attracted to . . . more than one body type? Example: Your body type and its polar opposite?

And if your partner were looking at porn that featured women with your exact body type . . . would you feel affirmed? Or would you be writing to ask me why your husband looks at porn of women with your exact body type when he can look at you? And is your husband sharing his porn with you . . . or are you combing through his browser history?

Either way, PORN, if looking at what he’s looking at makes you sad . . . maybe you should stop looking at what he’s looking at? If he’s not neglecting you sexually . . . if he isn’t just saying he finds you hot and sexy but showing you he does . . . why waste time policing his fantasies?

People enjoy what they have and fantasize about what they don’t. So long as we don’t take what we have for granted . . . it’s not a problem . . . unless we decide to make it one. v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at thestranger.com. v @fakedansavage

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Get a side of jam with your lunch every weekday at noon with the Reader’s 12 O’Clock Track series on TheBleader.com.

JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 45

Quilt ò DANIEL DORSA

NEW

Asking Alexandria, Born of Osiris, I See Stars, After the Burial 11/1, 4:30 PM, House of Blues b Ballroom Thieves 10/8, 10 PM, Schubas Jon Bellion 10/28, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 7/29, 10 AM b Big Sandy & His Fly-Rite Boys 10/29, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 7/29, 11 AM Claudia Quintet 10/26, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Slaid Cleaves 10/8, 8:30 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 7/29, 11 AM Death From Above 1979, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Deap Vally 10/13, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 7/29, 10 AM, 17+ Demolition Hammer 9/24, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, on sale Fri 7/29, noon, 17+ Gorguts, Intronaut, Brain Tentacles 10/8, 7:15 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 7/29, 10 AM, 17+ Guided by Voices 9/3, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 7/29, noon, 18+ Har Mar Superstar 10/28, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 7/29, noon, 17+ Robyn Hitchcock, Emma Swift 11/17, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/28, noon b Hot Sardines 10/25, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/28, noon b Incognito 10/28, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/28, noon b Gavin James 11/17, 7:30 PM, Subterranean b Jamestown Revival, Johnny Fritz 10/22, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 7/29, 10 AM, 18+

Johnnyswim 11/12, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 7/29, 10 AM b Tom Jones 10/3, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Kidd Jordan & Alvin Fielder 9/2-3, 9:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Mac Sabbath 9/12, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Magnificent Coloring Day with Chance the Rapper, Skrillex, John Legend, Alicia Keys, Lil Wayne, Young Thug, and more 9/24, 1 PM, U.S. Cellular Field, on sale Fri 7/29, 10 AM b Frank McComb 8/31, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/28, noon b Moosh & Twist 9/10, 6 PM, Subterranean b Mouth of the Architect 8/12, 9:30 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint The 1975 11/13, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 7/29, 10 AM b Pack A.D. 11/16, 8 PM, Schubas Poison the Well 8/14, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Porches 9/30, 9 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 7/29, 10 AM, 17+ Pwr Bttm 10/26, 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b Quilt, Mutual Benefit 9/20, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Quintron & Miss Pussycat 10/15, 9 PM, Hideout Royal Canoe 11/9, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen RX Bandits, And So I Watch You From Afar 10/5, 8:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 7/29, 10 AM, 17+ Shinyribs 10/21, 9 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 7/29, 11 AM Sondorgo 9/15, 8 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, on sale Fri 7/29, 11 AM This Wild Life 10/12, 6 PM, Subterranean b

46 CHICAGO READER - JULY 28, 2016

Two Tongues, Backwards Dancer 11/16, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Thu 7/28, noon, 17+ Phil Vassar 10/23-24, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 7/28, noon b Volbeat, Killswitch Engage 9/13, 6:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 7/29, 10 AM b Wild Belle 8/26, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Yonder Mountain String Band 10/29, 8:30 PM, House of Blues, 17+

UPDATED Bill Callahan 9/25-26, 7:30 and 9:30 PM, Constellation, early shows sold out, late shows added, 18+ Mekons 9/19-20, 8 PM, Hideout, 9/19 sold out Sumac 8/9-10, 8 PM, Township, second show added, 17+

UPCOMING Airbourne 9/30, 9 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Alehorn of Power with Thor, Argus, and more 11/12, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Anderson Wakeman Rabin 11/5, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Anthrax 9/21, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Bad Boy Family Reunion with Puff Daddy, Lil’ Kim, Mase, Faith Evans, Mario Winans, and more 8/27, 8 PM, United Center Band of Skulls 9/10, 10 PM, Metro, 18+ Boys Like Girls 8/12, 8 PM, the Vic b Buzzcocks 9/22, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+

