Print Issue of September 13, 2018 (Volume 47, Number 49) by Chicago Reader

C H I C A G O ’ S F R E E W E E K LY S I N C E 1 9 7 1 | S E P T E M B E R 1 3 , 2 0 1 8

‘Grooving in Chi’ 1968 A new coﬀee-table book looks back at writer Terry Southern and photographer Michael Cooper’s experiences chronicling the 1968 Democratic National Convention BY AIMEE LEVITT PHOTOS BY MICHAEL COOPER 9

NOT EVEN 2018 CAN STOP

RIOT FEST 20-28

2 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

C H I C A G O R E A D E R | S E P T E M B E R 1 3 , 2 0 1 8 | V O L U M E 4 7, N U M B E R 4 9

IN THIS ISSUE

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

ACTING DEPUTY EDITOR KATE SCHMIDT CREATIVE DIRECTOR VINCE CERASANI DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY JAMIE RAMSAY CULTURE EDITOR AIMEE LEVITT MUSIC EDITOR PHILIP MONTORO ASSOCIATE EDITORS STEVE HEISLER, JAMIE LUDWIG SENIOR WRITERS DEANNA ISAACS, BEN JORAVSKY, MIKE SULA SENIOR THEATER CRITIC TONY ADLER STAFF WRITERS MAYA DUKMASOVA, LEOR GALIL, PETER MARGASAK SOCIAL MEDIA EDITOR RYAN SMITH GRAPHIC DESIGNER SUE KWONG MUSIC LISTINGS COORDINATOR LUCA CIMARUSTI FILM LISTINGS COORDINATOR PATRICK FRIEL CONTRIBUTORS ISA GIALLORENZO, SHERRY FLANDERS, ANDREA GRONVALL, JUSTIN HAYFORD, JACK HELBIG, IRENE HSIAO, DAN JAKES, MONICA KENDRICK, BILL MEYER, J.R. NELSON, LEAH PICKETT, JAMES PORTER, BEN SACHS, DMITRY SAMAROV, KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI, ALBERT WILLIAMS INTERNS TYRA NICOLE TRICHE, ANNA WHITE ---------------------------------------------------------------ADVERTISING DIRECTOR CHRISTOPHER BEST SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER EVANGELINE MILLER DIRECTOR OF DIGITAL JOHN DUNLEVY ADVERTISING COORDINATOR HERMINIA BATTAGLIA

THIS WEEK CITY LIFE

4 Shop Window Kids’ shop Peach Fuzz brings gender-neutral, LGBTQ-friendly books, clothes, and toys to Humboldt Park. 5 Joravsky | Politics Looking back at the latest mayor Chicagoans have loved to hate 6 Dukmasova | Criminal Justice Jury expert Shari Seidman Diamond shares what to expect from the selection process in the Jason Van Dyke trial. At least ﬁve jurors had been seated as of press time.

FOOD & DRINK

7 Restaurant Review At Bixi Beer, Logan Square’s new Asian brewpub, continents collide (and collapse).

ARTS & CULTURE

ARTS FEATURE

‘Grooving in Chi’ 1968

A new book chronicles the chaos as writer Terry Southern and photographer Michael Cooper covered the Democratic National Convention. BY AIMEE LEVITT 9

---------------------------------------------------------------DISTRIBUTION CONCERNS distributionissues@chicagoreader.com CHICAGO READER 30 N. RACINE, SUITE 300 CHICAGO, IL 60607 312-222-6920 CHICAGOREADER.COM ---------------------------------------------------------------READER (ISSN 1096-6919) IS PUBLISHED WEEKLY BY STM READER, LLC 30 N. RACINE, SUITE 300 CHICAGO, IL 60607.

13 Visual Art The exhibition “Windows, Doors, and Mirrors” explores unseen labor hiding in plain view. 14 Theater The House Theatre of Chicago’s Borealis gives short shrift to its own message. 15 Theater In No Child . . . a teacher and her students discover the magic of theater. 15 Theater Radio Golf, (Not) Another Day, and four more new stage shows, reviewed by our critics 16 Movies The Brazilian fantasy Good Manners confounds all expectations. 17 Movies Sociologist and still photographer David Schalliol explains how he came to make his ﬁrst documentary, The Area. 18 Movies The 70-MM Film Festival returns to the Music Box. 19 Movies American Chaos, White Boy Rick, and seven more new releases, reviewed by our critics

MUSIC & NIGHTLIFE

29 Shows of note Idles, Residente, Trouble in Paradise, and more of the week’s best 35 Secret History of Chicago Music If you don’t know Megon McDonough, blame the maleness of Chicago’s 70s folk scene.

CLASSIFIEDS

35 Jobs 35 Apartments & Spaces 36 Marketplace

FESTIVALS

Not even 2018 can stop this music fest

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY MICHAEL COOPER

It’s been a bad year for punks, but Riot Fest has persevered to bring us Run the Jewels, Blondie, Gary Numan, and 85 more acts. BY READER STAFF 20

37 Savage Love Lonely, ugly, and middleaged? You’re not alone! 38 Early Warnings Cher, Nile Rodger & Chic, Dirty Projectors, and other shows to look for in the weeks to come 38 Gossip Wolf Quantum Englewood honors the neighborhood’s history with a cast of hundreds, Devin Shaﬀer outdoes herself on Yarrow’s latest, and more.

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 3

CITY LIFE Shop Window

This kids’ store gives hugs

é ISA GIALLORENZO

Claire Tibbs’s LGBTQfriendly Humboldt Park children’s boutique is also a place to read and explore.

Blocks in the play nook; wooden wall decor by Brooklyn-based Great Lakes Goods; shop assistant Devyn Mañibo é ISA GIALLORENZO

4 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

“PEACH FUZZ IS AN INCLUSIVE kids’ shop,” says Claire Tibbs of her new business, which opened in Humboldt Park in mid-July. She named the store accordingly: “We all have [peach fuzz], no matter our age. It is tactile, textured, body positive, inclusive, and undeniably human. The space and our goods I hope evoke the same. . . . We want all people to enter and feel hugged by the space.” And that’s exactly how I felt after arriving at the store, which is painted in various soothing pastel tones with vibrant neon accents. The walls are covered in unexpected color combinations that surprisingly work beautifully together. One of them opens into a cozy nook designed for more introspective activities: decked with beanbag chairs and minimalist wooden blocks, it’s the perfect hideaway for the little ones. There kids can enjoy a handpicked selection of the books Peach Fuzz offers, from Julian Is a Mermaid to Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History to the bilingual picture book Buenas Días. I chose books that “speak in some way about the world I wish to see,” Tibbs says. “Where cultures and kids and queers and immigrants and women and people of color and animals and feelings are all valued and empowered.” Besides books Peach Fuzz carries a wide array of stylish toys, accessories, home goods, and clothing imported from all over the world.

PEACH FUZZ

1005 N. California, 312-785-1442, littlepeachfuzz.com. Wed-Fri 10 AM-6 PM, Sat-Sun 11 AM-6 PM

“There is something really beautiful about melding child raising from different cultures,” says Tibbs. “It’s good for parents to see that there are many ways to make empathetic, well-rounded, healthy kids.” On the clothing rack is a selection of recycled denim jackets in kids’ sizes zero months and up. They’re easy to personalize with the store’s lovely selection of iron-on patches ($3). Peach Fuzz also hosts free events geared toward the community—for example, a family planning night promoted by a fertility clinic, a kid-friendly yoga class, a singalong with readings about gender identity and how being different is special. Still in the planning stages are a denim jacket embroidery class, salsa dance and Spanish lessons, “and much more,” promises Tibbs, 31, who since 2013 has also owned the midcentury-modern home decor shop Humboldt House. At Peach Fuzz, Tibbs says, “I want kids to feel seen and heard, and to know that they are interesting.” —ISA GIALLORENZO

Listen to The Ben Joravsky Show on WCPT, 820 AM, Monday through Friday from 2 to 5 PM.

CITY LIFE

People to see and places to go é ASHLEE REZIN/ SUN-TIMES

POLITICS

Say what you will about Rahm ...

Looking back at the latest mayor Chicagoans have loved to hate. By BEN JORAVSKY

oon after Mayor Rahm announced he wasn’t running for reelection, I got a text from my old friend Ken Davis, host of CAN TV’s Chicago Newsroom, asking how long it would be before I wrote a sentence that began: “Say what you will about Rahm, but . . . ” In other words, how long would it take before Rahm’s successor—and right now the heavy favorite’s got to be Toni Preckwinkle— does something so foul, so stupid, so counterproductive that I find myself longing for the good old days of Rahm’s reign? As hard as that is to imagine. It was that way with Mayor Daley, by the way. Man, I complained about Daley week after week, a decade from the end of one century to the end of a decade at the start of another. And then, three months into Rahm’s tenure, I found myself intoning, “Say what you will about Daley, but . . . ” I first uttered those words at a budget hearing at Kennedy-King College in summer 2011, when Emanuel was roughly four months into his tenure as mayor. Listening to Rahm that day it became obvious to me that his first budget—with its cuts and closings—was all about sending a message to people outside the room at Kennedy-King.

People who didn’t depend on city services. People whose neighborhoods weren’t boiling over with crime. And the message was that Rahm was the kind of Democratic mayor who was unafraid to inflict damage on the city’s most vulnerable residents—as though that were the true sign of political greatness. So I’m not sure what I’ll miss about Rahm’s eight years in office—in fact, I’m not sure what there is to miss at all. The closing of schools and mental health clinics? His relentless self-promotion—like congratulating himself for finally addressing our fiscal obligations after ignoring them for his first four years? The press releases taking credit for things that probably would have happened anyway, like United’s moving its headquarters into the Loop? The burying of the Laquan McDonald videotape? The funneling of $50 million in TIF dollars to Navy Pier? The murders? The corruption? Two of his handpicked school CEOs resigned in disgrace—one, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, is serving time in the federal penitentiary. At least Rahm didn’t destroy all the good things that other mayors created. Like, just to pick one—the Chicago Jazz Festival. Last Saturday’s concert, where Ramsey Lewis

played the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly Wow,” may have been the highlight of Rahm’s reign. At least the second term. Thank goodness the mayor hasn’t sent out a press release taking credit for that. So far. A few unanswered questions remain as he prepares to leave City Hall—like, would Mayor Rahm have won reelection? The answer says a lot about us, the voters, in Chicago. I mean, is there no accountability for a mayor, no matter what he or she does? Rahm seems to think so. In interviews over the last few days, he’s bragged that he definitely would have won had he run. Well, on the one hand, yes, Rahm had the most money of any candidate in the race— about $7.5 million, with the ability to raise millions more from the fat cats who figured to make out big in his third term. And he also had the undying loyalty of northside lakefront voters from Wards 42, 43, and 44, who’ve acted as though Willis Tower would jump into the lake should their beloved mayor not return to office and fork over even more money for real estate deals like Lincoln Yards. He’d probably have had Barack Obama’s backing too. I’m not sure why the former president feels compelled to show so much love for his former chief of staff, considering Rahm all but got kicked out of the White House. But Obama’s commercials clearly played a big role in Rahm’s winning back the black vote against Jesus “Chuy” Garcia in 2015. All in all, Rahm would have been the favorite had he stayed in the race. On the other hand, there’s no guarantee he would have been allowed to run. Let’s not forget former governor Pat Quinn’s petition drive for a binding referendum that would impose mayoral term limits. Rahm had his lawyers fighting to keep the measure off November’s ballot, but Quinn won round one in that battle, when Board of Election staffers ruled he’d collected enough valid signatures to qualify. In any event, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Rahm dropped out a few days after Quinn won that ruling—not that the mayor would ever claim Quinn, an old foe, had anything to do with his decision to throw in the towel. And I can’t I say I feel sorry for Rahm having to walk away from the limelight. Given his fierce tenacity and sense of entitlement, I have no doubt he’ll go on to bigger and probably wealthier things. Say what you will about Mayor Rahm, but he always takes care of number one. v

m @BennyJshow

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SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 5

CITY LIFE Former Chicago police oﬃcer Jason Van Dyke listens to Judge Vincent Gaughan’s ruling ordering that his bail be raised only slightly for giving interviews to the Chicago Tribune and a local TV station. é ANTONIO PEREZ/CHICAGO TRIBUNE

CRIMINAL JUSTICE

Men and women of the jury . . .

A legal expert shares what to expect during the selection process in the Jason Van Dyke case. At press time, ﬁve jurors had been seated. By MAYA DUKMASOVA

ury selection in the murder trial former Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke began on September 5. Nearly four years after he ﬁred 16 shots into 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, and nearly three years after he was indicted for the on-duty shooting, Van Dyke’s attorneys and the special prosecutor have commenced the painstaking process of picking the 12 men and women who will evaluate his actions. According to data released this year by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, just 1 percent of the some 300,000 felony cases in the county have been decided by a jury since 2009. Typically, a pool of potential jurors is selected randomly from a list of Cook County residents compiled from state driver’s license records and voter registration rolls. For each case, the number of jurors in the pool varies, but for the Van Dyke trial an exceptionally large pool of more than 100 people was called for evaluation. Last Wednesday selection

6 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

began with a written questionnaire administered to potential jurors. Attorney and psychologist Shari Seidman Diamond, an expert on juries and a professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, says paper questionnaires are “not atypical of large, publicly notorious kinds of cases.” The questionnaire will allow special prosecutor Joseph McMahon, Van Dyke’s defense attorney Dan Herbert, and Judge Vincent Gaughan to weed out people who clearly couldn’t be impartial before beginning one-on-one interviews with each potential juror (known as voir dire). The questionnaire is also “a good idea on psychological grounds,” she adds, because people may feel more at ease disclosing information about themselves in writing than speaking up in front of a packed courtroom. The questions on the questionnaire haven’t been released to the public, but they’re compiled by the prosecution and defense, and vetted by the judge.

Diamond says that conducting voir dire interviews with each juror individually after the questionnaire, as Gaughan plans to do, is the right decision for a case like this too. “You don’t want to expose other jurors to answers [that could bias them]. . . . It takes a little more time, but it’s a good thing to do.” Indeed, given the size of the jury pool it could be more than a week before a jury is seated. The voir dire interviews should be composed of open-ended questions that put potential jurors in a position to say a lot about their backgrounds and thoughts, Diamond says. For example, rather than asking potential jurors “Have you ever known someone killed by police?” to weed out people who might have a negative attitude toward cops, Gaughan might ask “Have you known someone who has had a bad experience with police?,” and if jurors say they have, they might be asked to describe the experience. During jury selection the judge can strike (and the prosecutor and defense can ask him to strike) an unlimited number of potential jurors for cause. These can be things as basic as not being an American citizen, not being able to speak English, or having a physical impairment like blindness or deafness that would prevent one from fully considering evidence in the proceedings. But in Illinois potential jurors can also be struck for cause if they aren’t “free from all legal exception, of fair character, of approved integrity, of sound judgment, [and] well informed.” State law doesn’t deﬁne any of these things, and thus gives judges a lot of leeway to use their discretion about what kind of people will make worthy jurors. After all strikes for cause have been, the prosecution and defense can each strike up to seven jurors without stating a reason—these are called peremptory challenges. These challenges can themselves be challenged if either side thinks that the other is striking someone based solely on their race, ethnicity, or gender. However, the challenger has to prove discriminatory intent, and these types of challenges (known as Batson challenges, stemming from the 1986 Supreme Court decision in Batson v. Kentucky) are often rejected by judges. Batson challenges can’t be used to protest striking a juror based on his or her age, religion, or—as might be relevant in this

case—professional background. “Removing someone because he’s a police officer or has officer relatives would be exactly what would be used for peremptory without question under Batson,” Diamond explains. After the first pool of potential jurors was brought into the courtroom Wednesday, local media reported some reactions from individuals who indicated they knew the significance of the case they might be asked to decide. One woman reportedly gasped and held her hand to her mouth; a couple of people exchanged meaningful glances. Though it will be difficult to select people who haven’t heard anything about the case at all, Diamond explains that the question Gaughan will likely be asking is whether jurors think they could be fair and follow instructions despite their prior knowledge of the case. Van Dyke’s attorneys clearly think people might be lying if they answer “yes” (they’ve filed a motion to move the trial out of the county that Gaughan has yet to decide on). But Diamond says it shouldn’t be assumed that people can’t put their own opinions aside and decide cases on their evidence. “I don’t think anybody could be completely objective, but our studies do show that jurors are in large measure influenced by the evidence,” she says. Her research has shown that being put in the position of carrying out such an important duty affects people’s behavior and thinking. “They kind of rise to the occasion. . . . People try to get out of jury duty, but what we find is that once they are actually on a jury they take it seriously and they want to get it right.” She notes that the first question jurors typically ask a judge after a trial concludes is “Did we get it right?” Diamond also pointed to the example of a pro-Trump juror who recently voted to convict Paul Manafort on all charges. “The jury role is quite a compelling role that does modify what people do,” she said. “The setting makes people better.” There is, of course, ample reason to suspect bias that interferes with jurors’ abilities to make decisions on the evidence in a more typical trial—when a black defendant may be facing 12 white “peers” in the box. And perhaps Van Dyke will feel the same way being tried by 12 civilians with no connection to law enforcement. If he feels that he can’t get a fair shake from a jury, Van Dyke can still opt for a bench trial—meaning he’d ask the judge to decide his case—up until the moment when the 12th juror is sworn in. v

m @mdoukmas

FOOD & DRINK

BIXI BEER | $$

2515 N. Milwaukee 773-904-7361 bixi.beer

RESTAURANT REVIEW

Continents collide (and collapse) at Bixi Beer

An Asian brewpub from Owen & Engine’s Bo Fowler sends lots of mixed messages.

Loup de mer with Fresno chiles, cilantro, and scallions, in black bean sauce with whole green peppercorns

By MIKE SULA

he “belt noodle Yibin style” at Bixi Beer is one of the best bowls of pasta I’ve eaten all year. I don’t care that it’s a black-market merger of two different regional Chinese noodle dishes; the chewy, wide Shanxi-province biang biang noodles—like steroidal pappardelle— tangle adaptably well amid funky black beans, pickled mustard greens, chopped peanuts, and the electric ma la buzz that together make up the MO of the southeastern Sichuanese dish they’re named for. But if you’re offended by such blatant disregard for borders, you’ll look away in horror from the “Chicago beef bao,” two taco-size

é MATTHEW SCHWERIN

steamed buns folded over bulging portions of shaved prime rib and giardiniera. Too bad, because those are pretty scarfable too. “Pan-Asian” is possibly the most meaningless descriptor in restaurant critic-ese, and yet that’s what you get at Bixi Beer, a new brewpub from chef Bo Fowler of Fat Willy’s Rib Shack and Owen & Engine. Her portfolio is nothing if not diverse. Pronounced “beeshee” and named for the hybrid dragon-turtle of Chinese mythology, the two-story Logan Square buildout adopts the hybridized approach mapped out by the likes of Momofuku and Mission Chinese (or closer to home and more recently Kimski and

Ludlow Liquors), but with food specifically meant to be eaten with eight beers brewed off to the side of the dim first-floor barroom. Such a sweeping, pancontinental scope— which also references the food of Vietnam, Thailand, Nepal, and Korea—presents real risks on a menu where the same noodles are deployed in a trio of soups including one, a murky, vaguely Korean chicken broth with bok choi, that tends to soften and disintegrate them into mush. Textures also seem to be a problem with the various dumplings, which include pulpy, sticky steamed mandu with kimchi and mushrooms and momo that arrived pasty and

undercooked, filled with mealy curry-spiced chicken that tasted as if it had been murdered by five-spice powder. On the other hand, crispy fried cylindrical “pot stickers” that perform suspiciously like fried spring rolls are tightly packed with a juicy shrimp-and-pork farce and come with a pleasingly acidic dipping sauce. A salad of watercress, rice vermicelli, and thinly sliced beef tongue has a similarly bright, fish-sauce-tinged profile, as does the inexplicable pool beneath two scoops of creamy shrimp-and-crab dip bedecked with fat slices of roasted peach. These broad strokes of sweet, sour, salty, spicy, and sometimes fishy are splashed J

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 7

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PROTECT YOUR BRAIN:

Once Marijuana Hijacks a Brain, it may not be reversible

FOOD & DRINK

Search the Reader’s online database of thousands of Chicago-area restaurants—and add your own review—at chicagoreader.com/food.

