Chicago Reader print issue of August 22, 2024 (Vol. 53, No. 29)
IN THIS ISSUE
FRONT
04 Editor’s Note A report from the DNC and environs
CITY LIFE
06 Street View A visitor from Texas is smoking.
NEWS & POLITICS
07 From the past Lessons from the 1944 DNC about progress and the vice presidency
13 Protest CPD walks back protester protections ahead of the DNC.
FOOD & DRINK
16 Brown | Feature Community Food Navigator works toward food sovereignty.
18 Reader Bites The patio at Elina’s
COMMENTARY
19 Isaacs | On Culture Chicago’s history with political conventions comes alive in Paul Durica’s walking tour.
ARTS & CULTURE
20 Comic The grid is Alberto Aguilar’s muse.
21 Books Ananda Lima’s debut short story collection
21 Exhibitions of Note Reviews of solo shows at Comfort Station and the Chicago Cultural Center
THEATER
22 Wertheimer | Stand-up Windy City Comedy Festival plants seeds for next year’s inaugural outing.
FILM
24 Galil | Feature The Music Box Theatre will screen Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!, a campy cult classic by eccentric filmmaker and musician Matt Farley.
26 Moviegoer What a way to make a living
26 Movies of Note Alien: Romulus feels uninspired and formulaic, Hunter Schafer makes Cuckoo worth a watch, and The Premiere too o en tells instead of shows.
COVER PULL QUOTE IN “ANANDA LIMA WRITES FOR THE DEVIL” BY MICHAEL VANCALBERGH, P. 21
MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE
27 Chicagoans of Note Mini Manson, cult YouTube entertainer
30 Shows of Note Previews of concerts including Big K.R.I.T. at the Firehouse Block Party for Peace, J Noa at LatiNxt, Girl K, and Dillinger Escape Plan
34 Early Warnings Upcoming shows to have on your radar
CLASSIFIEDS
33 Jobs 33 Professionals & Services
BACK
35 Savage Love He wants it whenever she doesn’t.
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After months of preparation and anticipation, and with the eyes of the world on Chicago, the Democratic National Convention (DNC) kicked off on Monday, August 19. From the United Center to McCormick Place, Democratic Party officials began the politicking and elbow-rubbing that come with the ceremonial four-day affair. For the first time in the convention’s history, delegates from the “uncommitted” movement pressured the party into hosting a panel on Palestinian human rights. Nearly 200 delegates for Vice President Kamala Harris have reportedly joined the roughly 30 uncommitted delegates in calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and an embargo on weapons to Israel.
Meanwhile, in the shadows of the United Center, thousands of protesters marched a 1.1-mile route starting from Union Park, bringing those demands from the halls of power to the city streets. Chants of “Free, free Palestine,” and “CPD, KKK, IOF, they’re all the same,” rang out along side streets that surrounded the convention. Another march, organized by the Philadelphia-based Poor People’s Army, was supposed to have been granted a permit to take their march to Madison Street, directly in front of the stadium, after the city missed a statutory deadline to respond. Instead they were met with a wall of cops. Organizer Cheri Honkala was arrested as the group attempted to deliver a citizen’s arrest to the
DNC.
The day was not without more hiccups. Shuttle buses transporting convention-goers between the United Center and McCormick Place were stuck for over an hour due to the protests, security screening protocols, and an accidental collision. Ahead of the evening’s festivities, hundreds of attendees and journalists alike were stuck in hours-long lines outside the convention hall. When the proceedings got underway, they dragged on behind schedule, with President Joe Biden not taking the stage to deliver his 50-minute speech until nearly 11 PM. v
—Shawn Mulcahy, news editor m smulcahy@chicagoreader.com
This page: Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws protest on August 18. Next page (clockwise): protest on August 19, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks on August 19 at the United Center during the fi rst night of the DNC, Mayor Brandon Johnson at the OEMC headquarters, a lone protestor in Union Park. DON COLLEY FOR CHICAGO READER
CITY LIFE
STREET VIEW
Bold, vibrant, and smoking
Cigars are part of style for this visitor from Texas.
By ISA GIALLORENZO
“Iwanted a vibrant look that would show off my melanin and of course my red locs,” said Shirlonda Taylor, 47. I met Taylor this summer on her first visit to Chicago, as she was heading to dinner and a downtown show. “ Six ,” she confirmed via
emailed. “The highlight of my visit was going to a Chicago Sky game, seeing [Sky teammates] Angel Reese and Kamilla Cardoso, and actually getting a picture with [actor and former basketball player] Iman Shumpert from the series The Chi. How cool is that?”
“My style is generally very laid-back and comfortable the majority of the time,” said Taylor, an o ce manager for a dialysis company. She said she stepped up her game during her trip. “I showed my friends my pictures while I was in Chicago and they were like, ‘Oh wow Tay, you go out of town and show out!’ I said, ‘Yes, indeed sometimes you have to go out and show out.’ I’m in a new city, and I want to see myself in a di erent environment. Chicago did not disappoint,” Taylor shared.
regretted missing Chicago Cigar Week, which began just a few days after her departure, but promised to come back for it. “Smoking cigars gives me a sense of peace and relaxation in this hectic world. We all go through something, but once I sit down with a cigar and fellowship with my cigar family, I’m at peace,” she explained.
Taylor thinks that both cigars and fashion can make powerful statements. “When you smoke a cigar, that experience is personal. You made the choice to enjoy a cigar. Fashion is also personal. When you purchase your clothes, it’s about your experience and how you want to look and feel. I want to be beautiful with my cigar in hand because I am bold and vibrant,” Taylor said.
a later email. “That show was amazing from beginning to end.”
The Dallas–Fort Worth area resident really enjoyed her time visiting Chicago. “I fell in love with the people and the food, plus the buildings were absolutely amazing,” she
The day she was photographed, Taylor was sporting a Shein Curve pleated maxi dress featuring the gradient shades of a beautiful sunset, a cool pair of Nike Dunk Lows, and a bag that doubled as a cigar case. “I love to smoke cigars, and [my bag is] a great personalized accessory that I ordered from [the smoking accessories vendor] Bee Poked By Bianca,” said Taylor. “My style inspirations come from my cigar-community family,” she added.
A dedicated cigar lover, Taylor visited the Biggs Mansion cigar community in the Gold Coast and had “an amazing experience.” She
For those wanting to achieve similar confidence levels, Taylor recommended them to “be comfortable in whatever they have on and own it!”
“When I say own it, I’m saying make it a piece of your personality. Your fashion [delivers] its own conversation before you utter a single word. . . . Be free and be you and be unapologetic about it! Treat everyone with respect and respect everyone’s fashion,” she wisely prescribed. v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Shirlonda Taylor ISA GIALLORENZO
A custom-made bag by Bee Poked by Bianca (on Instagram @beepokedbybianca) ISA GIALLORENZO
NEWS & POLITICS
The mystic and the haberdasher
What the 1944 DNC can teach us about 2024
By MICHAEL SPENCER
Editor’s note: This is the third piece in a series about three nominating conventions in Chicago that changed the course of United States history.
Atrain carrying an armor-plated car rolled to a stop in the Chicago rail yards on July 15, 1944. At around three in the afternoon, the chairman and treasurer of the Democratic National Committee slunk from the shadows into the siding where the train was parked and climbed aboard. Half an hour later, as the train began to move, the two men emerged with a copy of National Geographic Tucked between its pages was a note from the president, postdated to July 19—the day the Democratic National Convention (DNC) was scheduled to open in the Chicago Stadium.
Robert Hannegan, the committee chairman, and Edwin Pauley, the treasurer, hoped President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s message would settle the question of who would serve as the next vice president. But they didn’t have time to check. The train’s whistle sounded, and they jumped from the car as it began to ease out of the yard.
For months, party bosses had been maneuvering to ensure that their preferred candidate would be on the ballot for FDR’s unprecedented fourth presidential campaign. Sinking into the seat of a cab on the way back to headquarters, Hannegan and Pauley finally opened the letter, hoping the ordeal was over at last.
Instead, the president wriggled away yet again without giving a clear answer. As his train steamed toward the west coast, he left behind just two sentences: “You have written to me about [Senator] Harry Truman and [Supreme Court Justice] Bill Douglas. I should, of course, be very glad to run with either of them and believe that either one would bring real strength to the ticket.”
If they wanted Truman, they’d have to get him nominated themselves.
That episode, which unfolded at the 1944 DNC, is a Rorschach test for Americans’ feelings about the latter half of the 20th century. Interpreting its consequences requires us to metabolize the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the New Deal, the atomic bomb, McCarthyism, and the Cold War.
For those on the political right, FDR is a Machiavellian figure who expanded the powers of the executive, defiled George Washington’s two-term tradition, and made a mockery of classical economic austerity principles. The neoliberals who inherited the Democratic
Party still identify broadly with his ameliorative social programs and Keynesian fiscal policy, though sweeping reforms and transformative visions have since fallen by the wayside.
The 1944 DNC determined who would control U.S. foreign policy at the end of World War II. It was a pivotal time, when the executive branch of the most powerful nation in the world got to set the terms of a new geopolitical order.
The convention fell between two critical dates in this rise of U.S. power: Starting in June, the U.S. and its allies had begun liberating Nazi-occupied France on the beaches of Normandy. In August, near where the Yakima and Columbia Rivers meet in Washington state, a Manhattan Project nuclear reactor produced the first critical mass of weapons-grade plutonium.
FDR survived less than three months of the term he would ultimately win in November 1944. This did not come as a surprise to those close to the president. Party bosses knew they needed a machine guy as second-in-command, a party apparatchik who would be a reliable understudy to their ailing leader. And that man, they decided, was not incumbent vice president Henry Wallace.
In 1940, FDR nearly refused to run again if Henry Wallace wasn’t on the ticket. Eight years earlier, after his first election, FDR picked Wallace, a scientist and journalist, as his agriculture secretary. Wallace followed in the footsteps of his father, who died in 1924 while he was secretary of agriculture under President Calvin Coolidge.
The Wallaces were an Iowa family of “book” farmers. Bu eted by the economic turbulence of the late 19th century, his father moved the family to Ames, Iowa, where they started an agribusiness newspaper, which Wallace eventually took over.
Like many Iowa farmers, Wallace grew up a Republican. But he began to turn away from the party while his father was agriculture secretary. Wallace blamed Coolidge and Vice President Herbert Hoover for his father’s death. Stressful policy battles pitted the elder Wallace against Hoover’s laissez-faire economics, all while his health began to decline. The month after his father’s death in October of 1924, Wallace cast a protest vote for Robert La Follette’s third-party presidential run. La
Bess Wallace Truman and Margaret Truman at the 1944 DNC in Chicago
NEWS & POLITICS
continued from p. 7
Follette split the progressive vote with the Democrats, clearing the way for Coolidge to win in a landslide.
In Kansas City, that 1924 Republican landslide threw failed haberdasher Harry Truman out of his judgeship in the Jackson County courthouse. But he’d be back.
Local bosses dominated politics in the 19th century as U.S. cities industrialized and grew. Like Chicago had Big Bill Thompson and New York City had Tammany Hall, Kansas City had the Pendergast brothers.
Truman met Lieutenant Jimmy Pendergast while enlisted in the Army during World War I. The lieutenant was under investigation for his part in the death of three of his men after a live explosive detonated at their encampment near Fort Sill in Oklahoma. Truman, whose family moved to the Kansas City area when he was a boy, happened to be on the board reviewing the case. Truman did the most of anyone to defend Pendergast.
While running his floundering men’s clothing store into the ground, Truman embedded himself in Kansas City social clubs and continued to rub shoulders with the Pendergasts. Jimmy brought his father, Mike Pendergast, to the haberdashery sometime in late 1921. The three decided that Truman would run to be a judge in the upcoming county election.
Over the next decade, both Truman and
Wallace rose through the ranks of U.S. politics. Wallace continued editing the family newspaper as Hoover replaced Coolidge as president, ravaging Iowa farmers with austerity economics in the face of the Great Depression. FDR appointed Wallace to his cabinet in 1933.
Buoyed by the Pendergast machine, Truman was reelected as presiding judge of Jackson County in 1926, where he served from the following year until he was fingered to be U.S. senator in 1935. Pendergast reportedly said after Truman’s election, “I wanted to demonstrate that a well-oiled machine could send an o ce boy to the Senate.”
FDR and his armored railcar arrived in San Diego as the DNC began in Chicago.
From there, he’d board a cruiser bound for Hawai’i to conference with General Douglas MacArthur in Honolulu. It was an act of defiance. His doctors and close advisors knew the president was dying of heart failure and speculated about whether he could survive another term. But that spring, after a bout of walking pneumonia, FDR called for a secret meeting with his generals to discuss the military strategy for ending the war with Japan.
On July 20, FDR made his acceptance speech from his railcar to the delegates inside the Chicago Stadium. In retrospect, the scene was a portent as ill as the president. The delegates sat silently, watching the empty podium as
FDR’s disembodied voice echoed throughout the arena. From the rafters above them hung the same campaign poster from 1940.
Top Democrats had already begun discussing options for a replacement for Vice President Wallace. They exhorted FDR that Wallace was a liability on the ticket. But Wallace was overwhelmingly preferred by Democratic voters regionally and nationally in the spring of 1944. So, why were the bosses determined to select a new vice president at the convention in Chicago?
The ruling class in the United States saw World War II as a culmination of two decades of “mass politics” that had empowered the communists in the Soviet Union and the fascists in Germany. To some, the FDR presidency was the U.S. version of the same phenomenon. This perception was fed by the known leftists, socialists, and full-blown communists who held prominent positions in his administration. Many in the White House, including perhaps the president himself, saw the U.S. as managing a global transition away from capitalism.
This prospect terrified the business class, who had been lifted out of the Depression by stupendous public investment in the wartime economy. Identified with the New Deal and the war e ort, FDR’s sway over the electorate made his power nigh unimpeachable. Much of the federal bureaucracy, which grew exponentially during the 30s, owed its existence to Roosevelt and his reforms. In his person, FDR truly embodied mass politics in the U.S. Fortunately for capital, the president’s health would take care of that problem. But to end the excesses of mass politics, they still needed to get rid of Wallace.
In Chile, the scene was astonishing. More than 100,000 packed into a Santiago stadium designed to hold 80,000 to hear him speak. “Never in Chilean history has any foreigner been received with such extravagant and evidently sincere enthusiasm,” U.S. ambassador Claude Bowers reported to the State Department. Even Wallace’s opponents had to agree the trip was a success after a dozen countries in the region declared war on Germany.
