Chicago Reader: print issue of August 11, 2016 (Volume 45, Number 44) by Chicago Reader

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 | A U G U S T 1 1 , 2 0 1 6

politics Pat Quinn pushes for mayoral term limits in Chicago. 10 Food & Drink Nightwood’s former chef is doing big things at Giant. 37

Video games level up to high a Chicago a ist and polymath William Chyr is using PlayStation as the canvas for his magnum opus, Manifold Garden. By RYAN SMITH 12

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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, ANNE FORD, ISA GIALLORENZO, JOHN GREENFIELD, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, DAN JAKES, BILL MEYER, J.R. NELSON, MARISSA OBERLANDER, DMITRY SAMAROV, KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI, ZAC THOMPSON, DAVID WHITEIS, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS APRIL ALONSO, SARA COHEN, MARC DAALDER, KT HAWBAKER-KROHN, FARAZ MIRZA, SUNSHINE TUCKER, ANNA WATERS

FEATURES

IN THIS ISSUE 26 Movies In Equity, we ﬁnally get a ﬁlm about women on Wall Street.

MUSIC

4 Agenda A political revue from Slate and Second City, the untold story of Parliament Funkadelic, and more recommendations

ARTS & CULTURE

Video games level up to high art

Chicago polymath William Chyr is using PlayStation as the canvas for his magnum opus, Manifold Garden. BY RYAN SMITH 12

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8 Street View Effortless late-summer style from the co-owner of Wishful Thinkin Clothing 8 Marijuana A new Illinois law defines driving while stoned. 9 Transportation The family of a bike messenger struck and killed by a Chicago tour bus files a wrongful death lawsuit. 10 Politics Former governor Pat Quinn pushes for mayoral term limits in Chicago. 11 Activism How protests in Ferguson inspired the occupation of “Freedom Square.” 21 Visual Art A collection of homemade erotic art mailed to Alfred Kinsey arrives at Intuit. 22 Theater The Globe Theatre’s Merchant of Venice subverts the play’s anti-Semitism. 23 Comedy Susan Messing celebrates ten years of Messing With a Friend, her weekly improv show.

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Chicago’s black queens are upholding a radical gender-bending tradition. BY KT HAWBAKER-KROHN AND SUNSHINE TUCKER 18

FOOD & DRINK

CITY LIFE

ARTS & CULTURE

VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT NICKI HOLTZMANN VICE PRESIDENT OF NEW MEDIA GUADALUPE CARRANZA SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES MARISSA DAVIS, AARON DEETS MARKETING AND EVENTS MANAGER BRYAN BURDA DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY BUSINESS MANAGER STEFANIE WRIGHT ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA CLASSIFIEDS REPRESENTATIVE KRIS DODD

28 In rotation Current musical obsessions of Kittyhawk’s Kate Grube, Peggy Fioretti of Kickstand Productions, and Reader writer Leor Galil 30 Shows of note Congolese band Mbongwana Star introduces Chicago to its mix of postpunk and funk grooves.

Drag race

24 Lit Bookworks closes up its Wrigleyville shop after 32 years in business.

37 Restaurant review: Giant Former Nightwood chef Jason Vincent is doing big things in a little Logan Square spot. 40 Bar review: The Ladies’ Room Fat Rice’s new bar brings Macau’s red-light district to Logan Square.

CLASSIFIEDS

41 Jobs 41 Apartments & Spaces 43 Marketplace 44 Straight Dope Why do so many Americans dislike Hillary Clinton? 45 Savage Love Orlando-based sportswriter Dan Savage ﬁlls in for the vacationing advice columnist. 46 Early Warnings Calexico, Deerhunter, Esperanza Spaulding, and more shows in the weeks to come 46 Gossip Wolf Reggae Fest Chicago debuts, and more music news.

ON THE COVER: PHOTO OF WILLIAM CHYR BY COLLEEN DURKIN; PROPS BY DOUG JOHNSTON. FOR MORE OF DURKIN’S WORK GO TO COLLEENDURKIN.COM

AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 3

AGENDA R

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Send your events to agenda@chicagoreader.com

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Swiss Army Man Sat-Sun, August 13-14 @ 4:00pm

Finding Dory

4 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

Ayn Rand in this delightful new musical by Gregory Dodds. Loosely based on the real-life Rand’s chance encounter with director Cecil B. DeMille before the height of her fame, this imagined scenario isn’t concerned so much with Rand’s politics as it is with her calculated love aﬀair with actor Frank O’Connor (they subsequently maintained an open marriage for decades). Here she’s the curt, methodical, practical embodiment of the objectivist philosophy she famously championed—everything the easygoing Frank isn’t. Still, opposites have a tendency to attract, and even the most conservative folks enjoy “fonding” every once in a while, as Rand likes to say. It makes for some good comedy and even better musical numbers. The show is part of MCL’s musical series Premier Premieres. —MATT DE LA PEÑA Through 9/10: Sat 7:30 PM, MCL Chicago, 3110 N. Sheﬃeld, mclchicago.com, $20. Einstein’s Gift In 1909 chemist R Fritz Haber, a German Jew who’d renounced his faith to advance

his career, successfully demonstrated the feasibility of artificial ammonia production. His discovery led to the production of nitrogen fertilizer, saving Europe from starvation, and to the creation of chemical weapons—including Zyklon B, the gas used in Nazi death camps. Haber’s is a cautionary tale with global implications, and while Canadian playwright Vern Thiessen’s 2003 dramatization of Haber’s rise and fall has its clunky moments, it gives big questions about personal and scientific responsibility deep resonance—as does Genesis Theatrical’s stilted but earnest production, directed by Elayne LeTraunik. Thiessen shoehorns Einstein into the mix unsuccessfully, but his Huber is a towering tragic figure betrayed by his principles and his nation, compellingly captured in Chris Saunders’s unstinting portrayal. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 8/28: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6860, genesistheatricals.com, $32, $17 students and seniors.

Fitzfest The name F. Scott Fitzgerald is synonymous with a generation; it conjures a world of stags and debs, highballs and champagne, college boys and filles de joie. His novel The Great Gatsby, which flopped hard when it first appeared in 1925, continues to signify the primeval American fascination with wealth and power, as it probably always will. First Floor Theater’s Fitzfest showcases eight one-act responses to Fitzgerald’s life and work. The best one, from playwright Calamity West, is inspired by the short story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Shockingly for an event of this nature, West appears to be the only author among the group who’s ever felt moved by Fitzgerald’s writing. The rest of the bill, I’m sorry to say, is filled with ugly drubbings of his life and gender politics that depict the author of Tender Is the Night as a kind of gigantic oppressor. —MAX MALLER Through 8/13: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Mon 8 PM, Collaboraction, 1579 N. Milwaukee, 312226-9633, firstfloortheater.com, $15-$25. The Jackie Wilson Story Kevin R Rolston Jr.’s charismatic presence and thrilling vocals anchor this portrait

of influential singer Jackie Wilson, aka “Mr. Excitement.” Known for his falsetto wails, athletic dance moves, strutting swagger, and sexy interaction with women in the audience—all of which Rolston re-creates impressively—the Detroit-born Wilson started out as a boxer before switching to a career in music and becoming one of the most influential performers in the development of R&B into soul during the 1950s and ’60s. Directed and written by Jackie Taylor, with dynamic choreography by Rueben Echoles, the show doesn’t whitewash the downbeat side of Wilson’s saga—his drinking, his womanizing, his volatile temper, his depression following the murder of his teenage son, his exploitation by corrupt record executives, and his final years in a semicomatose state following an onstage heart attack in 1975. But the production’s raison d’etre is the music—rousing renditions of classic hits such as “Lonely Teardrops,” “Reet Petite,” “A Woman, a Lover, a Friend,” the 1967 crossover smash “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher,” and even Wilson’s gospel-tinged reworking of the Irish ballad “Danny Boy.” —ALBERT WILLIAMS Through 9/4: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Black Ensemble

Theater Cultural Center, 4450 N. Clark, 773-769-4451, blackensembletheater. org, $55. Mother and Me Halfway through Broadway veteran Melinda Buckley’s one-woman show chronicling her fraught, codependent relationship with her glamorous but erratic Hungarian-immigrant mother (think working-class Gabor sister), Buckley has the increasingly demented octogenarian involuntarily committed to a psych ward. As the debilitated diva disappears behind steel doors, she hisses at her daughter, “I never want to see you again.” It might be an emotionally devastating moment, but like most everything in these unrelentingly manicured 75 minutes, it reads as a sharp bit of crafty acting. Under Kimberly Senior’s direction, Buckley is so poised and precise (the Broadway training is always evident) there’s hardly room for spontaneity or vulnerability— even the tears seem to arrive on cue. The material is poignant; less acting and more candor might give it emotional depth. —JUSTIN HAYFORD Through 8/14: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 2 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln, 773-404-7336, greenhousetheater.org, $25-$30. The Promise of a Rose Garden To date, no women have graduated from the U.S. Marine Corps’ Infantry Officer Course, the psychologically and physically demanding 86-day crucible soldiers must pass through in order to become commanders. Dustin Spence’s new play imagines the first class of female candidates in which some are successful—fertile ground for some sophisticated ideas about the politics of tokenism and the unique burdens carried by trailblazers. Elyse Dawson’s production capitalizes on those themes at fleeting moments; overall, though, the play is so dramaturgically clumsy that it starts spinning its wheels two-thirds of the way through. Nonchronological storytelling, outsize performances, and military platitudes further hinder the emotional impact Babes With Blades seems to be aiming for. —DAN JAKES Through 9/10: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-293-3682, babeswithblades.org, $10.

Queen Margaret Mark Van Doren once called the three parts of Henry VI a “massive and masculine performance.” Queen Margaret is Henry VI made less massive and less masculine, a brief, spirited adaptation for Muse of Fire that highlights the arc of one female character, Margaret of Anjou (Annelise Dickinson). It’s an intriguing exercise. The Bard himself later mocked his style here—the young Shakespeare had wandered out of his depth, and only survived his overwrought speeches and clanging, leaden lines by being a kind of genius. Playwright and codirector Jemma Alix Levy has chiseled away a redaction that retains everything said by Margaret while throwing in some relevant bits from Richard III. Dickinson’s performance is dynamic and heartfelt. Still, even with the drastic cuts—Levy deletes Joan of Arc entirely—Margaret is nulliﬁed onstage by the advent of Richard (Jon Beal), the deformed human wrecking ball. —MAX MALLER Through 8/28: Sat-Sun 3 PM, Ingraham Park, 2100 Ridge, Evanston; also Thu 8/19-Fri 8/20, 7:30 PM, Evanston Public Library, 1703 Orrington, Evanston; museoﬃretheatre. weebly.com. F Thrones! The Musical Parody R Created by well-known Chicago improv ensemble Baby Wants Candy,

this Game of Thrones musical parody makes its U.S. debut after playing at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Full disclosure: the character I most closely related to is Brad (played by a versatile and high-energy Nicholas Druzbanski), the only one who’s never seen the HBO juggernaut. If you like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and you like porn, you’ll love this show, the other characters conﬁdently assure him. What follows is a genre-bending, do-it-yourself living-room musical put on by Brad’s friends to catch him up on the plot. Endless inside jokes and spoilers had the audience falling out of their chairs on the day I attended—I just enjoyed the knockout vocal harmonies, particularly from Caitlyn Cerza. —MARISSA OBERLANDER Through 8/21: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 6 and 9 PM (except 8/13, 10 PM only), Sun 3 PM, Apollo Theater, 2540 N. Lincoln, 773-935-6100, apollochicago. com, $29-$44.

The Jackie Wilson Story o DANNY NICHOLAS

Best bets, recommendations, and notable arts and culture events for the week of August 11

ANTIQUE

MARKET & SALE

AUG. 13 & 14

Two Gentlemen of Verona R Critics often deride this Shakespeare comedy as one of his ﬂimsiest,

but Two Gents has more to oﬀer than a precursory glimpse at some of the Bard’s future greatest hits. In this version from the Reutan Collective, replete with old-school verse and Baz Luhrmann-like touches (Cosmo, Starbucks, board shorts), Valentine and Proteus are bros turned foes in pursuit of the Duchess’s daughter, Silvia, which is to say nothing of Proteus’s scorned lover, Julia, who’s determined to gain some type of closure by donning drag. Love, inﬁdelity, betrayal . . . much of this has a familiar ring to it—it’s a little bit Romeo and Juliet, a little bit Othello, and thanks to an excellent cast, a little bit rock ’n’ roll. —MATT DE LA PEÑA Through 8/14: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Side Project Theatre Company, 1439 W. Jarvis, 773973-2150, reutancollective.com, $20.

DANCE

Jimmie Blues and the Case of R the Accidental Dance Jordan Batta and Billy Siegenfeld star in this

noir dance performance from Jump Rhythm Jazz Project. Fri 8/12-Sun 8/14: 7 PM, Links Hall at Constellation, 3111 N. Western, 773-281-0824, linkshall.org, $20.

COMEDY

Joan & Ro Former Second City R cast members Katie Rich (currently a writer on Saturday Night Live) and Holly Laurent (now an LA writer and actor) return to Chicago with an improv show. Fri 8/12, 8 PM, iO Theater, the Mission Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury, 312929-2401, ioimprov.com, $10.

Take Action Show: #BlackLivesR Matter Members of Chicago’s comedy scene speak out about reform-

ing law enforcement and helping victims of violence. Wed 8/17, 10 PM, Playground Theater, 3209 N. Halsted, 773-871-3793, the-playground.com, $10.

Unelectable You You’d think this wretched presidential campaign would at least be good for comedians, but as NPR host Peter Sagal explained to Slate editor in chief Jacob Weisberg earlier this summer, the glut of low-hanging fruit together with the ugly, not-at-all funny stakes can be a rotten combination for parodists. A collaboration between Slate and Second City, this cathartic political revue vents frustration while managing to ﬁnd joy in the 2016 election’s absurdities. That said, the sketches are frequently safe and public-domain generic rather than opinionated—more Capitol Steps than The Daily Show. Mischievous crowd work, though, is reliably hilarious. —DAN JAKES Through 8/28: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 4 and 7 PM, Up Comedy Club, 230 W. North, 312-337-3992, upcomedyclub.com, $36-$46.

Survivor Talk: In Our Voices R At this iteration of the Illinois Holocaust Museum’s semimonthly event,

Comic Martin Morrow in Take Action Show: #BlackLivesMatter o KELSIE HUFF

VISUAL ARTS Arts Club of Chicago The Arts Club Centennial, a reenactment of the interactions between artist Alexander Calder and then-Arts Club president Rue Shaw that led to the creation of the mobile sculpture Red Petals. Paul Durica hosts. Fri 8/12, 7 PM. Mon-Fri 11 AM-6 PM. 312787-3997. 201 E. Ontario, 312-787-3997, artsclubchicago.org. Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art “Private Eyes: Selected Artwork From the Kinsey Institute Collection,” personalized erotic artifacts See page 21 for more on the show. Opening reception Fri 8/12, 5:30-8:30 PM. 8/12-10/2. Tue-Wed 11 AM-5 PM, Thu 11 AM-7 PM, Fri-Sat 11 AM-5 PM. 756 N. Milwaukee, 312-243-9088, art.org. Museum of Contemporary Art MCA Talk: Michelle Grabner and Angel Otero, the artists step away from the canvas to discuss their painting techniques. Sat 8/13, 3 PM. Tue 10 AM-8 PM, Wed-Sun 10 AM-5 PM. 220 E. Chicago, 312-2802660, mcachicago.org, $12, $7 students and seniors, free kids 12 and under and members of the military, free for Illinois residents on Tuesdays.

LIT

So You Wanna Be A Naked R Girl Naked Girls Reading invites female audience members to get nude

and tell a story—willing participants get free admission and compete for a prize. Fri 8/12, 8 PM, Studio L’amour, 4001 N. Ravenswood, ste. 205, 773-641-6387, nakedgirlsreading.com, $20.

Mitchell Winthrop speaks as part of Survivor Talk o JOHN PREGULMAN

Holocaust survivor Mitchell Winthrop recounts the story of his survival in the ghetto of Łódź, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the displaced persons camp he was detained in after the war. Sun 8/14, 12:30 PM, Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center, 9603 Woods, Skokie, 847-967-4800, ilholocaustmuseum.org. Vu Tran with Michael Harvey R Vu Tran reads from his recently released Dragonﬁsh, a mystery set

in Las Vegas’s Vietnamese-American community. He’s joined by local author Michael Harvey, whose latest crime novel, Brighton, follows the life of a Boston journalist. Thu 8/11, 6:30 PM, City Lit Books, 2523 N. Kedzie, 773-235-2523, citylitbooks.com.

MOVIES

More at chicagoreader.com/movies NEW REVIEWS Abortion: Stories Women R Tell Produced for HBO, this engrossing documentary by Tracy Droz

Tragos comes down hard on the state of Missouri, where women who seek abortions have a choice of exactly one provider and are further constrained by a 72-hour waiting period. Yet the personal and often raw testimony collected from about two dozen women spans the political divide over abortion, providing one of the most complex treatments of the issue since Tony Kaye’s monumental Lake of Fire (2006). Many of the subjects are patients or staﬀers at Hope Clinic in Granite City, Illinois, just across the state line from Saint Louis, and their stories are a grim reminder of how many women are driven to terminate pregnancies by sheer poverty. But Tragos also honors the experience of pro-life activists still haunted by their own abortions years earlier. Removing men from the equation seems to clarify the argument on both sides, though of course that’s easier to do in a movie than in a legislature. —J.R. JONES 91 min. Arclight

For more of the best things to do every day of the week, go to chicagoreader. com/agenda.

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Anthropoid This beautifully photographed but slow-moving thriller dramatizes the events of Operation Anthropoid, the British military mission in which members of the Czech resistance were recruited to assassinate high-ranking Nazi oﬃcial Reinhard Heydrich during World War II. The real thrills don’t arrive until the third act, long after two Czech parachutists trained in London (Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan) alight in their occupied homeland to rendezvous with their comrades on the ground. British director Sean Ellis not only cowrote the script but shot the movie himself, placing his cast of mostly British actors (attempting Czech accents to varying degrees of success) at the edges of the frame or focusing on their necks from behind during tense conversations to emphasize the characters’ mounting misgivings. With Toby Jones, Charlotte Le Bon, and Anna Geislerová. —LEAH PICKETT R, 120 min. River East 21

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Down There Chantal Akerman’s penultimate documentary (2006) is a diary of her brief stay in Tel Aviv, the most European of all Israeli cities yet not one in which the Belgian director felt at ease. As she preferred, a ﬁxed camera records long takes, in this case pointed out her living room window to capture the mundane activities on apartment balconies across the way. On the soundtrack Akerman muses about the suicides of her Aunt Ruth and Fania Mussman (the mother of writer Amos Oz) and struggles to connect her own identity as a daughter of Holocaust survivors to the realities of Israeli statehood. But work and health problems so exhaust her that she sleeps through a terrorist bombing. The movie is striking but reveals more about the ﬁlmmaker’s fragile state of mind than about the milieu. —ANDREA GRONVALL 78 min. Sat 8/13, 8 PM. Chicago Filmmakers W

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AGENDA B Gordon Parks Elementary Kevin Willmott, the adventurous screenwriter behind Chi-Raq (2015) and C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004), turns to documentary for this urgent chronicle of a hard-up grade school serving some of the poorest children of Kansas City, Missouri. “Poverty is trauma,” one counselor explains, and there’s ample evidence of how it disrupts the children’s education: students move from one school to another because their families are transient, and the kids onscreen seem genuinely needy (in one scene a principal lecturing a child leaves the room for a moment and the child asks the cameraman for a dollar). Willmott constructs a story arc out of the school’s certification difficulties—it sued the state after losing its charter in 2013—but the real conflict, between the chaos of the children’s home lives and the structure required for them to learn, is ongoing and intractable. —J.R. JONES 57 min. Sun 8/14, 3 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center Hell or High Water Two R brothers in West Texas (Chris Pine, Ben Foster) stage a

series of armed, low-skilled bank robberies (they bypass the safe and settle for the tellers’ cash on hand) in hope of scraping together $50,000 to save the mortgage on their family’s farm; meanwhile a Texas Ranger nearing retirement (Jeff Bridges) and his Native American partner (Gil Birmingham) close in on the two bandits. Written by Taylor Sheridan and directed by cult filmmaker David Mackenzie (Starred Up, Mister Foe), this action thriller is deceptively routine, foregrounding the men’s comings and goings even as Mackenzie teases out the dynamics of each partnership. When the final showdown arrives, the men are redefined by their deeds and what began as a sharp genre piece deepens into a subtle character study. —J.R. JONES R, 102 min. Landmark’s Century Centre, River East 21

Kaili Blues Dreams of the R dead weave through this enigmatic drama about a widowed

physician who journeys from the Chinese provincial city of Kaili to distant Zhenyuan to find his missing young nephew and deliver a gift to the dying friend of a coworker. En route the doctor reaches the village of Dang Mai, and in one bravura 41-minute tracking shot he’s driven around town by a motorcyclist who may be the nephew, mysteriously grown to adulthood. This looping shot, reflecting a Buddhist view of the universe as an endless cycle of life, death, and reincarnation, adds to the film’s hallucinatory aura, as does a trippy, ethereal score by Lim Giong (a frequent collaborator of Jia Zhangke and Hou Hsiao-hsien). Bi Gan directed this boldly original

Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story debut feature. In Mandarin with subtitles. —ANDREA GRONVALL 113 min. Fri 8/12, 7 and 9:15 PM; Sat 8/13-Sun 8/14, 5:30 and 7:45 PM; and Mon 8/15–Thu 8/18, 7 and 9:15 PM. Facets Cinematheque The Kind Words Three grown children of a broken Israeli family grieve for their mother, who has died of cancer; reject their father, who deserted her for a younger woman; and grapple with the news that their true biological father may be a French-Algerian filmmaker from their mother’s past. This revelation is telegraphed so aggressively in the first half of the movie that it barely constitutes a surprise, but director Shemi Zarhin (Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi) is less interested in suspense than in the family members’ quirks, and a nicely ambiguous ending affirms his seriousness of purpose. Finely characterized but sluggishly paced, the movie focuses on issues of fertility and generation, with an attendant air of self-absorption. In Hebrew with subtitles. —J.R. JONES 118 min. Fri 8/12, 2 and 6 PM; Sat 8/13, 7:45 PM; Sun 8/14, 3 PM; Mon 8/15, 8 PM; Tue 8/16, 6 PM; Wed 8/17, 8 PM; and Thu 8/18, 6 PM, Gene Siskel Film Center; also Wilmette Nine Lives A fussy real estate mogul (Kevin Spacey) with little time for his wife and children is trapped inside the body of his daughter’s tomcat. One has to wonder why an actor of Spacey’s caliber would appear in something like this: the premise (a distant, workaholic father is transformed into something nonhuman in order to reconcile with his family) has been done to death, and the script is stupid and debasing, subjecting the tycoon to numerous cat-piss and emasculation jokes after he turns into “Mister Fuzzypants.” Industry veteran Barry Sonnenfeld (cinematographer of Raising Arizona and Misery, director of The Addams Family and Men in Black) seems to have collapsed at the wheel, leaving his actors—including Jennifer Garner, Cheryl Hines, and Christopher Walken—to do a lot of mugging for their paychecks. —LEAH PICKETT PG, 87 min. River

East 21, Arclight, Cicero 14, Century 12 and CineArts 6 Sound of Redemption: The R Frank Morgan Story How many chances should a guy get?