Marijuana is not safe. No genetic test to predict who will be harmed the most. Please consider these risk factors before using this powerful, hallucinogenic drug: BIPOLAR DISORDER: Marijuana use raises the risk 2.6 times. Cougle JR et al. (2015). Quality of life and risk of psychiatric disorders among regular users of alcohol, nicotine and cannabis: An analysis of the National Epidemiological Survey on Tobacco and Related Conditions (Psychiatr Res, NESARC). J 66-67, 135-141 VIOLENCE: The 15% or so of marijuana users who experience psychotic symptoms from marijuana or go into permanent psychosis (schizophrenia) are 9x more likely to become violent than schizophrenics who never used drugs. Fazel S, Långström N, Hjern A, Grann M, Lichtenstein P. Schizophrenia, substance abuse, and violent crime. JAMA. 2009 May 20; 301(19): 2016-23 A disgruntled worker smoked marijuana before he started a fire at an air traffic control station in Aurora, 2014, shutting down air traffic in Chicago for nearly a week. https:// chicago. cbslocal.com/2014/09/30/brian-howard-was-high-before-setting-radarcenterfire-sources-say/

Vietnamese egg rolls and shrimpand-crab dip with roasted peaches; Chicago beef bao

DEPRESSION and ANXIETY: Marijuana raises the risk 1.8 times: Fairman, B.J. & Anthony, J.C. (2012) Are early-onset cannabis smokers at an increased risk of depression spells? Journal of Affective Disorders, 138(1-2), 54-62

é MATTHEW SCHWERIN

MAKES OPIATE PROBLEM WORSE: Olfson, M., Wall, M. M., Liu, S., & Blanco, C. (2018). Cannabis Use and Risk of Prescription Opioid Use Disorder in the United States. American Journal of Psychiatry, 175(1), 47-53. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.2017.17040413 Campbell, G, Hall, WD et al, Effect of cannabis use in people with chronic non-cancer pain prescribed opioids: findings from a 4-year prospective cohort study. The Lancet Public Health: htps://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(18)30110-5/fulltext PSYCHOSIS: Daily use of 12-18% THC marijuana use raises the risk 5 times DiForti M, et al. Proportion of patients in South London with first-episode psychosis attributable to use of high potency cannabis: a case-control study/ Lancet Psychiatry. 2015: 2(3): 233-8. Cannabis use is not secondary to pre-existing psychosis. Arsenault L, Cannon M, Poulton R, Murray R, Caspi A, Moffitt TE, 2002 Cannabis use in adolescence and risk for adult psychosis: longitudinal prospective study. British Medical Journal, 2002 Nov 23: 325 (7373): 1212-3 SCHIZOPHRENIA: Marijuana was the drug most likely to convert to permanent psychotic disorder, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder, nearly 1/2 half the time: Niemi-Pynttari JA, et al. (2013). Substance-induced psychoses converting into schizophrenia: a register-based study of 18,478 Finnish inpatient cases. J Clin Psychiatry, 74(1), e94-9. Starzer, MSK, Nordentoft M, Hjorthoj C (2018) Rates and predictors of Conversion to Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder Following Substance-Induced Psychosis. Am j Psychiatry, 175(4), 343-350 CBD: a derivative of marijuana, is promoted as a miracle cure, but needs to be treated with skepticism. Much that is sold as CBD is not pure. Its interactions with other drugs are not well publicized. https://www.drugs.com/npp/marijuana.html CRASHES: The driver responsible for the death of Amando Chavez, a father of four, in Schaumburg August 15 was allegedly under the influence of marijuana. https://www. dailyherald.com/news/20180817/prosecutor-speeding-driver-in-fatal-schaumburg-crashspent-day-smoking-weed

Protect Your Brain 8 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

continued from 7 all over the menu, particularly in larger-format dishes like a bowl of chicken gong bao with squash and peanuts or a crispy whole loup de mer showered in sliced Fresno chiles and scallions and served in a wide bowl of black bean sauce and whole green peppercorns. But nowhere is the deliberate blurring of cuisines so stark as on the restaurant’s legally mandated burger, redolent of a more subtle application of five-spice powder and sandwiched between rounds of squishy toasted bao topped with melted American cheese and slabs of sweet Chinese bacon. This isn’t in the same league as Owen & Engine’s now legendary burger, but like the Chicago beef bao, it’s one of the more winning mashups. It’s certainly a more deft and targeted fusion than the monstrous, messy chocolate sundae dripping with marshmallow fluff, peanut butter fudge, and Sichuan peanuts

Conversely, restraint seems like it was more thoroughly applied to the beer (and cocktail) lists—the advertised Asian-ish ingredients are barely perceptible even in interesting offerings like the dark, malty Chelonian Lair ale with Sichuan peppercorns, or the Shifties, a Bud-like lager whose promise of puffed jasmine rice fails to materialize, or the Smallmouth Buffalo, a bourbon-based cocktail whose fish-sauce syrup barely registers. I’m sorry I used the F-word just above. Like “pan-Asian,” “fusion” is usually forbidden—and definitely frowned upon—thanks to the abuses historically committed in its name. I won’t go so far as to use that word to describe Bixi Beer. But despite some inspired cross-cultural cooperation, the wide focus just leads to a lot of confusion. v

@MikeSula

‘Grooving in Chi’ 1968 What happened when Terry Southern and photographer Michael Cooper ﬂew in to chronicle the 1968 Democratic National Convention for Esquire—with William S. Burroughs and a non-Englishspeaking Jean Genet along for the ride. BY AIMEE LEVITT PHOTOS BY MICHAEL COOPER

ne afternoon a little more than 50 years ago, the photographer Michael Cooper wandered into the bar at the Chateau Marmont in LA and happened to run into a friend, the writer Terry Southern. Southern had time for just one drink, and then he had to get to the airport. He had an assignment from Esquire to cover the National Democratic Convention in Chicago. Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs were covering it too—their editor, Harold Hayes, had a feeling that the event might be better understood by absurdists rather than political hacks—and they’d planned to meet up with Allen Ginsburg. Cooper had a sense, both in his life and in his photos, where the energy was, where, as they said then, it was happening. That J

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 9

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was why, a few years earlier, he’d quit his job as a fashion photographer. He was tired of people telling him where to shoot and what to shoot and how many rolls he could shoot. Instead he started hanging out with artists and designers and rock musicians: Swinging London, not British Vogue, was where it was happening. (And then Cooper shot the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, so, yes, he did have a point, although he never got paid.) Now, in the last week of August 1968, the most happening place in America was Chicago, a city where he’d never been. He was broke, but somehow he scraped up the money for a plane ticket and was there the next day. He had shoulder-length hair and wore a purple suit with sandals, and at ﬁrst the security guards wouldn’t let him into the convention hall.

FOR THE NEXT FOUR DAYS, Southern, Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Genet, sometimes accompanied by their Esquire editor, John Berendt, and Grove Press publisher Richard Seaver, marched through Grant and Lincoln Parks and sat in the old International Amphitheatre, on South Halsted, where the Democrats ended up nominating Hubert Humphrey for president, and on the sidewalk of Michigan Avenue, where young people were protesting the war in Vietnam and nervously eyeing the Chicago police, who were armed with nightsticks, and the national guardsmen, who were armed with riﬂes. In Cooper’s photos, there’s a sense of wariness and tension, like everybody’s just waiting for the veneer of calm to snap. Or maybe I just think that because I know what happened next, the part that Cooper saw but didn’t shoot, but which Southern wrote about in an article called “Grooving in Chi” that was published in Esquire that November. “Advancing in the distance, silhouetted against the wall of light, moved this incredible phalanx of strangely helmeted men, swinging their nightsticks as they came [through Lincoln Park]. Once it was decided that we should leave, we moved with unfaltering gait—odd how infectious panic can be. Near the street, I glanced back in time to see them reach the place where we had been, and where a dozen or more [protesters] were still sitting. They didn’t arrest them—at least not right away; they beat the hell out of them—with night-sticks, and in one case at least, the butt of a shotgun. They clubbed them until they got up and ran, or until they started crawling away (the ones who were able), and then they continued to hit them as long as they could. The ones who actually did get arrested seemed to have gotten caught up among the police, like a kind of human medicine ball, being shoved and knocked back and forth from one cop to the next, with what

10 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

was obviously mounting fury. And this was a phenomenon somewhat unexpected, which we were to observe consistently throughout the days of violence—that rage seemed to engender rage; the bloodier and the more brutal the cops were, the more their fury increased . . . ” NOW COOPER’S PHOTOS AND SOUTHERN’S article have been published together (along

with some supplemental material) in a new book, Chicago 1968: The Whole World Is Watching, edited by Cooper’s son, Adam, and Southern’s son, Nile, and published by Hat & Beard Press, an LA-based outﬁt run by former Chicagoan and Stop Smiling publisher J.C. Gabel. An accompanying exhibit of 21 photographs will open next week at Land & Sea Department in East Garﬁeld Park, curated by

Adam Cooper, with contextual quotes selected by Nile Southern and a soundtrack assembled by Gabel, designed to immerse viewers in Michael Cooper’s vision of Chicago during that week 50 years ago. (Gabel intends this to be the ﬁrst in a series of books and traveling exhibitions incorporating archival material from Chicago and other parts of the midwest.) It wasn’t that Cooper was unaware of the

MICHAEL COOPER: CHICAGO 1968.

9/14-10/7: Reception Fri 9/14 7-9 PM and Sat 2-6 PM, otherwise by appointment, Land and Sea Department, 3124 W. Carroll, landandseadept.com, press@ hatandbeard.com. F

In one scene in Southern’s story, he and his companions, running from the police and tear gas, take refuge in the vestibule of an apartment building near Lincoln Park. “We were all huddled in this small hallway, just as one wave of police swept past, wiping out everyone in its path. Now we had to crouch so as not to be seen through the glass front of the door, because from the other direction they were rushing into the doorways and halls and routing them out. We could hear it happening next door in no uncertain terms. And then it was our turn and, sure enough, in charged four of the ﬁnest, with expressions of rage such as I have never seen. In fact, Genet later jestingly insisted that they had not been cops at all but actors who were overplaying their roles. “‘You Communist bastards!’ one of them snarled, ‘get the hell outta here! Now move!’ And he raised his club at the nearest person, who as it happened was Genet—but the latter, saint that he is, simply looked at the man and shrugged, half lifting his arms in a Gallic gesture of helplessness. And the blow didn’t come. Another tribute to Genet’s strange power over people. Instead, they pushed and prodded us out onto the street where they talked about taking us to the station; but they were soon distracted by activity farther down the block, and they rushed away. Because it wasn’t really us they wanted to get—it was the children.”

brutality that eventually erupted. Back at their hotel, he and Southern watched the battle between the cops and the protesters in Grant Park on TV. “He was physically brought to tears when he saw the way they treated Abbie Hoffman and the violence,” says Adam Cooper. “He was a Brit, he’d never witnessed anything like this before. It was so shocking to him to witness this that he felt compelled to document it, but what fascinates me about the imagery is, there isn’t shots of all-out violence.

It’s approached in a different manner. We still feel the conﬂict, but at the same time it’s not in such a way that you have to see blood, gassing, to know what’s going on. The beauty of the images, for me, is the way he walked away from the obvious and went the other way.” Southern was older than Cooper—he was 44 in 1968, while Cooper was just 27—and an American who had seen the earlier horrors of that spring and summer: the assassination of Martin Luther King, the riots that followed,

and the assassination, less than two months later, of Bobby Kennedy, who had seemed poised to win the Democratic presidential nomination. He took a less impressionistic approach to documenting the scene in Chicago. He embraced the horrible absurdity of a mayor trying to promote law and order by starting a domestic war. “Terry was a satirist,” says Nile Southern, “a satirist looking for the extremes of reality: Is this really true, can this really be happening?”

IT’S NO LONGER A VERY FRESH or profound observation that the unrest of 2018 has a great deal in common with the unrest of 1968. But it’s still an excellent subject for conversation. Last week, the morning after an anonymous White House official published an op-ed in the New York Times that claimed that many inside the administration know that Donald Trump is unﬁt for office and are working behind the scenes to protect the nation by thwarting his “reckless decisions” and “worst inclinations,” I talked with Adam Cooper, Nile Southern, and Gabel over Skype. (We were in four different time zones, and Cooper was in an entire- J

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ly different country. “This is not 60s at all,” Southern observed drily.) Gabel was trying to explain the significance of the op-ed to Cooper, who lives in Buenos Aires, and Cooper was trying to explain why the rest of the world still cares about what happens in America. “Every four years all eyes turn to America,” he said. “They set the standard and set the example of what the future is likely to hold, what the future is like for the rest of the world. I’m stunned the way Trump got in the way he did. It’s complete chaos as far as I’m witnessing.” Southern, who joined the conversation later because of technical difficulties, argued that the chaos of 1968 is different from the chaos of the present. “It’s such a fractured time now,” he said. “If I would envy anything from 1968 and the protesters who got their heads bashed in, it’s their single unified purpose. They wanted to make a statement.” The two editors and their publisher have been thinking about 1968 a lot all summer, since they decided to put the book together. Southern and Cooper have wanted to do a project based on their fathers’ work for a long time. They’d met through the photographer Andee Nathanson, who had been friends with both Terry and Michael. Southern is a filmmaker and a writer who has published a book about Terry’s 1964 novel Candy and maintains a website devoted to his work, terrysouthern.com. Adam, who’s also a filmmaker, inherited a collection of 70,000 of his father’s photos—“If Michael were still around today, in a digital world with an unlimited number of photos, it would probably be into the millions”—and has an almost mystical relationship with them. He likes to look through them late at night, when he won’t be disturbed by the phone, and although he’s been going over them with a light box and a magnifier since he was 18 years old (he’s now in his late 50s), he still regularly discovers new images or details. “I say to my wife, ‘Michael plays games with me. He holds things back: like he’s saying, “It’s not the right time for that thing yet.” And then boom, there it is, staring at me right in the face.’” Michael sold some of his Chicago photos to newspapers and magazines when he got home to London, but there were still many that had never been published. Cooper also met Gabel through Nathanson. Gabel has known Southern for more than 20 years, going back to when Southern began contributing to Stop Smiling. Earlier this year, Gabel noticed there wasn’t going to be much going on in Chicago to commemorate the 1968 convention—if “commemorate” is the right word. Abe Peck, then the editor of the

12 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

“In Cooper’s photos, there’s a sense of wariness and tension, like everybody’s just waiting for the veneer of calm to snap.”

underground newspaper Chicago Seed, now a professor emeritus at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, organized a summerlong series of discussions with journalists, activists, and historians about the long-term effects of the convention on the media. (Peck wrote the introduction to Chicago 1968.) But there have been no museum or gallery exhibitions or other public events. This seemed strange to Gabel, but also like an opportunity. He, Cooper, and Southern have been working on the book and exhibition since June, narrowing Cooper’s original selection of photos down from 100 to 21. After the exhibition leaves Chicago, it will travel to LA, San Francisco, and New York. Both editors and publisher are pleased with the result. They’re also pleased they’ll have a chance to remind the public both of the horrors that surrounded that convention and the genius of Michael Cooper. Neither Nile Southern nor Adam Cooper has many strong firsthand memories of 1968. Southern was only seven years old. He watched the coverage of Chicago on TV with his mother. He remembers black-and-white images of smoke and chaos and the look on his mother’s face when she told him his father was in the middle of it. Now he wonders if it was Genet’s apparent innocence—he didn’t speak any English and looked, at least in Cooper’s photos, like a genial old man—that helped protect Terry and his companions and got them out of Chicago uninjured. After the convention ended, Southern and

Cooper left Chicago and went their separate ways. That week was one more episode in a friendship that was based, in part, on a shared fascination with what was new and interesting—what was happening. (They were both drawn to the novel A Clockwork Orange for the way it created a new language to address the violence in contemporary culture and collaborated on a screen adaptation that was never produced, says Nile Southern; the ﬁlm was eventually made by Stanley Kubrick, with whom Terry had cowritten the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove in 1964.) But Nile Southern also suspects that afterward, Cooper was never quite the same. “One can only imagine how any ‘fragile, eggshell mind,’ no less Michael’s gentle soul, experienced that extreme brutality and intolerance on display that August,” he writes in the afterword of Chicago 1968. In 1973, Michael Cooper committed suicide. In a letter to Adam, he wrote, “Don’t believe the court when they say that I killed myself when the balance of my mind was disturbed. I just live in a disturbed world, and, as the old poem says, ‘I hear the sound of a different drum.’ . . . I come from what your generation will call the ‘Half and Halves.’ A generation that made a few changes, but had to experience too many other kinds of changes they had no control over, so some of us were bound to fall by the wayside. I’m one of those.” v

m @aimeelevitt

R READER RECOMMENDED

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ARTS & CULTURE

he skies had just opened with a thunderous burst of rain as I walked up to the Roman Susan gallery in Rogers Park. Beads of moisture had gathered on the glass pane, creating microdistortions in the gallery’s interior—which already had the appearance of a fun house. The artist Gwendolyn Zabicki had recently finished installing her disorienting solo exhibition “Windows, Doors, and Mirrors.” She’d hung five oil paintings of windows, doors, and mirrors on a reflective material that covers the entirety of the gallery’s floors and walls. The installation creates a confusing burst of layered images, forcing visitors to hunt for the painted mirrors hidden in the silver-tinged backdrop.

“WINDOWS, DOORS, AND MIRRORS”

Through 9/22: Thu-Fri and Sun 4-7 PM, Roman Susan Gallery, 1224 W. Loyola, 773-270-1224, romansusan.org. F

Door Mirror, oil on canvas, 48x16 inches, 2017 é COURTESY THE ARTIST

VISUAL ART

Housekeeping

Is the work in Gwendolyn Zabicki’s new exhibition a painting or a mirror? Only scuﬀs and scratches will tell. By KATE SIERZPUTOWSKI

The paintings are hung the way mirrors might be at home. Door Mirror (2017), a fulllength painting, hangs on the gallery’s closet door at the right height for peeking at an outﬁt or getting a better look at a new pair of pants. Other, smaller paintings hang at face level, while one particular painting doesn’t hang at all. Hand Mirror (2017), as one might assume from its title, is a painting of a hand mirror lying on the ground. The painting sits on the gallery floor, leaning against a real mirror. The juxtaposition forms a striking vignette that amplifies the confusion created by the competing reflections, making it harder to determine which is a real mirror and which is a painted imitation. “I think the installation makes it harder to see the paintings at first, but that might be a good thing,” explains Zabicki. “Being disoriented or momentarily confused gives you fresh eyes to see what is in front of you. It forces you to consider what you are looking at.” Zabicki, who’s 35, spends a lot of time thinking about painting. She teaches several painting classes at the Hyde Park Art Center, she interviews painters for the online publication Figure/Ground, she recently started a ladies’ painting club, and she has begun curating painting exhibitions, including “On Anxiety,” which opened at Cleve Carney Art Gallery at the College of DuPage late last month. As visitors walk through the gallery, their feet smudge the ﬂoor covering, distorting the

reﬂections of the painted mirrors that line the gallery. Zabicki has painted similar smudges or errors into her own work, as in the painting featuring streaks left from spritzes of unwiped Windex. These elements allow viewers to understand the surface and shape of the mirrors, rather than looking straight through them as they would while gazing at themselves in a real mirror. I can only imagine the difficulty of attempting to paint a subject that at its clearest is nearly impossible to see. The streaks of cleaning supplies helped Zabicki through the challenge of learning to paint mirrors when she began the series last year. “The marks would be dirty enough for me to see what was happening,” she explains. “This became a nice metaphor for unseen labor—the labor that we all depend on that is primarily done by women.” She’d started exploring this idea in 2016 in a larger suite of paintings that focused on women’s often unpaid work: a hand swiping away dust on a wooden coffee table, a kettle pouring hot water into the dingy recesses of an overused sponge. For Zabicki the series called to mind Pat Mainardi’s 1970 essay “The Politics of Housework,” a text that outlines the many ways men avoid cleaning and make excuses for their failure to do their fair share, instead taking a spotless home as a given. Zabicki’s focus specifically on mirrors grew out of this idea of hidden housework, but she chose instead to focus on the metaphor behind the streaky mirrors rather than a straightforward visual depiction of a household chore. “When you see a system that isn’t functioning properly, that is when you become aware of how much hidden work goes into making sure things go smoothly,” she says. “When a mirror is dirty you notice it, but when it is clean you don’t even see it, you don’t even realize that you are looking into it. When a system functions properly, it is taken for granted.” Zabicki doesn’t worry about the gradual buildup of scratches and footprints during the exhibition’s run. In fact, it excites her. For the exhibition’s closing she’ll host a party rather than an artist’s talk, using the mirrored surfaces as a disco backdrop for dancing. Dozens of dirty shoes will scuff, smudge, and scratch the mirrored floors, adding to the layers already produced during the show’s monthlong run. Will anyone see the footprints? Or will visitors be too distracted by dancing to notice their own contribution to the self-reflective exhibition? v

m @KateSierz SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 13

ARTS & CULTURE Paige Hoﬀman, Tia Pinson, and Johnny Arena é MICHAEL BROSILOW

THEATER

House Theatre’s Borealis doesn’t quite light up the sky Bennett Fisher’s play has all the amenities except a well-explored point.