BWhat truly seems lost to us after 1944 is the transformative vision as a facet of rhetoric and policy.
oth Republicans and Democrats had developed an opposition research file on Wallace, whose wide range of interests ran far afield of the average American. He was an intellectual who played tennis and learned foreign languages. He studied religious and philosophical traditions. He corresponded with Nicholas Roerich, a Russian peace activist and peddler of the occult religion of Theosophy. Wallace’s letters with Roerich ended up in the hands of Republican operatives before the 1940 election, which the Democrats only managed to keep under wraps by threatening to expose the extramarital a air of Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie. For all of this, Wallace was cast by opponents in both parties as a mystic, a tag that he didn’t deny. FDR and Wallace shared a desire to cooperate with the Soviet Union in planning the postwar world order. The business class in the U.S. was forced to tolerate this from the president because of his commanding electoral power. But once FDR was gone, they wanted a leader willing to dominate the Global South and oil-rich regions, which the Council on Foreign Relations identified in the 1930s as the “Grand Area” in geopolitical competition. Wallace had proven that he would not be that type of executive.
On July 17, FDR released a statement in support of Wallace. If he were a delegate at the convention, he wrote, he’d vote for the current VP. It was not full-throated enough of an endorsement for the anti-Wallace forces, who interpreted it instead as an invitation to nominate someone else. FDR could have told his advisors, party bosses, and convention delegates that they had to vote for Wallace. At any point, that would have been enough.
What made Wallace so frightening wasn’t just that he was popular with voters. He was also popular with people in Central and South America. His relatively anti-imperialist vision was in stark contrast to what the U.S. would bring to bear during the Cold War. In 1943, Wallace led a seven-nation tour of Latin America, where he spoke Spanish to crowds numbering in the tens of thousands. In Costa Rica, 15 percent of the population greeted his plane at the airport. In Ecuador, he explained the conditions of victory in World War II as he saw them: “If this sacrifice of blood and strength again brings a concentration of riches in the hands of a few . . . then democracy will have failed, and all its sacrifices will be in vain.”
Committee chairman Robert E. Hannegan calls the 1944 DNC to order. COURTESY OF THE TRUMAN LIBRARY
Throughout the spring, Roosevelt met with party bosses who preferred various options. Some preferred Senator Jimmy Byrnes, a southerner who went against the administration in 1938 on an anti-lynching bill. Others wanted Supreme Court Justice Bill Douglas, whom FDR counted as a friend and thought played an exciting poker game. Still others thought it should be Truman, who ran a wartime committee that approved private defense contracts. All left their meetings with FDR convinced they’d swayed him in favor of their preferred candidate. Publicly, Truman denied wanting the post until a July 19 meeting with Robert Hannegan and the bosses inside a literal smoke-filled room on the seventh floor of Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel.
Wallace took the stage at the convention on July 20 to second FDR’s nomination. He called on the Democratic party to keep a liberal course. “In a political, educational, and economic sense, there must be no inferior races. The poll tax must go. Educational opportunities must come. The future must bring equal wages for equal work regardless of sex or race.”
Roosevelt followed with his acceptance speech, after which demonstrations broke out among delegates and attendees who favored Wallace. Chicago mayor Ed Kelly distributed 15,000 counterfeit tickets in an attempt to create a deadlock between Wallace and Truman supporters on the first ballot. If enough Wallace supporters could “stampede” the convention and force a second ballot, Kelly thought, it might clear the way for Illinois’s favored son, Senator Scott Lucas.
But Kelly was playing with fire. The Chicago Stadium rang with chants of “We want Wallace!” as the organist cranked out the tune to the Iowa Corn Song. Sensing the changing tide, Ed Pauley threatened to cut the organ’s amplifiers. At the rear of the hall, Kelly tried to disperse the crowd as he shouted about the building’s fire code.
Over with the Florida delegation, Senator Claude Pepper stood on a chair, taking in the scene. He realized that if someone nominated Wallace amid this demonstration, the corn farmer from Iowa would sweep to victory. But the microphone in front of the Floridians had been cut off. Pepper waved the delegation’s banner, trying to attract the attention of convention chair Samuel Jackson. Casting down the flag, Pepper fought his way through the chaos. He would nominate Wallace himself if he could just make it to the front.
Pepper brushed past a railroad labor or-
ganizer and began to ascend the steps to the podium. But by now, Jackson saw Pepper making his way to the front. He and Hannegan had conspired to stop Wallace supporters from starting the nominations that night. As Pepper approached the top step, now just feet away from mike, Jackson moved to close the convention and gavelled the proceedings shut. “For better or worse,” Pepper wrote in his autobiography, “history was turned topsy-turvey that night in Chicago.”
It took another day and three ballots for the bosses to bribe and threaten the convention into picking the haberdasher from Missouri. The situation Harry Truman eventually inherited after FDR died led to perhaps the most tense and consequential four-month period of any U.S. presidency.
Truman left o ce with some of the lowest approval numbers on record, but he occupies a complicated place in our collective memory. Most recently, we met him at the movie theater, where he absolved Robert Oppenheimer and took responsibility for the nuclear bombing of Japan. (Truman later told Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this o ce ever again.”)
Generations of Americans, convinced of the false dichotomy between nuclear war crimes and an all-out ground invasion of Japan, believe that the incineration of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved their fathers and grandfathers from the horrors of invading the island nation. U.S. officials knew at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 that the only obstacle to peace with Japan was the terms of their surrender. Truman characterized a cable intercepted on July 18 as “the telegram from the [Japanese] emperor asking for peace.”
But ending the war early was imperative to keep the Soviets from establishing a foothold in Japan. A display of atomic weapons and unconditional surrender would stop Stalin from opening a new front.
Ironically, the only terms the Japanese wanted in July of 1945 were among those eventually granted to them: the maintenance of the emperor and the domestic constitutional order.
But they were only granted them after the U.S. had already nuked two cities. Truman also oversaw the privatization of knowledge and technological advancements funded by the war e ort. His insecurities led him to bluster in front of Soviet diplomats while his cabinet members assumed new de-
grees of authority. His administration institutionalized the Cold War, ended the Soviet–U.S. alliance, and established a puppet government in Korea. The elite counterrevolution against the mass politics of FDR was complete.
In this series, we have seen the populist movement capture the Democratic Party in 1896 and the Progressive Party’s frantic efforts in the summer of 1912. These reform movements reached national coherence with FDR’s New Deal, to which Henry Wallace was a natural heir.
At each turn in this story, we have seen the capacity of capital and the elite to retrench themselves in the face of widespread e orts to shift the status quo. U.S. soldiers returned from the collective trauma of World War II to the hyperindividualism of midcentury industrial society. They traded their arms for a house in suburbia, a car, and a microwavable dinner in front of the TV. All they had to do was agree that this was what they were fighting for. This was why their brothers’ entrails were scattered across the forests of France or some Pacific atoll.
Perhaps all this would have been the same under Wallace, who lost as a third-party candidate in 1948. The business class certainly wouldn’t have sat still while some midwestern mystic continued the project of social democracy.
NEWS & POLITICS
ning the election is harder. If Kamala Harris wins in November, she will be only the seventh vice president to do so. In the modern era, only George H.W. Bush has jumped directly to the presidency by winning an election. Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Al Gore all lost their bids. Lyndon B. Johnson got there by assassination. Richard Nixon had to wait eight years.
What truly seems lost to us after 1944 is the
We can be confident from this series, however, that vice presidents matter. The job is a sinecure, but VPs are often among the most viable candidates the next time a party holds a presidential primary. Joe Biden, the Dixiecrat eulogist, was tapped for Obama’s ticket to appease white racists in 2008. Despite being the fourth most popular candidate in the 2020 primary, Democrats had to coalesce around him to defeat an insurgent populist candidate. Will the 2024 vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, find himself in a similar position?
Getting the nomination is one thing. Win-
transformative vision as a facet of rhetoric and policy. As president, Johnson declared war on poverty, but his Great Society of the mid-1960s perished in the rice paddies of Vietnam. For neoliberal technocrats, the fall of the Soviet Union “ended history.” They assure us that this political system will achieve all our goals without new ideology or grand reform programs. We must be patient, they say. Progress is now only a function of time. We eagerly await our salvation. v m
Vice President Henry A. Wallace in his victory garden
JOHN VACHON/COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Makeup
I put my makeup on on the train
I put my makeup on on the train in front of everyone
I was not in the back of the train
I was in the middle of the train putting my makeup on
There is a man staring
He is next to his woman
His woman has on makeup but she put hers on at home
By Shannon Matesky
His woman has on makeup but she isn’t putting hers on on the train in front of
everyone
She doesn’t even do it in front of him
His woman had time this morning Isn’t running late because of family
I’m putting my makeup on on the train cause I’m running late
Can’t be seen without a face on
So I’m putting on eyeliner
Mascara
Blush
Drawing in my eyebrows
On the train
His woman is watching
She is judging
But has foundation
Has it all covered up
Under my makeup I’ve moisturized
What’s there
Under my makeup is me
This is me putting on my makeup on the train
This is me
With or without makeup
The man staring has seen both
He knows me better than his woman
Staring at me like I’m beautiful or something
Like he liked me without my makeup on
Like he likes me with my makeup on
Like he likes both
And is conflicted
Shannon Matesky is a writer, actress, producer and director from Berkeley CA. Shannon has lived, worked, and created in Chicago, New York and now resides as a creative in LA. Shannon has been seen on stages from colleges, to bars, to Broadway. Follow Shannon Matesky @smatesky or shannonmatesky.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
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
Learn more at PoetryFoundation.org
CPD’S RESPONSE
TO
THE
DNC
MORE OF THE SAME VIOLENCE?
AFTER MASS PROTESTS IN 2020, THE CPD AGREED TO OVERHAUL ITS POLICIES. AHEAD OF THE DNC, THEY’VE BEGUN WALKING THEM BACK.
By SAM STECKLOW, ISRA RAHMAN, ANDREW FAN, LAYLA JUNE WEST
Police and marchers during the Bodies Outside of Unjust Laws: Coalition for Reproductive Justice and
This story was copublished with the Invisible Institute.
On May 4, students and organizers set up tents outside of the Art Institute of Chicago and hung a sign that read, “Free Palestine.” Following protests on college campuses across the country, the Gaza solidarity encampment formed to demand the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) divest from the Israeli government amid its ongoing assault on Gaza.
Within 30 minutes, o cers issued an arrest warning and began blocking demonstrators from leaving, according to a statement later released by the People’s Art Institute, the collective responsible for the encampment. Protesters locked arms to defend the encampment and each other, standing in confrontation with o cers for hours.
Throughout the day, hundreds of people joined the demonstration in and around the North Garden of the private museum in downtown Chicago. The Chicago Police Department (CPD) set up barricades to contain the protest.
Officers eventually broke through the human chain and pulled students from the encampment, pushing them to the ground and arresting them while their belongings remained scattered around the garden. Students were “slammed into the ground, hit, kneeled and stepped on, and dragged,” the People’s Art Institute said in its statement. Two people had to be taken to the hospital.
In total, the CPD arrested nearly 70 protesters—all of whom had their charges later dropped under the Cook County State’s Attorney’s O ce’s “peaceful protest policy,” ABC 7 Chicago reported.
In public statements, Mayor Brandon Johnson and Superintendent Larry Snelling blamed the Art Institute for calling in the CPD in the first place. Police actions are under investigation by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA).
The CPD’s response to the SAIC protest raises troubling questions about its handling of mass demonstrations, protesters say. They’re concerned police actions at the encampment bear an alarming resemblance to their violent response to demonstrations following the police murder of George Floyd during the summer of 2020.
“The police have demonstrated time and time and time again that even if they’re given orders to restrain themselves, they simply can’t help themselves from beating the shit out of people smaller than them,” says a protester who was at the SAIC encampment and
asked to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal.
Civil rights advocates and oversight reports pointed to confusing policies, leadership failures, and poor compliance with existing rules as key elements behind the department’s chaotic and often brutal response. Police were caught on video covering their identification, using slurs, and beating demonstrators with batons. Their behavior generated hundreds of civilian complaints and was reflective of the CPD’s history of meeting periods of protest and civil disobedience with violence.
Experts warn the CPD is replicating many of those same conditions as it changes key policies and walks back protections for protesters in the run-up to the Democratic National Convention (DNC), where the city expects widespread demonstrations.
NEWS & POLITICS
continued from p. 13
Following widespread brutality and unconstitutional arrests in 2020, attorneys for a coalition of community groups filed a motion in federal court arguing that the CPD’s failure to protect First Amendment rights during protests violated the consent decree, the 2019 agreement governing CPD’s reform process. These groups—the ACLU of Illinois, disability rights group Equip for Equality, and law clinics at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University—play a formal role in providing community input on the consent decree’s progress.
After initial pushback from the CPD, the federal judge overseeing the consent decree forced the parties into settlement talks. In 2021, they agreed on a new policy to protect protesters’ First Amendment rights that barred police from arresting people for simple misdemeanor charges related to civil disobedience. It was implemented in December 2022.
At the time, some viewed it as only a small step forward. “These changes show progress, but much more needs to be done in order to prevent a retread from what happened last summer,” Northwestern law professor Sheila Bedi told the Chicago Tribune when the policy was announced. “I think that for so long as CPD shows up to protests looking for a riot, violence will happen at the hands of CPD o cers.”
Developments at the state level also promised additional protections for protestors—at least on paper. Provisions of the 2021 SAFE-T Act limited the types of force officers can use, required o cers to intervene and report excessive force to superiors, emphasized legal requirements to record arrests on body-worn cameras, and mandated that arrestees receive a phone call within three hours.
The coalition and other experts expected the SAFE-T Act and new First Amendment policy to be key regulations for CPD o cers during the DNC. That was, until February—fewer than six months out from the DNC—when the CPD released new versions of its mass arrest-related policies for public comment.
A January 2024 letter from the Illinois Office of the Attorney General, released by the OAG after inquiries from Invisible Institute, shows the policy had been in the works since November and that the OAG was aware that multiple portions of the CPD’s draft policies violated provisions of the consent decree.
The OAG, which has a formal role in overseeing the consent decree, approved them anyway, even as the office noted the tight
timeline the CPD was operating under. “Since sending the January letter, we have continued to engage with CPD and offer feedback on iterations of the department’s multiple arrest policy,” April McLaren, deputy press secretary for Attorney General Kwame Raoul, wrote in an email to Invisible Institute. “We continue to advocate for transparency and community input as CPD evaluates policy changes regarding its response to First Amendment activity and use of force and force reporting policies.”
The new policies came as a surprise to coalition attorneys. “We would have expected an advanced opportunity to comment on the mass arrest policy since there is such significant overlap with the issues in the First Amendment policy,” says Alexandra Block of the ACLU of Illinois.
The city is not required to solicit feedback specifically from the coalition on changes to CPD policy, but officials must allow time for community input.
“The last-minute nature of this is a problem of CPD’s own making,” Block says. “They just didn’t get the drafts done early enough for there to be the kind of examination and revision and community input that there really needs to be.”
In March, coalition attorneys argued in court that the updated mass arrest policies still violated the consent decree and First Amendment policy in multiple ways, including by not adequately restricting mass arrests and allowing for more lax use of force reporting at protests.
After the judge overseeing the case forced the CPD into a settlement conference with the coalition over the issue, police in June adjusted the policy again. Still, significant issues remain, according to the coalition, including a lack of clarity for officers about what constitutes a “First Amendment assembly” and a “crowd engaged in unlawful activity.” The former requires more restraint under the First Amendment policy, but the latter permits the use of mass arrests—an important distinction that allows for di erent responses by o cers.