If he can play jazz saxophone like Frank Morgan did, as many as he needs. Framed by a memorial concert at San Quentin, where the noted bebop player was incarcerated for many years, this 2014 documentary by N.C. Heikin lays bare the contradictions of his creative life. Morgan was praised for his talent from an early age, but a troubled family history left him plagued by self-doubt and heavily addicted to heroin. Burglary, check-kiting, and drug possession landed him behind bars, but his remarkable playing never stopped. The many interviews with family, friends, and lovers suggest that Morgan elicited goodwill no matter how many times he fell—and that’s a talent in itself. —DMITRY SAMAROV 84 min. Wed 8/17, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

Tear the Roof Oﬀ: The Untold Story of Parliament Funkadelic George Clinton, the mastermind behind the 70s musical collective Parliament-Funkadelic, is notably absent from this documentary, in which past employees accuse him of epic chicanery. P-Funk began in the 60s as a New Jersey doowop group called the Parliaments, who were signed to Motown at one point; they never released anything on the label, but as the ﬁlm indicates, Clinton took a cue from founder Berry Gordy, setting himself up as a high-rolling music impresario with Parliament, the trippier Funkadelic, and such popular side groups as Bootsy’s Rubber Band and the Brides of Funkenstein. Clinton wasn’t exactly a model boss—one musician says he got paid in cocaine; another remembers playing 55 shows in 61 days and ending up with a bus ticket and a $20 bill—and the stories of economic exploitation sit uneasily with the band’s onstage ethos of collective euphoria. Bobby J. Brown directed. —J.R. JONES 58 min. Fri 8/12, 8:30 PM, and Sat 8/13, 8:15 pm. Gene Siskel Film Center v

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AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 7

CITY LIFE Marijuana

o ISTOCKPHOTO

New Illinois law defines ‘stoned driving’

o ISA GIALLORENZO

By MAYA DUKMASOVA

Street View

Around the way girl WISHFUL THINKIN CLOTHING co-owner Brooke Moss is the picture of eﬀortless late-summer style: cutoﬀ shorts, a roomy plaid shirt, and sporty sneakers. Her high-gloss lipstick, shiny necklaces, and sleek golden-blond pixie cut add just the right amount of glam to the laid-back look. —ISA GIALLORENZO

WH EN GOVERNOR Bruce Raun er signed a new law decriminalizing marijuana possession July 29, Illinois became the 17th state to consider small possession a civil matter subject to a citation and a fine rather than a criminal offense. If you’re caught carrying less than ten grams of marijuana (which, it seems from some photos, is a lot of marijuana), cops may issue you a ticket for $100 to $200. Chicago has had an ordinance decriminalizing pot possession of up to 15 grams since 2012. “I’m obviously thrilled that the state is taking this approach,” says Amy Campanelli, who heads the Cook County Public Defender’s office. “It’s a progressive, fair criminal justice reform.” Campanelli’s office represents overwhelmingly low-income, minority clients in Cook County courts, and she hopes the new law will lead to fewer arrests for possession. Even with the Chicago decriminalization ordinance, Campanelli says that her lawyers continued repre-

senting dozens of clients charged with small possession every month. “These arrests are stopping people from getting jobs and getting school loans,” Campanelli says. “ It stops opportunity.” Importantly, the new law stipulates that possession citations will be automatically expunged after six months. The new state statute also adds a noteworthy wrinkle to the legalization landscape by defining what it means to drive under the influence of marijuana. Drivers will be subject to DUI charges only if they have five or more nanograms of THC in their blood, or ten or more nanograms of THC in their saliva. Defense attorneys in Chicago are also celebrating this aspect of the new law. Before, the state could bring DUI charges against anyone with even trace amounts of THC in their system. This meant that someone who used pot weeks ago could still test positive and wind up facing misdemeanor charges and steep fines.

The DUI stipulation is just as crucial as decriminalizing small possession statewide, Campanelli argues, because it will protect drivers who were not in fact driving under the inﬂuence from DUI charges. That people could be slapped with DUIs for trace THC in their systems “was making a crime without any criminal intent,” she says. So what do these new DUI thresholds mean for recreational smokers? Can you have a postdinner joint and still be ﬁne to drive? As with blood alcohol levels, the answer to this question varies depending on a person’s size, weight, and the potency of the bud. However, research has shown that red blood cells do not absorb THC well and that the blood content of THC spikes right after use but drops off fairly quickly. Similarly, saliva does not absorb THC well and testing has not proven reliable. In any case, waiting a couple of hours to drive after getting high is a

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

SURE THINGS THURSDAY 11

FRIDAY 12

SATURDAY 13

SUNDAY 14

MONDAY 15

TUESDAY 16

WEDNESDAY 17

× Half Ac re Beer D i nner Six specialty brews from Half Acre Beer Company are paired with a ﬁve-course tasting dinner featuring panfried perch, semolina gnocchi, and duck posole. 6:30 PM, Vie, 4471 Lawn, Western Springs, vierestaurant.com, $100.

r Ginza Holiday A celebration of Japanese culture that includes traditional food and drink, taiko drumming, Japanese folk dancing, and more. 8/12-8/14: Fri 5:30-9 PM, Sat 11:30 AM-9 PM, Sun 11:30 AM-5 PM, Midwest Buddhist Temple, 435 W. Menomonee, ginzaholiday.com, $7.

Ö L . A .T. E . Ride Friends of the Parks hosts its 28th annual overnight bike ride. The event includes a 25-mile trek, breakfast at Buckingham Fountain, and sunrise yoga sessions. 10:30 PM-5:45 AM, Buckingham Fountain, 500 S. Columbus, lateride.org, $45.

ê No rthalsted Ma rket

# Young Fe minist

C Drekfest 2016 Stage Left Theatre hosts a night of so-bad-they’re-good plays including Moist: A Mermaid Play and Mother Goose: The Royalty-Free Jukebox Musical. A panel of judges will award the title of “Grand Loser” to the worst of the bunch. 7:30 PM, ComedySportz Theatre, 929 W. Belmont, stagelefttheatre.com, $15.

" Sounds Like Chi-

8 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

Days In its 35th year, the midwest’s largest outdoor street festival features live music, drag performances, a variety of vendors, arts and crafts, and local food and drink. Sat 8/13-Sun 8/14: 11 AM-10 PM, Halsted between Belmont and Addison, northalsted.com, $10 suggested donation.

Conference Oﬀ the Sidelines hosts a free half-day conference for Chicago’s young feminists (under 21) featuring panels on sexual assault and activism with keynote speeches from Kwyn Townsend Riley and Ireon Roach. 9 AM-1 PM, KPMG, 200 E. Randolph, otschicago. org. F

cago: Live Podcast Festival A three-day podcast festival, where local podcasts—including Nerdette, Tell Me I’m Funny!, and General Admission—record shows in front of live audiences. Mon 8/15-Wed 8/17: 6:30 PM, Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted, steppenwolf.org, $20 per day.

CITY LIFE Blaine Klingenberg

good idea, especially since tests have shown that even the mildest buzz can correlate to blood THC levels far above the legal limit. Whether police departments in Illinois will be able to test drivers effectively is another question. Practically speaking, private defense attorney Michael O’Meara, who was also a Cook County prosecutor for several years, is skeptical that testing for THC in blood and saliva could be done in any systematic way, especially during traffic stops. “It is going to be much more difficult for law enforcement to successfully prosecute DUI cases for marijuana,” he says. When it comes to blood testing for THC, there is no equivalent to portable alcohol breathalyzers, and experts say portable saliva tests are unreliable. It’s not clear whether the Chicago Police Department even owns any portable saliva-testing equipment—the department responded to a request for comment with its protocol for alcohol testing. If cops don’t have a warrant, O’Meara notes, drivers can refuse to submit to blood, urine, or saliva testing—just as they can refuse breathalyzers and field sobriety tests after being pulled over for suspected drunk driving. “A portable breathalyzer is not considered as reliable as a breathalyzer at the station,” O’Meara explains. Cops use portable breathalyzers to establish probable cause for arrest, but the results from these tests are not admissible during trial, O’Meara says. Arrestees can even refuse breathalyzer tests at police stations. O’Meara predicts that, given the invasiveness of blood tests, more people will refuse them than breathalyzers. Without evidence from these tests, it’s very difficult for the state to win DUI cases, O’Meara says. However, he also notes that refusing to submit to field sobriety tests or bodily fluid testing can earn a driver’s license suspension. The public, he says, will have to weigh that consequence alongside all the other bad potential consequences of driving while stoned. v

ß @mdoukmas

o JONATHAN LOÏC ROGERS

TRANSPORTATION

Following suit

The family of a bike messenger struck and killed by a Chicago tour bus ﬁles a wrongful death lawsuit. By JOHN GREENFIELD

wrongful death lawsuit was filed last week on behalf of the father of bike courier Blaine Klingenberg, who was fatally struck by a double-decker tour bus at Michigan and Oak during the evening rush on June 15. The suit names bus driver Charla Henry and her employer, Chicago Trolley & Double Decker Company. According to Klingenberg’s friends, he was on his way to meet up with colleagues at Oak Street Beach after work when the collision occurred. He was bicycling north on Michigan through the intersection when he was struck and dragged by the westbound bus. Klingenberg was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital and pronounced dead on arrival. The Chicago Police Department crash report laid the blame on Klingenberg, stating, “The victim disregarded the light at Oak and turned into the bus, causing the collision.” Henry has not been issued traffic citations or charged with a crime. But in exclusive interviews with the Reader, two witnesses said they were convinced that the bus driver was at least partly responsible for the messenger’s death because she also entered the intersection after her light turned red. The wrongful death suit was filed in the

Cook County circuit court by the bike-focused personal injury firm FK Law (a sponsor of Streetsblog Chicago, which I edit). The document claims that Henry was guilty of one or more of the following acts and/or omissions: • “Disobeyed a solid red indication on a traffic signal” • “Failed to exercise that degree of care and caution that a reasonable person under similar circumstances would have exercised in the operation of the [double-decker] bus” • “Failed to keep an adequate lookout” • “Drove the . . . bus at a speed that was greater than was reasonable given the traffic conditions and the use of the highway” • “Failed to avoid hitting a bicyclist” • “Was otherwise careless or negligent in the operation of the . . . bus” The suit argues that, in addition to being fatally injured, Klingenberg “suffered great pain and anguish, both in mind and body prior to his death.” It also argues that Klingenberg’s father, Walter Klingenberg, as well as Blaine’s mother, Beverly Klein; brother, Corey Klingenberg; and sister, Kendal Klingenberg, have suffered the loss of Blaine’s “company and society.” The suit seeks a minimum of $50,000 in damages—the minimum required to get a

case into the circuit court’s law division. However, FK Law attorney Brendan Kevenides believes the final figure will likely be much higher. “We’re looking for an amount commensurate with the enormous loss felt by the family,” he says. “At this point, much of the evidence points to the driver having entered the intersection on a red light,” Kevenides adds. Chicago police detectives have reviewed video of the crash taken from an Office of Emergency Management and Communications camera at the southwest corner of Oak and Michigan, according to a statement from Police News Affairs, but haven’t determined whether or not the bus driver was at fault. (OEMC denied a Reader FOIA request to access the footage, arguing that allowing a civilian to see which parts of the intersection are visible to the camera would undermine efforts to prevent terrorism and other crimes.) FK Law subpoenaed OEMC for the tape last week. Kevenides says the department will likely have two or three weeks to respond. FK Law staff and outside experts hired by the ﬁrm also inspected the bus last week. “We’ve uncovered a lot, but there’s a whole lot more info out there,” Kevenides says. “Our strategy moving forward is to investigate exactly what happened and try to gain a much clearer picture than was previously reported.” The ﬁrst status hearing for the lawsuit has not yet been scheduled. A lawyer for the bus company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Family, friends, and coworkers of Blaine Klingenberg held a memorial bike ride and barbecue last month dubbed “RYB Fest,” the name inspired by the hashtag #RideYoBike. According to organizers, the purpose of the event was “to raise awareness of insecurities in bike infrastructure, the presence and vulnerability of cyclists on the streets, and celebrate the life that Beezy brought to all of us.” The ride began in Humboldt Park and continued downtown to some of Klingenberg’s favorite standby spots, then proceeded up Michigan to the crash site. Afterward, the group headed northwest to Richard Clark Park for a barbecue and trail riding at the Garden, a dirt-jump course within the park. About 200 cyclists filled the street in Klingenberg’s honor. v

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

AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 9

CITY LIFE

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

Former governor Pat Quinn recruiting voters to sign his petition in June

POLITICS

Taking the initiative

Former governor Pat Quinn pushes for mayoral term limits in Chicago.

By BEN JORAVSKY

oincidentally, I sat down for breakfast with former governor Pat Quinn to talk about mayoral term limits last week on the very day that a certain mayor named Rahm laid off 1,000 employees, including 500 teachers, from Chicago Public Schools. Even though he’d promised he wouldn’t make any classroom cuts. And even though the tens of millions in property tax dollars he needs to avoid such cuts sits in his TIF bank accounts. You know, that Mayor Rahm. But back to Quinn. As you may have read, he’s been spending his summer attempting to gather the 53,000 or so signatures he needs from Chicago voters to get a binding referendum placed on the March 2018 ballot. If passed, it would impose a two-term limit on the mayor of Chicago, thus blocking Emanuel from running for a third term in 2019. Quinn calls it his “Take Charge Chicago” referendum, though I think we might call it the “Protect us from Rahm” initiative. Since we, the voters, seem unable or unwilling to protect ourselves from him on our own.

10 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

A word about Quinn: He looked hale and hearty as he wolfed down a platter of French toast. If he harbored any bitterness over his 2014 defeat by Governor Bruce Rauner, he didn’t show it. He didn’t even seem deterred by the fact that he’d failed to obtain enough signatures to get the referendum on this November’s ballot, his original goal—a failure that will surely make his enemies gloat. No, he seemed as ebullient as ever as he greeted the steady stream of people who stopped by our table in the near-north-side eatery. Man, if all the people who say they voted for Quinn had actually voted for him, he’d still be governor. As always, Quinn had a Rain Man-like precision about his subject. He cited the exact article and section of the Illinois constitution that allows for such initiatives. He specified the precise number of signatures he needs to get his petition on the ballot (52,519) as well as the exact number he alone has gathered—“6,165 and counting”—since he launched the drive in June. He detailed the concerts, movies in the parks, and festivals he’d attended over the last

few weeks—rain or shine—while collecting signatures. “I’ve been to every part of Chicago,” he said. “I enjoy this—it’s democracy.” By my count, there are at least four theories as to why he’s interrupted his retirement at age 67 to launch this challenging endeavor: (1) he’s using the publicity to prepare himself for a 2018 run against Rauner; (2) he’s paying back Rahm for various grudges; (3) he loves this stuff; (4) all of the above. For his part, Quinn subscribes to theory number three. Since he was a 28-year-old law school student in 1976, Quinn’s overseen three statewide binding ballot initiatives—though only one succeeded. In 1980, he gathered enough signatures for a binding referendum on whether Illinois should cut back the number of legislators in the statehouse. It survived a court challenge and was approved by voters. In 1994, he attempted to place on the ballot a binding referendum on term limits for state legislators—including house speaker Michael Madigan and future senate president John Cullerton. It never came before voters because the state supreme court bounced it from the ballot after the Chicago Bar Association challenged its constitutionality—a 4-3 ruling that irks Quinn to this day. “I’ve always believed in direct democracy,” he says. And then, almost as if he were teasing people like me, people who are skeptical about term limits, he adds: “People on the liberal progressive side don’t always realize its potential.” He says this latest initiative is not a payback for Rahm’s past slights—a claim I ﬁnd hard to believe. Yes, the two have shared a few allies over the years. Ironically, Forrest Claypool—the budget cutter Rahm appointed as CEO of the public schools—was a Quinn aide back in the 1980s. But by and large, Quinn and Emanuel are vastly different political creatures. Rahm’s the quintessential insider who uses his clout to impose his will on, well, just about anyone he can. And Quinn’s the onetime maverick who, throughout the 80s and 90s, pissed off the powerful with his ballot initiatives and populist talk. In 2012, Quinn pulled a fast one on Rahm

o ASHLEE REZIN/SUN-TIMES MEDIA

when he used a last-minute appointment to keep the mayor from seizing control of the Illinois Sports Facility Authority, the state agency that oversees publicly financed stadiums, like Sox Park. Quinn’s maneuver kept the mayor from doling out public money to the Cubs to rehab Wrigley Field. It just goes show to you, even an old populist can occasionally outfox a fox. And Rahm irritated Quinn by offering only minimal assistance in his gubernatorial campaign against Rauner, the mayor’s old friend and business partner. Not that Quinn will ever admit it. Even under my relentless breakfast-time crossexamination, he steadfastly refused to concede that he holds a grudge against Emanuel. Instead, Quinn stuck to his explanation about how the state constitution specifically permits voters to impose mayoral terms limits. Then he recited the names of the 20 or so cities around the state—Naperville, Franklin Park, Wilmette, etc—that have done so. Then he noted that Chicago’s the only city among the ten largest in the country that doesn’t have mayoral term limits. Then he lost me with a glorious riff about American history that included a reference or two to George Washington, Ben Franklin, James Madison, and King George III—among others. Finally, I could take no more. “All right, already,” I said. “Give me that petition.” With the thought of the school cuts and TIFs on my mind, I signed it. Quinn aide Elizabeth Norden and a waiter looked on as witnesses, just in case Rahm’s election lawyers should challenge my signature at some future election board hearing. C’mon, folks. You know Rahm’s not going to let this referendum come before you without a fight if he wants to run for a third term. I realize that in the past I’ve generally written off term limits as Tea Party folly. And that more than once I’ve been known to say we already have term limits. They’re called elections. I guess this means that after about 25 years of watching voters reelect mayors like Daley and Rahm, I’m starting to lose confidence in Chicago’s ability to vote out its bums. The biggest surprise is that it took me so long. v

ß @joravben

CITY LIFE

Read Derrick Clifton’s columns throughout the week at chicagoreader.com.

Activists have camped outside Homan Square since July 20. o SUNSHINE TUCKER

ACTIVISM

Freedom summer

How protests in Ferguson inspired the occupation of “Freedom Square” By DERRICK CLIFTON

n a recent Wednesday afternoon in “Freedom Square,” pedestrians take refuge from the scorching heat in a hospitality tent stocked with campaign petitions, snacks, and a cooler of bottled water. A few kids dabble in watercolor painting, while adults empty trash and slice meat and vegetables for grilling. Curious community members approach to ask what has compelled these activists to brave the summer elements as long as they have. For nearly three weeks, protesters and their supporters have encamped on this vacant west-side lot, across the street from the Chicago Police Department’s Homan Square facility. An investigation by the Guardian last fall revealed that police had “disappeared” more than 7,000 people at the site, conducting off-the-books investigations and allegedly torturing and abusing detainees. Organizers describe Freedom Square as “a community block party and occupation to imagine a world without police.” The occupation will continue indeﬁnitely, they say, until city officials meet their demands—including shutting down Homan Square, revoking a proposed “Blue Lives Matter” ordinance, and

releasing reports about the death of 16-yearold Pierre Loury, who was fatally shot by police in April. “It’s important for activists to take their ideologies out of the meeting room and into the block,” says Kristiana Colón from within the hospitality tent. Colón is codirector of the #LetUsBreathe Collective, which is leading the occupation. “Part of being out here is having the autonomy to construct a village where we live our values every day and have the courage to resolve conﬂict without calling police,” she says. A passerby on the sidewalk catches Colón’s eye. “Would you like a bottle of water?” she asks, launching an exchange that ultimately wins another supporter for the occupation and its demands. Her attention frequently shifts from coordinating volunteers and accepting donations to tidying up the area and sharing lighter moments with kids at play. Colón and her brother, Damon Williams, drew inspiration for Freedom Square and their collective from the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri. They traveled to Ferguson two years ago this month (a journey detailed in the Reader’s April 7 cover story,

“Daughters of the Revolution”) and watched as the Ferguson group Lost Voices vowed to occupy a protest area near Ferguson police department headquarters until officer Darren Wilson was arrested for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. Colón and Williams dedicated crowdsourced funds to ensuring that the camp remained livable and sustainable. On the 47th day, police officers forcibly ended the occupation. (A grand jury chose not to indict Wilson for the shooting.) On July 20, Chicago-based Black Youth Project 100 staged a human blockade of Homan Square, during which 13 demonstrators were arrested, according to legal observers. Earlier that day, before leading a march in support of the action, #LetUsBreathe pitched seven tents on what’s now the occupation site. The tents were originally meant to create a visual spectacle, Colón explains, and to represent seven vital areas where resources could be redirected away from policing: restorative justice, education, employment, mental health, housing, arts, and nutrition. (They later added an eighth area, addiction treatment, after input from North Lawndale residents.) But on the night of the march, children from the neighborhood suggested another use for the tents. “They asked, ‘Are you all staying here? We want to camp with you,’ ” Colón says. “That was the ﬁrst sign of a desire for that kind of consistent engagement from the community.” After hearing from the kids, organizers went home that night pondering what would come next. In the conversations that followed, they drew inspiration from a few other concurrent events. Some of the Ferguson protesters would soon arrive to attend a ﬁnal rehearsal of Colón’s play reimagining their experiencs, Florissant & Canfield, named for a Ferguson intersection near where Brown was killed. That same weekend, groups in North Lawndale commemorated the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Chicago Freedom Movement, which rallied for open housing, quality education, and economic opportunities. These events sparked what organizers describe as an “overnight decision” to plan a longer occupation of the site. Freedom Square now feeds more than 200 people each day, fueled by the labor of organizers and volunteers, as well as in-kind do-

nations. At any given time, well-wishers drop off packs of bottled water, meat for grilling, fresh fruits and vegetables, ﬁrst aid kits, and other supplies to keep the grounds stocked. Organizers send daily alerts over social media detailing the donations they need. The space is also an extension of the collective’s Breathing Room programming, which offers free food and clothing, books, performances, and other vital resources, all of which are donated or exchanged. More than 20 children from North Lawndale—some

“When people ask about how long we’ll be out here, we say, ‘As long as we need to be, and as long as we can.’ ” — Activist Kristiana Colón

of whom joined the occupation with family members—show up daily to paint and draw in the arts and crafts space, play basketball, and attend educational workshops. Ferguson activists have also stuck around to help. “Even though I’m not from here, the support and energy has been overwhelming,” 25-year-old Dante Carter says. “Everyone has embraced me and shown me more love than I ever expected. . . . We’re here to help the community, to feed people, to smile, and to give the kids new experiences too.” The lot’s owners have yet to show up. Police haven’t attempted to remove the activists, though Colón says some officers occasionally pull up, rolling down their windows to taunt or berate them. (CPD did not immediately respond to requests for comment.) “We never imagined we’d be able to hold off police interference for this long,” Colón says. “And when people ask about how long we’ll be out here, we say, ‘As long as we need to be, and as long as we can.’” v

ß @DerrickClifton AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 11

o Colleen Durkin; props by Doug Johnston

12 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

VIDEO O GAMES LEVEL UP TO HIGH ART—AND WILLIAM CHYR IS AT THE CONTROLS

In the midst of the convergence of gaming and a , the Chicago a ist and polymath is using PlayStation as the canvas for his magnum opus, Manifold Garden, a gravity-defying puzzle game that traﬀics in profound ideas about architecture, physics, and the mysteries of the universe. By RYAN SMITH

n a chilly Friday night last October, William Chyr is standing in the center of the Pilsen art gallery Mana Contemporary, a beer in one hand, a PlayStation controller in

the other. A mix of well-heeled art patrons and casually dressed twentysomethings has crowded into the compact space for an offbeat exhibit, “Manifold Garden,” a sneak peek at the stillunfinished puzzle-based video game of the same name that Chyr’s been toiling at for years to design and build for PC and Sony’s PlayStation 4. Between bites of cheese and sips of wine, attendees gaze at prints of game screenshots depicting a series of complex symmetrical structures in muted colors that call to mind blueprints for skyscrapers as devised by M.C. Escher. The game itself is groundbreaking in its rendering of impossibly labyrinthine architecture and the gravity-defying gameplay in which the physical laws of the universe are malleable—a player can shift gravity, turning walls into ﬂoors. It’s also notable for what it lacks: there are no characters, not a word of dialogue, and no traditional story. Chyr describes the narrative as “like a parable, like ‘God created the world in seven days’ level of storytelling.” It’s a game about learning the cosmology and physical rules of a beautiful but alien space. Chyr has previewed Manifold Garden at least a dozen times before—but only at gaming conventions, where it’s been nominated for awards by major video game websites and generated significant buzz that helped the title land on the most-anticipated releases of 2016 lists of numerous critics. But tonight he’s presenting the game in a context he’s more familiar with—an art gallery. Before he decided back in November 2012 to try his hand at making a video game, he was exhibiting a much different kind of work: larger than life-size balloon sculptures informed by everything from everyday ﬂora to otherworldly fauna. “I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa. Most people haven’t, they’ve just seen it indirectly in magazines,” he says when asked about the switch from physical art to the virtual kind. “But the amazing thing about games is that you’re experiencing them exactly as the artist intended—through the video game console and TV.” And yet Chyr is not opposed to the oldfashioned gallery show. But the prints affixed to Mana Contemporary’s austere walls are sparse and chilly. The exhibit isn’t particularly interesting until the moment Chyr nudges the twin sticks on his PlayStation controller, jolting into motion Manifold Garden’s fantastical

world. After navigating the game’s unseen avatar through a network of palatial rooms, he hurtles the character into space, passing a series of skyscrapers, beams, and stairways that twist and turn and seem to go on forever. Chyr is expressionless as he toggles through the game. The 29-year-old, known to some as Willy, is slight of frame, his look distinctive only in its uniformity: long black hair that he wears slicked into a ponytail, white-framed glasses, and loose-ﬁtting V-neck T-shirts. “If you want to do installation art these days, video games seem like the perfect evolution,” he says, the words, as always, leaving his mouth slowly, like he’s measuring each syllable. “It’s virtual space where you control everything.” In other words, the real exhibit isn’t here, not in this physical space. The twodimensional stills plastered on the gallery’s walls are thumbnails that merely hint at the true scope of Chyr’s work. A middle-aged art professor stares at the limitless architecture on the screen with an expression of incomprehension. “So, how is this a . . . video game?” she asks hesitantly, holding out a glass of red wine as if to ward off the controller Chyr offers her. Chyr pauses long enough to make you wonder: Is this whole exhibition just a Trojan horse, a ploy to sneak a PlayStation game past the contemporary art world’s hallowed gates? A similar thought crossed my mind a few months later on a Saturday afternoon in January while attending a meetup for users of Twitch. On the popular website, gamers broadcast themselves playing while, on average, 550,000 concurrent viewers from around the world tune in. Every weekday afternoon, Chyr takes to Twitch to present the ongoing development of Manifold Garden to a small but devoted audience. In sharp contrast to Mana Contemporary, Ignite Gaming Lounge in Avondale, the site of the meetup, resembles a massive Xbox converted into a clubhouse: dim lighting, eardrum-busting electronic music, black walls dotted with Mortal Kombat posters. Chyr had planned to demo Manifold Garden live to the 100 or so gamers assembled, but was thwarted when Ignite didn’t have the necessary equipment to render the game. No one seemed particularly disappointed, though—least of all Chyr, a pensive artist adrift in a sea of motormouthed teens and twentysomethings giving unbroken attention to their first-person shooters and complex strategy games. He could’ve gone home and retrieved the device that would’ve made his presentation possible. But instead, he left after half an hour. J