BOREALIS

Through 10/21: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM (except 9/23 and 10/7, 3 PM), Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, 773-769-3832, thehousetheatre.com, $20-$50.

By TONY ADLER

orealis is everything we’ve come to expect a House Theatre of Chicago show to be: good-hearted, winsome, fantastical, funny, clever, sweetly indignant, charmingly messy, and just dark enough before the dawn. It adopts the crowd-pleasing idioms established by shows like the ensemble’s annual Nutcracker and carried through in last winter’s Hatﬁeld & McCoy, which somehow managed to be delightful despite all the carnage it chronicled. But Borealis’s energetic House-yness may be its biggest problem. The new play by Bennett Fisher spends so much time being all you expect that it gives short shrift to what it’s saying. Fisher’s script introduces us to rambunctious 13-year-old Cozbi (pronounced with a

14 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

long o, I guess to distinguish her from a certain prominent sex offender), who lives with her grown brother, Absalom, in the tiny central Alaskan village of Minto. Mom and Dad are “gone,” we don’t know why or how, though the when appears to be a matter of years—long enough, anyway, for the siblings to have developed a joshingly violent way with each other. In the first scene Absalom (the charismatic Desmond Gray) gets ambushed by Tia Pinson’s Cozbi as he puts on his snow gear; they assume D&D-style personas (Absalom: “I AM ARMORED IN DRAGON SCALES! POSSESSED WITH THE POWER OF FLIGHT! GIRDED WITH A THOUSAND GRASPING ARMS AND A SWIRLING, SLITHERY TAIL!”) and play-brawl. Really hard. With a prodigious amount of scat-

ological talk. This being the near future—“[s]ooner than you think,” according to the stage directions— Fisher assumes that the U.S. government has opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to unrestrained oil drilling. There are thousands of rigs out there in the ANWR, and Absalom works on one of them, doing two-week shifts away from home. Cozbi wants him to quit so they can head for the bayou, where she pictures herself eating real peaches and starting “some shit with an alligator.” To her astonishment, he agrees. As he leaves for his shift, Absalom promises to give his notice as soon as he reaches the oil company’s massive corporate complex. Three months later Absalom still hasn’t

READER RECOMMENDED

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returned. Instead, Cozbi receives a heavily redacted letter from him that sounds to her like a tattered plea for help. And she resolves to answer it. Making the long and trackless journey to the ANWR is only the start of her quest. (To give you an idea just how long and trackless that is in real life: when I tried googling a car route from Minto to the ANWR, the program responded, “Sorry, your search appears to be outside our current coverage area for driving.”) The real trek starts when she arrives at the complex, armed only with her ax, her indomitable will, and a mystic codex of corporate-speak titled The Art of the Seven Habits of Lean In and Influence People. All of the above is vividly imagined, in a gamer’s universe sort of way. Cozbi wrests the codex, for instance, from a disfigured hermit named Titus whose weaknesses (loves cigarettes, hates fire) she exploits to her advantage. Her journey toward Absalom is punctuated by confrontations with ascending levels of corporate “asshats,” each of which has to be fought through or finessed in the classic manner—and each of which gets its own eccentric look and powers, thanks to director Monty Cole and costume designer Izumi Inaba. Borealis features plenty of whimsically differentiated adversaries, along with some surprising secret weapons. And, of course, it manifests every one of those famous House virtues. Still, the point of the two-hour odyssey remains murky, if not for Cozbi then for me. Fisher goes to great pains to set up what looks like an ecological cautionary tale about an industrial behemoth despoiling the wilderness, and then fails to follow through on it: the pipelines and rigs serve as little more than a field of play for our heroine to negotiate on her way to her goal. Another ostensible subject is the dehumanizing nature of corporate culture, but Fisher doesn’t have anything all that remarkable to say about that beyond (a) lampooning its well-known excesses and (b) dressing those excesses up in fantasy-fiction iconography. The ultimate point, as far as I can tell, is the one arrived at by Cozbi yet never fully mastered by the play: that adults are liars and hypocrites who make the world worse by making peace with it as it is and betraying the imaginative child inside them. True enough as far as it goes. But inasmuch as the final—really, the only—say on the matter belongs to a 13-year-old, any potential richness is lost. Borealis remains a game with lots of cool bits: a charming mess. v

m @taadler

NO CHILD . . .

Through 9/23: Thu-Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Victory Gardens Theatre, 2433 N. Lincoln, 773-871-3000, definitiontheatre.org, $25-$35, $15 industry, $10 students. (Not) Another Day

THEATER

To Sun, with love

In No Child . . . a teacher and her students discover the magic of theater. By JACK HELBIG

amed after the well-meaning but now partly discredited Bush-era education initiative No Child Left Behind and based on her own experiences, Nilaja Sun’s 80-minute show tells the story of a visiting teaching artist who tries to get a class of uninterested, hostile teenagers at a rundown school in the Bronx to put on a production of British playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 play Our Country’s Good. The choice is ironic. Our Country’s Good is about prisoners putting on a play; the students in No Child . . . feel like prisoners too. Both Wertenbaker’s prisoners and Sun’s students find fulfillment and greater self-worth doing theater. We’ve seen this story before, but it bears repeating: making art can redeem the world— and the artist. Sun’s overarching story is also very familiar: an eager new teacher comes to a difficult, urban school where she faces an unruly classroom of youth who are angry, resentful, delinquent, emotionally wounded, or underappreciated—in short, left behind. At first the new teacher struggles, then she figures out how to reach her students, and in the end (“when those schoolgirl days of telling tales and biting nails are gone,” in the words No Child . . . é JOE MAZZA

of the theme song of the movie version of one of those stories, To Sir, With Love), she ﬁnds she has earned their love and/or respect. This story, too, bears repeating. Every real-life teacher has experienced some version of it, including me. Sun’s show started as a solo work, performed by the playwright herself, and it must have been a real thrill to see her jump from one character to another over the course of the show. There are 16 in all: students, teachers, administrators, and a janitor who doubles as a narrator. The show was very popular; Sun won a slew of awards (an Obie Award, a Lucille Lortel Award, two Outer Critics Circle Awards) and has performed the show at, among many other places, the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colorado. In Definition Theatre’s current revival, deftly directed by Chika Ike, the roles are divided up among an ensemble of six actors. And though the cast is very strong—Kirsten Chan is particularly winning as the visiting teacher—the material sags. Sun’s characters are quickly drawn, perfect for a solo performer making a quick changes, but they lack depth. We don’t feel like we get to know anyone in the show well enough to feel in our hearts their remarkable transformation—not even the main character. Nor do we see enough of the student production of the play within a play to get why this British play, of all plays—a play from the late 80s about prisoners in the 18th century putting on a play from the 17th century—reaches these kids and changes their lives. v

m @JackHelbig

é JEFFREY BIVENS

THEATER

‘Pain and suffering are inevitable’ Shattered Globe’s Crime and Punishment plays out like a psychopath’s TED talk. Even viewers with the heartiest intellectual appetites may grow tired of chewing through the nearly three hours of overcoats, dirges, and sorrowful lamentations that make up Chris Hannan’s new adaptation of Crime and Punishment, presented by Shattered Globe Theatre. Beyond just the sheer inviting challenge of staging Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel, it’s not hard to see why his provocative, radical ideas would appeal to artists and audiences in 2018 America. The philosophical parable interrogates the thresholds of mankind’s moral relativism and its inclination toward utilitarianism, particularly when it’s squeezed by poverty. Hannan describes the story as a “crime thriller meets Karl Marx and Jesus Christ”; adapted for the stage, the internalized musings and arguments of the murderer Raskolnikov (Drew Schad) play out more like a psychopath’s TED talk. Which, no doubt, could be interesting as hell. But director Louis Contey adopts a theatrical convention that’s not unlike the cornball one used in Neil Simon’s They’re Playing Our Song: mute ensemble players mirror characters’ emotions, doubling as their silent consciences. The eﬀect is a lot of highly presentational, reductive face-to-face grimacing and moody, arty movement sequences that layer on additional artiﬁce to what is intended to be a visceral, unnervingin-its-relatability experience. And attempts at levity between the deranged sermons—including some anachronistic jalopy-driver dialects—do little to move the proceedings along. Across the 11-person ensemble, though, there are capable and occasionally stirring performances, including Darren Jones as a tortured soul and Patrick Thornton as a methodical, so-amicable-it’s-eerie detective. —DAN JAKES CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

Through 10/20: Thu-Sat 8 PM, Sun 3 PM, Theater Wit, 1229 W. Belmont, 773-975-8150, sgtheatre. org, $15-$39.

R Tune in tomorrow

With Curious Theatre Branch’s Jenny Magnus, it’s always (Not) Another Day. Jenny Magnus, who’s spearheaded the invaluable Curious Theatre Branch for 30 years, has always

performed in her own plays. Now she takes a wide turn with her new 75-minute “non-opera,” not only staying offstage but crafting a fractured, protean, winningly guileless evening quite unlike anything she’s created before. Superficially, the piece is about the Writer (Vicki Walden), who’s struggling to write her way out of the current episode of her soap opera, Another Day. She’s killed off the show’s leading man, Bobby Jinx (Beau O’Reilly), but his shady contract stipulates he can never be fired. So she’s dead-ended at the funeral episode (shown repeatedly on several television screens), with Jinx immobilized in a coffin and the rest of the cast doomed to utter the same dialogue over and over as they await a new script. Meanwhile the real-life Jinx sits far upstage, musically meditating on his professional inertia: “It’s interesting to play nothing. . . . It gives you time to think.” It’s a charming bit of absurdism, sung in an intentionally artless vernacular with melodies that often cling to single notes. But Magnus, as is her wont, digs for deeper veins, exploring the debilitating compulsion to press on when no useful ideas or guiding principles are in sight. While both the singing and the staging felt hesitant on opening night, the material succinctly probes particuarly unsettling existential fears. —JUSTIN HAYFORD (NOT) ANOTHER DAY: OF

DEATH AND BEATS Through 10/6: Fri-Sat 8 PM,

Prop Thtr, 3502 N. Elston, 773-492-1287, curioustheatrebranch.com, $15 or pay what you can.

A nail-biting mayoral R race—in Pittsburgh Court Theatre’s Radio Golf makes a rousing conclusion to August Wilson’s “Century Cycle.”

The final play in August Wilson’s “Century Cycle,” Radio Golf, set in the 1990s, is a story about a little guy trying to survive the American political machine without having his morals ground to a pulp. Allen Gillmore expertly heads up Court Theatre’s fiveperson powerhouse ensemble as Harmond Wilks, an optimistic real estate developer running to become Pittsburgh’s first black mayor. Director Ron OJ Parson sets this examination of black upward mobility and class against a toe-tapping soundtrack that evokes the feeling of a classic sitcom with unusual gravitas. Alfred H. Wilson delights as eccentric military veteran Elder Joseph Barlow. Ann Joseph shines in a criminally underwritten role as Mame Wilks, Harmond’s wife, wringing every drop of pathos out of a cookie-cutter “stand by your man” scene. «

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 15

GOOD MANNERS ssss Directed by Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra. In Portuguese with subtitles. 136 min. Fri 9/14-Thu 9/20. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.

ARTS & CULTURE

Good Manners

bB James Vincent Meredith swaggers as Roosevelt Hicks, a ruthless businessman with an impressive short game, and James T. Alfred charms as Sterling Johnson, the underestimated voice of morality. Though Wilson’s broad-stroke interrogation of economically moving up and selling out could stand more nuance, the story of a fragile community yearning for a ﬂawless savior to beat the game with nothing more than his bare hands and idealism resonates perhaps more painfully today than it did when it premiered in 2005. Radio Golf feels like home to anyone who has had the pleasure of being intimately involved in the African-American experience, and welcomes the rest of America to peer through the window, feel the warmth and also perhaps catch a glimpse their own reﬂection. —SHERI FLANDERS RADIO GOLF Through 9/30: Wed

10:30 AM and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 2 and 7:30 PM, Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis, 773753-4472, courttheatre.org, $50-$74, $37.50-$55.50, students.

Return to Oz

Scraps the patchwork girl explores America’s favorite Kansas alternative.

With 14 books, a handful of plays, and even a comic strip on the beings and doings of the magical land of Oz, you would think L. Frank Baum, its self-styled Royal Historian, had adequately expounded upon the adventures of the quirky folk of a more colorful universe. However, our hunger for a more fabulous reality being insatiable, many others have taken up the task since Baum’s death 99 years ago, producing dozens more books, and of course Wicked and The Wiz. The latest in this unstoppable efflorescence of fanfic is Anthony Whitaker’s Scraps, premiering at the Den under the direction of Jamal Howard. A ragdoll sewn from a superfluous quilt and brought to life with magic powder, Scraps (Brittney Brown) doesn’t eat, can’t sleep, and uses her exquisite brain for maintaining a routine that doesn’t offend the local Munchkins. Made-up dreams and undrunk cups of tea seem her only destiny until a timely chat with the Tin Man teaches her that all the best things in life are pretend. Off she sets on a journey to Enlightenment (er, the Emerald City), where she hobnobs with the upper class: Dorothy and Ozma, Ojo the Unlucky, Betsy Bobbin, and more, each bitchier than the canonical stories would have you believe. The essence of Scraps is her optimism; the essence of Scraps is its unveiling of the complexity of relationships and identities that are central to America’s favorite Kansas alternative. The ensemble gleefully acquiesces to all the shapeshifting required with multiple roles and moveable set pieces. Charlie Irving brings vulnerability and complexity to her supporting role as our old pal Dorothy. —IRENE HSIAO SCRAPS Through 9/29: Thu-

Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, the Den, 1333 N. Milwaukee, 773-697-3830, newamericanfolktheatre.org, $25.

The stare

The Shipment forces its (white) audience to contemplate its complicity in perpetuating American racism. The most intense moment in playwright Young Jean Lee’s deliberately uncomfortable 2008 play, now being revived by Red Tape Theatre, happens in silence. Midway through the show, four out of the ﬁve members of

16 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

director Wendell Julius Clark’s all-black cast step forward in a line. They point their gaze at the gallery—first one white face, then another, and yet another—as the house lights at the Ready’s 65-seat black box gradually come on. The actors stare point-blank into the crowd. And stare. And stare some more. Tensions abate, briefly, in the second half, but from the play’s outset until that climactic beat ends, it’s sheer audience destruction. Things kick off with a soft-shoe number evoking minstrelsy by dancers Sheldon Brown and Hunter Bryant. Soon the scene shifts, with a variety show’s random lilt, to Marcus D. Moore’s rage-filled stand-up comedy diatribe against all things bigoted. Moore lets you squirm under his heat, goads you to nervous laughter, makes you applaud your own thrashing. The third segment is a stilted coming-of-age vignette rife with willfully penny-ante hood tropes: hip-hop poisonous, drugs evil, prison inevitable, black death a statistic. Eric Gerard is robotic as rapper Omar, mock-gratifying the commoditizing gaze of white patronage. Then comes the stare. As a white audience member, you feel bombarded, implicated, and vulnerable. The weight of accusation in the room summons a tremendous guilt, one that refuses to die down, refuses even to be named. But acknowledgment is a start, and it’s good, however ugly it feels at first, to sit with those feelings. —MAX MALLER THE SHIPMENT Through 10/13: Fri-

Sat 8 PM, Sun 7 PM, Mon 8 PM, the Ready, 4546 N. Western, redtapetheatre.org. F

Son of Sidney?

Nothing is what it seems in Six Degrees of Separation. John Guare’s intricate, rarified 1990 play, about a clutch of white New York elites whose lives are upended when Paul, a charismatic young African-American man falsely claiming to be Sidney Poitier’s son, ingratiates himself into their lives, seems to go in all directions at once, swirling and spinning from high farce to biting satire to wrenching tragedy in just over 90 minutes. Like Paul, a con man who appears to want little from his “victims” but social acceptance, nothing here is quite what it seems, most of all the comfort and confidence that privilege purports to convey. As the author notes, the play must “go like the wind.” Director Steve Scott’s staging goes like a gentle breeze. In Redtwist’s cramped confines, superimposition of scenes is impossible, requiring a full reset each time Guare’s script veers off in yet another unexpected direction (in the original Lincoln Center production, actors often appeared and disappeared on an upper level as though floating in darkness). And Scott’s cast struggles to find a tone pliable enough to encompass the script’s stylistic extremes. Everything is clear and cogent and, best of all, intellectually engaging, but it lacks the feverishness that gives the play its hallucinogenic momentum. The production’s ace in the hole is Donovan Sessions, whose meticulous, magnetic, heartbreaking performance as Paul makes most everything around him cohere. When he’s onstage, which isn’t near often enough, he is pure mesmerizing unfathomability. When he finally confronts the emptiness of his manufactured identity, it’s agonizing. —JUSTIN HAYFORD SIX

DEGREES OF SEPARATION Through 10/7: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr, 773-728-7529, redtwist.org, $35-$40, $30-$35 students and seniors. v

MOVIES

Warning: plot twists ahead

The Brazilian fantasy Good Manners confounds all expectations. By BEN SACHS

ike Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), the Brazilian feature Good Manners (which plays this week at the Gene Siskel Film Center) begins as one type of movie before transforming into something very different. To see the ﬁlm without any foreknowledge of what will happen is to experience one of the greatest jolts in recent cinema, so if you want to get the most out of the movie’s narrative turns, I encourage you to avoid reading any reviews (including this one) before watching it. Suffice it to say that the highly original story is just one of the achievements of Good Manners. The film is one of the most distinctive looking I’ve seen in some time, with strikingly colorful costumes (by Kiki Orona), production design (by Fernando Zuccolotto), and cinematography (by the great Rui Poças, whose credits include Miguel Gomes’s Tabu, Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, and numerous works by João Pedro Rodrigues). In fact Good Manners often evokes the animated Disney features of the 1940s in its bold and fanciful use of color; even before writerdirectors Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra steer the ﬁlm in an outlandish direction, it feels like a modern-day fairy tale. The visual aesthetic creates an interesting frisson with the content of the early sequences, which falls squarely in the realm of naturalistic drama. Good Manners begins ssss EXCELLENT

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when Clara (Isabél Zuaa)—a working-class black woman from the outskirts of São Paolo—arrives in the city center to interview for a nannying job with a rich white woman named Ana (Marjorie Estiano), who’s currently in the third trimester of her pregnancy. Wide-eyed and quiet, Clara suggests a frightened animal as she inspects Ana’s high-rise apartment; one can tell instantly that she feels out of place amid luxury. Her interview with Ana goes poorly, as Clara admits she never ﬁnished nursing school and has never held down a paying job for very long. Still, Ana sees good in the interviewee, who explains that she took care of her grandmother for seven years before she died. After Clara helps Ana overcome intense labor pains, the rich woman hires her on the spot, inviting her to move in and help around the apartment until the baby is born. Rojas and Dutra seem to be setting the stage for a ﬁlm of gentle social observation comparable to Anna Muylaert’s The Second Mother (2015), which used the relationship between a domestic servant and her employer to consider class-bound tensions in contemporary Brazil. Based on the opening scenes, you might expect Good Manners to chart the growing camaraderie between Ana and Clara, with the latter impressing the former with her kind nature and inspiring her boss to become more sympathetic to the working class. These things do J

ss AVERAGE

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THE AREA

Through 9/27: dates and times vary; see website, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846 2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.

Director David Schalliol is scheduled to appear for audience discussion on Fri 9/14-Sat 9/15, 8 PM; Sun 9/16, 5 PM; Fri 9/21, 8 PM; Sat 9/22, 7:45 PM; and Sun 9/23, 3 PM.