Block expects the flawed June mass arrest policy and others that the CPD put out for public comment in recent weeks will be what o cers are trained on ahead of the DNC. In a May 30 report, the Chicago O ce of Inspector General (OIG) also raised alarms around the late release of the policies, writing, “There has not been time for meaningful Department training or inclusion of public input prior to their implementation ahead of the Democratic National Convention.”
In addition to the policy’s substance, this
back-andforth in the months and weeks leading up to the DNC is harmful in and of itself, Block says.
“Our concern is that it sends a message that mass arrests are going to be CPD’s first line response to protests during the DNC, and they shouldn’t be. Protecting and promoting people’s ability to make their voices heard should be the first approach.”
opportunities for law enforcement to violate the rights of people arrested,” said Emma Melton, First Defense Legal Aid’s community and civil rights attorney, in a statement.
Beyond seeding confusion amongst officers, experts warn the policy changes forced through by the CPD in recent months could actually exacerbate problems identified in 2020.
The department’s new mass arrest policy lowers reporting requirements for officers who use force during large-scale arrests, allowing them to bypass the use of force report, known as a Tactical Response Report (TRR), in favor of a shorter form that omits many fields that were added to the TRR as a result of the consent decree.
Coalition attorneys and other experts contested the move, noting it would make it harder for supervisors and oversight investigators to hold officers accountable. “Relaxation of those rules leads to things not reported and emboldens o cers to use force more freely,” says Daniel Massoglia, director of First Defense Legal Aid’s civil rights clinic, which is not a member of the consent decree coalition.
The CPD is also under fire for failing to provide arrestees with prompt access to a phone call and lawyer. In addition to state law, both are required by a separate consent decree that emerged out of the mistreatment of protesters arrested in 2020.
Still, the CPD fails to provide arrestees with calls. According to a new report by Kyle Rozema, a Northwestern law professor who analyzed CPD data from February 2023 to March 2024, more than 99 percent of arrestees during that time did not consult with a lawyer, and 41 percent never made a phone call. Those numbers also largely held for arrestees charged with serious crimes, who are subject to interrogations.
“With the Democratic National Convention fast approaching, there will likely be increased
While the department has highlighted policy changes, there has been less public accounting for leadership failures.
The OIG’s investigation into the 2020 protests found that the police response was marked by “failures of intelligence assessment, major event planning, field communication and operation, administrative systems and, most significantly, leadership from CPD’s senior ranks.”
Talking with the OIG, senior command staff admitted they were unsure about mass arrest procedures when major protests spread across the city. And without direction from supervisors, some o cers said that the CPD’s strategy ended up being a game of “whack-amole.” Many o cers also failed to document their actions after using force on protesters, in part due to confusing and often incorrect instructions from high-ranking o cials.
In one case, even though COPA ruled their use of force unjustified, it cleared multiple officers of misconduct for failing to report that they had beaten protesters with batons because their supervisor had told them there was “a blanket TRR, which means there’s no reports . . . being done.”
The directive from Deputy Chief Michael Pigott appeared to directly contradict CPD policy. It also meant that o cers subsequently used extremely serious types of force without reporting it to the department or providing a legal justification as required.
While roughly a dozen officers and sergeants were suspended or reprimanded for their behavior, Pigott did not face discipline.
In July 2020, then superintendent David Brown announced a new team to improve the department’s handling of protests. The
Police near a protest route on August 18 ORIANA KOREN FOR CHICAGO READER
Critical Incident Response Team “is specially trained to make sure protests remain peaceful,” Brown said at the time. He also announced that the team would be led by Pigott.
Pigott left the department in 2021 and is now senior director of response and law enforcement liaison at Titan Security Group, a Chicago-based private security firm with more than 3,600 staff. Titan did not respond to a request for comment.
In the years since the George Floyd protests, the CPD has failed to make any significant progress in the consent decree–required reforms to its supervisory systems, according to Block of the ACLU. “CPD has a very long way to go to truly transform its historical culture of racism and brutality,” Block wrote in an email to Invisible Institute. “Transforming CPD’s leadership culture is a key part of the necessary changes.”
In a larger sense, the OIG’s focus on supervisory failures and the CPD’s focus on policy changes obscures the larger issue of police culture, added Loren Jones of the law and policy center Impact for Equity.
“CPD has a long history of responding to
First Amendment demonstrations with violence and arrests and treating masses of folks, particularly progressive folks, as the enemy when it comes to a large demonstration,” said Jones, who directs criminal legal reform e orts for the nonprofit. “I think we’ve seen that over the past year, not just in 2020. I think there’s this antagonistic energy that tends to happen in those spaces.”
The backsliding on policies around protests, combined with the CPD’s failure to address concerns about how its supervisors will respond during the DNC, is concerning for activists planning to protest the event, multiple organizers said.
Marches are scheduled for each day of the DNC but the city has worked hard to block permits for virtually all organizations that filed for o cial permission to march. On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked a lawsuit brought by marchers for a route permit that would allow them to protest outside the United Center.
“We are concerned about the City denying permits for marches during the time of the
Convention—denials that often lacked meaningful discussion on alternate routes until there was litigation,” Block of the ACLU wrote in an email. “Given the discussions around the mass arrest policy, we hope that the City will not deny permits to groups determined to march and then engage in mass arrests when these groups do gather.”
“The way they’re discussing it is extremely problematic,” said Mandy Medley, a lead organizer with Chicago for Abortion Rights, which is a member of a coalition of groups suing to overturn its permit denial. “It’s scary, right? It seems like they’re looking for any excuse to shut down protest as quickly as possible, whether or not it’s permitted.”
Organizers are particularly worried about force against Palestinian protesters. Cook County is home to one of the largest Palestinian diaspora populations in the U.S., and many Palestinian rights organizations plan to protest outside of the DNC.
“We’ve seen escalated violence from CPD towards Palestinian protesters that we never really saw before,” said Jenin Alharithi, the Chicago
coordinator for American Muslims for Palestine. Despite the uncertainty around what protections exist for them and how they will be treated, local organizers said that they remain cautiously optimistic about the DNC.
“We feel confident that we can have a safe protest, and we feel confident that there will be tens of thousands of people there,” said Faayani Aboma Mijana, an organizer with the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression. “And that’s the best way to keep us safe, having big numbers and having everyone organized.” v
Editor’s note: One of our reporters was arrested while participating in a protest in April 2024 and has pending municipal charges stemming from that demonstration. In addition, after this article was initially published online, the Art Institute’s public a airs executive director, Megan Michienzi, wrote to the Reader to refute the claim that any demonstrators were blocked from leaving.
Photo by Titus
FOOD & DRINK
It takes a village to sell a raised bed of produce
Chicago’s urban food sovereignty ecosystem has been burgeoning for decades; organizers founded the Community Food Navigator to be its connective tissue.
By DMB (D-M BROWN)
Back in 2020, Nick Davis was a restaurant cook at the Black-owned Urban Grill when disruptions in the farm-torestaurant supply chain made it difficult to acquire foods like lettuce, tomatoes, and dairy products. The pandemic lockdown caused growers and eateries alike to shut down, leaving the remaining farms to lose contracts with restaurants they serviced and the remaining eateries with no way to access produce from growers whose farms went under. While he wasn’t involved in Urban Grill’s direct procurement, Davis found himself helping to draw connections between farms and restaurants that had hit dead ends. He ended up leaving the grill for COVID safety reasons, but Davis then started working in an unofficial capacity for the slowly forming nonprofit Community Food Navigator (CFN), which sought to become the connective tissue between a broad range of independent local food workers who agreed they would fare better if they intentionally collaborated. The early CFN cohort started listening and collecting the direct concerns of a broad category of people who Davis calls food mobilizers. This runs the gamut of food educators, community organizers, leaders of cooking courses, restaurant workers, restaurant owners, mutual aid folks, farmers, chefs, and more. Those are the players the organization feels accountable to.
one who runs a farm stand—all of the types of people who do production and distribution.”
Part of what inspired the formation of the group was growers of color in Chicago saying that they wished they had an organization that centers them, the land stewards, the peo-
ple who have their hands in the dirt.
They talked to “anyone who has an influence in their community over how that community thinks about and consumes food,” says Davis, now managing director of communication and engagement at CFN. “People who get food from point A to point B. You could be a delivery person . . . or someone who is running a Meals on Wheels program. You could be some-
There has long been a gap in resources for growers of color. Black farmers in the United States have faced more than a century of discrimination from public and private institutions; the number of Black farmers has dwindled because farming is seen as no longer economically viable. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund details how Black farmers were long denied benefits from federal programs like the Great Depression’s Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and were the victims
of discrimination from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s new Farm Security Administration under the New Deal. In the 80s and 90s, the federal government admitted that the United States Department of Agriculture was a culprit of discriminatory practices but did
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Action Council, the City of Chicago, and the Greater Chicago Food Depository) passed the Urban Agriculture Business License Enhancement Ordinance, which makes it easier for businesses to connect with local farms and for farms to sell to local institutions.
Still, an urban agricultural license is only one of a long list of things that will help put local independent Black and Brown growers and food mobilizers on an even playing field. Today, CFN is connected with more than 340 growers and 500 di erent organizations that have engaged with them in some capacity. CFN works with a group of 13 local leaders, called the stewardship pod, who directly informed their original mission and still inform their ongoing strategy by providing feedback on what’s happening in their respective organizations and what the stewards are observing broadly in the local food system.
not investigate the claims brought to them. Black farmers, who in 1920 operated about 14 percent of all farms, now represent under 2 percent of growers nationally.
In recent decades, local farmer training programs like Windy City Harvest and Urban Growers Collective have ushered in a wave of new farmers. But when they try to sell food to grocery stores or schools, Davis says, they’ve run into problems and legal gray areas. Only as recently as 2023, the Chicago Food Equity Council (co-operated by Chicago Food Policy
For example, a lot of people struggle to access refrigeration for their produce, which would help extend the number of days they can keep it off the vine. CFN might ask their stewards, “How can we be more strategic about setting up more cold storage throughout the food apparatus?” One of the stewards is Pastor Reshorna Fitzpatrick, who runs a church and a robust food distribution program on the west side—churches are one of the biggest movers of free food in Chicago. Another steward is Howard Rosing, a researcher at DePaul University, who’s spent decades looking at how racism operates within food systems and pursuing community-informed research projects. People like Fitzpatrick and Rosing might be able to help those in the CFN network learn about the underlying causes of this problem and find a solution.
Overall, CFN works to help information flow through the local food system with more ease. “A lot of my day-to-day is just receiving and making phone calls between people,” Davis says, “trying to make sure the nervous system of the food [web] is sparking in the right way.”
CFN created a digital tool for farmers that acts like Facebook Marketplace or LinkedIn for organizations in their sphere, a “needs and offers” market for growers.
Melanie Carter, farmer, chef, community activist, and founder of Sunflower Soule Farm,
Chicago Grows Food provides kits all over Chicago, but they try to prioritize neighborhoods with contaminated soil as a result of years of redlining and environmental racism. CHICAGO GROWS FOOD
FOOD & DRINK
Today, CFN is connected with more than 340 growers and 500 different organizations that have engaged with them in some capacity.
was part of the “seed” or starter group that helped determine what the CFN app might be useful for.
Carter and other growers recommended that the app include a farm locator, listings of activities and food education events, and a method for users to communicate between one another. All of the suggestions were adopted.
Carter’s farm in Back of the Yards began as a concept during her urban agricultural apprenticeship program at Windy City Harvest in 2020. Today, her lot flourishes with collards, turnips, mustard greens, hot and sweet peppers, eggplants, potatoes, cabbage, fruits, and more. “I love getting my hands in the dirt,” Carter says. She leans toward regenerative processes that nurture and restore soil health, using compost and natural floral pesticides like marigolds, nasturtium, and alyssum.
Carter runs a farm stand every Saturday on 51st Street on a sliding scale basis, with products that can range from free to $5. She brings a bag of potatoes and cabbage to give away for free.
“When people say, ‘Well, I ain’t got no money,’ I say, ‘I ain’t asked you about your money.’ I say, ‘You’re hungry, you just hungry.’ And that’s the bottom line,” Carter says.
Right now she has one full-time worker on the farm—the neighborhood handyman. She has two other people who come and help around harvest times.
“Nobody’s getting rich doing this,” Carter says. “More than anything, [I want] the people [who] know about us to put the word out about us.”
CFN has also worked with Chicago Grows Food, an organization that tries to nurture the local food ecosystem by sending people home with “grow kits.” They try to reduce barriers to gardening by providing a tomato plant or a chard plant, for example, in a light, moveable, and porous fabric grow bag (made by west-coast company Root Pouch), filled with healthy soil and compost. Their smallest garden kit can fit on a windowsill and is typically distributed at schools and community events. The bigger the kit, the more outdoor space it needs. One of their most popular setups includes 12 five-gallon fabric bags, each with its own plant in a medium-sized pot
that one can grow in a front yard, backyard, balcony, or on stairs.
“It can be moved around depending on where the sunlight comes,” says Elizabeth Berkeley, director of Chicago Grows Food.
“It’s great for renters, because you can take them with you.”
The organization has distributed more than 4,000 grow kits per year for the last four they’ve been in operation. They also have more than 150 partners—spaces like public schools, private schools, libraries, churches, day cares, and “anywhere that is passionate about gardening and wants to start incorporating it into their educational system,” Berkeley says.
Chicago Grows Food partnered with CFN in 2022 to help build out this partner network. Berkeley is grateful for the CFN digital app, where she says gardeners can build relationships with like-minded growers without being data-mined. Chicago Grows Food promotes the app to their participants as a place to exchange ideas about container gardening specifically, which might involve di erent tips and tricks than growing in the ground. It’s helpful to mulch your garden when it’s hot outside, for example, and they encourage participants to use the app to inquire locally, “Hey, who’s got extra mulch? Where can I pick it up?”
Their kits are all over Chicago, but they try to prioritize neighborhoods with contaminated soil as a result of years of redlining and environmental racism. Back of the Yards, for example, is located next to shuttered factories, which took a toll on the local ecosystem.
State and city policies have a massive impact on how and if the local food system flourishes, and CFN has to meet these challenges. For example, schools, hospitals, universities, and prisons are institutions that move tremendous amounts of food, making decisions about where they purchase it from using public money. The recently created Urban Agriculture Business License Enhancement Ordinance enables farms that are, for example, down the street from an elementary school, to demonstrate to that school that they’ve achieved the necessary safety certifications to sell locally grown food. Each farm’s business license and individualized city contract clarify that their produce, grown within Chicago city limits, is acceptable to consume.
continued from p. 17
Policy also impacted farmers in February 2020, when Lori Lightfoot’s administration released a new hydrant permit policy that made accessing the water for their urban farms, as they all had prior, prohibitively expensive— from $25 to over $500.