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The fantastical structures in Manifold Garden are inﬂuenced by 20th century artists and architects like M.C. Escher, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Tadao Ando.

continued from 13 “It was, uh, an interesting meetup,” he said later. “Not what I expected.” If Chyr’s plan was to use the auspices of a video game to smuggle in profound ideas about architecture, physics, and the mysteries of the universe, he was beginning to think Manifold Garden would be a tough sell to this group of Red Bull-swilling, trigger-happy hard-core gamers.

n 2016, enough of high culture’s gatekeepers have grown up around Nintendos that video games with artistic aspirations don’t necessarily have to sneak past them. Nor do gamers automatically reach for the reset button when confronted with offbeat or more complex genres that go beyond mashing buttons and shooting aliens. One result of this new environment is that the seemingly disparate worlds of contemporary art and video games are ﬁnding some room for crossover—even if the convergence is far from perfect. “You see a dual, fragmented audience at Willy’s shows. You get the Chicago artgoer who has a phobia of an Xbox controller and a gamer who wants something that requires

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twitch reflexes,” says Chaz Evans, a cofounder of the itinerant Video Game Art Gallery. “That said, the overlap in the Venn diagram between those who want to see experimental media in all its forms and those who want to play video games—that overlap is wider than people assume.” There’s a hope in Chicago’s indie-gaming circles that Chyr’s Manifold Garden, upon its planned release sometime next year, expands the audience who cite fine art and gaming as intersecting interests. Chyr doesn’t go that far, but he admits he senses he’s a part of an exciting new movement. “It really does feel like French New Wave with film, and I’m an active participant,” he says. “I mean, I’m not Godard, but it’s like, I probably know the Godard of games.” If gaming and art are indeed experiencing a moment of convergence, Chicago is a logical epicenter. The city boasts a vibrant scene of DIY developers, arcade bars, developer co-ops, and indie festivals like Bit Bash, the three-year-old alternative games festival taking place August 13. Last year’s edition of Bit Bash resembled an art festival more than a traditional video game convention, and not just because of the presence of craft beer, food trucks, and DJs. More than 1,000 attendees played 40 indie games, some exhibited in ways reminiscent of an off-the-wall contemporary art show: a swordfighting game in the hollowed-out half frame of a car, an eight-bit dragon game displayed on a cabinet mounted into a backpack worn by a volunteer. “It’s a common idea to us—show off games as something more than a booth and a TV. We’re showing off the medium like it’s art,” says Bit Bash’s Rob Lach, whose title of lead curator hints at the organization’s intention to elevate the form. “People often brush them aside as ‘just games,’ but there’s a reverence for them here in Chicago.” Chicago even has its own sort of missionaries working to bring games into the high-art conversation: Evans and Jonathan Kinkley, the cofounders of the three-year-old VGA Gallery. In addition to partnering with Mana Contemporary for Chyr’s ongoing artist residency at the gallery, the nonprofit sells video game art prints (ones from Manifold Garden go for $35 apiece). They’ve also helped organize and curate exhibitions like “Game Art vs. Art Game,” opening August 18 at Columbia College’s Arcade Gallery, a group show of “video games of artistic significance,” created by experimental game designers and fine artists dabbling in games. Likewise, VGA Gallery is collaborating on a fall exhibition of the art of Philip Mallory

Jones, a multimedia artist making a game called Dateline: Bronzeville, about a weekly newspaper columnist solving a mystery in the titular south-side neighborhood. “It’s often thought that galleries don’t include video games and games don’t include art history,” Evans says, “but I’d like to think that both could include both.” Their proselytizing appears to be paying off. So far this year, the Museum of Contemporary Art has hosted two gaming pop-up exhibits curated by Bit Bash during the institution’s Prime Time after-hours event series. Attendees could look at the social realist paintings of Kerry James Marshall on one floor of the MCA and play a round of the PlayStation game Johann Sebastian Joust on the next. Michael Green, the MCA’s assistant director of community programs and engagement, says neither art patrons nor museum staff raised an eyebrow. These days, he says, “games are a more acceptable and accepted kind of thing within our museum’s contents and just within an academic framework.” Patrick Jagota agrees games are making progress in academia. The assistant professor at the University of Chicago and cofounder of the school’s Game Changer video-game design lab helped establish a video game library at the U. of C. in 2012 as the study of the form has expanded beyond their production—design, engineering, and animation—into the social sciences. Jagota’s Critical Videogame Studies course analyzes games in a manner similar to the way humanities classes examine other narrative forms such as novels and ﬁlm. “We focus on the formal attributions and cultural implications of games,” Jagota says, “and have both aesthetic and philosophical discussions about them.” Indications that games have leveled up in cultural cachet are evident outside Chicago as well. In 2012, the Smithsonian American Art Museum announced an “Art of Video Games” exhibit, its curators proclaiming that the medium was an amalgam of traditional art forms—painting, writing, sculpture, music, storytelling, cinematography—“that offer artists a previously unprecedented method of communicating with and engaging audiences.” The Museum of Modern Art in New York followed suit in 2013 with a permanent spot for 14 games, ranging from Pac-Man to Portal, in the institution’s applied design wing. Jason Rohrer, creator of Passage, one of the games on display at MoMA, had a ﬁve-month exhibition this year at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum that was billed as the first solo art museum retrospective for a video game designer.

Images from Kentucky Route Zero (top) and Jonathan Blow’s The Witness

On the surface, it might seem surprising that the contemporary art world has begun to embrace a medium best known for paper-thin, simplistic distractions like Angry Birds or the orgies of violence, gore, and sexism in Grand Theft Auto—brain rot for kids or those afflicted with Peter Pan syndrome. After all, games are still one of the few cultural objects that qualify as a bipartisan scapegoat; both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have indiscriminately condemned the form for causing moral decay in children and teens. Until recently, video games didn’t fare much better with progressive cultural critics either. Just six years ago, legendary Chicago SunTimes film critic Roger Ebert declared on his blog that “video games can never be art.” “No one in and out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists,” he wrote. It was a post heard round the world—or at least in video gaming’s often shrill corner of the In-

ternet. Ebert’s screed drew the predictable ire of thin-skinned fanboys who came to gaming’s defense, leaving more than 5,000 comments on the post. A few months later, Ebert wrote a half apology, but his original post prompted something of an existential question: In the fourplus decades since Pong became a nationwide obsession, have games remained just gloriﬁed kids’ toys or have they come to deserve a place among the long-canonized mediums of cinema, literature, and visual art? Ebert’s assessment was eventually overruled by an unlikely art critic—the U.S. Supreme Court. In a case that arose from a California effort to ban the sale of violent video games to minors in 2011, none other than the late justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his judgment: “Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music)

and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world).” SCOTUS support or not, the debate over whether games are art now seems nearly irrelevant. “The average person experiences games such as Candy Crush or Call of Duty, but what most people don’t know is [video games] are also the new frontier for artists,” says Blair Kuhlman, a designer at Synapse Games in Lincoln Park. “There are so many beautiful and amazing and weird things right now.” The award-winning PlayStation title Journey plays like a Joseph Campbell monomyth set against an animated painting. Critics praise dystopian document thriller Papers Please for its ability to make players consider their morally suspect role in the game as a border agent who decides the fate of immigrants. The surreal Kentucky Route Zero, made by a pair of Columbia College alums, feels like what might happen if David Lynch directed a virtual adventure about a delivery driver exploring a magical highway. Artists like Kuhlman are crafting lowfi experimental fare that stretches the very definition of a video game to its breaking point— which is why many in the field are beginning to use the term “interactive art” in place of “video games.” Columbia College’s game-design classes, for example, fall under the school’s Interactive Arts & Media department. The new breed of brainy, artful indie games that has emerged since Ebert’s polemic is indebted to Jonathan Blow’s time-warping puzzle game Braid. Released on Xbox 360 in 2008, the title combined the visual aesthetics and the gameplay tropes of Super Mario Bros. with the narrative structure of Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible Cities to unfurl an ambiguous story about the motivations of a man rescuing a princess from a monster. Braid’s popularity was proof to the industry that it was possible for a single artist with vision to make a commercially successful game that didn’t rely on cutting-edge graphics or cheap thrills. Critics have likened Braid to the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, and Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape as a similarly transformative work that helped push the creative envelope and lay the groundwork for a new production model. Blow’s long-awaited follow-up, the esoteric PlayStation 4 brainteaser The Witness, grossed more than $5 million during the first week of its release in January. That’s impressive for an obtuse puzzler designed, as Blow told the Guardian, “for people who like to read Gravity’s Rainbow.” J

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hyr doesn’t have a dog-eared copy of the notoriously perplexing Thomas Pychon novel lying around, but he’s in many ways a direct product of the increasing intersection of fine art and video games that Blow helped set in motion. But Chyr says he didn’t choose video games because he loves the medium; it’s merely the form that offers the most artistic possibilities. And that’s part of what makes Chyr an exciting and pioneering figure. Up until this point, video game designers have been mostly familiar with other video games or the rather intellectually shallow realm of nerd culture—sci-fi, fantasy, superheroes. Manifold Garden’s influences are Chyr’s—fine art, cinema, architecture, physics. That constellation of unconventional reference points has the potential to both appeal to art crowds and broaden the interests of current gamers, says Bit Bash’s Lach. “As these worlds mingle, you see people trained in fine arts working [in games],” he says, “and that’s great because some of the best projects are heavily influenced by other mediums and not by games.” Before he was inspired by Blow’s work after seeing the documentary Indie Game: The Movie in 2012, Chyr had almost zero experience with video games. They certainly weren’t on his creative radar when he came to Chicago from his native Toronto in 2005 to attend the U. of C., where he double-majored and graduated with physics and economics degrees. He enjoyed aspects of both fields, including summer research work at a nuclear physics lab in Italy, but realized before his senior year that he didn’t want to be saddled with a career in either. On a whim, Chyr started studying circus arts, learning to juggle, ride a unicycle, and twist balloon animals through the U. of C. student organization Le Vorris and Vox Circus. He considered joining up with the circus fulltime before an unlikely career path opened up when he began experimenting with pairing LED lighting and balloon sculptures to resemble bioluminescent creatures. His experiments with balloons as sculpture led to two largescale installations on campus and one during a Festival of the Arts fashion show. Two days after Chyr graduated in 2009, the Museum of Science and Industry saw his sculptures on the university’s Science Chicago website and commissioned a work for a high-profile event in Millennium Park. “One thing led to another, and all of a sudden I’m making balloon installations,” Chyr says with a laugh. He worked birthday parties and

16 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

In 2012, Chyr and more than a dozen volunteers twisted together some 1,500 balloons to create his installation A Handful of Stardust inside the Calgary science museum Telus Spark. o FABY MARTIN

the occasional festival, and performed on the city’s streets. When that hustle didn’t pay the bills, he began seeking a career in advertising. A 2010 internship at ad-firm giant Leo Burnett petered out after seven months when he couldn’t secure an entry-level position in the art department. He made a single spec ad during his brief tenure—a drawing for a brand of feminine-hygiene products featuring a maxipad designed to look like a maze with a dot of blood in the center. His boss buried it, but it later caught the eye of an executive at the firm who launched a print campaign around it that eventually garnered industry awards and the praise of feminist blogs for its unique design and bold concept as the first ad of its kind to depict blood. “I didn’t even see the final piece until I picked up an Us Weekly at a 7-Eleven,” he says. Chyr made more headlines soon afterward—this time with an experimental novel called The Collaborwriters in which every line was chosen using an online voting system. But that project fizzled after five pages. Broke and depressed, he moved back to Canada in 2011 and landed a six-month gig at the Calgary science museum Telus Spark. He returned to Chicago in 2012 after Beck’s Brewery selected his balloon-sculpture de-

signs to appear on the labels of a series of limited-edition “art bottles.” The exposure from the bottles, as well as an accompanying short documentary about Chyr that was made as part of the campaign, opened up paid gigs building elaborate balloon sculptures at museums, galleries, and public spaces such as Ogilvie Transportation Center. He landed his first solo exhibition in June 2012 at High Concept Laboratories, “Systems/Process,” in which he filled a two-story warehouse with knotty chains of balloons created via a “generative algorithm.” But like one of his leaky sculptures, Chyr’s enthusiasm for full-time balloon work slowly deflated. “I realized I was just becoming ‘balloon guy,’” he says. “I didn’t have the benefit of the doubt of someone like Jeff Koons. No one cared at the end of the day. It didn’t matter if I did a great or mediocre piece—the reaction I got was same, like ‘Oh cool, balloons.’” Chyr considered switching to glassblowing and thought about going back to school to study architecture when he came across Blow’s Braid. It was a revelation about the purely artistic possibilities of video games. “I like architecture, but I discovered that I just wanted to make cool-looking stuff. But in the real world, people have to actually live in buildings and they need bathrooms and pip-

ing. In a virtual world, you never have to think about where the toilet is,” Chyr says. “Turns out I didn’t want to be an architect—I wanted to be a video game architect.” Chyr built a rough prototype in November 2012 based on an idea inspired by the scene from the 2010 ﬁlm Inception when Ellen Page’s character learns the rules of the movie’s dream world and bends and folds the Paris skyline, which allows her and Leonardo DiCaprio’s character to walk on new planes of gravity. In the game he devised, initially named Relativity after the iconic Escher drawing, physical laws were never constant. Players would solve a series of ten puzzles by hitting buttons and switches that shift gravity, permitting the avatar to walk on walls and ceilings. It was an interesting concept, but its limitations and technical ﬂaws were revealed after Chyr showed an early build to a few local game developers he met at Emporium Arcade Bar in Wicker Park. “I thought they were going to be like ‘You’re a genius,’ but that wasn’t the case,” he recalls. “It was a disaster and everything was wrong.” Still, Chyr got enough positive feedback that he believed there was a nugget of a good idea. During a six-month artist residency at a hotel in Shanghai in 2013, he kept tinkering but gave himself an ultimatum: If

nothing came of the game in half a year, he’d quit and go back to balloon sculpting. One of the first things Chyr realized during that period was that Relativity was quite boring. To help spur new ideas he tried out a few other titles, chief among them Valve Corporation’s 2007 puzzle game Portal. “I hadn’t picked up a controller since the old Nintendo 64 days,” he says. Relativity began to seem less like a true game and more like a virtual walking tour of Chyr’s art installations interspersed with a few simple puzzles. Based on advice from local indie developers, feedback from play testers at video game shows he attended, and lots of trial and error, he wholly reconceptualized the game. He expanded his gravity-flipping parlor trick into a system of physics the player would gradually learn; he envisioned small moments of discovery as a player explored architecture and space—for instance the realization that the world of the game looped in on itself. “You see a skyscraper that looks like it never ends, and you’re like ‘Holy shit,’ but then you experiment and drop a box down off a ledge— it appears to fall from both above and below simultaneously and land from above. Now you use that knowledge of the world to solve a puzzle,” Chyr says. “It’s about a certain kind of poetry through physics.” There was still no dialogue and no characters, but the game was no longer just a play on Escher and a Christopher Nolan film—it became a loose metaphor for the interconnected discoveries of the last 400 years of physics. “You have Newton,” Chyr explains, “and Newton says, ‘OK, the apple falls from the tree and this is how gravity works.’ Then people start building on top of that and you get to Einstein and he says, ‘This is the shape of the universe.’ Newton had this model of gravity that made sense for everyday, but Einstein was talking about gravity for very large objects to the point where gravity bends space-time itself. Space-time is curved. If the theory of relativity deals with things on a large level and then quantum mechanics deals with things on a very small level, is there some kind of unified theory that ties everything about the universe together? The game is trying to capture that.” Along with improving the game’s theoretical framework, Chyr sharpened the visuals. Once simple, flat, and minimalistic (“I suck at modeling, so I made everything with boxes,” Chyr says), the images became dizzyingly complex, full of patterns and ornamentations that evoke the designs of architects such as Tadao Ando and Frank Lloyd Wright. Indeed, the horizontal lines of Wright’s Prairie style

“Turns out I didn’t want to be an architect— I wanted to be a video game architect.” crept into Chyr’s mind after the artist visited the Robie House in Hyde Park. By the end of 2014, the upgraded game had begun to get noticed. While attending a game-development camp in Toronto, Chyr was approached by a Sony representative who’d seen the game and asked the artist to show it off at the electronic giant’s trade show, PlayStation Experience 2014. The presentation led to Chyr inking a deal with Sony in November of that year that meant Relativity would be developed for PlayStation 4. “It was an amazing opportunity, I couldn’t say no,” Chyr says. It meant an infusion of development funding, wider distribution—and soon enough, a new name: Manifold Garden. “The original prototype . . . just involved changing gravity to walk on walls. The game is so much more than that now,” he wrote in a September 2015 blog post on PlayStation’s website in which he unveiled the new title. “We’ve added a ton of new mechanics, and the game is now really about exploring architecture and consequences in a world where physics is turned upside down.”

t’s the first week in July, nearly four years since he began developing Manifold Garden, and Chyr is seated in his Hyde Park apartment, eager to show off the most recent version of the game. In the living room that doubles as his home office, his desk is dominated by three large computer monitors, each teeming with game-related programs, software tools, browser windows, and a chat program that lets him talk shop with his ever-remote peers. Handwritten notes taped on the walls are full of game-related reminders and to-do lists. His residency at Mana Contemporary is ongoing, but Chyr says it doesn’t make practical sense for him to actually do development work at the gallery. Chyr hands me a PlayStation controller and I begin to move through a series of floating rooms, hitting buttons to flip gravity and navigate corridors and hard-to-reach exits on ceilings. My stomach gets mildly queasy when I fall off an outdoor walkway into the abyss of Manifold Garden’s inﬁnite loop.

Chyr says in recent months he’s added a “dark world,” multiple endings, cubes that can be used to “bend” or redirect streams of water, and a yin-yang-like morality system in which a player decides if he wants to grow or destroy trees. Manifold Garden just keeps on blooming. But for how long? The game had been scheduled to drop this year, but Chyr pushed back the release until 2017. (Manifold Garden’s official website hasn’t been updated to reflect the change, and a blurb from Wired magazine on the site’s home page says the title is “among the most anticipated games of 2015.”) This summer he hired a contractor to assist with programming to ensure the new deadline is met. “I could release the game in three months, and it would work functionally, and you can solve all the puzzles, and it’d have a lot of interesting ideas—but it wouldn’t be a great game,” he says. “I want to make sure we have enough time to really polish up the edges.” In June the game’s latest demo was nominated for a handful of awards at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in LA. Still, Chyr couldn’t help but notice some of the competition was focused on emergent technology, particularly

games built for virtual reality headsets. He worries that the ground has drastically shifted in the industry since he started work on what became Manifold Garden way back in 2012. He’s also become more concerned with the possible reaction of what is now Manifold Garden’s target demographic. “This game was initially designed more with art in mind, now it’s definitely more gaming-centric. It’s not like I’m scared of the New York Times art critic. I’m scared of Steam reviewers that are going to be like ‘This is bullshit, don’t buy it,’” he says of the PC-gaming distribution platform. “It shouldn’t be the case, but it is.” Chyr is learning the hard way that there’s at least one definite downside to working as a video game architect—he can keep polishing edges and building to infinity with almost no physical limitations to stop him. “If you’re an artist, unless you’re crazy, you’re not going to want to spend all of your life on one painting,” Chyr says. “Yeah, we’ve got to finish this, otherwise I could just work on it forever.” v

ß @RyanSmithWriter

Join us for two outdoor walking tours inspired by the neighborhood surrounding the Driehaus Museum, once known as McCormickville. Saturdays, May 14 – October 15 Lasting Legacies: The Grandes Dames of McCormickville 10:30 a.m. Mansions and Millionaires: The McCormickville Walking Tour 1 p.m. For more information, visit DriehausMuseum.org or call 312.482.8933, ext. 21.

40 East Erie, Chicago, IL 60611 • info@driehausmuseum.org AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 17

DRAG RACE

Words by KT HAWBAKER-KROHN Photos by SUNSHINE TUCKER

B Chicago’s black queens are upholding a radical gender-bending tradition.

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ehind the pageantry and the appletinis, drag has always been a radical act. History tends to credit white activists for the gay liberation movement, but people of color in cha-cha heels were among those who took the ﬁrst stand. In the early morning of July 28, 1969, police raided Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn, but quickly lost the upper hand when the bar’s queer patrons began to fight back. Witnesses say that Marsha P. Johnson, a 25-year-old black trans woman and drag queen, was the first to stand up. “Marsha Johnson said, ‘I got my civil rights!’” Stonewall historian David Carter told the Village Voice in 2012. “Then Marsha threw a shot glass into a mirror. And that’s what started all the riots. This was later known as the ‘shot glass’ heard round the world.” In a city more concerned with 16 shots than shot glasses, Chicago’s black queens have been passed Johnson’s torch. While the thriving ball culture of the west and south sides— explored by the Reader in a 2011 feature—is a haven for young, gay, black men “whose sexuality can make them outlaws and targets in their neighborhoods,” as the story puts it, queens who come to the glittering clubs of Boystown work within a mostly white drag culture increasingly embraced and tamed by the mainstream. According to performers, there are approximately 75 full-time working drag queens in Boystown, only ﬁve of whom are black. And in the tense aftermath of the city’s police shooting scandals, these queens continue the overtly political legacy of their art form, giving new meaning to the term “drag race.” The Reader spoke with two of the city’s younger black drag queens about their work and their identities on and off the stage.

ARTS & CULTURE Opposite: The Vixen, a Chicago drag queen, on Harlem Avenue in Berwyn. This page, clockwise from left: Twenty-ﬁve-year-old Tony has been performing as the Vixen since 2012; Tony’s two-and-a-half-hour transformation begins with layers of eye makeup; the Vixen straightens her wig cap. Her nude painted costume is handmade.

The Vixen IN A GRAINY cell-phone video, the Vixen dances beneath a purple light, thrusting her fist in the air to the beat of Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Really Care About Us” before landing, legs akimbo, in a death drop, her back flat on the floor. It’s one of the less confrontational numbers from the 25-year-old drag queen, who once performed a song dressed as Michael Brown. A gay man from the south side, Tony, as he’s known offstage, began performing in nearby clubs in 2012, but eventually chased paying gigs in Boystown. (Tony asked to be identified by his first name only, citing concerns for his personal safety.) “I came to the neighborhood for the same reason everybody comes to the neighborhood: to find acceptance,” he explains. But he says he quickly realized how “cutthroat” the north side was for black drag queens.

