Chicago Reader print issue of August 15, 2024 (Vol. 53, No. 28) by Chicago Reader

THE PROTEST ISSUE MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

22 Caporale | Feature Chicago band Glutton for Insurrection make music to crack open prisons.

24 The Secret History of Chicago Music Fred Holstein is the forgotten anchor of Chicago’s folk scene.

26 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including the Million Tongues Festival, Thra, TisaKorean, and L’Abortion Variety Hour

29 Gossip Wolf I-94’s ﬁrst live event unites dance musicians from Chicago and Detroit, the South Side Sanctuary opens in Bronzeville, and more.

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30 Professionals & Services

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31 Savage Love You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.

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“A Senior Citizens’ March to protest inﬂ ation, unemployment and high taxes” led by Rev. Jesse Jackson at Lake Shore Drive, 1973 DOCUMERICA / EPA

EDITOR’S NOTE

Fifty-six years ago, graphic scenes of police brutality captured viewers across the globe. Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters descended on our city to demand an end to the United States military’s involvement in Vietnam, and Chicago police responded in true Chicago fashion. Likened by one U.S. senator to tactics employed by the gestapo, then mayor Richard J. Daley instead blamed the violence on “outside agitators” who came to the city “for the avowed purpose of a hostile confrontation with law enforcement.”

Half a century later, the backdrop to this year’s Democratic National Convention feels eerily familiar to that of 1968. Grassroots movements from cities nationwide are planning a mass mobilization in opposition to the U.S. government’s continued support of a livestreamed genocide. Meanwhile, police superintendent Larry Snelling again warns of “outside agitators” as he telegraphs his eagerness for yet another heavy-handed police response. On college campuses, acts of resistance by students and faculty are met once more with repression.

So often, media coverage of protest movements focuses on the practical: the size of the crowds, the parsing of the “peaceful” from the “violent,” the response by cops. Yet too often, that same coverage ignores the underlying conditions that drove people to the streets in the ﬁrst place.

This issue is an e ort to give space to those conditions—both new and old. From the lasting impact of the Red Summer of 1919 to the University of Chicago’s red scare of the 1930s, from movement photojournalists to the role of art in resistance, this issue is an homage to our city’s historic and vibrant role in the struggle for a better world.

As o cials roll out the red carpets and prepare once more for the prime-time spotlight,

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

the stage is set for another showdown. The whole world is watching Chicago yet again. Will this time be any di erent? v

—Shawn Mulcahy,

news editor m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com

CORRECTIONS

For the second time, the Reader has updated the online version of S. Nicole Lane’s August 1 print feature for the Food and Drink section, “Stussy’s Diner opens in Bridgeport with high hopes.” The previous version of the article implied that the Johnny O’s and Bruno’s establishments are currently open, but both shuttered in the late 2010s.

The Reader has also updated the online version of the article “Pookie Crack Cakes sells out every day,” written by Tyra Nicole Triche and published in our August 8 print issue. The story was amended to correct the days on which the Pineapple Paradise (Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday) and Peach Crack Cobbler (Wednesday and Saturday) specialty cakes are available.

The Reader regrets the errors. v

The Chicago Seed published a special convention issue in the summer of 1968. COURTESY MARC FISCHER

Have you eaten?

The quiet power of feeding each other

By YASMIN ZACARIA MIKHAIEL

“Have you eaten?”

The unassuming question carries with it generations of love, an active kind of love, especially among immigrant communities. It feels like an open secret across homes that food is often a supplement, or sometimes a stand-in, for verbalized love. Food transcends emotional barriers—a salve, simply plated. There’s a truth and beauty to the cliche of fruit appearing from thin air in homes filled with resilience and grief.

In what would be the last grocery run I did for my dad, his only request was blueberries. He stayed in the car, too weak to join me in Aldi. The simplicity of the request ached in a new way, and my stomach twirled into an anxiety knot. I miss cooking with him, laughing over our American shortcuts to the beautiful complexity of Persian food. He taught me the importance of food, but toward the end, he didn’t even have the energy to eat it.

Less than a week later, after my dad’s cancer diagnosis, we’d be in Los Angeles, surrounded by aunties and July cherries, pears, and watermelon. Fruit now feels like a ghost, its memories and symbolism haunting. Here, there is an individual grief that sporadically alienates, but I know loss is a collective experience that, just like food, is best shared.

Now as I cut fruit for organizing meetings, the weight persists, heavy with history and privilege. I share the sentiment with many friends of the Southwest Asian and North African diaspora that everything reminds us of Palestine, but especially food. Almost a year deep into the ongoing bombardment of Palestinians and the destruction of humanitarian aid by Israelis and their government (and ours), I know we are beyond a watermelon-symboled resistance.

The watermelon, a once subtle stand-in for the Palestinian flag during a time when the

flag itself was banned, has publicly taken to the streets—its red, black, and green are now as loud as protest chants and Chicago City Council calling for a ceaseﬁre. I think of all the places I cut watermelon and what more we can do to stop death.

“Have you eaten?”

The months pass and one lover persists in this refrain. I can’t remember the answer. But with a brain and body healing from a longago eating disorder, my memory is jogged by my own Instagram stories: There is dill rice burning (purposely) on the stove, saffronmarinated chicken a step away from seared, Persian cucumbers idling on the counter.

My days are broken by my kitchen, reprieves from work and the first-to-arriveto-the-Zoom-meeting dread. It feels like I’m stealing back time even though nourishment is a necessity, even though feeding myself is the bare minimum.

Food as a physical practice is not something I considered until it became my main daily movement, a time for grounding. Burned out from liberation work, grief work, work work—I find myself hermitting unless beckoned to the water or streets, and even then it’s a toss-up. The weight of this summer demanded something di erent. O cially, more than 36,000 Palestinians are dead. Uno cially, the number could be closer to 186,000. Global crises compound over and over. There’s little break from loss, and it intimately impacts our relationships to each other and ourselves. After losing a close friend this summer, the harshness of our conditions under ruthless empires became unbearable. The loss was a reminder that global struggle is not happening in the abstract, that our futures are interconnected and we need each other to survive.

“Have you eaten?”

I’m not a meal prepper, my mind too full of other futures, five-year plans that often demand pivots. But I have deep appreciation for our community food workers who insist we gather and break bread and remember.

Somehow, in the face of devastation, it’s become easier to ﬁnd each other, us diaspora kids yearning for a taste of homelands some of us have never been to. Our group chats explode with fierce opinions on restaurants, tips on ﬁnding make-or-break ingredients, and invitations to eat.

One time, some early December weekend, I was tasked with bringing pounds of tomatoes and cucumbers in my biggest tupperware to a kickboxing gym. A friend of a friend made it our community kitchen for a night. As I walked

PROTEST ISSUE

in, I was hit with a unique waft of gym ﬂoor rubber, fresh lemon, and brined grape leaves. More than 20 of us, friends new and old, gathered around long folding tables awaiting directions or taking charge for a night of warak enab, or dolma, making.

Homemade hummus and bulk-bought pita circulated our tables alongside stories of aunties, brags of keeping the leaves intact, and whispered mashallahs. I squeezed a million lemons for a jar of juice. We beamed at our makeshift night, Instapots taking our gym dinner over the ﬁnish line.

“Have you eaten?”

Even in the wake of so much loss, the exhaustion, the mobilizing, this one question can break through it all, offering a moment of reﬂection on the day’s nourishment or lack thereof. A beat, this intimate check-in, slows everything else. With it comes an opportunity to feed or be fed. Then, there are the memories of all those who have inquired, hopeful that your needs are met. And if not, they are ready to serve. v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

FOOD & DRINK

I’ve loved all of chef Sujan Sarkar’s restaurants, including Sifr, for which he collaborated with chef Sahil Sethi. So when I heard early this year that the talented duo were opening Chicago’s first Indian cafe, I was stoked. Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I have a wicked sweet tooth, so I was most excited for the pastry case—with sweets like dirty chai tiramisu and mango ras malai—and the unique coffee and chai drinks. While the oaksmoked vanilla latte is certainly killer, I was surprised to ﬁnd that my favorite bite of all was actually savory.

its marinade and char, rich and creamy makhani sauce, a hint of peppery arugula, mint chutney, and both Amul and cheddar cheeses. It’s perfect for eating at your desk without making a mess.

The chicken tikka toastie looks like a straightforward panini-style sandwich, but the humble white bread exterior belies a sophisticated medley of flavors within. There’s neatly diced tandoori chicken with

General manager Yash Kishinchand, who developed the cafe menu, says his inspiration was to “blend beloved flavors of tandoori chicken into the universally cherished grilled cheese.” He tested the sandwich with sourdough and other artisan breads, but he found that simple white bread let the ﬂavors shine best. “Growing up, I enjoyed grilled cheeses with Kraft slices as well as Amul and ketchup—the Indian way,” he says. The chicken tikka toastie is justifiably one of Swadesi’s bestsellers and perfectly encapsulates the cafe’s vision of bringing Indian cafe culture to America. —AMBER GIBSON SWADESI CAFE 328 S. Jefferson, #120, $13, 708-553-6350, swadesicafe.com v

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

i know something about the breaking point hands coded red at birth as if my grandmothers didn’t work the land that grew the food that made fat the men in the bank towers saying they now own this land

who was massacred and made you god?

i know something about video playback about roadkill about the moment I ﬂicker through your headlights as you pass, thinking “what a shame, the deer should have complied.”

i should have complied with my pillaging. LIVE FREE OR DIE is righteous only in the mouths of white people

i know something about enough about the sharpening of my ﬁngernails so that next time I’m ready i know

you like me best as a hashtag, a headline, a vigil, a black squarei regret to inform you that i am the well i am the true leaf, the orchard, the harvest

i regret to inform you that i am the ﬁeld on ﬁre, the machete, Harriet’s gun.

i could be rain, if you’d let me.

i know something about holy war it is waged by those with an ocean on one side, and on the other canons leveled at their children

By McKenzie Chinn

McKenzie is a multi-disciplinary artist in Chicago, with a focus on filmmaking, theatre, poetry, and performance. She is a member of the acclaimed Growing Concerns Poetry Collective, and her short film A Real One won the Chicago International Film Festival’s Gold Hugo, qualifying the film for 2025 Academy Award consideration. She lives in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood with her fiancé Mykele, their new baby Ocean, and their cat Wifi. mckenziechinn.com

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

A weekly series curated by the Chicago Reader and sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. Summer Hours Wednesday–Saturday: 11:00 AM–5:00 PM

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

cori nakamura lin onibaba studio

Chicken tikka toastie at Swadesi Cafe

PROTEST ISSUE

LANGUAGE

Uprising or riot? Depends who you ask.

The words ascribed to history depend on who’s telling the story.

By SIRI CHILUKURI

On a hot summer day in July 1919, a group of Black children ﬂoating on a raft drifted farther than they should have, into a part of Lake Michigan that abutted a predominantly white beach. The children, unaware of the invisible color line in the water, continued to play until, eventually, violence erupted.

Young, white beachgoers threw stones at the kids. One of them struck 17-year-old Eugene Williams, who fell into the lake and drowned. His friends tried to alert a police o cer named Daniel Callahan to the man they thought responsible for Williams’s death to no avail.

Soon, fighting broke out among people gathered at the beach. The ensuing violence spilled into Black communities as groups of young, white people instigated terror. Led by WWI veterans, residents of Bronzeville—then known as Chicago’s Black Belt—joined together to protect their communities against outsiders who ﬁred indiscriminately at them.

Thirty-eight people were killed and hundreds were injured. Black residents made up two-thirds of those wounded, but they also made up two-thirds of 138 people indicted for rioting and were blamed by the city’s police department for a majority of the violence.

This event kicked off a period known as the Red Summer, in which similar incidents, typically described by historians as race riots, erupted in cities across the United States. So many words could plausibly describe both the initial violence and the Black resistance to that violence: riot, uprising, rebellion. Such terms are often used interchangeably—even though their connotations could not be more di erent.

“In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were hundreds of race riots,” says Peter Cole, founder and director of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project. “That term generally meant mobs of white people attacking Black people. And mob—similar to riot—suggests that it’s disorganized.”

Today, mass protests of the U.S. government’s support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians are playing out in cities nationwide. They’ve shut down bridges, highways, and commercial districts, slowing tra c to a halt. Yet in the ensuing days and weeks, politicians, often physically and culturally removed from communities that initiate these protests, have no problem condemning them as acts of “terrorism.”

riot,” the phrase grew out of a need to describe violence along the lines of race.

The other reason language matters? These events often have historical consequences that play out decades or centuries later. In Chicago, the 1919 Race Riot is linked to the physical segregation we continue to experience more than 100 years later. It “was a major factor in the subsequent increase in the hardening and expansion of racial segregation by neighborhood,” says Cole.

The words we ascribe to history are subjective, shaped by the life experiences of those keeping record, says Heather Ann Thompson, historian and professor at the University of Michigan. Many supporters of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, for example, consistently experienced high rates of poverty, inequality, and police brutality. For them, events like Bloody Sunday, the Martin Luther King Jr. Assassination Riots, and the Greensboro sitin could all be understood as uprisings—moments of justified catharsis after years, decades, centuries of oppression, explains Thompson. But for those who benefitted from the status quo, such events were destabilizing and threatened the whole system.

“They saw [protests] as threatening and chaotic and understood it, therefore, as [a] riot, which kind of means mayhem. And of course, the media, in typical fashion, understood it likewise as [a] riot,” Thompson says. “And indeed, every time in American history since when this has happened, the term riot is always used over uprising.”

“The idea that protests are not chaotic affairs is also ahistorical. By deﬁnition, protests are meant to disrupt,” says Thompson. “Like a strike is supposed to stop production, a protest is supposed to stop the normal order of business.”

The reason language matters is not, Thompson emphasizes, due to political cor-

Often, Chicagoans say all maps of the city look the same. It could be ambient temperature, graduation rates, or percentage of pickleball players—the city’s original sin of segregation reverberates through to today. It inﬂuences public life for every person who lives here, whether they realize it or not. The

Conversations about race, violence, and resistance aren’t stuck in the past. Many modern movements for racial and economic justice in the U.S. draw similar comparisons, decades or even centuries later. When protests gripped the nation in 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd, reporters often described them as violent—yet they overlooked the violent police response.

“The preponderance of the violence is state violence and police violence,” Thompson says. “And yet we describe the uprisings as violent.”

rectness. Instead, accuracy is the main focus. The distinctions between uprising, rebellion, riot, race riot, and protest—often denoted by whether people in power perceive the events as justified—exist because there are fundamental di erences in the actions they describe as well as the instigators and aftermath. Despite the somewhat outdated usage of “race

history of the 1919 Race Riot remains a pivotal event, even if the term itself might not be used today. “In other words,” says Cole, “not only was [the race riot] important in its own right, it literally shapes the city that we all live in still today.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

PROTEST ISSUE

‘We will not protect you’

Chicago’s response to the 2020 mass protests revealed glaring holes in police accountability. What does that mean for the DNC?

By ERISA APANTAKU, ANDREW FAN, DANA BROZOST-KELLEHER, MAHEEN KHAN, AND ISRA RAHMAN

This piece was copublished with the Invisible Institute. Content note: This story discusses police violence.