“Within like a week and a half, half of these farms went under,” Davis says. “They were no longer able to water their food. Fruit was withering on the vine, and we had no idea why she did [it], but there was absolutely zero transparency.”
Davis says that Lightfoot eventually revealed that the more expensive access was to filter contaminated water from the hydrant, but the city didn’t make it financially easy for farmers.
“That was a policy that was intended to help from a public health standpoint but really deteriorated the actual infrastructure,” Davis says. “Farms went under and they were just abandoned.”
The work being done at the Street Vendors Association of Chicago (SVAC) is another good example of how local policies can create or tear down barriers for members of the independent food ecosystem.
The majority of street vendors in Chicago are low-income elderly immigrants; the highest concentration of vendors are in the 22nd, 24th, and 25th wards. These shops get set up “out of necessity,” says Rozanna Rivera, economic developer for SVAC. “What do most of our elders do? They cook. So they provide these cultural delicacies out of necessity to be able to provide for their families, because a lot of them [are] not able to participate in the local economy.” Many of these shop owners also watch children and can’t work a nine-to-five.
SVAC seeks to create and find resources for these vendors, such as ushering them through the licensing processes, finding capital to start their business, and encouraging cooperative ownership of shared kitchens, as the city requires their food be prepared in commercial kitchens.
Rivera shared that the sum of licensing alone for street vending ranges from $7,000 to $10,000. Insurance for a cart can be up to $1,000, and a permit from the Chicago Park District is $2,000. A cart, which can be wood or steel, costs between $1,200 to $5,000. Total costs to start street vending reach upwards of $20,000, and vendors only average $1,000$1,500 in income per week.
One policy challenge that vendors face is
that the city of Chicago prohibits preparing fresh cut fruit on the street—it’s supposed to be prepackaged like in a grocery store. But that limits how many cultural hallmarks patrons can experience.
“You’d have to prepare [elotes] fresh for the butter to melt on the corn,” Rivera says. “Some of the processes don’t allow for this.”
Being connected with CFN, at least, has helped these vendors—especially those living and working in areas without grocery stores nearby—get in touch with farmers to access locally grown produce.
Amajor component of CFN is creating spaces where growers can convene and be paid to give advice and input to the organization. CFN partners are paid to attend events and do on-site food education. They’re paid to purchase produce directly from growers and have chefs prepare it on the spot. CFN hosts monthly volunteer days at different farms, where community members are invited to visit a farm “open house” style and help the owner complete any work they might need.
Natasha Nichols is a first-generation farmer
on the south side who built her house with her husband ten years ago in a vacant lot in West Pullman. They transformed a quarter acre of neighboring lots into an educational farm; it’s one small part of a green corridor in the making.
Her farm, We Sow We Grow, houses 50 chickens, and it draws curious neighbors and passersby to their work. In 2023, CFN hosted a volunteer day at We Sow We Grow.
“We had to dig up our farm . . . they were helping us literally rebuild,” Nichols says. “We were working from a blank slate, building all of our raised [soil] beds and making sure that they were [properly] placed for the season.”
Nichols says that Black folks can do “magical things” with food, making it stretch farther than you’d expect. Her investment in food
Nothing says Chicago summer like sipping an Aperol spritz on a patio—and Elina’s is the best place to do that. Elina’s is a popular restaurant, yet its patio remains a treasure because it can’t be seen from any street (or even their dining room). With string lights hanging over the roughly ten tables nestled between brownstone buildings and greenery, it resembles an intimate rooftop dinner party away from a bustling city— my personal oasis in West Loop. Elina’s has mastered being on the cusp of upscale and casual. Yellow and blue bar stools next to red gingham tablecloths with a picnic vibe are juxtaposed by castle-like dining sets, including vintage flower plates. These plates, collected over many years by co-chef and co-owner Eric Safin from across the country, add a unique and eclectic touch to the ambiance. The mix-and-match na-
sovereignty began a few years into the farm, when West Pullman went from having multiple groceries stores in a one-mile radius to having none. For her, food has always been the center of family, of traditions, of celebrations and funerals. The goal of her garden, which provides an array of classes, is the same as CFN’s: to try to get as many people as possible to start growing fruits and vegetables in their own spaces.
“I know that it won’t take the place of larger farms and grocery stores,” says Nichols, “but it’s just nice overall, for mental health, for community greening, for the ecosystem, for everybody to be growing something in their backyard.” v
m
dmbrown@chicagoreader.com
ture of the designs allows my friends and I to pick our plates based on which “feels the most us,” but it also gives the restaurant a feeling of relaxed sophistication. Despite its charming atmosphere, it doesn’t lack practicality—there are heat lamps for when the temperature begins to drop, although they do close the patio in the winter, typically from October to May. But on a sunny summer day, there’s nothing like enjoying a meal in the heart of a garden, fresh herbs and flowers in full bloom.
The culmination of all of these attributes fosters a comforting and inviting atmosphere that has yet to be matched elsewhere. Stepping onto the patio with my friends feels like entering our safe space, where we anticipate a relaxed meal filled with laughter, where nothing in the outside world really matters. —JORDANA COMITER ELINA’S, 1202 W. Grand, 312-929-2249, elinaschicago.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.
The patio at Elina’s
This popular Chicago Grows Food grow kit includes 12 fi ve-gallon bags with different plants.
CHICAGO GROWS FOOD
From Abe to Pigasus
Paul Durica’s walking tour celebrates the highs and lows of past political conventions in Chicago.
By DEANNA ISAACS
For those of us lucky enough to live here, Chicago is always the dense and vibrant hub of the world. But this week, our dropdead gorgeous, beating-heart-of-the-nation city, with all its challenges and glories, really is the cynosure of the globe, focal point of the human universe.
It’s a heady moment. Also a tra c-tangling headache. In a few days, however, the 2024 Democratic National Convention, like so many presidential nominating conventions before it, will pass into history.
Which means it might add a new stop or two to the Chicago History Museum’s Convention City walking tour, created and led by the museum’s director of exhibitions, Paul Durica.
Maybe it’ll be the stretch of Wacker Drive east of Michigan Avenue, where marchers rallied Sunday evening and a focus on reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights was subsumed by calls for Palestinian liberation and the end of U.S. aid to Israel, setting the tone for demonstrations that followed.
Durica has been conducting some of the city’s liveliest history lessons since he launched Pocket Guide to Hell as a walking tour side hustle during his graduate school days at the University of Chicago. (The name, as former Reader sta er Aimee Levitt pointed out when she wrote about him for a Best of Chicago issue a decade ago, was inspired by a 19th-century Brit’s alleged description of
our town as “a pocket edition of hell.”) The Convention City tour is a roughly two-hour stroll, all of it in the Loop. With so many of the places that hosted conventions in the past torn down—the International Amphitheatre, Chicago Stadium, and the second and third Coliseums—his touchstones are convention landmarks still standing in this central area.
Here’s a handy Chicago bragging fact: we’ve hosted more Democratic and Republican presidential nominating conventions than any other city—26 at latest count, more of them Republican than Democratic. A momentous one took place at the tour’s starting point, the southeast corner of Lake and Wacker. In 1860, this busy intersection was the site of a huge, hastily constructed building called the Wigwam, where Abe Lincoln, the mere “rail-splitter,” won an upset victory over former New York state governor William Seward for the Republican nomination.
The tour will be joined here by Dan Weinberg, proprietor of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, which has been around since 1938. Weinberg, who says Lincoln “wouldn’t recognize his party today,” will bring along a pair of items from that raucous convention,
including a handwritten delegate’s tally of the three rounds of voting that ended with the rail-splitter’s victory. (Visitors who make their way to his shop at 824 W. Superior can see, among other relics, Weinberg’s own convention exhibit and a bronze life cast of Lincoln’s eerily disembodied face and hands.)
From the Wigwam site, Durica says, the tour heads to City Hall, where he’ll talk about the role Chicago mayors have played in conventions, notably Democratic political machine founder Anton Cermak in 1932 (he died the following year, after taking an assassin’s bullet apparently intended for president-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt), and Richard J. Daley in the 1960s. Then it’s on to what’s now known as Daley Plaza, where, in 1968, members of the Youth International Party (the Yippies) nominated a 145-pound hog named Pigasus the Immortal for president and were promptly arrested—candidate and all—by the Chicago Police Department.
Other stops include the Auditorium Building, which hosted a convention in 1888 while it was still under construction, and the Congress Hotel, where, Durica says, “Theodore Roosevelt stayed in 1912, when the Bull Moose convention met here in Chicago. That was the year when the Republicans basically broke apart— roughly half stayed with William Howard Taft, the incumbent, and the other half went with Roosevelt, to form the Progressive Party.”
There’s a stop at the Blackstone Hotel, site of the original smoke-filled room (during the 1920 convention, when dark horse Warren G. Harding landed the Republican nomination), and the final stops are at the Hilton and in Grant Park, “to talk more about 1968,” Durica says. After that, if folks want to hang out a bit, they might adjourn to the bar in the Congress, which has a chair on display in its lobby from the White House, said to be a favorite of presidents like Polk and Van Buren. “There’s a little stanchion with a velvet rope, so you can’t sit down, but it’s right there in the lobby. If the bar is closed, I’ll be happy to just stay there in the park and talk for awhile.”
At press time, the Saturday, August 24 tour ($25; $22.50 for members) had already sold out, but, interested readers, you’re not out of luck. Responding to demand, Durica says he’ll conduct another on his own time, at 10 AM on Sunday, August 25, with the same itinerary. Visit the Pocket Guide to Hell website (pocketguidetohell.com) for more information. v
m disaacs@chicagoreader.com
Protesters in Grant Park during the 1968 DNC STEPHEN DEUTCH/COURTESY CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM
ARTS & CULTURE
ARTS & CULTURE
Ananda Lima writes for the Devil
Her short story collection is a surreal meta commentary on cra .
By MICHAEL VANCALBERGH
Writers think a lot about how, and why, they write. Inevitably, the question of, “Who am I writing for?” needs answering. Some settle on writing for themselves. Some, a direct appeal to the market. Others decide to write for their muse: a spouse, a child, a distant relative.
Chicago author Ananda Lima writes for the Devil.
Rthe piano left behind by their philandering roommate, ripples with energy.
Each story fits a cliched “type” of short fiction. There’s one with a ghost, one with magical realism, one about a workshop, one about returning home.
CRAFT: STORIES I WROTE FOR THE DEVIL by Ananda Lima Tor Books, hardcover, 192 pp., $24.99, us.macmillan.com/ books/9781250292971/craft
Lima’s debut collection of short stories, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, starts with an unnamed writer sleeping with the Devil at a party in 1999, leading into a story, written by said writer, about sleeping with the Devil at a party in 1981. The collection keeps up the back-and-forth between stories written by the writer and stories of the writer herself. Often, the interludes shed light on the story that comes after. Just before the story “Porcelain,” Lima’s writer argues with herself about what the rat in the next story means, crossing out suggestions such as, “The man becomes the rat” or “The rat never comes.”
Between the titled stories are gorgeous, narratively connected interludes. They address the mundanity of waiting in a DMV and the complications of COVID-19. In each, the Devil returns, sometimes as inspiration, sometimes as friend, but always as a jumping-o point to the next narrative o ering meant to appease his hunger.
The stories stand out as extraordinary pieces of short fiction. In “Idle Hands,” we’re treated to a series of responses by workshop participants to the writer’s story. It’s a searing, accurate portrait of the inanities and the subtle violence of workshop comments. In “Antropófaga,” the protagonist Béia eats Americans that come from her workplace vending machine for lunch. Their nutritional value is suspect, but she can’t resist. Even an extremely short story like “Rent,” where roommates decide to free a ghost from
The stories become commentaries on craft, situated between the writer’s experiences and reflections in the interludes. During one such interlude is a great example of this meta-conversation about writing fiction: “The writer was also an immigrant. Sometimes, when the immigrant writer wrote, there was no migration in the story, and she wondered if there should be. . . . These were the kind of questions she talked about with the Devil.” This metacommentary invites readers to consider that what is permissible to write about is the kind of stories that we’re told.
Craft is about story—how we tell them, who we tell them for, how telling stories brings us out of the darkest spaces, how stories affect the way we experience the world. Lima’s book is, yes, about the crafting of stories. It’s also about that moment when a reader lifts their head from the page and the co ee shop doesn’t feel the same.
It’s brighter. The heat coming from the baristas smells like humanity. What they read has opened them to something new. Craft invites us to imagine stories as the possibility of a more human experience, the potential for something di erent. Even if they’re written for the Devil himself. v
m letters@chicagoreader.com
Bibliographical, nonsense #2: A(n) (Book) Encounter, olivier COURTESY COMFORT STATION
OPENING
RIntimate copies
At Comfort Station, olivier considers the politics of classification.
In “Bibliographical, nonsense #3: Paratextual Messages of the (UF)Os,” on view at Comfort Station until September 1, olivier continues to fine-tune an evolving practice of creative citational mining that opaquely but playfully considers the politics of classification and identification. Working somewhere between the hermetic conceptual world-making and systematizing of Stanley Brouwn and the unfolding language games of Ray Johnson, olivier’s work adds a punctuation mark to these art historical forebears by (re)presenting found texts and systems of archival display that hone in on how difference can be found and made.
Throughout the space there are a number of photocopies of predominantly academic or literature texts that are hung and housed in polyethylene archival bags. These pages are presented with annotations, redactions, or enlarged marginalia that change their fixed meaning, o en organized around the spaces between words and sentences that contain the letter “o.” A pertinent example comes from an intervention into a page from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Library of Babel” in which olivier has altered a sentence to read, “I repeat: in order for o to exist, it is sufficient that it be possible. Only the impossible is excluded.” These works serve as both personal intervention and, as copies, facsimiles of that intervention. The larger poetic olivier gets at with this strategy is to show that likeness (the copy) doesn’t mean sameness. In our contemporary moment, which gushes with pangs toward individualism, this may feel like a postmodern retread. Yet, olivier’s dance of similarities isn’t simply a post-truth divorce of meaning
but rather discreetly rejects monolithic identification with purpose. A hallmark of queer production is, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, the cra ing of an open mesh of possibilities, and this is precisely what olivier’s exhibition does, showing us, again and again, how otherwise settled things might be considered otherwise. —CHRIS REEVES “BIBLIOGRAPHICAL, NONSENSE #3: PARATEXTUAL MESSAGES OF THE (UF) OS” Through 9/1: Sun 11 AM-2 PM, Comfort Station, 2579 N. Milwaukee, comfortstationlogansquare.org/calendar
RCapturing life on the CTA
Painter Peter Broitman transforms el riders into character studies.
Critic Jerry Saltz was perhaps the first to articulate a dichotomy in figurative painting between the cool, clean portraiture of Alex Katz and Alice Neel’s clumsily rendered goo alls. If there’s an equator between these poles, it’s the oeuvre of Peter Broitman, who indulges himself in Katz’s stylistic bravura without tempering his Neel-esque psychic insights. It’s only right that Broitman’s current exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center is located in its Senior Center, where the obstreperous characters of his paintings meet their real-life counterparts.