“When I started, the clubs would bring in a queen of color for each show in order to check off the diversity box,” Tony says. “So we’d all be ﬁghting for that one spot. If I was working, then they weren’t.” Though the neighborhood considers itself a haven for LGBT folks, Tony believes that antiblackness is still a major issue in queer circles, including the drag community. “You ultimately have to choose between calling out racism or homophobia,” he says.

This friction came to a head for him earlier in the summer when a friend made antiblack comments on Facebook about the “south side trash that ruined Pride.” “You live in Chicago,” Tony scoffs. “We all know what you mean when you talk about people from the south side.” Tony called him out, sparking a charged discussion about the racism that he says keeps queer communities segregated. In response to this exchange, the Vixen per-

formed Beyonce’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself” at her next show, wearing a shirt that read south side trash. The Facebook acquaintance in question was in the audience that night. “A lot of times you have to ﬁght to get your face on a poster,” the Vixen says. “There’s always a risk involved when I bring up being black.” Even so, when it comes to the politics of drag, the Vixen keeps pushing them—as Beyonce would say—“to the left, to the left.” J

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ARTS & CULTURE

Drag queens continued from 19

Petty Crocker

“I DON’T THINK all drag is about dressing up as a woman,” says 21-year-old Itunuoluwa Ebijimi as she smears blue foundation over her face. “When a drag queen is wearing six pairs of lashes and three wigs and padding for the gods, they’re not dressing up as a woman. I’m not dressing up as a woman.” A cisgender woman, Ebijimi, aka Petty Crocker, represents a subculture within a subculture. While the most familiar image of a drag queen is a man dressing up as an exaggerated woman, Petty practices “genderfuck” drag, caricaturing the impossible expectations of femininity and masculinity by blurring them. For queens who present in this category, it can mean pairing a poufy pink dress with a full beard, or adding synthetic sexual appendages to a delicate costume. “I’m inspired by club kids and artists like Leigh Bowery,” Ebijimi explains, referring to the young, technicolor partygoers of 80s and 90s New York and the clown-faced performer who heavily influenced Boy George. “It’s not about classic drag but something extraterrestrial.” Raised by her Nigerian mother in Uptown, Ebijimi began applying makeup as a teenager and staging performances in her bedroom, taking her femininity to louder volumes. She was often the only black student in her class, and felt that her white female classmates expected a great degree of conformity from her. “I tried to live up to a white vision of what femininity was supposed to look like,” Ebijimi says. Drag allowed her to emphasize the parts of her identity her school community tried to silence. “You can only pretend you’re not black for so long,” she says with a laugh. Now an undergrad at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Ebijimi believes that drag is a high art form, one that can’t be limited by the conventional dichotomy of man vs. woman. “There’s something about creating your image,” she says. “Drag is so interdisciplinary—it’s got fashion, performance, photography, and sculpture.” This, Ebijimi says, allows drag to be both intellectual and entertaining. “What makes drag great is its intersectional concepts: gender, sexuality, race, class, ability.” Donning an enormous blond afro and pants

20 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

Clockwise from bottom left: Itunuoluwa Ebijimi, aka drag queen Petty Crocker, in her Little Village apartment; Ebijimi applies a mask of iridescent makeup, including a line of dark blue around her lips to make them pop during her lip-sync routine. “It’s easier for me to do colorful faces,” she says; Ebijimi uses her curly wigs to both critique stereotypes of black femininity and take pride in it. “I am a black femme,” she says. “I only perform songs by black femmes. I reference a lot of black culture in how I dress.”

she made out of hair extensions and jeans—“a reference to cowboys, who were originally black and indigenous men”—Ebijimi checks herself in the mirror one last time before heading out. She smiles widely, eyebrows raised, embodying the club scene’s joyful mania. She tilts her face and narrows her eyes, gazing at herself with a serious look of deﬁance. It’s time to perform. v

ß @kt_h_k a @sunshine.tucker

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ARTS & CULTURE

Anonymous, Man Cross Dressing, mid-20th century o COURTESY OF THE KINSEY INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN SEX, GENDER, AND REPRODUCTION

VISUAL ART

‘Private’ lives made public By BRIANNA WELLEN

y now, thanks to the movie Kinsey (2004) and Showtime’s Masters of Sex, most people are well versed in the story of Alfred Kinsey, the Indiana University professor who collected Americans’ individual accounts of their sexual histories in the late 1930s and early ’40s. Within three years of beginning the project he had collected more than 2,000 personal sexual histories, and by 1947 he had founded the Institute for Sex Research. But Kinsey wasn’t just in pursuit of stories and private experiences—he quickly became interested in how human sexuality was represented in toys, antiquities, and art. “Once it became known that Kinsey was interested in collecting work of a sexual nature, people started sending things in, because at that time there was no repository for this

kind of artwork,” says Rebecca Fasman, art collection consultant at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute. “Private Eyes: Selected Artwork From the Kinsey Institute Collection,” a touring exhibit that opens on Friday, August 12, at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outside Art, displays some of the homemade erotica that was mailed to Kinsey. The show features drawings, paintings, and sculptures that depict revealing and frequently amusing glimpses into the taboo desires of anonymous artists during a buttoned-up era. Some pieces are instructional, like the typewritten diagram titled A Guide to the Administration of a Cane, which points out areas of maximum erotic effectiveness on a drawing of a naked woman’s ass. Many of the images are tame by today’s standards,

conveying how guarded the culture was at the time. One triptych of illustrations, for example, shows the progression of a man dressing as a woman: the ﬁrst image is of the man dressed in women’s undergarments, and by the third he’s dressed entirely in women’s clothing. More shocking images in the collection—like a crudely drawn sketch in pencil of a man who thinks he’s having sex with a woman on top of a donkey but is actually penetrating the animal—were possible grounds for arrest. “Just being in possession of work like this could have potentially been illegal,” Fasman says. “For the artists themselves, to be creating artwork that—if the police came to your house—you could be arrested for it, it becomes a bigger deal than the homemade sex tapes that people make today.”

Beyond their risky creation, the images in “Private Eyes” are enriched by the mysterious personal histories behind each work. Who was the intended audience for A Guide to the Administration of a Cane? Did the artist of the triptych ever actually cross-dress? Was the donkey sketch based on its creator’s actual experience or hidden desire? It’s the unknown aspects of these pieces that may suggest why Kinsey felt compelled to collect sexual histories in the first place. v R “PRIVATE EYES: SELECTED ARTWORK FROM THE KINSEY INSTITUTE COLLECTION” Opening reception Fri 8/12, 5:30-8:30 PM. 8/12-10/2, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, 756 N. Milwaukee, 312-243-9088, art.org, suggested donation $5.

ß @BriannaWellen AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 21

ARTS & CULTURE

Phoebe and Jonathan Pryce o MANUEL HARIAN

THEATER

Anti-Semitic? You bet! By TONY ADLER

And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out . . . —Matthew 18:9

here are always people ready to pluck out what offends them. Consider Steven Frank, a lawyer whose attack on The Merchant of Venice has been bouncing around the Internet, in various drafts, for a while. The latest version turned up in the Chicago Tribune on August 4, the day Jonathan Pryce opened as Shylock in a touring production of the play produced by London’s Shakespeare’s Globe and presented at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Agreeing with Harold Bloom that Shakespeare’s 1598 romance is a “profoundly anti-Semitic work,” Frank argues that it’s “time to say ‘never again’ to this historical aberration,” apparently in the interests of social hygiene. “Every time it is produced,” Frank writes, “the play introduces new audiences to vile medieval tropes of anti-Semitism that might otherwise have dissipated over time.” The idea that Shakespeare may be singlehandedly responsible for the survival of hoary slanders against Jews seems mighty peculiar, but Frank is right about one thing: The Mer-

22 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

chant of Venice is anti-Semitic, not just in its language but in its structural bones. The Globe staging, however, offers a ﬁerce, smart, cunning rebuttal to Frank’s contention that the only correct response is therefore to pluck it. Shylock is, of course, the iconic Jewish moneylender. He’s made his fortune letting ducats at interest, and just about every character onstage damns and abuses him for it—including his daughter, Jessica, who, as played here by Phoebe Pryce (yes, Jonathan’s daughter), seems to ﬁnd her very proximity to him excruciating. Excruciating enough, in fact, that she takes radical steps to distance herself from him. Jessica elopes with a noble goy, Lorenzo, using the old man’s strongbox as a dowry. Yet that’s not the worst of it. Hoping to help out his friend Bassanio, who needs money to woo the fair and clever Portia, an overextended merchant named Antonio begs a loan from Shylock. It’s a fraught negotiation, Antonio having a reputation as a Jew hater as well as a history of shaming Shylock publicly for what he calls usury and Shylock calls “thrift.” Shylock hates Antonio and his whole Christian tribe right back. So in joshing earnest, he gets Antonio to accept a famous rider: If Antonio

should default on the loan, Shylock may claim a pound of his flesh in compensation. Needless to say, Antonio defaults and Shylock refuses to renounce his pound of flesh, setting up a trial at which the Jew gets a brutal comeuppance calculated to send Elizabethan audiences out of the theater feeling that all’s right with the world after all. No mistake—in the context of the play, Shylock is a villain. A money-grubbing, Christ-rejecting, vindictive son of Abraham. More to the point, he’s relatively trivial. Just part of a subplot contrived to forward the mechanics of the narrative and provide comic relief from Merchant’s true subject: the rocky romance between Bassanio and Portia. Frank would probably have his way, the play dismissed as an embarrassing relic, if Shakespeare weren’t incapable of writing a flat character. But he really couldn’t—a fault that yields odd, empathic anomalies like Shylock’s “hath not a Jew eyes” speech, forcing us to take second and third looks at who the character is and what goes on in his world. And what we think of it. Director Jonathan Munby doesn’t use those anomalies to mitigate or excuse the prejudice in (and of) Merchant. To the contrary, we’re made vividly aware of every horrible epithet Shylock’s antagonists throw at him. The moneylender’s beard is pulled, his gabardine spat on, his pocket copy of the Old Testament thrown on the ground. He’s greatly tormented even in the context of what was considered acceptable behavior in Venice circa 1600. He’s not a victim, though. As unpretentiously embodied by Pryce, Shylock has the guarded quality of anyone living among strangers who nevertheless need him. But he’s neither frightened nor shy (in fact, it’s his confidence in the power of the law to protect him that leads him to his doom)—nor particularly lovable either. Rather, he’s calculating in the manner of a chess player: cool, pragmatic, emotionally remote yet nursing a core of self-righteous heat. Jessica might’ve found him inaccessible even under less trying circumstances. No, this Merchant isn’t out to transform Shylock into the protagonist he was never supposed to be. It’s out to achieve something more subtle and disturbing, that Frank certainly didn’t imagine. That something is in the music and dancing, the festive partying that opens the show and punctuates it throughout; in little passages of comic audience participation. The cast get us clapping and laughing along before they let the hate flash out. And then we’re left sitting there, uncomfortable, implicated. v R THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Through 8/14: Wed 1 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 800 E. Grand, 312-595-5600, chicagoshakes.com, sold out.

ß @taadler

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ARTS & CULTURE Susan Messing onstage with her husband, Michael Clayton McCarthy o JERRY A. SCHULMAN

COMEDY

Ten years of Messing around By BRIANNA WELLEN

usan Messing will always remember the opening night of her weekly show Messing With a Friend: that same evening Jack Farrell, a student in an improv class she taught, almost died from a ruptured aorta. As her student was rushed to the hospital, she took to the stage for her two-person, anything-goes improv show. “That’s how the real show opened up that night,” Messing says. “That’s how I remember when we started doing the show, because he almost died.” Today that student is alive and well and working at Second City, and Messing With a Friend is celebrating its tenth anniversary. During the past decade the self-described “joyful, uncensored, and improvised romp through hell” has featured guests like Ike Barinholtz, Andy Dick (for a special one-off called Messing With a Dick), Aidy Bryant, TJ Jagodowski, and Rachael Mason. They take a single suggestion and create an hour-long, entirely improvised show. What ensues is a master class in improv: the performers play multiple characters and glide through scenes with such ease that it feels like the material must’ve been written ahead of time.

The tenth anniversary event will feature Jagodowski as the guest, with part of the proceeds from the ticket sales going toward the Nick Wieme Improv Scholarship, named after the improv comedian who died in the smokestack of the InterContinental Hotel in 2012. Jagodowski and Messing, who frequently collaborate together, have an objective they bring to every show they do: Jagodowski always tries to kill Messing, and Messing always tries to kiss Jagodowski. “I bet she’s going to try to kiss TJ during the tenth anniversary, and I bet he won’t let her,” Mason says. “There’s a running overunder on how many times she tries to kiss him and how many times he tries to kill her. We all sort of bet on it—it’s riveting to watch.” Messing, a staple of the Chicago improv community, came up with the idea of a weekly two-person event in 2006, when she decided to cut back from 11 performances a week to just one. “I got married and had a baby and thought, ‘If at most you could do one show a week, what would you want to do?’” Messing says. “I would want to work with people I had never gotten an opportunity to work with or I miss desperately.”

Messing With a Friend had short runs at Second City and iO before eventually finding a permanent home at the Annoyance Theatre—it’s now the venue’s longest-running show. The Annoyance’s executive director, Jennifer Estlin, came up in the local comedy scene with Messing: they first met in college at Northwestern University and were both cast during the Annoyance’s very first auditions. Despite their long shared history, Estlin was nervous the one time she performed alongside Messing as a “friend.” “It was slightly terrifying, just because the last thing you want is to be the person who goes up with Susan and blows it,” Estlin says. “But she’s so wonderful about it. Her whole approach to it is, ‘If you’re not having fun, then you’re the asshole.’ It was a breeze—it was over before I knew it, and I had a really great time.” Mason, who was a student in Messing’s improv class, likewise remembers feeling anxious before taking the stage with Messing for the first time. “TJ Jagodowski stumbled upon me,” Mason says. “He goes, ‘Don’t be nervous. Playing with Susan is like playing with a broken fast-pitch machine: you don’t know what speed or direction it’s coming from.’ And it’s still true.” Since then, Mason has earned the title of the “friend” who has performed with Messing the most. The pair also make up the improv duo the Boys, and they’ve traveled the world together. The experience has taught Mason a lot. Messing “is a grown woman who still does bits in Customs,” she says. “You don’t do bits in Customs.” The situation is indicative of what may have kept the show alive for so long: Messing lives and breathes what she does and enjoys doing it. She’ll run a bit into the ground if it delights her enough, and she says she’ll keep performing Messing With a Friend until she gets yanked off the stage. “There is nothing better than to recognize that people have put down the joint, stopped tweeting or swiping right or left, and actually kind of share in what could be potentially magic or shit fire,” Messing says. “And they did it with me.” v R MESSING WITH A FRIEND: TENTH ANNIVERSARY SHOW Thu 8/11, 10:30 PM, Annoyance Theatre, 851 W. Belmont, 773-697-9693, theannoyance.com, $20.

ß @BriannaWellen AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 23

ARTS & CULTURE A customer browses Bookworks’ extensive collection of titles. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

to bug, because sometimes people just like to be left alone while shopping.) One former employee, Patty Templeton, even used Bookworks and Bob and Ronda themselves as inspirations for her supernatural novel, There Is No Lovely End. (The ﬁctional bookshop is haunted; fictional Bob fights demons; ﬁctional Ronda is a ghost.) Bookworks’ closing was inevitable at some point. The neighborhood has changed a lot during the last few decades, and with all the upcoming construction scheduled in Rickettsville (ne Wrigleyville), not to mention the CTA’s proposed Red-Purple Bypass Project (aka the Belmont flyover) possibly coming down the line, more change is certain. That makes for an environment where bar after bar can flourish, but it’s awfully tough sledding for an independent bookstore, especially with soaring rents. I could go on and on with my own remembrances. I asked Bob and Ronda for some of theirs as the physical shop nears the end. (Bookworks will continue selling online; see thebookworks.com. Everything in the shop is 25 percent off right now; starting August 15, everything will be 50 percent off.)

LIT

Bookworks books it

Remembering the Wrigleyville bookstore, which will close this fall By JEROME LUDWIG

n August 1, Crain’s reported that Bookworks (3444 N. Clark), my favorite bookshop, would be closing on October 15, after 32 years in business. Bookworks has been an oasis on that particular stretch of Clark Street, just south of Wrigley Field. It’s a bibliophilic haven. I’ve been a customer of Bookworks for more than 20 years. I’m also a former employee. I worked there from about 1995 to mid-1998, before I left to start what ended up as a 14-plusyear tenure at the Reader. I loved working at the shop and for the owners, Bob Roschke and Ronda Pilon, who are a couple of the nicest people you could ever meet. For a big reader like myself, Bookworks was a wonderful place.

24 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

Important note: Working in a bookshop is not all glamour, people! Each box of books, hauled up from the filled-to-capacity basement to be priced and shelved, was received with anticipation. (Pro tip: avoid the evil clown in the basement.) Since the vast majority of the stock is used books, each title is researched and priced individually—that takes some time. Of course, not every box contains treasures. On a rare occasion, you might get a box of paperback romance novels to price and shelve. Ugh! (Not judging, though! Bookworks caters to readers of all stripes.) Shelving takes some skill too. You need to make sure the books aren’t packed in there too tightly, so that covers aren’t damaged and titles aren’t too hard for browsers to remove.

You need to cull older titles that may have been on the shelf for years because the person who’s looking for that very book hasn’t walked through the doors yet. You need to keep circulating older titles with newer ones so that your regulars will stay regular, knowing they’ll ﬁnd something new to them. It can be a lot of work, but when a customer comes to the register with a book that you happened to shelve recently, having put it in the perfect place, and she’s just thrilled to have found just what she was looking for, your heart sings. And it’s rewarding to help customers try to ﬁnd a particular title, even if (especially if) they can’t remember exactly what title they’re looking for. (Once I saw the actor Tim Roth browsing the True Crime section. I didn’t want

BOB ROSCHKE: Eddie Vedder was a personal friend of our business neighbors, Flashbacks and Strange Cargo, and he used to occasionally stop in Bookworks. I remember having a conversation with him one night about an antique health brochure he was buying called Vitalogy. It was a surprise to see it turn up later as the cover of his 1994 release by the same name. I noticed Wikipedia states it was bought at a “garage sale,” but it really did come from Bookworks. I always enjoyed having individuals show up at the store selling items. Opening a box of old books occasionally felt like opening a potential treasure chest. They were often filled with dreck, but when the books were good, they were often very good. Over 30 years, the constant inﬂux of customers has blurred somewhat. Those individuals who still stand out the most are primarily the dedicated “book scouts” who spent many hours searching for items at estate and garage sales that they could sell for a proﬁt. One of them still is driving a car so jammed with books that it appears to no longer have any springs. Tourists stop to

ARTS & CULTURE

Roschke and Pilon working behind the counter o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

take pictures whenever he pulls up in front of the store. RONDA PILON: We’ve had an incredible parade of customers who were authors [ed. note: including Don De Grazia, Mary Pilon— Ronda’s niece—and Reader writers Ben Joravsky and the late Lee Sandlin]. BR: Our former employees have moved on to, or continued to expand, a wide range of careers. On the top of the list there are musicians, professors, teachers, editors, doctors of philosophy, ministers, bookstore managers, artists, published authors, graphic novelists, coffee shop owners, and even a few Reader employees. What will you miss the least? BR: Fifty-to-70-hour workweeks. RP: Bar crawls and their impact on the neighborhood. Paperwork. The nonstop responsibility of having a shop opened 360 days a year on a busy Chicago street: keeping it staﬀed, safe, functioning. What will you miss the most? BR: The customers and staﬀ that appreciated and acknowledged the work it took for us to keep the shop successful for 32 years.

RP: Looking through thousands of books and not knowing what you’ll see next! Every single day! Books you never dreamed existed but are so fascinating. I just found a book from 1950 called Prison Etiquette, prefaced by Christopher Isherwood, with amazing illustrations. Playing a part in the encouragement of new readers. Sometimes an entire family would come in with their high school student to ﬁnd The Red Pony or To Kill a Mockingbird for a reading assignment. Occasionally a new adult reader will be looking for something to improve their literacy. I love trying to find a good match to read. I’ve learned to always maintain an open mind. We have Chicago police officers who are building beautiful libraries of leather-bound books, ﬁremen who are collecting early titles on boxing, attorneys who collect African folk art and books. The incredible education that people shared from their lives, whether it was how to build a banjo from a wooden cigar box, how to bet the horses at the next Kentucky Derby, new research on protein molecule folds, or the latest tattooing techniques. More often than not, our customers know more about the genre they’re interested in than we ever could, and talking with them is always an education. v

ß @jeromeludwig AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 25

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE Equity

MOVIES

In the company of women By J.R. JONES

quity, an expertly crafted financial thriller, is being billed as the first movie ever made about women on Wall Street. Press materials explain that it was “directed, written, produced, and financed by women, a collaboration among women in entertainment and business leaders in finance—the real-life women of Wall Street—who chose to invest in this ﬁlm because they wanted to see their story told.” Writer-producer-stars Alysia Reiner and Sarah Megan Thomas deliver on that promise, weaving into their suspense story many potent observations about the challenges faced by women in high finance. But you have to wonder if the movie’s backers really understood what they were getting into, because the three women at the center of the story are less than heroic. What makes Equity not just a good drama but a great and daring one is that its female characters can be as greedy, ruthless, amoral, and duplicitous as their male counterparts. Only Nixon could go to China, and only women could get away with writing a movie that portrays professional women so cynically. That sort of rigorous self-examination

ssss EXCELLENT

sss GOOD

is a primary benefit of having more diverse voices in the movie business. Male filmmakers tend to define women characters through their relationships with men, whereas female filmmakers are more likely to define women characters through their conflicts with each other. Amid all the financial skullduggery of Equity, Reiner, Thomas, and cowriter Amy Fox find time to expose a generational fault line between the film’s two older women characters, who are more accustomed to exploiting their attractiveness for professional reasons, and the younger one, who finds that sort of tactic beneath her. This is only one aspect of a finely layered story, but the question of whether women should take advantage of their looks in business cuts right to the heart of a macho culture in which they’ve traditionally been viewed as prizes. Sorority doesn’t count for much in the cutthroat world of investment banking. Middle-aged Naomi (Anna Gunn) has taken nine Silicon Valley companies public, but her last stock offering was a messy affair that damaged her professional reputation. Coming up in the ranks behind her is Erin (Thomas), a smart, ambitious, and strikingly pretty woman who

ss AVERAGE

26 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

s POOR

•

presses Naomi for a raise early in the story and begins to outflank her in front of her superiors. Erin rescues Naomi during a meeting in which they’re courting the business of Ed (Samuel Roukin), a smug tech entrepreneur, and later persuades him to sign an indemnity clause that Naomi needs to keep the deal from falling apart. At the same time Naomi must defend herself from Samantha (Reiner), an old college pal now working for the Justice Department. Samantha wants to nail a hedge-fund buccaneer for insider trading, and she hopes to get the goods on him through Naomi’s lover, Michael (James Purefoy), who works in another division of the investment firm and has dealings with the suspect. Naomi comes across as a woman with too much self-respect to sleep her way to the top, but she’s also a survivor, and she’s come to accept that women need to use whatever tools they have at their disposal. “You seem to be taking care of Ed,” she notes sarcastically after unexpectedly finding Erin at dinner with their client. When Erin protests her innocence, Naomi replies, “When Ed hits on you, whatever you do with that, that’s your business.” Erin in turn learns something private about her boss when she shows up at Naomi’s door late one evening and finds her intimately involved with Michael. Workplace romances are discouraged at the firm because they can lead to proprietary information being shared, so Naomi’s long-standing relationship with Michael has the feel of a secret affair even though their feelings for each other are casual at best. When Samantha asks Naomi about her sex life, the banker replies, “I get what I need.” Samantha—who’s raising two children with another woman—comes from the same generation as Naomi, and she has no problem with using her beauty to her advantage. In one of the funnier scenes she throws herself at a nerdy hedge-fund manager (Nate Corddry) during a cocktail hour, gets him completely smashed, and teases him into revealing some insider information he used to score a deal. When he phones her back later, screaming that he was tricked, she laughs it off and hangs up on him. In a way Samantha does the same thing with Naomi, trading on her personal charisma to get something out of her. Late in

the movie, when Naomi visits Samantha at home, she’s left alone momentarily with the two kids, and the boy informs her, “I don’t talk to strangers.” Naomi replies, “It’s really your friends that will stab you in the back.” By that time the relationship between the women has become little more than a transaction. Contrary to what Naomi might think, Erin refuses to accept the sexual paradigm that the other two women have lived with for two decades. Ed most deﬁnitely hopes to get Erin into bed, but when he tries to close the deal, she recoils. He responds with a crushing putdown: “If I really want to talk business, I’ll call Naomi.” If this were a man’s movie, the moment when Erin walks out on Ed would be celebrated as a climactic triumph, but in this movie her moral superiority is shortlived: enraged at the insult, she turns up at Michael’s door, claiming that she’s looking for Naomi, and allows herself to be invited inside for a glass of wine when Michael senses an unexpected opportunity to get laid. While they’re chatting over wine in his living room, Erin takes a call from Naomi and puts her on speakerphone so that Michael can eavesdrop on their conversation. When Hillary Clinton, during a Democratic primary debate, was asked why she took $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, she replied, “That’s what they offered.” Equity espouses a similar philosophy: early in the movie, when Naomi sits on a panel discussion for young professional women, she warms the crowd with her declaration “Don’t let money be a dirty word. We can like that too.” But if the women from Goldman and other big banks who invested in Equity thought they were commissioning a love letter to themselves, they may want their money back. By the end of the movie Naomi’s words have been turned on their head, spoken by another woman whose integrity has just been bought and paid for. Equity imagines a world in which women call the shots in business, and ﬁnds that world as craven as the one we inhabit now. v EQUITY ssss Directed by Meera Menon. R, 100 min. Century 12 and CineArts 6, Landmark’s Century Centre , River East 21

ß @JR_Jones

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August 12 - 18

Fri, 8/12 at 2 pm & 8:15 pm; Sat, 8/13 at 3 pm; “As smart and funny as Sun, 8/14 at 5:15 pm; vintage Woody Allen.” Mon, 8/15 at 6 pm; Tue, 8/16 at 8:15 pm; — Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun-Times Wed, 8/17 at 6 pm; Thu, 8/18 at 8:15 pm

www.siskelﬁlmcenter.org AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 27

MUSIC IN ROTATION

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

A still from Bojack Horseman o COURTESY NETFLIX

The cover of Tricot’s Kabuku EP

LEOR GALIL

KATE GRUBE

PEGGY FIORETTI Marketing director for Kickstand Productions

Noname, Telefone Chicago rapper-singer Noname, formerly Noname Gypsy, has been working on her debut mixtape for years, and she dropped it on the last night of Lollapalooza. Unlike that megafest, Telefone inhales and exhales Chicago—in the exquisite, soulinfluenced instrumentals, in the guest vocalists from overlapping segments of the local hip-hop scene, and in the references to specific Chicago experiences (such as enrolling in a program from local nonprofit After School Matters). Noname bottles up the evanescent magic of summer without letting it go stale.