ARTS & CULTURE

MOVIES

Building stories

Sociologist and ﬁlmmaker David Schalliol explains how he came to make his ﬁrst documentary, The Area. By ANDREA GRONVALL

Isolated Building Study 11 é DAVID SCHALLIOL

ome people seem destined to be filmmakers, even if they didn’t always envision it. Painters, writers, photographers, and other artists who’ve spent years observing and interpreting life can one day make an intuitive leap and refine and extend their skills by taking up a movie camera. That’s what happened to visual sociologist David Schalliol, 41, who more than a decade ago began working as an architectural still photographer before progressing to moving images. His feature documentary directorial debut, The Area, played to a sold-out house when it premiered last month during the Gene Siskel Film Center’s Black Harvest festival; it now returns to that theater for a two-week run. The saga of a protracted, initially furtive land grab in Englewood, in Chicago’s impoverished 20th Ward, by the wealthy Norfolk Southern Railway, The Area follows citizen activist Deborah Payne for five years as she fights to preserve what’s left of her neighborhood before it’s bulldozed for an extension of the railroad’s 47th Street intermodal shipping yard. The film grew out of Schalliol’s University of Chicago PhD project in sociology, for which he documented buildings around the

city that were slated for demolition. “During my years in grad school I had a lot of time, if not money,” Schalliol told me during a recent interview. “Particularly at the University of Chicago, where there’s an intent in pursuing your ideas wherever they take you, this translates into a kind of looseness or flexibility in how you investigate those things that interest you. I want to meet people, understand a place, make connections, and produce work that has meaning and effect.” When not traveling to photograph cities and other sites for his blog, Sociolography, or writing activist journalism or taking on commissions (like the more than six-dozen images he shot for the 2016 book Affordable Housing in New York), Schalliol divides his time between Chicago and Minneapolis (he teaches sociology and anthropology at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota). Born in Indianapolis, he got his first camera at age ten, but became a true shutterbug while enrolled in his public high school’s photography department. As a teen he used his camera to record the local hardcore and punk music scene, earning praise for his album covers and sleeve art, but it was the quieter corners of the metro area that made the bigger impact on his sensibility

and worldview. “I was living in a suburb [in Hamilton County, near Carmel, Indiana] where urban edges were continually being redeﬁned, and was trying to make sense of it, as farms were being purchased for the sake of suburban construction. Sitting there empty, waiting for redevelopment, they were places where I liked to hang out. When I compared those farms to their new surroundings, I started to think in terms of economic incursions and the built environment, how they influence not only where we live, but how we live, and just who is beneﬁtting from these changes.” For proof of how this early experience shaped his aesthetic, read his 2014 art book Isolated Building Studies, a hauntingly alluring series of photos that have one thing in common: the subject is a lone home or commercial structure, either occupied or abandoned, sitting squarely in center frame and surrounded by empty lots. Street and/or sidewalk takes up roughly the bottom eighth of the frame. Seasons may vary, as well as time of day, but each image is highly evocative—eerie, poetic, even lushly romantic. Some of them remind me of Edward Hopper’s paintings. I told Schalliol that I thought I could discern

his style in The Area—particularly the title shot showing two identically designed homes, one nearly destroyed. He confirmed: “I take a lot from my still photography and use it in my cinematography. Before even thinking of The Area, my role as environmental cinematographer on the documentary Almost There [2015] was to shoot footage that matched the other images and the mood of the film, within the context of the main character [eccentric Indiana artist Peter Anton]. On that project I was working through ideas about how the kind of things I’m interested in regarding the mode of still photography can be conveyed through the elements of film. “One of the things that facilitates this is that I use lenses with a shift-tilt function that are primarily used in architectural photography. Let’s say we’re in downtown Chicago and we look up at any building. We visually experience a single-point convergence: essentially, the sides of the building seem to connect at some point high up. They don’t, usually, but we’re perceiving it that way. What the lenses do is allow you to look at the same building without having to turn your head up. When I am standing across the street from those two houses for the title shot of The Area, I turn a knob that due to some funny physics of the lens allows the camera to record the top of the buildings without having to turn upward. That’s nothing that’s typically done in cinematography, but it works.” Schalliol thrives on collaboration and conversation; at the Black Harvest screening he shared a long, freewheeling Q&A with Payne, his star and a producer of the film, and coproducer and coeditor Brian Ashby (both Ashby and Schalliol are part of Chicago-based Scrappers Film Group). A historian, a pastor, a former political campaign staffer, and a government watchdog in the audience all voiced their approval of The Area, and a couple of other audience members thanked the trio for showing facets of the south side that mainstream media rarely cover. This got me thinking again about the beauty of Schalliol’s images, and something he told me earlier: “No matter how modest or how exuberant the history of any structure is, I think it is essential to treat buildings with the same amount of respect, regardless of the context of the photograph. What are the salient elements of inequality? How do you address them, and how do you figure them out? These are ideas that absorbed me as a teenager, and I’m still working through them now.” v

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 17

MUSIC BOX 70MM FILM FESTIVAL

9/14-9/27: dates and times vary; see website, Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport, 773-871-6604, musicboxtheatre.com, $14, $12 students and seniors, $10 kids, $75 festival pass.

ARTS & CULTURE continued from 16 happen, yet the directors hint that they have something else up their sleeves with their subtly fantastical imagery. Consider a beautiful shot that occurs when Clara walks back to her home after her interview with Ana. São Paolo’s downtown skyline looms behind Clara, lit up in unnatural hues of purple and pink—the world of the rich seems like an enchanted castle, and the delicate musical score, driven by flute and harp, adds to the fairy-tale vibe. As the story proceeds, the filmmakers draw inspiration from gothic novels as well as fairy tales. Clara quickly intuits that her employer is hiding some dark secret: she finds a loaded revolver while cleaning Ana’s bedroom, and she hears strange noises coming from that room at night. When the two women go to the mall one afternoon, Ana encounters an old friend from her hometown (apparently she moved to São Paolo only recently), but the friend acts as though Ana doesn’t exist. Ana also tells Clara she’s estranged from her family and her former fiance, though she remains coy as to why. Rojas and Dutra set a slowish pace, allowing the sense of mystery around Ana to fester (and encouraging viewers to immerse themselves in the gorgeous imagery); one shares in Clara’s curiosity just as one bonds with Jane Eyre or the unnamed heroine of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Then things get odd. About a half hour into Good Manners, Clara returns to the high-rise one evening to find Ana sleepwalking around the apartment. The rich woman approaches

164 North State Street

Between Lake & Randolph MOVIE HOTLINE: 312.846.2800

THE AREA

«««« “An eye-opening saga of resistance.” — Chicago Reader

Sept 14 - 27

Fri., 9/14 at 3:45 & 8 pm; Sat., 9/15 at 8 pm; Sun., 9/16 at 5 pm; Tue., 9/18 at 8:30 pm; Wed., 9/19 at 6 pm; Thu., 9/20 at 8:15 pm SEE WEBSITE FOR SHOWTIMES THRU 9/27

GOOD MANNERS “Wondrously weird…blends raw horror, deftly composed songs, beautifully drawn storyboards and strong lead performances into a single, elegant package.” — NY Times

Sept 14 - 20

Fri., 9/14 at 3:30 & 8 pm; Sat., 9/15 at 3 pm; Sun., 9/16 at 5 pm; Mon., 9/17 at 7:45 pm; Tue., 9/18 at 6 pm; Thu., 9/20 at 7:30 pm

SEPT 14 - 20 • THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO BUY TICKETS NOW

18 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

Pablo Picasso in Henri-Georges Clouzot’s one-of-a-kind 1956 art ﬁlm, restored in 4K.

www.siskelﬁlmcenter.org

her servant, sniffs her like an animal, kisses her on the mouth, then bites her lip so hard she bleeds. The next night, Ana wakes from a nightmare and calls Clara into her room; the two become intimate and, acting on their growing mutual fascination, end up making love. When the sex scene ends, Rojas and Dutra bring up the harp-and-flute music on the soundtrack, as if to say that the influence of fairy tales has taken over the film completely. It’s a liberating moment. Ana and Clara’s lovemaking shatters barriers of class, race, and heteronormativity in one fell swoop—it feels as though they’ve granted the movie permission to become anything. Who knows what Ana’s secret could be now? When we speak of “the magic of the movies,” I don’t think we’re talking about cinematic fantasy so much as the sense of limitless possibility that movies can engender. After all, people fall in love all the time, but rarely do they feel fated to fall in love the way characters do in movie romances. Similarly, people are capable of changing the world they inhabit, but rarely does social change occur as suddenly and as sweepingly as it does in fiction films. By showing how people and societies can transform, movies encourage viewers to imagine how they can foster such transformations themselves, and this is one key to cinema’s enduring appeal. Rojas and Dutra not only understand this truth of the medium— they seem positively drunk on it. The twists of Good Manners are indeed surprising, but more importantly they speak to the inherent potential of all movies, fantasies and otherwise. It’s worth noting that the film doesn’t change its shape until after one of the characters changes hers. As inspired as the narrative form may be, it’s pointedly in the service of theme. Rojas and Dutra may relish the fact that anything is possible in movies, but they also acknowledge the limitations of real life. Without giving anything away, let me say that reality comes crashing in at the end of Good Manners, and that its intrusion is emotionally devastating. One reason the ending makes such an impact is that, unlike every preceding narrative development in the film, it feels inevitable. After more than two hours of opening up possibilities, the filmmakers close them off, effectively shutting the door on one of the most imaginative environments the cinema has introduced. I was upset to have to leave it. v

m @1bsachs

West Side Story

MOVIES

Big big screen

The 70-Millimeter Film Festival returns to the Music Box Theatre. THE MUSIC BOX 70MM FILM FESTIVAL returns to the Music Box Theatre for the fifth year with eight new films, including a brand-new 70mm print of Lawrence of Arabia. Film buffs know how incredible it is to see a film in 70mm. The picture is smoother and wider than lower-resolution formats, allowing viewers to see details that would otherwise go unnoticed. With studios and filmmakers switching to digital, however, it’s becoming more of a rarity. The Music Box is one of few theaters in the country that has the correct projector to screen the prints. Julian Antos, an organizer of the event, says the festival brings audiences together to experience the beauty of film that tends to be forgotten with digital copies and home video readily available. Though digital copies can be excellent references, they’re no substitute for the real thing. This year, the Music Box wanted to offer more new titles along with festival favorites 2001: A Space Odyssey and opener West Side Story. “Adding new titles is really important, but I’m consistently impressed with how the stuff we show every year does,” says Antos. The new titles include The Dark Crystal, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Remains of the Day, Silverado, The Sound of Music, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, The Thing (1982), and Year of the Dragon. —MARISSA DE LA CERDA

Get showtimes at chicagoreader.com/movies.

ARTS & CULTURE The Mystery of Picasso

Pablo Picasso conspired with ﬁlmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot (The Wages of Fear) to create this 1956 pseudodocumentary on the genius at work; through the miracle of time-lapse photography, we see the master knocking out a dozen major works over what purports to be the course of a single day. The ﬁlm begins in the standard format, and then expands to CinemaScope when Picasso whimsically demands more room. With music by Georges Auric; photographed by Claude Renoir. —DAVE KEHR PG, 77 min. Fri 9/14, 2 and 6:15 PM; Sat 9/15, 1:30 and 5:30 PM; Sun 9/16, 3:15 PM; Wed 9/19, 8 PM; and Thu 9/20, 6 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

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MOVIES

R American Chaos

In this documentary, producer and filmmaker James D. Stern travels to red states in the months ahead of the 2016 presidential election to meet with supporters of candidate Donald Trump. Stern talks to former coal miners in West Virginia, ranchers on the Arizona-Mexico border, and Cuban-Americans in Florida, learning that all of these people have specific and deeply personal reasons to vote for an apolitical and amoral billionaire. Stern, a Democrat, is visibly distressed throughout, but his goal with the film is not to argue or to condescend but to listen. Stern strives to understand those with whom he disagrees while also including authorities on climate change and social psychology to rebut the potential Trump voters’ most egregious fallacies. It’s a powerful approach. —LEAH PICKETT R, 90 min. River East 21

Dede

This Georgian drama marks the feature debut of director Mariam Khatchvani, who demonstrates a sure hand with actors and a taste for natural beauty. Set in the Caucasus Mountains in the 1990s, the story spends several years with a young woman whose life is consistently dominated by males. Her plight, which ﬁnds her transferred like property from one man to another, illustrates the misogyny and brutality of rural Georgian culture, and Khatchvani underscores the sense of communal portraiture by frequently cutting away to wide shots and images of mountains. The director clearly despises her villains, but her approach to domestic drama is wisely understated; adopting an almost ethnographic perspective, she shows how ritual and superstition deﬁne the entire community. As a result, the men don’t seem wholly responsible for their hideous behavior—it’s the inevitable result of how they were raised. In Georgian with subtitles. —BEN SACHS 97 min. Fri 9/14, 6 PM; Sat 9/15, 8 PM; Sun 9/16, 3 PM; and Mon 9/17, 8 PM. Gene Siskel Film Center

Mandy

Writer-director Panos Cosmatos follows up his underground hit Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) with another atmospheric, slow-moving horror film set in 1983. Somewhere in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, a lumberjack (Nicolas Cage) and his wife (Andrea Riseborough) get abducted by an acid-eating religious cult; the cult members kill the wife in a bizarre ritual, and the lumberjack, arming himself with everything from crossbows to chain saws, enacts bloody revenge on the Jesus freaks. That’s pretty much the entire plot—Cosmatos is less interested in telling a story than in setting a mood, lingering on most of the shots until they become hypnotically fascinating or deathly dull, depending on your point of view. (The synth-driven score, by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, goes a long way in establishing the vibe.) I didn’t much care for the film, but I can see how it might appeal to gorehounds and fans of genre cinema. —BEN SACHS 121 min. Fri 9/14-Thu 9/20, 7 and 9:30 PM, Music Box

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White Boy Rick

Given the cast (which includes Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eddie Marsan, Bruce Dern, and Piper Laurie) and the remarkable premise, this Detroitset docudrama should have been a knockout; unfortunately, it fails to make much of a dramatic impact. The title character is the teenage son of a two-bit arms seller (McConaughey) who goes from being an FBI informant to a high-proﬁle drug dealer in the mid-1980s. No matter how far he rises in the criminal underworld, Rick can’t help making stupid mistakes (he’s only a kid, after all); the most incredible part of his story may be that he avoids arrest for as long as he does. Director Yann Demange (’71) seems uncertain whether to play the material as searing drama or black comedy, and so he gives up on establishing a recognizable tone altogether. More damningly, the awkward, arhythmic editing keeps one from enjoying this on a purely narrative level. —BEN SACHS R, 111 min. ArcLight Chicago, Century 12 and CineArts 6, Chatham 14 Theaters, City North 14, Crown Village 18, Ford City, River East 21

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American Chaos

Noel Black’s odd, creepy thriller came out of nowhere in 1968 and almost dropped out of sight shortly thereafter, though it’s built a small but solidly deserved cult reputation in the years since. Anthony Perkins is a nice young man who once liked to set ﬁres and was incarcerated as a result; Tuesday Weld is the squeakyclean cheerleader who understands and then some. With Beverly Garland and Dick O’Neill. —JONATHAN ROSENBAUM 89 min. Preceded by Black’s 1966 short Skaterdater (17 mins., 35mm). 35mm. Tue 9/18, 7:30 PM. Northeastern Illinois University

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SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 19

NOT EV EN

The crowd for the Lawrence Arms on day two of last year’s Riot Fest é ASHLEE REZIN/CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

2 018 CAN STOP RIOT FEST It’s been a bad year for punks—and for everyone else who hates authoritarianism. But Riot Fest has persevered to bring us Run the Jewels, Blondie, Gary Numan, and 85 more acts. By LEOR GALIL

his year you could buy bulk Halloween candy and pumpkin spice lattes before Riot Fest announced its entire lineup. Just seven days before fans would start queuing up outside Douglas Park, organizers finally announced the event’s daily rosters, began selling singleday tickets, and indicated who’d be headlining each night. Over the years Chicago’s many music festivals have established pretty regular schedules for their lineup announcements, such that you can usually tell when this year’s will drop by looking up the date on last year’s. Riot Fest’s delay was unusual, of course, but not necessarily a symptom of a crisis. It’s never been the type to follow in the footsteps of other festivals. Of course, there was a crisis, but it happened months ago. The same day in May that Riot Fest announced its ﬁrst wave of 2018 acts and began selling three-day passes, Ticketﬂy (the festival’s ticketing partner for eight years) was hacked and went offline. This not only handicapped many small venues’ websites and

20 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

RIOT FEST

exposed personal information for about 27 million user accounts, but also paralyzed Riot Fest’s ticket sales at a critical moment. The festival moved those operations to Eventbrite as quickly as possible, but much of the damage had been done. Riot Fest received a settlement from Ticketﬂy in July, and rather than pocket the money, it offered deals to fans—it sold a limited number of three-day passes for $99.98, and anyone who already had tickets at the time of the settlement could buy a three-day pass to next year’s Riot Fest for $99.98. Fortunately, before that snafu happened, Riot Fest had already assembled a lineup worthy of its recent streak of top-shelf bookings.

Fri 9/14 through Sun 9/16, 11 AM-10 PM, Douglas Park, 1401 S. Sacramento, $129.98 three-day pass ($249.98 VIP), $49.98 single-day tickets ($99.98 VIP), free for children under five, all-ages

This is its seventh year outdoors, long enough for some noticeable patterns to emerge among the big acts at the top of the bill— which isn’t a complaint, not when the repeaters include Elvis Costello (returning to the stage after canceling a string of July dates to recuperate from cancer surgery) and Blondie (whose pre-breakup catalog will be reissued next year by the Numero Group). Several notable names are Riot Fest ﬁrst-timers, including Gary Numan, Liz Phair, the Jesus Lizard, Cat Power, the Avengers, and Incubus. The last big additions, Weezer and

Run the Jewels, aren’t earth-shattering reunions like Jawbreaker in 2017, the original Misﬁts in 2016, or the Replacements in 2013, but RTJ are one of rap’s biggest, most unexpected crossover acts in years—and interestingly enough, Riot Fest is showcasing them during their prime. Festival rules, transit routes, and other details are posted at riotfest.org. That’s also a good place to look out for late lineup changes—it’ll have them before we do. v

m @imLeor

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 21

CL A SSIC AL B U MS I N FULL : R I OT F E ST GOE S S I X FOR SEV E N I N 2 018 Only one of these records never needs to get played again—and it’s not Suicidal Tendencies’ thrash landmark, Cypress Hill’s dark trip, or Bad Religion’s brainy skate-punk masterpiece. By LUCA CIMARUSTI

ostalgia can blind us, so that we remember things as way better than they actually were. Riot Fest capitalizes on that phenomenon year after year by enlisting a handful of bands to play their best-known records front to back. I just went back and listened to all seven of this year’s albums, and I’m here to tell you how they’ve aged—no nostalgic bias allowed.

FE AR

The Record (1982)

Sunday 2:25 PM, Rise Stage

stitutionalized” (“All I wanted was a Pepsi!”) still hilariously embodies teen angst, and its ridiculousness can’t cool down this heater of a record. Suicidal Tendencies shred through this thrash landmark, altering the course of punk and metal by combining them—their debut album seemingly transformed every band that listened to it. It’s so over-the-top and fast and angry and funny that it’s impossible to have a bad time when it’s on. Stone-cold classic. Added bonus: Slayer veteran Dave Lombardo plays drums in the Tendencies now, and it’ll be mind-blowing to watch him rip these tunes up.

Immediately upon revisiting The Record, my thoughts were, “Holy shit, this is the perfect punk album!” It’s pissed off, it’s fun, and every song is great—it’s in the canon for a reason. Upon further listening, though, the homophobic and misogynist lyrics started to eat at me and I felt icky. People didn’t talk about toxic masculinity in 1982 the same way we do now, but that doesn’t make it sit any better. In 2012 a different lineup rerecorded The Record in its entirety, changing the ugliest words, and while that’s an admirable step it doesn’t make hanging with the original version any easier.

BAD RELIGION

SUICIDAL TENDENCIES

“Insane in the Brain” is cute and all, but don’t stop with that kitschy, ubiquitous hit single— this whole album smokes. The dense, darkly trippy production and witty lyrics (with an almost comical emphasis on drug use) make

Suicidal Tendencies (1983)

Sunday 4:40 PM, Riot Stage

All these years later, 19-year-old Mike Muir freaking out about his clueless mom on “In-

22 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

Suﬀer (1988)

Sunday 8:30 PM, Radicals Stage

this feel right at home alongside today’s ﬁnest psychedelic rappers—whether they know it or not, Future, Migos, and Travis Scott all owe a debt to Cypress Hill.

DIGABLE PL ANETS

Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) (1993)

Friday 5:15 PM, Radicals Stage

CYPRESS HILL

Now that face tats and lyrics about molly and lean are basically required in rap, Reachin’ sounds straight-up wholesome. In 2018, you could probably get away with playing Digable Planets at a children’s party. The positive messages and breezy rhymes can sound kind of silly in a modern rap context, but Doodlebug, Butter Fly, and Ladybug Mecca have undeniable ﬂows—and the beyond-smooth jazzy production still sounds fresh.

Friday 8:15 PM, Radicals Stage

L AGWAGON

Aside from a handful of questionable 80s production choices (are those . . . Rototoms?), this record is a ﬂat-out masterpiece. In retrospect it’s easy to see how Suffer kicked off the 90s skate-punk boom, which managed to creep its way into the musical mainstream—it’s a nearly perfect album, and it’s aging like a ﬁne wine.