A hint of rebelliousness animates Broitman’s ridiculous canvases—a er halting a three-decade career as a trial attorney to paint full-time, the floodgates opened on caprices he couldn’t reveal inside staid courtrooms. Like Rumpelstiltskin spinning straw into gold, Broitman transforms unremarkable el rides into character studies of the wandering mind. In one work set on the Red Line, a burly construction worker’s slumber prevents him from noticing that the riders opposite him are mid-metamorphosis, their heads transmogrified into those of ravenous zoo animals. Another apposes the raiment of five seated passengers, throwing jeans-clad backpackers beside regal-robed ball attendees to comic effect. Broitman is more acutely aware than most of the CTA’s communal role, which circumscribes two antithetical extremes—it bears witness to both our public-facing selves and our inner lives.
Broitman’s forays into political satire are more facetious: three giggle-faced Chicago Seven members adorn Abbie, Rennie, and Jerry, while Black Jack awkwardly befriends a waddling avian in General Pershing and Duck. If this show’s lawyering conscience—obsessed with conveying the truth—and affinity for risible juxtapositions are any indication, we can expect Broitman’s work to evoke many dropped jaws and hearty guffaws in the years to come.
—CHARLES VENKATESH YOUNG “HUMANS (MOSTLY)” Through 8/28: open daily 10 AM-5 PM, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, chicago.gov/city/en/depts/dca/supp_info/ exhibits.html
THEATER
Windy City Comedy Festival plants seeds for next year’s inaugural outing
Chicago comic Ariel Julie is a picky booker.
If she doesn’t wholeheartedly believe a comic is expertly skilled, they’re not getting up on that stage—at least not if Julie has anything to say about it. So, when she started booking for the first annual Windy City Comedy Festival fundraiser on August 8, she was not messing around.
“I would never book a show where I did not fully believe that every comic on that show had the potential to just murder,” Julie said. “I really wanted to showcase not just some of my favorite comics but [a] variety.”
The August 8 event—featuring Chicago comedians Junior Stopka, the Queeny Bitch (who replaced the COVID-19-stricken Kristen Toomey), and Dwayne Kennedy—was a fundraiser for, and a little taste of, the Windy City Comedy Festival coming to the city in August 2025. Coproduced by Julie and the Queeny Bitch, the festival will be “three to five days of shows with your favorite comics from Chicago, as well as comics from around the country that you’ve never heard of but you’re going to want to know,” Julie said.
The festival was born from the realization that Chicago doesn’t have a consistent, annual comedy festival of its own, despite being a mecca for the comedic arts. Since Second City
spearheaded the rise of the Chicago comedy scene in 1959, Chicago has raised an abundance of comedy legends, including Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, John Belushi, Seth Meyers, and Kumail Nanjiani.
“Every major city has a music scene. Every major city has its museums and its history and all that. But not a[nother] major city has a history of comedy in the way that we do,” Julie said, noting the “countless great spaces” for comedy in the city, including Zanies, the Laugh Factory, the Comedy Bar, the Lincoln Lodge, and the Den Theatre, where the fundraiser was held.
While Chicago does have a lot to offer its comedians, those whose careers are first fostered in the city tend to pick up and leave as their careers take o , said Ryan Martin, CEO of the Den Theatre.
“Our city has a long-standing tradition of nurturing and producing outstanding comedians who, unfortunately, often move to the coastal cities to further their careers,” Martin said. “Investing in up-and-coming Chicago talent is vital to keep our comedy scene vibrant, creating an environment where they can thrive and continue to perform here, and treating audiences to the best comedic talent around.”
list over the years includes Danitra Vance, Hannibal Buress, Matt Bellassai, Gwen Rose, and Jaboukie Young-White.)
“There’s an audience for every type of comic here. In fact, the shows that are the best are the shows that have the most diversity on them,” she said. “The best part about comedy is that you’re watching people make jokes and be funny about their life experiences, and when you have that variety and diversity, you have comedy that’s suddenly relatable to so many more people. Because this is such a diverse city, you need that.”
Julie, who’s traveled across the country to perform, notes, “It is not like that in other scenes.” A few months ago, Julie performed in Indiana at a comedy club celebrating their 20th show. She was the first female comedian they’d hosted.
“There’s an audience for every type of comic here.”
By JOJO WERTHEIMER
Windy City Comedy Festival organizers hope the event will bring a variety of talent managers and agents to the city. By bringing agents into the local scene, Julie hopes to prove that “you shouldn’t need to leave Chicago to get representation.”
“More comics in this scene need to be signed, in my opinion. We have a few, but we have so many more that are just as talented but haven’t been seen by the right people yet,” she said. “I’m not asking for these agents or managers or whoever comes out to move to Chicago, I’m not asking them to relocate, but I am asking them to consider representing comedians who also don’t want to relocate.”
“In other places, especially in the midwest, there are shows where the lineups are all white, all men sometimes,” she said. “Clearly, Chicago is a place that celebrates diversity.” When booking for the Windy City Comedy Festival, Julie is looking to find a balance among variety, diversity, and quality. A good show cannot exist if one of the elements is missing, she said. For example, if Julie were to book three straight, white men in a row at the same festival, it would be a loss for both the comics and the audience.
“Our city has a longstanding tradition of nurturing and producing outstanding comedians who, unfortunately, often move to the coastal cities to further their careers.”
“They might all have really great jokes and be really great writers, but if you put them all in a row, the audience might get bored with having a really similar comic back to back to back,” she said. “So that third straight, white guy is probably not going to do as well as the first two, or [as well as the others] if he had gone up first, because the audience is just like, ‘Oh we just saw that two other times.’”
Similarly, without a strong focus on the quality of the performers, the show isn’t fulfilling its main goal: to make people laugh.
The Chicago comedy scene not only o ers a variety of venues and renowned alumni, but also diversity—both in performers and audiences—that helps comics hone their skills. The city has been home to many popular queer comics and comics of color, Julie said. (A short
“I do think it’s very important to note quality for me comes first,” Julie said. “Because no matter how many wonderful people you have from whatever backgrounds, if the jokes aren’t there and it’s a comedy show, it’s not going to work.”
For the festival, the lineup will be picked
Ariel Julie performs at the Windy City Comedy Festival fundraiser on August 8 at the Den Theatre. RODESCU HOPKINS/A HOLLYWOOD JOINT
based on submissions. Comics are invited to send in a five- to eight-minute clip for a fee, most likely $20 for nonlocals but discounted for local comedians. Julie and a group of diverse comedians “with di erent tastes in comedy” will be watching the clips and curating the lineup. “We want to make it fair but still high quality,” she said.
As a general rule, Julie never books based on clips she sees on social media, despite the influx of comedians using social platforms to self-advertise. TikToks and Instagram Reels, which are generally only around a minute long, don’t provide her with the context she needs to fully trust a performer. Comics like Stopka, Toomey, and Kennedy have been in the game for over a decade. If they were to get heckled or their sets were to go terribly wrong, they could handle the situation while still being funny and professional. You can’t gauge this type of expertise in a short clip on social media, she said. Although festival organizers run the same risk with longer submis-
sions of comedians they don’t know, they can at least see that the comedian could handle a full eight-minute set onstage, Julie said.
Windy City Comedy Festival organizers are taking a more traditional approach than other Chicago comedy festivals in recent years, such as the 312 Comedy Festival which, last year, had shows as close as the Riviera Theatre and as far as the Rialto Square Theatre in Joliet, Illinois. Julie is focusing on making the festival worthwhile for comics—performers will get stage time at a variety of venues, a recording of their sets, and the opportunity to take headshots and network with both agents and other performers from around the country. The festival will take place across multiple venues, including the Den Theatre and the Lincoln Lodge. The other venues are to be determined, but Julie is committed to making sure the venues are close enough so comedians can get around easily on public transportation.
“I did a festival where I flew across the country and ended up doing [two] bar shows. If I had known that would be the show I was doing, I might not have made the decision to do the festival. I want this festival to be worth the comedians’ time and their e orts, where they’re going to get some great exposure in this city, they’re going to have a great set on a great stage in front of a great audience,” she said.
Above all, Julie wants the Windy City Comedy Festival to have longevity—an annual reminder of why comedy has been sacred to Chicago since Second City opened and why Chicagoans should continue to invest in local comedy in the future.
“We want this to be annual, every year, and become one of those destination festivals that people around the country can say, ‘I got into Windy City Comedy Fest’ and people are like, ‘Oh my god, that’s amazing.’ We want this to be a real credit and a real accomplishment. That’s why we have these really high standards. High standards, but super accessible for people who want to see comedy.”
“It’s so simple, but there’s so much going on in the world that is not funny at all right now, and sometimes you just need to be reminded that life is funny, and it’s OK to laugh, and it’s OK to forget about things that aren’t good for just a minute,” Julie said. “Because Chicago is full of so many kinds of people that have so many di erent life experiences, one thing we all have in common is that we want to be able to laugh about them.” v
Featuring ensemble members Audrey Francis, Francis Guinan, Ora Jones, and James Vincent Meredith
By MICHAEL FRAYN
From top: The Queeny Bitch, Dwayne Kennedy, Junior Stopka RODESCU HOPKINS/A HOLLYWOOD JOINT
FILMFILMFILM
FEATURE
Riverbeast alert
The Music Box Theatre will screen Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You!, a campy cult classic by eccentric filmmaker and musician Matt Farley.
By LEOR GALIL
Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You! opens with a white-haired gentleman directly addressing the audience while seated on an upholstered armchair. The setup reminds me of Alistair Cooke’s role as the refined host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre , though the Riverbeast introduction is closer in spirit to the goofy theatrics of a William Castle picture. But Riverbeast runs on an odd, unfamiliar pulse. The unnamed host possesses a Boston accent, and his eyes dart from side to side as he reads off a warning about the movie’s impending horrors in a halting, a ectless drone. The host’s voice also sounds a little muddy, as if he was recorded calling on an outmoded car phone underneath the Ted Williams Tunnel. The scenery behind the host appears cluttered, and the lamp backlighting him is a tad too bright. All of this enhances Riverbeast ’s down-to-earth charm. After the host tells viewers of the movie’s built-in “Riverbeast alerts,” he encourages any fearful audience members to cover their eyes. He then proceeds to show you his method; he places his left hand over his face, then spreads his middle finger and ring finger apart to reveal his right eye. The Riverbeast introduction is more of a Rorschach test than a warning: if you can see the card-carrying AARP nonactor imperfectly delivering campy lines as a delightful expression of homemade filmmaking, then Riverbeast is the kind of cult movie for you.
RDON’T LET THE RIVERBEAST GET YOU!
99 min. Thu 8/22 8 PM (sold out) featuring a Q&A with Matt Farley and Leor Galil and Mon 9/23 9: 30 PM at the Music Box Theatre, general admission $11, Music Box members $ 8, 3733 N. Southport, 773 -871- 6604
Let the Riverbeast Get You! , remains a highwater mark. Farley plays Neil Stuart, a highly respected tutor who returns to his home in Rivertown three years after his attempts to warn his fellow citizens about the Riverbeast tarnished his reputation. Stuart dodges odd looks from townspeople as he proceeds to rebuild his life. He moves in with his old bandmate, Teddy Hollingsworth (Tom Scalzo), who stopped playing music when Stuart left town. He attempts to win back the heart of his ex-
it also looks a little o on purpose; I’m not sure Riverbeast would’ve succeeded as an homage to campy midcentury monster movies if the leviathan didn’t look like it could be felled by a sudden gust of wind.
Bill Reilly, who plays Riverbeast’s host, has only one other film credit to his name. Reilly plays an advisor (again unnamed) to the mayor of a New Hampshire town in Freaky Farley ,
a 2007 horror-comedy directed by Charles Roxburgh. Freaky Farley stars Matt Farley, who cowrote the script with Roxburgh and serves as the face of their DIY cinematic collaborations. Roxburgh and Farley started making movies as students at Providence College in the late 1990s. In 1999, they self-released a shot-on-video movie called The Paperboy . Farley’s leading man is an antihero who writes essays for his fellow college students and delivers them while wearing tighty-whities over his head to conceal his face. Farley and Roxburgh have since collaborated on a little more than a dozen movies (and counting). Their ninth film, 2012’s Don’t
fiancee, Emmaline Price (Elizabeth M. Peterson). By day, Stuart tutors Allie Stone (Sharon Scalzo), the miscreant daughter of Rivertown’s revered former professional athlete, Frank Stone (Kevin McGee). The Riverbeast, meanwhile, emerges from the Merrimack and begins to terrorize the town.
Roxburgh and Farley made the Riverbeast costume with a broken wet suit they purchased from eBay. The mud-brown creature sports an oval head with gigantic fish eyes and an open mouth with a handful of pointy teeth that resemble stalactites and stalagmites. As much as the beast’s curious appearance is born out of the filmmakers’ shoestring budget,
Roxburgh and Farley knew how to make their limitations work in their favor by the time they began filming Riverbeast . As with their other films, they relied on friends and family to fill out the cast. Peterson, who plays Farley’s Riverbeast love interest, is also married to him in real life; Tom Scalzo plays music in Moes Haven, a band he and Farley started decades ago at Providence; Farley’s father, Jim, plays monster hunter and “ladies’ man” Ito Hootkins. Some Riverbeast actors have limited range, but all of them appear to relish their time on camera, even if they have trouble getting their words out. Granted, Roxburgh and Farley’s Riverbeast dialogue sounds like it’s assembled from invented postwar lingo and tongue twisters sourced from a thesaurus. The Riverbeast tagline is baked in the film’s idiosyncratic language: “He’s the most indecorous aquatic menace of all-time!” Chicago film critic Katie Rife first saw Riverbeast in June during a program of Farley and Roxburgh films at New York City volunteer-run theater Spectacle. Based on the name Motern Media, under which Farley releases, publishes, and screens all his artistic endeavors, Spectacle called the event Motern Mania. Rife’s friend Peter Kuplowsky, a film programmer in Toronto, had long evangelized Motern to her, and Roxburgh and Farley’s writing left an impression. “I like the stream-of-consciousness aspect of it and all the random stu they throw into it, because that’s what they were thinking about while they were making the movie,” Rife says. “I find that very charming.”