Tricot, Kabuku EP Japanese math-rock band Tricot open this 2016 release with the song “Nichijo_Seikatsu.” What begins as a simple a cappella arrangement builds into a soaring fugue of vocal melodies, bass, and found sound. The rest of the EP, like the rest of Tricot’s catalog, is surprisingly varied and just as satisfying, springing to life with the vigor and oddity customary to the band’s genre. Screaming guitar skips over the busy, pitterpattering rhythm section, and the whole record drips with major vocal sass. You know the “aaahh!” buildup in Chic’s “Le Freak,” right before they say “freak out”? There’s one of those in here. Way nifty.

Bighand//Bigknife, Winner’s Cup Two winters ago, a friend called me enthusiastically from Denton, Texas, to say that he’d just seen “the best band ever,” and then sent me a video clip of some dudes ripping through amps so big that I could hardly hear what was going on. When I finally got around to listening to Bighand//Bignkife’s recordings, I squealed at how incredibly crushing they were. This April, they released Winner’s Cup. It’s the kind of heavy that I’ve yearned for, and I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve jammed this EP at least once a day since its release.

Reader staﬀ writer

“Generic 2007 Pop Song” from Bojack Horseman, season three, episode two Like its title character, the bleak and beautiful animated series Bojack Horseman really goes in on certain jokes—you might even say it beats a dead horse. I ﬁnd it charming, particularly the way the flashback episodes foreground the zeitgeist-iest trappings of their time—including a character singing a ﬁctional song that’s made to sound like a then-current radio hit. The second episode of the new season is set in 2007, and its song slops on the Auto-Tune. Jeremy Enigk at Beat Kitchen on July 29 The Sunny Day Real Estate front man tours only sporadically, but I’ve managed to see him twice in two years. His unearthly voice has acquired darker hues as he’s aged, and he wears its new raspiness well. Enigk played three tracks from SDRE’s proggy 1998 album, How It Feels to Be Something On, which Sub Pop just reissued—it makes me wonder if SDRE is prepping for more reunion shows.

28 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

Front woman for Kittyhawk

Mariah Carey singing “Emotions” on MTV Unplugged in 1992 Wake up in the morning, slam your first cup of coffee, and right as the caffeine hits your bloodstream—just when you feel like you’ve nearly shed that last flake of groggy monster skin—put on this song and try not to shed a fat-ass salty tear when Mariah hits that whistle note at 1:16. #OurMusicMyBody Chicago nonprofit Between Friends is using this summer festival campaign to further its mission of breaking the cycle of domestic violence and building a community free of abuse. With assistance from Rape Victim Advocates, it’s been repping this hashtag online and at music fests to remind everyone to keep an eye out for sketchy behavior—and help attendees get some backup if they feel unsafe. Information is available at betweenfriendschicago.org!

The Platters I recently told myself that I wanted to become an expert on doo-wop. To be honest, though, that journey was pretty shortlived—as soon as I stumbled upon the Platters, I couldn’t will myself to venture onward. I had found the perfect vocal group. They have that sound that makes you want to romanticize the 50s and 60s. Milk shakes and roller skates and jukeboxes. You know. Next time you’re at a record store, pick up one of their albums. I promise they’re a pleasant addition to any collection. Pinegrove’s Audiotree Live session Pinegrove have mastered their craft. Hailing from Montclair, New Jersey, they’ve created ﬂawless kind of rocking alt-country that begs to be played loudly and on long drives. And as if I weren’t already listening to this band multiple times a day, Chicago-based music company Audiotree went and recorded an incredible session that I can’t stop watching. Thanks for fueling the obsession!

Special Guest:

The Old Fashioned

THIS FRIDAY! AUGUST 12 • VIC THEATRE

THIS SATURDAY! AUGUST 13 • PARK WEST

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AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 29

Recommended and notable shows, and critics’ insights for the week of August 11

MUSIC

ALL AGES

PICK OF THE WEEK

Congolese band Mbongwana Star introduce Chicago to their mix of postpunk and funk grooves

Jackie Lynn o JULIA DRATEL

THURSDAY11 Jackie Lynn Open Sex open. 9:30 PM, Silent Funny, 4106 W. Chicago, $10. b

o FLORENT DE LA TULLAYE

MBONGWANA STAR, DOS SANTOS ANTI-BEAT ORQUESTA

Thu 8/11, 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, Michigan and Randolph. F b

COCO NGAMBALI AND THEO NSITUVUIDI were members of Staff Benda Bilili, a remarkable band of homeless Congolese paraplegics who lived on the grounds of Kinshasa’s zoological gardens and mixed conventional and homemade instruments to create a sound all their own. Belgian producer Vincent Kenis of Congotronics fame introduced the crew to the world, but after making two strong albums for Crammed Discs they suffered an acrimonious breakup. Last year the two former members debuted Mbongwana Star with the help of Irish-born, Paris-based producer and bassist Doctor L (ne Liam Farrell, who worked previously with Nigerian drummer Tony Allen). There’s a strong Western vibe at work on the group’s knockout From Kinshasa (World Circuit). The album’s mix of numbed postpunk and funk grooves with local traditions makes me think of a group of soukous musicians who’ve just stumbled into the sessions for Talking Heads’ Fear of Music—liquid guitar and

30 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

soulful Lingala vocals ﬂoat over throbbing rhythms, accented by the occasional blown-out note. There’s no concern for world-music purity; on the contrary, it’s the collision of disparate sounds that makes the project so electric. “Shégué” pulses with a tightly coiled bass, stuttering beats, wiry and minimal funk guitar, spare organ stabs, and bursts of electronic noise—still, it’s the group’s call-and-response vocals that give the song its charm. “Coco Blues” has an austere, low-key quality, a simple guitar lick cushioning the gorgeously soulful singing of Ngambali, while “Malukayi” enjoys the extra propulsion provided by the ringing, ampliﬁed likembes of Kinshasa’s Konono No 1. A charming homage that reveals where Mbongwana Star came from, closer “1 Million C’est Quoi?” features the unmistakable soukous guitar, and it ultimately illustrates that the musicians are headed toward a much different place. This is their Chicago debut. —PETER MARGASAK

Under the name Circuit des Yeux singer-songwriter Haley Fohr has carved out a powerful sound world focused on her forceful voice. On last year’s In Plain Speech (Thrill Jockey) she taps into her lower register, turning a rustic foundation into something otherworldly as she unleashes harrowing melodies and spellbinding long tones with commanding precision and intensity. Circuit des Yeux’s gothic purity might lose focus if Fohr were to leaven the sound with lighter forms, so she created a fictional character named Jackie Lynn to explore something different. A collaboration with Bitchin Bajas, the eponymous Jackie Lynn record uses the familiar trope of a small-town girl fleeing her constricting roots for the big city—which in this case happens to be Chicago. After moving into a Little Village apartment, Jackie joins forces with a drug dealer she meets on the CTA, eventually splitting town just before the cops bust into their pad. The concept is secondary to hearing Fohr sing direct melodies and lyrics amid less tempestuous, churning arrangements. The cover image of Fohr donning a starred cowboy hat, fake Nudie suit, and white boots suggests an oldschool countrypolitan act, but the record’s simple guitar arpeggios, cheap drum-machine rhythms, and swirling synthesizer textures forge a sophisticated platform for a breezier manifestation of her gripping voice. Most of the songs are short and hooky, while she occasionally injects wry humor that would be out of place in her main gig (on “Smile” she sings, “I’m so sick of these jocks with their little tiny cocks”). When I first heard about this project it seemed excessive for her to develop a second persona, but the more I’ve listened to Jackie Lynn the more she’s made sense. —PETER MARGASAK J

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MUSIC continued from 30 Anthony Jay Sanders Horse Jumper of Love, Strange Mangers, Not for You, and Nomar open. 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 2100 W. Belmont, $10, $8 in advance. 17+ Though Chicago singer-songwriter Anthony Jay Sanders is gearing up to release his official solo debut, I Will Be the One Who Goes (Near Mint), next month, he’s already been around the block. He fronts the charmingly theatrical emo mob Island of Misfit Toys and occasionally jumps into other bands to help fill out live shows (he spent as much time onstage as off- at the final Chicago show by Michigan fourth-wave emo heroes Empire! Empire! in April). He’s also a delightfully irrepressible force in different circles of the national independent emo scene—as an example, adventurous Philly trio Jank gives him a shout-out on “Spilt to Bill.” All of this is to say that Sanders understands his capabilities as a musician, and on I Will Be the One Who Goes he ﬁnds ways to push beyond the quasi-symphonic template he’s fashioned with Island. The intimate, luminescent “Three” may very well play to some listeners’ nostalgic pangs for downtempo, slightly lo-ﬁ aughts indie pop, but Sanders approaches it with the kind of earnest fervor that helps push the song into the future. —LEOR GALIL

Mbongwana Star See Pick of the Week on page 30. Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta open. 6:30 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, Michigan and Randolph. F b Rhyton Crown Larks headline; Rhyton and Onyou open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $8. Dave Shuford’s never been a guy to play just one instrument, or one style. The New Yorker can operate a guitar, mandolin, saz, baglama, and bouzouki, and he sings in a drawl that betrays his southern upbringing. He’s played unruly improvised music with the No Neck Blues Band, rollicking country rock with D. Charles Speer & the Helix, and psychedelic extrapolations from Rebetika (a century-old Greek folk style with roots in Athenian hash dens) on his solo D. Charles Speer LP Arghiledes (Thrill Jockey). But with both aforementioned combos on hiatus, the trio Rhyton is the place where he pulls it all together. On last winter’s exhilarating LP Navigating by Starlight (MIE), Shuford, bassist Jimy SeiTang, and drummer Rob Smith deliver a pair of spaced-out instrumentals that sound like the Jimi Hendrix Experience inventing Hellenic jazz rock. They rein in the jams and Shuford steps up to the mike on their newest album, Redshift (Thrill Jockey), which includes languid guitar picking, insectoid

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32 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

electronics, and some straight-up boogie, including an entirely unironic cover of Joe Walsh’s “Turn to Stone.” —BILL MEYER

SATURDAY13

WE ARE SCIENTISTS 08/21

Cornelius 8 PM, Park West, 322 W. Armitage, $25. 18+ In the late 90s, Cornelius was often and annoyingly referred to as the “Japanese Beck,” shorthand for a musician who seems to like hip-hop and lo-ﬁ indie rock. But Cornelius is a headier and more precise artist than Beck has ever been, and his heavily hyped 1998 album Fantasma is better than any of the latter’s full-lengths. It’s an absorbing, stereo-channel-panning, weirdly catchy, and deeply fun mishmash of hip-hop, noise rock, Beach Boysstyle California pop, bossa nova, and experimental electronic music. In other words, it is perhaps the most “late 90s” of all late-90s albums, a celebration of kitsch and the contemporary and the futuristic, all ﬁltered through a distinctly Japanese Shibuyakei prism. Most importantly, it sounds incredible on headphones when you’re stoned out of your mind. An underappreciated masterpiece, Fantasma was recently remastered and reissued on vinyl by Lefse, with four bonus tracks added. For this show Cornelius will be performing the album in its entirety. If you like marijuana, a word of advice: indulge. —TAL ROSENBERG

Eternals Espiritu Zombie Group Spectralina open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $15, $12 in advance. Veteran Chicago postpunk trio the Eternals have never sounded much like any other band. Foregrounded by the complex, Jamaican-inspired bass lines of Wayne Montana and the off-kilter beats sculpted by a long line of strong drummers—in recent years the chair has been deftly occupied by Areif Sless-Kitain—and topped by abstract keyboard patterns and elliptical samples and the hypnotic intonation and hectoring fury of charismatic front man Damon Locks, the trio have clearly understood originality to be imperative, even if their work has sometimes fallen flat because of it. Four years ago Montana upped the ante when he wrote a set-long suite called Espiritu Zombie, expanding the group to a ten piece to debut the music at a remarkable Pritzker Pavilion concert. Too often ambitious projects are one-off endeavors, but the Eternals have managed to keep the project alive with occasional gigs while wisely memorializing the effort with a strong recording out this week on New Atlantis/Submarine. The tunes reveal kaleidoscopic arrangements, with a plush horn section (cornetist Josh Berman, alto saxophonist Nick Mazzarella, and flutist Nate Lepine), the shimmering vibraphone of Jason Adasiewicz, and the enchanting backing vocals of Jeanine O’Toole and Tomeka Reid (with cadences that suggest old-school Sun Ra songs). Bass duties are handled by Matt Lux, with Montana moving over to guitar, unleashing funk riffs and slaloming, jazzlike leads. From song to song the music touches on a wide spectrum of funk, rock, and soul, but in typical Eternals fashion it slips between the cracks bordering those styles. J

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FESTIVALS

Partake in classical music outdoors or the inaugural Reggae Fest Chicago

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Festival Cubano The celebration of Cuban culture features live music from Willy Chirino, Isaac Delgado, Albita Rodriguez, Rey Ruiz, and many more. 8/12-8/14, Riis Park, 6100 W. Fullerton, thecubanfestival.com, $20.

Reggae Fest Chicago “One day, one love!” is the motto. Programmed by Subterranean, Reggae Fest’s lineup of ska, reggaeton, roots reggae, and world music includes Toots & the Maytals, Lee “Scratch” Perry (see page 32), Iration, Budos Band, and Hepcat. 8/13, Addams/Medill Park, 1301 W. 14th, reggaefestchicago.com, $37.50.

LILLY HIATT 09/05

SHEL 10/09

BJ BARHAM 10/13

ALL GET OUT 10/29

Thirsty Ears Festival This is Chicago’s ﬁrst summer street fest to exclusively feature classical music. Performers include the Black Oak Ensemble, Picosa, Palomar, and Cory Tiffin. 8/13, Wilson between Hermitage and Ravenswood, acmusic. org, $5 suggested donation.

THE DUPONT BROTHERS 08/21 WEAVES 08/22 FATAI 08/23 FAMOUS OCTOBER 08/24

SMOOTH HOUND SMITH 08/26 GRANT LEE-PHILLIPS 08/27 DTCV 08/27 MEYHEM LAUREN 08/28

AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 33

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9/9 Global Dance Party: Jaerv 9/10 Erwin Helfer / Barrelhouse Chuck with Billy Flynn / Gospel Keyboard Masters: The Sirens Records CD release show for all 3 artists! 9/16 Global Dance Party: Chicago Cajun Aces

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8/31 Johnny Blas & his Afro-Libre Orquesta • Jazz Institute of Chicago's Jazz Club Tour

BURNS TWINS, THE AUNTEAKS, MANWOLVES, MORMON TOASTERHEAD, MATT FITZGIBBON TUE, 8/16

SKERRYVORE, JOHN BALLANTYNE’S CRAZY HEART WED, 8/17

TERRAPIN FLYER W/ MELVIN SEALS (JGB) THU, 8/18

BUSINESS AS USUAL, EARPHORIK, OCEAN DISCO FRI, 8/19

GOLDEN GATE WINGMEN (JOHN KADLECIK, JEFF CHIMENTI, REED MATHIS, & JAY LANE) SAT, 8/20

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Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

MUSIC Lee “Scratch” Perry o COURTESY REGGAE FEST

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FRI THU

Stirrup 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10 suggested donation.

continued from 33

Considering the diﬃculty of organizing all these busy players—not to mention that the band’s core lineup has been busy working out new material—I don’t know how many more chances we’ll get to experience this juggernaut in the ﬂesh. —PETER MARGASAK

Lee “Scratch” Perry Part of Reggae Fest Chicago (see page 33). 8 PM (set time), Addams/ Medill Park, 1301 W. 14th, $50, $45 in advance. b A new one-day festival helmed by DJ Papa G (of Subterranean’s Reggae Gold dance party), DJ J Niice (B96), and Chuck Wren (Jump Up! Records), Reggae Fest Chicago boasts a solid lineup that includes iconic Jamaican reggae group Toots & the Maytals, Chicago-based ska and reggae harmonica legend Charley “Organaire” Cameron, and 90s California ska outfit Hepcat. I’d recommend arriving early to soak in all the sounds, but if you have to pick one act don’t miss Lee “Scratch” Perry, not only the architect of dub but a prolific producer who’s probably forgotten more of his songbook than most bands will ever be able to scrape together. Perry, now 80, is showing his age, but his idiosyncrasies nevertheless shine through. How many performers could show up 30 minutes late to a set wearing what looks like an intergalactic onesie and sporting a red-dyed beard? And still casually and naturally find the right crest of a rippling dub melody to dive into? Well, that’s exactly what happened at Riot Fest last year, and the memory resonates with me even as so much of the fest’s other performances slip my mind. Not that Perry’s eccentric life doesn’t hit some bumps—after he forgot to extinguish a candle in his Swiss studio last December the whole place burned down. But he continues to release music at a regular clip, and I imagine he’ll play a track or two from his forthcoming solo album Must Be Free. —LEOR GALIL

SUNDAY14 Boris Earth open. 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $21. 18+ The last time Japanese trio Boris were in town, they were supporting their 2014 full-length Noise, a record that streamlines their wide range of styles into one neat package—they have, after all, dabbled in pretty much every heavy-metal subgenre and sub-subgenre imaginable since their inception in 1992. And the notoriously prolific Boris haven’t scaled back since Noise. Though they aggressively barrel ahead on their 2015 team-up with Japanese black-metal crust punks Endon, their other recent releases do the opposite. On May 2, 2015, Boris dropped three albums of meandering drone, and earlier this year they put out Gensho, a collaboration with noise artist Merzbow. On that massive double-double LP one set of discs showcases Boris reimagining seven of their best-known tracks—in addition to a cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes”—as minimal drone pieces. The result is beyond successful: “Farewell,” the opener from 2005’s American breakthrough Pink, transforms into a dreamy shoegaze soundscape, while the thrashy “Akuma no Uta” morphs into waves of sludge reminiscent of Earth. Gensho’s second half is four sides of harsh noise pieces by Merzbow, naturally designed to be played at the same time as the Boris tracks—so make sure to pick up a second stereo on your way home from the record shop. On this tour the band will perform the aforementioned fan favorite Pink, a brutal, timeless album that got a special reissue this year via Southern Lord. The edition adds a second disc of studio outtakes that keep to the record’s fun, rock ’n’ roll stoner-metal fury. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

On one hand Stirrup’s latest album, Cut (Clean Feed), carries on an aesthetic that the Chicago trio began mining in 2009, when its members splintered off from their work with psych-folk group the Horse’s Ha (led by Janet Bean and Jim Elkington). Drummer Charles Rumback and bassist Nick Macri play elegant, elastic grooves that seem to go on forever—albeit with steady, unobtrusive displacements and shifting accents—as they provide a foundation for the extended improvisations of cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. Throughout his career Lonberg-Holm has led a variety of groups that showcase his richly lyric side (In Zenith, Terminal 4, et cetera), and Stirrup continues that tradition. His bowed lines offer generous melodic elaboration of the trio’s folkrock themes. What differentiates Cut from previous efforts is the way Lonberg-Holm brings in his penchant for noise and abrasive textures. While a track like Macri’s “Six Minutes to Montrose” features the rhythm section sharing some of the cellist’s agitation, it mostly maintains a veneer of calm while Lonberg-Holm’s pretty, melancholy melodies fluidly dissolve within waves of acidic splatters, feedback, and harmony-rich dissonance. He frequently uses effects pedals to give his instrument a guitarlike feel, and on Cut he follows that tendency to its logical conclusion, playing an actual guitar on a bunch of pieces. On either instrument Lonberg-Holm casts lovely spells, embroidering every folksy melody with endless variations. —PETER MARGASAK

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First Hate Grün Wasser headline; First Hate, Grand Prix, and Choral Reefr open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western. F

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The sparse Copenhagen duo of Joakim Nørgaard and Anton Falck Gansted are perhaps better off cloaked in the enigmatic mystique in which they seem to revel. A mix of chilling, harrowing electro and submerged pop hooks—ones that bubble up from beneath the pair’s barren, sullen vocal melodies—the young First Hate are best deﬁned by their recent six-song EP The Mind of a Gemini (Escho), no doubt because it’s the most expansive of the duo’s very small handful of releases. Though stern in approach, with Nørgaard and Gansted laying out icy ’scapes that sometimes allude to Carpenter-era soundtracks, the record contains several moments of colorful ﬂourishes, like during “Warsawa,” when chirping synths whirl around the wistful lines “Look into my eyes / I’m speaking without words / ’Cause I could never say / The words my eyes say.” There are several stark, baritone Ian Curtis-like ruminations (“White Heron”), but the more the EP spins, the easier it is to pick out subtle harmonies and textured chapters of sophisticated songwriting. First Hate seem to have already caught up to the hype in Copenhagen, and if they stay the course, I imagine it’s just a matter of time till they do so in the States too. —KEVIN WARWICK J

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S P DR EC INK IA LS

T F A ER R C BE

4757 N TALMAN · 773.942.6012 · ILOVEMONTIS.COM ·

Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma ! MAX WHITTAKER/PRIME

continued from 35 Sioum Wings Denied, Fin’Amor, and Hercyn open. 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 2105 S. State, $12, $10 in advance.

Composed of the Zdrinc brothers, Arthur and Dorian, with keyboardist Kevin Clark, Chicago instrumental outfit Sioum have a dual-mission website: in addition to being a recording and touring band, they offer services as composers for film and game music. Almost six years passed between their 2010 debut, I Am Mortal, but Was Fiend, and the brand-new Yet Further, but last year they also released the soundtrack for the PC role-playing game Towers of Ajura. The repetitive yet cinematic feel of game music also seems to influence Yet Further. The record features prog, art-rock, and postrock blends and swatches, with metallic highlights and some Lovecraftian colors out of space in its complex, smeared sound palette. Four of the seven tracks run more than ten minutes, while the 16-minute-plus title piece combines laid-back but deeply unsettling rhythms with evocative guitar and keyboard effects. This is a settle-in-for-the-journey record that will reward repeated listenings—and stubbornly prevent any temptation to background it. —MONICA KENDRICK

TUESDAY16

Omni Melkbelly and Deeper open. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $8.