On the final day of May in 2020, at the height of demonstrations against police violence that gripped cities nationwide after the murder of George Floyd, protesters filmed a violent scene at the corner of Clark and Hubbard in Chicago’s River North neighborhood. Amid a confrontation with protesters, roughly a dozen Chicago police officers beat demonstrators, striking some with batons as they tried to escape and others as they fell to the ground.

A video provided to the Invisible Institute shows an officer named Richard Bankus approach one of the people on the ground. Bankus raises his baton and strikes the man, appearing to hit him in the head. As he’s hit, the protester on the ground backs away from

Bankus, trying to avoid additional blows.

All the while, Sergeant Zachary Rubald stands directly behind Bankus, looking on. The scene unfolding in front of him is serious. Chicago Police Department (CPD) policy forbids o cers from hitting people with batons unless they are attacking or threatening to attack officers or others. Even more, baton strikes to the head qualify as deadly force and are never allowed against nonviolent protesters. As a sergeant, Rubald is responsible for ensuring o cers follow CPD rules and for reporting any misconduct he witnesses. Instead, Rubald turns and walks away; he never reports the incident.

From the streets of River North to Harper Court in Hyde Park, hundreds of CPD officers were accused of violence and misconduct during the summer of 2020, their actions often caught on video, like Rubald and Bankus.

Faced with an unprecedented surge of complaints, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA), Chicago’s police oversight body, ruled that roughly 50 o cers should be suspended or ﬁred, a major increase from prior oversight agencies. However, most protest cases still did not lead to discipline.

COPA also faced dozens of formal challenges from CPD leadership that succeeded in blunting discipline, particularly attempts to hold supervisors accountable for their failure to stop misconduct. As Chicago gears up for major protests at this month’s Democratic National Convention (DNC), experts warn that the failure to discipline cops sends a powerful and troubling message to all officers on the streets this summer.

COPA did not respond to speciﬁc questions about their investigations and recommendations about supervisors, instead writing that in 2020, current COPA chief administrator Andrea Kersten,“who was Chief of Investigative

Operations at the time, led COPA’s Protest/ Civil Unrest Unit, a specialized squad uniquely organized to receive, review and triage mass protest-related complaints.”

The CPD did not respond to requests for comment.

Two of the cops who could face off with protesters later this month are Bankus and Rubald. Craig Futterman, a law professor and head of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the University of Chicago, says Bankus’s actions and their handling by the department are troubling, with the video showing an unjustiﬁed use of potentially deadly force. Futterman argues Rubald’s behavior was particularly egregious. “He’s looking right in front of him and then literally turns his back and walks away. Again, no ifs, ands, or buts— he should be ﬁred.”

Both officers faced serious discipline for their actions, though Bankus was evasive about whether he was the officer caught on

Police clash with protesters at Clark and Hubbard on May 31, 2020.

camera, speculating that another o cer could have been wearing his helmet, and Rubald told COPA he didn’t recall whether he saw any o cers strike a protester. Rubald, who in 2020 had recently been promoted to sergeant, was himself named in a 2008 lawsuit that accused several o cers of beating a man in the head with a baton until he bled. The city paid nearly $400,000 to settle the case. Rubald had also shot and killed a teenager in 2008.

COPA recommended that the CPD suspend Rubald for six months and consider terminating Bankus, citing the latter o cer’s “lack of remorse.” Investigators found that Rubald’s failure to halt or report the misconduct was “inexcusable, particularly for someone of the sergeant’s rank, position, and authority.”

Yet neither officer faced the maximum discipline recommended by COPA. Instead, Rubald’s suspension was reduced to one month after then CPD superintendent David Brown formally challenged the punishment and police brass opted to suspend Bankus instead of firing him. Not long after he beat a protester and then refused to acknowledge his actions to investigators, the department promoted Bankus to detective. Neither Rubald nor Bankus responded to voicemails left with numbers listed under their names or addresses.

Futterman says the limited discipline for supervisors in the highly publicized Clark and Hubbard case sends a chilling message to future protesters: “If you criticize us, if you speak up against us, you get what’s coming. You can be beat. You can be killed. And we will protect our o cers that do that. And we will not protect you.”

Police violence in the summer of 2020 had long-term consequences for protesters.

Across town the same day as the incident in River North, organizer and artist Damon Williams was at a demonstration in Hyde Park when o cers beat participants, including then Police Board chair Ghian Foreman, with batons. The incident led to seven suspensions.

Williams said he su ered from a concussion after he was beaten by o cers. “For weeks and months I had [an] intense stress response,” he says, “barely being able to lift a bag of laundry or having panic attacks in the morning. The cost of it was so real.”

The allegations against Bankus and Rubald were part of a wave of complaints about the CPD’s response to protests in summer 2020. COPA ultimately tallied 526 protest-related cases.

PROTEST ISSUE

COPA discipline challenged by CPD

Lieutenants/commanders

Investigating this surge of cases proved challenging. In a lengthy report, the Chicago Office of Inspector General wrote that the CPD’s “operational response to the protests and unrest and gaps in its relevant policies crippled accountability processes from the start,” citing widespread noncompliance with body-worn camera rules and a breakdown in mass-arrest procedures among other factors. All told, the Invisible Institute used publicly released investigation summaries to identify at least 54 instances in which COPA found ofﬁcers committed misconduct during protests or unrest between May and June 2020. COPA recommended 50 officers be suspended or fired, with most facing suspensions longer than 30 days.

Two-thirds of COPA’s rulings against Chicago police officers for conduct during summer 2020 came from just five incidents.

COPA’s handling of the cases was a shift from its predecessor, the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), which faced sustained criticism for regularly ruling in favor of officers. Between January 2007 and June 2016, Chicagoans lodged more than 8,000 allegations of excessive force against cops; investigators sustained just 135 of these cases during this nearly ten-year stretch. Meanwhile, COPA sustained 25 excessive force cases from late May and June 2020. Futterman says the number of ﬁndings against o cers is in line with an agency that is notably more independent than prior oversight bod-

Source: Analysis of COPA data by the Invisible Institute

ies. “What I’ve seen in COPA has been historic,” he says.

Still, two-thirds of COPA’s rulings against Chicago police o cers for conduct during the summer of 2020 came from just ﬁve incidents: the baton attacks at Clark and Hubbard, the incident in Hyde Park recounted by Williams, an incident where o cers attacked a woman at the Brickyard Mall, an assault by Officer James Hunt, and a protest at the Columbus statue in Grant Park where an o cer struck 18-year-old organizer Miracle Boyd in the face. Each of these incidents received extensive media coverage and had substantial video evidence.

But the bulk of complaints from protesters, especially those that lacked definitive video evidence, did not lead to ﬁndings against ocers. Erin White was at the protests downtown on May 30, 2020, when she says she witnessed officers grab a young Black woman from a group, drag her, and beat her on the ground until her skull bled. “It was the most disturbing thing,” says White. One o cer in particular stood out to White because he had also hit and spit on her.

White’s friend Rachel Dickson was at the protest, too, calling it the “most violent protest I’ve ever seen.” Police “pushed me down, grabbed me, and it just felt really violent and horrible,” she says. More than a year later, in July 2021, she decided to file a complaint online, naming Michael Donnelly as the o cer who assaulted and threatened to arrest her.

While giving her in-person statement to investigators, Dickson showed them photos and video from the protest. She says her video didn’t show the attack, but she used it to point out which o cers were violent with her and others. Dickson also pointed COPA to White as a witness.

After White told COPA what she saw and experienced, she says officials asked if she had any video of the encounter. White told

them she didn’t but could recognize the ocers’ faces. She is frustrated that the process seemed to require that she alone provide all the evidence.

It seemed to Dickson that the COPA o cials she spoke with knew the o cer in her video was a problem. “It sounded like maybe he had complaints before,” she says. (Donnelly was one of the officers involved in the wrongful raid on Anjanette Young in 2019.)

Dickson says that in the first two months after initiating her complaint, COPA investigators contacted witnesses and brought her in to take a statement. After that, she received two emails in 2022 and 2023, each telling her the complaint was still under investigation. Then, last year, Dickson received a letter saying her case was closed, without naming any speciﬁc o cers. Documents don’t show any discipline against o cers in her case.

According to COPA’s records, Dickson’s case was administratively closed on July 17, 2023, almost two years after she filed it, due to its “Timeliness Initiative” meant to clear its backlog of cases. According to the initiative, cases older than 18 months that lack certain allegations—such as dishonesty, domestic violence, sexual misconduct, unjustified uses of deadly force, unjustified uses of excessive force resulting in an injury—would be closed. The agency started the initiative because discipline was consistently overturned in arbitration for older cases, COPA chief administrator Andrea Kersten has said. COPA did not respond to specific questions about this case or its Timeliness Initiative.

Ocer Matthew Drinnan was caught on camera calling a protester a “fucking f----t” at a River North protest on May 30, 2020. COPA recommended the officer be ﬁred, declaring that “O cer Drinnan’s expression of hate speech signiﬁcantly undermines

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continued from p. 9

Department e orts to enforce the law impartially.” In response, Superintendent Brown ﬁled a formal challenge. COPA backed down, accepting Brown’s proposal that Drinnan instead serve a 270-day suspension. The superintendent relied on past precedent, including a case where an officer used a racial slur to refer to Barack Obama and was suspended instead of being ﬁred.

Brown’s dispute was part of a larger pattern. In instances where COPA did rule against cops, its findings were often overturned or watered down. The CPD formally challenged COPA’s findings in 20 cases, including its recommendation to ﬁre Nicholas Jovanovich, the o cer who knocked out one of organizer Miracle Boyd’s teeth at a protest. Jovanovich resigned after the Police Board rejected Brown’s challenge.

Notably, while Brown did concur with some findings against rank-and-file officers, he fought COPA in every case involving a senior supervisor, challenging efforts to discipline two commanders and three lieutenants. Brown also challenged findings against six of ten sergeants, including Rubald, who faced long suspensions for failing to stop o cers under their command from using excessive force. In Rubald’s case, then Police Board member Andrea Zopp ruled in favor of Brown’s recommendation, which reduced Rubald’s suspension from six months to one.

lied on a “specialized team” of investigators who coordinated with the State’s Attorney’s Office and the FBI. “Much of the strategy used previously is in place now,” Rottner wrote. “COPA benefits from the lessons learned in the past, when civil unrest has led to increased complaints, however due to a signiﬁcant reduction in open investigations, COPA is positioned to absorb complaints that may occur as a result of the Democratic National Convention without overburdening the agency.”

Williams worries the upcoming convention could reinforce aggressive police crowdcontrol tactics citywide. He points out that the policing of the DNC may carry over into “how large gatherings of young people are responded to; how future protests, parades, and celebrations on the south and west sides are then treated.”

“It’s disgusting. There’s no accountability. There’s no consequence.”

Four years after the violent police response to widespread protests, most officers accused of serious misconduct remain on the street as Chicago prepares for potential mass demonstrations yet again.

In late July, Donnelly was named in another high-profile incident.

The Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (CAARPR) posted a video of multiple officers restraining a man on a sidewalk. One of them—identiﬁed as Donnelly by CAARPR—strikes the man in the head.

Kara Crutcher, an attorney at Northwestern’s Community Justice and Civil Rights Clinic, says the handling of protest complaints reflects a broader issue with COPA’s efforts to hold o cers accountable—e orts frequently hampered by other parts of the oversight system. Crutcher says the failure to hold supervisors accountable is problematic “because it sends that ongoing message that exists in the Chicago Police Department that this is a brotherhood . . . and we protect each other ﬁrst and foremost.”

Jennifer Rottner, a COPA spokesperson, declined to answer speciﬁ c questions about how the agency prioritized those cases, writing instead that the 2020 investigations re-

When the man, who is being held down by several cops, continues to struggle, the o cer pulls his gun and points it directly at the man’s head, telling him, “You’re going to get fucking shot.” CPD claimed the man was armed and refused to turn over a gun, while the man quickly ﬁled a lawsuit against the department White is upset Donnelly could respond to DNC protests. “It’s disgusting,” she says. “There’s no accountability. There’s no consequence.

“If he’s willing to do those things in broad daylight in front of other people, [he’s] not afraid of a whole lot of other cops. Not afraid at all. You just know this is how he acts every time.” v

THEGREENPAGES

PROTEST ISSUE

IAny questions for the pharmacist?

Drugstore magnate Charles R. Walgreen’s anti-communist crusade

By STEVEN MELENDEZ

n April 1935, University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins received a letter from the concerned relative of a student. “With regret, I am having my niece, Miss Lucille Norton, discontinue her studies at the University of Chicago,” wrote pharmacy magnate Charles R. Walgreen. “I am unwilling to have her absorb the Communistic inﬂuences to which she is so insidiously exposed.” Norton, the 18-year-old daughter of the druggist’s late brother-in-law, was staying with Walgreen’s family while attending school at his expense. Walgreen alleged she was assigned reading from Karl Marx and a propaganda-laden Soviet schoolbook. At home, he charged, Norton would speak of moral relativism, conflicts between communism and capitalism, and the declining role of the family as an institution. The university was allowing “seditious propaganda under the guise of academic freedom,” he argued, and a professor had even dared to advocate for “free love.”

Those detailed claims were aired in a series of often-comical state legislative hearings—“an inquisition that turned into burlesque,” as Studs Terkel would later write— that essentially exonerated the university and embarrassed Walgreen, who in 1937 would make a $550,000 donation (worth around $12 million in 2024 dollars) to the school to promote “the study of American institutions.” But the controversy and ensuing gift, which would prove instrumental in establishing Chicago’s influential pro–free market economics program, anticipated battles over academic freedom and political inﬂuence that continue nationwide nearly a century later.

“In 1935, the university was not as beholden to donors; there’s broadly a liberal, left-wing culture; and it can resist the pressure from someone like Charles Walgreen in ways that are a lot more difficult in the 21st century,” says David Austin Walsh, a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism who’s written about conserva-

tive inﬂuence in higher ed. By 1935, Walgreen had turned what began as a single pharmacy on the south side into a nationwide empire. Often remembered as the father of the modern drugstore, he prided himself on attractive, well-stocked shops with pleasant customer service, good prices, and quality house brands of everything from face cream to bug spray. Lunch counters served affordable hot food and sandwiches, along with a signature chocolate malted milkshake that included a generous helping of Walgreen Drug Store brand ice cream.

Walgreen’s company was a prolific buyer of newspaper advertising across the country, and it sponsored baseball broadcasts on Tribune-owned radio station WGN. That likely helped his allegations get the attention of the national press. It also didn’t hurt that his fears of communist indoctrination resonated with conservative publishers like Tribune owner “Colonel” Robert McCormick and, especially, William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper ty-

coon who’d later inspire Citizen Kane. Hearst, like Walgreen, had parlayed his family’s San Francisco Examiner into a nationwide network of newsreels, radio stations, and newspapers including Chicago’s Herald-Examiner . His newspapers’ so-called yellow journalism backed U.S. entry into the Spanish–American War, and he had supported the labor activism and trust-busting crusades of the Progressive Era. But by the 1930s, an older and wealthier Hearst had become a critic of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal—or, as his papers often put it, the “Raw Deal.” He crusaded against purported communist inﬁltration of institutions like unions and universities, even sending reporters undercover as prospective students to suss out left-leaning professors, anticipating rightwing tactics that persist today.