Rife helps program 24-hour scary movie marathon Music Box of Horrors alongside Will Morris and Music Box managing director Ryan Oestreich. After Rife experienced her first taste of Motern, Oestreich reached out to her and Morris about hosting a week of movies in the theater’s small garden screening space while the main theater closed for renovations
The titular Riverbeast; “He’s the most indecorous aquatic menace of all-time!” MUSIC BOX THEATRE
in August. Rife had been impressed by the Spectacle audience’s reaction to Riverbeast . She figured the Music Box of Horrors audience would be receptive to the movie’s o eat sensibilities and shaggy appearance; the Music Box’s garden has a small capacity, which also made it easier to take a chance on a movie like Riverbeast
“It’s risky because of the DIY nature of it,” Rife says. “A lot of times people will conflate production value—which is often a euphemism for budget—with quality. People will see something that someone clearly made on their own, without a lot of institutional backing, and think that that means it’s not any good, because it doesn’t look quote-unquote polished.” I’ve discovered this firsthand with Riverbeast. A couple years ago, I attempted to play it for my wife and a friend of ours. About 30 minutes in, they complained that Riverbeast had the look and feel of cheaply made porn and asked me to turn it o . Riverbeast had little in the way of distribution upon its initial release in 2012. Whatever cult status it currently claims is due in no small part to Farley. He’s a compulsive artist perhaps best known for his music. Farley claims to have recorded more than 25,000 songs under dozens of pseudonyms. He’s written music for audiences so niche I would’ve assumed they didn’t exist, and he’s recorded songs about office supplies and towns in Illinois with the same aplomb as his tributes to celebrities. You’re more likely to have encountered Farley’s music than his movies, especially if you have a child and an Alexa smart speaker; in 2022, Buzzfeed and NPR reported that Alexa-born requests for songs about poop provided a windfall for Farley’s scatalogical songs.
I first learned of Farley in late 2020 from my friend Sarah Joyce, who occasionally babysat for a kid obsessed with Farley’s poop songs. In need of a pandemic project, I decided to attempt to listen to Farley’s entire recorded catalog and document my experience in a
quarterly zine, titled Freaky 4 Farley. I published two issues before throwing in the towel. Farley’s music tested my patience, but it opened me up to Farley’s films—and, in e ect, the man himself. Farley sings his cell number in more songs than I can count and makes himself available to anyone willing to call or text him.
Farley is a relentless self-promoter too, so as soon as he heard about my zine project, he became its biggest cheerleader—he put a copy of the first Freaky 4 Farley in one of the movies he made with Roxburgh, 2021’s Heard She Got Married . Parasocial relationships are an everyday part of consuming art online, but Farley works at fostering a more distinctive bond with those who engage with his work. In 2021, I became obsessed with New England beach pizza, a sweet, square-cut pie topped with provolone. That Thanksgiving weekend, I convinced my wife and sister to try the pizza in its hometown of Salisbury, Massachusetts, and after tweeting photos, I received a text from Farley about it. The following year, Roxburgh and Farley released a kindhearted time-travel movie called Magic Spot , which includes a date scene involving New England beach pizza.
I’ve found this kind of feedback loop nourishes Farley’s work as much as it reinforces his connection to the dozens (hundreds?) of diehard fans he’s won over. In his self-published book, The Motern Method, Farley encourages readers to think about small audiences: “Instead of trying to appeal to everyone, think about making a work of art that appeals to a very specific, underserved group of people.”
Part of what makes Riverbeast charming is that it feels like it was designed primarily to entertain the people making it as well as their friends; more than a decade later, Farley is still doing his darndest to make you feel included. v
m lgalil@chicagoreader.com
week at chicagoreader.com/movies
Things have been hectic at my day job, and, as a result, I was a little less of a cinephile this past week than I usually am. It used to be that I could rally after a busy day at work, see one or two movies a night, and still be able to get back to it the next day, but alas—I can’t extend myself like I used to, and my position is such that I sometimes need to work into the evenings to get stu done.
So it was nice to go see Whit Stillman’s 1998 film The Last Days of Disco at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Saturday morning as part of Mubi Fest, and on 35 millimeter to boot. It had been awhile since I’d seen it, so imagine my surprise (OK, it’s not that dramatic) when I was reminded that a comedic motif throughout the film is everyone ragging on one of the main characters for working in advertising. Dear reader, I also work in advertising—not out of any grand passion, mind you, so I wasn’t offended in the least. More so, I just thought it was ironic that after such a grueling week, the profession in question would be the butt of so many jokes in a movie about the nuances of clubbing.
And I say that with the utmost respect. It’s a fantastic film, and it made me nostalgic for a club-going experience I’ve never actually had but imagine would be a lot more fun than what accounts for clubbing nowadays. I wouldn’t call myself a Stillman devotee, but in The Last Days of Disco I do appreciate the sincerity peeking out from behind the mannered pasquinade. There’s an earnestness, both real and partially caricatured, for the a ectedness of it all, that does justice to the musical genre—one that, ironically, was “killed” right here in Chicago, at Disco Demolition Night on July 12, 1979, at Comiskey Park,
which ended in a riot.
Maybe The Last Days of Disco is just what I needed to remind myself of what’s really important and how best to spend my days (not quite going to disco clubs, but watching movies about them, of course). In a 2018 interview with Vulture , writer-actor-director Stillman seemed to lament that such a culture of fun and going out has been contemporarily eschewed for staying in, presumably to recover from what our generation has termed the “hustle.” “I think it would be good if people would reflect on long-term priorities,” he says, “and maybe not get into the situation of the job where people are forced to work more than really should be necessary.” Amen to that!
On Sunday, also at the Film Center, I saw Edward Yang’s debut feature, That Day, on the Beach (1983), screening as part of the Entrances & Exits series. It’s hard to believe this was anyone’s first film, but it makes sense that it was Yang’s—though it’s so fully realized that I had to keep reminding myself of its place within his oeuvre. One aspect of the film deals with a character who gets sucked into corporate culture, leading to the enigmatic ending where one must wonder what kind of demise this lifestyle ultimately led to. Yang masterfully charts the impact of a widespread cultural shift in attitudes toward the workplace and the family unit in a way that resonates even today. OK, back to work. 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.
NOW PLAYING
Alien: Romulus
A er more than four decades, the Alien series has finally taken the solipsistic turn its fellow long-running horror franchises took years ago. Alien: Romulus feels made by and for people who are familiar with the component parts of an Alien movie but haven’t ever seen one.
Romulus touches upon the requisite thematic beats of pregnancy as horror, android–human relations, and evil capitalism within the first ten minutes, all with truly egregious examples of telling rather than showing. Cowriters Rodo Sayagues and Fede Alvarez (who also directs) rush through embarrassingly explicit dialogues to assure audiences that, yes, they’ll be addressing everything they need to address.
While some of these moments are merely laughable, like a mustache-twirlingly evil doubling of a work quota, others are offensive. The film’s only Black character, Andy (David Jonsson), is also the main android character, and his status as “real” or “fake” is exhaustingly litigated. Things only get more uncomfortable when Andy explicitly states that his prime directive is to do whatever is best (including sacrificing himself) for Rain (Cailee Spaeny), the young white woman who’s here to take over the franchise from Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley.
The thrills in Romulus have the same checkboxticking feel as the themes. We’re run from set piece to set piece including attacks, stealth missions, and, of course, turning back for someone in the finale. Some of these sequences offer inventive ways of engaging the multifaceted horror of the xenomorph, but they all feel inconsequential and more like video game quests than parts of a narrative.
Maybe it was inevitable that the Alien franchise fell prey to uninspired regurgitation, but it could have been better than this. —KYLE LOGAN R, 119 min. Wide release in theaters
RCuckoo
Cuckoo is a film that feels like it was kicked out of the nest too soon. It’s full of potential, from the cast to the visuals to the sound, but the delivery is shaky. The familiar-feeling beginning sees Gretchen (the entrancing Hunter Schafer), a 17-year-old who’s recently experienced the loss of her mother, relocate with her father and his new family from the U.S. to the German Alps to live and work at a resort. Like A Cure for Wellness (2016), Cuckoo relies on the stunning-veering-on-surreal visuals to do some heavy li ing, building an eerie atmosphere that creates a quiet unease in viewers even before they meet Mr. König (Dan Stevens), the resort owner who takes an immediate and intense interest in Gretchen’s mute half-sister, Alma (Mila Lieu). From there, the film is teeming with tropes across tones; some work well—like when Schafer does a near-fourth-wall break, providing a bit of levity by flat-out mentioning how weird everything
is—but many don’t. As for Cuckoo’s sonic attributes, which oscillate between serene and screeching and are a prominent part of the plot, enjoyment will most likely vary widely among viewers. The twist, with the help of Schafer’s increasingly impressive acting chops, however, is unique enough to soar above any shortcomings and hold an audience’s attention. —BECCA JAMES R, 102 min. Wide release in theaters
The Premiere
Indie director Jon Silver’s new film The Premiere takes place almost entirely within the Music Box Theatre in Lakeview. Fun fact, I live near the Music Box, so this was a surreal watch. Every time the film cut to an exterior shot, I got a little paranoid that I would see my Zach Galifianakis-ass visage huffing and puffing across the street carrying a Jewel bag full of burrata. Though I would be embarrassed if that happened, it would have added a tiny bit of something to The Premiere, which can o en feel like a whole burrat-of nothing.
The Premiere centers on a young filmmaker, Jacob (Grant Kennedy Lewis), as he tries to damage control his new movie’s imploding premiere. As a setting, the Music Box makes total sense for a film about indie filmmakers; those who have been to the theater know it’s Chicago’s monument to film and filmmaking. Several scenes are dedicated to Jacob talking with his wacky cast and crew about all the crazy stuff that happened while making their movie. Not seeing the production process isn’t an issue, but hearing people talk at length about how much they love something but never actually seeing them do that thing will never not read weird. It’s like talking to a Wrigleyville guy who “really loves going to the Music Box.”
This is an ensemble comedy built way too wide. Jacob has to wrangle disapproving parents, deranged cast members, journalists, and incompetent theater staff. Performances are solid all around, but comedy o en takes a back seat to a weird amount of exposition for a bottle movie. The film also tries to frame Jacob’s anxiety in a high-concept way that just doesn’t work. If anything, The Premiere works best as a great snapshot of the Music Box before its big renovations. —JONAH NINK 81 min. Davis Theater, 8/27 at 8 PM v
Cuckoo MUSIC BOX
The Last Days of Disco (1998)
GENE SISKEL FILM CENTER
MUSIC
CHICAGOANS OF NOTE
Mini Manson, cult YouTube entertainer
“I’ve created
a character
that lets me survive and perform. I can do what I always wanted to do, and nobody can say I can’t.”
As told to MICCO CAPORALE
If you walk or take the CTA a lot, especially on the north side, you may have spotted one of Mini Manson’s stickers. Some are drawings in black, white, and red, and others are pixelated color photographs, but they all show a circular image of a man’s head, tipped forward and smiling impishly up at you, his eyes and lips smudged in black and blood trickling from his hairline and mouth. He’s throwing the horns with a hand gloved in black leather, and he’s brought the outstretched index finger of that hand to his forehead in a salute. The stickers promote the entertainer’s YouTube channel, which has almost 3,000 followers.
Mini Manson is the project of Andrew Paul Roach, a 55-year-old resident of Portage Park. He started the YouTube channel during lockdown, and he now works on it full-time. His one-bedroom apartment houses an elaborate stage decorated with neon lights, skulls, candles, and rock posters where he performs karaoke songs in costumes of pleather and satin. He also shares snippets from his life, including footage of protests at the Democratic National Convention and trips to other cities. The few original songs he’s released have been used as background tracks or remixed by other members of the YouTube community.
Roach got his first social media account just days into lockdown in 2020, and he’s quickly grown into something of a Jan Terri for the digital age. Terri is a homegrown cult hero who became a microcelebrity in the 90s for her
offbeat, blisteringly sincere lo-fi music videos (“Losing You,” “Get Down Goblin”), which got the attention of Marilyn Manson—he invited her to open a few shows for him in the late 90s. Roach looks to Manson as something of an aesthetic icon (it’s ill-advised to admire much else, given the cloud of abuse allegations that surrounds him), and he’s found an audience thanks to his Manson fandom and his earnest, grassroots approach to marketing.
Ididn’t start using social media till I was 50. I’m getting more familiar with today’s Internet and apps and all that. I’m not lonely anymore. Every day of the week, no matter what time it is, I can press the button for Discord or YouTube or whatever. There’s someone to talk to. The Internet saved me during COVID. I literally made a job using my own image. I never thought I’d see the day.
I’ve wanted to be an entertainer all my life. I just never could put it into action. One day I was trying to take a photograph, but I accidentally took a video, saying “This fucking shit” in all my makeup and everything. It made me laugh so hard. I uploaded it to YouTube, and all these people were so nice and encouraging. So I made more.
I didn’t know how to express myself before COVID. I started doing it online, and now I go out like that. Sometimes people are mean in public. I’ve learned to adjust my appearance a little bit so as not to cause jealousy or friction or whatever. People hate what they fear, so
A Mini Manson sticker
MUSIC
continued from p. 27
they feared me and were jealous at the same time. I don’t know. But once in a while, I’ll have someone come up because they recognize me. That makes my day.
I used to be a little show-o . As early as four years old, I’d start jumping around and dancing when my dad’s friends came over. I wanted the attention—I craved it. I would take these cardboard boxes and make little theaters for puppet shows. Sometimes I’d just start singing out on the bus or at museums. When I was in high school, I was in drama club. I thought acting would be my path. I still want to act—like, a character actor. I don’t think I’d be able to sit there and do a soap opera unless they wanted somebody to act like the Joker or something, which—I’m not the Joker, by the way. Sometimes people think I’m trying to be the Joker, but I’m not.
I was never super into Marilyn Manson until he played [Ye’s] Donda [event] at Soldier Field about three years ago. When I saw him wearing a Hugo Boss coat with his short hair, I thought, “He looks so fucking fine.” It’s why I’ve got pictures of him all over my apartment. I like to kiss on the pictures for my channel.
One guy called me a hypocrite and a fascist for liking Marilyn Manson. I’m like, “How?” And he says, “Because you worship him—you believe everything he does.” I worship his clothing, the way he sings and moves onstage and performs. I think he’s very handsome as an older man. That’s it.
I just want to express myself. I couldn’t do that in high school. I’d see all the other kids in the 1980s dressing all gothic, with the black makeup and the Dracula and all the dark and doom and death. I resonated with that, but I wasn’t allowed to express it openly outside my body. I had to get away from my family for 20 years to feel safe to do it. I turned 50, and I just felt free.
I always wanted to do music, but I was intimidated, especially because of my older brother. He learned how to play the guitar when he was 14, but he became a Baptist preacher. His music career ended before it started, and he would be very mean to me. I was afraid to pick up a guitar because of him. So finally, at the age of 50, I took guitar classes at the Old
Town School of Folk Music. It opened up my mind and made me feel so useful. It was like an epiphany.
I didn’t come from a good background. My mom and dad didn’t understand how to be parents. My dad was a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and my mom was a housewife. They’re dead now. I had a younger sister, and she’s dead too. Overdose. My brother lives in Florida. We don’t speak. My dad fostered a lot of animosity between me, my brother, and sister. After my mom died, we all broke apart and didn’t speak again. It’s been over 20 years. I’m used to being alone.
I’ve been cognizant every day I’m alive that my brother and sister thought I was a weirdo and a reject. They’d make fun of me at school, and then everyone else would join. It was like a domino of misery. My mom had another son who died after my sister was born. I call him the lucky one. He didn’t have to grow up with my father, his abuse, and my parents’ alcoholism. But I’ve created a character that lets me survive and perform. I can do what I always wanted to do, and nobody can say I can’t. I don’t have to go to a record producer or a movie director to be famous, like you used to. I graduated from Columbia College in 1994, so I’m familiar with the industry.