On its recent debut album Deluxe (Trouble in Mind) this spry Atlanta trio thrives on a jittery, tightly wound attack that recalls a slew of postpunk bands working in the late 70s and early 80s (A Certain Ratio, Pylon, Monochrome Set, et cetera). Bass-

36 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

ist Philip Frobos and drummer Billy Mitchell forge a lean, throbbing pulse that has all the hallmarks of early new wave: spazzy yet a bit robotic, danceable but rigid. The heavy lifting comes from guitarist Frankie Broyles, a former member of Deerhunter, whose lines transmit a wiry kind of funk, sometimes in the form of brittle single-note constructions, sometimes in scratchy chords that suggest a mutant Famous Flames lick. Frobos isn’t a very forceful or precise singer, but his muted, pitch-challenged delivery brings charm to Omni’s stripped-down sound, toggling between a half-assed hectoring and a kind of melodic croon situated between Ray Davies of the Kinks and Glenn Million of the Feelies. Omni doesn’t seem to care that it’s not pursuing a novel sound, and considering that few other working bands are bothering with an attack like this, neither do I. —PETER MARGASAK

Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma 8 PM, Ravinia Festival, Green Bay & Lake Cook, Highland Park, $20-$95. b We see quite a bit of cellist Yo-Yo Ma around here, mostly thanks to his ongoing gig as Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s creative consultant. This Ravinia concert is something else, though. Ma will play with 16 members of the Silk Road Ensemble—a globally sourced crop of world-class musicians he founded in 2000—including most of those featured in the reverential but thoroughly enjoyable 2015 documentary about the group, The Music of Strangers. If you’ve seen the movie your appetite’s been whetted for this live performance by, among others, Chinese pipa player Wu Man, Iranian kamancheh virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor, Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, and fabulous Galician bagpiper Cristina Pato. The program, like the ensemble, is a worldly stew: everything from a “Fanfare for Gaita and Suona” to “Take the ‘A’ Train.” —DEANNA ISAACS v

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FOOD & DRINK

GIANT | $$$ R 3209 W. Armitage 773-252-0977 giantrestaurant.com

Eggplant agrodolce reigns supreme among the vegetable dishes. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

NEW REVIEW

Jason Vincent goes Giant After a break, the former Nightwood chef is doing big things in a little Logan Square spot. By MIKE SULA

poster print of the ﬁrst two stanzas of Shel Silverstein’s poem “Me and My Giant” hangs squarely in the middle of one wall in Jason Vincent’s decidedly compact Giant, his long-awaited comeback after stepping down two years ago as the nationally exalted chef at Nightwood. The reason for Vincent’s sabbatical is similar to the common refrain heard from retiring athletes and politicians leaving office: some form of “I want to spend more time with my family.” So it’s no surprise that after two concentrated years with the kiddos, Vincent—along with partners Ben Lustbader (a former chef at Lula Cafe, Nightwood, and Publican Quality Meats) and Josh Perlman (Avec)—situated a children’s poem at the heart of his new restaurant.

But what does it mean, this poem about a boy who communicates with a lonely Goliath by scratching his toe? There’s certainly some irony at play. Giant, a narrow space wedged between Scofflaw and Sink | Swim, with some 40 seats and an open kitchen crammed in the back, is nowhere near as “high as a mountain and wide as a barn,” as the poem’s titan is described. But Vincent, at least, has come back in a big way. Good luck getting a table after five or before nine, one or even two weeks out. And historically, that’s no surprise either. There are so many reasons to follow Vincent, so many reasons to champion his projects: he uses great product, hires talented people, seems genuine and kind, helps develop neighborhood commerce, participates in the larger Chicago

community in charitable and cultural ways, and most importantly, he’s been one of the founders of the Chicago farm-to-table movement during the first part of this century. At Lula, along with owner Jason Hammel, he focused on the quality of product and the restaurant’s relationships with producers more than adherence to any particular style of cooking, a fluidity he developed further at Nightwood, becoming known as a chef who cooks deceptively simply; that is to say, with an outward emphasis on recognizable, appealing food prepared with expert technique and complex execution that never overplay their hand. Similarly, for all the talk of simple, recognizable food bandied about before Giant’s opening, Vincent isn’t letting just a few high-quality ingredients do the talking on a brief, J

AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 37

S P O N SO R ED CO NTENT

DRINK SPECIALS LINCOLN PARK

ALIVEONE

2683 N Halsted 773-348-9800

LINCOLN PARK

DISTILLED CHICAGO

1480 W Webster 773-770-3703

BERWYN

LINCOLN SQUARE

6615 Roosevelt 708-788-2118

4757 N. Talman 773.942.6012

FITZGERALD’S

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

NEAR SOUTH SIDE

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WICKER PARK

PHYLLIS’ MUSICAL INN 1800 W Division 773-486-9862

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7006 N Glenwood 773-274-5463

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RED LINE TAP

REGGIE’S

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 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

$5 Rolling Rock $4 Benchmark, Evan Williams, or Ezra Brook

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

CLOSED

$1 oﬀ all beers including craft

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

$5 Oberon, $5 Moonshine

All Draft Beers Half Price, Makers Mark Cocktails $5, Crystal Head Vodka Cocktails $4

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

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

$2 oﬀ all Whiskeys and Bourbons

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

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FOOD & DRINK

Pici, tossed with bacon and jalapeño and blanketed with crunchy bread crumbs; vanilla ice cream balls rolled in butter-pecan crunch and crumbled dehydrated strawberry. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

continued from 37 vegetable-heavy, uncategorized menu that builds in portion size from top to bottom—although the initial bite undercuts my argument. It’s an uni shooter, an orb of warm, liquefied sea urchin gonad encased in a crispy battered shell and perched atop a nest of soy-marinated cucumber threads. It was a controversial bite among my tablemates, seeming more like something that belongs on a modernist tasting menu or at a forward-thinking pinxtos bar. Some felt that it disrespected the integrity of a product whose pleasures come from its raw, impossibly light, mousselike natural texture. I loved it, but I will admit it’s a weird, incongruous start for a menu that continues (for the moment) with a gorgeous dish of sweet and spicy red, green, and yellow peppers topped with a seemingly superfluous dollop of rapidly melting honey butter. This delicate dish disintegrates into a delicious mess of juice, fruit flesh, and fat ready to be sopped with the accompanying house-made bread. It’s the kind of of-the-moment dish that reinforces with startling clarity, “Ah, this is what early August tastes like.” Same goes for other vegetable– based dishes that, while more complicated, still get the message across. Strips of cold marinated zucchini with a half-cooked texture, for example, are showered in pumpkin seeds, cilantro, and snow-white crumbled cheese. Sweet corn is perfect right now and barely needs anything but salt; the Thai chile mentioned on the menu sounds appealing,

but it barely registers among peanuts, mint, and cheese, which combine to form a kind of amped-up esquites dominated by crispy matchstick potatoes and a general creaminess. An eggplant agrodolce reigns supreme among the vegetable dishes, the soft sweet-and-sour flesh given texture by crushed cashews and balanced by crema, all to be soaked up with thick, toasty house-made pita. A sweet gob of Jonah crab salad accompanied by spongy waffle fries conjures ghosts of New England seafood shacks, when all you have left in your paper boat are some fries, a few pieces of stray seafood, and a cocktail sauce that has all the familiar notes of cheap common varieties but with an unexpected depth and intensity that make one simultaneously appreciate and repudiate it forever. Totally brilliant, evocative, and tasty. Meanwhile, thick, crusty Parmesan-dusted onion rings pair well with a couple meatier dishes at the far end of the menu: a bavette steak fanned out among peas and rice, and pecan-wood-smoked baby back ribs, their firm texture and judicious smoke easily standing up to the sweet sauce and a treacly side of beans. But it’s really Vincent’s trio of pastas that I expect people are looking forward to most. I have a feeling Giant could serve any one them with corn flakes and milk and still get a positive response, such is the superb tensile texture of these noodles, in particular the fat pici, tossed with bacon and jalapeño and blanketed with crunchy bread crumbs. The “sortalini”

are a kind of half-assembled tortellini with guanciale, basil, and pine nuts thrown in along with the season’s brightest tomatoes, while fusilli Jerry (a Seinfeld reference) is a meaty, sweet, tomato-tinged bolognese, at once familiar and transporting. Desserts are likewise presented simply but loaded with deep flavor. Fat, explosive blueberries swimming in creme anglaise have been soaked in Thai bird chiles and ginger syrup, while vanilla ice cream balls rolled in butter-pecan crunch and crumbled dehydrated strawberry could pass for a supercharged strawberry-shortcake Good Humor bar if not for the drizzle of cajeta on top. As beverage director, Perlman is refreshingly focused on wine, and while there’s only a handful of cocktails and beers, his global list comprises small, interesting selections ranging from an obscure biodynamic Albariño to an idiosyncratic French red whose name,“You Fuck My Wine,” evokes Travis Bickle addressing France’s official designation of origin rules. Ask, and the staff will find you the right thing to drink. Eat a few meals at Giant and you’ll realize that the best thing about it—much like Nightwood and most assiduously seasonal restaurants—is that it will never bore. So long as Vincent continues to be inspired by what’s happening around him, the food won’t fall into a rut. v

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ß @MikeSula AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 39

THE LADIES’ ROOM R 2953 W. Diversey, 773-661-9170, eatfatrice.com

FOOD & DRINK

BARS

Enter the Ladies’ Room

Seating in the tiny bar is available by reservation only; the plum brandy in the Onu You Didn’t is made by CH Distillery using a recipe from Fat Rice’s janitor, Onu. o DANIELLE A. SCRUGGS

Fat Rice’s new bar brings Macau’s red-light district to Logan Square. By JULIA THIEL

he Ladies’ Room, at least in name, calls to mind an everlasting ladies’ night, designed to draw women into a meat-market bar scene with discounted drinks. But that’s far from what Fat Rice chefs Abraham Conlon and Adrienne Lo have delivered with their new cocktail lounge in the restaurant’s former waiting room—they’re interested in a more international ﬂavor of sleaze. The bar is inspired by the gambling dens of Macau’s red-light district a century ago, places where hookers and drugs were easy to come by. (Both are in short supply here, but there are playing cards on the tables in case you’re determined to gamble.) The Ladies’ Room may not have all the trappings of an authentic Macanese gambling parlor, but walking into the tiny space does feel a bit like being transported to another country. It’s tucked away behind a curtain, so well hidden from the also-new Fat Rice bakery (which you walk through to get to the bar) that the ﬁrst server we asked didn’t

40 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

seem to know it existed, instead directing me to the restaurant bar at Fat Rice. Heavy crimson curtains block outside light, allowing red bulbs to cast a rosy glow on walls plastered with pinup-style images of Asian women in varying degrees of undress. With just 20 seats available only by reservation, the bar has certain similarities to the even tinier, ticketed Milk Room in the Chicago Athletic Association Hotel. But the two cocktail programs are quite different: while Milk Room is focused squarely on the classics, tracking down 50-year-old bottles of spirits and liqueurs to create rarefied boulevardiers and the like, the Ladies’ Room is busy reinventing them. The first section of the brief cocktail list is titled “Classics Reimagined,” which our waitress explained means taking a backward-engineered approach to cocktails like the negroni and manhattan, using housemade ingredients to create a drink with a flavor profile that’s similar to—but not quite the same as—the original. In the case of the White Negroni, the traditional gin and vermouth are

there, but the Campari has been replaced by Malort and wild-lemon liqueur (both made in-house) for a drink with an intensely citrusy aroma and a piney herbal ﬂavor that arrives seconds before the bitterness—which provides less of a kick in the teeth than Jeppson’s Malort but will still wake you up. The menu’s other category for singleserving cocktails is “New Mad Style.” (There’s also a hot and a cold “tea for two” and two large-format cocktails for groups.) This grouping takes things even further off the rails by offering drinks like “Vermouth,” in which you’re presented all the ingredients for the fortified wine and combine them to your personal liking. A glass of Lagar de Darei Vinho Branco is joined by a small bowl of dried ingredients—clove, cinnamon, wormwood, orange peel, Thai basil bud, and marigold—and tiny vials of infusions, including citrus quinine liqueur, galangal vodka, matsutake artichoke extract, and orange chamomile bitters. It’s more of a fun experiment than a delicious one: by the time I’d gotten everything adjusted to

my liking, tasting in between additions, the wine was mostly gone. All those house-made liqueurs that make appearances in the cocktails are also available as a tasting flight, which is well worth it just to appreciate the chartreuse, which smells like chamomile and tastes of jasmine and herbs. The velvety creme de cassis is the essence of black currants, a revelation to anyone who’s only had the bottom-shelf variety. The Ladies’ Room doesn’t make plum brandy, the main ingredient in the Onu You Didn’t, but it’s still essentially theirs: the cocktail’s namesake, Fat Rice’s Transylvanian janitor, Onu, has been making tuica (traditional Romanian plum brandy) for years. When Conlon tasted it he was so impressed that he partnered with CH Distillery to create Onu Tuica Romanesca from the janitor’s recipe. Combined with a plum shrub, umeboshi vinegar, and visinatå (sour-cherry liqueur), it’s light, floral, and savory, less sweet and fruity than you’d expect from a drink in which every ingredient involves plums or cherries. The Goan Calamando, though—a mildly creamy, tropical-tasting concoction involving feni (a cashew-fruit spirit from Goa, India), rum, and house-made roasted-almond orgeat syrup, among other things—is sweet and tart enough to be comparable to candy. The vessel it’s served in, shaped like a Japanese raccoon dog with a straw protruding from its throat and a sprig of mint sticking out of the back of its head, is a conversation piece in its own right. Besides the cocktails, there are three beers from Belgium’s Brasserie de Rochefort, one cider, four wines by the glass and quite a few more by the bottle, and several pricey pours of hard-to-find spirits. The food menu, as eclectic as the drinks list, is limited to a few snacks, including heirloom tomato salad, curried vegetable samosas, crab chips, and the Macau rice crisp—a sort of Rice Krispies treat with nori, sesame, and pork floss. For a bar with such a strong sense of place, the Ladies’ Room is all over the map, and that’s exactly why it works. The menu reads like its components were selected at random from the offerings of a dozen different bars; the cocktails include equally puzzling combinations of ingredients. You get the sense that the people in charge are just experimenting and having fun, making up their own rules along the way. Going along for the ride, it turns out, is a lot of fun too. v

ß @juliathiel

CHICAGO PUBLIC MEDIA is

JOBS

ADMINISTRATIVE 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-BrightCurious-Open mindedWork schedule:-Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays 2pm-6pm-Saturdays 8am12pmPlease note that the employment hours are not flexible.Resume submission options:-Email: behaviora loptometry@gmail.com-Fax: 847866-9822No phone calls please.

SALES & MARKETING CHICAGO PUBLIC MEDIA is

hiring a Director of Business Intelligence to build and implement our data infrastructure. Must have 5 years’ experience with Google Analytics, Tableau, SQL, ETL, and OLAP. Salesforce certification strongly desired. Send resume and cover letter to jobs@wbez.org.

Telephone Sales Experienced/aggressive telephone closers needed now to sell ad space for Chicago’s oldest and largest newspaper rep firm. Immediate openings in Loop office. Salary + commission. 312368-4884. O’HARE AIRPORT ART AND GIFT GALLERY, featuring art,

handcrafts and jewelry is seeking exceptional Full time and Part time Sales Consultants! Please email your resume to petra@hoypoloi.com or call Hoypoloi Gallery at 407-827-0113

WBEZ RADIO SEARCHING for

a results driven Account Executive. Media and digital sales experience is strongly desired. B2B sales experience is required. Send resume and cover letter to jobs@wbez.org.

hiring a Sales Assistant. Must have strong Power Point skills with an interest in media sales. Backgrounds in marketing and sales preferred. Send resume and cover letter to jobs@ wbez.org.

TELE-FUNDRAISING: HOT SUMMER CASH! Felons

need not apply per Illinois Attorney General regulations. Start ASAP, Call 312-256-5035

General CAT LOVING STAGE ASSISTANT NEEDED- The Amazing

Acro-cats featuring rescued house cats that tour the nation, is seeking a dedicated stage assistant *Fulltime/seasonal work for the right candidate. Primary Duties *Stage work during the performance entails cat wrangling, moving props, and supporting role for the master trainer and stage assistant *Merchandise sales and front of house operation before and after the performances. *Daily tour operations - run errands, clean bus interior, purchase supplies for cats and humans, help with cat care and feeding when needed. *Coordinate volunteers for all performances with a clear understanding of needs and the ability to delegate volunteer tasks Qualifications: REQUIRED *Experience being on stage in front of a large audience *Excellent customer service skills and experience with merchandise sales *Strong organizational abilities with a high comfort level operating in a fast paced and constantly changing environment. *Friendly demeanor IDEAL *CDL license *Tour bus driving experience *Experience with cat care, animal training, ideally in a veterinary clinic or rescue/shelter environment, preferred. Compensation: Pay commensurate with experience must love adventure and travel across the country. Www.circuscats.com Email resume and references if interested to polly@amazinganimals.biz.

WBEZ RADIO IS hiring a Morning

News Producer (4:30 AM - 12:30 PM) to write news scripts, short news packages and identifying the news of the day. Must have 2 plus years’ news radio experience. Send resume, cover letter with links to your clips to jobs @wbez.org.

Trinuc has IT openings (work in Palatine, IL & various unanticipated locations throughout US) using 1 or more following skills: SSRS, XML, DB2, JCL, VSAM, Ab Initio, Oracle, SQL Server. S/ W Developers, Sys S/W to research to design, dev & test s/w; (Job #SD1) Reqs Masters+3 yrs relev exp or Bach+5 yrs progressive exp. Reqd exp must include 3 yrs using 1 or more listed skills. DBAs to coordinate changes to comp d/b; (Job #DBA1) Reqs Masters+3 yrs relev exp. or Bach+5 yrs progressive exp. Reqd exp must include 3 yrs using 1 or more listed skills. (Job #DBA2) Reqs Masters+12 mos relev exp. Reqd exp must include 12 mos using 1 or more listed skills. (Job #DBA3) Reqs Bach+12 mos relev exp. Reqd exp must include 12 mos using 1 or more listed skills. Foreign educ equiv of reqd deg acceptable for all positions. For all positions we also accept equally suitable comb of educ, training &/or exp qualifying app to perform duties. Travel/ relocation to various unanticipated locations throughout U.S. reqd. Send resume (specify ID#): Trinuc, LLC, 1540 E. Dundee Rd, Ste 110, Palatine, IL 60074 .

Essential Functions: - Work closely with the Creative Director and other marketing team members to conceptualize, design and execute promotional programs and marketing materials, both print and digital. - Design print advertisements and collateral for sponsors and in-house clients. - Create presentations for meetings either from scratch or using existing templates. - Shoot, edit and produce video stories for advertising.suntimes.com and other B2B, B2C projects - Participate in research and brainstorm sessions with internal clients and marketing team. - Understand business objectives and become a master at identifying client expectations and needs. - Independently manage, document, and prioritize workload to meet deadlines - Communicate with internal clients and manage creative process through completion of marketing projects. - Other duties and projects as assigned Qualifications: Education and Experience - College degree, preferably in Communication Arts/Graphic Design/ Digital Art - 2-3 years professional office experience Skills - Excellent written and spoken communication skills for customer service, presentations, and coordination between internal and external stakeholders - Strong organizational skills - Experience shooting video with Canon 7D or comparable cameraStrong video editing, production and photography skills essential - Strong knowledge of Adobe Creative Suite (including After Effects) - Exceptional typographic skills, and photo retouching - Sound understanding of design print techniques/processes - Basic HTML/CSS skills and familiarity with WordPress - Ability to handle multiple projects with strict deadlines Resumes can be mailed, emailed or faxed to the following address: The Chicago Sun Times Attn: Human Resources – Graphic Designer 350 N. Orleans, 10S Chicago, IL 60654 Fax: (312) 321-2288 Email address: hr@suntimes.com – Please note Graphic Designer in the subject line. The Chicago Sun Times is an Equal Opportunity Employer

S. Megazzini, Ref:IFR, East Aurora SD 131, 417 Fifth St., Aurora, IL 60505.

y Mulesoft ESB, Websphere 6.x/7.x, JB OSS4.x & Tomcat 6.x, Perl, Shell Scripts, Database Design using MS SQL and MySql. Permanent US work authorization. Apply to ashwini. chandramouli@aspiresys.com.

GRAPHIC DESIGNER: COMPANY in Niles, IL seeks one w

/ Bachelor’s Degre. Duty: Prepare sketches of ideas, detailed drawings, illustrations, artwork, blueprints, using drafting instruments, paints, and brushes, or computer-aided design equipment. Mail Resume to Chang Corporation. Attn: Mi Sook Hong Kim, 7400 N. Croname Rd. Niles, IL 60714.

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

NUTS ON CLARK POPCORN

ROGERS PARK! 1357-67 W

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.

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

CHICAGO PUBLIC MEDIA is

EDGEWATER!

searching for a VP of Finance to lead our accounting team. Must have experience with preparing budgets and interfacing with a board of directors. CPA strongly preferred. Send resume and cover letter to jobs@wbez.org.

CHICAGO PUBLIC MEDIA is CAT LOVING TOUR BUS DRIVER/TECH PERSON NEEDED - The Amazing Acro-cats,

featuring rescued house cats, need a qualified & experienced tour bus operator who can also execute the tech portion of the production. *This can be full-time/seasonal work for the right candidate. *Primary Duties include driving a 45’ Prevost bus towing a car from city to city. *routine and troubleshooting maintenance on Acro-Cats tour bus and passenger car *sound and light technician for Acro-Cats stage show *Assist rest of Acro-Cats team with stage set up and strike *CDL REQUIRED with more than two (2) years bus driving experience and maintenance/record keeping *Ability to carry #50+ for load in/out and load out *Customer service/people skills a plus! *Flexible schedule *Open-minded personality with a willingness to learn. Compensation: Pay commensurate with qualifications and experience. www. circuscats.com. Must have CDL and experience with tech production. Please email resume and references to suzanne@attyedwards.com.

GRAPHIC DESIGNER (Print/Video) The Chicago Sun-Times is looking for an experienced graphic designer who can craft compelling visual brand narratives for print and video. We are looking for an innovative thinker with the ability to manage a high volume of individual projects under challenging time constraints. Our ideal candidate is tech-savvy and efficient with great attention to detail and the ability to solve problems quickly and creatively. (S)he will work closely with the Creative Director and other in-house marketing team members to develop and create brand messages, advertisements, marketing collateral and digital/video stories for B2B and B2C audience segments. This role will help manage critical initiatives to support the growth of print, digital and experiential products.

EAST AURORA SCHOOL District 131 seeks Elementary Bilingual Teachers for Aurora, IL. Bachelor’s in Elementary Education (will also accept any field in accordance w/ State Board of Education req’s OR foreign 3yr degree as recognized by State of IL as an acceptable equivalent). Professional Educator License (PEL) or valid IL cert /license as req’d by State of IL w/ Elementary & Bilingual Endorsement. Must speak, read & write Spanish. Travel to various locations throughout the district req’d. Send resume to:

TRANSUNION INTERACTIVE, INC. (a wholly owned subsidiary of

TransUnion, LLC) seeks Lead Engineers - Quality Assurance for Chicago, IL location to design, implement & maintain testing efforts for a variety of software platforms. Master’s in Comp. Sci. or Comp. Eng. or Comp. Applications plus 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci. or Comp. Eng. or Comp. Applications plus 5yrs exp. req’d. Must have exp. w/testing strategies including Black Box, GUI, Regression, Smoke, testing large client/server, web-based, cloud computing & middleware applications on Windows & Unix environments, automation testing (QTP, Test Complete, Visual Studio TFS, Selenium), .NET framework, HTML, CSS, HTTP, HTTPS, SOAP UI Pro, SQL, Oracle DB, Test Harnesses, Groovy scripting, Robot Framework, JIRA. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: MJK, 555 W. Adams St., Chicago, IL 60661

ASPIRE SYSTEMS, INC. – Sys-

tems Analyst, Oak Brook, IL. Design/ develop customized software. Req: B .S. or foreign equiv in Comp Sci, Eng, Math, or related, plus 5 yrs related exp. Exp in Software Devel Life Cycle: Requirement Gathering/Analysis, System Analysis/Design, Coding/ Implementation, focus on Object Orientated programming & Software Application Design. Exp. With technologies: Java, J2EE, Spring 3.0, REST(Jersey), Struts 2.0, OAuth 2.0, Hibernate 3.x, Spring Data DB2, Sybase, Tibco EMS, Active MQ,

TECHNOLOGY Applications Strategy and Integration Manager (Multiple Positions), PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Services LLC, Chicago, IL. Work with various types of technologies and software frameworks such as Java, .Net, iOS, and HTML5. Req. Bach’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Info Systems, Engg, Info Tech, or rel,. + 5 yrs post-bach, prog. rel. work exp.; OR a Master’s deg or foreign equiv. in Comp Sci, Info Systems, Engg, Info Tech, or rel., + 3 yrs rel. work exp. Travel up to 80% req. Apply by mail, referencing Job Code CHIAPP, Attn: HR SSC/Talent Management, 4040 West Boy Scout Boulevard, Tampa, FL 33607.