Around 1935, newspapers including Hearst’s also reported on a widespread wave of campus protests, organized by students who correctly feared the coming of a second world war in which their generation would be called to ﬁght. Students around the country held rallies and strikes (essentially walkouts from class) to protest ties to military research and mandatory Reserve O cers’ Training Corps programs, with some taking the Oxford Pledge, a vow by students around the world to abstain from military service.

Like protesters in future decades, they were variously met with counterprotests, outright assault, arrests on questionable charges, and claims they’d been led astray by outside agitators. In the same week news broke of Walgreen’s letter, a brawl broke out between U. Chicago students and American Legion members brought to campus by a conservative group. One student was sent to the hospital, knocked unconscious by a Legion band member who wielded his trumpet as a club.

Walgreen likely followed the HeraldExaminer ’s coverage of campus politics. He was certainly familiar with Hearst’s publications, having been a major advertiser in the Herald-Examiner as well as the subject of a breezy proﬁle in the American Druggist trade magazine. He even wrote for Hearst’s Chicago Evening American in 1925, o ering advice to a teenage girl with an aptitude for science seeking advice on a pharmacy career and potential apprenticeships.

“It seems to me that there are other professions more desirable to women than that of pharmacist,” wrote Walgreen, who had himself entered the field through a chance

A Walgreens pharmacy at Cermak and Ridgeland in Berwyn in 1955

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS CHICAGO

RED SCARE

The Walgreens ultimately managed a rightward shift to the zeitgeist, one that reinforced the power of wealthy business leaders to influence universities.

job o er received as a teen in Dixon, Illinois. “Women have been successful in this line but the percentage is small.”

The Herald-Examiner quickly learned of Walgreen’s communism allegations, beginning days of coverage with an April 12, 1935, headline that proclaimed, “Drug store chief’s letter a bombshell.” The next day, the paper ran more coverage of Walgreen, accompanied by a large photo of the druggist and his niece, in which Hutchins denied the school was “teaching communism” or “engaged in propaganda of any sort.” Hearst columnist Arthur Brisbane warned of the “disappointment and heartaches” caused by free love. “Such teachings are reprehensible, regrettable,” he wrote. Hutchins requested detail about the allegations, but Walgreen said he’d rather present to the university’s board, with reporters in attendance—a suggestion Hutchins quickly rejected. “The University will ignore your criticism until it receives the evidence it has asked for,” he replied.

Hutchins, a youthful New Deal supporter who spent much of his life defending academic freedom, had already publicly defended faculty against allegations aired in the Hearst pa-

pers. His university had also deﬂected reports of student radicalism, at one point denying anti-war students had gone on strike—such a thing was impossible, o cials claimed, since Hutchins’s reformist policies didn’t require class attendance in the ﬁrst place.

But conservatives in the Republicandominated Illinois senate forced the issue, voting to open hearings into Walgreen’s claims and pointedly alluding to the university’s state tax exemptions. “The university should welcome this opportunity to clear itself of grave charges,” one senator said. And while sharp-witted Hutchins was advised to play it straight, the public hearings still frequently descended into farce.

The Communist Manifesto had indeed been covered in an introductory social science class, a professor conﬁrmed to the senators, alongside thousands of pages of writing on varied political viewpoints, including material by Herbert Hoover. The Soviet schoolbook had been taught, too—in an English composition class, where students dissected its biases and techniques of persuasion. And the alleged advocacy of free love was a happily married professor’s o -the-cu quip in response to a

student’s trollish question. There was no sign of classroom indoctrination. Walgreen’s daughter, the poet Ruth Walgreen Stephan, later suggested in an unpublished autobiographical novel that Norton had played devil’s advocate at home to prove she wasn’t intimidated by her rich uncle.

Testimony from Elizabeth Dilling, an anti-communist crusader and former U. Chicago student from north-suburban Kenilworth, notorious for her antiSemitism, proved unpersuasive. She leveled charges of subversion against faculty, board members, Supreme Court justices, Eleanor Roosevelt, and beloved Hull House founder Jane Addams. She denounced university board chairman and meatpacking heir Harold Swift, a lifelong bachelor, as a “cream puff type” who flirted with communism the way other wealthy men dallied with “chorus girls.” And when an audience member made a pun about Dilling and gangster John Dillinger, Dilling’s husband punched him in the face. As the hearings rolled on, their coverage in the Herald-Examiner shrank.

“smug, rich, and comfortable” beneﬁciary of pre-FDR capitalism, bent on keeping college students from imagining alternatives. (Decades later, a stunning memorial essay for Stephan by her former husband cited the incident as an example of “conformist pressures” in the Walgreen household that hampered Stephan’s artistic pursuits, and it’s hard not to see a pattern of Walgreen diminishing women’s wants and needs.)

It all likely became an embarrassment for Walgreen. He was conservative in many respects, and he seemed to struggle to understand how anyone could question the system that had brought him such prosperity, but he was not a conspiracy theorist like Dilling; he had even defended Roosevelt’s tax increases earlier in 1935. Non-Hearst outlets often played the hearings for laughs. They portrayed Walgreen—a previously unassuming businessman who, according to his wife’s memoir, ate a daily breakfast of prunes and was so devoted to work he suspended their honeymoon to ﬁll in for a pharmacist they met along the way—as a naif manipulated by Hearst and, perhaps, even by an attention-seeking niece.

Not everyone was laughing. James Henry Breasted, a renowned U. Chicago archaeologist, accused Walgreen of displaying a “complete lack of any sense of social responsibility” in an era of dangerous demagoguery.

An exposé of Hearst in the progressive Modern Monthly referred to the “moronic Walgreen,” and Madison’s Capital Times called him a

After the hearings, a chastened Walgreen reconciled with Hutchins and, in 1937, pledged his $12 million donation. The pair regularly met for friendly lunches—Hutchins’s biographer, Milton Mayer, quipped that the university president earned the gift testing out new variations on lunch-counter tuna— and Hutchins delivered a fond eulogy at Walgreen’s funeral upon his death from cancer in 1939.

The donation established a Walgreen Foundation at the university, funding lectures on American society that continued into the 1950s. It’s clear from records archived at the U. Chicago library that Walgreen’s son, Charles Walgreen Jr., inﬂuenced the selection of some speakers, effectively vetoing a proposal to invite progressive Roosevelt administration official Rexford G. Tugwell and questioning the relevance of talks by diplomat Ralph Bunche. Bunche discussed lessons from his peacemaking e orts in Palestine that would, a few months later, see him become the ﬁrst African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But talks still went far beyond bland

Charles R. Walgreen (right) and Edvard Beneš, president of Czechoslovakia,in 1939 when Beneš served as a visiting professor at U. Chicago. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

PROTEST ISSUE

continued from p. 13

patriotism, even during World War II and the early Cold War, including inﬂuential lectures by Carl Sandburg, Hannah Arendt, George F. Kennan, and Adlai Stevenson. In one instance that might have shocked Walgreen Sr. had he lived to see it, a professor overseeing the talks even suggested political philosopher Eric Voegelin’s lectures focus more on Marxism. The younger Walgreen’s effective veto had more of an impact on e orts to use some of the funds to endow a social science professorship, when potential hires apparently failed to meet his political requirements. Some faculty worried about a donor wielding such power. As research by Roanoke College economist Edward Nik-Khah reveals, that stando ended when the university transferred the funds from a political scientist’s purview to the graduate business school.

In 1958, the school used Walgreen money to hire economist George Stigler, a skeptic of government regulation and antitrust enforcement. Stigler, who’d win the Nobel in economics in 1982, e ectively took control of the donation. He used it to fund research and influential conferences that promulgated his pro–free market beliefs and helped establish the university as a preeminent hub for neoliberal economic thought, providing powerful intellectual ammunition to deregulatory interests who’ve come to hold considerable political power in the U.S. In 1977, Stigler secured additional funding from conservative foundations to create what’s now the university’s pro-market George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State. “If you wanted to be overdramatic about it, you could say the appointment of Stigler in 1958 under the Walgreen chair was the beginning of the end of the New Deal order,” says University of Utah economist Marshall Steinbaum. So, while Hutchins successfully defended the university’s autonomy and freedom of expression in 1935, the Walgreens ultimately managed a rightward shift to the zeitgeist, one that reinforced the power of wealthy business leaders to influence universities—in Chicago and across the country. It’s something now taken for granted as capitalism’s beneficiaries wield sway on everything from campus Gaza protests to areas of research.

“The university won the battle and lost the war,” says Steinbaum, “because the battle was [to] protect academic freedom in the 30s, but the war was the New Deal. And the New Deal lost.” v m letters@chicagoreader.com

KNOW YOUR RIGHTS FOR PROTESTERS

by Isabelle Senechal

Tens of thousands of protesters from across the country are expected to descend on the Democratic National Convention this month. You may be one of them.

As you prepare to march for the causes you care about, you may wonder how to protect your rights and personal safety.

Reduce risks to your physical and digital safety

Before you protest, you should inform a trusted family member, friend, or colleague about where you will be and when you expect to be done.

If you can, attend protests with others. “I always tell people to practice the buddy system. There’s safety in numbers,” says Nour Jaghama, Palestine and Iran campaign coordinator for CodePink, a feminist, anti-war advocacy group.

Wear comfortable walking shoes and keep a piece of paper in the sole of your shoe with phone numbers for local, state, and federal defenders’ ofﬁces, and other important contacts.

Jaghama also recommends wearing a face mask over your nose and mouth. In addition to being a health precaution, masks can make it more difﬁcult for you to be identiﬁed online.

For ﬁrst aid, consider bringing a pack of decontamination wipes (Sudecon is a popular brand). If police use pepper spray

or other chemical irritants that burn your face, use decontamination wipes or saline water to ﬂush out your eyes; do not use milk, as you could expose your eyes to bacteria.

Be aware of your surroundings

Situational awareness is critical when in crowded, high-energy environments like public demonstrations, so you can identify important visual cues that signal incoming danger

Police pulling their helmet visors down, putting on gas masks, or defensively raising their shields are telltale signs that they’re planning to charge the crowd. If you notice these behaviors, you should move toward an exit to avoid getting caught in the fray.

Crowd dispersal is also a sign that police may begin kettling, or trapping and containing smaller groups of protesters, to make mass arrests. While it is illegal for police to kettle crowds in Chicago, you should not assume that ofﬁcers will always follow protest protocol, warns Ben Meyer, a private criminal defense attorney who has represented protesters whose rights have been violated by law enforcement in multiple lawsuits against the city. If the police do kettle crowds, Meyer advised that “you need to make a mental note because that’s unlawful.”

Know your legal rights

Whether you’re a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, person with a visa, or undocumented migrant, you have a constitutional right to peacefully assemble in public spaces and exercise free speech through the First Amendment.

The U.S. Constitution also protects you from unreasonable search and seizure and self-incrimination, and ensures your

right to a fair trial and legal counsel. When stopped by police during a protest, you should ask, “Am I being detained or free to go?” If they say you’re free to go, you should walk away. If they give you contradictory information (e.g. saying you’re not detained but not actually letting you leave) then they’re violating your Fourth Amendment rights.

You’re not obligated to answer any questions from the police. Meyer strongly advises protesters to invoke their right to remain silent and avoid responding to police queries about their motivation for attending the action or who they know there.

If the police try to search your belongings during a stop, tell them you don’t consent to the search. They may not necessarily stop, but your statement could be evidence in court.

If the police violate your constitutional rights during a protest, Meyer recommends keeping calm and not ﬁghting back. It’s safer and easier to prove that your rights have been violated after the fact in court.

Meyer emphasized, “On the street, you should do whatever is safest for you while protecting your rights.”

Cook County Public Defender arrest hotline (for arrests by Chicago police or state troopers): 844-817-4448

Federal defender’s ofﬁce (for arrest by federal agents or outof-state police): 312-621-8300

First Defense Legal Aid 24/7 Help Not Jail hotline: 1-800-529-7374

National Lawyers Guild Chicago 24/7 DNC legal support line: 872-465-4244

R“ IN POLITICS: CONVENTIONS AND CAMPAIGNS”

Through 9/30 : Wed noon- 6 PM, Thu noon-7 PM, Fri 2-6 PM, Sat-Sun 10 AM-1 PM, Chicago Center for Photojournalism, 1226 W. Wilson, chicagocenterforphotojournalism.com

Some 50,000 visitors are expected to descend on Chicago for the Democratic National Convention (DNC) as delegates come together to nominally pick the party’s 2024 presidential candidate and their running mate. Many organizations will protest around the city—from pro-Palestinian demonstrators to abortion rights groups and anti-poverty coalitions—and some are still ﬁghting to march within “sight and sound” of the DNC’s United Center location.

In 1968, photojournalism captured the clashes between anti-war protesters and police, reporting the truth beyond when then mayor Richard J. Daley decried protesters as “terrorists” to the media. “The whole world is watching” became more than a metaphor for photographing inside and outside the convention hall.

Denise Keim founded the Chicago Center for Photojournalism at the beginning of 2023. She spent nearly four years raising money for the launch by driving Uber and Lyft at night. A street photographer and educator, she wanted to make a home for the craft and teach others how to harness visual storytelling. Today, the center keeps the tradition alive, hosting exhibitions, lectures, and classes from its storefront gallery in Uptown.

It’s about “bringing art back down to the real world,” Keim said. “I’m creating a community out of art. For so long, we’ve put our artists up in factory buildings in some decrepit neighborhood where we couldn’t see what they were doing. It wasn’t always like that.”

When you walk inside the center, it feels less like a gallery and more like a storefront. Uptown neighbors pop in and peruse the photos on display throughout the day—some aspiring photojournalists, others with storied careers themselves. Now, Keim is taking lessons from her 30-year career to create a community of practice in Chicago.

“Photography can be used for good and evil. We can make anybody look any way, anytime. But the most important thing I try to do when teaching is—what’s your moral compass? Why do you need that photograph? How do you want to see? How do you want to react with the community and give people the utmost respect?”

Like much of their media counterparts, photojournalists have weathered rapidly shrinking newsroom budgets and often taken the brunt of layo s. Between 2000 and 2012, photographers, artists, and videographers were cut by nearly 43 percent nationwide. While some newsrooms have cut their photog-

PHOTOJOURNALISM

A picture of protest

The Chicago Center for Photojournalism records resistance locally and globally.

By REEMA SALEH

raphy departments completely, others rely on reporters or the public to get their photos.

“Everybody wants it, but no one wants to pay for it,” Keim said. “The photo world changed dramatically. The magazines folded, the newspapers started folding, and then your Aunt Susie got her point-and-shoot and was doing all the weddings. All of a sudden, our whole model had collapsed, and we were still getting paid the same amount that we were getting paid in the 70s.”

Students at the center have covered everything from protests against the U.S.’s

PROTEST ISSUE

was documented, and I think photojournalists have a very important role to capture what is going on and preserve it for history,” Bezalel said.

In a few weeks, the students will cover the DNC and the protests surrounding it. As an educator and photographer, Shawna Matten came to photojournalism through the center. She is excited to capture images from the DNC: the protesters, the traditional media outlets covering it, and the workers who make the convention happen.

“Most of the time when we’ve been covering events similar to this and the protests, people can be very combative, and it’s important to maintain your perspective of where you’re coming from,” she said. “There are many times where we get yelled at by people not believing that we’re not on a side. I know that could happen with people being angry, which I understand, but there could also be a lot of joy and happiness, too.”