Black Sunday (1993)

Let’s Talk About Feelings (1998)

Friday 2 PM, Rise Stage

Surprise of the century: this shit holds up. I barely remembered Lagwagon from the CD I had in junior high, so I was expecting annoying

NOFX Lite, but Let’s Talk About Feelings is an interesting, unconventional punk record. The unnerving chord progressions, unorthodox song structures, supremely catchy melodies, and virtuoso-level playing make this guy one of the best releases from the heyday of Fat Wreck Chords. Plus it clocks in at around 25 minutes, so even if you’ve got a low tolerance for pop punk, it’ll be over before it starts grating on your nerves.

SPITALFIELD

Remember Right Now (2003)

Sunday 3 PM, Radicals Stage Oh no. Spitalﬁeld weren’t good 15 years ago, and they certainly aren’t good now. This is forgettable, wimpy pop-punk, and even the occasional attempts to elevate it—tubular bells, electronic embellishments—fall flat. When I listen to this I can imagine the scene that played out in the studio, with one of the band members excitedly asking the rest, “Jimmy Eat World did it, so why can’t we?” This is a reunion no one needs. v

m @LucaCimarusti

H OW AT M OS P HE R E

Ant (left) and Slug of Atmosphere é COURTESY THE ARTIST

ACC I D E N TAL LY PRE D I CT E D JUI C E W R L D The Minneapolis duo invented emo rap—now also called “Soundcloud rap”—15 years before the likes of Lil Xan and Trippie Redd picked up the thread. By LEOR GALIL

ince last year a cohort of underground rappers with a penchant for aggro instrumentals, histrionic lyrics, and face tattoos has been attracting a lot of national media attention—in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Ringer, Pitchfork, Complex, and elsewhere. In June 2017 Times critic Jon Caramanica popularized the term “Soundcloud rap” to describe a scene that included Trippie Redd, Lil Peep, Lil Pump, and XXXTentacion. The New Yorker’s coverage, on the other hand, has opted for a name that says more about the music than about its delivery platform: “Emo rap.” For around 15 years now, “emo rap” has been applied to a long string of artists, many of them radically different from one another. But the unwitting early-2000s originators of the subgenre and today’s Lil Xans and Lil Peeps have a few things in common: They’ve all made music that exposes surprising vulnerability, they’ve all borrowed from punk aesthetics, and they’ve all launched their careers underground, sometimes in reaction to mainstream hip-hop trends. In the early 2000s, mainstream meant gangsta rap—50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ was the best-selling album of 2003. But at the same time, Minneapolis hip-hop duo Atmosphere was heating up the national underground. If you believe Atmosphere rapper Sean

ATMOSPHERE

“Slug” Daley, he coined the phrase “emo rap” while clowning a rock journalist in a 1997 interview. “I was, like, playing—‘Oh, but it’s emo rap,’” he told Underground Hip Hop in 2007. “They were like, ‘Oh, I get it. That makes sense,’ and from there it spread. I already cut off two of my toes, reprimanding myself for saying that shit.” Whether he’s telling the truth or not (I haven’t seen his feet), in the early aughts Daley became emo rap’s poster boy, and the possibly imaginary subgenre grew to include many other acts associated with his independent Rhymesayers label. Atmosphere didn’t make sonically radical music; their scuffed-up, sample-based productions could’ve been made during the 90s boom-bap era. But Slug’s detailed verses—he picked apart what he saw as his weaknesses and faults, and also frequently vented bitterly about failed relationships—represented a new lyrical approach in hip-hop. They appealed to an audience that didn’t care for “In da Club.” In 2003 Sun-Times contributor David Jakubiak reviewed a headlining Atmosphere set at Metro: “It’s been called emo-rap, and it’s

Friday 6:45 PM, Radicals Stage

something that taps directly into the consciousness of the hordes of white youths who call themselves ‘the real hip-hop.’” In 2004 Mark Donohue, music director at Emerson College radio station WERS-FM, discussed the phenomenon with the Boston Globe: “There’s always been a huge suburban audience for [gangsta or hardcore] hip-hop, but this is the hip-hop for the kids in high school who were more into the punk scene and weren’t part of the popular crowd.” Emo rap’s audience also helped illustrate the aesthetic crossover at work. Caramanica’s deﬁnitive early emo-rap feature in the February 2004 issue of Spin described Atmosphere fans at Scribble Jam who “look like they got lost en route to a Death Cab for Cutie show.” After Atmosphere played a Warped Tour show in Cleveland in 2003, he noticed singer Zach Davidson of forgotten Seattle emo band Vendetta Red buying one of their T-shirts. Emo rap became a burgeoning subculture at the same time as emo rock took over the mainstream, and Atmosphere bridged the two

scenes. That 2003 Warped Tour run was one of three for the group, and they coreleased their best album, 2003’s Seven’s Travels, on venerable punk label Epitaph. As the 2000s wore on, emo mutated from Dashboard Confessional to Panic! at the Disco in just a few years. Emo rap didn’t much change at first, but once the term existed, it started getting slapped onto all sorts of inappropriate things: Kid Cudi, Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreaks, Drake. The new class of emo rappers—the ones who also get called Soundcloud rappers—actually make music that owes a debt to Atmosphere, whether they know it or not. If you’d talked a bunch of hip-hop-loving kids into saving their allowance to go to Warped Tour 15 years ago, and they’d caught an Atmosphere set between Taking Back Sunday and the Used, they’d probably sound like Lil Peep and Juice Wrld now too. v

m @imLeor SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 23

RI OT FE ST GENDE R BREA KDOWN

R I OT FE ST

T H E P R OP ORT I ON O F AC TS AT E ACH CHICAGO F ESTIVAL T H AT H AS I N C LU DED AT LE AST ONE F E M ALE ME MBER 140 120

I N CHE S TOWAR D

N U M B ER O F AC TS

100

GE N DE R BAL ANC E The great women on the festival’s 2018 bill demonstrate how urgently it needs to book more.

80 60 40 20

By MADELINE HAPPOLD

0 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

● F EM A LE I NC LUSI V E

24 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

R I OT FEST GEN DER B R E AK DOW N BY C I T Y 100

PE R C E N TAG E O F F E M A LEI N C LU SI V E ACTS

or the largest punk fest in North America, in some ways Riot Fest isn’t actually all that punk. When it comes to the gender balance of its lineups, the Chicago-based music festival is solidly within the status quo. I crunched the numbers for every Riot Fest lineup since its founding in 2005, including the Chicago, Toronto, and Denver festivals as well as the one-off 2012 events in Philadelphia, Dallas, and Brooklyn. The Chicago fest has never topped 25 percent female-inclusive acts—that is, acts with at least one woman involved. The 2018 lineup hits that one-quarter mark, though the four headliners—Weezer, Beck, Run the Jewels, and Incubus—are entirely male. The previous female-inclusive headliner was No Doubt in 2015. To be fair, these lousy numbers aren’t unique to Riot Fest, and many festivals do much worse. The gender gap in festival bookings has attracted international attention: UK music-development charity PRS Foundation, as part of its Keychange initiative, brought together 45 festivals and conferences (mostly in Europe) that pledged to reach gender parity in their lineups by 2022. This year Pitchfork was one of only three major summer festivals where at least half the roster featured women—including rockers such as Julien Baker and Girlpool, who could easily get booked for Riot Fest too. No fests accomplished that in 2017. The Riot Fest 2018 lineup features 22 female-inclusive acts out of 88 total, among

● A LL M A LE

80 60 40 20 0 2 01 2

2 013

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2 01 5 ● D ENVER

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● TOR O NTO

RIOT FEST H A S H E LD R ECUR R I N G F E ST I VA LS I N T WO C I T I E S B E SI D E S C HICAGO : TO R ON TO ( 2 012 TO 2 01 5) A N D D E N V E R ( 2 013 TO 2 01 6) .

them young bands (Mannequin Pussy, Bully), 90s indie-rock favorites (Liz Phair, Cat Power), and 70s punk and new-wave icons (Blondie, the Avengers). Some are recurring Riot Fest acts: Speedy Ortiz, for instance, played at the Chicago and Denver festivals in 2015. Front woman Sadie Dupuis remembers scanning the 2015 lineup for other female-inclusive acts. “It was a little

bit dismal,” Dupuis says. That year Chicago’s Riot Fest was the largest to date, with more than 130 bands, but only 18 included women. Avengers front woman Penelope Houston says that when the San Francisco group formed in 1977, punk “gave permission for anybody and everybody to be . . . any part of that scene.” The early punk scene, while hardly utopian in its gender politics, made room for

a lot of amazing women who’ve been inspiring other women for generations. Houston is supportive of the upsurge in the number of younger female musicians, but she says it’s “disappointing” to see gender gaps persist in punk and rock. Other large festivals devoted to those genres are even less inclusive than Riot Fest. Rock on the Range, based in Columbus, Ohio, and Welcome to Rockville in Jacksonville, Florida, also booked exclusively all-male bands as headliners this spring. Warped Tour’s farewell run this summer had only 7 percent femaleinclusive acts. Riot Fest’s Chicago lineups have generally improved from year to year in terms of gender balance—from one female-inclusive band in 2005 (and none in 2006 or 2007) to 22 out of 91 in 2017. “You would hope that things would be slightly closer to equal,” Dupuis says. “It’s really important to support the kind of inclusivity you want to see.” For those of you tired of looking for girls rocking Riot Fest and ﬁnding Wolfmother and Mom Jeans instead, here are some bands that actually have women in them. And they’re better too.

LIZ PHAIR

SPEEDY ORTIZ

Liz Phair’s 1993 magnum opus Exile in Guyville was the antidote to guy-powered rock. She was celebrated and criticized at the time of its release, because not all music writers were comfortable with a woman writing songs about fucking, wanting, and getting what you fucking want. For the album’s 25th anniversary this year, Reader culture editor Aimee Levitt wrote about how it connected with her: “Liz Phair was one of the only people out there who I felt was speaking directly to me, and for me, without requiring the sort of adjustments and shifts that most people who aren’t straight white men make so often that after a while, we stop realizing that we’re making them.”

The indie-rock band originally started as a home recording project by Dupuis before turning into the current four-piece set. Twerp Verse, released in April, sets Dupuis’s apathetic drawl against toothy riffs (“Life is carnage . . . swear I don’t care anymore,” she sings on “Lucky 88”). In 2015 Speedy Ortiz started a help hotline to allow concertgoers to alert the band and crew via text if they’re dealing with harassment.

Friday 2:10 PM, Roots Stage

Friday 1 PM, Roots Stage

THE AVENGERS

Sunday 3:30 PM, Rebel Stage When the Avengers formed in 1977, says Houston, punk was the “craziness” that San Francisco needed. “I just thought, I’m a punk and we’re all punks and we’re together in this,” she explains. “It was a great breaking down of barriers and opening of doors.” The old-school punk sound enshrined on their album Avengers, released four years after they disbanded in 1979, should be a breath of fresh air at Riot Fest, which tends to favor testosterone-fueled throwbacks with more 80s hardcore in their DNA.

PUSSY RIOT

Friday 3 PM, Radicals Stage This balaclava-wearing Russian collective formed as an activist group in 2011 before becoming a feminist punk band too (they still do quite a bit of both). Pussy Riot are known for their theatrical acts of public protest, including storming the 2018 World Cup ﬁnal dressed as police. (They also took the stage with gubernatorial candidate Daniel Biss shortly before he lost the Democratic primary to J.B. Pritzker in March.) Their music is just as punchy as it is deﬁant, mixing martial electronic beats with spitfire vocals and rabble-rousing political lyrics. v

m @MadelineHappold

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SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 25

B LO ND IE ’S

T RAG EDY OF

é MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES

AN D T H E

é PHILIP TOSCANO/GETTY IMAGES

C L EM BURKE

T RUMP FACE Our terrible president doesn’t deserve to be compared to the best journeyman drummer in rock—but just look at them. By JAKE AUSTEN BLONDIE

miss the old Kanye, who wasn’t prochoice in regard to slavery. I wish I could still binge The Cosby Show without contemplating real-life violations of consent. But in this era of MAGA meatheads and #MeToo reckonings, as famous and powerful men trash their own legacies left and right, the only celebrity I have sympathy for is Clem Burke. Rock’s best journeyman drummer became a Hall of Famer in 2006 for his decades in Blondie, with an awesome asterisk for his cup of coffee with the Ramones and a skinny tie full of midwest power-pop merit badges for his service with the Romantics. But I get a sinking feeling with every new photo he posts of his triumphant world travels: through no fault of his own, Clem Burke has Trump Face. I understand that time and gravity loosen everyone’s skin, add jowl weight, and turn sexy pouts into alter kacher puckers. But Burke looks too goddamn much like our terrible president! It’s a cruel prank of nature for such a national treasure to resemble a racist, baby-caging, pussy-grabbing international embarrassment. I suppose Burke always favored Trump in appearance—as younger men, they shared frat-boy good looks and sim-

26 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

Sunday 5:45 PM, Roots Stage

ilar hints of arrogance in their squints. And to be fair, Trump’s orange mug has broadened to have the kind of chipmunk cheeks that have always been charming on the veteran drummer. Burke still looks cooler, smarter, trimmer, and sexier than even Home Alone 2–era Donald—only his face has tragically Trumped. His puffed, groovy shag isn’t exactly the same as whatever Trump’s hair is, either. But it’s too fucking close! This hurts, because Blondie is as important to me as any band. Debbie Harry’s siren voice, sly genius, and devastating beauty made her an adolescent obsession (to paraphrase Steve Martin on Farrah Fawcett: “The hours I spent holding up her poster with one hand . . . ”). My proudest literary accomplishment is working with 70s scenester Paul Zone to coauthor his coffee-table memoir, Playground, which is chock-full of Blondie stories and photographs. And my favorite two hours from Chicago’s 21st-century festival explosion were at Riot Fest 2013, camping out in front of Blondie’s stage—first I watched the best of the fauxBlack Flags on the next stage over, and then I got to experience Burke’s and Harry’s bril-

liance from 20 feet away. But now, every time I scroll through Twitter on my phone, I’m not just risking exposure to the horrors of Trump’s latest carwreck tweet. Burke is also active on Twitter, and following his account—one of my favorites—can be like playing Russian roulette. He may share a magniﬁcent vintage photo, drop a big piece of Blondie news, or circulate an anti-Trump story (he retweeted Tony Visconti posting last week’s anonymous New York Times editorial from an alleged White House source). But he also might have a new head shot in which he’s being unjustly defamed by God and his stylist. Burke has also used Twitter to announce that UK television channel Sky Arts has made a new documentary about his life and career, My View, scheduled to premiere the weekend of Riot Fest. It should be fascinating, but I hope the cinematographer used a bit of soft focus and avoided lighting from below—and for God’s sake, Burke had better not show up wearing a red tie. v

m @JAKEandRATSO

Brandon Boyd of Incubus é JUAN KATTAN

IN CUBU S HAT E D NU-METAL B E FORE HATI N G N U- ME TAL WAS COO L The much-maligned subgenre is enjoying a rosy reappraisal in the media, but Incubus cut their ties to it even before its early-2000s fall from grace. By LEOR GALIL

he 1990s are far enough gone that the voracious nostalgia cycle has begun to nibble at nu-metal. That much-maligned genre became the pop-facing side of metal in the late 90s, when Korn and Limp Bizkit competed with N-Sync, the Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears to get videos on Total Request Live. People who were in junior high when Kid Rock dropped Devil Without a Cause in 1998 are now old enough to own houses, have kids, and contribute to retirement accounts (though let’s be honest, nobody in their 30s or younger today is ever gonna be able to retire). People with gray hairs and back problems get misty about Jacoby Shaddix of Papa Roach screaming that he doesn’t give a fuck if he cuts his arm. And Incubus—once the prettiest boys in nu-metal—are one of the biggest acts at this year’s Riot Fest. Incubus formed in 1991, while the core members were still students at Calabasas High School northwest of Los Angeles. At ﬁrst they occupied a gray area between several kinds of alt-rock: they played funk-metal harder than the Red Hot Chili Peppers, they were sillier than most self-respecting radio-rock acts,

and they used too much turntable scratching for the jam-band circuit. As nu-metal began its ascent, though, Incubus streamlined their sound and made it more accessibly aggressive, falling perfectly in sync with metal’s newest pop manifestation. In 1996 Paul Pontius, the A and R man who’d signed Korn to Epic Records imprint Immortal a couple years earlier, brought Incubus aboard at the same label. The following year it released the second and most nu-metal Incubus album, S.C.I.E.N.C.E. The band hit the road with Korn, toured Ozzfest for two summers, and in 1999 released Make Yourself, their mainstream breakthrough. Nu-metal signiﬁers glimmer here and there in its songs— scratching, rapid talk-singing that could almost pass for rapping—but they’re mostly straightforward pop-rock. It went platinum in summer 2001, and in November of that year the Chicago Tribune commented, “Incubus is a nu-metal band for people who don’t like nu-metal bands.” By that point Incubus had thoroughly distanced themselves from nu-metal. In October 2001 they released Morning View, an album almost indistinguishable from what radio wie-

the past tense. Last year front man Brandon Boyd told the Guardian that being associated with it had always made him cringe: “So much of nu-metal was openly misogynistic . . . and that always felt really weird to me.” But as the case of George W. Bush proves, nothing is too terrible to be rehabilitated by the 24-hour hot-take machine. Lately tastemakers have been praising nu-metal for its contributions to pop: the Fader published an oral history of Korn’s bruisingly feral “Freak on a Leash,” and Stereogum celebrated Kid Rock’s bone-stupid Devil Without a Cause. I was curious to see if Incubus would condone or ignore this rosy reappraisal of nu-metal at Riot Fest—would they tilt their set toward their nu-metal years or pretend that whole thing never happened? I reached out to the band through their label’s publicist, but alas, I never heard back. Incubus probably wouldn’t have told me what they planned to play at Riot Fest anyway, but I could still learn something INCUBUS about their other gigs this year Sunday 7:45 PM, by consulting the admittedly Rise Stage ners call “active rock.” The unscientific data at setlist.fm. band’s DJ, Chris Kilmore, Were they dipping more and told Billboard.com he thought more into their old nu-metal masome of the songs on Morning terial, emboldened by the upsurge View could be big on pop radio. in nostalgic retrospectives? He also dismissed the scene that Incubus Unfortunately, the 49 Incubus set lists I had left behind: “A lot of what is out there is analyzed didn’t suggest a trend one way or the pretty much crap,” he said. “There are good other. From set to set, the band mostly slightbands—Korn, Deftones, and even Limp Bizly altered song orders or rotated tracks in and kit. . . . I think a lot of bands saw that and said, out. Of the 42 songs Incubus have played live ‘Oh wow, if we just make this style of music this year, only nine are from their nu-metal this way like this, we’re going to sell a lot of years, and just two come from S.C.I.E.N.C.E. records and make a lot of money.’ And because The band have been drawing half their mateof that, I think that makes that category and rial from three of their eight albums: seven that genre weak.” songs apiece from 8, Morning View, and Make Unhitching their wagon from nu-metal was Yourself. I’m counting Make Yourself as one a good call for Incubus. After screamo and of Incubus’s nu-metal albums, but its connecmetalcore knocked the genre from its pedestal tion to the genre feels incidental now. The in the early 2000s, Incubus were able to conballad “Drive,” its biggest hit, wouldn’t sound tinue more or less unburdened by their prenu-metal at all if not for the sparse turntable vious association with it. (Especially in retroscratching. When Incubus play it at Riot spect, nu-metal looked like a musical symptom Fest, they won’t be pandering to nu-metal of toxic white masculinity.) Since 2001 Incubus nostalgia. They’ll simply be obeying the iron have released four bland, middleweight poplaw of outdoor music festivals: never skip the rock albums, most recently last year’s 8, which lighters-up song. v peaked at number four on the Billboard 200. These days they only engage with nu-metal in m @imLeor

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 27

Blake Schwarzenbach of Jawbreaker, who reunited after two decades to play Riot Fest last year.