TRANSUNION INTERACTIVE,

INC. a wholly owned subsidiary of TransUnion, LLC seeks Sr. Analysts, Reporting Databases for Chicago, IL location to provide support and gather specifications for database design and reporting. Master’s in Comp. Sci. or Info. Systems or Info. Analysis or related field plus 1yr exp. req’d. Must have exp. writing SQL queries, SQL Server/Oracle database, Ab Initio, Unix/Linux, Java, VB Script /VBA programming. 30% telecommuting permitted. Send resume to: C. Studniarz, REF: QW, 555 W. Adams St., Chicago, IL 60661

EMBEDDED SYSTEMS ENGINEER, Aurora, IL: Limited domestic Trav and/or reloc to mult client locs nationwide to work with embedded microcontroller-based sys sftwre, arch, des, hrdwre/ sftwre interaction, multitasking embedded real-time sys, comm protocols, logic analyzers, oscilloscopes. Utilize embedded C, C++, ARM Assembly, MCU, MISRA C Stdards. Reply: Calypso Soft, Inc., 4260 Westbrook Dr, Ste 107 Aurora IL 60504

ACCOUNTANT, PREPARE FINANCIAL statements. Execute & analyze budgeting, forecasting, cash management. Prepare tax return. Req’s a Bach in any field with college accounting course credits req’d for a Uniform CPA exam & completion of the exam. Also req’s 2 yrs exp as accountant. Job in Chicago, IL. Res to: Young H. Mok P.C., 3200 Temple Lane, Wilmette, IL 60091

G REAT

Opportunity

ARE YOU HIV+? Aged 18-64? In-

terested in Research? Call Jake at 312-996-0745

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

hiring an HR Coordinator to assist with reports and compliance projects. Must have 2 years’ experience using HRIS systems (UltiPro preferred). Send resume and cover letter to jobs@wbez.org.

WBEZ RADIO IS hiring an Enterprise Editor to lead coverage of our small but award winning reporting team. Must have 4 plus years news room editorial experience. Send resume, cover letter with links to your clips to jobs@wbez.org. WBEZ RADIO IS hiring a PM Digital Editor (1:00 PM – 9:00 PM) to manage the homepage and online news of the day. Must have 3-5 years’ newsroom experience. Send resume, cover letter with links to your clips to jobs@wbez.org. WBEZ RADIO IS hiring an AM

Digital Editor (7:30 AM – 3:30 PM) to manage the homepage and online news of the day. Must have 3-5 years’ newsroom experience. Send resume, cover letter with links to your work to jobs@wbez.org.

NAIL TECHNICIAN, CLEAN, shape, decorate customers’ fingernails & toenails. Apply no-chip manicure & artificial nails. 1 yr exp req’d. Job in Chicago, IL. Res to: Nail Fairy, Inc., 1249 W. Fullerton Ave., Chicago, IL 60614 NAIL TECHNICIAN, CLEAN, shape, decorate clients’ fingernails & toenails. Apply no-chip manicure & artificial nails. 1 yr exp req’d. Job in Chicago, IL. Res to: HBL, Inc. dba Spa O, 1212 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60605 WORK ONLINE WRITING for

major media partners like CNN. Writing jobs are available now! Please visit www.writingcareers.us to learn more and get started.

SR. S/W TEST Eng. Chicago, IL. MS Dgr. Knowledge of Java, Selenium, XML, PL/SQL, MS SQL Srv, Rally, Unix. Res: EPAM SYSTEMS, 41 University Dr, #202, Newtown, PA 18940

Geotechnical Engineer MngrLombard, ILSAM Consultants, Inc- Masters Civ Eng. Req. Email Resume helmoursi@samconsultants.us

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $600-$699 - CLOSE TO Public Transportation & The Lake, Renovated Studios, Wood Floors

1061 W. Rosemont. 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

9147 S. ASHLAND. Lrg Studio, dine -In Kit., hdwd flrs, laundry, closets. Clean & Secure. $625/mo. No Pets. Avail now! 312-914-8967. MARQUETTE PARK: 6315 S California Studios from $600. Free heat and appliances. Free application fee. Call +1(312)208-1771

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,

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 STUDIOS AND 2 BRS

67th/ Jeffery & 56th/Wabash UPDATED UNITS! NO MOVE IN FEE! ONE MONTH FREE! Free Window AC. livenovo.com or Call 312-445-9694

SUMMER SPECIAL $500 To-

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

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

3BR, 2BA. $900.CHICAGO 76th/ Drexel. 2BR. $700. Heat Incl. 773-874-9637 / 773-493-5359

RIVERDALE 1 BEDROOM apartment, carpet, A/C, Stove & refrigerator. Near Metra. $650/mo + Security. 708-552-1883

RIVERDALE new decor 1 & 3BR avail, heat, water, appls, nr metro, many amenities. $700 & $950/mo. No Pets. No Smoke. 708-841-8094 CHATHAM 80TH/EVANS, 1BR, 2nd flr, hdwd flrs, heat and appl incl. $650. $300 Move-In Fee. Call John 847-877-6502

CHICAGO - $299 Move In Special! 110th & Michigan, Studio & 1BR Apts, $470-$560/mo. Available now Secure building. 1-800-770-0989

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

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

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

FREE HEAT - CHATHAM, 1BR, 1BA, heat & garage space incl in rent. laundry on premises, $790/mo. Avail Now 773233-7673

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

80TH & PAULINA, co m p letely remodeled, 4 room, 1BR, tenant heated, $650/mo. No security deposit. Agent Owned, 312-671-3795

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

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

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)

SOUTH SHORE , 75th & Saginaw, 1 & 2BRs, hardwood floors. Stove, fridge, parking & heat incl. $650-$950. Call 312-4038025

CHATHAM LARGE 1BR Apt, wall to wall carpeting. Seperate dining room. Heat Incl. No Pets. $725/ mo + sec req. 708-323-8317 WOODLAWN 1525 E 67th Pl, spacious 2 BR, 3rd floor, formal DR, carpet, $800 w/heat, close to transportation appl. 773-375-3323 110TH & VERNON. Large 1 & 2BR,

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

RIVERDALE - NEWLY decor,

2BR, appls, heated, A/C, lndry, prkng, no pets, near Metra. Sec 8 ok. $795. 630-480-0638

AUGUST 11, 2016 | CHICAGO READER 41

1 BR $800-$899

1 BR $1100 AND OVER

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

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

SECTION 8 WELCOME SOUTHSIDE, Recently renovated, 1, 2 & 3 BR Apts. $800-$1250/mo. Call Sean, 773-410-7084

EVERGREEN PARK, Spacious 1BR, elevator bldg., appliances, heat incl, close to Christ Hospital, $850/mo. 708-422-8801

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

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

LOOP MARINA TOWERS, 1 BR.

Spectaular Lake/River view, High Fl.,2 BALC. Great Location - 24 hr. Security - $1700, 312-321-0063

1 BR OTHER 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

LARGE ONE BEDROOM apart-

ment near Red Line. 6822 N Wayne. Hardwood floors. Pets OK. Laundry in building. $925/ month. Heat included. Available 10/1. 773-761-4318, www.lakefrontmgt.com

Ravenswood 1BR: 850sf, great kit, DW, oak flrs, near Brown line, onsite lndy/stor., $925-$1095/heated 773-743-4141 www.urbanequities. com

Kildare (2400N) corner 1BR & 3BR, new kitchen and bath, oak flrs, on-site lndry/storage/prkg $900-$1100+util 773-743-4141 w ww.urbanequities.com

Wrigleville 2BR, 1400sf, new kit/ deck, FDR, oak flrs, Cent Heat/ AC, prkg avail. $1495 + util, Pet friendly, 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

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

CHICAGO, 8105-07 S. Paulina Newly remodeled 1 & 2 BR Apts. $650$750/mo. Call Tom, 708205-1448 or 773-7798100

CHATHAM CHARM , Vintage,

newly rehab, 1 BR, h/w flrs, sec alarm, heat & hot water incl, laundry, Sec 8 & Seniors Welc. Call for appt (773)418-9908

CHICAGO, 7727 S. Colfax, ground flr Apt., ideal for senior citizens. Secure bldng. Modern 1BR $595. Lrg 2BR, $800. Free cooking & heating gas. Free parking. 312613-4427 82/WOODLAWN, STUDIOS $525+, 1BR $625+. 773-577-0993. 68/Michigan, 1BR $625+, 2BR $775. 773-744-1641. Lrg units, heat, appls, ckng gas incl. New wndws, lndry. No dep/app fee. CALUMET CITY 158TH & PAXTON SANDRIDGE APTS 1 & 2 BEDROOM UNITS MODELS OPEN M-F, 9AM-5:30PM *** 708-841-5450 *** NO SECURITY DEPOSIT No Move-in fee! No Dep! Sec 8 ok. 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 CHICAGO - CLEAN, NEWLY remod, 1BR, 1st floor Apts, oak flooring. Ready Now! 722 E. 89th St. FREE HEAT. 708-951-2889 RIVERDALE/LANSING , 1 BR condo, available now, new appliances, off street parking, $750/month Call Mr. Jackson, 708-846-9734

58th & Campbell, 1 & 2BR, modern kitchen & bath, dining room. Starting at $650/mo & up. Heat included. Sec 8 ok. 847-9091538

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

1401 W 80TH, Auburn Gresham

2BR from $895, Free heat and appliances. tel:773.916.0039 or 312.593. 1677.

BELLWOOD 2BR, 2nd flr East, no pets, W/D in bsmt, tenant pays elec/gas. Avail Now. $900 + 1 mo dep. Michael Britton 773-297-7755

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

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

û NO SEC DEP û 1431 W. 78th St. $2BR. $600/mo 6829 S. Perry. 1BR. $520/mo. HEAT INCL 773-955-5106

75 S.E. Yates - 2 BR, Fam Rm, 1.5BA, LR, DR, Eat in Kit, 2nd flr apt in 3 flat. Ten. pays heat. $925 No Increase. 773-375-8068

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

SECTION 8 WELCOME. 2748 E. 83rd, 1BR $525. 8207 S Elizabeth, 3BR, $1195, heat incl. 630-835-1365 Discount RE

remodeled 1 BR, 1 BA, Dining room, Living room, hdwd flrs, appliances. & heat included. Call 847-533-5463

CHATHAM BEAUTY XL 2BR, 1700sf, hdwd flrs, sep Liv & Din rms, heat incl. $995. SK Properties Grp. 773-493-7000

CHICAGO, 69th & Dante, 3BR, free heat, proof of income required. $1100/mo + 1 mo security. Call 773-493-9804 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

71ST/HERMITAGE. 3BR. 77TH /LOWE. 1 & 2BR. 69th/Dante, 3BR. 71st/Bennett. 2 & 3BR. New renov. Sec 8 ok. 708-503-1366

MOVE IN SPECIAL B4 the N of this MO. & MOVE IN 4 $99.00 (773) 874-3400 Ashland Hotel nice clean rms. 24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air. Low rates daily/weekly/monthly. South Side. Call 773-376-5200

ST . 3 large rooms, 1BR, 2nd flr. $775/ mo + 1 mo sec. Tenant pays utilities. 773-785-5492

CALUMET PARK. NEW remod, furn, 2100sf, incl conf room, storage, kit, parking, huge gated yard. Rent Neg. 773-220-0715

2BR W/ CARPET, cherry kit cabi-

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 1043 E. 80TH St.: 2BR $775 Large apartment, stove, fridge, heat included. Call 773.916.0039

2 BR $1100-$1299 EAST ROGERS PARK, steps to

2ND FLR 2 BEDROOM + BALCONY + DEN. Heat, cooking,

4300 BLOCK OF AUGUSTA, 2BR, 1st & 2nd floor, laundry facility on site, $1125/mo, utilities incl. Sect 8 ok. No pets / no smoking. 773-4180195

2 BR $1500 AND

2 BR $900-$1099

MAYWOOD - 2BR APT WITH enclosed sun porch, carpet A/C. No pets. Ten pays electric & gas. Avail now. $900. David Miller, 708259-9219

Chicago - 2BR, 1st flr, $995/mo, ap pls/heat, A/C, carpeting, blinds incl. near 91st/Cottage Grove. Sec 8 ok. No Pets. Smoke Free bldg 773-429-0274

2-4BRS. NEW, great school and area, Sec.8 ok, $1150-$1400 Cal Heights & Chatham. Also have Rent to Own Prop. 312-501-0509

SOUTH SHORE - Large 2+ BR Apt, 1 bath, carpet & hdwd flrs, new appls. Laundry avail. Heat incl. $900mo. Call 708-204-2182

ROYALTON HOTEL, Kitchenette $135 & up wk. 1810 W. Jackson 312-226-4678

2 BR UNDER $900 CHICAGO 5246 S. HERMITAGE: 2BR bsmt $400. 2BR 1st floor, $525. 3BR, 2nd floor, $625. 1.5 mo sec req’d. 708-574-4085.

1117 N CENTRAL PARK 2ND fl, 2 deluxe BR, $800/mo. Must sign 6 month lease. Must be employed. credit check. Simmons 773-2782028 78th and Throop. 4rms, 2BR, hdwd flrs, modern kitch and bath, tenant pays heat. $625 No Sec Dep. Brown Realty Inc. 773-239-9566

2 BR $1300-$1499

the beach at 1240 West Jarvis, five rooms, two bedrooms, two baths, dishwasher, ac, heat and gas included. Carpeted, cable, laundry facility, elevator building, parking available, and no pets. Non-smoking. Price is $1200/mo. Call 773-764-9824.

VICINITY 65TH and St. Lawrence, modern, tenant heated, 2BR Unit. $725/mo. No Sec Dep. Agent Owned, 312-671-3795

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

CHICAGO - BEVERLY, large 2 room Studio, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $650-$975/mo. Call 773-233-4939 FREE HEAT 1518 E. 82ND

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

CHATHAM- 718 E. 81st St. Newly

ROOMS FOR RENT. Males pref.

6140 S. St. Lawrence. $450/mo., include all utilIties. Call Now. 773-7268263

CHICAGO

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

224-223-7787

appliances including dishwasher & microwave, mini blinds, hardwood floors. Great location: walk to lake shopping and transportation. 773561-4128

OVER

2 BR OTHER NEW YEARS RESOLUTION, rent for less! PRINCETON PARK HOMES. Rents Starting at $844/MO. A privately-owned south side Chicago rental town home community since 1944. Two and three bedroom residences featuring: • Spacious landscaped grounds • Walk to public transportation (CTA, “El”) • Nearby public and private schools • Ample parking • Convenient to shopping • Centrally located Campus Park • Easy access to Dan Ryan • Annual Resident’s Lawn & Garden Contest. Each unit includes: • Deck or patio • Private front and rear entrance • Basement with hook-ups for washer and dryer • Modern kitchen and bathroom cabinetry. For more information contact our rental office at: Princeton Park Homes • Phone: 773-264-3005. 9119 S. Stewart Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60620. Special movein credits. on selected units. Visit our website at www. ppkhomes.com

CHICAGO, 1436 W. 77th St., Newly remodeled, 2BR Apartment, heat included, carpeting, ceiling fans, Section 8 welcome. 312-608-7622

EXCELLENT CONDO AT 837

W Barry in Lakeview! Totally rehabbed 2Br, 1Ba with hardwood, exposed brick, granite, stainless, and slate bath. Building has indoor pool, gym, sauna, and rec room. Great for a roomate with large closets. $1900/mo. Available Sept 1st. 203-216-1080

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

LARGE BRIGHT LINCOLN PK

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

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

BEAUTIFUL NEW APT! 7649 S Phillips Ave 1, 2 & 4BR 741 S. E. 72nd St. 2BR. Stainless Steel!! Appliances!! Hdwd flr!! marble bath!! laundry on site!! Sec 8 OK. 773- 404- 8926

AUSTIN CENTRAL/ADAMS. LRG 1st flr, 2.5 BR Apt, hdwd floors. Heat & appliances incl. Sec 8 welcome. 773-287-4967 or 872-600-0203

8943 S. ADA. Safe, secure 23BR, separate heating, nice flrs, school & metra 1 blk away, $750$1200 /mo. Section 8 welc. 708465-6573

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MATTESON, 2BR, $990$1050; 3BR, $1250-$1400. Move In Special is 1 Month’s Rent & $99 Sec Dep. Sect 8 Welc. 708-748-4169 CHATHAM AREA New Renovated 1 & 2BR apts, appls incl. Near transportation & Coles Park. No Pets. 773-846-4077 FREE HEAT!! NO Deposit!! 2 & 3BR. Section 8 Welcome !!! 773-955-1133 Or 773-288-6771 SECTION 8 WELCOME Central air, garage, 2-5BR. Chatham 503 E. 89th St. 6714 S. Eberhart.312-804-0209 ALSIP: 2BR, 1BA, $830/mo & 3BR, 1.5BA, $1100/mo. Parking, appliances, laundry & storage. Call 708-268-3762 CHATHAM, 736 E. 81st (Evans), 2BR, 5 rms, 2nd flr $800/mo. Call Mr. Joe at 708-870-4801 8941-43 S. COTTAGE Grove,

1st / 3rd flr, 2BR Apts. Ten htd, lndry /appls incl. Credit check $700 mo + $350 move in fee 773-721-8817

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200 CHICAGO 11740 S. LASALLE, 3BR, WILL ACCEPT 2 or 3 BRM SECTION 8 VOUCHER. No Security Deposit! hrdwd & ceramic flrs, Stove & Refrigerator, w/ d, tenant pays utils, 1st floor of 2 flat bldg, $1000/mo. Call 773-2210061

7711 S. EAST End 3ﬂ $950+sec. heat include buz entr hardwood ﬂ , stove/frig, laundry 773-456-1274 want good ten SOUTH HAMMOND IN, Cozy 3BR brick, 1.5BA, C/A, large fenced back yard, 2 car garage, quiet block, $1175/mo. 708-2784849 CALUMET CITY, 3BR, 2 car

garage, fully rehab w/ gorgeous finishes & hdwd flrs. Beautiful backyard. Sect 8 ok. $1200/mo. 510-735-7171

95TH/FORREST. 3BR. $875/MO. 2 FLAT BUILDING. RANCH REALTY 773-238-3977 CHICAGO, NR MARQUETTE/ Hermitage, 5BR brick house, 2 full ceramic BA, hdwd flrs, new kit. big bsmt. $1170/mo. Neg. Call 773-3860736

3BD./1BA. CHI HTS, cer tile kit. /ba. fans, plenty clts, laun. rm, lg yd, side dr. & alm sys. $940. cre. chk dep. req. Calls only 708.275. 1451 MATTESON 3BR APT, 1st flr, new flrs, near METRA. Avail

Immed. $920/mo + 1 month sec. Utilities incl, pets OK. 708-903-5930

CHICAGO, 7946 S. Muskegon, 2nd floor, 3BR, pay own utilities, Section 8 welcome, $700/mo. Call Mitch, 630-788-7378 3BR, All vouchers welcome including 1 or 2BR vouchers, Section 8 OK, fenced yard $975-1100/mo. 708-800-2562

SOUTHSIDE- 68/EMERALD, 68/HERMITAGE, 65/Aberdeen 3BR, $800/mo. 5BR, 2BA, $1050. Call for more info: 847-977-3552

DOLTON - 3BR, 1BA, garage, $1300/month & security Section 8 Welcome. 773-454-7441 83 ELIZ.. HUGE 3BR remod, ce-

ramic & beaut. wd flrs, lndry on site, no pets / smoking. Ten pays heat. $1050+sec. Crdt chk. 773.354.9750

NEAR 77TH/LOOMIS, 3BR apt. newly decorated, stove & refrigerator incl. Utilities not incl. $875/mo + security & 1 month rent. 773-317-1328 CHATHAM 8817 S. Cottage Grove Nice 3BR, 2nd flr, Ten. Pays Utils., $1,100/mo. Section 8 Welcome No Sec. Dep! Call 773-844-1216

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

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

CHICAGO SOUTH: 114 E 119th

St. Newly decorated 4BR. Laundry facility in bsmnt. Heat included $1200 /month. 773-317-0479

SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo. 708-288-4510 Chicago, 120th and Normal. 5BR, 2BA, hardwood flrs, full finished basement, island kitchen. $1150/mo + sec. 708-369-3997

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499 11740 S. LASALLE, 2nd floor of 2 flat bldng. 4BR, will accept 3 or 4BR Voucher, hdwd flrs, stove, refrigerator & W/D incl. Newly remod., $1200/mo. No Security Deposit. Tenant Pays utils. Sect 8 welc. 773-2210061 CHICAGO: E. ROGERS PARK

6728 N. Bosworth Ave. Beautiful, large 3BR, 2BA, DR/LR, Hrdwd flrs. Nr trans/shops. Heat, appls, laundry included. $1450. Available now. 847-475-3472

CHICAGO, 124TH & Normal, 3BR, 1.5BA, Brick Georgian, finished basement, hardwood floors, Sec 8 OK. $1350/mo. Call 708705-6879 8600 S. KINGSTON, 3 B R brick bungalow, updated, freshly painted, hdwd flrs, cfan, unfin bsmt, $1400. Sect 8 welc. 773-619-9511 SAUK VILLAGE - 3BR Homes, 1 car garage, quiet neighborhood, $1200-$1350/mo + security. Section 8 OK. Call 708-271-2502 SECTION 8 OK 7749 S. Lowe. Totally remodeled 4BR, 2BA, 2 extra rooms. $1350/mo. 773-443-0175 8841 S. PRINCETON. 4BR, 1BA, hdwd flrs, newly remod. $1400/mo. Tenant pays utils. No Sec Dep. Sec 8 Welc. 773-221-0061

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799 BEVERLY/MORGAN PARK. 3BR brick ranch house. C/A, $1,500/

month + 1.5 mo sec dep req. No pets/ smoking, Sect 8 OK. 708-647-9737

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

NEAR 83RD & Yates. 5BR, 2BA, hdwd flrs, fin basement, stove & fridge furn. Heat incl. $1600 + 1 mo sec. Sect 8 ok. 773-978-6134

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499

UNIVERSITY PARK. 4, 3 & 2BR, House/Condo, Section 8 ok. For information: 708-625-7355

WICKER PARK 3 bedroom apart-

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

76TH AND CALUMET

MATTESON, SAUK VILLAGE &

ment. Historic brownstone. Quiet residential street close to Blue Line, buses, nightlife, 606 walking/ biking path. Large parlor, living, dining room, kitchen. Electric stove/ dishwa sher/ microwave/ new refrigerator. Coin-operated basement washer/ dryer. 2120 W Concord Place. $2000 / month, heat included. Text/ call 773-551-9547. Or 281-513-9475. Email mzimmerman@uh.edu.

MARKETPLACE GOODS

OTHER

SECTION 8 NEW RENOVATED.5 Bedroom HOUSE. 241 W. 58 St. Close to transportation, schools, shopping. No sec depCALL (773) 407-3772 ASAP RICHTON PK, 4BR 1.5BA full fin bsmt, 2 car att gar. 3BR TH, 1.5BA, full fin bsmt, pool & prkng. Must verify income. Bad Crdt OK. 708. 633.6352 CHICAGO, 122ND & ABERDEEN, 4BR, 2BA, wood floors, full unfinished basement, large yard. Section 8 preferred. Call Joe, 708476-5946

HUGE, immaculate 3BR, 1BA Newly remod, close to trans & shopping, quiet block. Must See! Sec 8 welcome Call 312-7700795 SAUK VILLAGE NICE 3BR Home + den, C/A, attached garage, $ 1100/mo + 1 month security. Section 8 Welcome Call 312-231-6972 RIVERDALE 13923 MICHIGAN.