“We know about the DNC in 1968 because it was documented, and I think photojournalists have a very important role to capture what is going on and preserve it for history.”

Later this summer, the center plans to host two exhibitions focusing on protest photography. From August 14 to September 30, “In Politics: Conventions and Campaigns” will showcase Keim’s imagery from the past two RNCs and from photojournalists Brendan Bullock and Nima Taradji. After the DNC, the center will host a postmortem on what student photographers captured, from the convention itself to the protests surrounding it.

role in fueling the war in Gaza to student-led encampments at universities across Chicago and, most recently, the Republican National Convention (RNC). One of the students who photographed the RNC with Keim, Ronit Bezalel, came to photojournalism to tell the stories of social movements after a career in documentary ﬁlmmaking. Documenting what happens matters, she says, because of how photojournalism can impact how people remember protesters and social movements for years to come.

“We know about the DNC in 1968 because it

Slated to go up later in the season, “In Protest: Global Activism” is accepting public submissions for photographs depicting “the spirit of questioning the status quo” until August 31. With the advent of smartphones and social media, photography is now more accessible than ever, but professionals have been left without places to make a living. And while the industry might be in trouble, audience appetites for good visual journalism haven’t exactly gone away. For Matten, occupational instability has made photojournalism a labor of love more than proﬁt. But being able to capture people and stories that often get missed keeps her coming back.

“Our work is always to get a picture from a di erent angle than someone else and make sure we tell a holistic story,” she said. “You could easily, with a photograph, just like words, manipulate an image to say a di erent story than something that’s not actually real. As a photojournalist, it’s our job to make sure that we’re telling the story of what’s actually happening.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Top: The Chicago Center for Photojournalism; Bottom: Shawna Matten and Patrick Landes photograph an anti-war protest. DENISE KEIM

ARTS & CULTURE

BOOK REVIEW

Finding liberation in sound

RCHICAGO HOUSE MUSIC: CULTURE AND COMMUNITY

Marguerite L. Harrold

Belt Publishing, paperback, 209 pp., $24, Arcadiapublishing. com/products/9781953368737

Marguerite Harrold captures the ecstasy and the energy of Chicago house music.

By TYRA TRICHE

Poet, teacher, and community activist

Marguerite L. Harrold takes readers on a trip to the city’s underground house music scene with her new book, Chicago House Music: Culture and Community . In the introduction, she states her intention to “explore the music and culture from its roots to the present day, and to highlight local community members, their experiences, and their contributions to the culture.” She does this effectively by taking a deep dive into Black music history and honoring the Black LGBTQ+ icons who paved the way for house music to reach party people across the globe.

The book starts by dissecting the origins of house music. “The thing is, almost anything can be a house song, because almost everything has gone into creating the house sound,” Harrold writes. Elements of Negro spirituals, ﬁeld songs, gospel, jazz, blues, R&B, soul, and funk are all embedded into the fabric of the sound. Some of the key elements are the communal uplifting that’s woven throughout gospel and blues, and the improvisation that’s central to jazz. Before house music got its name in the early 80s, it was called disco. Harrold likens Black music to a sprawling family tree: “Disco music is the mother of house music. Funk and soul are her fathers. Gospel, blues, rock, R and B, and jazz are her godparents. Hip hop is her brother.”

Harrold divides Chicago’s house music timeline—which she acknowledges is very complex and not always linear—into four parts, centered around those who built the culture: The Pioneers (1970–1975), The Originators (1976–1989), The Innovators (1990–2000), and the Guardians of the Flame

(2000–present). She thoroughly tracks the movement of the people and the music throughout the decades.

The house-music pioneers that she highlights include David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, and Larry Levan, three men from New York who

on music and a sense of community. Levan’s Paradise Garage was groundbreaking, as he worked with Richard Long, who designed premier sound systems, to create the lighting and sound of his space. This was the ﬁrst time that a club had been curated around the DJ; Paradise Garage also featured a dance ﬂoor that could accommodate 2,000 people. Harrold notes that these innovations remain a model for how modern clubs set up their sound systems today.

R BOOK RELEASE PARTY Wed 8/ 14, 6 PM, Silverroom, 1506 E. 53 rd St., thesilverroom.eventcalendarapp.com

would follow. These house-music parties were safe spaces for young queer people of color in the city. Harrold, who grew up in the city during this era, details how Chicago’s house-music culture developed in the 80s. There was a certain style of dress and people began forming social groups and collectives, like the Chosen Few and Vertigo.

“The thing is, almost anything can be a house song, because almost everything has gone into creating the house sound.”

owned spaces that transformed the dance club experience during the 1970s. They were also all DJs who understood a good party is reliant

There is a detailed exploration of how house music made its way to Chicago during the late 60s and early 70s, a time that was ﬁlled with social and political turmoil. The Black Arts Movement was in full swing and a new soul sound was developing. New York native Robert Williams, who frequented Mancuso’s Loft and Siano’s the Gallery, visited Chicago in the early 70s and was disappointed to find the clubs here were nothing like what he experienced back home. He eventually moved to Chicago a few years later and would soon own his own club where Frankie Knuckles, a gay Black man from New York, would be the resident DJ. This was a Black gay club that required membership, not to be exclusive but to ensure everyone’s safety. Through word of mouth, the club became a popular spot very quickly, and was dubbed “the Warehouse” by local teens. This is where the term “house music” originates from. Harrold writes, “It is with the same spirit of inclusion and connection, based on love of the music and the strength of the LGBTQI community, that the Warehouse became legendary and crowned Frankie Knuckles as the godfather of house music.”

The crowd at the Warehouse grew more diverse, and house music in Chicago exploded from there. A slew of dance clubs, house music DJs, and party promoters

But then there was a shift in the ’90s and 2000s—hip-hop and house music began to split. Radio stations switched from playing house to hip-hop, and the club scene became more expensive and focused on those with VIP status. House music had grown far beyond Chicago and DJs started becoming global superstars. House heads remained resilient and came up with innovative ways to keep the culture alive. Groups like 3 Degrees Global emerged with the mission to revitalize the friendship and connection that’s at the heart of house music. In 2005, 5 Magazine, founded and published by Czarina Mirani (aka Czboogie), established itself as the only publication in the country that is focused exclusively on Chicago house music.

The latter half of the book features interviews with essential ﬁgures in Chicago’s house music scene: Kendall Lloyd, Edgar “Artek” Sinio, DJ Lady D, Czboogie, Mario Smith, and avery r. young. They each describe how they were introduced to house music, how it makes them feel, and in what ways house music has impacted their lives. They all share similar sentiments about the way that house music has always accepted them as they are. Young, who was named the 2023 Chicago poet laureate, shares how house music and Sunday morning church are one and the same. “It is all supposed to be breaking the shackles of what binds you so that you can be liberated enough to understand how to be humane to other humans,” he says.

Harrold does an excellent job of mapping out the past and present landscapes of Chicago house music, while bringing to life the Black LGBTQ+ heroes who birthed its sound and feel. She demonstrates that Chicago house music is much more than just a music genre: it’s a safe space, it’s a living and breathing culture, and it’s a way of life. v

m ttriche@chicagoreader.com

Harrold honors the LGBTQ+ icons who brought house to the masses. COURTESY BELT

PROTEST ISSUE

DANCE PREVIEW

Hisako’s House explores home, history, and injustice

Robyn Mineko Williams’s site-speciﬁc work honors her grandmother’s experiences in a WWII Japanese American internment camp.

By IRENE HSIAO

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the compulsory removal of “all persons deemed a threat to national security from the West Coast.”

Two months and 12 days before, Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, launching the United States into World War II. Over the next six months, the U.S. government incarcerated more than 120,000 Japanese Americans—almost 70,000 of whom were American-born citizens—without charges, separating them from their homes, businesses, and property and imprisoning them in horse stalls, cowsheds, and other facilities meant to hold livestock. Most would remain there until 1945. “The incarceration of Japanese Americans is considered one of the most atrocious violations of American civil rights in the 20th century,” notes History.com.

“In my high school history book, [the internment of Japanese Americans] was covered in literally one paragraph,” recalls choreographer Robyn Mineko Williams, whose maternal grandparents, Francis Akira Nishimura and Nancy Hisako Nishimura, were both sent to camps during World War II. “My grandma and her two sisters were born in California and lived in a beautiful house in Long Beach. When the war came, they were relocated to Jerome, Arkansas.” Incarcerated as a teen and released on her 18th birthday, Williams’s grandmother attended college in Philadelphia before moving to Chicago, a postwar hub for Japanese Americans. Her life and story inspired Williams to create Hisako’s House, performed in the house her grandparents built in the 1950s in Lombard, Illinois.

Although Williams was often at her grandparents’ home while growing up, they

HISAKO’S HOUSE

8/ 16 -8/25 : Fri-Sat 7: 30 PM, Sun 3 PM; no show Fri 8/23 ; the Nishimura residence, 1S140 Pine Lane, Lombard, www.robynminekowilliams.com/see, $ 40 ($ 80 for performance and “family meal” on Sat 8/24). The house is not ADA accessible.

in audio recordings and ﬁlm, Williams had no initial intention of creating a public performance. “I process things by making,” she says. “My goal was just to make something to show my grandma and my mom.”

Williams also spoke with other family members, including her great-aunt Pauline Nishimura, who was four when she was interned with her family, as well as a family friend, Tonko Doi, who spent her first years inside a camp. “I watched a lot of oral histories and tried to connect with Densho and other organizations that preserve this history,” she says. She observes that the bulk of her knowl-

exist and are being used to detain migrants who are trying to come into the United States.” Japanese Americans who have been incarcerated and organizations such as Tsuru for Solidarity continue to protest the use of the camps to detain immigrants and refugees, rallying behind the slogan, “Never again is now.”

A year and a half of research began to translate into movement when Williams visited Manzanar, an internment camp in California, in 2022. “I danced on the land—it was the ﬁrst time of trying to express some of what I had learned. That experience was very powerful.”

were reticent about their experiences. “It was always called camp. It was never called ‘incarceration’ or even ‘internment,’” she recalls. “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, we were in camp during this time.’” Occasional anecdotes at the dinner table revealed memories of guards, towers, and barbed wire, but Williams didn’t know much about what had happened. “There wasn’t a lot of detail. They didn’t talk about it a lot, but it was also sort of normalized.”

Williams began to delve more deeply into her family history during the pandemic. “Because I wasn’t working, I had more time to hang out with my grandma. At the time she was about 93. I had a lot of questions about her life before the war, during the war, and afterwards.” Documenting their conversations

edge about the camps came from sources outside her family. “It felt embarrassing in ways because I was learning such basic history about this experience—but after going through this process of trying to learn about it, I was able to forgive myself a little bit for not knowing. That history and that conversation has been squashed—there’s a reason that I didn’t know about it. It was hidden, and it was hidden from me.”

The existence of the camps was also not generally known or discussed among Williams’s peers. “Friends of mine didn’t know about it or would have no idea that I would have any connection to it at all. It turned a light on for me: people need to know! It’s very relevant to what is happening today. Some of these camps still

A month later, when her grandmother had to be moved to an assisted living facility, the idea for a site-specific work came to her. “Her house is the container— this is the space that holds all of these memories,” she realized. Two weeks after that, the Chicago Cultural Center awarded Williams a 2023 residency in their dance studio, providing space and funding to develop the project with dance artists Isaac Aoki, Jesse Obremski, Jie-Hung Connie Shiau, Leah Terada, and Stephanie Terasaki, musician Macie Stewart, and filmmaker Mike Gibisser. “The stars aligned,” she says. Although not all her collaborators share a personal history with the camps, they explored archives together, looking at artifacts, diaries, and photographs by people who had survived the camps. “What has become kind of magical is that without a lot of explicit storytelling on my part they have embodied a lot of my family without knowing explicitly about them,” she says. “My mom was like, ‘How did you get them to look so much like Grandpa or move so much like Grandma?’ They all really immersed themselves and brought themselves to this work.”

Nancy Hisako Nishimura passed away just before the ﬁrst performance of Hisako’s House in 2023. This August, Williams welcomes the public to experience her grandmother’s house. “My grandma and grandpa really loved opening up their house to people. They loved when the house was full with food and people and chatter. They loved to have their house full of life. I hope people will kick o their shoes, feel the carpet, walk around—eat our little snacks that my son will be passing out. I really hope that people can just enter the space and make themselves at home.” v

m letters@chicagoreader.com

Jie-Hung Connie Shiau in Hisako’s House RICARDO E. ADAME

STAGES OF JUSTICE

‘We want to inform the everyday public of what we actually go through’

Mud Theatre Project centers the voices of those who have been incarcerated.

By DILPREET RAJU

In 2018, a group of men housed inside Dixon Correctional Center—more than 100 miles west of Chicago—realized the power storytelling and performance have over their lives, and the lives of others around them, by forming an arts-based program.

After coordinating with one another and careful consideration from their warden, a space for men inside the prison to write, craft, discuss, read, and perform was born: the Dixon Theatre Workshop. After only a few years, multiple workshop members were being recognized by PEN America through its prison writing contest.

Brian Beals, founder of the workshop, said people used the space to discuss systemic issues and desperate circumstances that some peers understood all too well but probably had little chance to explore beyond an inner dialogue. Most Dixon Theatre Workshop participants were from Chicago and had never been so far from their home for so long.

“Let’s talk about this violence in a way that they wouldn’t expect—not just the violent act, but the drivers and triggers of violence,” he said, “and let’s do it in a play.”

They covered a range of issues, from policing to redlining as a political tool to weaken demographic majorities, and the disinvestment in the neighborhoods they grew up in.

Beals said there was surprisingly little censorship from prison administration apart from two “redline” rules they had to follow.

fanity part, I think that was like a blessing, to challenge the writers to be a little bit more creative in how they express the points that they were making.”

His peers all agreed that it ended up being a positive for them as writers.

In 1988, Beals still had aspirations to be a police o cer and was on his way to becoming one as a student at Southern Illinois University.

“I was coached by a police o cer in high school. I had a lot of respect for their work,” he said, but “if you experience what I experienced, it’s something you couldn’t possibly consider.”

Beals was wrongly convicted of the murder of a six-year-old boy and served 35 long, unjust years before being released last year a few weeks before Christmas. He’s been adjusting to having freedoms since his release was ordered, fighting for fair exoneree pay, and working to grow his nonproﬁt Mud The-

“I was the last core facilitator to leave,” he explained. “Once I left, they immediately moved to shut the program down.”

But he said their work is far from over. More people exit Illinois prisons every single day; more than 7,000 people have left prison facilities already this year, according to the latest Department of Corrections Quarterly Report.

“We feel like we’ve learned so many lessons in the process of developing that program that would beneﬁt these communities out here,” he said.

“Prison has a culture of not allowing the guys on the inside to talk about certain things,

“to sacriﬁce for the greater good, for us as a brotherhood and us as an organization.”

An overarching theme, Toussaint explained, was about creating work “that can impact the system, within the system.”

Beals said their work was heavily reviewed but that they had to put their faith in those performing to not go off script. During the entirety of the Dixon Theatre Workshop, not one disciplinary ticket was written despite hundreds of men participating.

“We had a review process with everything that we would say, from lyrics with spoken word, poetry, the rap concepts to the plays,

particularly race and power structures,” Beals explained. “They take that as being forms of revolution and protest.”