CAN R I OT

é ALISON GREEN

F E ST T U R N N OSTALG I A I NTO A RE NEWAB L E R E SOU R C E ? Maybe it’s possible to book amazing reunions forever—but only by building current bands into tomorrow’s back-from-the-dead headliners. By DAVID ANTHONY

ver the past decade, Riot Fest has made its name by pulling off the impossible. By now it’s almost a given that its lineup will include reunions of long-defunct bands that fans never thought they’d get another chance to see: the Replacements, the original Misﬁts, Drive Like Jehu, Jawbreaker. It’s what has made Riot Fest a destination, drawing people from around the country—or from even farther away. But this year, when Riot Fest announced the bulk of its lineup at the end of May, it felt underwhelming. Though Blink-182 have since canceled their headlining set (drummer Travis Barker is suffering from blood clots in his arms), their Riot Fest booking didn’t feel as signiﬁcant as it had in 2013—and the fact that they’d closed out a night at Lollapalooza last year didn’t help either. Because the Blink reveal didn’t carry the same weight as a surprise reunion, many folks assumed Riot Fest still had a big secret up its sleeve. That made them antsy about the eventual second lineup

28 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

announcement, but Riot Fest delayed the release of that information till a week before opening day, provoking anxiety and confusion among fans and journalists. Faced with Blink’s last-minute cancellation, Riot Fest unsurprisingly tapped bands that it’s already booked repeatedly to fill the void. Of the three replacements, only Run the Jewels are appearing for the first time (this was one of the last major festivals they’d yet to play). The other two, Weezer and Taking Back Sunday, demonstrate how difficult it’s getting for long-running festivals (especially those defined in part by genre) to make their offerings feel fresh. Weezer headlined in 2011, when Riot Fest shows still took place in the Congress Theater, playing their Blue Album in full, and three years later they did the same thing in Humboldt Park. And Taking Back Sunday has only skipped one Riot Fest since 2013. These replacements join other top-billed acts making a return to Riot Fest. Some of those repeaters—Blondie, Elvis Costello & the Imposters—would be welcome no matter how often they showed up, but their earlier trips have nonetheless taken some of the punch out of their 2018 appearances. Perhaps the only genuine surprise was Jerry Lee Lewis, but at a

punk-leaning festival he seems likely to attract more curiosity seekers than genuine fans. When Riot Fest debuted in 2005, it was already peddling nostalgia—even though it couldn’t yet deliver the way it can now. It brought out the Dead Kennedys, the Misﬁts, and the Germs, all without their original front men, setting the stage for the 2016 booking of the original Misﬁts, complete with Glenn Danzig. Riot Fest’s focus on the past isn’t unique among music festivals, but it’s started to feel like a crutch—it relies heavily not only on big reunions but also on full-album sets that help fill out the undercard. Bringing aboard Bad Religion and Fear to run through fan favorites is a tacit acknowledgment that you’re not necessarily concerned with whatever shape punk is currently taking. Festivals certainly don’t bear sole responsibility for putting over new talent—despite their best efforts, few fests have been able to crown younger acts in an effective way. And that’s leaving aside the possibility that structural changes in the music business mean it’s simply producing fewer bands with the kind of gravitational pull that will have fans clamoring to see them 20 years after they break up. So what happens when the nostalgia runs

out? Riot Fest can’t afford to treat reunions and classic-album performances like a renewable resource, because every time another beloved band decides to give the old reunion thing a go, that pool of headliners—and “impossible” gets—shrinks a little bit further. And then it’s only a matter of time before Weezer gets booked for a third play-through of the Blue Album. Not every festival relies as heavily on the past as Riot Fest, but plenty of them are suffering from the crowded marketplace. In 2017, two Chicago festivals, Get in It MusicFest and Common’s Aahh! Fest, called it quits. This year, Los Angeles’s FYF Fest pulled the plug, and long-running Washington State festival Sasquatch announced it won’t return in 2019. Each one collapsed due to its own distinct set of factors, but it’s not hard to see a trend emerging. Riot Fest has always done a good job carving out its own niche, but it’s already spent 14 years mining punk’s history. Now that Warped Tour has packed it in after its own 24-year run, maybe it’s time for Riot Fest to get a little more invested in where the genre’s heading. v

m @DBAnthony

Recommended and notable shows and critics’ insights for the week of September 13

MUSIC

b ALL AGES F

PICK OF THE WEEK

Fearless song and dance troupe Fendika headlines Ethiopia Fest Chicago 2018

Michael Nesmith é SUN-TIMES COLLECTION

THURSDAY13 Michael Nesmith & the First National Band 8 PM, Maurer Hall, Old Town School of Folk Music, 4544 N. Lincoln, sold out. b

é COURTESY THE ARTIST

FENDIKA

Part of Ethiopia Fest Chicago. Sun 9/16, 2-9 PM (Fendika at 6 PM), Artifact Events, 4325 N. Ravenswood, $5. b

MELAKU BELAY IS a master of Eskista, a shoulder-popping Ethiopian dance style thought to have been inspired by the movement of snakes, as well as a student of the dance traditions of the approximately 80 tribal groups within his country. In 2009 he founded the performance ensemble Fendika, which is based in a similarly named nightclub in Addis Ababa, Fendika Azmari Bet. The group showcases variations developed in both rural and urban settings, combining energetic dance routines with azmari vocal numbers on which singers work oblique commentaries upon current events into lyrics. On their album Birabiro (Terp) a trio of musicians playing massenko (one-string spike ﬁddle), krar (a lyre), and kebero (hide-covered hand drum) supply raw acoustic frameworks for singer Nardos Tesfaw as she switches ﬂuidly between celebratory chants and exquisitely ornamented renditions of classic tunes like “Anbessa” and “Tezeta.” Despite

their mission as cultural preservationists, Fendika have forged strong connections with contemporary-minded Western musical groups such as Boston-based Ethiopian music ensemble Debo Band, Dutch experimental punk group the Ex, and Paal Nilssen-Love’s Large Unit, the drummer’s pan-Scandinavian freejazz big band. This past July I saw the Large Unit and Fendika join forces in Molde, Norway, where they whipped a crowd of festival-weary jazz fans and curious local youths into a sweaty frenzy. For this concert—the ﬁrst of a U.S. tour—Belay leads a seven-piece edition of Fendika with two singers, two dancers, and three musicians for a headlining set at the fifth annual Ethiopia Fest, and with an audience that includes people who can understand the words to their songs and know the steps to the dances, the effect of their performance is bound to be even more electrifying that the ﬁrst time I caught them. —BILL MEYER

Though the loss of many beloved baby-boomer musicians in recent years has made this decade seem cruel, it’s also been a time of resurrection for several bands and projects of members of that same generation. For fans of these groups, that’s sometimes meant a crazy-amazing chance to catch performances by ﬁgures they never dreamed they’d actually get to see. Case in point: Michael Nesmith. This summer, Nesmith and his old Monkees cohort Micky Dolenz went on the road, where they treated audiences to a set list packed with deep album cuts and even a load of psychedelic songs oﬀ the soundtrack of Head—the satirical 1968 film the Monkees starred in after the cancellation of their now-classic television show. During a sound check for their June 21 concert, Nesmith collapsed and was rushed to the hospital, and now, just months after undergoing quadruple bypass surgery, the ornery Papa Nez (as his fans like to call him) is back to the stage again. This time he’s touring with his pioneering country-rock outfit, the First National Band. Nesmith, a Texas native who had a career in folk music (as “Michael Blessing”) prior to being cast in The Monkees, was probably the most “musicianly” of the four bandmates. He wrote most of their original songs, and he indulged his love of country music on tunes such as “Nine Times Blue” and “You Just May Be the One,” exploring similar territory as the Flying Burrito Brothers in the late 60s. In 1970, Nesmith exited the Monkees to pursue his country-and-western-tinged vision, and enlisted pedal-steel-guitar god Red Rhodes (who Nez collaborated with until Rhodes’s death in 1995) to form the First National Band. Within two years the group released three albums on RCA, J

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 29

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

as Riot Fest, but this intimate Empty Bottle-based festival offers a musical and philosophical opposite to its sprawling counterpart. There’s no nostalgia, overhyped reunions, or overblown egos, just some of the freshest, most innovative, and most interesting indie-rock sounds out there. The distinctive identities of the two labels are represented across the festival, with a mix of artists from both rosters appearing each night. The kickoff show on Thursday is all local: art-rock three-piece Facs bring their all-encompassing darkness to the headlining slot, while postpunks Negative Scanner, garage-meets-power-pop band Ethers (Thursday is a record-release/tour-kickoff show for them), and folk-rock singer-songwriter James Elkington open. Night two gets more cerebral, with psychedelic folk groups the Weather Station, Gun Outfit, and Olden Yolk along with Paris band En Attendant Ana, who eschew all indie-rock conventions. And between sets, Matchess performs from a “side stage” located on the venue floor. The final night is topped off by brainy, surgical Atlanta postpunks Omni, who are supported by Omaha scuzz-rocker David Nance as well as Nap Eyes, a duo of Nathan Bowles and Jake Xerxes Fussell, and acid-folk guitarist Kayla Cohen, who plays as Itasca; meanwhile Amps for Christ perform on the side stage. Neither Trouble in Mind nor Paradise of Bachelors is the type of label to release bad shit, and this weekend is like a best-ofthe-best showcase of their incredible acts. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

Jamal Moore performs at the High Zero Festival on Friday. é STEWART MOSTOFSKY

continued from 29

resulting in several sizable hits, including the melancholic “Joanne” and the high-and-lonesome “Silver Moon,” plus a few other singles that scratched the charts. By 1972 the ﬁrst incarnation of the band was over, and a Second National Band—which included a Moog player and a more rocked-up sound—was introduced, but the public didn’t quite get it. From there Nesmith moved into studio production, working on albums for Iain Matthews and Bert Jansch, among others, and maintained a solo career into the 80s, when he entered the then-nascent world of video production. Last year Nesmith announced he’d be playing First National Band material again (with his sons backing him up) in a short series of west-coast shows. I almost hopped on a plane to see them, so I’m absolutely thrilled about this extremely rare, intimate, once-in-a-lifetime chance to see a showcase of the pure dawn of country rock. —STEVE KRAKOW

Trouble in Paradise See also Friday and Saturday. Facs headline; Negative Scanner, Ethers, and James Elkington open. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10, $30 threeday pass. 21+ Trouble in Paradise, a meeting of the minds between tastemaking Chicago label Trouble in Mind Records and North Carolina’s heady Paradise of Bachelors, takes place over the same weekend

30 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

FRIDAY14 High Zero Festival See also Saturday. Tonight’s bill, in order: a quarter of Jim Baker, John Berndt, Tom Boram, and Michael Zerang; a duo of Angel Bat Dawid and Jamal Moore; a trio of Rose Hammer Burt, Carol Genetti, and Shelly Purdy; and a trio of Ben Baker Billington, Jeﬀ Carey, and Owen Gardner. 7 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10. b High Zero is a festival of improvised and experimental music that made its debut in Baltimore in 1999. Created by the Red Room Collective, an artist-run organization that’s been holding concerts at Normal’s Books & Records in Charm City since 1996, High Zero is on a mission to confront both audiences and performers with situations they’ve never faced before. Every festival set features a new collaboration, and the combinations of sound, motion, and visual artists they introduced transgress stylistic, generational, cultural, and social boundaries. This year, for its 20th iteration, High Zero is hitting the road. A caravan of Baltimore-based artists—including longtime veterans such as electronic musician and Red Room founder John Berndt, Matmos electronicist M.C. Schmidt, and Ancestral Duo saxophonist Jamal Moore—will travel to Chicago one weekend, New York the next, and return home at the end of September. In each city, they’ll play with a number of local musicians; in Chicago, the list of collaborators includes vocalist Carol Genetti, clarinet and piano player Angel Bat Dawid, and instrument inventor Eric Leonardson. Music like this comes with no guarantees, but you can be sure that over the course of the festival you’ll encounter

MUSIC Ernest Dawkins performs at the Englewood Jazz Festival on Saturday. é MARC MONAGHAN

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

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15 8PM

The Hot Sardines SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 7PM

High Zero Festival See page 30. Fri 9/14 and Sat 9/15, 7 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, highzero.org, $10 per day, all-ages

FESTIVALS

Beyond Riot Fest: south-side jazz, Ethiopian folk, cutting-edge indie rock, and more Trouble in Paradise See page 30. Thu 9/13, 8:30 PM; Fri 9/14, 9 PM; and Sat 9/15, 8 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, paradiseofbachelors.com/trouble-in-paradise, $10 Thursday, $15 Friday and Saturday, $30 three-day pass, 21+ Fulton Market Harvest Fest Poliça, Lee Fields, and Duffel are among the musical acts at this food festival, which features live culinary demonstrations from top chefs. Fri 9/14, 5 PM; Sat 9/15, 11 AM; and Sun 9/16, noon, Fulton between Halsted and Peoria, fultonmarketharvestfest.com, $30 three-day pass, all-ages

something pretty noisy, something pretty queer (in every sense of the word), something pretty fearless—and maybe something that no one’s ever heard before. —BILL MEYER

Idles Bambara opens. 10 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, sold out. 18+ The name “Idles” is something of a misnomer—the members of this five-piece UK punk band have worked their tails oﬀ to cement their sound since forming in Bristol in 2011. By the time they selfreleased their debut full-length in 2017, they’d nailed it. Brutalism is as near perfect as any punk record in years, with heartbreak, desperation, joy, and hilarity playing tug-of-war across its wiry, mutating tracks— often within a single verse. Front man Joe Talbot

Oaktoberfest Oak Park ushers in fall with a street fest full of craft beer, local food, and live music, including Charley Crockett and Shemekia Copeland. Fri 9/14, 4:30 PM, and Sat 9/15, 12:30 PM, Marion and North, Oak Park, oaktoberfest.net, free, all-ages

Harold LópezNussa Trio In Szold Hall SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 7PM

Armitage 50th Anniversary Concert Celebrating 50 years of musical history at 909 W. Armitage in Lincoln Park!

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 8PM

Riot Fest See the Reader’s preview package on page 20. Fri 9/14 through Sun 9/16, 11 AM, Douglas Park, 1401 S. Sacramento, riotfest.org, $49.98 per day, $129.98 three-day pass, all-ages

Holly Near

Englewood Jazz Festival This celebration of south-side music and culture features live sets from the likes of Ernest Dawkins, Denise Thimes, and Charles Heath. Sat 9/15, noon, Hamilton Park, 513 W. 72nd, englewoodjazzfest.org, free, all-ages

In Szold Hall

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28 8PM

Bruce Molsky's Mountain Drifters SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30 3PM

David Wilcox In Szold Hall

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5 8PM

Lakeview Taco Fest This street festival has booked a low-effort mix of cover bands and party bands. Sat 9/15, 2 PM, and Sun 9/16, 1 PM, Southport between Addison and Roscoe, chicagoevents.com/events/lakeviewtacofest, $10 suggested donation, all-ages Ethiopia Fest Chicago See page 29. Sun 9/16, 2 PM, Artifact Events, 4325 N. Ravenswood, ethiopiafestchicago.com, $5, all-ages

writes lyrics that overflow with wry observations and sociopolitical barbs, which he delivers as a mix of stream-of-consciousness monologues, hazy ﬂashbacks, barroom taunts, and late-night confessions. Brutalism is in part a tribute to Talbot’s mother, whose photo appears on the cover. She’d had a stroke when he was 16 (he’d been her caretaker for years, ever since his stepfather died), and she passed away during the making of the album. Even without knowing the backstory, you can tell from listening to it that Talbot was going through a lot when he wrote it, and his struggles are relatable—you ﬁnd yourself hoping things will get better for him. Unfortunately, reality hasn’t cooperated. Last year he and his partner lost their baby to a stillbirth. The pain of that experience flavors Idles’ new album, Joy as an Act of Resistance (Partisan), as do Talbot’s ruminations on masculinity—

Shawn Mullins SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6 7PM

Erwin Helfer & Reginald Robinson In Szold Hall

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11 7:30PM

Rob Ickes & Trey Hensley / Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen In Szold Hall

ACROSS THE STREET IN SZOLD HALL 4545 N LINCOLN AVENUE, CHICAGO IL

9/14 Global Dance Party: Bomba Dance Party featuring La Escuelita Bombera de Corazón 9/30 Global Dance Party: The Revelers 10/12 Global Dance Party: Nessa 10/13 Melanie

WORLD MUSIC WEDNESDAY SERIES FREE WEEKLY CONCERTS, LINCOLN SQUARE

9/19 Spiro

OLDTOWNSCHOOL.ORG SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 31

MUSIC

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

continued from 31

the way traditional ideas of maleness have affected his sense of self as well as macrolevel cultural and political phenomena. The songs on Joy also address immigration rights, homophobia, and modern love, and Talbot can cut to the heart of any subject— though some listeners have misunderstood his characters’ uglinesses for things he believes himself. “I think people get angry about my lyrics—but they all actually make complete sense to me,” he told NME last year. “I’m not fucking Leonard Cohen. Does it have to fucking change your world? It’s changed mine. Fuck off!” With their driving beats, disjointed guitars, and maniacal swagger, Idles invite you into their world face-first. Joy is music for anyone who’s been through the wringer and come out standing. —JAMIE LUDWIG

Options Fond Han, Floatie, and Jodi open. 9 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, $10, $8 in advance. 21+

Unassuming Chicago musical wunderkind Seth Engel has his hand in too many musical projects to print in a short concert preview; even listed on his website, the titles of albums he’s produced, engineered, or played on take up a great deal of real estate. Suﬃce it to say, if you’ve spent any time at this year at Subterranean (where he and

32 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

Options é VANESSA VALADEZ

his bands are frequent performers), a punk house show, or Pitchfork Music Festival, you’ve probably seen Engel bringing some unfathomably complicated music to life. He’s drummed for outre pop genius Nnamdi Ogbonnaya at Pitchfork and in a spate of tours, he plays guitar for experimental misfits Anthony Fremont’s Garden Solutions, and he drums for mathy fourth-wave-emo supergroup Lifted Bells, among his many other gigs. Under the name Options, Engel has recorded and released a spate of emo-inﬂected power pop that’s as equally aﬀecting and straightforward. On Options’ brandnew Vivid Trace (Sooper) Engel doles out sweetly forlorn vocals atop guitars as strong and immaculate as stainless steel, and backs them with adroit

rhythms that punch up every song to ensure each melody finds its target. The lineup for his live band tonight includes Zach Elias on guitar, Corey Wichlin on drums, and Ogbonnaya on bass and backup vocals. —LEOR GALIL

Residente 8:30 PM, House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn, sold out. b Three years ago wildly imaginative producer and MC Residente (aka René Pérez) disbanded Calle 13, the shape-shifting hip-hop and reggaeton project he started with his stepbrother Eduardo José Cabra Martínez (aka Visitante) in 2004 in

their native Puerto Rico. That project catapulted the duo to global fame, and it gave Residente the resources to pursue his vision for his self-titled 2017 solo debut—a musical investigation of his ethnic roots inspired and fueled by the results of a DNA test. To create the album, he traveled the planet, working and recording with musicians and producers from China, Ghana, the Caucasus, and Burkina Faso along his way. Upon ﬁrst listen I was repeatedly surprised to hear such a staunch exponent of urban Latino music giving Tuvan musicians like Mongun-ool Ondar (of Chirgilchin) and Chinese opera singer Pan Xiaojia such prominent roles, replete with melodies shaped on traditional instruments from each region. But Residente couches all of that style hopping within his own banging beats and Spanish-language rhymes, and the music ultimately coheres. While I wish the interaction and engagement with his diverse guests sounded more interactive, as it does on “Dagombas em Tamale”—a pounding collision of Caribbean rhythms with those from Ghana, played by the Tahma Cultural Troupe—Residente has still pulled off the project with impressive skill. The album bubbles with his curiosity, and each song has lyrics that touch on themes and subjects that dominate life in a particular region, such as the endless ﬁghting in Chechnya on “Guerra,” and the realities of climate change in China on “Una Leyenda China.” —PETER MARGASAK

MUSIC Regular Oatmeal Warrington, Bristletongue, and Girl K open. 8 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $8. 17+

Alexandra Niedzialkowski, aka Cumulus é SARAH CASS

Trouble in Paradise See Thursday. The Weather Station headlines; Gun Outﬁt, Olden Yolk, En Attendant Ana, and Matchess open. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10, $30 three-day pass. 21+

Trouble in Paradise See Thursday. Omni headlines; Nap Eyes, Nathan Bowles & Jake Xerxes Fussell, Itasca, David Nance, and Amps for Christ open. 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, $10, $30 three-day pass. 21+

SATURDAY15

SUNDAY16

High Zero Festival See Friday. Tonight’s bill, in order: a quartet of Samuel Burt, Eric Leonardson, Stewart Mostofsky, and Cristal Sabbagh; a trio of CK Barlow, Julie Pomerleau, and Jason Soliday; a duo of Jen Hill and M.C. Schmidt; and a trio of Andrew Bernstein, Tomeka Reid, and Katherine Young. 7 PM, Elastic, 3429 W. Diversey, $10. b

Fendika See Pick of the Week, page 29. Part of Ethiopia Fest Chicago. Fendika headlines. 2 PM, Artifact Events, 4325 N. Ravenswood, $5. b

Regular Oatmeal front man Nick Cartwright sings like he’s being dragged from his bed after sleeping in way later than he (and, well, society) deems acceptable, his drawn-out words heavy from the weight of his own malfeasance. His style ain’t for everyone, and neither is the rough-hewn brand of emo his Chicago band plays. But for the faithful emo heads who prefer to pretend the 2000s never happened and like to argue about the state of fourth-wave emo, Regular Oatmeal’s recent Great Shout EP (self-released) oﬀers a charming escape. Its blunt rhythms, lumbering guitars, and callused

vocals veer between clashing and harmonious, and the band finds sparks as they figure out how to piece everything together. —LEOR GALIL

MONDAY17 Cumulus Uma Bloo, Hawley, and Joey Nebulous open. 8 PM, Subterranean, 2011 W. North, $8. 17+

Seattle singer-songwriter Alexandra Niedzialkowski, who records and performs as Cumulus, understands the mystique of the style of indie rock that emerged from the Paciﬁc Northwest a gener- J

Professor Emeritus Jag Panzer headlines; Professor Emeritus and Ancient Seance open. 7:30 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint, 2105 S. State, $20. 21+ I admit a mea culpa for not getting around to this Chicago band’s 2017 debut, Take Me to the Gallows (No Remorse), a little bit earlier. The album strides into the fray with a handily segmented heavy-duty toolbox; they seem to know just when to gallop in a Iron Maidenly way, lay down some heavy doom like they’re still searching for the brown note, or present melodic power-metal that’s just shy of a ballad. Front man MP Papai sells the classic sword-andsorcery vibe (or Lovecraftian horror, as in “Rats in the Walls”) with howling, histrionic conviction, and the guitar work balances out his excess with even more excess—which is what you want, really. Tonight, Professor Emeritus appears on a strong bill with fellow locals Ancient Seance, who just released a solid demo, Cryptic (available on their Bandcamp page); Colorado power-metal stalwarts Jag Panzer headline. —MONICA KENDRICK

Residente é COURTESY THE ARTIST

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 33

Terry Bozzio

MUSIC

é MAYUMI BOZZIO

TUESDAY18

continued from 33

ation ago and was perfected by the likes of Death Cab for Cutie—the kind of sweetly sentimental rock songs whose easygoing, weightless melodies belie the mountains of emotion hidden within the notes. And Niedzialkowski weathered her share of hurt in the period leading up to Cumulus’s forthcoming second album, Comfort World (Trans), which gets its name from a billboard for a shuttered mattress store she spotted a couple hours out of Seattle. She and her boyfriend of four years broke up, she got ﬁred from her day job, and—if you choose to take the lyrics to the album’s title track literally— it would appear that she spent a good deal of time stoned, alone, and sleeping at odd hours. Her plaintive vocals offer an empathetic shoulder for anyone struggling with a large and cumbersome prob-

Terry Bozzio 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 2105 S. State, $40. 17+

lem; her whip-smart arrangements and spry performances suggest the best way out of a bad situation is to keep moving despite (or because of) enormous pain. On the album’s most aggressive song,

“Tough Crowd,” Niedzialkowski confronts her faults and bruises against a roaring guitar, and when she sings that she’s “a fuckup” it’s a celebration, not a curse. —LEOR GALIL

OakToberfest After Party

JARED & THE MILL - CARDINAL HARBOR

In The SideBar - IAN LEITH

OakToberfest After Party

Classic Rock Dance Fest! Free Show - No Cover!