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

DOLTON 3BR, 1.5BA, garage,

CHARMING 2 BED 1 bath home

in Goodman WI. Great vacation place on ATV/Snowmobile trails. 3miles to Lake Hilbert,30 mintues to Wal-mart and other shopping,45 mintues to Carter Casino. 36,500.00 O.B.O 262210-2230

BEVERLY OPEN SUNDAY, 8/14 1-3pm

10030 S Longwood Dr.

$439,900. Fabulous Hilltop 3 Story. 4 brs, 2 1/2+ba. Nanny/in-law suite. Hdwd firs. Updtd gourmet kit. Close to Metra, Starbucks, downtown Beverly. Mary Ellen Fitzgerald Fitzgerald Real Estate 773-909-1792

3117 N. CHRISTIANA, Victorian SFH newly renovated 4BR, with new kitchen appls, C/A & central heat. $479,000. Call 773-8995769.

Estate/Garage Sale. Thurs. 6/9, Fri. 6/10 & & Sat. 6/11, 10am4pm. 8539 S. Knox, Chicago. Something for Everyone, Too Much To List!!!

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

tenant pays utils. Section 8 Welcome. Avail 9/1. Contact Mr. Nathan 773-230-8665

MARKHAM HOMES FOR RENT 3 & 4BR. Section 8 preferred. Immediate Occupancy. Call 708-296-6222

roommates

MARKHAM 4BR, 1.5BA , hdwd flrs, Dettached garage, finished basement. Section 8 ok. Call 847-804-9210 South Shore: 3BR 1.5 bath & 2BR: newly remodeled. Hrdwd flrs, heat & hot water incl. No Sec Dep. Sec 8 welc.. Call 9am-5pm 773-731-8306

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

Community Garage Sale- Biggest Sale in the South Side of Chicago. Over 20 Homes. Tons of Bargains on toys, jewelry, clothes, furniture, electronics, collectibles, etc. Saturday Sunday. August 13th +14th, 10AM-7PM 67007000 Bennett-Euclid Streets (near 67th and Jeffery) 60649. You don’t want to miss this once-a-year event!

WANTED TO BUY: R12 FREON. 609 certiﬁed willing to pick up and pay CASH for cylinders and cases of R12, Phone: (312) 291-9169 email: sell@refrigerantﬁnders.com

CHICAGO MULTI-FAMILY YARD SALE, Saturday 8/13 &

Sunday 8/14, 9am-4pm. 4917 N. Oakley (Lincoln Square) 5 Families, great stuff, clothes, teaching supplies, various treasures.

MASSAGE TABLES, NEW and

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

BEAD YARD SALE!

Semi-precious, pearls, crystals, seed beads, findings, vintage jewelry and more! Saturday, August 13, 10-3PM 1310 South Blvd. Evanston, IL

MATTESON 101 Sundance Rd. Everything Must Go! Sat 8a-? Tables, chairs, TVs, kids furn, linens, dishware, appls, electronics etc. Too Much to List. Don’t Miss!

SHIH TZU/ POM/ Yorkie, 3 girls, 1st shots, home raised with kids, calm, great personality, adults grow up to 5lbs, $749. Call 262-289-7634

STANDARD POODLE PUPS AKC, parti 3 boys, brindle 1 girl, home raised, 1st shots, great personality, health guarantee, $1249. 262-289-7634

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to "An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State," as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16147518 on July 21, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of Jam Promotions with the business located at 2150 W Bradley Place #2, Chicago, IL 60618. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner( s)/ partner(s) is: Jeremy Reed, 2150 W Bradley Place #2, Chicago, IL 60618, USA; Monica Zanetti, 2150 W Bradley Place #2, Chicago, IL 60618, USA.

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pur-

JACKSON PARK HIGHLANDS

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

CHICAGO, 5BR SINGLE Family Home. Beautifully renovated, new kitchen, fridge & stove included, hardwood floors. 708-557-0644

legal clinic at 405 w. Superior, 7th ﬂoor, the 3rd Wednesday of every month, 6p-9p. Curent/former sex workers and anyone who has experienced unstable housing in the past year are eligible for free legal assistance.

UNFORGETTABLE, RELAXING, THERAPEUTIC Deep Tissue Massage for your physical, mental, spiritual health. Returning to business, previous clients welcome. Jolanta 847650-8989. By appointment. Lic. #227000668.

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

for rent, Rhodes, Section 8 312-505-

SWOP CHICAGO HOSTS a free

HEALTH & WELLNESS

FOR SALE

3 BR OR MORE

ELEGANT 4BR APT nice block, 6137 S. hdwd floors throughout. welcome. $1100/mo. 8737

SERVICES

FOR A HEALTHY mind and body.

European trained and certified therapists specializing in deep tissue, Swedish, and relaxation massage. Incalls. 773-552-7525. Lic. #227008861.

UKRAINIAN MASSAGE. CALLS in/ out. Chicago and sub-

urbs. Hotels. 1234 S Michigan Avenue. Appointments. 773-616-6969.

suant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16147482 on July 20, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of BRAVE MOVE TRANSPORTATION with the business located at: 9439 LINCOLN AVE., BROOKFIELD, IL 60513. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: DIESEL ANTHONY BALDWIN, 9439 LINCOLN AVE., BROOKFIELD, IL 60513, USA

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16147495 on July 20, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of DANIEL GAWRON CONSTRUCTION with the business located at: 5129 S. KENNETH, CHICAGO, IL 60632. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/ partner(s) is: DANIEL GAWRON, 5129 S. KENNETH, CHICAGO, IL 60632, USA

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16147704 on August 5, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of ENACTZ CONSULTING with the business located at: 2941 N WHIPPLE ST #1, CHICAGO, IL 60618. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: MARIA ASTUDILLO 2941 N WHIPPLE ST #1, CHICAGO, IL 60618, USA

MUSIC & ARTS JULIUS CAESAR ~ By William

Shakespeare, Directed by Kathleen Carot ~ Open Call Auditions. This production will utilize non-traditional casting. Women and men of all ages and ethnic groups are encouraged to attend. 8/29 & 8/30; 6 – 9 p.m. No appointment necessary. Prepared monologues and cold readings heard. www.oakton.edu Park in Lot A. For more info, call 847.635.1897.

BUSINESS OPS SEPTIC BUSINESS FOR SALE, Lake County, IL. Established for 30 years. Asking $125,000. Call 847395-8637—

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16147653 on August 4, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of MCW DESIGNS with the business located at: 7236 W 153RD ST, ORLAND PARK, IL 60462. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: SHARON G SHERIDAN, 7236 W 153RD ST, ORLAND PARK, IL 60462, USA

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16147678 on August 4, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of D2 with the business located at: 1711 S HALSTED #1, CHICAGO, IL 60608. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/ partner(s) is: ANNA MORT, 1711 S HALSTED #1, CHICAGO, IL 60608, USA

legal notices NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16147478 on July 20, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of BIOPSYCHOSOCIALWELLNESS PARTNERS with the business located at: 2721 JOSEPH AVE, DES PLAINES, IL 60018. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: MARK MURDOCK 1353 SAGER RD, VALPARAISO, IN 46383, USA, NANCY C BRICKS 2721 JOSEPH AVE, DES PLAINES, IL 60018, USA

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to “An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State,” as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16147553 on July 26, 2016 Under the Assumed Business Name of TIM’S BARBERSHOP with the business located at: 420 E. 87TH ST., CHICAGO, IL 60619. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner (s)/partner(s) is: TIMOTHY E. RAGIN, 8600 S. VERNON AVE, CHICAGO, IL 60619, USA

NOTICE IS HEREBY given, pursuant to "An Act in relation to the use of an Assumed Business Name in the conduct or transaction of Business in the State," as amended, that a certification was registered by the undersigned with the County Clerk of Cook County. Registration Number: D16147701 on August 5, 2016, under the Assumed Business Name of POREQPINE with the business located at 4461 W Hutchinson, Chicago, IL 60641. The true and real full name(s) and residence address of the owner( s)/ partner(s) is: Giancarlo Mancuso, 4461 W Hutchinson, Chicago, IL 60641, USA.

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By Cecil Adams Q : Why do so many Americans dislike

Hillary Clinton? It seems to predate her time as secretary of state or even as senator. Does it have something to do with her husband’s two terms in the White House? —JONATHAN PEARCE

A : In 1964 Barry Goldwater quipped about

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nuking the Kremlin men’s room and equated Medicare with giving old folks free resort vacations, cigarettes, and beer. Just before Lyndon Johnson strolled to victory that November, Gallup found that 46 percent of Americans viewed his Republican opponent unfavorably, with 26 percent of respondents into the “highly unfavorable” camp. For five decades, Goldwater has been the most unpopular major-party presidential candidate ever, a record that some deemed unbreakable. Well, they used to think nobody would ever hit 62 home runs in a season either. By Gallup’s latest reckoning, back in June, exactly half the American public views Hillary Clinton unfavorably, 33 percent highly so. But Hillary Clinton and mass unpopularity are old pals. The first major attempt to suss out the source of the antipathy, Henry Louis Gates’s “Hating Hillary,” appeared in the New Yorker in 1996—meaning this idea is now old enough to vote. The thing is, though, Clinton’s popularity numbers have never stayed put. She wrapped up her secretary of state gig in 2013 with a 64 percent favorability rating, and even that wasn’t peak Hillary—in 1998, at the kickoﬀ of Bill’s impeachment, 67 percent of Americans were on her side. Now, we’re a polarized people. A third of Americans will always approve of Hillary Clinton, while another third forever will be ready to holler “Lock her up!” But what’s with that middle that can’t make up its mind? Clinton’s own spin on her ﬂuctuating favorability is that she’s a wooden campaigner whose numbers dip during the election cycle, but a hard worker who forges her way back into our hearts with her sturdy competence. But a charisma deficit alone isn’t enough to turn half a nation against you. What about ethical concerns? Granted, the Clintons have often seemed oddly unworried about appearing too chummy with big donors to their campaigns and charitable foundation, and a fog of impropriety clings to Hillary even when specific claims are disproven. But certainly no presidential candidate has faced so much congressional scrutiny immediately prior to an election: Republican-controlled committees have been hammering away at

Clinton for three years now, first on Benghazi, then on her usage of e-mail. And that kind of shelling from the opposition is nothing new—in the 90s, Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of everything from real estate shenanigans to outright murder. And yet Bill Clinton has emerged from the battles of the past unscathed: as recently as 2014 his favorability polled at 64 percent. Meanwhile Hillary suffers the scorn of a reinvigorated left that’s retroactively critical of her support for her husband’s policies—adopted in the aftermath of the Reagan years, when Democrats were stumbling over each other in their efforts not to appear too liberal. How did Hillary get stuck holding the bag? Let’s not dance around the obvious: Hillary Clinton is a woman. Surely it’s a double standard that allows Bill to seem like a charming rapscallion who just cuts a few corners while Hillary is cast as a shady crime boss. Back in the 90s, as the first working woman to serve as first lady, Clinton initially took a lead role in health-care policymaking but hit massive turbulence from D.C. traditionalists who thought she’d misread her job description. Such paleo-antifeminist rancor—and an accompanying rap as presumptuous and pushy—is something that more recently prominent female politicians, like Elizabeth Warren, have largely been spared. None of this is to make excuses for her— politics is a tough game, and a better operator might have handled things more deftly. As that 1996 New Yorker piece suggests, Hillary’s always just rubbed plenty of people the wrong way. Then again, “Why doesn’t anyone like you?” is a hell of a question for even the savviest politician to field continuously for 25 years. However, friends, we live in wondrous times, and in 2016 Hillary’s not even our least popular presidential candidate. Gallup again: 59 percent of Americans don’t like Donald Trump, including 42 percent who can’t stand him. Fortunately, nobody’s writing in to wonder why— I’d never get it all in a single column. v Send questions to Cecil via straightdope.com or write him c/o Chicago Reader, 350 N. Orleans, Chicago 60654.

PRESENTS

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

A fake Dan Savage is this week’s @fakedansavage Orlando-based sportswriter Dan Savage on love and sex DEAR READERS: I’m on vacation for the next three weeks—but you’ll still be getting a new column every week, all of them written by Dan Savage, none of them written by me. This Dan Savage is a sportswriter and the assistant director of digital content for OrlandoMagic.com. Dan has covered six NBA finals and ten NBA All-Star Games, but this is his ﬁrst time giving sex-and-relationship advice. “Other sportswriters often tell me they enjoyed reading my latest column,” Dan Savage told me in an e-mail. “Then when they show me the article, it’s one of your sex-advice columns. The joke’s on them this time around!”

Q : I’m a straight guy in my

40s, and I’ve been with my wife for more than 20 years. I’m still incredibly attracted to her. Recently, I’ve been a bit frustrated with us not having sex as frequently as I’d like. So I broached the subject with her. I tried to be easygoing about it, but maybe I fucked that up. Basically, I told her that I fantasize about her daily and would like to have sex more often. I cited two examples of frustration. Two weeks ago, I came on to her and tried to initiate, but we had a dinner party to go to and she didn’t want to be late. One week ago, I was ﬂirting with her but was rebuﬀed because we were going out to dinner and . . . she wanted to go to dinner more than to fuck, I guess. I made my wife cry by bringing this up. End result is that she doesn’t want to fuck more than we already do, there’s nothing I can do to make sex more appealing for her, and it hurt her for me to bring the subject up at all. I dropped it, apologized, and moved on. I

don’t want to coerce her into anything (I want her to want me), so here we are. How can I communicate better in the future? —USING MY WORDS

A : Communication in any

relationship is key. On the basketball court, one of the ﬁrst things young players are taught is to communicate eﬀectively with their teammates. In relationships, the same principles hold true. You have to be able to effectively communicate with your partner in order to keep both parties happy. Timing matters too. So first, I’d make sure you communicate your needs at a time other than when you’ve just been rebuffed. You’re then likely to be less emotional, think more rationally, and more effectively explain your needs without applying added pressure. Second, I’d try making your next move when other plans aren’t on the table. In both the examples you mention, UMW, the timing of your request appears to have been an issue for her. Schedule some time for an intimate dinner at home or cap off an exciting evening out on the town with romantic advances. If she doesn’t respond to your improved efforts, then she’s not being a good teammate. A successful relationship is when both members’ needs are met, not just one’s.

Q : I’m a 36-year-old

bisexual female. I’ve been dating my nice midwestern boyfriend for about four and a half years. Within the ﬁrst few dates, I brought up nonmonogamy. I get bored, I like attention, and I love the chase. He was against it. I thought, OK, we have a lot of other positive stuﬀ going for us—maybe he’ll reconsider in the future. But I feel

like I’ve lost a part of my sexual self—no adventures, no three-ways, I miss girls, etc. I feel that what I want— newness, some kink he isn’t trained in, being with a girl, etc—he can’t give me. So I brought up opening up the relationship again. He listens to your podcasts now, but he doesn’t think he could handle the idea of me with someone else. I don’t think I can handle the relationship as it is now, though, and this was my suggestion to try to make it stronger. I feel like I’ve already ended the relationship just by bringing this up. Are we doomed? —A GIRL HAS NEEDS

A : I appreciate you having

your boyfriend listen to my podcasts—oh wait, that was probably meant for the other Dan Savage. But your question reminds me of a topic that’s currently top of mind in my profession: NBA free agency. There’s nothing worse than being locked into a five-year guaranteed contract with a guy who doesn’t fit in with your franchise. Likewise, you need a guy who shares your relationship goals and values. If your boyfriend is someone who has no interest in open relationships—and from all indications, he’s doesn’t— odds are he’s never going to be happy in that type of situation. And if you’re never going to be happy with monogamy, then you need to find someone whose values match your own. Unfortunately, some people are destined to play man-to-(wo) man, while others are more satisfied in a two-three zone defense. v

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Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at thestranger.com. ß @fakedansavage

AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 45

b Twilight Hours 9/23, 10 PM, SPACE, Evanston Ty Dolla Sign 9/3, 10 PM, Prysm Nightclub Umphrey’s McGee 9/3, 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Velvet Acid Christ 10/15, 8:30 PM, Cobra Lounge Vulfpeck, Tauking McGee 9/4, 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Ziggy Marley 10/2, 7:30 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM b

UPDATED Hobbs’ Angel of Death, Atomic Aggressor 9/7, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, canceled Kaleo 10/14-15, 7:30 PM, House of Blues, 10/14 added, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM, 17+

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All Get Out 10/29, 10 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 8/12, noon, 18+ American Football 10/29, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Anoraak 9/18, 9 PM, Schubas Baauer 9/2, 10 PM, the Mid Bad Suns, Coin 8/28, 7 PM, Double Door, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM b BJ Barham 10/13, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 8/12, noon Doyle Bramhall II 10/27, 8 PM, City Winery b Bronze Radio Return 9/29, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Calexico 9/17, 7 and 10 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, on sale Fri 8/12, 8 AM b Chook Race 9/19, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Will Courtney 9/13, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Crown the Empire, Blessthefall, New Years Day, Too Close to Touch 11/13, 5 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM b Deerhunter, Aldous Harding 10/21, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM, 18+ Lewis Del Mar 10/13, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM, 18+ Devil Wears Prada, Memphis May Fire 10/13, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge b Kevin Devine & the Goddamn Band 12/2, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, on sale Fri 8/12, noon b Elizabeth Cook 10/14, 8:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM Sam Feldt 9/4, 10 PM, the Mid Louis Futon 9/2, 9:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 18+

Galantis (DJ set) 9/2, 10 PM, Prysm Nightclub Gooch Palms 9/29, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Good Charlotte, Story So Far 11/4, 6:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM b Lilly Hiatt 9/5, 8 PM, Schubas Griﬃn House 10/26, 8 PM, City Winery b Ian Hunter & the Rant Band 10/11-12, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 8/11, noon b IAMX, Cellars 9/27, 8 PM, Double Door, on sale Fri 8/12, noon, 18+ Eric Johnson 11/5, 7 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 8/11, noon b July Talk 11/9, 9 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 8/12, noon, 17+ Keys N Krates (DJ set) 9/3, 10 PM, the Mid La Sera, Springtime Carnivore 10/30, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM Lampedusa with Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Patty Griﬃn, Buddy Miller, Milk Carton Kids, and more 10/13, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM, 18+ Loose Ends 11/13, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 8/11, noon b Marc Ford, Neptune Blues Club 11/23, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM Marian Hill, Verite 10/8, 8 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 8/12, noon b Megon McDonough, Eddie Holstein 9/23, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston Mipso 11/30, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 8/11, noon b Mo 11/27, 7 PM, Metro b Coco Montoya 9/21, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 8/11, noon b

46 CHICAGO READER - AUGUST 11, 2016

UPCOMING Mura Masa 10/22, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 8/12, noon, 18+ Nihil 10/24, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge Willie Nile 11/11, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 8/11, noon b Nots 10/20, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Owen 10/8, 8:30 PM, Chicago Athletic Association Hotel, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM Pinky Doodle Poodle 9/3, 8 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Pretty Reckless 11/11, 7 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM b Psychic Ills 9/23, 10 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Rhye 10/13, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Draco Rosa 9/18, 9 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM, 17+ Royal Bangs 10/1, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Shel 10/9, 8 PM, Schubas, on sale Fri 8/12, noon Sister Hazel 12/9-10, 8 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM, 17+ Sleigh Bells (DJ set) 9/2, 10 PM, Virgin Hotel Esperanza Spalding 10/27, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Thu 8/11, 10 AM b Speak Low if You Speak Love 10/7, 5:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b St. Lucia, Baio 10/22, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM, 18+ Suicide Silence, Whitechapel 10/9, 6 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 8/12, 9 AM b Suicideboys 9/3, 6:30 PM, Double Door, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM b Sum 41, Senses Fail 10/21, 7 PM, House of Blues, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM b Sunﬂower Bean, Lemon Twigs 10/21, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 8/12, 10 AM b

Amity Aﬄiction, Being as an Ocean 10/8, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Anderson Wakeman Rabin 11/5, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Anthrax 9/21, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Andrew Bird 9/7, 7 PM, Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park b Black Sabbath 9/4, 7:30 PM, Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre, Tinley Park b Danny Brown 9/22, 7 PM, House of Blues b Cactus 9/24, 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint Cavalera Roots 10/6, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ David Crosby 8/31, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Dear Hunter 9/21, 7:30 PM, Metro, 18+ Drivin’ N Cryin’ 9/7, 8 PM, Schubas Explosions in the Sky 9/10, 8 PM, Aragon Ballroom, 17+ FIDLAR 11/17, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Radney Foster 8/21, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Full of Hell & the Body 9/1, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Goblin Cock 10/2, 9 PM, Empty Bottle God Is an Astronaut 9/3, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Guided by Voices 9/3, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Glen Hansard 9/20-21, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Health 9/25, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Incognito 10/28, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery b Jai Wolf 11/5, 11 PM, Metro, 18+ Jesu, Sun Kil Moon 11/13, 8 PM, Park West, 18+ K Theory 11/25, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Lucy Kaplansky 10/21, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Kikagaku Moyo 10/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

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Lordi 2/14, 7 PM, Double Door Muﬀs 8/28, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Opposite Sex 9/26, 9 PM, Empty Bottle F Protomartyr, Gotobeds 11/2, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Record Company 10/7, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Ben Rector 10/21, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre Red Fang, Torche, Whores 12/10, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Saint Motel, Weathers 10/15, 7:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Saint Vitus, the Skull 10/10, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Buﬀy Sainte-Marie 8/24, 8 PM, City Winery b Arturo Sandoval 9/29, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Todd Snider, Rorey Carroll 10/11, 8 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Straight No Chaser 12/17, 3 and 8 PM, Civic Opera House b Stray Birds 8/30, 7:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Street Corner Symphony 9/17, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Strumbellas, Foreign Air 10/25, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Twin Peaks, Ne-Hi 8/20, 4 PM, Half Acre Beer Company Wehrmacht 11/5, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Allison Weiss 9/17, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Wolves in the Throne Room 9/23, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Wood Brothers 11/3, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Yes 8/20, 8 PM, Copernicus Center b 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+ Bill Callahan 9/25-26, 7:30 and 9:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Echo & the Bunnymen 9/17, 8 PM, Metro, 18+ Lukas Graham 1/17, 7 PM, House of Blues b Jason Isbell 11/18, 7:30 PM, Thalia Hall b Lush 9/18, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Mekons 9/19-20, 8 PM, Hideout Morgan Heritage 8/24, 6 PM, Double Door b Pearl Jam 8/20 and 8/22, 7:30 PM, Wrigley Field Stabbing Westward 9/22, 8 PM, Double Door Tricky 10/30, 7 PM, Double Door v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene BEFORE COFOUNDING Chicago ska band Heavy Manners, singer Kate Fagan released the 1980 new-wave single “I Don’t Wanna Be Too Cool” b/w “Waiting for the Crisis”—a bouncy, rollicking call-out of drugged-up hipster trash backed with one of the Reagan era’s catchiest paranoia jams about the militaryindustrial complex. After the record’s second pressing burned in a house fire, it became something of a collector’s item, and this week Brooklyn label Manufactured Recordings is finally reissuing the seven-inch (with two unreleased bonus tracks). On Thursday, August 11, Fagan celebrates the reissue with a set at Debonair Social Club’s Neo night. The $5 door charge beneﬁts Yoga for Recovery, which helps women in Chicago prisons, and before 11 PM you can get in free with the password “too cool”! In 2012, Reader staff writer Miles Raymer called Swimsuit Addition’s music “apocr yphal-Halloween-scare-stor y bubblegum that’s full of broken glass.” On Wednesday, August 17, Tall Pat Records releases the Swimsuit Addition cassette EP Killin Time, and it sounds like the local punk four-piece has packed some razor blades into its tunes! That night the band celebrates with a set at Double Door (after a Saturday show at the Burlington). Reggae Fest Chicago, a single-day celebration of reggae, ska, roots reggae, and reggaeton, debuts at Addams/Medill Park on Saturday, August 13, and a couple late club gigs will keep the party going sans porta-potties. LA ska outfit Hepcat headline Subterranean on Friday, August 12. And on Saturday at Double Door, local roots-reggae group Akasha headline the Simmer Down Sound aftershow, where guest selectors Mykol Orthodox (of TJ Fiyah Sound) and Kinky P join regulars the Graduate, Rad Brian, and Marcus Iyah. Double Door also hosts Midwest Ska Fest on Sunday, August 14, with Hub City Stompers, the Crombies, and a dozen more. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

AUGUST 11, 2016 - CHICAGO READER 47