“It just examined so many aspects that people never really considered when they talk about violence, particularly in and around the city of Chicago.”

“First rule is no profanity, and then the obvious rule was you can’t criticize any other staff or employees,” he said. “With the pro-

atre Project, the newest iteration of the Dixon workshop. Last month, I spoke with him and other members of the Mud team at the group’s work house in Englewood.

Toussaint, who prefers to go by his first name, is a member of the Dixon workshop and the Mud Theatre Project. He explained that because so many topics or words could put the group at risk, there was a lot of trust put into group members.

“I’ve never been in this environment before. I, more or less, might have been more radical in my thought,” Toussaint said, describing how it felt joining the theater workshop. He explained it was important

we turned them in for review,” he said. “One mistake, and we were done. So you’re talking about hundreds of guys coming through our program and not one disciplinary ticket being written? That’s amazing.”

Toussaint said the review process was ultimately a sacrifice worth making for the greater good of the program.

“Often it was a burden which we all must share in order to make sure the program went forward,” he said. “It was a necessity . . . we couldn’t allow the program to fall through.”

He talked about how different his life and that of so many others is from when he ﬁrst entered prison.

“ Coming into the system at barely 18 years old and having all these insecurities about

From le : Toussaint, D.F., Wendell Robinson, and Brian Beals (founder of Mud Theatre Project) DILPREET RAJU

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continued from p. 19

myself,” Toussaint said. “To see 25 years in the future and have more people that love me on the way out, [rather] than the way in, it’s surreal.”

There were still significant hurdles, like the prison denying friends and family from attending the performances. That’s where the Still Point Theatre Collective, a Chicago company focused on creating original work with outreach to marginalized communities, came in and offered public readings of their plays so that families could experience their loved ones’ work in some capacity.

Wendell Robinson, executive director of Restore Justice, a nonproﬁt aimed at reforming hard-on-crime measures within Illinois criminal code, was one of the few able to visit a performance at Dixon Correctional Center in early 2023.

“They did everything, the sound, the lighting, that was amazing to me. To see the work that they have put in, and then the story was just so powerful,” he said. “It just examined so many aspects that people never really considered when they talk about violence, particularly in and around the city of Chicago.”

Robinson explained that it was a healing experience to be there for a performance night, but they had little time to celebrate after the play concluded.

“It was a sense of normalcy too, because I had a chance to come in and hug bro,” he said, referring to Beals, “but when it was time to go,

the reality of where we was set in then, too, because we were just ushered out so fast. We didn’t get a chance to be like, ‘Man, great job.’”

Beals said prison had become much more difficult to live in day-to-day as, over the decades, programming was stripped from Illinois prison facilities. While he was able to restore some programming for a time at Dixon Correctional Center, he said there are endless stories to showcase for people inside—and outside—prison.

“The goal is to go back and build these cohorts. We want to go from workshop to production in these communities and teach the lessons that we learn,” Beals said. “Of course, we also have this body of plays that speaks to prison culture, the life conditions that we would like to show the public.” The company has been asked to perform at next year’s Rhino Fest.

The youngest member of Mud Theatre Project is King Moosa, now a rapper and trauma outreach specialist in Rockford, who was prosecuted as an adult when he was 14 years old. He said they’re making art for more than just people a ected by the criminal legal system.

“ We want to inform the everyday public of what we actually go through, so they can realize the things that are happening and not just the result, not just the crime, not just an event,” Moosa said, adding, “There’s an underlying condition of why these instances steady happen.” v

From le : Darrion Benson, Beals, Toussaint, D.F. BRIAN BEALS

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

A still from Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967)

Ifound a perhaps insubstantial, yet resonant connection between two films I saw this weekend: Michael Snow’s three-hour experimental tour de force La Région centrale (1971) on 16 millimeter at Sweet Void Cinema, programmed by fellow Reader critic Joshua Minsoo Kim, and John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) at the Music Box Theatre on a newly struck 70 millimeter print. (The latter was absolutely stunning; I teared up at a few close-ups and the famous scenes where actors are centered in a dark doorway contrasted against the blazing vista.)

niece, emphasizing the ultimate pointlessness of his enmity toward her captors.

NOW PLAYING

RClose to You

Dominic Savage’s Close to You is a quiet indie film that hits a lot of familiar beats, all of which are transformed by a respect for and celebration of trans identity—something that remains depressingly rare in film. Cowriter Elliot Page plays Sam, a trans man living in Toronto who is returning home for the first time in five years for his father’s birthday. His family wants to be supportive but can’t quite manage it, while his high school sweetheart, Katherine (Hillary Baack), now married with two kids, is so happy to see him that she isn’t quite sure what to do about it.

Juliette distance themselves, metaphorically and literally. Richard, an archaeologist, begins searching for his family’s literal roots and becomes obsessed with unearthing the ancient oak tree on their property. Meanwhile, Juliette retreats to her bedroom to mourn until eventually turning to the occult.

There are long periods without dialogue where Smith and Clark showcase their interior conflict masterfully. Their physicality is particularly a strength of the film, and without it, the slow pace and looming quietness would feel sleepy, not ominous. What’s unspoken is allowed time to simmer underneath the surface, like a bomb waiting to go off.

During both, I was consumed by the landscapes—and, to be fair, that’s the point. La Région centrale is nothing but geographies: it was shot in northern Quebec over the course of 24 hours, not by the filmmaker per se, but by a “Camera Activating Machine” (CAM), a robot-like structure on which a 16-millimeter camera was mounted and operated via computer program (and by remote control, requiring the filmmakers to hide behind large rocks in order to keep the surrounding landscape free of conspicuous human presence) to rotate 360 degrees in any direction. The results are extended sequences in which various aspects of the surrounding landscape appear in constant rotation for several minutes at a time, round and round and round again. Those three hours passed surprisingly fast. Whenever I travel by plane, train, car, or bus, I like to sit by the window to look out at the fleeting views. The experience I had watching La Région centrale was similar, achieving “a certain kind of singleness or remoteness that each spectator can have by seeing the film,” as Snow said to fellow experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas in a 1972 interview. And I had a similar experience watching The Searchers , a narrative film, but one that emphasizes Monument Valley’s vast absence of civilization to prop up the precarious illusion of the idealized American West. It props it up only to tear it down, through the circuitous actions of its repugnant protagonist as he tirelessly searches for his

The repetitive motion of Snow’s CAM evokes an existential uncertainty, if it can even be called that. As Kim noted before the screening, Snow was “composing” the film for the movement of one’s eyes. Whereas the vast, uninhabited terrain in The Searchers conveys the loneliness of its central ﬁgure’s quest for vengeance, the vacant panorama of La Région centrale prompts one to question more than just human existence, but all that surrounds it as well. “And also,” Snow said in the abovementioned interview, “I think I wanted to say that wildness should be left as wild as possible, as long as there is some left . . .”

The Searchers was referenced in another ﬁlm I saw this week, Martin Scorsese’s debut feature, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967), at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the Before They Were Big series in collaboration with the Chicago International Film Festival. Scorsese is a consummate cinephile— maybe THE consummate cinephile—so the reference didn’t surprise me, but I thought it was serendipitous knowing I’d be seeing Ford’s ﬁlm later that week.

I wrote about Věra Chytilová’s Something Different (1963) for Cine-File. Speaking of repetitive motion, it follows two women, a gymnast and a housewife, as they go about their daily routines, which ultimately leave them unsatisfied. That’s certainly a feeling to which I can relate. Compare this film with her 1966 masterpiece, Daisies, and it seems Chytilová really understood both feminine malaise and the notion that girls just want to have fun. Perhaps in response to the repetitive nature of my days, I should stage an epic food fight. Until next time, moviegoers. —KAT SACHS v

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

From the description, you can probably guess at most of the tensions and most of the plot. Page, though, is a wonder—he is by turns nervous, acerbic, sensitive, and smoldering. The movie delights in his intelligence and vulnerability, as well as in his sensuality; the opening shirtless shot is a decided statement of purpose. The ﬁlm also refuses to judge Sam for his refusal to prioritize his family over his own safety and self-respect, nor for what he himself sees as a slowness in getting his adult life started, nor for the way his romantic arc threatens to derail an apparently happy hetero marriage. Savage and Page (who collaborated on the story) are determined to honor the ways in which LGBTQ+ lives don’t ﬁt normative Hollywood expectations about which relationships are supposed to matter and what success is supposed to mean. Close to You, in its low-key way, is evidence that we are in a golden age of queer cinema. —NOAH BERLATSKY R, 100 min. Limited release in theaters

RStarve Acre

Horror movies o en make the mistake of not knowing how to use silence. Whether underutilized or applied excessively in a ﬁlm, the squandering of silence is the loss of a major tool of suspense building. Based on the 2019 novel of the same name by Andrew Michael Hurley, Starve Acre is a folk horror-drama that excels in the weighty atmosphere between spoken words.

Folk horror is a subsection of the horror genre popularized in the late 1960s and ’70s with movies like Witchﬁnder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973). The genre utilizes elements from folklore to conjure fear. O en, these ﬁlms are set in nature or a rural setting and induce a subtle, slow-burn terror by exploring themes of superstition, isolation, paganism, and the unforgiving brutality of nature.

Two years a er the death of his abusive father, Richard (Matt Smith), his wife Juliette (Morfydd Clark), and their son Owen (Arthur Shaw) have moved back to Richard’s ancestral estate. The vast and ominous land in rural Yorkshire named Starve Acre is haunted by Richard’s memories of his cruel upbringing, but he is determined to create a better life for his family.

A er Owen abruptly dies, the family is put on a destructive path to uncovering the sinister underbelly of their new home. Consumed by grief, Richard and

While it may not be a blockbuster thriller or a gory slasher series, the talented performances and bleak cinematography will haunt viewers long a er it’s over. —KYLIE BOLTER 98 min. Limited release in theaters

RSugarcane

All documentaries about historical and ongoing societal evil need to balance the history with the human, and some do this better than others. This balance is Sugarcane’s greatest strength. The film, codirected by filmmaker Emily Kassie and activist Julian Brave NoiseCat, follows a few people (including NoiseCat and his father) as they investigate the horrors, past and present, of a specific residential school, Saint Joseph’s Mission in British Columbia, Canada.

Residential schools, which existed in both Canada and the U.S. until the end of the 20th century, forced Indigenous children to assimilate to white, Western ideals. Mostly operated by the Catholic Church, they created a hotbed of abuse of all kinds. Some of that abuse, like punishing children for speaking their Indigenous languages, was part and parcel of the school’s missions. The rampant sexual abuse was, like all Catholic abuse of children, antithetical to the Church’s teachings but possible because of the opportunities aﬀorded to predators.

Sugarcane includes some archival footage and contemporary news reports, specifically on the continual discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves near residential schools, but focusing mostly on individuals allows the film to dive deep on the traumas the broader history has caused. We see former chief Rick Gilbert confirm through DNA testing that his father was a priest at Saint Joseph’s Mission; NoiseCat and his father Ed read a 1959 newspaper story about Ed being discovered near an incinerator by a custodian; and longtime advocate Charlene Belleau discuss the mass suicides of boarding school attendees, including her uncle. Through these individual stories, a picture comes together of the decades-long and multifaceted institutional failures that fostered these atrocities.

Sugarcane is as harrowing as it is vital. It’s a remarkably explicit consideration of intergenerational trauma that manages to center speciﬁc suﬀering without forgoing any aspects of the conditions that birthed such violence. —KYLE LOGAN R, 107 min. Gene Siskel Film Center v

RUNNING DOWN THE WALLS

PROTEST ISSUE

PROTEST AMPLIFIED

Making music to crack open prisons

Chicago band Glutton for Insurrection play to summon an anarchist future where everyone is free from capitalism and the carceral state.

By MICCO CAPORALE

Glutton for Insurrection don’t have much in common with other goth synthwave projects. Their lyrics are aggressively political, with no hint of romanticism. In the group’s four-year lifespan, they’ve performed only about a dozen times, exclusively at generator gigs and political beneﬁts. What started as a creative outlet during COVID lockdown has become an exercise in resistance aesthetics by four masked performers demanding the impossible: total freedom without permission.

As the band tell it, they’re four prisoners from a not-too-distant future who’ve broken out of jail and time traveled to the present to stop the climate apocalypse and the rise of fascism before it’s too late. In actuality, Glutton for Insurrection started as a pandemic bedroom project by the group’s founding member, who goes by Grog. They’re a formerly incarcerated person employed as a bartender, and along with most other service workers, they were furloughed during much of lockdown—and as businesses reopened, they were among the ﬁrst to return to work, COVID be damned.

Many of their friends, because they were frontline employees, lost their livelihoods or fell ill and couldn’t work. Less than a month before the George Floyd uprisings, Grog uploaded eight tracks of eight-bit anarchist aggression to Bandcamp, including “V!RU$ 5TR!K3,” which describes their anger about being forced to risk their health to keep the wheels of capital turning.

punk scene hosted small mask-required generator shows at out-of-the-way outdoor locations, especially on the south side. Grog performed the first Glutton for Insurrection set at one of these shows. Since then, the group’s roster has expanded and contracted; it currently includes Grog on vocals and guitar, Gramps on drums, Grub on keyboards and synths, and Grievance on bass and vocals. Each of the four members is a longtime political organizer as well as a veteran of the south-side punk scene, and the Reader is using their stage names at their request, to avoid potentially enabling state surveillance and retaliation. Glutton for Insurrection cite Sin Orden and Los Crudos as primary inspirations, and they frequently revisit YouTube footage of Los Crudos playing a guerrilla set at Daley Plaza in 1993 to remind themselves of what’s possible.

“We don’t even think of them as shows,” Grog says. “We’re actually casting spells and creating interventions—public spectacles which could be atomized and, like, resubjectify our relationship to the physical space around us.”

What started as a creative outlet during COVID lockdown has become an exercise in resistance aesthetics by four masked performers demanding the impossible: total freedom without permission.

As Chicago inched back toward normalcy after lockdown, members of the city’s DIY

Since 2022, one place you can count on catching Glutton for Insurrection is at the Chicago iteration of Running Down the Walls. This noncompetitive 5k run/jog/walk/roll is organized each fall by local chapters of the Anarchist Black Cross Federation, a group that provides legal and ﬁnancial support to political prisoners and prisoners of war. Launched in 1999, Running Down the Walls raises awareness and generates funds for speciﬁc prisoners vetted by ABCF’s Warchest Program. It’s held outside jails across the country, usually with bands

Featuring Glutton for Insurrection and other acts to be announced. Sun 9/15, 5 PM, Metropolitan Correctional Center, 71 W. Van Buren, free, all ages

and DJs joining in. People inside often run or walk in solidarity, inviting curiosity from fellow inmates in hopes of raising their political consciousness.

“When we play a show in front of the jail, we are participating in public culture,” Grievance explains. “We are trying to share the music with folks that are inside. But we’re also trying to literally let the ground just start to shake and open, and the prison doors will burst open, and everyone will be freed.”

Like Grog, Grievance has served time in prison. Between the two of them, they’ve spent more than a decade behind bars on charges related to their activism. Listening to and making music have always been big parts of their lives, but while locked up they’ve found it difficult to do either. Many prisons are located in remote areas reached by fewer radio stations. Some commissaries sell only hand-cranked radios to pick up the signal, Grog and Grievance say, and they often break in less than a year.