SUN

...A Celebration Of Val Camil etti

16 And The Beat Goes On WED

THU

20 FRI

Jazz In The SideBar - JAROD BUFE QUARTET

Club Closed For A Private Event - SideBar Open Chicago’s Premier Steely Dan Tribute!

DEACON BLUES 6th Anniversary Show 22 Club & SideBar Closed For A Private Event SAT

9/26 - Anna Egge / Jessica Robbins 9/27 - Honey Island Swamp Band 9/28 - Country Night In Berwyn 10th Anniversary 9/29 - Nick Moss Band 10/4 - Joey Landreth Trio / Dowd & Drew 10/5 - Rico 10/6 - The Cold Hard Cash Show 10/10 - John Prine Birthday Tribute 10/12 - Heavy Sounds Stax Records Night 10/13 - Eric Gales 10 /13 - Chris Knight (SideBar Music Room) 10/18 - Blues Caravan 10/19 - Robbie Fulks / Linda Gail Lewis 10/19 - Lindsay Beaver CD Release Show (SideBar) 10/20 - Black Lillies 10/25 - Reckless Kelly 10/26 - Eric Lindell 10/30 - Gurf Morlix 10/31 - The Quebe Sisters 34 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

Find more music listings at chicagoreader.com/soundboard.

If you’re the specific kind of nerd who has ever picked up a copy of Modern Drummer, you’re probably familiar with musician Terry Bozzio. A next-level shredder, Bozzio put his chops to use backing legendary gonzo-fusion master Frank Zappa starting in 1975, and he’s remained part of the Zappa circle ever since; he’s arguably best known for being the first person to play the artist’s notoriously complicated composition “The Black Page” (which was apparently named for how it looked written out on sheet music, with all the notes crammed onto the staff) and tackling it with ease. Bozzio’s music career has been a long road since his Zappa days. In the 80s he performed with synth-poppers Missing Persons, and through the decades he’s played with various jazz and fusion ensembles as well as appeared on albums by a wide variety of artists including Richard Mark and Jeff Beck—he even recorded some tracks with Korn on their 2007 record Untitled. But what keeps the drum-clinic junkies ﬂocking back to Bozzio after all this time are the ostinato-based solo drum compositions he started developing in the 90s, beginning with his 1992 recording, Solo Drum Music I, on which he introduced an enormous drum kit. As it turns out, that was just the start; today Bozzio plays out drums-only songs on a hilariously massive drum set that features more than 20 tuned tom-toms, 50 cymbals and gongs, and eight bass drums. I feel like it’s a rite of passage for a young drummer to see a live Bozzio solo show—I know it was a big deal for me when I was a kid. On this tour he’ll be playing 12 original compositions: ten on his enormous drum set, one on a cajon box drum, and one on a Japanese taiko drum. If watching a guy play an hour-long set on drums that are collectively worth as much as a house is your idea of a good time, this show is not to be missed. —LUCA CIMARUSTI

Natalie Prass é TONJE THILESEN

JOBS

SALES & MARKETING Telephone Sales Experienced/aggressive telephone closers needed now to sell ad space for Chicago’s oldest and largest newspaper rep firm. Immediate openings in Loop office. Salary + commission. 312-368-4884.

General THE NORTHERN TRUST Com-

pany is seeking a Consultant, Transition in Chicago, IL w/ the following reqts: BS degree in Business Administration, Finance or related field or foreign equivalent degree. 2 yrs of related experience. Required skills: Create Visual Basic for Application (VBA) macros to automate manual processes to reduce processing time and eliminate errors (can be gained via coursework); Investigate exceptions, transaction matching, and ensure settlement of trade on the TLM Platform (Transaction Lifecycle Management) (2 years); Apply S.W.I.F.T (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) recognized transactions to support the movement of client assets between accounts at Sub Custodian level (2 years); Monitor emerging, frontier and stable markets in the global arena that are opened to facilitate clients securities trading on Omgeo ALERT as supported by DTCC (2 years). Apply on-line at www. northerntrustcareers.com and search for Req. # 18110.

THE NORTHERN TRUST Co. is

seeking a Consultant, Risk Analytics in Chicago IL, with the following requirements: MS in Math, Statistics or Economics and 1 year of related experience. Prior experience must include at least one year of experience with each of the following: build predictive models by applying statistical and data mining techniques including time series theory, regression modeling, machine learning algorithm, simulation and sampling for business purpose; design, develop, maintain, implement and test statistical models and ensure quality control of the model development process; perform predictive analytics using data management, data visualization and statistical analysis software including SAS Enterprise Guide; provide analytical reports, communicate findings and provide recommendations to management and business partners. Please apply on-line at www. northerntrustcareers.com and search for Req. # 18117.

SENIOR UNDERWRITER, SPECIALTY INSURANCE, INLAND MARINE

WEDNESDAY19 Natalie Prass Stella Donnelly opens. 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 2424 N. Lincoln, $17, $15 in advance. 18+ “Keep your sisters close / You gotta keep your sisters close,” backup singers breathe into the retro-90s R&B chorus on Natalie Prass’s “Sisters.” In line with the title of her new album, The Future and the Past, the Virginia singer-songwriter couches her up-to-the-minute anti-Trump feminism in sounds inspired by the music of an earlier era. The album is swathed in 80s Janet Jackson-style beats and

Mariah Carey-quality hooks, summoning the spirit of iconic pop divas to help us boogie and twirl in the face of the rolling political apocalypse. “Sing out your voices / This kind of noise is / One that rejoices, yeah / Stand like a rock / I am the sources of / My body’s choices,” she declares over robotic early-80s disco swagger on “Ain’t Nobody.” Preserving the music you love and preserving women’s rights are treated as synonymous, and though folks on the left sometimes denounce pop culture as shallow and nostalgia as regressive, for Prass silly pop is a salve and an inspiration, and the dance floor remains a place of joy, inclusion, and community. On The Future and the Past, Prass shows that history can be a resource, and that the right song can be a call to arms. —NOAH BERLATSKY v

(QBE Americas, Inc.; Chicago, IL) Evaluate risk exposure posed by insuring clients in QBE’s Inland Marine business to determine appropriate coverage and price of inland marine insurance policies in accordance with internal underwriting guidelines and government regulations. Requirements: Must have a Bachelor’s degree in Business, Insurance, or a closely related field, plus 4 years of experience in the insurance industry. In lieu of a Bachelor’s degree, the employer will accept 2 additional years of experience in the insurance industry. Apply by email, referencing Job Code KBGFJG15604-3, Attention: Shannon Furtaw, Lead Recruitment Coordinator, QBE Americas, Inc., Email: Shannon.Furtaw@us.qbe.com.

TRANSUNION, LLC SEEKS Sr.

Analysts for Chicago, IL location to design, implement & maintain IT infrastructure & develop enterprise software applications. Master’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. Eng. or Info./ Instrumentation Tech. or any Eng. field + 2yrs exp. or Bachelor’s in Comp. Sci./Comp. Eng. or Info./ Instrumentation Tech. or any Eng. field + 5yrs exp. req’d. Req’d skills: Automation test development, software development lifecycle testing, developing enterprise applications, Java, Ab Initio, Groovy, Unix, SQL, Angular, VB Script, JAVA Script, Maven, CA Dev Test, Selenium, GIT, TIBCO Admin, Protractor, Jasmine BDD, Service Virtualization, SOAP UI, ITKO LISA, HP QC, Agile methodology. Send resume to: R. Harvey, REF: DRVR, 555 W Adams, Chicago, IL 60661

PRO COMPUTERS, LLC

(Chicago, IL) seeks a COMPUTER

USER SUPPORT SPECIALIST to provide IT support services regarding computers, printers, servers, network, storage and cloud computing by phone, e-mail, remotely or at client’s site. Position requires travel to Milwaukee/Racine once a month. Submit resumes to careers@youneedapro.com

GROUPON, INC. IS seeking a Senior Software Engineer in Chicago, IL w/ the following responsibilities: Develop, construct & implement the next generation of company products & features for Groupon’s web & mobile apps. May telecommute up to 100% from any location in the U.S. Apply on-line at https://jobs.groupon .com/jobs/R18057 GROUPON, INC. is seeking a Product Designer in Chicago, IL w/ the following responsibilities: Collaborate w/ UX researchers to better understand customer needs. Apply on-line at https://jobs. groupon.com/jobs/R18021

REAL ESTATE RENTALS

STUDIO $500-$599 CHICAGO, CAL PARK & Blue Island: Studio $625 & up; 1BR $700 & up; 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Parking. Call 708-388-0170 DIVISION BY AUSTIN, 2.5 room Studio & 1BR on bus and train line. $575-$650/mo. Tenant pays utilities. Call 708-307-2440 CHICAGO, CAL PARK & Blue Island: Studio $625 & up; 1BR $700 & up; 2BR $885 & up. Heat, Appls, Balcony, Carpet, Laundry, Parking. Call 708-388-0170

STUDIO $600-$699 SUNNY ANDERSONVILLE 2 bedroom, Modern bath, kitchen, hardwood floors, hutch, mini blinds, natural woodwork, balcony, no dogs, washer/dryer, deck, garage option. $1245. Oct 1st. 708-482-4712

Chicago, Hyde Park Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, elevator bldg, phon e/cable, switchboard, fridge, priv bath, lndry, $165/wk, $350/bi-wk or $650/mo. Call 773-493-3500 Chicago, Hyde Park Arms Hotel, 5316 S. Harper, elevator bldg, phon e/cable, switchboard, fridge, priv bath, lndry, $165/wk, $350/bi-wk or $650/mo. Call 773-493-3500

STUDIO $700-$899 COZY CLEAN CONVERTIBLE

studio. Belmont/Sheridan. Buses outside, short walk to train. Building has doorman, outside pool, wellmaintained. $730. (773) 557 8925

LARGE ONE BEDROOM for

sublease through 1/31/19. 6822 N. Wayne. Hardwood floors. Pets OK. $845/month (heat included). Available 10/15. (773) 761-4318

LARGE ONE BEDROOM near

red line. 6822 N. Wayne. Hardwood floors. Pets OK. $975/month. Heat included. Available 10/1. (773) 761-4318

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

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

Ashland Hotel nice clean rms. 24 hr desk/maid/TV/laundry/air. Low rates daily/weekly/monthly. South Side. Call 773-376-5200

1 BR UNDER $700 MIDWAY AREA/63RD KEDZIE Deluxe Studio 1 & 2 BRs. All

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

QUALITY APARTMENTS, GREAT Prices! Studios-4BR, from

$545. Newly rehabbed. Appliances included. Low Move-in Fees. Hardwood floors. Pangea - Chicago’s South, Southwest & West Neighborhoods. 312-985-0556

7022 S. SHORE DRIVE Impecca-

bly Clean Highrise STUDIOS, 1 & 2 BEDROOMS Facing Lake & Park. Laundry & Security on Premises. Parking & Apts. Are Subject to Availability. TOWNHOUSE APARTMENTS 773-288-1030

76TH & SAGINAW, 1-2 bed-

room apartments with beautiful hardwood floors. Heat & appliances included. $625-$795/mo. 773-4450329

CLEAN ROOM W/FRIDGE & micro, Near Oak Park, Food -4Less, Walmart, Walgreens, Buses & Metra, Laundry. $115/wk & up. 773-637-5957

CHICAGO 65TH & Wood 1+ or 2+ BR w/large kitc., newly decorated, on quiet block. Avail. now. $630 & $750/mo. Call 847274-6936

CHICAGO - Englewood area, 1BR, $600/mo + 1 month security + 1 month’s rent. Tenant pays all utils. Available now. 773-7444603 LOVELY NEWLY DECORATED rooms available. $425/mo. Also,

3BR apts for section 8 - voucher holders welcome. 773-703-8400 63rd & Pulaski. 1BR. Remodeled. $700/mo heat incl. Steadman Rlty. 773-284-5822 After 5pm 773-835-9870 NICE ROOM w/stove, fridge & bath Near Aldi, Walgreens, Beach, Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry. $133/wk & up. 773-275-4442 BIG ROOM with stove, fridge, bath & nice wood floors. Near Red Line & Buses. Elevator & Laundry, Shopping. $121/wk + up. 773-561-4970 6930 S. SOUTH SHORE DRIVE Studios & 1BR, INCL. Heat, Elec, Cking gas & PARKING, $585-$925, Country Club Apts 773-752-2200

7425 S. COLES - 1 BR $620, 2

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

NEWLY REMOD Studios, 1 & 2BR starting at $580. No sec dep, move in fee or app fee. Free heat/hot water. 1155 W. 83rd St. 773-619-0204

Forest Park: 1BR new tile, energy efficient windows, lndry facilitities, a/c, incls heat - natural gas, $895/ mo Luis 708-366-5602 lv msg

1 BR $700-$799 ALSIP: Updated 2BR apt, 1. 5BA. $925-$950/mo & 1BR apt, 1BA, $770/mo. New appls, laundry, parking & storage. 708268-3762 CHICAGO

WESTSIDE

NICE

1BR $700 & 2BR $800, Austin Area, quiet bldg, Move in fee. Laundry rm, heat incl. Call 773-575-9283

9147 S. ASHLAND. 1BR $760, CLEAN, QUIET & SECURE, hdwd flrs, appls, lndry. No Pets. Also studio available .312-914-8967.

1 BR $800-$899 ONE BEDROOM GARDEN apartment near Warren Park and Metra. 6802 N. Wolcott. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $850/month (heat included) Available 10/1. 773-761-4318.

CHICAGO, 11422 S. Forest Ave. 1st & 3rd flrs, freshly updated, 3 lrg BRs, appls incl. $1100/mo. Tenant pays all utilities. 847-602-2416

1 BR $900-$1099 ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT. 1st floor. 5815 Fullerton, be-

tween Central & Austin. Available immediately. $900/mo includes heat, water and parking. Laundry inside building. 773-889-8491. ONE BEDROOM APARTMENT near Loyola Park. 1337 1/2 W. Estes. Hardwood floors. Cats OK. $950975/month (heat included). Available 10/1. 773-761-4318.

SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 35

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

lowship Manor, 5041 South Princeton Avenue, Chicago IL, 60609 for one bedroom apartments. Applicants must be at least 62 years of age, and must meet screening criteria. Contact the onsite management office by phone at (773) 9245980, or Via postal mail. This institution is an equal opportunity provider.

2, 3 & 4BR Houses & Condos. Matteson & Sauk Village. Sec 8 OK. Call 708-625-7355

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

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

3 BR OR MORE $1500-$1799

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

room apartment, 4423 N. Paulina.

LARGE 3 BEDROOM, one bath

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

10/1. Parking space available for $75/ month. (773)761-4318.

2 BR UNDER $900

MARKHAM, NEWLY REHABBED 3BR, 1BA, new appls

CHICAGO, NEWLY DE C O RATED 2BR Apartment, hardwood

APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SUMMER IS HERE!!! MONST UNITS INCLUDE.. HEAT & HOT WATER STUDIOS FROM $495.00 1BDR FROM $545.00 2BDR FROM $745.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000** APTS. FOR RENT PARK MGMT & INV. LTD. SUMMER IS HERE!!! HEAT, HW & CG PLENTY OF PARKING 1BDR FROM $785.00 2BDR FROM $1025.00 3 BDR/2 FULL BATH FROM $1200 **1-(773)-476-6000*** ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar Villas is accepting applications for subsidized 1BR apts. for seniors 62 years or older and the disabled. Rent is based on 30% of annual income. For details, call us at 847-546-1899 ∫

SENIOR WOMAN in E. Garfield

Park looking for 3 Women 55 and older to share house & utils. No Smoking or drugs. Will do credit check. 773-574-2024 or 708-488-7753

6748 CRANDON & 7727 COLFAX Most Beautiful Apartments! 1 & 2BR, $625 & Up. Off street parking. 773-947-8572 / 773-288-4444 SECTION 8 WELCOME. 8 0 2 2 S. Maryland, 1BR, modern, appliances, off street parking, $625-$980/mo. Call 773618-2231 CHICAGO - BEVERLY, 1 & 2BR Apts. Carpet, Hdwd Flrs, A/C, laundry, near transportation, $795-$1040/mo. Call 773-2334939 SUNNY & LARGE 2 & 3BR, hd wd/ceramic flrs, appls, heat incl’d, Sect 8 OK. $900 plus. 70th & Sangamon/Peoria. 773456-6900

floors, blinds, Appliances included. Close to transportation. $650/mo. Call 773-617-2909

94-3739 S. BISHOP. 1st and 2nd flrs, 5 rms, 2BR, stove, fridge, parking, storage, near trans/shops. No pets. $950 + sec. Heat Incl 708-335-0786

HEATED

TWO

BEDROOM.-

new kitchen, Hardwood Floors, granite countertops, outdoor deck, near Paulina stop, 773/307-9010 $1600/ mo.