I studied animation, cartooning, illustration, that sort of thing. I really like Jim Davis, who drew Garfield , and George Gately, who drew Heathcliff . And Belvedere [by George Crenshaw]. Belvedere was a dog. The thing I’ve noticed about all these comic-strip characters that I like—dogs, cats, whatever—they were always fucking happy and celebrating and stumbling around. I always wanted my life to be happy like that.
“I’d see all the other kids in the 1980s dressing all gothic, with the black makeup and the Dracula and all the dark and doom and death. I resonated with that.”
After I graduated, I thought I’d just get a job, but that didn’t happen. I panicked because my father was such a dick that summer—I went and joined the Marine Corps. After six weeks, I was discharged because of pneumonia [and came back to Chicago]. Then I got a job as a paralegal. My dad always said, “Either you’re in school or you’re working. You’re not just going to stay home.” I lived at home till I was 32 years old. I did leave a few times and came back. Tried to spread my wings in Florida, just to get my own identity.
My friends always went there and came back with these great tans. I love nature, and I’d see all the pictures of the palm trees and beaches and all that great shit. I’d be like, “Why can’t my family go to Florida and Disney World and shit?” I’ve still never been to Disney World. I love drawing and have made many comics and coloring books. I’m about to make a Mini Manson coloring book. Over the years, I’ve sold artwork here and there but never anything substantial. Then a few years ago, an Internet friend introduced me to artist trading cards. He’d make all this money just drawing, and he doesn’t even draw good. “Atrocious” could be the word, but people buy it. I managed to sell a few hundred dollars’ worth of my own cards. They usually want me to draw lolcows.
A lolcow is an object of derision online. Some of them think they’re rock stars, but they’re delusional and don’t realize how fucked-up they are. People will bully them, even to the point of suicide. People have told me to kill myself
many times. They get cruel on the Internet. There’s a lot of jealousy online. Some people just like to watch fights.
Eventually, someone taught me how to make money o my channel. I used to perform for free. Then I realized my time and money and all the years that I trained to do this are worth something. Just because I like doing it doesn’t mean it’s not a job or that I shouldn’t get paid. It’s not a j-o-b job that you’d talk about like it’s a bathroom, like, “Ugh, I gotta go to my j-o-b!” You have a right to get paid, even if you enjoy your job.
Once you’re over 50, there’s a lot going against you, not only with your health and memory decline—people just look down on you because you’re a dinosaur. If I were 30 years old, I’d probably be in Hollywood right now. I’m still waiting for Hollywood to call. v
m mcaporale@chicagoreader.com
Mini Manson, aka Andrew Paul Roach COURTESY THE ARTIST
Recommended
Big K.R.I.T. brings timeless southern hip-hop to North Lawndale’s annual Firehouse Block Party for Peace
BIG K.R.I.T.
Part of the 17th annual Firehouse Block Party for Peace. Featuring hosts D2G & JunJune (1–5 PM) and Binkey & Keya Trammell (5–9 PM); live music by Big K.R.I.T., Boi Jeanius (DJ set), Recoe Chi, Reconcile, Wande, Phenom Universal (with live band and special guests Asha Omega and Mani Jurdan), Sol Development, and the Microphone Misfitz; DJ sets by Jaidot (noon–2 PM), Ca$h Era (2–5 PM), and Rock On (5–10 PM); and an MC battle curated by Awthentik Poetry. Sat 8/24, noon–10 PM, Firehouse Community Arts Center of Chicago, 2111 S. Hamlin, free with RSVP at thefcac.org. Fb
BIG K.R.I.T. IS A FECUND producer, rapper, and singer who’s been smearing tracks with his signature thump and thick southern accent for more than a decade. Born Justin Scott and raised in Meridian, Mississippi, K.R.I.T. is running a marathon, not a sprint—in fact, his stage name is a backronym for King Remembered in Time. He revisits that concept with the title of his 2023 EP, Regardless, It’s Still Timeless .
K.R.I.T.’s longevity in hip-hop is already evident. He hovers and uplifts tracks with slow-riding, bass-bumping, ass-shaking sounds as well as his uncontestable deep-fried southern presence. His résumé is grand; he’s collaborated with giants, including Lil Wayne and J. Cole, and he’s put out some of the best mixtapes of the 2010s, most notably 2011’s Return of 4Eva . In June, he appeared on Megan Thee
Stallion’s new album, Megan , floating in on “Miami Blue” (along with producer and rapper Buddah Bless).
K.R.I.T. brings his rich, powerful southern rap to North Lawndale’s Firehouse Community Arts Center for their 17th annual Block Party for Peace. The Firehouse’s mission is to provide a safe haven for some of the city’s most at-risk youth through arts, faith, and entertainment. This year’s event promises to be an all-ages, familyfriendly extravaganza of epic proportions. The bill also includes lots of homegrown acts, including ever-refreshing genre-mixing singer Asha Omega, explosive mentor and entertainer Phenom Universal, and renowned producer and battle, radio, and club DJ Boi Jeanius. Grab your friends and get ready for a fun, thoughtfully curated day of food, live music, dance, live graffiti, and more. —CRISTALLE BOWEN
THURSDAY22
Girl K Cece Maravilla opens. 8:30 PM, Sleeping Village, 3734 W. Belmont, $22.66. 21+
In fall 2017, Chicago singer-songwriter Kathy Patino self-released Sunflower Court , the debut album from her solo project, Girl K. Patino’s earliest recordings have a shagginess reminiscent of old-fashioned garage rock, but in the ensuing years, she’s evolved past that—the full band she assembled for Girl K’s 2019 follow-up, For Now , played sweet, sometimes languorous indie rock. The Girl K concept doesn’t seem shackled to any particular style (or any particular lineup), and the 2021 EP Girl K Is for the People focuses on dance-floor rhythms and swooning synths in clean but dramatic arrangements that emphasize Patino’s mellow, inviting vocals. (The title track feels engineered to play on nostalgia for pre-reunion LCD Soundsystem.) The new album My Future (Take This to Heart) goes even further, documenting Girl K’s fullfledged investment in pop. For this release Patino has also returned to working as a solo artist. She produced the album’s shimmering synthetic landscapes with Clemente Calandra (aka Heartgaze), and they feel enormous even when they recede into the distance so that Patino’s voice can fill the foreground. Girl K’s newfound pop sound retains some of the loose swagger of Patino’s earliest work, most obviously in the spiky synth lines and frazzled guitar notes of “Mouth.” From the very start, she could write a magnetic melody, and album single “Alone With U” has a bittersweet hook whose fresh but familiar feel is ready-made for the Billboard Hot 100. —LEOR GALIL
Esmé Patterson Em Spel opens. 8:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $20. 21+
Esmé Patterson’s light voice and mostly acoustic folk music can lull you into letting your guard down—and that’s when she belts you with a sucker
COURTESY THE ARTIST
Girl K CHRISTOPHER FINN
punch. Her landmark 2014 LP, Woman to Woman (Greater Than Collective), is a collection of acerbic responses from the perspectives of female characters in classic songs written by men (plus Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”). She starts with “Valentine,” an exuberant kiss-off to Elvis Costello’s narrator in “Alison” (“Honey, try to keep those thoughts of me / In my party dress / Out of your head”), and works her way through delightfully mean-spirited answers to the Beach Boys’ “Caroline, No” (“The Glow”), the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” (“Bluebird”), Townes Van Zandt’s “Loretta” (“Tumbleweed”), and others.
The songs on Patterson’s most recent album, 2023’s Notes From Nowhere (Sometimes River), aren’t thematically unified to the same extent. The record includes its share of folkie uplift, like the sweetly philosophical and slightly cloying “Circles.” The highlight, though, is a bleak, ominously droning version of the traditional ballad “Shadow of the Pines,” where Patterson pushes her voice up to its higher register, nodding to the high lonesome yodels of country crooners Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams as she caresses vivid details with the gravity of coffin nails. “A sudden fitful darkness stole across the summer sky,” she sings. “And a shadow fell between my love and me.” The track ends with two minutes of squalling feedback that seem to have wandered in from a Sonic Youth album. As with much of Patterson’s work, that unexpected edge makes it cut all the deeper. —NOAH BERLATSKY
SATURDAY24
Big K.R.I.T. See Pick of the Week on page 30. Part of the 17th annual Firehouse Block Party for Peace. Featuring hosts D2G & JunJune (1–5 PM) and Binkey & Keya Trammell (5–9 PM); live music by Big K.R.I.T., Boi Jeanius (DJ set), Recoe Chi, Reconcile, Wande, Phenom Universal (with live band and special guests Asha Omega and Mani Jurdan), Sol Development, and the Microphone
MUSIC
Misfitz; DJ sets by Jaidot (noon–2 PM), Ca$h Era (2–5 PM), and Rock On (5–10 PM); and an MC battle curated by Awthentik Poetry. Noon–10 PM, Firehouse Community Arts Center of Chicago, 2111 S. Hamlin, free with RSVP at thefcac.org. Fb
Dillinger Escape Plan Trash Talk, Secret Chiefs 3, the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, and No Men open. 6:30 PM, Salt Shed outdoors, 1357 N. Elston, $45 general admission, $95 premium admission (balcony access). b
The Dillinger Escape Plan’s 1999 debut full-length, Calculating Infinity , hit the metal and hardcore scenes like a runaway train. The record took the abrasive, sinister acrobatics of east-coast 90s hardcore bands such as Deadguy and Jesuit to implausible extremes, paving the way for technical metalcore to become one of the most popular sounds of early 00s underground punk. Two years after the album’s release, DEP’s (literally) fire-breathing vocalist, Dimitri Minakakis, le the group, while the band became a markedly different animal, moving away from their relatively straightforward metalcore roots and more toward the eclectic work of vocalist Mike Patton (who sang on DEP’s 2002 EP, Irony Is a Dead Scene). But in 2017, when that version of the band broke up a er several more lineup changes, they still had some unfinished business from their early days. That became all the more clear last December, when DEP announced a string of reunion shows with Minakakis on vocals around the 25th anniversary of Calculating Infinity. “Something still feels unsaid as far as the Dimitri era of the band,” founding guitarist Ben Weinman said in a press statement.
Full-album sets of classic records have become so ubiquitous in punk and hardcore that each new one can feel like pure marketing. But to be fair, few debut albums feel as ferocious a quarter centu-
Esmé Patterson
MUSIC
ry later as Calculating Infinity. The one-two punch of “Sugar Coated Sour” and “43% Burnt” (a career highlight whose opening guitar line belongs on any “best riffs of all time” list) would be enough to enshrine most bands as legends, but Dillinger operate in top form throughout the entire album. Jazzy interludes and sudden time-signature shifts act as glue between instrumental bludgeoning and Minakakis’s caustic vocals. This Salt Shed gig is joyful news for old heads considering an ill-advised return from mosh retirement as well as for fans who weren’t yet born when Calculating came out. If the set list mirrors the band’s recent New York shows, attendees can also expect some bonus tracks from other early DEP releases and potentially a cover or two. Time to party like it’s 2001. —ED BLAIR
J Noa Part of the first day of the LatiNxt festival. See Sun 8/25 for details on day two. Navy Pier Beer Garden: Future Rootz DJs (2 PM), Techlado (4 PM), Philthy Dronez (5:30 PM), J Noa (7 PM), Pahua (8:30 PM), and Cedeño (9:40 PM and 10:10 PM, with a break for 10 PM fireworks). Wave Wall Stage: Alejandro Marenco (2 PM), BiLatinBby (4 PM), Jenny Fox (6 PM), Chillona (7:30 PM), Karennoid (8 PM). 2–11:10 PM, Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand. Fb
J Noa is still in her teens, but her life has already been extraordinary. On her 2023 single “No Me Pueden Parar” (“I Can’t Be Stopped”), the Dominican hip-hop star uses machine-gun staccato rapping and eviscerating rhymes to articulate four aspects of what makes her “impresionante” (“awesome”): her age (she was 16 when the song dropped), her gender, her commitment to schooling despite the limited resources of the community where she was raised, and
her pride in her homeland. With that, she ends her list—noting that a recounting of her exceptional qualities could “go on to infinity.”
Born Nohelys Jiménez in San Cristobal, J Noa follows in the footsteps of socially conscious Dominican rap artists Melymel and Lápiz Conciente, known respectively as “La Mamá del Rap” and “El Papá del Rap.” This has earned her the nickname “La Hija del Rap” (“the daughter of rap”). She began crashing local rap battles and laying out rhymes as
a young child, and her lines frequently address the woes of her low-income neighborhood. In the short 2022 documentary Mi Barrio by Noise Colectivo, she describes herself as an urban journalist. Reporting with a candid, loving gaze, La Hija del Rap contrasts her neighborhood’s joyful, raucous energy with the frustrations of poverty, widespread drug abuse, classism, and other forms of discrimination.
Powered by her YouTube fame, J Noa signed with Sony Music in January 2023. By the end of the year, she’d received her first Latin Grammy nomination, for the single “Autodidacta” (“Self-Taught”). She informs the song’s incisive verses with the cadences of Dominican rhythms, including ba chata, merengue, and dembow— an explosive, potent mix that’s equally thrilling and captivating.
—CATALINA MARIA JOHNSON
Tygapaw Cqqchifruit, La Spacer, and Composuresquad open. 10 PM, Smart Bar, 3730 N. Clark, $25, $20 students, $20 in advance. 21+
Find
In many ways, Tygapaw is to Brooklyn what Trqpiteca DJs Cqqchifruit and La Spacer are to Chicago: they’re all queer DJs of color who extend electronic music’s history into the future by building on its Afro-Latine roots and centering queer clubgoers. So it’s extremely fitting that Trqpiteca would bring Tygapaw to the midwest for a headlining set at Smart Bar. Born Dion McKenzie, Tygapaw has called the dance floors of New York City home for the past two decades, but the 40-year-old DJ came of age attending outdoor guerrilla dance parties in Jamaica. Their techno is infused with elements of dancehall and 90s R&B, and it sometimes features spoken-word portions that hit like Afrofuturist spells to summon a more holistic club space. The title and tracks of their latest LP, Love Has Never Been a Popular Movement., are rooted in the teachings of feminist theorist bell hooks, especially the 1999 book All About Love: New Visions. In it, hooks argues that love is an action, not a feeling, and that a coercive culture of imperialism and white supremacy has warped our understanding of love and its revolutionary capacity.
Implementing this philosophical framework while mining a Black sonic archive is part of Tygapaw’s greater mission to decolonize electronic music. That’s one reason they started Fake Accent, a monthly QTIPOC club night in New York that spawned a record label platforming QTIPOC artists. In February, Tygapaw told Interview magazine, “When I’m researching the root of a sound I connect to, I find that Black people are often at the source. This is why I put more diasporic African aspects into my sound.”