Many facilities offer MP3 players for purchase, but those devices aren’t necessarily more reliable—their warranty coverage usually lasts 90 days or less. In a 2013 article for Spin, one inmate likened them to clunky “runof-the-mill plastic ones for kids” and said he’d had to replace his MP3 player twice because they break so easily.

The devices also have vastly restricted features, including time limits on how long

and how many times someone can browse the purchase library per day. Songs often cost as much as $1.85 apiece, which is clear price gouging compared to downloads from Amazon or iTunes—and in 2017, an inmate’s average pay for a regular prison job ranged from $0.86 to $3.45 per day before fees and deductions (a decline since 2001). Song options are limited to radio-friendly edits, and listening privileges can be restricted by guards. If people want to keep their player after release, they have to pay an additional fee.

“Prisons are a sandbox for the shittiest moneymaking schemes by the copyright industry,” Grog says.

Only medium- and minimum-security facilities even have the option to hold any sort of music programming, and many of those don’t bother. Grog, a loud atheist who’d been playing guitar since they were a teenager, talked their way into a church band just to keep making any kind of music. When Grievance got locked up, Grog would mail them guitar tabs so Grievance could teach themself to play. Grievance could borrow musical equipment occasionally but says it took a lot of sucking up and good behavior to earn the privilege. And when instruments broke, they weren’t replaced. Prisons also don’t make allowances for music recording of any kind.

Restricting access to music not only erodes the individual’s sense of subcultural identity and connection to the outside world but also

Glutton for Insurrection: Grub, Grievance, Gramps, and Grog COURTESY

limits inmates’ ability to process their experiences and express their creativity. Marx would call this a denial of one’s fundamental human capacity. Glutton for Insurrection call it bullshit.

Before performing at Running Down the Walls, members of Glutton for Insurrection work with inmate contacts inside to circulate a number that incarcerated people can call during the event. This way, they can request songs from DJs, and if someone holds the phone to a megaphone or connects it to a loudspeaker, a prisoner can even talk to the audience. People also read letters from inmates aloud onstage.

This year’s Chicago event is at the Metropolitan Correctional Center downtown, and it’s previously been held at Cook County Jail near 26th and California. For a few hours every fall, the liminal space between freedom and bondage becomes an autonomous zone centering the needs and experiences of those behind bars that’s ﬁlled with food, zines, banners, and lots and lots of music. No gods, no masters, no permits. Just vibes.

This approach is important to the group for a few reasons. “We’re not particularly interested in playing venues and generator shows with permits because they start to feel more established and less adventuresome and fun,” Grog says, “and frankly, less of a danger or threat to the established order, which is what we’re ﬁghting against.” They also see claiming space as its own act of protest.

Glutton for Insurrection describe performing at a rave at the Damen Silos on the South Branch of the Chicago River, emphasizing the site’s history as a guerrilla show space. They hope it endures, but in 2022, it was purchased by a developer who intends to demolish the structures despite environmental concerns raised by local residents. Because the silos sit at the intersection of ﬁve neighborhoods, the band fear that a demolition could cause an ecological catastrophe in McKinley Park, Pilsen, Bridgeport, Chinatown, and Little Village—similar to the harm done to Little Village in 2020 by the razing of the Crawford Coal Plant.

In April, the city reached a $12.25 million settlement with Little Village residents, but that’s only $317 per person in the plaintiff class. And according to a 2023 Guardian analysis, Chicago’s south and west sides have the third-worst fine-particle air pollution in the country. Glutton for Insurrection don’t just see using the silos as a way to claim space for free-

PROTEST

dom of movement and expression; they also see defending the structures as a way to seek justice for a neighborhood that’s been subject to vicious environmental racism.

This is one of many ways Glutton for Insurrection enact their politics—it goes beyond just lyrics. Their sound, visuals, and approach draw on many inﬂuences. The band embrace a goth aesthetic because that subculture reckons with death.

“Death is a dish served daily by this fascist regime,” Grog says. “This government has always been on an imperialist, colonialist death trip. We’re talking about a genocidal administration committing mass death currently in Palestine, but we see it all over this culture.”

The band love a video-game sound because they’re all gaming nerds with their own cyberpunk interests and dystopian fantasies. They use costumes and theatrics because it’s fun and anonymizing and also rooted in a history of radical street theater, such as Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theater and the diffuse global collective Reclaim the Streets. During shows, they often burn ﬂags or use a fake guillotine to behead e gies of cops. At one event, members dressed like Supreme Court justices and played their instruments with papiermâché gavels while saying a lot of things that added up to “fuck SCOTUS.”

Glutton for Insurrection want to build on the legacy of other bands working to expand what playing shows can mean. They mention Hemorage, a San Francisco thrash-metal group who’ve refitted a minibus as a rolling stage so they could play impromptu sets whenever and wherever, and Atari Teenage Riot, a 90s techno-punk act that formed in response to Berlin’s neo-Nazi subculture and openly clashed with fascists and cops.

But Glutton for Insurrection don’t consider it important that they build an audience. They don’t care if you come to their shows, and they don’t care if you like their sound. They want to inspire more people—even people who hate their band—to make a culture outside of commerce. They want a world where underground organizers can set their own age limits for shows, no one has to buy alcohol or merch to feel like they’re participating, and anyone can be entertained regardless of their ﬁnancial situation. Glutton for Insurrection believe punk should be an all-out menace to imperialism and cultural hegemony. Musical performance can be combat. v

m mcaporale@chicagoreader.com

THE SECRET HISTORY OF CHICAGO MUSIC

Fred Holstein is the forgotten anchor of Chicago’s folk scene

His soulful voice and generous heart made him a beloved ﬁxture in local clubs, but he le such a scant recorded legacy that he’s fading from memory.

By STEVE KRAKOW

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

Longtime readers of the Secret History of Chicago Music know that one of my favorite ways to ﬁnd a subject is to stumble across one of their LPs in the bins at a thrift store. I’d heard a bit about local folkie Fred Holstein, but I almost instantly understood a lot more about him as soon as I laid hands on his ﬁrst LP, the 1977 release Chicago and Other Ports

Holstein interpreted other peoples’ tunes, like a bard of yore might’ve done. In the liner notes to Other Ports, famous folk singer and labor organizer Utah Phillips explained that Holstein was all about live performance—he wondered if a Holstein album even made sense. “Maybe the record company would be better o spending the money to send out tickets to Fred’s shows,” he wrote. Maybe no LP could possibly “sum up what happens between a lot of people who need something and a singer who wants to give something.” Another one of Phillips’s lines—“Fred Holstein without Chicago would be Mel Torme”—convinced me I had to ﬁnd out more.

Holstein was born on the south side on December 9, 1942, but because he didn’t tour or record much, he never built a significant following outside Chicago. In the 1960s and ’70s, though, he helped provide the lifeblood of the city’s folk scene, and within it he was well-known and widely loved.

Holstein grew up in South Shore, and his parents owned a drug store a few blocks west at 79th and Michigan. He had his folk-music epiphany when he saw preeminent lefty troubadour Pete Seeger play downtown at Orchestra Hall in 1959, and as soon as he could he bought an acoustic guitar, spending a whopping $14.95. He learned the instrument by playing along to LPs and using songbooks, and in 1960 he enrolled at the Old Town School of Folk Music. (He’d later work in the school’s store.)

By the early 60s, Holstein was gigging at the Old Town Pub (one of the Wells Street clubs he’d started sneaking into as a kid) and a basement co eehouse called Scot’s Cellar beneath a drive-in restaurant in Morton Grove. He also rambled around the country a bit, as many folk singers did, but he soon returned to Chicago after failing to ﬁnd a sustainable spot in the famous scenes in Greenwich Village and San Francisco.

Our city supported a lively folk community for much longer anyway. By the early 1970s, the national folk-music boom was tailing o , but Chicago enjoyed a second wave throughout the decade, perhaps because its distance from the coasts freed local artists from the pressure to respond to trends.

In the late 60s, Holstein began mentoring other local musicians, including Steve Goodman, who’d make his first recorded appearance in 1971 and go on to become one of the

most beloved folkies in Chicago.

Unlike Goodman and most of his other contemporaries in Chicago folk (John Prine, Jim Post, Bonnie Koloc), Holstein wasn’t a songwriter. But he reputedly kept hundreds of other people’s songs in his head, whether material by fellow folkies or traditional tunes whose authors are lost to history. “Most American pop music is about one thing: the relationship between men and women,” Holstein told Reader columnist Bill Wyman in 1995. “Folk is about a lot of things: work songs, war songs, lullaby songs. There are songs of requited and unrequited love, but there’s such a rainbow there.”

Holstein liked to share a song he’d newly learned as soon as he could fumble through it, and if he wanted to, he could play dozens of sets without repeating one. He had a growing audience in Chicago that embraced his rich, soulful baritone and his encyclopedic and endearingly ramshackle performances.

“Ethnomusicologist” is probably the term that suits Holstein best. “Understand the song,” he once said. “It is a lot more important than you are.”

One of Holstein’s favorite stages was at the

famed Earl of Old Town (now Corcoran’s Pub & Grill), opened by Earl Pionke in 1962; after it began hosting folk concerts in 1966, Holstein became one of the ﬁrst up-and-comers to play there regularly.

Holstein was also a fixture at Somebody Else’s Troubles (2470 N. Lincoln), a club he opened in 1974 in partnership with Pionke, Goodman, his younger brother Ed Holstein, bartender Henry “the Duke” Nathaus, and folk-scene pillar Bill Redhed. (Somebody Else’s Troubles is also the name of Goodman’s second LP.) He frequently appeared on the radio too, especially the WFMT show The Midnight Special, which launched in 1953 and still airs today.

Holstein’s short recording career began in 1977, when Vermont-based label Philo released Chicago and Other Ports. The album includes a few traditionals, of course, plus three Utah Phillips tunes and a selection of material from artists as far-ranging as Woody Guthrie, Jacques Brel, and UK balladeer Ralph McTell. The no-frills, stripped-down arrangements capture Holstein’s workingman’s style—he plays six- and 12-string guitars and banjo, and he’s accompanied only by a double bassist—

STEVE KRAKOW FOR CHICAGO READER

but no album could contain his big personality.

Holstein put out only one more album of new material, and he self-released it in 1978. The cover of For All the Good People superimposes him on the Windy City skyline, and its track list includes work by singer-songwriter and activist Malvina Reynolds and Scottish folkie Eric Bogle. Holstein doesn’t play any Phillips tunes this time, but the legendary train hopper guests on a version of Goebel Reeves’s best-known song, “Hobo’s Lullaby.” In 1981, Holstein and his younger brothers, Alan and Ed, opened a venue called Holsteins on Lincoln near Fullerton. Ed Holstein was also a musician, and he and Fred would often warm up for visiting musicians or even headline their own shows at the club. It closed on New Year’s Day in 1988.

Holstein kept working as a bartender a few blocks south at Lincoln Park tavern Sterch’s, but his performances dwindled dramatically. In 2001 he released a retrospective double CD, Fred Holstein: A Collection, that compiled songs from his two albums, live recordings, material from the WFMT archives, and even

MUSIC

interview excerpts.

Encouraged by the warm reception the collection received, Holstein played a few times per year at the Abbey Pub, usually with Ed opening, to enthusiastic crowds. But his health was poor, and that started to catch up with him fast. At age 61, Holstein died of heart failure on January 12, 2004, after emergency abdominal surgery at Swedish Covenant Hospital.

“He inﬂuenced so many people, not just with his music but with his huge heart,” Ed told the Chicago Tribune for Fred’s obituary. “He was the authentic folk singer on the scene,” said Bonnie Koloc. “He sang with such truth and conviction.” It’s hard to think of better epitaphs for a folk singer who was both larger than life and down to earth. v

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

MUSIC

PICK OF THE WEEK

The itinerant Million Tongues Festival celebrates 20 years by returning to the source

Recommended and notable shows with critics’ insights for the week of August 15

THURSDAY15

Ekko Astral Tetchy and Sawamura No Hitter open. 8:30 PM, Gman Tavern, 3740 N. Clark, $20, $16 in advance. 21+

MILLION TONGUES FESTIVAL

Thursday’s bill features Simon Finn with the Singleman Aﬀair and special guests, Josephine Foster, Spires That in the Sunset Rise with Michael Zerang, and Eli Winter. Bil Vermette plays the side stage. Friday’s bill features Los Dug Dug’s, the Great Society Mind Destroyers, and Plastic Crimewave Syndicate with Christopher Connelly and special guests (playing songs by Hawkwind, the Deviants, and Pink Fairies). The Joy Poppers play the side stage. Thu 8/15, 9 PM, and Fri 8/16, 10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $25, two-day pass $45. 21+

THE MILLION TONGUES FESTIVAL is the brainchild of psychedelic polymath (and longtime Reader contributor) Steve Krakow. The original event in 2004 was a five-night, big-tent a air at the Empty Bottle that drew together acid folk, ecstatic jazz, and freak-flag-flying rock, including new and nearly forgotten performers from Chicago and around the world. Since then, Million Tongues has varied in size as it wandered from one local venue to another (except for 2020, when the performers adapted to pandemic restrictions by streaming from their homes). No matter where it’s been held, it’s always carried the torch of music made by heads for heads.

In honor of Million Tongues’ 20th anniversary, Krakow has returned to the club where it all began. This year’s festival will span two nights, one of dark folk magic and the other of heavy rock action. A preparty at Experimental Sound Studio on Wednesday, August 14, will include an art show featuring posters and photos from previous festivals and a con-

versation between Krakow and English folk singer Simon Finn—whose entropic, feverishly spiritual songs were a highlight of the 2004 edition. The weekend’s concerts will re-create the nonstop sensory overload of the original fest by having performers play on a side stage between main-stage sets. Thursday’s program is especially notable for the return of Finn and the reunion of eldritch duo Spires That in the Sunset Rise, a formerly local group that will partner here with Chicago improvising percussionist Michael Zerang. On Friday, Mexican garage rockers Los Dug Dug’s will make like the decades since the 1960s never happened; reunited locals the Great Society Mind Destroyers will wallow in wahwah-pedal mayhem; and Krakow’s band Plastic Crimewave Syndicate will back singer Chris Connelly (Sons of the Silent Age, Ministry) and saxophonist Bruce Lamont (Yakuza) for a set of Hawkwind, Deviants, and Pink Fairies covers. For the occasion, the Bottle will also host a popup store for dealers of rare records. It’ll be a happening. —BILL MEYER

I didn’t expect living through the decline of American society to be so stupid. A dozen things seem to happen every day that are so jarring to my moral sense, so hard to get my head around, that sometimes all I can do is post “lol this sucks” on a Twitter knockoff where I know maybe a few dozen people. Part of what I like about Pink Balloons (Topshelf), the recent debut album from queer D.C. punk group Ekko Astral, is that its stylistic hodgepodge feels like a visceral reaction to the messiness of all this dumb bullshit. Its sturdy but scuffed-up songs build on straightforward rock interplay to make daring stylistic leaps. The jangly power-pop guitar riff on “Make Me Young” introduces honeyed harmony vocals in the faux-naïf style of indie legends Half Japanese and a whole ra of K Records bands. Rugged rhythms course through “Sticks and Stones” while harsh guitars emphasize Jael Holzman’s dry, biting vocals.