2 BR OTHER ROUND LAKE BEACH, IL Cedar

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

Riverdale Apt for rent, 2 bedroom, heat included, $875/mo + security. Section 8 ok. Please Call 773-852-9425

2 BR $900-$1099 BRONZEVILLE - 2br/2ba Apt. A/C, W/D, appls, rehabbed, nr good schls, prkg. transp. $900 + sec & utilities. Sec 8 welc. 312-860-8561

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

LR/DR, 3br, 1.5ba, EIK. $1075 or $1225 w/sec 8, ten pays utils & sec. Call before 7pm 708.770.4190

639 E. 90TH St., Gorgeous, 2BR, 1st flr, updated kit & bath. $ 875/mo + 1 mo sec. Clean & Quiet. No Pets. 773-930-6045

HARVEY3BR, 1BA, driveway, newly rehabbed, no pets. Section 8 Welcome. 708-275-5471

75 S.E. YATES -Renovated 2BR, FR, 1.5BA, LR, DR, Eat in Kitc., 3 flat, tenant heated, $950/mo. No rent increases for 4 years. 773-375-8068

2 BR $1500 AND OVER LARGE BRIGHT LINCOLN PK

DOLTON - 3BR House, 1BA, newly rehabbed, basement, $158 5/mo + security. Section 8 welcome. Call 708-879-1043 GARY, 3BR, 1.5BA, appliances included, basement, 2 car garage, $950/mo + security. Section 8 Welcome. 773-972-3230. SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 7721 S Peoria, 3BR apt, appls incl. $1050/mo. 708-288-4510

3 BR OR MORE $1200-$1499

6150 S. VERNON Ave. 3 Bdrm 6159 S. KING DR. 3 Bdrm 7649 S. PHILLIPS. 1-4 Bdrms 6943 S. WOODLAWN. 1-4 Bdrms

6721 S. CHAPPEL . 4 bdrm

Stainless steel appliances, hardwood flrs, granite countertops, laundry on site. No sec deposit $500 lease signing bonus Section 8 welcome 312-778-1262

STUDIO $695 1BR $795 Bus stop, metro train & shopping center nearby. Newly decorated, carpeted, stove, fridge, dining room, FREE heat & cooking gas. No application fee, FREE credit check. 1-773-919-7102 or 1-312-8027301

1 & 2BR $1095/mo. Newly decorated, hdwd flrs, stove & fridge incl, Free Heat & Hot water. Sec 8 welcome. Free credit check, no application fee, laundry facilities. 1-773-667-6477 or 1-312-802-7301

SECTION 8 WELCOME Newly Remodeled. 61st/ Rhodes. 3BR. Dining Rm.

3 BR OR MORE UNDER $1200

/ DR, hdwd flrs, sunporch, fireplace, heat & appls incl. Sect 8 ok $975/mo

GENERAL

HYDE PARK MOVE-IN SPECIAL

appliances & heat included. Call 847-533-5463.

4428 W JACKSON Blvd. 7.5 rm,

GLENWOOD, Updated large 2BR Condo, $990/mo. HF HS, balcony, C/A, appls, heat/water incl. 2 pkng, laundry. Call 708.268.3762

3 BR OR MORE $1800-$2499

CHATHAM, 720 E. 81st St. Newly remodeled 1BR, 1BA, hardwood floors,

92nd & Ada, 2BR, lg & spacious w

on Henderson St, $1000/mo utils not incl Section 8 OK. 773-736-8502

laundry rm, garage & driveway, $1500/mo water incl. Section 8 welcome. 847-274-1000

1 & 2 Bedroom Apartments Starting at $799 219-650-5000 or 219-314-8192

BRONZEVILLE: SECTION 8 WELCOME. No Security Deposit. 4841 S Michigan. 4BR $1300/mo. Appliances included. 708-2884510

6 ROOM FLAT 2BR for Rent

PULASKI & 78TH ST . 3BR, 1BA,

55 PLUS COMMUNITY

HYDE PARK, 5035 S. Drexel, $950/mo+utils.+ 1 mo sec. Sec 8 welc. 2BR on 2nd floor, 1.5BA, bsmt, assigned parking. 312-504-4260

+ sec. 773-415-6914

incl washer/dryer, Section 8 welcome. Avail Immediately, $1500/mo. 708-793-3885

{

8457 S. BRANDON, 4BR, 2nd floor, hardwood floors, Section 8 ok. 3BR or 2BR voucher ok. Call 847-312-5643.

R U YO AD E R E H

hdwd flrs, Heat Incl. $1000/mo. 773-874-9637 or 773-493-5359

4 BEDROOM NEWLY rehabbed apartment, available now. Apartment is located in a 2 unit building less than a block from the University of Chicago . New Granite kitchen island and countertops stainless steel appliances . Beautiful Wood floors. Large dining room in addition to kitchen. Great neighborhood street, located within walking distance to Metra and L stations. New Jewel being built only 4 blocks away. Close to all the Hyde Park shops and parks. Small animals okay with additional deposit. Laundry included located in basement.

3 BR OR MORE OTHER VIC. OF 63RD/ARTESIAN,

nice, upper 3BR, encl back porch, hdwd flrs, spac liv rm + din rm. Avail Now. Move-In Fee req. 773-704-0239

6117 S. CAMPBELL, newly decorated 4BR Bsmt Apt. Heat incl. Stove & refrigerator. $1000/mo + $1000 sec dep. Sect 8 welc. 312719-0524

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

2Bd, 1Bth, In Unit W/D, Roof Deck, Back Porch, HVAC, Fireplace, DW, Hardwood Flrs, Available Immediately. $2000-$2900 Call: 773-472 5944

S. SUBURBS Newly Renovated. 3BR, 1BA, fin bsmt, 2 car gar, Seniors Welcome. $1250 /mo + 1.5 mo sec. No pets. 708-752-2665

3BR,1BA, NEWLY REMOD &

ADULT SERVICES

more, Section 8 Welcome, appls incl, Security & 1st month req. Available now. 630-703-9226

70TH & ABERDEEN, Newly remod, hdwd floors, heat incl., 2BR, $695/mo. 3BR, 3rd floor, $75 0/mo. 1 mo rent + 1 mo sec. 773651-8673 SECTION 8 WELCOME, Newly updated 2 & 3BR nr 80th & Hermitage, heat & appls included. Ceiling fans, pergo floors. 773-490-4677 NEW KITCHENS & BATHS.

101st/May. 1BR. 69th/Dante, 3BR. 77t h/Lowe, 2BR. 71st/Bennett. 2BR. Sec 8 Welc. 708-503-1366

roommates SOUTH SHORE, Senior Discount. Male preferred. Furnished rooms, shared kitchen & bath. $475/mo & up. Utilities included. 773-710-5431 FURNISHED

ROOMS

REACH OVER

1 MILLION

PEOPLE MONTHLY IN PRINT & DIGITAL.

$400;

Utilities included. Near good transportation. $200 clean up fee required. Fixed income invited. Call 312-758-6931

CHICAGO 71st/Sangamon

($400) Quiet, Furnished Rooms, Share Kit & Bath. Call 773-895-5454

MARKETPLACE GOODS CLASSICS WANTED ANY CLASSIC CARS IN ANY CONDITION. ’20S, ’30S, ’40S, ’50S, ’60S & ’70S. HOTRODS & EXOTICS! TOP DOLLAR PAID! COLLECTOR. CALL JAMES, 630-201-8122 ENGLISH BULLDOG PUPPIES, GCHB CH Sired Show Dog, Excellent Pedigree/show potential, 618-335-2586 for pics & info

NOTICES RUBY MCCLURE, 7348 S. Emerald Ave., Apt. 2. You are hereby served in the case of Vick v. McClure, 2018 L 618, Cook County. You must file your appearance online at www. cookcountyclerkofcourt.org within 30 days of this notice. Failure to do so will result in a judgment being entered against you. The Law Office of Daniel E. Goodman, 847-292-6000.

36 CHICAGO READER | SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

312-222-6920 l

SAVAGE LOVE

By Dan Savage

Advice for a couple of late bloomers 50s and have never been in a relationship. I am so lonely, and the painful emptiness I feel is becoming absolutely unbearable. In my early 20s, I hooked up oﬀ and on, but it never developed into anything. I have always told myself that’s OK; I’m not a people person or a relationship kind of guy. I have a few lesbian friends but no male friends. I have social anxiety and can’t go to bars or clubs. When hookup apps were introduced, I used them infrequently. Now I go totally unnoticed or am quickly ghosted once I reveal my age. Most nonwork days, my only interactions are with people in the service industry. I am well groomed, employed, a homeowner, and always nice to people. I go to a therapist and take antidepressants. However, this painful loneliness, depression, aging, and feeling unnoticed seem to be getting the best of me. I cry often and would really like it all to end. Any advice? —LONELY AGING GAY

A : “In the very short term,

LAG needs to tell his therapist about the suicidal ideation,” said Michael Hobbes. “In the longer term, well, that’s going to take a bit more to unpack.” Hobbes is a reporter for HuffPost and recently wrote a mini-book-length piece titled “Together Alone: The Epidemic of Gay Loneliness.” During his research, Hobbes found that, despite growing legal and social acceptance, a worrying percentage of gay men still struggle with depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. Loneliness, Hobbes explained to me, is an evolutionary adaptation, a mechanism that prompts us humans—members of a high-

ly social species—to seek contact and connection with others, the kind of connections that improve our odds of survival. “But there’s a difference between being alone and being lonely,” said Hobbes. “Being alone is an objective, measurable phenomenon: you don’t have very many social contacts. Being lonely, on the other hand, is subjective: you feel alone, even when you’re with other people. This is why advice like ‘Join a club!’ or ‘Chat with your waitress!’ doesn’t help lonely people.” The most effective way to address loneliness, according to Hobbes’s research, is to confront it directly. “LAG may just need to get more out of the relationships he already has,” said Hobbes. “He has a job, friends, a therapist, a life. This doesn’t mean that his perceptions are unfounded—our society is terrible to its elders in general and its LGBTQ elders in particular—but there may be opportunities in his life for intimacy that he’s not tapping into. Acquaintances LAG hasn’t checked in on for a while. Random cool cousins LAG never got to know. Volunteering gigs you fell out of. It’s easier to reanimate old friendships than to start from scratch.” Another recommendation: Seek out other lonely guys— and there are lots of them out there. “LAG isn’t the only gay guy who has aged out of the bar scene—so have I —and struggles to find sex and companionship away from alcohol and right swipes,” said Hobbes. “His therapist should know of some good support groups.”

Q : I am a 55-year-old gay male. I am hugely overweight and have not had much

RESTAURANTS AND BARS

FOOD & DRINK

Gay, middle-aged, and lonely as hell Q : I’m a gay man in my late

THE LATEST ON YOUR FAVORITE

experience with men. I go on a variety of websites trying to make contact with people. However, if anyone says anything remotely complimentary about me, I panic and run. A compliment about my physical appearance? I shut down the proﬁle. I don’t like being like this. I just believe in being honest. And if I’m honest, I’m ugly. The face, even behind a big-ass beard, is just not acceptable. I have tried therapy, and it does nothing. How do I get past being ugly and go out and get laid?

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

Ahora español Livelinks.com 18+

—UNAPPEALING GIANT LOSER YEARNS

A : You say you’re ugly, UGLY,

but there are some people who disagree with you—the people who compliment you on your appearance, for instance. “I’m not sure I even believe in the word ‘ugly’ anymore,” said Hobbes. “No matter what you look like, some percentage of the population will be attracted to you. Maybe it’s 95 percent or maybe it’s 5 percent, but they are out there. When you find them, do two things: First, believe them. Second, shut up about it.” In other words: Just because you wouldn’t want to sleep with you, UGLY, that doesn’t mean no one wants to sleep with you. “The next time someone tells him they’re into big dudes with beards, he shouldn’t argue, he shouldn’t panic, and shouldn’t hesitate,” Hobbes advises. “Just say ‘Thank you’ and let the conversation move on.” v Send letters to mail@ savagelove.net. Download the Savage Lovecast every Tuesday at savagelovecast. com. m @fakedansavage

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EARLY WARNINGS

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SEPTEMBER 13, 2018 - CHICAGO READER 37

Julia Holter é DICKY BAHTO

NEW

Appleseed Cast, Joie De Vivre, Pacemaker 10/20, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Randy Bachman 1/24-25, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 9/13, noon b Bass Drum of Death 11/1, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Monte Booker, Esta, Sango 10/25, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Bottle Rockets 11/10, 9 PM, Hideout A Bowie Celebration with Mike Garrison, Earl Slick, Gerry Leonard, Carmine Rojas, Bernard Fowler, Corey Glover, Lee John, and more 2/22, 7:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM, 18+ Edie Brickell & New Bohemians 10/30, 8 PM, Park West, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM, 18+ Cher, Nile Rodger & Chic 2/8, 8 PM, United Center, on sale Fri 9/14, noon Mike Cooley 12/7, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Coone 12/13, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Shemekia Copeland 12/26-27, 8 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 9/13, noon b Cub Sport 10/25, 8 PM, Subterranean, on sale Fri 9/14, noon, 17+ Current Joys 11/14, 8 PM, Tack Room b Gus Dapperton 10/26, 7 PM, Subterranean b Matthew Dear 11/15, 8 PM, Sleeping Village Dirty Projectors 11/11-13, 9 PM, Sleeping Village El Tri 11/21, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM, 17+ Matt Embree 10/9, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen b

Jose Gonzalez & the String Theory 3/28, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM Grapetooth 11/11, 7 PM, Thalia Hall, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM b Greensky Bluegrass 12/28-31, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM Har Mar Superstar & Sabrina Ellis 11/24, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Julia Holter 2/28, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Irkallian Oracle 11/16, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Jade Cicada, Detox Unit 11/16, 9 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Jay Rock 11/11, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, 18+ Stephen Kellogg 12/13, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM b Tori Kelly 11/5, 8 PM, Fourth Presbyterian Church, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM Myles Kennedy & Co. 11/13, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Elle King, Cordovas 11/10, 7:30 PM, the Vic, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM b Lawrence Arms 12/13-15, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Amos Lee 3/30, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM Lil Ugly Mane, No Warning 10/24, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 18+ Loose Ends 11/3, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 9/13, noon b Magpie Salute 1/26, 9 PM, Metro, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM, 18+ Maribou State 2/18, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM, 18+ Matthew & the Atlas 11/17, 7 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Michigander 11/17, 9 PM, Schubas, 18+

38 CHICAGO READER - SEPTEMBER 13, 2018

Tony Monaco & Fareed Haque 11/10, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM b Jessica Moss 12/12, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Nao 1/26, 8 PM, Concord Music Hall, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM, 17+ Justin Osborne 12/5, 7 PM, Schubas, 18+ The Roast of Ronnie Radke 11/14, 8 PM, Bottom Lounge b Scarlxrd 10/26, 6 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club b Single Mothers 11/6, 8 PM, Schubas, 18+ Sleepwalkers 10/11, 8 PM, Subterranean Spose 11/16, 9 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ 30db 11/23, 7 and 10 PM, City Winery, on sale Thu 9/13, noon b Trans-Siberian Orchestra 12/28, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont, on sale Fri 9/14, 10 AM Trophy Eyes, Seaway 12/7, 6 PM, Bottom Lounge b Jung Joon Young 10/14, 6 PM, Concord Music Hall b

UPDATED Ron Pope 3/8-9, 8 PM, City Winery, 3/9 sold out, second show added b

UPCOMING Acid Dad 11/2, 9 PM, Empty Bottle AJJ, Kimya Dawson 10/9, 7 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Alcest, Cloakroom 10/31, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Eric Bachmann 10/13, 9 PM, Hideout Bad Cop/Bad Cop 10/7, 7 PM, Reggie’s Music Joint

b Courtney Barnett, Waxahatchee 10/18, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Belly 10/6, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Blessthefall, the Word Alive 9/26, 5:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Blitzen Trapper 9/24-25, 8 PM, Schubas Borns, Twin Shadow 9/30, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Caamp 12/7, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Cave 10/20-21, 9 PM, Hideout Phil Collins 10/22, 8 PM, United Center Dark Star Orchestra 9/29, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Destroyer 10/17, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Devildriver 11/11, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Dying Fetus, Incantation 9/23, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge, 17+ Roky Erickson 11/9, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Exploded View 11/1, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Eyehategod, Obsessed 9/23, 8 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ Eleanor Friedberger 10/5, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Frigs 9/22, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Ghost 11/1, 7 PM, Aragon Ballroom b Ghostmane 10/28, 7 PM, Lincoln Hall b Kevin Griﬃn 10/26, 8 PM, City Winery b Hand Habits 10/21, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Her’s 11/11, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Iron Chic, Spanish Love Songs 9/25, 8 PM, Subterranean, 17+ Island 10/1, 6 PM, Beat Kitchen b Joey Purp 9/22, 9:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Gabriel Kahane 11/16, 8:30 PM, Constellation, 18+ Eryn Allen Kane 9/27, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Kansas 10/13, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre King Khan & the Shrines 9/30, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle King’s X 12/9, 7 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Julian Lage Trio 10/5, 9 PM, Lincoln Hall Lala Lala 9/28, 9 PM, Empty Bottle Lemon Twigs 1/25, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ The Life and Times 10/17, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Lil Xan 10/2, 6:30 PM, House of Blues b Madball 9/30, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge, 17+ John Medeski’s Mad Skillet 11/7, 7 and 9:30 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Menzingers, Tiny Moving Parts 11/14, 7 PM, Concord Music Hall, 17+ Pat Metheny 10/12, 7:30 PM, Chicago Theatre

ALL AGES

WOLF BY KEITH HERZIK

EARLY WARNINGS

CHICAGO SHOWS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IN THE WEEKS TO COME

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Muncie Girls 11/11, 6:30 PM, Cobra Lounge b Municipal Waste, High on Fire 11/15, 7 PM, Metro, 18+ Oh Sees, Timmy’s Organism 10/12, 8:30 PM, Thalia Hall, 17+ Parquet Courts 12/3, 7:30 PM, the Vic, 18+ Phish 10/26-28, 7:30 PM, Allstate Arena, Rosemont Red Fang, Big Business 9/27, 8:30 PM, Empty Bottle Red Wanting Blue 10/6, 8 PM, SPACE, Evanston b Rozwell Kid 11/15, 8 PM, Beat Kitchen, 17+ Travis Scott, Trippie Redd 12/6, 7:30 PM, United Center Allen Stone, Nick Waterhouse 12/1, 8 PM, the Vic, 18+ Terror, Harm’s Way 10/10, 7 PM, Subterranean, 17+ This Will Destroy You 11/2, 9 PM, Metro, 18+ Trapped Under Ice 10/7, 7 PM, Cobra Lounge b Vaccines, Jesse Jo Stark 10/11, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Butch Walker 9/26, 8 PM, House of Blues, 17+ Bob Weir & the Wolf Bros 10/31-11/1, 7 PM, Chicago Theatre

SOLD OUT Bonnie “Prince” Billy 10/7, 7:30 PM, Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago Cavetown 12/8, 6:30 PM, Bottom Lounge b Denzel Curry 10/4, 7 PM, Bottom Lounge b Chelsea Cutler 10/2, 8 PM, Chop Shop, 17+ Billie Eilish 10/28, 7 PM, Metro b Laura Jane Grace & the Devouring Mothers 11/8, 8 PM, Hideout Hozier 9/21, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre b Jim James, Alynda Segarra 11/9, 7:30 PM, the Vic b Tom Morello 10/8, 8 PM, Lincoln Hall, 18+ Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin 11/18, 8 PM, Reggie’s Rock Club, 17+ Tenacious D 11/13-14, 7:30 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ The The 9/22, 8 PM, Riviera Theatre, 18+ Lucinda Williams 11/17, 8 PM, FitzGerald’s, Berwyn, Oak Park River Forest Food Pantry Beneﬁt Thom Yorke 12/4, 8 PM, Chicago Theatre v

GOSSIP WOLF A furry ear to the ground of the local music scene LAST YEAR AACM chairman Ernest Dawkins, Funkadesi founder Rahul Sharma, and the Old Town School of Folk Music won a $50,000 grant from the Joyce Foundation to create an epic composition that journeys through 100 years in the musical history of Englewood. The piece was disseminated online to community groups that rehearsed it separately, and on Saturday, September 15, they’ll come together at the Lindblom Academy auditorium (6130 S. Walcott) for the premiere of Quantum Englewood, presented by the Old Town School’s Music Moves Chicago program and Dawkins’s Live the Spirit Residency. It does indeed sound epic, with more than 100 instrumentalists and 250 singers, including Funkadesi (of course), Ben LaMar Gay, Maggie Brown, the Live the Spirit Jazz Ensemble, the Soul Children Gospel Choir, the Bucket Boys, and Fernando Jones’s Blues Kids. The concert is free, but lots of proud parents will be angling for the good spots! The dreamy, hazy bedroom folk that Chicago’s Devin Shaffer records as Yarrow is sparse and spacious, with reverberant guitar, haunting vocals, and exquisite ﬁeld recordings. Last week she dropped the cassette Cluster via downstate label Manic Static, and it’s Yarrow’s best yet—it can give you the uncanny feeling of eavesdropping on someone playing alone in the woods, surrounded by crickets and birds. The tape is available through Yarrow’s Bandcamp page and limited to 100 copies. As Cut Worms, garage-pop wonder Max Clarke reimagines the sounds of the 50s and 60s for the present day. Last year he signed with Indiana label Jagjaguwar, which in May released Cut Worms’ debut full-length, Hollow Ground. Clarke lives in Brooklyn, but he got started while at Columbia College and maintains Chicago ties: Dumpster Tapes, which put out Cut Worms’ At Home in 2015, will drop a cassette of Hollow Ground for Cut Worms’ Schubas show on Thursday, September 20. —J.R. NELSON AND LEOR GALIL Got a tip? Tweet @Gossip_Wolf or e-mail gossipwolf@chicagoreader.com.

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