b Cold Cave, TR/ST 9/14, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Fred & Toody Cole 9/21, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Crystal Fighters 10/4, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Dear Hunter 9/21, 7:30 PM, Metro, 18+ Deerhoof 8/5, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall DTCV 8/27, 10 PM, Schubas DuPont Brothers 8/21, 8 PM, Schubas Elvis Depressedly 8/30, 7 PM, Subterranean b Failure 10/21, 9 PM, Double Door, 17+ The Faint, Gang of Four 9/30, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ God Is an Astronaut 9/3, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Gold Panda 9/16, 10 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Gucci Mane 9/23, 8 PM, UIC Pavilion Glen Hansard 9/20-21, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Health 9/25, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Honeydogs, Dusty Heart 8/18, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Gavin James 11/17, 7:30 PM, Subterranean b Jesu, Sun Kil Moon 11/13, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ Kikagaku Moyo 10/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Elle King 11/5, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre b Lake Street Dive 9/23, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Jenny Lewis, Watson Twins 9/8, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre b Madball 8/14, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Marduk, Rotting Christ 9/11, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Cass McCombs 10/21, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Merchandise 9/30, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Meshuggah, High on Fire 10/28, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ North 41 8/19, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Of Montreal 9/19, 7 PM, Metro b Omni 8/16, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Paper Bird 9/10, 7 PM, Subterranean Perfume 8/31, 8 PM, The Vic b Pigface 11/25, 9 PM, House of Blues, 17+ P.S. Eliot 9/13, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Puddles Pity Party 10/7, 7:30 PM, Park West, 18+ Pup 11/12, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Queensryche 12/9, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Reckless Kelly 9/5, 8 PM, City Winery b Record Company 10/7, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Darius Rucker 8/20, 7 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Satan 10/26, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Screeching Weasel, Bowling for Soup, Ataris 11/4, 6:30 PM, Concord Music Hall b Skinny Lister 11/3, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Squirrel Nut Zippers 10/9, 5 and 8 PM, City Winery b Allen Stone 10/7, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Tacocat 9/25, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Thee Oh Sees 11/19, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ This Will Destroy You 11/18, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Twenty One Pilots 1/28, 7 PM, United Center VNV Nation 10/23, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Vomitface 8/31, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Ryley Walker 8/25, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Warpaint 9/30, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Wertico Cain & Gray 8/11, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b William Elliott Whitmore 10/29, 5:30 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club Whitney 12/3, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Wild Child 9/17, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Brian Wilson 10/1, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Andrew W.K. 9/15, 7 PM, Revolution Brewing Tap Room Wolves in the Throne Room 9/23, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Yes 8/20, 8 PM, Copernicus Center b Young the Giant, Ra Ra Riot 11/4, 7:30 PM, Aragon Ballroom Dweezil Zappa 10/12, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ ZZ Top, Gov’t Mule 9/17, 7 PM, Rosemont Theater, Rosemont

SOLD OUT Bear vs. Shark 10/29, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Bear’s Den 9/23, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Echo & the Bunnymen 9/17, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Lukas Graham 1/17, 7 PM, House of Blues b Lush 9/18, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Morgan Heritage 8/24, 6 PM, Double Door b Pearl Jam 8/20 and 8/22, 7:30 PM, Wrigley Field Tricky 10/30, 7 PM, Double Door v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene SINCE 2011, CHICAGO-BASED experimental radio platform Radius has broadcast some 600 episodes of far-out sound art, both live and prerecorded. These days it’s hosted on WIIT 88.9 FM and streams online at theradius.us, and at 7 PM on Friday, July 29, local musician Anthony Janas will perform one of the series’ most ambitious pieces yet. In Water Has Nothing to Say and Neither Do I, Janas will perform on a treated sailboat—basically a 25-foot daysailer outfitted with hydrophones and contact microphones, the sounds of which he’ll filter through a modular synthesizer as he sails from Adler Planetarium to 31st Street Beach. The audience can listen live onshore with handheld radios provided by the organizers. Ahoy Captain John Cage!

If dry land is more your thing, on Friday, July 29, Township hosts Drop Your Weapons, a benefit for anti-gun-violence alliance Everytown for Gun Safety. The alliance, which claims three million members, works with lawmakers to pass commonsense gun laws—a damned good cause!

The benefit will include sets from righteous punks such as Tim Kinsella, Josh and Eli Caterer of the Smoking Popes, and Vortis. Stick around for a silent art auction of work by the likes of Jay Ryan, the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow, and the Mekons’ Jon Langford, as well as drink specials from Revolution Brewing and raffle prizes from local bars and restaurants.

Lollapalooza ain’t the only four-day festival with an anniversary to celebrate this weekend! House of Sol kicks off its tenth year Thursday, July 28. It’s part of Fiesta del Sol, a long-running fest that benefits Pilsen Neighbors Community Council— and which launched House of Sol in 2007 to honor Chicago’s house-music community. This year’s lineup has 34 terrific DJs, among them juke mastermind Gant-Man (Friday, 9:30 PM), global bass duo Soulphonetics (Saturday, 3 PM), and house heavy DJ Heather (Sunday, 7 PM). House of Sol is free and takes place at 1500 W. Cermak. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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JULY 28, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 47

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