Ekko Astral are a capital-P political punk band, with witty lyrics that work overtime to show how politics seeps into our personal lives. The references are clear if you spend too much time online, but even if you gave up on social media ﬁve years ago, you’ll be able to pick up what “On Brand” is putting down: between big blasts of contemptuously grotty guitar, it tears into shallow trend hoppers who treat political commitments like any other consumer choice. In June, Ekko Astral released the single “Holocaust Remembrance Day,” which captures some of the cognitive dissonance and exhaustion I’ve felt as a Jewish advocate for Palestinians, watching my religious and cultural history weaponized by a genocidal state. This is something else I like about Ekko Astral: they work to unpack complicated feelings and experiences, and they’re honest enough to admit it when they end up somewhere just as messy. —LEOR GALIL

Clockwise from top left: Million Tongues artists Simon Finn, Bil Vermette, Armando Nava of Los Dug Dug’s, Spires That in the Sunset Rise with Michael Zerang, and the Joy Poppers PHOTOS COURTESY OF STEVE KRAKOW (FINN, VERMETTE, JOY POPPERS) AND MICHAEL ZERANG (SPIRES) AND BY JOSE BERNAL (NAVA)

Thra JOHN MALLEY

Million Tongues Festival night one See Pick of the Week at le ; see also Fri 8/16. Today’s bill features Simon Finn with the Singleman Aﬀair and special guests, Josephine Foster, Spires That in the Sunset Rise with Michael Zerang, and Eli Winter. Bil Vermette plays the side stage. 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $25, two-day pass $45. 21+

Thra Urine Hell, Barren Heir, and Blood Nymph open. 8 PM, Reggies Music Joint, 2105 S. State, $15. 21+

There are so many blackened death-metal bands these days it can be overwhelming to try and sort them out. No one can deny their pustulent and enthusiastic musicality, but their uniformity can become oppressive—and not necessarily in a good way. Phoenix group Thra separate themselves from the slavering pack by adding a heaping helping of sludge. Their first full-length, 2023’s Forged in Chaotic Spew (Translation Loss), opens with a few seconds of scraping feedback that could’ve come from a Melvins record. As a whole the album isn’t King Buzzo weird, but its fetid lumbering suggests the existence of a brute intelligence guiding the maelstrom toward its prey. The aptly named “Drag” has the grinding brontosaur charge-and-wallow pace of a solid Autopsy track. “Terror Vessel Pt. 1” is a couple minutes of glorious ambient feedback growl, with a piercing gurgle that would make Sonic Youth check their amps; “Fracture” starts out with dissonant, filthy chiming before drummer Grey Smith starts smashing away with a sound like calluses striking calluses. The growls and roars of vocalist Robert Wolfe stay down in the mix somewhere, so that he’s not the focus of the chaos but just another element in the frenzied spew. Thra are sufficiently steeped in the swampy traditions of elders such as Incantation and Coffins to know that if you want to stand out from the rest of the walking dead, a little muck on your distorted features goes a long way. —NOAH BERLATSKY

FRIDAY16

Million Tongues Festival night two

See Pick of the Week on page 26; see also Thu 8/15. Today’s bill features Los Dug Dug’s, the Great Society Mind Destroyers, and Plastic Crimewave Syndicate with Christopher Connelly and special guests (playing songs by Hawkwind, the Deviants, and Pink Fairies). The Joy Poppers play the side stage. 10 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $25, two-day pass $45. 21+

Packs Joey Nebulous and Snake Pond open. 9:30 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $19.57. 21+

Toronto indie-rock band Packs formed just a few years ago, but they’ve already caught the attention of fans and critics with their rough-around-theedges pop sensibility. Madeline Link, who founded the group as a solo project in 2019, has a gift for articulating everyday happenings with witty observations, and since the band settled on a four-piece lineup they’ve continued to reﬁne their sound. On January’s Melt the Honey , Packs’ third album for New York–based label Fire Talk, they seem comfortable in their abilities while pushing the boundaries of slacker rock. On 2021’s Take the Cake and 2023’s Crispy Crunchy Nothing , Link’s lyrics are mostly despondent, but on the new record, bits of hope and funny one-liners peek out of her introspective reﬂections on dilemmas and ruts—on “Honey,” she dances with infatuation and the sense of having someone on her side.

“HFCS” and “Pearly Whites” hit hard, thanks to the guitar work of Dexter Nash and the dynamic rhythm section of bassist Noah O’Neil and drummer Shane Hooper. Packs also add variety to their indierock sound: a psychedelic instrumental on “AmyW,” a Spanish-language spoken-word piece on “Missy” (performed by Lupita Rico, aka Tormentatropica),

and gritty folk rhythms on “Her Garden” and “Paige Machine.” Nearly ﬁve years into their career, Packs remain endearing and exciting. A er their simmering, sweaty set at the Logan Square Arts Festival, this relatively intimate show at Sleeping Village should be a treat.

—SHEA RONEY

SUNDAY18

TisaKorean Your Stepdad and Thirteendegrees° open. 8 PM, Schubas, 3159 N. Southport, $20, $18 in advance. 18+

Houston MC and dancer TisaKorean raps like he grew up surfing MySpace: he has an affinity for hiphop styles that arose from regional subscenes or sound like they emerged fully formed on the Internet. His April album Mumu 8818 (JaZZZy / Nice Life) thrums with the sparse, punchy percussion of ringtone rap, and its chintzy synthetic squelches (such as the faux steel drums on “Jockin Me”) remind me of Soulja Boy’s early lo-fi productions. TisaKorean’s stylistic switcheroos share a spirit with the outre masterpieces of hip-hop’s blog era, and he borrows more than just the free-for-all aesthetic of 2000s underground hip-hop: his chameleonic, over-thetop performances on the mike show that he really understands that era’s emphasis on fun. Party music is more joyful when you can get a little silly, and TisaKorean has had silliness in him from the jump— and in case you missed it, there’s a track called “Silly Night” on Mumu 8818. The new album is a little more refined than 2023’s blissfully bonkers Let Me Update My Status, but I think that’s an improvement—blog rap faded away in the early 2010s, but on Mumu 8818 TisaKorean sounds like he’s figured out how to start a party that might never end.

—LEOR GALIL

MONDAY19

L’Abortion Variety Hour: A Cavalcade of Cooch Featuring hosts Jill Hopkins and Lizz Winstead; music by Jon Langford & Sally Timms, Bethany Thomas, and Nora O’Connor; burlesque by Dannie Diesel; and comedy by Winstead, Marcella Arguello, and Rebecca O’Neal. 8 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $40, $35 in advance. 18+

Brace yourself for a parade of pussy. A procession of punani. L’Abortion Variety Hour: A Cavalcade of Cooch is brought to you by the good folks at Abortion Access Front (AAF). The New York–based nonprofit, founded in 2015, uses humor and creative

Ekko Astral KEVIN CONLON

Madeline Link of Packs CARLEE DIAMOND

TisaKorean COURTESY THE ARTIST

more music listings at chicagoreader.com/musicreviews

activism to destigmatize abortion and ﬁght the forces working diligently to take away access to safe and legal reproductive health care. A national abortion ban is on the line in the upcoming presidential election, while conservative discourse on reproductive rights regresses further into the archaic by the day. It’s important to raise awareness of this growing crisis, and the organizers of this event propose that the most fun way to do so is with another relic from the past: a variety show.

This night of live music, burlesque, and comedy is hosted by Lizz Winstead (founder and chief creative oﬃcer of AAF and cocreator and head writer of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show) and Jill Hopkins (local media giant, Metro new media and civic events producer, and overall badass). They’ll have you chuckling as they take shots at the powers that be. Winstead will also perform a comedy set, along

with the ridiculously funny and fashionable Marcella Arguello (who made waves last year with her HBO Max special Bitch, Grow Up!), Chicago-born writer and comedian Rebecca O’Neal, and plenty of special guests.

A variety show is nothing without music, and L’Abortion Variety Hour has plenty to get excited about: local actor and singer Bethany Thomas, alt-country mainstay Nora O’Connor, and a duo set from Jon Langford and Sally Timms of longrunning punk collective the Mekons. Dannie Diesel (aka Danielle Colby from American Pickers ) will put the cherry on top with some sexy, politically fed-up burlesque. A portion of ticket proceeds beneﬁts AAF, and as the clock quickly ticks toward November, this is a great opportunity to support some good folks getting creative about protecting reproductive rights. —CRISTALLE BOWEN v

MUBI FEST 2024 celebrates the rich connection between music and ﬁlm

The streaming giant’s inaugural festival in the U.S. presents an exciting lineup of ﬁlm screenings, music events, and more.

This month, MUBI comes to Chicago to present the American edition of MUBI FEST 2024. The two-day event is part of an international series of festivals hosted by the London-based streaming platform and ﬁlm distributor in nine cities across the UK, Italy, Turkey, and North and South America.

The Chicago edition of MUBI FEST 2024 highlights the deep and fruitful relationship between music and ﬁlm with a weekend of screenings, conversation, and connection at two of the city’s most beloved arts institutions—the Music Box Theatre and the Gene Siskel Film Center—before a closing-night celebration at the Salt Shed.

Saturday, August 17 features two cult classics, Mo’ Better Blues (Spike Lee, 1990) and The Last Days of Disco (Whit Stillman, 1998), as well as the Chicago premiere of My First Film, the new feature-length ﬁlm debut of Zia Anger, who is widely known for her work directing music videos for indie-rock artists including Mitski and Beach House. Additional screenings include Babylon (Franco Rosso, 1980), which follows a young reggae DJ amid racial tension in 1980s South London; All That Jazz (1979), a semi-autobiographical fantasy based on the life of its director, Bob Fosse; and Nashville (1975), Robert Altman’s satire of American politics through the lens of the 1970s country music industry with a star-studded ensemble cast, including Keith Carradine, Shelley Duvall, and Lily Tomlin.

the Music Box, where they can mingle with fellow film enthusiasts, and a live taping of MUBI Podcast exploring the 20th anniversary of Looking For A Thrill—the expansive five-hour documentary released by eclectic Chicago label Thrill Jockey that asked 112 musicians to share a story about a musical inspiration. For the occasion, podcast host Rico Gagliano will interview two local musicians involved in the original film, including Janet Beveridge Bean (11th Dream Day) and Doug McCombs (11th Dream Day, Tortoise).

Sunday continues the embrace of diverse musical genres that makes MUBI FEST’s Chicago edition feel like a ﬁlm lover’s spin on a mixtape. The Music Box will host a matinee screening of Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (Stephen Nomura Schible, 2017), a documentary about the prolific Japanese composer and antinuclear activist. The fun culminates that evening at the Salt Shed, where Canadian experimental pop band

U.S. Girls will perform a live set before front woman Meg Remy sits down for a live conversation with music journalist and documentarian Jessica Hopper. Stay for a special screening of beloved 1986 musical fantasy, Labyrinth, starring David Bowie, Jennifer Connelly, and a cast of characters from director Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. You’ll be reminded of the babe, the babe with the power, before live DJs close out the festival with a dance party for the ages.

Attendees are also invited to a happy hour at

Visit mubifest.com to learn about MUBI FEST 2024 and purchase tickets today.

continued from p. 27

Clockwise from top le : L’Abortion Variety Hour performers Jill Hopkins, Bethany Thomas, and Dannie Diesel PHOTOS COURTESY THE ARTISTS

A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene

CHICAGO DJ Hannah “Vitigrrl” Viti often visits Detroit to hear or play dance music, and a couple years ago she dreamed up a project to highlight the connections between house and techno from Chicago and Detroit. “My first time on the soil, I was really inspired and felt called to figure out my authentic place in the community,” Viti says, “but also to amplify and bring back what I’m learning [with] actual opportunities for Detroit DJs here in Chicago.”

In July, Viti launched the mix series I-94 with ten mixes, half by Chicagoans (including Craig Lo is and Miss Twink USA ) and half by Detroiters (including Tammy Lakkis and Father Dukes ). Future mixes will drop every other week, and on Saturday, August 17, I-94 hosts its debut event, an eight-hour dance party called Revival at the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago (6400 S. Kimbark).

program coordinator for the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. I-94 and Deep Joy (Viti’s new partnership with CtrlZora ) will present 11 DJs on two stages, one indoors and one outdoors; Viti, Lo is, Mark Grusane, Lori Branch , and DJ Lady D are among the performers. The all-ages event begins at 3 PM;

GOSSIP WOLF

tar Bros and piano-vocal duo Jer Roque & Natalie Clyne . “This is probably the best opportunity in the midwest to see one night of video-game music that is performed by passionate people in a high-energy setting,” Shields says. Tickets are $25, $20 in advance; the show starts at 7:30 PM.

“THIS SPACE IS DESIGNED to nourish people’s soul,” says Jasmine Michaels , cofounder of the new South Side Sanctuary at 4702 S. King Drive. Created on a formerly vacant city-owned lot, the sanctuary is a green space designed for all sorts of gatherings, with outdoor classrooms and a market space. Since 2023, Michaels has run OASES , a sanctuary development and regenerative investment ﬁ rm, a direction she took a er a lupus diagnosis changed her outlook in 2021.

“I dedicated my life to sanctuary development because that’s what I needed,” Michaels says. Lupus is an auto immune disease that disproportionately aﬀects Black women, and stress can exacerbate it. “I realized how many other community members, how many other women of color, especially entrepreneurs, were struggling with the same things.”

Viti began working in Chicago nightlife in the mid-2010s, bartending at Uptown gay bar Big Chicks and eventually moving into stage management at Berlin—which brought her closer to local drag performers and club stars such as Lucy Stoole and JoJo Baby. She started DJing in 2018 and soon landed a residency with Kristen Kaza’s long-running queer party, Slo ’Mo. “Kristen has really helped usher me into new levels of my career,” Viti says. “When I thought about creating Revival and I-94, the kinds of spaces and dance environments I hoped to create, a lot of these things I’ve learned and experienced through Slo ’Mo.”

Viti says she’s spent the past six months or so building out I-94. Last month she chose a venue for Revival thanks to Max Li, the arts

it’s BYOB, and food trucks will be on-site. Tickets cost $40 to $45.

ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 17 , Beat Kitchen hosts Chicago Video Game Music Fest 3, where all the acts play songs that either come from a video game or could have. Organizer Bobby Shields says the fest grew out of GR8bit Live , an annual charity concert in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Shields drums in Arc Impulse , a video- game cover band that frequently played at GR8bit Live. “The individual that was booking it out there started to look for someone to pass the torch to,” Shields says. “We both said, ‘Why don’t we move to Chicago—I’ll be the guy.’ Once that happened, it started to turn into less of a charity event and more of a reunion for a bunch of the bands.”

Shields got hooked on video games at age eight, and as a drummer he aspired to play the music he loved from Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy. While at the University of Arizona in 2009, he learned to program chiptune on a GameBoy. He’d soon form chiptune rock band the Runaway Five with multi-instrumentalist Zach Wolfenbarger , and a few years later both of them joined Arc Impulse.