As most devout lovers of electronic music know,
house and techno are countercultural sounds developed by Black DJs in Detroit and Chicago, respectively. The artists who pioneered house music in particular were primarily gay and had musical roots in the Afro-Latine beats that helped define disco. But many U.S.-based DJs of color lament that in recent decades the cultural centers of those genres have migrated to Europe, especially Berlin, where their sounds are policed on arbitrary technical grounds and more explicitly Black aesthetics and Black innovations are discouraged.
As Tygapaw told Interview , their approach to techno is instinctual. “I’m not excluding any sounds from my sonic palette and I’m not disengaging with my soul and my body when I create techno,” they said. “Meanwhile, in techno’s journey from Detroit to Berlin, a fragmentation happened where the Germans decided that they wanted to remove the soul. It wasn’t created in that way.” Tygapaw envisions a future for electronic music that’s led by artists of color who respect the genre’s origins while exercising a creative and political imagination appropriate to the present. How can we popularize love? Come to Smart Bar and find out. —MICCO CAPORALE
SUNDAY25
LatiNxt day two See J Noa on Sat 8/24. Navy Pier Beer Garden: Future Rootz DJs (2 PM), OvejaNegra (3:30 PM), Bulla en el Barrio (5 PM), Ramon Chicharron (6:30 PM), DJ Chava (7:45 PM). Lake Stage in Polk Bros Park: DJ Lapiz (5:30 PM), Ana Tijoux (7 PM). 2–9 PM, Navy Pier, 600 E. Grand. Fb v
Dillinger Escape Plan COURTESY THE ARTIST
continued from p. 31
Tygapaw JEAN TOIR
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].
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.
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 Bachelor’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/ requisition/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.
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.
Hoerr Schaudt Landscape Architects, LLC seeks an Architectural Designer. Mail resume to 1555 W Fulton Street, Chicago, IL
Childcare Director
Wonderland Day Care Services, Inc. Seeks a Childcare Director. Mail resume to 3715 S 58th Ave, Cicero, IL
Logistic Coordinator
(Hoffman Estates, IL) Tate & Lyle Solutions USA LLC seeks Senior Research Scientist–Sensory w/PhD or for deg equiv in Sens, Food Sci or rltd fld (also accepts Mast & 3 yrs exp in job offrd). Must have exp w/snsry analys mthds (desc, discrim, consmr tstg); snsry data collec syst (Compusense); stat analys sftwre (SAS, JMP, XLSTAT or R). Apply online at https:// careers.tateandlyle.com/ global/en or to HR, 5450 Prairie Stone Pkwy, Hoffman Estates, IL 60192
https://chicagoreader.com/ advertise/
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
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
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.
Sr. Supervisor, Manufacturing Operations (Chicago, IL): Be responsible for oversight of pharmaceutical manufacturing processes; producing high quality pharmaceutical products in accordance w/regulatory requirements to achieve the operations production plan; as well as oversee daily supervision of personnel on the efficient use of equipment & materials to produce quality products under cGMP in accordance w/the production plan, including scheduling & resource coordination. Req’s Master’s degree (or foreign equi. degree) in Pharmacy, Pharmaceutics, Pharmaceutical Science or related w/ knowledge of IQ, OQ, PQ, preparing standard protocols & reports for testing & analyzing Injectable products; as well as overseeing & managing regulatory compliance. Apply HR, Kashiv BioSciences LLC, 3440 S. Dearborn St, Ste 300, Chicago, IL-60616.
Lead Actuarial Analyst (Chicago, IL): Lead processes that support core actuarial functions and unit economic modeling and support multi-state expansion including rate
Logistic Coordinator: Monitor stocking & distr of goods at transportation comp. Resolves complex situations invol customers, staff, other supply chain personnel. Monitor daily activity. Compl w/ policies. Manage and monitor performance of fleet, routing and scheduling planning. Bachelor’s degree in any field. 2 yrs exp in profession related to logistics. Res: West Wind Express, Inc. 7050 S Archer Rd, Bedford Park IL 60458
TECHNICAL
Cisco Systems, Inc. is accepting resumes for multiple positions in Chicago, IL: Software Engineer (Ref#: CHI103C): Responsible for the definition, design, development, test, debugging, release, enhancement or maintenance of software. Telecommuting permitted. Leader, Technical Support (Ref#: CHI163C): Responsible for leading a team in the delivery of world-class customer support on a line of products or for a targeted group of customers. Telecommuting permitted. Please email resumes including position’s reference number in subject line to Cisco Systems, Inc. at amsjobs@cisco. com. No phone calls please. Must be legally authorized to work in the U.S. without sponsorship. EOE. www.cisco.com
Business Intelligence Analyst National Board of Certification and Recertification for Nurse Anesthetists (NBCRNA) seeks Business Intelligence Analyst in Chicago, IL to assr vrs NBCRNA Dta Systms are in-sync & cnstnt. Reqs BS in Math, Econ or Stat, or a clsly rltd fld + 24 mnths exp in a rltd ocptn. Reqs 24 mnths exp w/ the fllwng: SQL Srvr Rptng Srvcs (SSRS), SQL ldr; Prgrmng lgc; Dta intgrty, dta vldtn, dta cnsldtn, rsrch dta analsys, dta pipln crtn; Dta mngmnt; Cmnctn skls to trnslte dta into dta insgts & clct tchncl req. for rprts; & Mcrsft Office, Tablu, PwrBI. Telecommuting is avlbl. Mail resumes to Leah Cannon at 8725 W Higgins Road, Suite 525, Chicago, IL 60631.
Software Engineer II w/ McKinsey & Co., Inc. US (Chicago, IL). Build industry-specific data models & dashboards that provide insights to make better decisions w/ data. Telecommuting permitted. Req’s Bachelor’s in Comp Sci, S/w Engg, or rel field, or foreign degree equiv + 2yrs of s/w dvlpmnt exp. Domestic travel typically required. Destination & frequency impossible to predict. Email your resume to CO@mckinsey.com and refer to Job # 7803696.
Speech & Language Pathologist Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago d/b/a Shirley Ryan Ability Lab seeks Speech & Lang Pathologists for Homewood, IL location to plan, conduct, & evaluate programs designed to improve patients’ communication skills. Master’s in Speech-Lang Pathology req’d. Req: Speech lang pathology clinical competence cert from American Speech-Lang-Hearing Assoc req’d; Illinois Speech-Lang Pathologist license or temp license req’d; CPR cert req’d. Apply online: https:// www.sralab.org/careers, REQ ID: JR-1061733
PROFESSIONALS & SERVICES
CLEANING SERVICES
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
CLASSIFIEDS JOBS
EARLY WARNINGS
AUGUST
THU 8/29
Chicago Jazz Festival day one featuring Amina Claudine Myers, Jason Adasiewicz, and more 12:30 PM, Chicago Cultural Center F b
FRI 8/30
ARC Music Festival day one featuring DJ Heather, Logic1000, and more 2 PM, Union Park, 18+ Chicago Jazz Festival day two featuring Catherine Russell, Charlie Sepúlveda, Tomeka Reid Quartet, and more 11:30 AM, Millennium Park F b Sonny Landreth & Cindy Cashdollar 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music b North Coast Music Festival day one featuring Subtronics and more 2 PM, SeatGeek Stadium, Bridgeview, 17+
SAT 8/31
ARC Music Festival day two featuring Dom Dolla, Idris Elba, and more 2 PM, Union Park, 18+ Chicago Jazz Festival day three featuring Kenny Garrett & Sounds From the Ancestors, René Marie & Experiment in Truth, Jeff Parker & the New Breed, and more 11 AM, Millennium Park F b
North Coast Music Festival day two featuring Illenium and more 2 PM, SeatGeek Stadium, Bridgeview, 17+
SEPTEMBER
SUN 9/1
ARC Music Festival day three featuring Honey Dijon, Marshall Jefferson, and more 2 PM, Union Park, 18+
Chicago Jazz Festival day four featuring Spanish Harlem Orchestra and more 11 AM, Millennium Park F b
North Coast Music Festival day three featuring Two Friends, Slander, and more 2 PM, SeatGeek Stadium, Bridgeview, 17+
TUE 9/3
Hermitage Green 8 PM, Martyrs’ Moontype, So Surface, Wallplant 9 PM, Empty Bottle
SAT 9/7
Ann Hampton Callaway 8 PM, North Shore Center for the Performing Arts, Skokie b Outlaw Music Festival featuring Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, John Mellencamp, Southern Avenue 5:30 PM, Credit Union 1 Amphitheatre, Tinley Park b
TUE 9/10
Avril Lavigne, Simple Plan, Girlfriends 7 PM, Huntington Bank Pavilion b
Nora En Pure, Sohmi, Jono Stephenson, Side Project 9 PM, Ramova Theatre, 18+
Riot Fest day one featuring NOFX, Marley Brothers, Fall Out Boy, Public Enemy, and more Noon, Douglass Park b
SAT 9/21
JPEGmafia, Jane Remover 9 PM, Radius, 17+
Riot Fest day two featuring Taking Back Sunday, NOFX, Beck, Bright Eyes, and more 11:30 AM, Douglass Park b
SUN 9/22
Riot Fest day three featuring Sublime, Slayer, NOFX, Dr. Dog, Lamb of God, and more 12:10 PM, Douglass Park b
WED 9/25
WesGhost 8 PM, Chop Shop, 18+
FRI 9/27
Tasha, McKinley Dixon 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+
SAT 9/28
Johnny Rawls 9:30 and 11 PM, Rosa’s Lounge
Warm Love Cool Dreams day one featuring the Jesus Lizard, Sextile, Provoker, King Woman, Bendik Giske, Aitis Band, Stress Positions 2:30 PM, Salt Shed (outdoors) b
SUN 9/29
Warm Love Cool Dreams day two featuring Kelela, Floating Points, Sister Nancy, Shabaka, 454, John Glacier, SML 2:30 PM, Salt Shed (outdoors) b
BEYOND
WED 10/2
His Name Is Alive 9 PM, Empty Bottle
THU 10/3
Artikal Sound System 7:30 PM, Beat Kitchen b Whores, Nerver, Ira Glass 8:30 PM, Sleeping Village
FRI 10/4
Luciane Com & Gafieira Rio Miami 9 PM, Logan Square Auditorium b
SAT 10/5
KEN Mode, Hide 8 PM, Reggies Rock Club, 17+
SUN 10/6
Telmary & HabanaSana 6 PM, Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center b
FRI 10/11
Somi 7:30 PM, the Promontory
SAT 10/12
Giolì & Assia 10 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+
FRI 10/18
Terror Reid, Eliozie, Domsta 7:30 PM, Avondale Music Hall
TUE 10/22
Front Bottoms, Eliza & the Delusionals 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+
Noah Gundersen with Abby Gundersen 8:30 PM, Hideout Porches, Sweet93 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+
WED 10/23
Front Bottoms, Eliza & the Delusionals 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+
Noah Gundersen with Abby Gundersen 8:30 PM, Hideout
Giolì & Assia COURTESY THE ARTIST
By DAN SAVAGE
Q: Straight, monogamous, cisgender couple here. Six years together, two years married.
My husband loves board games, problem solving, and anything that gets his brain going. But like many straight white cis dudes, he’s not particularly aware of what motivates him. He’s also not straightforward with exactly what turns him on. But one thing he likes is initiating sex at the most inconvenient moment.
He’ll try to get things going when I’m cooking or when we have to get dressed and get somewhere. The more I rebuff his advances, the more motivated my husband is to have sex. I think my rebuffs feel like a game for him—a fun problem to solve— but I find the whole thing pretty fucking annoying.
a productive conversation about what he wants and that I always have to start the hard conversations. I have two questions for you: 1. How can I get him to have a real conversation with me about what turns him on?
If I’m right about the rebuffs feeling like a game to him, I want to figure out ways to turn this into an actual game
off, you could just tell him what’s he doing and order him to knock it off. If he disagrees—if he doesn’t think he’s initiating sex at the worst possible times because overcoming your resistance turns him on and/or affirms his irresistibility and/or seems like a fun game to him—then you can challenge him to come up with a better explanation. If he can’t, he’ll have to accept yours.
That said, JUMANJI, I think there’s a bigger issue here than your husband’s legitimately annoying inability to articulate what he’s doing and why and when.
“Now? Right now?” T LEISH/PEXELS
I’ve tried asking him what turns him on, and I’ve been straightforward about his advances not feeling sexy when I’m concentrating on not burning dinner or getting dressed and out the door because we’re meeting friends somewhere or have a reservation. But it just keeps happening.
Even worse, we’ve been busy lately and talked about making time for sex, so I’ve been trying to initiate more. But when I initiate at a good time, he turns me down. Meanwhile, he continues to initiate at the worst times. So, now I’m angry that he can’t seem to have
that feels sexy for me too. If that doesn’t work . . .
2. How do I get him to stop?
P.S. When I’m not being annoyed by the above, I find him incredibly sexy. The sex we have is great and sometimes amazing. We have a lovely and fun life together.
—JOKEY UNAWARE MAN’S ACTIONS NOT JUICY IDEAL
a: 1. Does it have to be a conversation?
You have a pretty good read on what your husband is doing, JUMANJI, so instead of initiating an open-ended conversation in the hope your husband has an epiphany and knocks this shit
amazing. Seeing as your husband shoots you down when you initiate (something he needs to work on), JUMANJI, all this great-to-amazing sex must be happening when you’re trying to get dinner on the table or out the door. If he can learn to read you better and take no for an answer when the answer is a firm no—if he can learn not to push when there’s something on the stove that really can’t wait—maybe the answer can be yes when the meal you’re
SAVAGE LOVE
preparing or the friends you’re meeting can wait.
P.S. Your husband isn’t the only one who can play games. You can lie to your husband about having dinner reservations for 7 PM when they’re actually for 8 PM and let him think he’s getting away with something when he initiates sex at 6:45 PM.
P.P.S. If you really wanna make it a puzzle and keep him out of the kitchen, JUMANJI, get your husband a cock cage and hide clues
for the combination lock in other parts of the house. If he can solve the puzzle and free his cock before dinner, you will turn down the heat and have a quickie on the kitchen counter. But he’s not allowed in the kitchen—he’s not even allowed to talk to you—until his cock is free or his dinner is served, whichever comes first. v
Read more at the URL savage.love. m mailbox@savage.love
Your husband sounds like one of those people who wants sex to feel spontaneous—a wild and uncontrollable force that overtakes you both—while you sound like someone who wants sex to feel controlled and contained. (I imagine sex wouldn’t be inconvenient at those times when you initiate, which may be why he passes.) Finding a workable compromise that allows for sex to be (or feel) spontaneous for him without sex always being a hugely inconvenient pain in the ass for you will require you both to give a little. So, it’s not an epiphany on his part that will resolve this conflict, JUMANJI, but a “pay the price of admission” compromise on both your parts. He’s going to need to demonstrate—he’s gonna need to telegraph—more consideration for your feelings about the where and when of sex and you’re gonna need to demonstrate to him that you’re willing to be (or willing to fake being) reasonably spontaneous.
2. Do you want him to stop?
You say the sex you have with your husband—when you have it—runs from great to
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