Arc Impulse perform in the middle of the fest’s ﬁve-act bill. Shields also drums in opening band the Adventure Guild , who cover music from Stardew Valley . Los Angeles–based Chrono Trigger group Kingdom of Zeal headline; rounding out the bill are acoustic duo Super Gui-

Michaels founded the South Side Sanctuary with Cecilia Cuff , CEO of the Nascent Group and co-owner of Bronzeville Winery, and it’s been a three-year labor of love and learning. The sanctuary opened with a ribbon cutting on August 6, and since then it’s been open every day from 8 AM till 8 PM. The project was funded in part by a $500,000 grant from Chicago’s Public Outdoor Plaza program (POP!), launched in 2022, which the city describes as helping “community-based organizations revitalize underutilized land along neighborhood retail corridors.”

The mission of the South Side Sanctuary is to platform local artists and give neighbors a place to gather and pour into themselves. For three years, Michaels and Cuﬀ have been holding community stakeholder meetings to learn what community members feel they need from this space. These meetings established that the sanctuary would have four key programming areas: arts and culture, sports and recreation, entrepreneurship, and integrative wellness. To develop this programming, Michaels and Cuﬀ worked closely with Third Ward Alderperson Pat Dowell and local organizations, including FourtuneHouse (who’ll take the lead in arts and culture) and Black Girls Shred (sports and recreation).

“This space is designed to highlight the beauty that was already in Bronzeville,” Michaels says. “Bronzeville has always been creative, empowered, culturally significant, full of the most vibrant human beings.”

—TYRA NICOLE TRICHE AND LEOR

GALIL

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

Lori Branch, Vitigrrl, and DJ Lady D will all play sets of their own at Revival on Saturday. DAVID SABAT

An early rendering of the South Side Sanctuary KORY POWELL

CLASSIFIEDS

JOBS

Health Care Service Corporation seeks Business Analyst (Chicago, IL) to work as a liaison among stakeholders to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems.

REQS: This position reqs a Bach deg, or forgn equiv, in Tech or Bus Admin or a rel fld + 2 Yrs of exp as a proj mgr, sys analyst, or a rel position. Telecommuting permitted. Applicants who are interested in this position should submit a complete resume in English to hrciapp@bcbsil.com, search [Business Analyst / R0026599. EOE].

Investment Analyst

818 Capital Group, LLC seeks an Investment Analyst. Mail resume to 1509 N Milwaukee Ave Libertyville, IL 60048.

Application Security Engineer M1 Holdings, Inc. seeks Application Security Engineer in Chicago, IL to review and advise on security practices throughout M1 infrastructure and product builds. Telecommuting is permitted. Apply @ www.jobpostingtoday. com Ref#39289

Sr. Food Scientist - Perform formula commercialization, ingredient substitution, clean label formulations & adapt formulations. Present initial feasibility factors. Utilize quality improvement methodology. Determine mfg process flow. Organize production trials. Innovate R&D process flow. *Work is at the Employer\’s HQ office - 238 Tubeway Dr, Carol Stream, IL 60188; no travel involved. Min

Reqs: Master’s in Food Sci, Food Process Engnrng, or closely rltd ﬁeld + 1 yr exp in occupation rltd to Food Scientist. Must possess 1 yr exp in the following: Developing clean label food products per FDA regs; Conceptualizing & creating acidiﬁed food & condiment products per 21 CFR Part 114; Replacing chem preservatives w/ natural additives to food products; Creating food products in compliance with FSPCA; Organizing safety & mfg records in compliance with HACCP regs; Calculating mass balance equations to obtain yield, cycle time, & cost reduction on food products; Performing food consistency measurements using a Bostwick Consistometer or Brookfield Viscom-

eter; Taking acidity measurements using a pH Potentiometer; Creating nutritional labels using a nutrition label software such as Recipal or Formulator.

Resume to Fresh Factory Manufacturing LLC at info@thefreshfactory.co

National Key Account Manager National Key Account Manager – Scope Health Inc. Duties: interact/collaborate with account managers to meet revenue, distribution & profitability targets for OTC eye care product range. Offer technical and business solutions to meet key customer needs & liaise with Snr. Management & regional sales leads regarding sales strategy implementation. Oversee work of 1 key account manager. Req’s U.S. high school diploma or foreign equiv. and 4 years of experience in a sales role involving OTC drugs/medical devices, of which at least 3 years involve managing a large national customer account in the U.S. or overseas. Req’s at least 2 years of experience managing a team of one, or more, junior sales employees. Travel req: 24 trips to locations throughout the USA + 2-3 to Europe each year. Jobsite: employee may telecommute (work from home) from anywhere within the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area. Send resume and cover letter to HR Manager, Scope Health Inc. 79 Madison Ave. 8Fl, New York, NY 10016.

TheMathCompany is seeking a Associate Principal – Customer Success for Chicago, IL office. Manage existing client engagements & drive growth in new tech & accts. Pos is ﬁxed based in Chicago, IL office; however, telecommuting is permitted 100% of the time. To apply, send cover letter & CV to Yuvaraj.r@ themathcompany. com. Req. #6878012

TECHNICAL

HYDY, Inc. is accepting resumes for Senior Analyst, Operations Data Science in Chicago, IL. Design, develop and maintain key operations processes, data models, and templates to enable Operations team to scale. Telecommuting Permitted. Send resumes to: people@ heyday.co. Must reference: REF#JE-SAN.

Kodai Capital Management LP (Chicago, IL) Seeking Data Scientist to scope requirements to assist investment

decisions based on analysis of complex data sets. Must have a Bachelor’s or foreign equivalent in Mathematics, Engineering, Quantitative Finance, Applied Sciences or related ﬁeld & 1 yr of related work experience. Email resume to careers@kodai.com

Solution Architect

Burwood Group seeks a Solution Architect in Chicago, IL to lead the architecture and strategy process, defining requirements, phases, and creating designs during the project execution. Telecommuting allowed from anywhere in the US; 20% of domestic travel required throughout the US. Applicants interested in this position may apply at www.jobpostingtoday. com Ref#72445.

Health Care Service Corporation seeks Sr. Application Architect (Chicago, IL) to be responsible for ensuring alignment of project specific designs with application architecture roadmap. REQS: This position requires a bachelor’s, degree, or foreign equivalent, in Computer Science or Information Technology or a related ﬁeld plus 5 years as an Information Technology Specialist or related occupation. Telecommuting: Hybrid, 2 days a week from home. Applicants who are interested in this position should submit a complete resume in English to hrciapp@bcbsil.com, search [Sr Application Architect / Reference # - R0032533. EOE].

Sr. Mechanical Engineer (Sustainability) - Cosentini Associates (Chicago, IL) - Must have proof of legal authorization to work in U.S. Apply online at https://www.cosentini .com/ (under Posting Number 15100000447). To view full information about the job opportunities including the full job description, related occupation, education and experience requirements please refer to the internet posting at https://www. cosentini.com/ under Posting Number above.

JDE Techno Functional Analyst position at Merieux NutriSciences . Position located in Chicago, IL. Position will be responsible for assisting in problem solving and engineering software solutions within JD Edwards Enterprise One software application in functional and technical areas. Position requires Bach-

elor’s degree Computer Sci., Computer Eng. or related field (or foreign equiv) and 3 yrs. relevant software exp. Position allows for telecommuting within commuting distance of reporting office in Chicago, IL. Interested applicants can apply via the company website at https:// mxns.csod.com/ux/ats/ careersite/5/home/req uisition/6281?c=mxns

SBA Acquisition Group (Franklin Park, IL) Seeks Manager of Process Excellence to lead dvlpmt & implementation of new processes & procedures. Must have Bachelor’s or foreign eqvlnt in Electrical, Mechanical, or Industrial Engineering or related ﬁeld& 1 yr of post-baccalaureate exp. in an ISO 9000 certiﬁed manufacturing environment. Email resume:careers1@sai-aps.com.

Quantitative Researcher CTC Trading Group, LLC seeks a Quantitative Researcher in Chicago, IL. Partner directly with trading to turn market observation and intuition into working hypotheses. Telecommuting is permitted. Apply @ https://www.jobpostingtoday.com/ Ref #88564.

Projects & Investments Manager . RWE Offshore Wind Services,

LLC. Chicago, IL. Lead investment decision process. MS: BA, Fin, Econ, or rel. 3 yrs Invest Mgr, Fin Analyst, or rel exp. Alt Reqs: BS & 5 yrs exp. Other exp reqd. Apply: https://americas.rwe. com/careers-americas.

Senior Android Developer Position – Fortune Brands Innovations Fortune Brands Innovations Group, Inc. is seeking a Senior Android Developer in Deerfield, IL with the following requirements: Master’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related ﬁeld and 1 year of related experience OR Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or related field and 3 years of related experience. Required skills: Design and Implement Code for the SDK in Kotlin integrating various components and supporting partners with the code change requirements; Implement Unit Testing using various libraries such as Junit, Mockitto for supporting better implementation of the Android Code base and improved test coverage; Integrate Rest Api services in the Android app and implement the

code in the Android app; Implement new features and maintain the code base for the Android applications; Improve code maintainability by using the Object-Oriented Design Principles and Patterns for Android applications. 100% telecommuting; can reside anywhere in the US. Company headquarters in Deerﬁeld, IL. Anyone interested in this position may apply at https:// www.fbhs.com/careers and search for job: Senior Android Developer.

Full Stack Engineer sought by Amount, Inc. in Chicago, IL. Rspnsble for full stck dvlpmnt using Ruby on Rails and React. Remote work prmtd. Salary range: $102,690 to $165,000 per yr. Apply at https:// www.jobpostingtoday. com/ Ref # 52653.

Senior Business Systems Analyst (Chicago, IL): Anlyze biz prcss & dta reqs & dsgn intgrtd system of atmtd sltns. Min reqs: Bach of Inf Systms or rltd & 5 yrs exp w/ IT prjct plnng & systms implmnttn. Exp mngng prdct rdmps using Azure or smlr. Exp using Mcrsft Prjct or smlr to ensr tchncl dlvrbls algn wth biz gls. $120328/ yr. Resumes: J Fonte, Coates US, 112 N May St, Chicago IL 60607.

CHESTNUT ORGANIZING AND CLEANING SERVICES: especially for people who need an organizing service because of depression, elderly, physical or mental challenges or other causes for your home’s clutter, disorganization, dysfunction, etc. We can organize for the downsizing of your current possessions to more easily move into a smaller home. With your help, we can help to organize your move. We can organize and clean for the deceased in lieu of having the bereaved needing to do the preparation to sell or rent the deceased’s home. We are absolutely not judgmental; we’ve seen and done “worse” than your job assignment. With your help, can we please help you? Chestnut Cleaning Service: 312-332-5575. www. ChestnutCleaning.com

SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

What eats you

It’s OK to tell them you don’t want it.

By DAN SAVAGE

Q: I’m a queer cis woman in my late 30s with a problem: I don’t like having my pussy eaten. This isn’t about me being uncomfortable with the way my pussy looks, smells, or tastes. I just don’t like the sensation. At best, I get close, but eventually plateau—which is frustrating. At worst, it feels slimy, like a slug exploring my genitals. Also, being on my back with my knees up reminds me of being at the gynecologist—which is not sexy.

In the end, it’s just not my thing. But the actual problem for me is modern men. They are obsessed with eating pussy and get very pouty when you don’t think it’s the best. I like plenty of other things (being held and talked dirty to, light teasing with their mouths, ﬁngering, etc.), but they all want to get me oﬀ orally.

I get a lot of, “You just haven’t had it done right,” or, “Wait until I do it for you,” and then they get mad when (surprise!) I don’t like this thing I don’t like.

I tried dating a couple of men who “don’t eat pussy,” but those men didn’t seem to care at all about getting a woman oﬀ. And while I’m queer, it feels like cunnilingus is even more important when you’re hooking up with other women/AFABs.

Honestly, I feel like faking it with new partners and enjoying my actual orgasms alone would be easier than opening up about this to new people. Being treated like a freak has turned sex— which is supposed to be fun— into something that makes me feel bad about myself.

Any advice would be appreciated. At the very least, Dan, maybe you could make a public

service announcement telling people that being good, giving, and game (GGG) for a cis woman doesn’t just mean eating her pussy, it means showing a genuine interest in who she is as an individual sexual being.

—WISH I LIKED LICKS

a: Let’s get that PSA out of the way:

Not everyone likes receiving oral! There are cis men who don’t like having their cocks sucked! There are cis women who don’t like having their pussies eaten! There are trans men who don’t like having their pussies eaten or their neophalluses sucked and trans women who don’t like having their cocks sucked or their neovaginas eaten and enbies who don’t like having their genitals—whatever form they take—licked or sucked! People are allowed to dislike things! Even things you’re good at! Even things most people like! Being GGG means listening to people when they tell you what they like! And doing those things! If they are things you like too! It’s really not hard! I hope that helps, WILL, but since PSAs never reach 100 percent of their target demo, you’ll still have to tell new partners you dislike receiving oral sex. Which means, if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life faking orgasms before sneaking away to get yourself off (which sounds worse than having to explain that receiving oral isn’t what you want), you’re gonna have to use your words

Pro-tip: don’t string

weak-ass words together into mealy-mouthed statements like, “Sometimes I get close from oral but I’ve never gotten off from oral and there are other things we could do if that’s OK?” The kind of guys you wanna fuck—who are, ironically enough, the kind of guys who do want to eat pussy—are highly likely to interpret a statement like that as a cry for help. Many of them may have been with women in the past who were uncomfortable with their own genitals and/or had never been with a guy who loved eating pussy, WILL, and thanks to their persistence (in offering oral over and over again) dozens or hundreds of other women overcame their hangups and discovered that they loved being on the receiving end of oral sex. That is how it sometimes goes down.

But that’s not how it’s going to go down for you. You don’t have issues with how your pussy looks, smells, or tastes. You’ve been with plenty of men who loved eating pussy. You’ve given it a try again and again . . . and again . . . and it’s not for you.

So when you’re with a new sex partner, WILL, you need to hammer that point home with a clear and emphatic statement like this, “You’re one of the good guys I hate straight guys who don’t go down on women but plenty of people who were really good at eating pussy have gone down on me and it does nothing for me. Not only does it not turn me on, it turns me the fuck off. And that’s not what either of us is here for. So, about those fingers of yours . . .”

I have some good news for you, WILL: your choices aren’t limited to guys who won’t shut up about how much they love eating pussy and guys who won’t shut up about how much they hate it. Because mixed into the pile of modern men who seem

obsessed with eating pussy, WILL, you will find a small number of modern men who are only pretending to be obsessed. And in that pile of queer women (and AFABs) you might wanna fuck or date, WILL, you will find a small number of women (and AFABs) who enjoy everything about sapphic sex except the eating pussy part. The kind of partner you want is someone who goes through the motions of pushing back when you say you

don’t want to receive oral sex (“Wait until I do it for you!”) but who doesn’t push back for long. You want someone who’s relieved to learn they don’t have to eat your pussy but whose relief isn’t obvious. If you can own that—if you can admit to wanting a partner who wants to eat your pussy but doesn’t insist on it or does a very good impression of someone who wants to eat your pussy—you’ll have an easier time tolerating the pushback you’re inevitably

going to receive when you share this fact about yourself. Because that pushback is a good sign, WILL. It’s a sign that this person is worth the time and effort required to convince them that, no, you really and truly don’t want to receive oral sex. v

Read the rest of this column, see archives, and/or record a question for the Savage Lovecast at the URL savage.love/askdan. m mailbox@savage.love